It Is Recommendsday, My Dudes #61 · 5:38pm May 18th, 2022
Today, I'm going to lean into a bit of the apocalypse - not for any doom and gloom reason, but just because it's a fun plot device to leverage. And it gives a great chance to point out two veteran authors who are underappreciated.
I'll begin with the end of the world itself in Heat Death for Two by Comma Typer.
The sun is dying - well into the red giant phase and getting close to collapsing into a supernova. Spiral Star is the last pony alive in Equestria, sealed in an enchanted cold suit that is now on the verge of failing. Having retreated to the north pole, he sits and watches the boiling sea and blasted land as the sun enters its final death throes and wonders which will die first: his suit (and thus himself) or the sun?
And then, across the searing hot waters, he spots a goddamn reindeer skipping across the waves to bring him a Hearth's Warming gift.
The last gift.
This story's one that's really stuck with me over time - there's a certain slow poignancy to it as the protagonist introspectively watches the world die around him. This is helped by there not being any proper dialogue, just Spiral summarizing the conversation with narration. And he feels so damn tired the whole time, too. Past the trauma and the grief, well into simply sitting on the dying shoreline with a sigh to watch the last moments.
Of course, then there's the reindeer Alice. Doggedly completing her life's mission and adding a bit of light to a dreary situation. It's what wards away the Dark tag, keeping this to a more straight drama. It's just the right amount of counterpoint, too.
In all, it's a great take on the end of the world. No grand chaos, no dramatic fight. Just two beings sitting on a beach, watching the last moments side by side while full of melancholy and hope.
On the other side, we've got something a bit more after the apocalypse: DwarvishPony's Pieces of Me.
Rarity - a utility assistance android (not a robot, darling, please) - pulls herself out of the wreckage of the factory that built her. Sometime after she was constructed, the world seems to have ended. After a little wander, she stumbles into a settlement that's still scraping by: Sweet Apple Acres. They take in the strange machine, provided that she pulls her own weight with the farm work. While there, Rarity strikes up a friendship with the youngest, Apple Bloom. And when one of the water pumps that keep the farm alive breaks a gear, Rarity silently takes one from her own arm to make it work again. And when discovered, Apple Bloom doesn't like that one bit.
For starters, this one's fun because Rarity/Apple Bloom is a pretty atypical pair of characters. Particularly without a Sweetie Belle in the mix! It's also great because - as FoME notes in the comments - it's great to see a post-apocalypse that's not all bike gangs and leather. (DwarvishPony's Tracks in the Sand is similar in that vein and another one I happily recommend.) It's good just to see the characters we know still being themselves, even in this kind of painful alternate setting.
And that's part of what shines through with this - Rarity is a robot utility assistance android, the world is ending, she's working on a farm doing manual labor... and she's still Rarity. (This post originally was going to be themed around robotic Rarities, until I realized that I was pairing this one with Beyond Mere Programming, which is also a DwarvishPony piece.)
Plus, as I've noted in the past, I am an absolute sucker for the heroic sacrifice trope. And this one shows strongly that it works even when there's no glorious battle to be had.
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Apparently I had this open in another tab. Both of these stories were excellent reccommendations!