It Is Recommendsday, My Dudes #71 · 7:15pm Jul 27th, 2022
To end out a month of "If I had a nickel for every time this happened, I would have two nickels. Which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice," I'm going to bring out two real powerhouse authors.
The theme this week? Something I'll have to actually spoiler to preserve the stories themselves. But for those doubling back, it's stories in which characters in a cast gradually disappear.
I'll start with the shorter of the two: "Hey Twi..." by Flint-Lock.
Told entirely through journal entries between Sunset Shimmer and Twilight Sparkle, it details Sunset's increasingly desperate attempts to contact Twilight as, well... as her world falls apart.
As stated above, I don't want to go into the specifics of the plot, as that would spoil the plot. It's a short piece, so any summary is going to give away a ton. So it's best to just give it a read, I say.
That said - it's the tone that really makes this one work. Sunset's emotions really shine through despite the extremely economical word count. There's a lot packed into each 200-ish word chapter and Flint-Lock does not hold it back. This is great horror - not a bit of blood spilled, but reading it still makes you go "Oh no. Oh no" in the best way.
It's quick, it's impactful, it's economic and efficient. This is a wonderful example of super-short fiction, and one that hits you in just the right spot to leave a mark.
The longer piece comes from FIMFiction's titan who needs no introduction or hype: shortskirtsandexplosions. The story in particular? Refraction.
Conceptually, it's simple. The first chapter is a fairly mundane scene out of the life of the Bearers - meeting at Sugarcube Corner, discussing plans for the coming days, joking about past events.
The second chapter is the same scene. So is the third, the fourth, and so on. Just that with each iteration, there's one less pony in the room. And the world. And from there, the changes spill outwards.
Where today's first story is fast with each cut, this one takes considerably more time with it. You can see at each step how the world's developed differently - down to names and identities shifting as events play out differently. The ripples start small but quickly grow out of control until everything's damn near unrecognizable.
The story starts bright, dipping deep into melancholy and mental anguish before rising to a defiant end. There's a few horrific moments as the reader realizes what's been lost and just what that means, but in all it's a story much more about endurance and the resilience of self. And it's all written with that wonderful skirts aplomb. There's few writers on this site that can challenge skirts' skill with imagery and emotional resonance, and this tale uses it to beautiful effect. It's one of my favorite skirts stories, and that says a lot.
New or catching up? Try Recommendsday: The Index for your story needs!
Apparently I have read Refraction before, though I don’t remember a thing about it. Onto the Re-Evaluate bookshelf it goes!
Skirts' stories cover the spectrum for me, everything from "I've had enough of this" (the Austraeoh saga, which I persisted with for two and a half books but which often felt more slog than magic) right through to "Oh wow, I love it" (Theory, a clever short which managed to be both devastating and inspiring). Refraction has caught my interest, though, so onto the RiL it goes!
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When you've got as large a library as skirts does, that tends to happen.
A little tidbit from my own end: initially when I arrived on the site, it took me some time to get a good feel for the common authors. Because of timing and what was being published at the time, I spent a good six months presuming skirts was one of the cadre of fetish porn writers and never bothered to look deeper.
Boy was that something I was wrong about.