• Member Since 1st Apr, 2012
  • offline last seen Last Thursday

darf


pony-writer/pornographer looking for work. old stories undeleted. i'm sorry. Patreon here

E
Source

Pinkie Pie and Twilight Sparkle have a house by the shore together. Many years have gone by. Sometimes, every day is hard.

Dedicated to.

Inspired by.

Chapters (1)
Comments ( 80 )

That was quite good. Sad, but good.

~Skeeter The Lurker

This story lived up to it's tags, and I loved that ending.

I could imagine this as a sort of alternate fallout from the 'Lesson Zero' episode. Where Twilight had been asked to leave the town and such.

Darf delivers yet again yet again. :pinkiecrazy:

Also folk music, yus. I'd assume you've heard of Sufjan Stevens, Mr. Darf?

If I'm reading it correctly: Twi is clinically depressed?

Shining isn't going to write, but it isn't your fault Twilight.

2896743
really? shit. i searched for a fitting pic for hours.

if you have a better one, lemme know so i can change it :facehoof:

2896767

Author of that story here! Don't worry mate, it happens to everyone. I remember seeing two stories with the same cover art in the feature box once. :pinkiehappy:

Master Darf, please teach me the ways of the feels.

Have you ever felt depressed? More properly, have you ever 'had' depression? Have you had months-long periods in your life that you can barely remember because they were mostly absorbed by sitting in your bedroom, trying to figure out how to leave and be 'normal' for a moment? I'm not talking about a brief period of intense depression caused by the death of a loved one, of a long-term relationship falling apart, or any other transitory factor: I mean the sort of pathological bleakness that starts in your brainstem and travels down to your soul, to the point where there's brief periods in the day where you know (don't think, know) that suicide is the only answer. Days where the temptation to leave a corpse for others to find and the very act of looking in the mirror is so primally revolting you can barely do it. Days where you sicken yourself just by existing and when sitting in your car you want to start pulling off strips of skin simply because you can't be yourself and exist anymore. It's hard to describe what something like this feels like to someone who's been fortunate enough not to feel it- the very idea that the self no longer makes sense and you spend most of your time in a dream world of total, all-encompassing self-hatred and suffering.

I ask all these questions because Silencer is one of the only bands that I've heard who capture depression as it actually is. Not a romantic sorrow, not something passionate and artistic, but the greyness of living in that mental state, where sadness eventually gets overwhelmed by sheer tiredness, resignation, and regret that you ever existed. There's a potent mixture of insane rage and equally insane self-destruction in this music that I think only really resonates with people who have been there before (and not even all the time, at that). It's a product of a very peculiar mixture of neurological chemicals and environmental suffering, and Silencer captures exactly what it's like to feel it. Not really sad, not crying, not even wishing for another life, but just sitting on the couch, knees pulled to your chest, looking out the window, and not thinking because it hurts too much even to think. It's horribly negative music that I have no doubt has inspired more than a few desperate bids for salvation at the bottom of a pill bottle.

pretty appropriate

2896767 Ceck out www.reddit.com/r/twipie, they'll have something for sure.

Make another one I want to know why Twilight is sad. :fluttershysad:

2897295

Nearly certainly full blown Chronic Depression.

Very good story. It just felt right for some reason. It's completely against everything the show goes for, but I just makes sense.

2896509 You read like every story ever, don't you? :twilightsmile:

2898031

Was it that obvious?

~Skeeter The Lurker

I am a fucking idiot. I knew I shouldn't read this after seeing some of the comments, but I did it anyway.

Very nicely written, incidentally.

I completely undestand how Twilight feels, and I have felt the same way in the past, but i never forget, that tomorrow is a brand new day and a new chance at life.

Shit man, why is your writing so good?! :fluttercry:

Very touching.
You used the word "said" too much, try changing that word to more descriptive words.

Amit #21 · Jul 19th, 2013 · · 1 ·

2901108
I'm not the author, but:
:rainbowderp:
:rainbowhuh:
:rainbowlaugh:

I can relate to Twi. I haven't felt that way recently, but for a while there...yeah. I get it.

This story was...beautiful, I think is the word I want. You showed Pinkie and Twilight perfectly. I just...it's...I like it. A lot.

