Hello, everyone! This is Dark Avenger, bringing you the latest fic review out of the dark and shpooky place that is FimFiction.

Today’s choice, entitled “A Hell of a Time”, is a comedy fic. It offers a humorous retelling of the events following a scene from the Season 4 finale, which is when Tirek banishes the three princesses -- Celestia, Luna, and Cadence -- to Tartarus shortly after they decided to give all of their magic to Twilight Sparkle for safekeeping. While the episode only shows the victims get chained up in this rough realm, this fic decides to speculate what actually happened in there while our favorite purple pony was busy re-enacting a battle from DragonBall Z.

The basic setup is this: Celestia remains determined to find a way out, Luna sits back and acts like she’s the “boss” since she already has experience with being locked away, while Cadence just complains because she fell onto her face and it really hurts. They also argue about what Twilight should be doing and how that relates to Celestia’s mentality, since she believes that her student is smart enough to not get into a meatheaded fight with Tirek. The other two princesses disagree, and they are able to relax because they’re certain Twilight will just “bust a (magical) cap in dat homie’s ass and break us all out in no time, yo!” And since we all know how the story ends, I’m sure you can imagine who ends up looking like a “fool” once they get free.

Aaaand… yeah, this is pretty much all the source of humor we have to work with.

“Oh, dear,” Celestia repeated, biting her lip and taking a step towards her niece, who still hadn’t moved at all. “Oh, dear. I think she broke something. What do we do?”

“You’re exaggerating, Sister.” Luna waved a hoof. “She’s all right!”

“Grbmbtflgggggh.”

“See? She agreed with me.” Luna shrugged and started looking for something in her mane. “Let her be, she’ll get better eventually. We have more important issues to attend, after all.”

“I don’t know. I think we should at least move her.” Celestia moved her head close to Cadance’s. “I’m not really sure if she can, uh, breathe.” She squinted. “Her face is completely flat against the ground.”

PROTIP: We are exactly 499 words in, and it’s still the “they arrived in Tartarus by falling onto their asses” gag. If you’re still laughing at this, you probably died of asphyxiation. That is: if you laughed at all...

Since this isn’t a very long fic, and there’s even less to discuss about the plot itself, I suppose I should take some time now to talk about comedy. Or, to be more precise, let’s start with what made the original show funny.

The humor in Friendship is Magic, much like a lot of the other things in it that made it so appealing to everyone, relies primarily on its characters. Compared to how whimsical the setting is -- I mean, they’re freaking ponies -- these characters are all given plenty of depth as the show progresses, instead of just leaving them as vapid one-dimensional bystanders for every scenario, i.e “this is the stupid one, this is the serious one who’s always annoyed by the stupid one, this is the cute and innocent one,” etc.

Now, I’m not saying FiM is the apogee of character creation or storytelling in general, but the effort is definitely there. Even Pinkie Pie, the most obnoxious pony by far, is shown to have more working under her skin than just some “never ending cocaine high” or whatever. And once you have these characters in place, the humor pretty much writes itself. You have them interact with each other, with those outside their group, or just have them react to some situation in general. You can have a serious character find themselves in a ridiculous situation, or even the other way around, and it leads to instant funnies.

Conversely, “A Hell of a Time” is your standard “straight man and their silly companions” model. As you may have guessed by now, Celestia is the “straight man”, Luna is the “silly one”, and Cadence is… the extra comic relief, maybe? To be honest, her character feels almost redundant among them, and overall the three of them are more caricatures than the ponies we got to know them as. The environment is barely put to use, if at all. Almost all the “humor” comes from the “silly ones” trying to act as ridiculously as possible, while the “straight man” desperately tries to keep it together, only to end up looking the fool themselves.

Let me clarify that, in general, I have nothing against this kind of comedy. It’s not my favorite kind, but I can still enjoy it. I like it when stories make it clear that they don’t take themselves seriously, which balances out all the ridiculous “serious fics” that pop up every now and then. And in all fairness, this fic did get a few genuine laughs out of me. However, those brief moments of joy did little to soothe the immense frustration brought on by the rest of the content, and if you ask me, those few laughs aren’t enough for the fic to deserve all the acclaim it apparently got.

The problem here is the context. The original show keeps its identity by making sure that, no matter what happens, its characters stay in character. If it just did whatever it wanted to them, they become little more than “skins” to be wrapped onto whatever the writer thought was funny. Unfortunately, this is exactly what “A Hell of a Time” tries to get away with. It uses recognizable characters, only to have them start acting completely out of character for the sake of “dem funnies.”

