History made us.
Literally.
Certain events we remember. Certain events we even hold dear.
Certain events we've forgotten. Certain events... We wish to forget.
Here's a collection of jokes and anecdotes from the hooves of those who've survived the biggest terrors equine society has faced, and an insight into our own lives and history.
In memory of World War 1, World War 2, the Holocaust, and in memory of all the victims and martyrs who died, fighting, or merely living through terror.
Chapters (1)
Why does this have a comedy tag? There is nothing funny about this topic.
The same reason the tragedy tag is there.
It was 99% tragedy and 1% dark comedy. The entire thing, even in hindsight, is completely absurd and unsound for the common man.
Also, bits and blots of humor can be found in crumbs, hidden in the text. Dark, sour, embittered gallows humor, but it's still there.
The Holocaust, the greatest tragedy of modern history, proved that men are not animals - they are far, far worse. And marked the end of an era, the end "fair fight" in warfare - and indeed, the meaningless slaughter didn't ended with the end of WW2 -, and the end of our belief in natural innocence - a hypothesis already weakened by World War 1.
It is obviously a subject that shouldn't be taken lightly.
But, if you look at it through the eyes of those who suffered through it, you'll see it far more differently. No longer it is a mass bundle of depressing data, no longer it is a horror story about human nature - it becomes a tale, spread from mouth to mouth, from father to son, mother to daughter.
Terror outweighs rejoice in reality, but in the minds of the survivors, life was all the more brighter with the War getting more and more behind them. And even under the mind-numbing horrors that was the Holocaust, some remained conscious enough to see the absurdity of the whole thing, and, like any other human, laugh at it.
I have to admit, the comedy tag is a bit misleading, as the comedy we're talking about is very dark and few and far between.
Shall I take it off?
3402621 sry that i didn´t answer sooner, but after reading your post, and calming a bit down, I can understand why it was there initialy. I just re-read this and I think it acomplishes to show what happened at that time.
But when you have seen a KZ and hear the storys the survivors have to tell about that place, you get a bit irritated, when there is a Story about it labeled as comedy.
In my hometowb was just a camp for prisoners of war (Stammlager VII A), but we visited two KZ in School in 9th grade, and even a watchtower othe Berliner Mauer, in 10th grade, which was converted into a museum by an old man, whose brother was killed near it.
A "Darkhumor" tag would have fitted this story very much as you explained, but a normal comedy tag is misleading.
Still it´s a good story and one step more to avoid similar things in the future by remebering the wrongs done in the past.
I'm glad that we've came to an agreement.
(Pre-review comments:)
I thought this was going to be a trollfic...
But now I'm just drawing a blank. I have absolutely no idea what to say about this. Or, to be more specific: I'd rather know a few more things before saying anything.
This would be a lot more difficult if a review weren't basically a one-way system. So here's a weird idea: would you consider taking part in an interview instead? ZP-style or normal is up to you...
Depends... What's ZP?
5190345
Zero Punctuation.
Your story was submitted to a group dedicated to
stealing- I mean... stealing... a certain review style of a semi-famous internet critic. Who is infamous for giving extremely harsh criticism in a crude sometimes offensive manner, with little to no regard for other's opinions.Oh yeah, and there's funny bits too.
5190345
Yeah, that reminds me: was it you who submitted the fic to our group?
Also, please use the reply feature, otherwise I won't know that you've replied...
5191188
Did we kill him somehow?
I didn't mean to...
No worries!
I was just away in the Czech Republic , and there was no stable internet connection where I went.
Anyways, thanks for replying!
I should've figured out what the ZP abbreviation meant...
Anyways, unload it on me! I'm not afraid! >:-)
5205534
Nope, he just replied.
Still didn't use the reply feature though.
5205759
And after reading the story myself, I can sort of see why Dark Avenger wanted an interview before jumping into this. Your story is... how to put it... "Special", I believe it's called, in the American public school system. I might consider reviewing it myself, but honestly I think that any legitimate criticism I have for it would be drowned out by the repeated question of, "Why did you put ponies in it? Why did you put ponies in it? Why did you put ponies in it?"
