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“Polyamory.”
Rainbow Dash blinked at Rarity. “Come again?”
“Polyamory. What you’re trying to build with Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy is called a polyamorous relationship."
“Okay,” said Rainbow Dash, “fine. So I know what it’s called. But what I really need to know is how I’m going to make it work!”
Featured on the Pony Fiction Vault, 05/11/12!
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Awww yis, been waiting for this
Great first chapter!
Omg loved the ending of this chapter so cute. :D Liked all of Pinkie Pies randomness.
I wasn't expecting such a level of quality from a fic with a premise like this one's. I'm reeling. You've struck such an excellent pace, such a balance of brevity and color. You led me through so smoothly that I'd hardly noticed the length, not once is there a dry spot. Its beyond my technical capacity to give this proper praise.
And I've only finished the first chapter.
The Colgate coming out of the covers smiling made me laugh out loud. The convo between Twilight and Rainbow was pretty funny at some parts. The end result was nice.
Completely loved the ending to this chapter it was so beautiful and magical. Loved the date and all the apologizing. Plus the funny bit with Scoot and Rainbow that was very funny onward to the next chapter.
Loved the ending to this story. It was very well written, detailed, and full of everything good. Likes all of the side pairings. I was a little surprised when they both screamed no. I thought they would really fall in love, but loved the way it played out. Faving and watching for more works like this from you, and will be reading your other works. Awesome chapter and a story I will be reading more then once.
438857 To be fair, they could still develop a genuine attraction later down the line. I made it perhaps overly clear that they both enjoyed the kiss. But what they were trying to do -- changing their relationship to please Pinkie, not because of internal motivations; moving incredibly fast; Fluttershy using Rarity's seduction tips instead of being herself -- was the wrong way to go about it. Them saying yes after all of that wouldn't have been the nicest moral.
Holy hell this is trippy.
I must continue reading!
Rainbow Dash pointed lazily at her friend’s horn. “You teleported across.”
Twilight looked confused. “Now that you mention it, that would have been a really good idea.”
Thank you.
438878 The only one question remains then......
Will there be a 'down the line' continuation?
Edit: And also, really interesting story. I'm personally reading the idea of a polyamory relationship for the first time, and it's incredibly well done. Have a nice day and good luck in the future!
You did it!
Yes!Yes!YES!
HahahaYEAH!
Yay~!
Ther's a story behind that response. It's not a story that can be told easily, or lightly and despite my chronic need to open up unnecessarily to others, this is neither the time nor the place for the telling.
What you deserve to know is this, you wrote a curative to an ailment I thought I'd never fix. A perspective I'd thought lost to me. You fixed what I'd assumed was forever broken.
You brought Pinkie back to me.
I won't forget that.
I assume you're eager to hear what I thought of the story, and no doubt you will not be pleased that I can offer no criticism. I percieve no word out of place, no character mishandled. If anything is lacking, my only suggestion would be a sequel for that is what my heart burns for. Intellectually, it could be left here, and I would be no less happy for it.
You've written something special. Something memorable. And in the process, you healed a broken heart. I wish there was more I could say or do to express how much this meant, but the only option I'm left with is a simple "Thank you".
Sweet, heartfelt and very well crafted. At every moment I believed entirely, not only that these are the same ponies we know and love, but that we're seeing those same ponies a little older, more experienced and more mature. Masterful!
Okay, now that I've finally had a chance to read it, I must say this is an excellently written story. Every character was believable and in-character, and showed sure-tell signs of previous character development.
And the best part of the whole thing was Dash and Flutters not loving each other in the end. Here I was expecting everything to head towards a perfect three-way relationship and you're all like "NOPE, REALISTIC CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT, BITCH." and then I had the biggest grin on my face.
So yeah, good story.
I'm not quite sure what prompted me to read this but now I am oh so VERY VERY glad that I did! This was written so gosh darn well that may just have to see if it can topple any of my top 5. Gonna need to spend some time thinking on that.
While I'm not normally a fan of shipping fics, this is a really great story!
This was quite good. I'm glad you didn't force Fluttershy and Dash together.
439040
Honestly, that's not intended as a complaint. They both admit that Rainbow Dash is better at reacting to immediate physical crises, even if she spends most of this story worrying about stuff. Also Twilight has grown more powerful and in control of her magic as the series has progressed -- look at her description of her abilities at the beginning of Boast Busters -- and it's not at all hard to imagine that teleporting across that chasm would have been genuinely difficult for her back then. That said, Twilight consistently believes she knows more and can do more than is actually the case, so it is in character for her to think Rainbow Dash's suggestion makes sense, even if there were perfectly good reasons against it at the time.
