TFake Smiles: Fluttershy's Lament

• MLP: FiM
• Dark
• Sad
• Slice of Life

Rainbow stumbling across Pinkie drinking went a lot better than Pinkie could have hoped, what she didn't know is what would come from it. She thought she was the only one of her friends that was miserable and wearing a mask, she was wrong.

• Narcotics
• Suicide / Self Harm
• Profanity
• Fluttershy
• Rainbow Dash
• Pinkie

Perfectly Insane · 7.9k words  ·  93  0 · 2.9k views

So, there is finally a sequel to the highest rated story I have reviewed. Let’s hope it lives up to the last one.. If you need a refresher, here. Is the review of the first story. Or, if that is too much of an ask, these two stories can be summarized as follows;

In this story, the primary characters from the first story, Pinkie and Rainbow, go to visit Fluttershy and learn about how broken she is. And let me tell you, that song is rather apt.

In terms of what I liked in this story, this one is very much like the last one in the for the most part, the characters feel real*. There is this chemistry here between the characters that is genuinely present to read. Like the first story, everyone isn’t some magical girl saying that everything will be great at the end and to just believe and be optimistic, they shout and act hostile and generally don’t behave like what people would encourage you to do when it comes to depression, instead they act like… humans. Complete with all the self-destructive, self-sabotaging BS that one would expect.

Furthermore, this story is dark. Like the first story, this one addresses the topic of the all-too-real existence of major depressive disorder with added suicidal ideation. What I even loved was the author use of treatment resistant depression, the ultimate pathway to existential nihilism (see Bojack Horseman) with the lively caveat that there is no light at the end and all you can do is embrace the suck.

Now, as for the negatives, first and foremost would be the writing.

Her eyes were barely open, like she was so lost in thought she hardly was even awake.

Her eyes were barely open, seemingly so lost in thought that she could only be considered conscious in the most technical sense.

Issues like this are all too common in the story for my liking. There is a seeming lack of eloquence in the manner that things are being described in. There is a lack of subtlety and refinement to a good deal of the writing, only really telling what is going on to a serviceable degree while not going far enough to really draw the reader in and invest them in the scene. There are additional grammatical issues here and there, but the primary concern I have is in regards to the polish not being as high as I would like to see for a story.

As for my second criticism, well…

[warning, personal rant inbound. What is being said here may not be good advice or true, but it was a personal thorn in my side while reading, and as it relates to story construction, I felt I needed to include it. While writing this, I realized I am probably too close emotionally to this story, and as such, I would STRONGLY recommend disregarding my scores at the end with the exception of the main three (Writing, Pacing, Characters) as those are the only ones I can trust myself to be decently objective with. If you feel I am off on anything here, challenge me, please, I DESPERATELY want to be wrong about all this.]

Remember that asterix? Well, here is my clarification on why that praise needed some clarification, and a reason why this review was almost painful to write on an emotional level. This story, rather than straddling the line between the grittiness of reality and the optimism of MLP and looking to balance the two, swerves back and forth and creates a strange and disesteeming tone to it all.

This might be because I love dark, realistic, depressing stories and find positive ones distasteful, but this story is tonally different from the first in a way I was not a fan of. While the first fake smiles was very grounded and felt very authentic and genuine (while also having Pinkie be a little too sad-sackish for my taste it did work, and this is continued in this story), this story feels like it was hit by Dr. Doofenshmirtz MLP-inator (making everything positive and wholesome to make people too soft to stop him from taking over the tristate area) and a good deal of the quiet, contemplative, and real dialog, interactions, and writing was stripped away to give a positive message about things getting better and being willing to suffer through to a point where there isn’t as much suck, while strangely also keeping the darkest, most grounded aspects of the first.

I am not trying to say that a story cannot have a positive message or that the worst parts of our existence can’t be portrayed a little less grim-dark, but I will say that when you do so, especially in a sequel that is to a story as depressing as the first, you need to be careful not to go too far, as what you get comes across a wee bit moralizing and like an anti-suicide PSA.

