Efake oceans

• MLP: FiM
• Tragedy

The room is white. The ocean outside is blue. Everything is okay.

• Spitfire
• Soarin

The Red Parade · 1.3k words  ·  43  4 · 764 views

Overview

The room is white. The ocean is blue. So long as that’s true, everything will be okay.

This is a tricky story to review, for a lot of reasons. It breaks rules very deliberately, and it’s probably not about what you think it’s about for most of the piece. I don’t know if there’s any way to properly review it without spoilers, but I also think it’s a story that you should absolutely not go into having been spoiled. So if you haven’t read it, I will just say this: It’s only 1300 words, and they’re worth your time.

Characters

There are two characters in this piece, Spitfire and Soarin’. The story is very short, so we don’t have much time with either of them, but despite that, they both feel like real characters. Their dialogue is simple, all about the situation at hand and not much else, but the style of the piece and the surrounding narration make it hit hard.

There’s not much to these characters, all things considered. You could replace them with really anyone, and the story would still work. In some stories, that would be a bad thing. This one, however, isn’t focused on the characters so much as the imagery. The characters are here to paint a picture, and that’s what they do. For the purposes of this story, they’re used well, and there’s not much to say about them other than that.

Plot & Pacing

The pacing here is fantastic. The story wants you to slow down and consider, and it does that with deliberate repetition that becomes a familiar mantra, only for it to shift and change at the end as the implications become clear. It puts a lot of punch into a very small amount of words, but it doesn’t feel rushed because of it.

As for the actual plot… it fits into a common enough fanfiction genre - “two ponies talking in a room.” These pieces can often lack direction or substance, especially if the ponies are poorly written or they’re talking about something that doesn’t matter. In this case, neither of these things is true. What they are talking about matters a great deal, and more importantly, it justifies why they are sitting in a room talking about it. In other words, the only story this could be is two ponies talking in a room.

I’m not going to go into details about what the conversation leads to to avoid spoilers here as much as I can. In some ways, the conclusion is obvious long before the story gets there, but it’s clear that the journey is the important part here. The ending goes straight for the jugular on the feelings front, but it’s set up well enough that it doesn’t feel too manipulative. It can be tricky to have tragic endings feel earned in a story this short, but this pulls it off. Not perfectly, but very well.

Technical Skill

There’s a well-known saying in art of all kinds that you have to know what the rules are in order to break them. This is certainly on display here. This is a story that is almost entirely dialogue driven, and there is not a quotation mark to be seen. No distinction is made between narration and dialogue, but this is not a mistake but a deliberate choice. This is something that is easy to do poorly and difficult to do well, and it’s done well here because those quotation marks are not necessary. At no point in this story was it unclear what pieces of the text were narration, and which were a pony talking - or even which pony was talking, since there obviously aren’t any speech tags either.

In a similar manner, it repeats itself quite deliberately, but knows exactly how much repetition is too much, and then when to change it to reflect the changing mood of the story.

This works. It gives the entire story a feeling much like poetry, where the way the words flow is just as important as what the words say. It is a way to elevate the prose into something more than just ‘grammatically correct.’ Sometimes, the best way to make the mechanics stand out is to deliberately break the rules.

Rating

Character: 4/5 

The characters do what they need to do to make the story work, and no more. 

Plot: 3.5/5

The plot is simple but effective. It’s nothing new in terms of what it’s trying to do, but it executes it very well.

Mechanics: 5/5

The prose deliberately breaks the rules, and the result is poetry. It’s rare to see a story that stands out primarily because of its mechanics.

Final Score: 4.16/5

A story that feels very poetic, which does a great job of planting some very evocative imagery into the reader.

Final Thoughts

This is a story that is difficult to put into words why I liked it. It feels unique because of the way the story is told, rather than the story it’s telling, and it’s worth reading for that alone.