That, and I'm already procrastinating the hell out of reading another story I'm supposed to be reviewing.
5207976
5205534
Like I said before, it was an experiment. The "play" which it was based on has moved me so much that I thought I have to share the experience. And, out of all websites, FIMFiction seemed to have the most responsive readers. I also wanted to allegorize, to see how much of the original could be converted into Equestrian context.
I never thought of this as a "successful" experiment, but an effective one none the less.
Besides, with so many people writing dark stories that dare to discover the darker nature of equinekind, bringing with it concepts, such as bloodshed, torture and terror, to an artistic level, I think it's only fair that I put my cards down on the table as well, but doing so with a story that probably hits hard home for all of us. A depressive story to end all depressive stories.
5207976
My thoughts exactly. Which is why I'm not as much interested in the story as I would like to know about the "author-story relationship," so to speak.
5208713
Okay, if you're willing to go for it, then I'll whip up a few questions and will send them in a PM soon.
5208751
Thank you.
This review is brought to you by Zero Punctuation Reviews...
...except it isn't actually a review, or at least definitely not a conventional one. Due to the, shall we say, sensitive content of the story, I decided to do something a little different: I interviewed the author, ZP-style.
Enjoy!
(The following are a couple of excerpts. Full interview here: link)
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DA: Before I dive into the dirty business at hand, I must get this out of the way: the fic reminded me an awful lot of "Fatelessness." Coincidence, or was it an inspiration?
SB: While I haven't had the joy of reading this beaut' of Kertész, I've heard enough of it from parents and grandparents to understand the gist of it. However, in this case, I have to say it is coincidence. This... Work of mine (hard to describe it as a story) is inspired by, and entirely plagiarized based upon the Hungarian alternative play "The Ghetto Sheriff" ('A Dohány utcai Seriff'), which is... Basically what I wrote down, except that I spent the one-and-a-half-two hours of it sitting in complete darkness, listening to the stories that "actors" related to us from various parts of the darkened room, occasionally breaking the flow of anecdotes with cheerful, anti-semitic songs or funeral music, whilst the stories themselves were accompanied by the gentle sounds of violins slowly being tortured to death... Not just reading the stories. I was one of the selective few who remained stone-faced throughout the whole play, mainly due to the fact that I was already well-educated on the topic. However, until that point, World War II and the Holocaust had only been an episode of history and a mere statistic for me.
After this, however, I could no longer "look the other way".
DA: Well, the biggest elephant in the room is starting to give me weird looks, and I fear that it’s planning to sodomize me in the closet any minute now. I suppose it’s time we grabbed a rifle and blew its brains out: you wrote a fanfic that does the "pony version" of The Holocaust. You've already answered the part about what inspired you, but what possessed you to make it pony-related at all?
SB: To tell you the truth, this was born out of a necessity. Like I said before, the FIMFiction reader-audience is the most responsive I know of, never fearing to comment (usually in a helpful manner) on others' work. Placing this on DeviantArt would've probably met with a bland response, since I haven't made myself "famous" there. FIMFiction has had it's fair share of dark fics, many of which are similar to my attempt, so I thought such a... "Creation" wouldn't be completely out of place…
DA: The story opens with a series of, shall we say, divisive jokes, since they will either make the readers laugh, or they will pave the road to getting yourself banned from wherever you told them. In fact the title itself is a reference to one such joke (aside from the inspiration that you mentioned).
To me, it seems like the perfect metaphor for the fic as a whole: on one hand, the content is extremely divisive, since you will either get people who are intrigued by the fic and appreciate the intent, or those who are deeply offended by the very idea of combining ponies with the Holocaust. There is also a slim minority of people who could fap to this, but let's just ignore them. On the other hand, just as the jokes seem to ridicule a tragic event, they actually represent how events like these are slowly becoming parodies of themselves as time passes, yet people still keep ranting about them, distorting the story just to suit their own purposes. Call it "Godwin's law IRL," if you will.
