Fanfiction Reading Update #170 · 9:58am Feb 4th, 2016
Advisory: contains unmarked spoilers for D=S-M and several marked spoilers for D=S-M2
Gotta admit, I was pretty bummed with the reception Fight Club got. I figured it wouldn't do terribly well—it may have been a clopfic, but its fetishes were certainly not common—but I still thought it would do better than it did. Oh well. It's a good experience. Not everything you write will be popular or well received. And it certainly didn't help people didn't like the ending that much.
It has dampened my desire to work on the Rainbow Factory story, though. Especially since the oneshot comedy I did a while back, Compliance, that was also based on Rainbow Factory had a rough start as well. If a oneshot comedy didn't do well, just imagine how bad a [Dark][AU][SoL] would do.
I suppose that takes things into the “do you write for yourself vs write for others” debate. It's mainly the former for me, but also some of the later since part of my goal with fanfic writing is to gain experience. Anyway, on to the fanfics.
I finally get around to reading one of the last chapters of The Night That Never Ended where Twilight confronts the Captain and Nightmare Mo—oh, wait. That was the season finale. Never mind.
I catch up with The Lunar Rebellion as Shadow continues to deal with the necromantic body as internal fighting and Uriah Gambits start to fray the pegasi.
I read Through a Glass, Darkly's newest chapter as the plot continues to slowly move forward with Dash and Twilight, and Cadance and Rarity setting up future events.
Equestria Enduring fully reboots, but still has that really confusing “four plots going on at once” thing it was doing previously. Hopefully, it's just a feature of the first chapter, because that made the original very hard to follow.
I read all the outstanding chapters of Sparkle Day and my confusion over what's going on only intensifies. One chapter ends with Twilight and an OC in a dream and the next kicks off a Dragon-Equestria warfic with the OC nowhere to be found. She was one of the supporting characters until then, too.
Evil!Twilight is without a doubt one of the hardest genres to pull off well. It requires a careful blending of Twilight falling down the slippery slope and good plotting, or else it will feel empty and suspension of disbelief breaking. It also needs Twilight to stay in-character. Otherwise, what's the difference with just an OC evil character?
D=S-M (Despair = Suffering – Meaning) looked like it had the slippery slope slide locked down and showed promise for the rest. Celestia's killed in an apparent griffin assassination, leaving Twilight heartbroken—as all Twilestia fics inevitably end in tears and angst—and wanting revenge. Luna tries to push her back up the slope—even after a blatant assassination attempt on herself—but without much luck.
Things come to a head when the train Twilight, Dash, AJ, and Fluttershy are on is derailed, and fittingly, the plot follows after the train in the derailment. For, you see, a game of plot twists ensues. Twilight and company are attacked . First, the griffins are responsible. Then it's revealed to be Spitfire—no, wait, it's another alicorn—that's technically a lie, it's actually Lightning Dust somehow using the alicorn amulet to become a literal alicorn (if only Trixie had learned that ability). She's really working for Luna, who was behind everything—but wait, you've been on a ruse cruise this whole time and it's really Cadance who's behind everything. By the way, she's also a changeling.
Plot twists are always fun, but there definitely comes a point when they don't do anything for a story. All of those twists happen over only a few chapters—some within the same chapter. It doesn't really do anything interesting and only serves to clutter up the plot. It also throws in a ton of confusion. Why's Lightning evil now? How come the alicorn amulet suddenly transforms people into actual alicorns when Trixie remained unaffected?
In the middle of the plot twist fight, Lightning kills Fluttershy. For a mane six death, it was pretty meh. Fluttershy played almost no role in the story up until then and the whole death was pretty obviously to serve as The Tipping Point. Anyone who's read an evil!Twilight story should know The Tipping Point. It's that event in a story that finally pushes Twilight over the edge and makes her sign up and receive her Evil Empress photo ID.
Had Fluttershy played a larger role, or the death been this big dramatic moment—say, Twilight desperately trying to stop a griffin assassin from striking again, only to arrive just as the knife is thrust in—it could have worked, but it really seemed like this extra event tacked on. Lightning Dust and Twilight are fighting. Oh, by the way, Fluttershy's dead.
The train derailment really does derail the story. The plot goes from Twilight gradually sliding down into the evil!Twilight shitck as griffin issues build, over to her lopping off Lightning's limbs for killing Fluttershy. It's a little disappointing to see a nice slow slide down the slope suddenly accelerate like a luge—and see that carefully set up griffon plot get torn down in the process.
If it were just that, it wouldn't be so bad. Some disappointing plot twists, a wasted griffon storyline, and another hasty evil!Twilight descent. Certainly not the worst, and the characterization's good, but then it actually ends.
Fanfics seem to always have issues with endings. Maybe it's because of the serial style of writing, where the plot's stitched together over months—sometimes with long breaks in between—or maybe it's just lack of planning. Whatever the reason, endings are where it's most likely for things to go wrong. Derail, you could say.
In this case, Lightning convinces Twilight Luna's evil. For some context, Lightning's working for Cadance and has just had a majority of her appendages removed. If she's confessing the big evil plan, why doesn't she actually confess? Lotta loyalty for a hired pegasus. For some reason, she pins it all on Luna. Or maybe she was just convenient avoiding proper nouns and using “the Princess.”