Darf I think this is the first time I have read a story you wrote not about pony sex

:fluttercry:

This was beautiful. So simple and beautiful.

I've been where Twilight is now. Sometimes, I return there.

I hope I won't drag someone there with me.

Brilliant fic, darf.

This was... what's the word... I don't even know but it was really good. I wish we had a little more insight as to why Twilight was so depressed but I liked the portrayal of the characters.

Am where Twilight is. As are many... Good fic.

This was hard to finish. Mostly, that was due to how damn well you portrayed the situation. The painful walking-on-eggshells feeling of every exchange... the many "she didn't says"....

I think the story hit a little too close to home.

Thanks, Darf.

So
Twi is depressed
She left Ponyville with Pinkie
And PInkie isn't helping, not really
Doesn't say "I love you"
Forgets the door
It's so sad
A
Can't
type doccrectly
ahn

DAMNIT DARF!!!!! i follow you for the pony porn and you pull this beautiful, heart wrenching thing out of your ass? god the FEELS! I hate you, you magnificent bastard.

Okay. Other than the names of the characters and what their limbs are called I just don't see how this qualifies as a FIMfiction.

Why is the Princess's student/a Princess of Equestria/Element of harmony & savior of the world depressed and living in a small harbor town? Why is Pinkiepie there too? Why is Pinkie in love with Twilight? Why would someone who dedicates their life to learning everything about magic settle with working in a small bookstore? (Also, the bookstore is really unexplained as it seems to only exist as a device to get Twilight out of bed). Why doesn't Pinkie tell Twilight that she loves her? Whats the goal of this story, why doesn't it have an start or ending?

If I was to summarize what I got from your story:
character one is depressed, and lives a life they don't want to live in a small harbor town
Character two lives with character one and loves them, but doesn't tell character one of their love.

That's it, that's everything important in your story so far. They went through two days where nothing important to the story happened.

Am I missing something here? I'm seeing a bunch of really positive comments and ratings, but I'm scratching my head as to why. Are people rating it high just because it's a darf story?

This is the kind of slice of life fics that I love. Why is that? Because I can certainly relate to it. I feel like Pinkie here. :pinkiehappy:

Oh, God. This is so beautifully sad.
I can feel it tugging and twitching my heartstrings everytime I read it, and I love every second of it.
:pinkiesad2:

I'm left confused and disappointed by this story. Have I missed the point? :rainbowhuh:

Great atmosphere, leaving it ambiguous on the whys was a good choice. Greenthumbed

darf #36 · Aug 21st, 2013 · · 1 ·

3081717
the point is just that depression sucks. not much more to say about it.

When all you do is write a depressed character with no reason or backstory to his/her depression, it does not make for an engaging read. I like these two characters a lot, but I could not bring myself to care about them in this story

darf #38 · Aug 23rd, 2013 · · 5 ·

3091683
you're totally entitled to your opinion, but i don't understand the problem you articulated. clinical depression doesn't often have a traceable reason. i kind of shamelessly emulated real life with this story to the point where it's a little bit divorced from the show canon, and it's a pure vignette with the only conflict present in the day-to-day goings on of life... but all that said, i don't know that a 'reason' for the depression would help anything. maybe there's another reason it sat poorly with you that you didn't articulate.

either way, it's definitely not a story for everyone. it's probably even a little bit of a sympathy grab for people who have been through the same situation as either Twilight or Pinkie. or maybe i'm overplaying the importance of empathy in this situation. anyway.

thanks for reading, at the very least.

3092196
(Maybe this will explain further.)

The thing is, without any insight into the inner workings of her mind, I'm left unable to connect to the character and thus emphasize with her, which is pretty key to the emotion working in the story. I understand clinical depression (I have some close relatives who suffer from it and there's a chance I have it to some degree), but it's a little presumptuous to just assume that because a pony is sad that people will feel sad. This story, I think, illustrates a pitfall of slice-of-life: it can be easy to wind up without a conflict, or at the very leas without a strong one. There's a barely alluded-to conflict between Twilight and Shining Armor (really disappointed that didn't get any payoff, by the way), the self vs. self with Twilight (which, since we don't get any insight into it, is just sort of there), and the conflict between Pinkie and Twilight, which isn't so much a conflict as Pinkie trying to help Twilight with her problems. And we don't really know what those problems are.

