I'm Always Here For You by Nugget

I'm a plushie!

I was made from love, by a creator, I know, who cares about me. However, as time goes on, something happens to my creator. I'm now worrying about him. Why is my artist wearing that frown?

I only now realized the redundancy of putting quotation marks round the story names in the thread title. The hell do I do that for? I'd change it, but I don't care to.

Today we've got one of those abstract, dialogue-less stories through the perspective of the narrator. It's a short piece, about 1.1k words, so I'm not expecting it to cure my depression or anything (I don't actually have depression).

The narrator is a Moon Dancer plushie, and the reader is the creator—or I'm pretty sure you're the creator since the story uses the "you" pronoun. This plushie is sort of alive, not really. Eh, it's like Toy Story if the toys couldn't move. She says that she loves her creator and everything about her (her design, her name) she's grateful for.

The theme here is detachment and losing your connections. I mean emotional detachment, obviously not physical. It's not like dogs love to chew up soft toys or anything.

And this sense of detachment is carried through with the representation of time. Essentially the creator stops loving this plushie, begins to ignore it, all while the plushie notices this but never stops loving you. Eventually she's sold off to somepony else. It's meant to be sad because the whole relationship is completely one-sided: the plushie loves you forever but, being the selfish bastard you are, treats it like a toy and lets it collect dust.

And man, this point of loving you is really emphasized. Fortunately it never became too repetitive, meaning the thinking plushie isn't a bad character or anything. She's just pouring out her soul through this particular lens, and you're the judge of that.

I was reading through the comments (yeah, I do that) and noticed that many people were talking about the plushies they had and how they love them. The problem for me is that I don't have any plushies. I just watch the show and never collect merchandise (i.e. I'm a fucking wimp). So the reliability of this fic depends on you.

I sincerely don't know how else to judge it. It's too abstract to be called a story and too short for any real evaluation. Is it worth the five minutes of reading? Personally, no. Other than an immediate, spur-of-the-moment reaction for anyone who loves their pony plushies, you won't really get anything out of here. It won't make you rethink any deep concept with any post-reading contemplation.

With that being said, it's not bad. It's a charming, feelsy-ish little fic that doesn't try anything big. It's not great, but it's not terrible. If you own any MLP toy plushies you hold dear then, by all means, give this one a read. It'll make you sentimental for ten minutes. That's not bad.

6/10

By the way, let me take a brief moment to explain my scoring system. Plastering numbers at the end of reviews tends to be pretty senseless, so to try to find some sense in the general senselessness of ratings I've tried to make it more lenient and relative.

First of all, if I give a 100,000+ word adventure fic a 6/10, it doesn't mean I'm equating it with, say, this one-shot. The former is obviously better. I judge fics on the merits that their owns standards set up. Occasionally I'll give two scores (one personal, one official, like my last review), but you get the point.

Second of all, a 5/10 from me is average. Neither good nor bad, just "ehhhhhhh." If I give you a 5 don't feel too discouraged, or if you do feel too discouraged then don't blame it on me, or if you do blame it on me then don't make me feel bad about it. A 6/10 is okay–good, a 7/10 is pretty great, and so on. It gets slightly exponential.

That's all.