Okay, so all Luna has to do is convince Twilight that's not the case. But somehow, a train derailing and Twilight being a little wangsty means she's committed treason—and killed her friends for no good raisin. A griffin massacre, sure. I could even buy attacking Luna. But why would anyone think Twilight, bitter and angry over the griffins killing her princess, would derail the train she was on and kill her friends?
if there's one thing that really kills it for me, it's poor communications. They're one of the most frustrating things for a reader to encounter, especially when the whole plot relies on it. Lightning not directly naming Cadance, Luna and Twilight getting horribly mixed up, Dash and AJ conveniently getting teleported far enough away from the trainwreck to not be able to clear this all up in a few minutes.
And it's all for a pretty standard evil!Twilight sequel. Twilight's evil and plotting revenge, while Luna tries to stop her, Cadance chuckles evilly while Shining wonders why his wife's suddenly glowing green, and the reader grinds their teeth in frustration over the fact the whole thing could be resolved in about an hour of careful and precise conversation.
All the while, I look back on such a great start--the assassination, the bitterness, the steadily developing griffin plot--and remember just how hard evil!Twilight is as a genre. D=S-M receives:
...moustaches out of five, and as a result, I neither upvote nor downvote it.
Something something Oneshots.
Negotiations is downvoted for being another damned anti-TCB story that does absolutely nothing with the concept and instead sets up a strawman of the plot it can beat down. Complete with the standard “humans aren't violent murders now please excuse us while we nuke the Crystal Empire.” It's at the point I doubt anyone writing anti-TCB fics even knows what the actual plot to the story is because they're too busy masturbating to The Other Side of the Spectrum. Just once—just once—I'd like to the see the premise, Equestria and a wave of unstoppable radiation are teleported to Earth and everyone has to deal with the clusterfuck, actually done. Jimmies confirmed for jammed.
The glut of AU fics kicks off with The Ever Ash Project which doesn't really do the Sombra War justice and instead opts for a literal nuke. One that seems thrown in just for the sake of killing everyone. Not only is it impractical, but the fact that you can evacuate over the ocean to another location on the planet makes it seem like a pretty senseless “everyone dies” grimdark story.
What Could Have Been takes me back to the far flung days of Canterlot Wedding fix fics. And as with most of them, it really lays on the melodrama and the “Twilight was right and everyone else was wrong and should feel bad.” To the point I smiled when Spike described dream!Twilight's suicide because of how over-the-top and downright hammy it was.
Storm is favorited and upvoted because I hadn't done either previously. It remains the gold standard of “post natural disaster” fanfics and is what got me addicted to the genre that has still yet to deliver a great multi-chapter. The wait will go on, possibly forever.
A Book Report and a Night of Anxiety is a nice little fluffy SoL story about filly Twilight, book reports, and possibly unintentional Spongebob parallels.
And that's all I read for the dayquarter.
# of story updates remaining: 527.
# of “Read Later” stories remaining: 1,079.
Whoo! :D I'm always glad to see your review updates.
Sparkle Day would've made more sense if the description came out and said, "Twilight faked her death centuries ago to draw the arguing royal sisters closer together. Now she's back on the eve of a war with dragonkind." It's nominally a sequel to a nicely done time-looping TwiLuna shipfic, though we haven't seen much of that in Sparkle Day until the latest chapter.
And that just inspired me to binge through D=S-M.
I guess because I love crazy plot twists. Not so much love for contrived conflict/tragedy, though. At least it was short.
Not Alone. And also... um... no, nothing else. That was pretty much the beginning and the end.
Well, I can cross D=S-M off my list. Thank you for that!
True Story:
I never had any interest in reading any TCB stories until I got fed up with being (figuratively) slapped in the face by the anti-TCB ones.
I was waiting for this review for a long, long time and in my head I was always wondering if I should ever comment, because I was pretty proud of DSM, until I ended it as I did.
I always wrote it for myself and that is what probably was the problem for a lot of people. I knew what was going on . I wanted people to be confused as fuck so in the sequel so I could show off the truth. But that backfired.
The sad thing is, even after posting the sequel and going on my explanation rampage, I wanted to start answering all the questions that pissed people off in the way I executed it... Yeah. I wanted to.
I sat back in January after not looking at DSM for months and read it and, you know what? I don't even like it anymore. I don't actually get the same joy I did back then and writing the first two sequel chapters made me feel like I shouldn't bother continuing it any more...
And then I read the review I was dreading. Because I cannot defend it in any way. All of it was true and accurate and reflects my own feeling of what was once my favourite thing to write for.
Worst of all Corruption of Sun has suffered too from DSM. The subjects are similar and I feel I am less confident in continuing it any further.
Why rant about it here? Because I fully agree with xTSGx and I am embarrassed to even look at it. DSM was my first real foray into fan fiction of a dark nature and I think it will be the last.
I'll just stick to my crazy clop shit.
Thanks again xTSGx. Was sobering to read your opinion.
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I wouldn't be discouraged. Yeah, D=S-M's ending wasn't great, but like I said, those early chapters were good and that initial griffin plot and Twilight possibly leading Equestria into a war was what got me into the story in the first place. There was a really good story there, it just got derailed. Not every story you write will go perfectly. There'll be errors, there'll be plot points that don't pan out, there'll be miscalculations over both your and your audience's enthusiasm. It's all part of the process.
And the key is to take that and learn from it. Use it to improve your writing. The first time you fell off your bike and scraped your knee, did you just stop? So then why are you abandoning more serious stories? Get back on the bike and do it again.