I guess what I'm saying is, without any backstory to how the characters ended up this way, they become sort of pony-shaped cutouts that don't feel like they have much personality. Twilight is always a Debbie Downer; Pinkie is always trying to be supportive. That's it. They're one-note. There's no character growth, change, or what feels like any point to the story. It's fine to tell a vignette, but generally basing them around character moments and change helps to make them interesting even if the conflicts aren't strong.

None of that is here.

That was beautiful.
And, if I were you I would treat the fact that the comments are divided between "that was beautiful" and "I don't get it" as a great achievement in writing.

Beautiful.

Sad, but beautiful.

this was a well-written little story in its own right, but it has nothing at all to do with MLP besides just using the names. the characters are different enough from their show selves that it doesn't feel like them, and there's no explanation or period of adjustment--we're just supposed to accept that twilight is much different now with her depression and pinkie is much different now with her maturity and worrying about twilight. the setting is significantly different from the show with no particular explanation or period of adjustment--they're living on their own and presumably are/were romantically involved with no mention of how they got from the state of the show to this current situation. familiar names are really the only thing that make this a MLPFiM story; there's nothing about the characters, the setting, the atmosphere, anything, that makes this fimfiction story. if you changed the names to characters and places from another show or just original ones altogether, nothing would change or seem out of place.

like i said this is a decent story by itself but i don't really see why its a pony story at all, or at the very least why it isnt a story about some oc ponies since theres nothing tying this story's twilight and pinkie to the real twilight and pinkie.

darf #43 · Aug 23rd, 2013 · · 4 ·

3093674
at the risk of entering heavily into a situation i always dread (the author 'justifying' their work to a detractor), i do want to say a little bit more, mostly because i've valued your opinion on my stories in the past, and because i feel like you're begrudging this story for not doing something it has no grounds doing in the first place. i'll say a few more things, which i suspect won't change your mind anyway, but i want to explain because there's missing context. if your take away is that you still don't like the story, that's fine too.

firstly: in case it's not glaringly apparent, the whole thing is an emulation of Hemingway-esque short story minimalism. we can use Hills Like White Elephants as the closest analogy, because it really represents the whole 'give no details and show conflict only in the unspoken'. in much the same fashion as that story, this is meant to be a full execution of the iceberg principle; you, the reader, aren't meant to see any of the inner workings or information. context of the conflict is absent. everything is beneath the surface. i'm aware there are plenty of people who hate that particular short story, but i love it, so if there's just a disparity there we can chock the whole thing up to taste.

two: while i suspect your point about understanding depression was well meaning, i don't believe it can be entirely valid unless you've been either of the characters in this relationship. maybe that is to say it's more impactful to read a story that has been about your life in parts—the comments along the lines of 'i've been Pinkie/Twilight before' definitely lead me to believe that—but i'm still a bit confused by what more you were looking for. there's no 'reason' for Twilight's depression, much the same way there isn't sometimes for real depression. there's no 'backstory' because the inferrence is that if you're depressed, you've been depressed for a while. this story's presentation is cyclical, even though i gave a little bit at the end in the form of a soft reconciliation, showing that tomorrow is a new day, and Twilight might wake up and feel just a little better. asking for grandiose illustration of conflict, supplying of missing information, etc. etc. is defeating the purpose of painting a picture of the sameness of depression in the first place. i feel like i even leaned a little harder into giving the audience something to work with by using unspoken sentences to show the mental turmoil of the situation, where Hemingway would have kept that stuff stripped.

three: specifically about Twilight's brother—there's no 'conflict' hinted at there either. the issue is simply that Twilight wants to hear that someone she loves cares about her, and she doesn't. the fact that i'm spelling this out feels like i'm shooting the exercise in the foot, but i believe there's a staunch difference in the principles of writing enjoyed by someone who appreciates unspoken subtlety and minimalism versus an overt conflict. if you feel this story is lacking in the latter, that's fine, but it's intentional and i stand by it as a decision.

lastly:

There's no character growth, change, or what feels like any point to the story.

welcome to depression. that's kind of the point.

and, again, i will say that the soft moment of affection at the end of the story shows us there's a little hope. just like real life, it's not much, but it's a start.

hopefully that's all i need say on things. if you still don't like the story (and i suspect you won't), i'll totally respect that too, but i'd say it has a lot more to do with taste and a lot less to do with anything objectively wrong with the story itself. i'm fine agreeing to a difference of opinion if you are. :twilightsmile:

Very nice, I'm very impressed with this quite simple yet elegant and emotional writing. I'll be looking at more of your stuff and hopefully see you more in the near future, good Sir.