(What is a subtle take that is the line about their Hearth's Warming Eve parts being written by someone who didn't know who they were, since that was a Merriwether Williams episode.)
439041
I have no immediate plans for a continuation, especially because I have Twigate to write first. (Eh, it's better than "Collight.") But maybe someday, since Fluttershy's point of view goes drastically underrepresented in this piece. Everything is about what Fluttershy means to Rainbow Dash, with very very little of the other way around, even though they're quite different relations.
439172
Aww, I'm glad to hear it! However that happened. I have a bone to pick with a lot of Pinkie stories, which is that her hair almost always ends up going straight, and she almost always reveals some deep complicated philosophy behind everything she does. But the thing is, the show lets us see more into Pinkie's head than it does with any other character, maybe even including Twilight. And she's not very complicated and she has no wish to be, and I try my best not to do her a disservice on that front. Which in this case meant giving her very few lines, though to be fair, the story really isn't about her at all.
To all the more general comments thus far: Thank you! I'm happy to have pleased.
Finally got around to finishing this. Fantastic. I applaud you for not giving us the ending I'd thought you were. MetalFlare has beaten me to the punch in voicing the sentiment, but I feel the need to echo it: Right up the end I'd thought you were heading for the true three-way romance, and I was okay with that, but the fact that you didn't had me nothing short of ecstatic. A cut above most endings.
I can't tell you how much I like Dash's characterization. I was a bit worried during the first chapter that you'd written a Dash just a bit too aware of her action's consequences to be considered in-character. I was wrong, you've not made her out of character, you've made her a believable character, and one that fits right in with how I saw her pre-second season. Since then we've gotten a very callous - or very dim - Dash in both the show and fics. It's wonderful to see this, then: a Dash not quite knowing how to handle her friends' feelings, but very concerned for them.
I've already said how much I like your style, and I'm pleased to say that my opinion has not since decayed. I'm just a little envious of it.
Despite that, I did find myself wishing that the narration would slow down more often, to see more of the relationship between the three of them.To that end, I felt a bit unfulfilled.
"Dash and Pinkie" is described, "Fluttershy and Pinkie" is described, "Dash and Fluttershy" is heard, seen, smelled and maybe even tasted, but "Dash, Pinkie and Fluttershy" is only glimpsed.
Still, I understand it's not the story's primary focus, and cutting to the chase is something I often encourage.
Long, long, long comment short: you've more than earned the spot this has taken on my favourites list, and I eagerly await more from you.
442787
I'm not sure the story was supposed to be quite such a fakeout as I'm hearing it was, so I may need to go back and throw in a few more signs as to why they come to the conclusion they do. Just a sentence or two, though. Either way, as I said above, a three-way love affair would have had too many problems (given the themes and messages present in the story) were it arrived at in such a way.
Regarding awareness of consequences, I'm guessing you're referring to her worrying about adultery and stuff while talking to Applejack? Yeah, it's a fine line, even putting aside how much her language blows everything out of proportion. I spend a fair bit of time (mostly in the Twilight chapter) making her out to be unaware of what's going on, though a lot of that's just repression. On the other hand, there are lines like "because she was thoughtlessly impulsive, and endearingly tactless, and an unthinking loudmouth, and above all else deathly loyal to her girlfriend no matter the personal cost" where at some level, however conscious, she acts the way she does because she cares so much about the ones around her. It's sort of an elaborate manipulation of the concept of Loyalty, but there's a more basic principle at work too: it should be possible for problems to arise without characters making blatantly stupid choices. Still, she could probably use a few more moments of blatant lunkheadedness... there is a reason she can be mistaken for the element of Honesty.
(That said, one detail I wish I had been better able to explore is that Rainbow Dash does not have a perfect understanding of how her friends think. She starts off pretty well with Applejack and even Rarity, but gets more and more confused as time goes on. The problem is that neither Fluttershy nor Pinkie are all that well suited for long speeches about their inner psyches, making it hard to contrast properly Rainbow Dash's understandings of them with their own.)