As you may have noticed, this section of the review JUST clarifying that single asterix is almost 50% of the review, this is due to how in love I was with the first story. I REALLY wanted to like this story, I honestly couldn’t wait to finally get to see what the follow up to the first one would be like for two reasons. The first being, quite obviously, my love of the Fake Smiles, while the second was due to the author’s history. This will make the fourth story I have reviewed from them, and while I have my reservations about The Pinkamena Chronicles’ ending, I can’t say I disliked any one of them. The reason for this is because the author has shown a willingness to get dark and not pull their punches.

If I had to clarify just why this is so disappointing for me, my best answer to verbalize this is that if feels like the author was either afraid or uncomfortable with going the whole nine yards with the subject matter. This for me was most apparent in two aspects. Canonically, this story take place around abouts 24 hours after the first one, so seeing Pinkie express the virtue of continuing to live and the value of life felt… off. Secondly, rather than having a mostly third person externally omniscient perspective like the first one, we get that PLUS a look inside the mind Rainbow Dash telling us how much she cares for her friends and is broken up about how damaged they are.

The reason I think these detract from the story is that it feels like it was written by a different author.

In the first story, Rainbow, while being sympathetic to Pinkies plight, had a very reserved air about her, willing to show compassion, but not breaking down into an emotional mess. Here, we get to read how caring and emotionally effecting everything is to Rainbow. This feels off to me as it takes the ‘others care’ message from the first and almost rams it down your throat by not so subtly telling us how much this is the case in a manner not dissimilar to what happens in cannon.

And speaking of cannon, this story takes points from it to its detriment in my opinion. While yes, Pinkie and Rainbow would be this compassionate in cannon and be on the optimistic side of things, this just doesn’t make as much sense to me here. As was established in the first story, Pinkie is nihilistic and pessimistic, seeing little value in her life and seemed to have been mostly just convinced to curb her more destructive tendencies because talking to someone about her own brand of suck was better at alleviating her pain than good old alcoholism. In this story, her saying to keep living and that there is light at the end of the tunnel just didn’t feel in character for her when it has been less than 24 hours, especially when the nihilistic Pinkie form the first story resurfaces.

In short, Pinkie feels like she is doing this throughout the story.

Final scores;

Writing: 7/10, As stated, there is a lack of polish in the writing, things don’t flow as well as they could and have this odd phrasing and tone to them in a good number of sentences/paragraphs. I would highly recommend an editor or a second pass of the story to clean things up and get things ironed out.

Pacing: 8/10, The biggest road bump I could name would be regular explanations of the character’s internal thoughts and feelings, along with LONG dialog statements that actually go on for multiple paragraphs. The overall pacing is decent, but there is a level of telling rather than chowing and explaining rather than heavily implying and demonstrating that bogs things down.

Characters: 8/10, Characters are well handled and fell real and human, with all the idiosyncrasies and faults one would expect. I would just recommend to work on the dialog for them a bit as it feels less natural than in the firs story and comes across as ‘written by person to explain things and invoke a response from audience.’

Atmosphere: 6/10, As I said with that huge rant, there is a tonal issue going on. The atmosphere is being dragged back and forth between melancholy due to the implications and powerlessness that everyone feels due to the realization they have little control over their own psychological wellbeing and hope filled declaration of ones desire for and posable change to improve ones situation along with the usual MLP levels of care and friendship. The two create conflicting tones that fail transition smoothly, going from one to the other in a manner that simply feels jarring.

Darkness: 6/10, The tone here is all over the place when it comes to darkness. The author feels like they want to discuss the topic of severe depression and suicidal ideation, while at the same time not wanting to get to dark and seemingly condoning self-power-off. It is fine to take heavy topics and lower the severity and how depressing the subject is to make it more appealing, but topics like severe clinical depression and feelings of worthlessness, suicide, and the inability to feel joy NEED the tone to remain as consistently realistic and honest in their exploration and examination as going back and forth between the harsh reality of the matter and the hope filled view creates a conflict in tone.

Total Score: 35/50 or 7/10, This was a decent story that may have had been received better by me if it wasn’t tied to the first story as 70% of my issues came from the fact that when compared, the first Fake Smiles just felt closer to wat I would consider to be an ideal story due to how dark and gritty it was, putting asterixes next to every happy thing that happened.