Calender Mare by Alabenson

With Sweet Feather Sanctuary up and running, Fluttershy is ready to move on to another passion project of hers; reopening the long-closed Ponyville Pet Shelter. Unfortunately, renovating the pet shelter will cost far more than she can afford, even with the help of her friends. Luckily, Rainbow Dash finds that the Wonderbolts may be able to provide her with a way to raise the needed bits.
Unfortunately, that solution involves posing for the annual Mares of the Wonderbolts pinup calendar.

Well... fuck.

It's been nearly half a year since I've written my share of story reviews, either due to time constraints, or procrastination, or an unfortunate combination of the two. As a bold kind of compensation I'll be attempting to review all the stories in my folder as quickly as possible. Hopefully I'll be done by the end of the week. And, so, that's all in all—the gist of it, as it were.

If it weren't for the implicit sexual themes I could actually see this fic working as a canon episode for the show. I mean, the premise itself is embedded in said implicit themes, but in terms of plot direction, dialogue, and characterization, it has just enough flanderized banter and silly, innocent humour to be passed off as a legit episode. That's all well and good, both for the author and for my inconsistent tastes in what constitutes good writing. I've been reading a lot of literature translated from foreign languages, so what would normally sound abnormal to some—which is often a product of piss-poor cultural translation—I'm okay with it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, which in and of itself testifies acutely to my ability as a reviewer of fan-fiction.

The plot of Calendar Mare revolves around the gears of bureaucracy and capitalistic integrity yanking any last semblance of hope you may have had hidden away in your ever-so-unshakable aspirations: Fluttershy wants to re-open a public service shelter for pets but she's unable to cover the ridiculous costs. I'm being hyperbolic, by the way. Fluttershy and her friends don't throw all traces of hope to the wind. Instead, Rainbow Dash decides to work for some modeling company or other, with a specification on calendars (remember those bikini girl calendars? Um, me neither!). This serves the purpose of using the funds received from the modeling job to pay for Fluttershy's pet shelter. But lo and behold, Rainbow is embarrassed and must face the soul-destroying torments of revealing a deep, uncomfortable secret to your best friends. But, again, I'm being spitefully hyperbolic, that is, for the sake of picturesqueness.

I really enjoyed the plot. Don't be mistaken, characters facing imminent embarrassment/humiliation has been written before... but... uh, I don't read fan-fiction very often, so to me this is kinda new. No scene ever felt wasted. In the beginning it establishes the conflict, and the first character you meet other than Fluttershy is Rainbow Dash, which I assume is the author placing emphasis on the character we'll be following later on. The scene in the locker room, where it showed Rainbow's relationship with the other Wonderbolts, was a nice touch. You really get the feeling that these guys have been working alongside one another for months, if not years. I liked the line where Spitfire calls all the "ladies" in the room, and immediately dismisses Soarin.

Characterization was très bon! (that's French for "very good," you uncultured mongrels) The characters really did sound like their in-show counterparts. Alabenson was pretty spot-on on the numerous mannerisms: Fluttershy's timidly concealed enthusiasm for helping animals, Rarity's hedged assertions of wanting to help her friends out while also cringing at their lack of fashion sense, Rainbow's iron-clad loyalty—you know what? I really need to re-watch this show. I'm starting to lose a sense of these characters, and reading Calendar Mare brought me back to the surface of that stuff.

All these pieces flowed very nicely, which is to say I was never once overtly irritated during my reading process. Alright, cool. That does it for positivity. Despite my (reluctant) praise, problems abound.

It was decently paced, but there were moments of inconsistency. One moment we're with Rainbow Dash deciding whether or not she should model for these calendars, and right after we cut to her finishing up her last shooting session, and then a few hundred words later she's worrying what her friends will think. I would have preferred if the author placed greater significance on the, you know, modeling job which drives the entire second-half of the plot forward. I didn't think I'd say this, but it really needed to be at least 1,000 words longer.

And to bring up character behaviour, Rainbow had an exceedingly quick change of heart. This came off as very questionable for my tastes. Like, one moment she's so terrified of revealing her secret that she's actively avoiding contact with her friends, and then a fleeting conversation with Starlight later, she just completely opens up to them. Have these sudden flip-flops of character motivation occurred in the show before? Yes. Do I approve of them? No. This time I'm not being hyperbolic. Starlight relays literally two sentences of superficial encouragement, and that completely alters Rainbow's behaviour? Remember, this could very well only be a problem with me. My stories tend to have drawn-out dialogue sections where I try to suck out every last ounce of meaning from every last word spoken before I move on to the next scene.

Right before the last scene with Celestia and Luna (a funny little scene, mind you), right after Rainbow and her friends are finished laughing everything off, we very randomly and very abruptly cut to a description of Twilight's inner thoughts, going as far as to give us a recount of her past experiences as princess and what she makes of this. This comes out of nowhere, and really confused me as to what type of narrator Alabenson was using. Before we had a generic third-person omniscient narrator with no strong focus on either perspective, and then we just hop into Twilight's point-of-view. I find a way around this because I use first-person omniscient, a type of narration style that I'm very fond of. Sorry, this didn't work for me. Why do I care about what Twilight thinks? This isn't season 1.

The third act in general felt incredibly rushed, like the author just wanted to get this shit over with. Look, I get it: sometimes the idea you started out with has gone on for far too long, and now all you want is a way out. But that's definitely no excuse for a ~4,000 word story. Maybe if it was an Epic I'd have given it to you. I like writing for extended periods of time, so there's a chance I'm being biased here. In addition, was the comedy tag really needed? I stopped to think about this for a minute and realized that yes, it kinda is. Never you mind.

To end off this cacophony of insistent rambling (see, I'm self-deprecating for your entertainment, be grateful), there's a fuck-ton of mechanical errors, more so than I would have liked. Remember when I said this?

All these pieces flowed very nicely, which is to say I was never once overtly irritated during my reading process.

I was lying to myself. There were constant typos, where "cut" should've been "cute," or "her" should've been "here." Or general homophone errors. Or awkward sentence breaks. Or incorrect usage of punctuation. There was an immense lack of commas, too. Some sentences I'd even classify as being run-ons. Some of the dialogue was a bit strange, too:

“Well, after Mrs. Gentle Care moved to Trottingham the mayor just couldn’t find anypony to keep it running. I had thought about offering to turn it at the time, but I just couldn’t work up the courage to do it back then.”

You don't need to say "at the time" followed by "back then." It's repetitive and adds to my depression.

And the prose itself was pretty boring and uninspired; but that's not a real complaint on my part.

I gotta be honest, this story was much better than what I had anticipated, which is to say I expected a shitty one-shot. I didn't dislike it. I actually did, in fact, like it. If you've recently sobered up after caving in to the peer pressure of friendly bets at tequila bars, inferring subsequent levels of inconvenient drunkenness, then check this story out. 6/10 That's me being unfathomably generous, by the way.