tl;dr read my little stashie because it's awesome · 7:19am Sep 9th, 2012
Yeah, I know this has probably been done but why waste the time I specifically set out to waste when I wrote this?
Man, this is probably gonna offend some people. Here's a partial amelioration: you can always choose not to read it.
Read My Little Stashie instead.
also holy damn I spelt Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin right.
My Little Stashie and My Little Dashie: Motives, conflict, resolution.
This ties into the themes of The Importance of Verisimilitude, one of my first pretentious blog entries, but obviously you don't need to read that.
Keep in mind that I do not have any personal thing against the story My Little Dashie; I can very well see why it's popular, and I do not begrudge the (totally cool dude of an) author in the slightest. It's just what happens when I go back and actually look over a work.
Anyway:
The thing about interpersonal relationships is that they tend to happen for a reason.
It is important to note here that any reason is ultimately selfish – you do a good deed so you feel good. That's besides the point. What's notable is when affection develops without external reason, and that's why My Little Stashie hit me so much bloody harder than My Little Dashie.
Feels and laughter, man. Always the best combination.
The thing is, My Little Dashie gives an immediate, easy series of reasons for his adoption of Rainbow Dash: he's got rent control in a shitty neighbourhood.
Sorry.
I mean, he's in a drab, horrid, supposedly horrific world where everything is dull and ripe for angst. It doesn't feel like the real world, certainly; it feels like some pathetic facsimile built solely for miniature brightening. Nowhere is there an attempt to make the world better for anyone else; his desires are purely selfish and he's got
rent controlan unspecified millionaire jobauthor fiatnothing but his little currenda arquata sine fuga to brighten up his day.In other words, it's
Singaporea world built entirely to fit into the masturbatory fantasy that Equestria is perfect and that the real world is horrible by default; it is one of these places made to justify inaction and escapism, more shamefully pessimistic than the protagonist of Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground - the difference between the works being that Dostoevsky is conscious of just how pathetic the main character is.Sartre said that if he were Biafran, he would not write novels. Sartre was a dickhead in that regard so that's completely irrelevant, but the point remains. It is not real life. It is a world created in the mind solely for selfish purposes. Coupled with the protagonist's pathetically anon-like, second-person demeanour, the whole thing is a horrid relinquishment of personal responsibility.
They bond in a rather eerie, contrived manner; the man keeps her shut in completely and gets her to call him 'daddy'. I'm not going to elaborate on this point because to be honest it speaks for itself.
My own first impression of the story, which did not include any of these failings and thus provides some emotional impact – I am an individual who glosses thoroughly over subtle flaws – still fails to make me feel sad as it does bloody irritated. It doesn't make me irritated at Celestia, mind; it's a perfectly reasonable and completely OOC course of action to want the body of one of your Elements of Harmony back.
The thoughts I can derive from my first, emotional impression of the work, in other words, can be summarised as such:
You pathetic anon bastard – the bitch's taking your surrogate daughter away from your ass. Fucking do something, you pathetic little douche bitch. Does your child mean so little to you that you would relinquish her without a bloody thought? Are you such a selfish cunt you can't even bother suggesting, say, that she go fuck herself and try to break the fucker's horn off? Are you such a miserable bastard you would not risk death to save this person whom you have taken under your care without the slightest notion of recompense? You miserable pathetic rotter, you bloody fucking wanker, you miserable fucking bo lanjiao ah gua, you incompetent writer unable to make your characters even somewhat sodding realistic, you denouncer of human emotion, you insultor of beautiful irrationality, you defiler of volitional believability?
(Not to cast aspersions, of course, onto the honourable ROBCakeran53 – who, if I do recall, is a pretty cool guy.)
Meanwhile, we've got My Little Stashie, which immediately has a kind of likeable, more-or-less defined dickhead for a main character. He meets a weird-ass thing who has either replaced or who has eaten his drug stash.
Now, this makes no sense but fuck sense it's funny and it isn't trying to be sappy.
Anyway, he goes and tries to sell her on Craigslist and gets bronies offering houses for her.
And then here's the kicker: finding out that she is potentially intelligent life, he decides to keep her for no bloody reason; he is the opposite of Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, having that moment of sympathy that Tolstoy pushed him towards without touching and defining himself quite thoroughly as a good person.
Now, look what's happened.
He's not relinquished his personal identity in favour of the 'brony' identity. He's not had a great moment of contrived conflict, and the author does not attempt to give the illusion that there is any doubt in his mind as to what he is going to do.
What's happened is that he establishes his character as fundamentally altruistic – not as a member of a class of selfishly alturistic people that call themselves 'bronies', but in his own right. His motivations are never explained, but they are inferrable not as a symbiotic relationship – he does not depend emotionally on this pathetic ball of fur, because drugs and television do it fine – but as a purely selfless thing up to the point that he grows used to it and genuinely loves her.
Rainbow Dash develops a persona that, while deterministically similar to her old one, is a full-fledged, hilarious character in her own right. The connection feels like more of a coincidence than anything, and that's the genius of the thing; she's similar to how she was, but she does not sacrifice her identity entirely.
And then they bond like friends. The impression one gets is partially patriarchal, of course, but the bond they develop feels as realistic as any bond can be. It provides a fairly beautiful, personal bond; not a bond solely contrived by the author, or one existing purely for emotional gratification, or one existing purely out of fear or dependence, but one existing very much out of mutual respect.
The story is beautiful and emotionally realistic, really, because it doesn't try to be beautiful or realistic. Bloody marevellous.
It's also hilarious and then they fucked the end.
5th September 2012
Roissy, Île-de-France, FranceMended 8th September 2012
Yishun, Singapore
Dude. I think I love you.
I would have killed to write analysis like this at university. It's insightful, it's funny, it doesn't fall into the trap of being self-referentially obsessed with analysis for the sake of analysis. It makes a valid point. And it seems to be right.
I had never thought of it like this, having read both. I think you might be right. I still like My Little Dashie, but My Little Stashie was damn good, and I think you touched on the reason I liked it so much (more than the humor). Amazing.
<Applauds>
I do enjoy your random missives.
I prefer quivering sphere of horse more than ball of fur.
Amit, Dude, this is deep.
In a freaking hilarious manner.
344535 I concur, in all respects.