Deadbeat Apple · 6:48pm Jul 2nd, 2019
From the writer who brought you "Applejack's Parents Were Lovable People" comes "Applejack's Father is a Broke, Shiftless Deadbeat."
I have a pretty good father. My parents have been split for as long as I can remember, and my father moved very far away to find work and to support my brother and I. We saw him a couple times a year. Summers, holidays. The odd Thanksgiving and Spring. But we spent most of the year around our mother, which is... a whole other story.
Wow!
Still, in every way that counted, he was always there for us. He was no deadbeat. I know not everybody's that lucky. I've known a lot of people who've struggled to maintain strained, unpleasant relationships with their fathers. They might love them, begrudgingly, but they have no illusions about their characters. Those fathers might not be bad people, although many are, but they are, well... bad fathers.
This story was written with such situations in mind. It's based on my own experience with absentee, deadbeat dads (again, not my own), and with the children of those fathers who've been left to grow up and find themselves without that important pillar in their lives.
And, of course, I used the Apple Family for this story because Apple Bloom's personal suffering is one of the most consistent themes across my stories.
I don't even know what episode this is from
This story was conceived and written in response to a short fiction prompt, and its original draft was about 750 words. One thing I like about writeoff prompts: the word limit forces me to be economical with my word choice, conveying a complete story with fewer words, rather than more.
Which I think has been... mostly good for my writing?
In the case of the original writeoff draft, though, the restrictions of the contest also resulted in a more narrow, limited, and less effective story than what you wound up with here on FiMfiction. Apart from some paragraphs needing to be scaled back, or lines of dialogue being trimmed and losing some of their weight, the story's original ending was a product of those constraints. The FiMfic version is two chapters long; the first chapter is a revised version of the writeoff story, while the second chapter is an original composition altogether. The ending of the original draft was shuffled into the second chapter, and the story's probably the better for it.
Because, in the original, EqG Applejack was the one who asked Twilight if her counterpart had the same situation, and Twilight's lie was directed at her. Yes, Applejack's father being a widower, and a deadbeat, was a constant across universes. Twilight judged that Applejack would only be hurt by knowing that there was another version of herself who had something that she lacked: a father who she could love, and look to as a role model, even if he was dead. Or such was my rationale, anyway.
That was a point of contention in most of the feedback I got. So, I wrote a second chapter, mirroring the first, in which Twilight returns to Equestria and discusses the late Bright Mac with Applejack, and had Twilight lie to that Applejack instead. It's debatable whether it's in character for Twilight to do this (even as I sit here, writing this, I'm still not sure what she said/did was true to her character), but it works better from a narrative perspective.
Besides that, the only major change I made was clarifying something that was ambiguous in the writeoff draft: Bright Mac left before Apple Bloom could say goodbye. That was intentional. He did it on purpose.
Anyway, I'm gonna leave you on an expanded ending, based on a conversation with Dubs Rewatcher, an ending guaranteed to get me into the featured box:
Twilight thought of the other Applejack with her head bowed and the brim of her hat pulled low. She thought of a sputtering engine, tires crunching on gravel, and Apple Bloom crying out as she raced downstairs to catch her father, to say goodbye before he left her behind. "Yeah. This is how it is for her, too." Applejack suddenly took a steaming shit, then came on top of the shit. Applejack's cum ran down the shit, soaking it. "My sister is Anon-A-Miss." The featured box exploded.
All it needs now is the Displaced tag.
Funnily enough, that image comes from an episode more focused on Scootaloo's suffering. Apple Bloom is just collateral damage.
5083168 She still suffers; it counts.
Applejack shidded and cummed.
Wow! Posh!
Y’all need Jesus
Now since I have yet to leave a proper critique on the actual story, I will say that it’s... fine. It’s an interesting premise with competent execution, but I think it suffers for its short length
just like me. I get that that’s kinda the whole point of the Writeoff challenge, but there just isn’t really enough of a journey here for me to feel terribly invested in it. That’s not to say I didn’t like it though. It accomplished what it set out to do with the efficiency needed for the challenge. I guess it just comes down to my preference for longer-form storytelling.While this is largely orthogonal to anything you're saying, IMO fatherhood is really hard right now. I think it was probably easier a couple of generations ago, when in many ways the bar was lower, but at least the job description was more clear-cut. I think it might get easier again several generations down the line, as we maybe start to build a better foundation of fathers who were raised by fathers who modeled more meaningful involvement and emotional attachment. That doesn't excuse any badness right now, but it's... hard. I often feel like the script I was given doesn't work a lot of the time, and I'm stuck ad-libbing a lot more than I'm comfortable with.
(And so help me, if you drag up the Calvin and Hobbes comic that should've put this very reality in my head 25-30 years ago I will do a steaming poopie on your carpet too)