“But Dark Avenger! Didn’t the author himself say he knew they are all OOC, and it was all written in good fun?” That may be true, but the point is that if you aren’t even going to use the characters already given to you the way they are, then what’s the point of using them in the first place? This kinda strays into the topic of “what fanfics should be like in general”, but I don’t want to go very deep into that, so let’s just keep it simple.

When you write a fanfic, you are attaching yourself to a universe that’s already established, presumably because you wish to use the mechanics that come along with it. But if the end result is that your story has nothing to do with the spirit of the source material, it defeats the purpose of using that universe in the first place. If anything, at that point, the only reason you did it is because the original is already popular, so you wanted to ride its coattails by running under the same name and pretending to use the same characters.

Case in point: “A Hell of a Time” doesn’t show us what could have happened while the princesses were in Tartarus, let alone how that could have turned out to be amusing. It doesn’t try to adopt the spirit of the show to tell a story that was never told in canon, let alone make it funny. Instead, the only vibe I get is every inch of the fic screaming about what the author thinks is “funny”. I don’t feel like I’m immersed in a genuine story that has humorous twists and turns. I just feel like I’m stuck in a room with some guy who desperately wants to convince me that he’s good at humor.

Of course, none of that should be a problem if he is good at humor, right?

[Celestia] “Twilight Sparkle will not fight! She’s not—!”

“She has literally fought against every single foe that has attacked Equestria lately,” Luna interrupted.

[Cadence] “And she didn’t even use the Elements against Chrysalis. She went barehoofed.”

[Luna] “She came to Equestria to do two things, and she ran out of bubblegum long ago.”

PROTIP: Please stop.

No doubt everyone is screaming the same thing at me now: “ZOMG humours iz subjective, you dick!!11!” I won’t argue with that, but the same could be claimed in defense of anything related to art, which makes any attempt to judge them completely meaningless.

That said, here’s my subjective opinion of the “humor” in “A Hell of a Time”: from start to finish, we get an endless barrage of OOC behavior combined with unfunny and extremely forced gags. If you think that’s harsh, keep in mind that this has to be the fifth “comedy” fic I’ve read from Aragon, and in my eyes, his style isn’t showing any variety, let alone improvement. He starts off with an (admittedly) clever premise, only to just use the characters as mannequins, put some really obnoxious “funny hats” on their heads, and have them run about like beheaded chickens. Even the description is always some variation of the same thing: “...bla bla bla bla, there’s no way can things get even worse, is there?” Gee, where have I seen that before?

Not that this should be a problem. After all, with three princesses already in Tartarus (a.k.a Hell), speculating on how things could get even worse for them is not a bad concept in and of itself. The problem is that I’m not seeing the princesses in there. I’m seeing three puppets (four if we count Twilight later on) being dragged about erratically by someone who horribly imitates their voices to tell a cringeworthy story that doesn’t make me laugh.

Going back to that metaphor with “mannequins and hats”: even if I could find the jokes funny in this fic, the appeal is lost once I consider that you could just take those “hats” and put them on anyone to have the exact same effect. Those three stuck in Tartarus might as well be Applejack, Rarity, and Fluttershy, and you could establish the same setup by just not having them act the way they normally do. Same goes if it were three background ponies, or three OCs, god forbid. At least then you’d have the excuse that there are no established personalities, so you could do whatever you want.

In fact, there’s barely anything in the story that demands the fic to be pony-related at all. You could choose any three characters (or just make up your own) and do the same story. And the moment your link to the source material feels redundant, you know you’ve got problems...

I mean, sure, there’s a clever bit where Luna takes out her “imprisonment kit” or whatever it was called. It ties in with her jail time on the moon and raises some interesting questions, but instead of dwelling on that, we just get more OOC antics and sloppy humor. Rather than find an amusing way to explain what Luna ate on the moon if she was in need of toilet paper (and, by extension, what they plan to eat in Tartarus), we just get more unfunny jokes about how Cadence’s face hurts...

And then we get to the worst of it:

“Hmm.” Cadance scratched the back of her neck. “Yeah, to be honest, between that and the way Luna went all omnicidal a thousand years ago, I’m not sure you’re that good of a mentor figure. But hey, at least I am not a psychopath!”

[Celestia] “Yes, Cadance, that’s very helpful.”

“Seriously, though,” Cadance said, turning around to look at Luna and Twilight, who were still busy with the harmonica, “seeing how those two ended up like, I’m surprised Equestria didn’t burn down under your rule long ago.”