// Sphex

As a l ong time sufferer of depression, I quite approve of this story. It has a Hemingway sense of untold background and unspoken dialogue hinting at turmoil. It's a monotonous story in a good way capturing the bitter cycle of emptieness and hopelessness. For those that think it has no substance, well that's how it is for us, an empty life filled with the suffering of trying to find anything to live for. The very act of struggling brings agony and a kind of friction where you cry out for things to get better and suffer through life, and maybe a sliver of purpose at the end of the more tolerable days if you're lucky. Forget bad days, people can have bad months.

3094361
Ehhh. I've enjoyed Hemingway pretty regularly in the past, but I'm not so sure you hit what you were going for with this one. I can at least see what the story was attempting to be, though.

Agree to disagree sounds fine to me.

I found this to be absolutely beautiful, even as it broke my heart a little bit.

I think that, as readers of modern fiction, we've become accustomed to every tiny thing in a story being explained. This is not inherently bad, but sometimes it's good to see a story go the other way, to present us with a moment in time and refuse to allow us to peer too far into the past or the future. It takes a lot of guts for a writer to create a story where there is no real resolution to the central conflict, and no backstory to set it up. It goes against many of the established rules of modern popular fiction. But sometimes that is absolutely necessary.

Depressed characters in fiction often have a single, dramatic event in their past which explains their condition. We're almost trained to look for it at this point. But it became clear as I read the story that Twilight's depression, like so many real ones, had no real root cause.

Some commenters have said that you failed to explain the roots of her condition, but the way I read it, you conveyed the entire origin (or lack thereof) of Twilight's depression with a single line: "Why am I doing this?"

Having her depression be without cause was a brave choice on your part, and I thank you for making it. It contextualizes everything in the story, even the way Pinkie is acting: she knows her friend is has an illness, she knows her usual methods of parties and songs aren't going to fix anything. So she makes Twilight pancakes and tries to get her out of bed. It's all so very understated and small-scale for a larger than life character like Pinkie Pie, but that's what makes her the perfect choice for the role. It's like she's been made smaller by her friend's suffering.

I have a hard time deciding which character I felt for more. I get the impression that they didn't always sleep in separate beds.

In my experience, the really bad thing about being depressed, or living with someone who is, isn't big dramatic moments where the afflicted person bursts into tears or tries to hurt themselves; it's the monotony, the crushing sameness that causes each day to become indistinguishable from the last. Your ending captured that flawlessly. As someone whose writing tends to go for overstatement a bit too often, I'm very impressed with how much you've managed to convey with so few words.

My only complaint is that I think you went to the "she didn't say" well just a bit too often. Especially since the last use of it ("'I love you,' she didn't say") was so damn powerful. I worry that it may have lost a bit of impact due to your repeated use of the device.

Stellar work all the same, though. This is a story that will stay with me for some time.

I am lucky enough to not be able to really "get" this story. What I found curious however, is that I automatically assumed the depressed pony was Pinkie Pie. I was actually quite surprised it was Twilight. Perhaps reading so many fanfics has more of an effect on how I perceive these characters then I thought.

3094818 I totally thought it was going to be Pinkie Pie, too! I was glad for the novelty, though! Sort of...

My issue with this story is simple:

These characters - they aren't Pinkie Pie and Twilight Sparkle.

They have their names, and I suppose that it is conceivable that, through time and circumstance, the Twilight and Pinkie we know could end up like this. But the link isn't presented, and so these characters are irreconcilably disconnected from the ponies we know.

Other than that, it is very well-written. It's just not an FiM story. I give this neither an up- nor down-vote.

Login or register to comment