SB: The jokes in the beginning meant to represent how... Easily this all started. Jokes that were initially "innocent", just making fun of the generalized quirkiness of a group of people - or ponies - eventually became a source of broader generalization, then marginalization, then prejudice. Pre-existing ignorance, the fear of the unknown, and the unwillingness to accept difference led to segregation, bias and eventually, hatred. From the imperial rhetorics came the desire for greatness, and with the additional bias and hatred came the tools that forged new ideologies. Yes, ideologies.
When observed objectively, all extreme ideas base themselves around the "Us and Them" rhetoric - making enemies out of others, and making demons out of enemies. Both the far right, AND the far left are guilty of resorting to this recurring dogma, but it is this occurrence of demagogy that makes it so easy to identify extremism...
DA: I must admit, I did not like this story once I finished it, but I upvoted it nonetheless. Like I said, it did not offend me, and the writing was solid, but it still bothered me on other levels. For one thing, combining ponies with the Holocaust is about as subtle as a shish kebab made from the heads of aborted fetuses, plus there is little to no mention of how ponies, the embodiment of "love and friendship", suddenly turned into mass murderers, nor why they're suddenly using rifles and gas to do the dirty work.
Parallels with human history are nice and can work really well, but not when you're just replacing the human participants with ponies and calling it a day. That way it's more out of place than a baby seal and a sea urchin having sex in the middle of the Sahara desert. A land as magical and vomit-inducingly innocent as Equestria needs some serious backstory and worldbuilding to turn into nazi-occupied Europe and be in any way believable, let alone educational.
SB: Well, this was an experiment, and as any experiment, it has it's fair share of flaws.
One explanation to the usage of technology may be that it is the earth ponies who are doing all the dirty work (as per usual in Equestria), and, having no wings or magic to work with, they resort to their gruesome creativity. Also, as it was stated in a couple of the testimonies, this didn't happened from one day to the other. There was a steady, but increasingly faster buildup, leading from the implementation of the star insignias, all the way to the camps, and afterwards, to the bitter return. I may have smeared these details when writing, though.
Magical as the land of Equestria is, hard times could hit in anytime, and it's always easier to pass the blame. All it needs is just one man, or stallion, with a vision or grand delusion... And the rest... Is history.
Then again, while I wrote this story to relate the tale of one of, if not the greatest tragedy in modern history, my intentions were never really clear to myself, and the ponification of the stories, jokes and anecdotes were more out of necessity than out of intended design.
I guess you can call this a "misplaced experiment".
DA: Despite my complaints, the story does deserve praise for how it handles the subject. It's definitely nothing like all the utterly ridiculous fics that try to be "serious" and talk about things like 9/11 and war and tragedy and whatnot mashed together with fucking ponies, as though one were to put a violent rape scene into the second act of "Mary Poppins."
In my experience, even fics more "tame" than this one tend to become extremely divisive among the readers here. In fact, you may end up grateful that you made no mention of popular canon characters here, otherwise you would now be on the wrong end of a ton of obsessive fans. But aside from that, what do you expect will happen, and how do you plan to react to it? Will you run away and hide under your bed once the comments section collectively grabs the torches and pitchforks? Will you join the fray as "well-structured arguments" descend into ad hominems? Will you help them find all new ways of pointing out that the other person's mother offers sex to strangers for money?
SB: I think I'll see what happens when people start to notice this story (I might as well start popularizing it, for what it's worth, although I'm not sure how one could advertise THIS, well, aside from offering free cookies to people if they are willing to partake in an undisclosed "social experiment"), and then, react accordingly. If shit hits the fan, and people "boo" me out of this galaxy, then I'll just remove it. If people actually respond to it intelligently, and in an, at least, half-decent way, then I'll leave it on, and see where the train of thought takes this malarkey. I may patch it up a bit, after all, I can't truly relay what I've experienced while attending that play, so it may be better to make the story more "whole" than "experiency".
In the end, if people reduce themselves into premature, hysteric hairless apes, I could always drop down the F-Nuke and call out to them:
You haven't learned JACK SHIT from history, and your constant bickering over this story only proves that!
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(In case you missed the link the first time and/or would like to read the full thing, you may find it here: link)