As for slowing down... it's nearly 28k words, what do you want! No, but seriously, you're right: that's not the focus. It's not about the daily details of everyday life, any more than it's actually about Pinkie Pie. I think it's a little harder than it should be to say what it is about, if only because it's divided into two distinct sections, the Applejack/Rarity chapters (both set in the daytime) and the Twilight/Fluttershy/Pinkie chapters (all set at night), and they deal with two distinct issues, but I guess at its core it's a story of five conversations, plus the circumstances that make each one necessary. The challenge to myself was to write every single conversation all the way through, with no filler lines of "they talked about x and y and z." The first half of Twilight's chapter, the time skip, is the closest you get to a close look at domestic life, and it's really all setup for other things. The details of her romance with Pinkie are nearly irrelevant, they're just there to help strengthen the idea that RD and FS would be willing to risk messing up their (admittedly flagging) friendship to make her happy, since that's probably the stupidest decision in the whole thing and thus needs the most justifying. (Notice that the specifics of their relationship aren't important: the RD/FS incidents get brought up again and again, but the only specific thing RD and PP do together that matters at all is the flamenco performance, and that's mostly just because I like Pepperdance. It's all for emotional purposes.)
442987
I don't think my expectation was your fault, I just read too many shipping fics. I've been conditioned to expect things to go unrealistically well.
I... can't tell if you're being defensive in the rest of your post. I'm sorry if I came off the wrong way. You're pretty much describing my own reasoning for saying what I have, and I don't quite know how to respond.
Nah, not defensive, mostly just taking you as an excuse to provide a miniature director's commentary.
What I think worked, what I think didn't work, why certain things are the way they are. No worries.
I didn't expect this story to be good.
And it ended up being very good.
Well, Violet, nice job. Now excuse me while I read some more Hoofstuck until 4/13.
When I first saw this story's description, I thought that this was probably going to be full of fail given that not many can do a decent job telling a story involving polyamory but I had some hope that this would be different, so I read it. It quickly became evident that I did NOT need to worry at all. I am glad I read the whole thing and you did well in writing it.
As far as the RD-FS relationship goes, I was not surprised at all that they both said 'no' and didn't want to pursue romance with each other. They were close, but they felt more like sisters drifting apart to me.
Others have already given in-depth comments and such, so I'll just stick to the basics and say that I too was both surprised and pleased about how it ended the way it did - with RD + FS being good friends with a possibility for love in the future - instead of a generic shipfic/Hollywood movie type ending where they all fall in love and live happily ever after, blah blah blah.
This story was well written and more than interesting enough for me to read it in one sitting; as such, I'm popping you on watch and looking forward to reading anything else you might write
I love so much about this story. Your characterizations and dialogue, first and foremost--everyone felt and sounded exactly as they should. I loved Rainbow Dash asking to get into a fight with Applejack and their entire scene together, I loved the tiny and amusing Rarijack subplot, and I loved Twilight's scene, how wise and ridiculous and loving and silly and so very Twilight she was.
I think my favorite part, though, was the chapter about Fluttershy's and Dash's relationship going all to heck. That was really beautifully done. There was no manufactured drama, nobody acting OOC, no blow-out fights ... just two friends, through completely understandable actions, drifting slowly and painfully apart. I loved that you did allow them to reconnect at the end, because the chapter where they fell apart was just brutal to read (which I mean as a compliment).
Thanks for writing and for sharing this.
If I didn't already have 5 favorites in the box, I'd throw this one right in there with them. This is realistic, fantstic, well written, in character, and doesn't fall into the cliche of everyone falling in love because yay. I knew, just knew, they were going too fast and trying to like each other just for Pinkie(or at least what they thought Pinkie wanted) and it was just... amazing. I read this all in one day (props to DB for sharing the link ^), and even though I have 40 other stories I want to read, this one deserved my attention.
Honestly, this deserves to go on EQD, and if you haven't tried I'd suggest doing it. This is such a fine piece of work.
I do have one qualm with it though- right here:
>
Fluttershy the surprisingly good actress, coming up with ideas for how Commander Hurricane could mistreat Private Pansy until their scenes read like a caricature of their own relationship, but one written by someone who had never met either one of them…
The incredible difficulty of leaving Fluttershy behind to rejoin the rest of the Ponyville pegasi, training to create the waterspout that first time…
Her unrepressed joy when Fluttershy returned to the training grounds, full of life and action, a joy followed all too quickly by disappointment…
Spitfire’s praise, and how she hadn’t hesitated at all to tell the Wonderbolt that the true hero of the day was Fluttershy, her number one flier, her number one fan, her number one friend, as she was reminded again and again, dozens more times, until one day…
That formula, of a sentence or two then ... was starting to get really repetitive and annoying. It was the only thing that kinda made me skip ahead to see when all the ellipses ended, which was a bummer.