PROTIP: It’s funny because it’s all her fault. LOLOLOLOLOLOLOOOOL!!!1!!11!

Up to this point, I could have written this fic off as a “parody” (in the loosest sense of the word), but there’s really not much to say once you see someone resort to scraping the bottom of the barrel. I’m pretty sure this shitty trope was done and old less than two weeks after the first two episodes of the show aired on TV, let alone years after it. But since here we’re already talking about the prose equivalent of dangling a keychain in front of a baby’s face to make them laugh, perhaps this kind of stuff should come as no surprise.

Look, if you really want to write “the most randomest funniest story ever”, there are better ways to do it and better premises to work with. If you want to make the story of the princesses’ vacation in Tartarus funny instead of annoying, try to make use of their characters instead of just drawing funny faces onto cardboard cutouts. If you really want to “crank the silliness to eleven”, then make the environment of the characters as silly as you can. There are plenty of ways to make an in-character Luna say something that’s funny due to the context, yet isn’t ridiculous on its own. If I wanted to read about a smartass idiot who plays a blues harmonica in hell, I don’t see any reason why it should have anything to do with Miss Moonbutt.

Actually, scratch that. Previous experience had taught me that Aragon can write things that aren’t shallow. That’s why I originally had high hopes for this fic when I was only a third of the way in. Sure, the unfunny narration and Luna’s behavior annoyed me, but I expected some sort of turning point the whole time. A scene where she would reveal her true purpose for acting so weird, and the story would gain genuine substance. I was led to believe that Luna was actually even less optimistic than Celestia and thought that they might end up stuck there forever (though she was unwilling to admit it). The mention of her “imaginary friends” and whatnot hinted at how she tried to combat the crushing loneliness and despair while trapped on the moon. And now that she’s imprisoned somewhere again, she wants to make sure none of her companions have to suffer. When they start to worry, she starts acting silly to dispel the depressed atmosphere. When they question how long it will take Twilight to rescue them (or whether she can do that at all), she assures them that Twilight will bust them out in no time.

See? In one stroke, you have silly comedy, faithfulness to canon, and exploration of the source material, which is precisely what fanfiction is best for. But no. All that potential is lost, and instead we get a dumb and overlong joke about how Celestia sucks at running her country because “everything is always solved by friendship laserbeams”.

Just to put the final nail into the cross, I would add that the author said he wrote this thing in one go. In my experience, these “one-shot-in-one-go” fics reveal the inner workings of the author most accurately, since there’s no time for one to “round off the corners”, so to speak. On some level, these stories basically say: “When you open the gates, this is what spills out of my creator.”

That said, if this is what can be expected to rise up from the depths of Aragon’s being as a comedy writer, then I don’t have high hopes for the rest of his stuff. And I did read other comedy fics of his, all of which suffered from the same kinds of problems: humor without any modicum of subtlety, often strained too far to be funny at all, or never funny in the first place. The guy has excellent ideas, but the execution constantly falls short.

Here’s a message for all you “aspiring authors” out there, especially those who want to do “comedy”: if you insist on writing about these colorful talking horses, try to keep in mind why you were drawn to them in the first place. I know you have all your super awesome fics planned out where Twilight becomes the next Dragonborn and fights bug-bodied terrorists in outer space, but at some point you’re going to grow up and face the facts. The main reason why fics like Fallout:Equestria or the Dissonance series (“Envy and Arrogance”, “Guilt and Hate”, etc.) can get away with content that’s completely detached from the show -- even though we’re talking about nuclear war and possessed dead bodies of children here -- is because they still manage to focus on the spirit of the source material. They just changed the environment, taking it to extremes, and tried to explore how the characters could still endure using the magic of friendship. These are the times when it makes sense to write a fanfic, since it deals with something directly related to a vital part of that universe, and maybe even adds to it.

So yeah… either do that, or just use the damn “AU” tag…

Overall, dear readers, “A Heads on a Dime” is no more than a passable comedy flick. It’s a quickie, some of the jokes can be enjoyed, and it doesn’t waste your time for that long. If I had never heard of it or the author before, I’d probably give it a 5/10 “meh” rating and just move on. But this review happened after me witnessing the same gimmick get reused over and over and over again, milking a giant audience in the process, and at this point I can’t forgive any of the cheap shots it pulls. And if this is what gets popular as “comedy” and this is what I’m supposed to accept as “funny” because “the masses said so”, then I just feel sorry for all of you.

Read it if you want. Who knows, you might get a laugh. I didn’t...