Anyways, this is incredibly well done and you have earned yourself a watcher.
541716 Colgate avatar! Clearly you must be responded to.
In all seriousness, thank you! (And thanks as well to the various people who've commented since I last said anything here.) I noticed Donny's Boy's tumblr post after checking the referrals to see what could explain the small spike in favorites the other day, and was quite flattered to have provided someone with an OT3, especially since I already recognized his name. I haven't tried to put this on EQD, unlike Saigonshy, but nor do I have any plans to, because a) I suspect this isn't exactly their type of story (short/cute or long/adventure-oriented) and b) I'm not sufficiently satisfied with it to believe that it meets the standards that I like to pretend EQD has. (It'll be appearing in the Pony Fiction Vault next week, though, along with an interview with me about it, and that's arguably a more exclusive club than EQD anyway.)
Thanks for your qualm! The clip show, as I like to call it, is an awkward beast indeed. It should be pretty apparent that I like repeating a sentence or paragraph structure for rhetorical effect (c.f. the friendship-falling-apart section in Ch.3 which alternates between regular paragraphs and parenthetical paragraphs giving further details on whatever had just been discussed), but now that you mention it, I can certainly see how that particular instance could have gone on for too long. It's a terrible section in general.
This fic is an odd one, though very well written. To me it seems less strange that the story is about a polyamorous relationship than that for a large amount of it, the central Pinkie Pie relationships are backstage to FlutterDash friendshipping. In retrospect this was likely the correct choice to make, as it put focus on a relationship that doesn't appear much in fiction, that between the two endpoints in a 3 way relationship, rather than the directly romantic focus that comes up a lot. As has been noted, the rhetorical patterning was a bit much at times, but even those segments tended to be well done, and served their purpose in the narrative. I would have liked to have seen a bit more of Pinkie Pie in this though. After the explanation of why Rainbow loves her, that subplot is basically dropped in favor of a tight focus on RD's emotional state, and her dwindling relationship with Fluttershy. I could have used some actual scenes between the two, rather than the brief snapshots that were given. You get bonus points for having TwiGate, a ship that I don't think I've seen before. Regardless of any minor criticisms, I really liked this one. It's getting a favorite despite its finished nature, which means that I might end up rereading it at some point. You seemed to be hinting at a fully TwiGate prequel, and I'm excited to read more stuff from you.
542787 Yess. Colgate is the best avatar
And I've heard of the Pony Fiction Vault, but never went there. I may give it a shot though if this is going there.
Ver nice. I like this a lot, particularly that it isn't idealizing anything really. Write more, and I'll read it! Even if it's completely unrelated.
Very good shall go on
So...um...im confused. Good chapter.
I really loved this whole story. The agony of watching Fluttershy and Dash drift apart while maintaining that everything was fine felt like nails grating down a blackboard (but in an, ahem, awesome way) - I wouldn't have minded them falling for each other too, but it's just as fitting if not more for their strong friendship to be re-affirmed instead.
Considering the hi-jinx that we FIMFictioners put the Mane 6 through it's odd that there haven't been too many polyamory (polyandry?) stories, but I'm very glad to have come across this one.
539191
You! How do you always find the good stories long before me?!
626185
It's because I'm a man on a mission.
A mission to find high-quality shippy stories.
627954
Mission accomplished!
627954 I actually read this the day before you posted. LoL.
But yes, this is very well done. It felt a little info-dumpy in the first chapter, but I was still hooked. And yes, kodus for not forcing FlutterDash (even though that would still be hot
)
Awwwwwww...
(that is all that needs to be said)
*looks at clock* "huh....1:42am.....I could still get 5 hours of sleep if I finish the next chapter. *clicks next*
Oh, that forceful, dark and...I don't know how I'm supposed to describe it but the way Rarity acted when she "threatened" Rainbow Dash was simply awesome!
“Now, we can do this the easy way or we can do this the fabulous way.”
best.. line.. EVER!!!
I love:
- your humour,
- your evocative imagery,
- your prose itself and your rhetorical techniques,
- your dialogue and character,
- the ease with which you slip in key worldbuilding info, like the time that has passed since the series,
- your narrative structure: how quickly you set up the scenario, where you placed the climaxes, and the persistent awkwardness and doubts that plagued your ponies, never giving them the easy way out,
- your approach to canon: completely fitting your story into it, giving everypony the benefit of the doubt, using more of their screen personality than just their nominal quirk, and extrapolating into the future naturally,
- your unforced nods of fanon,
- your treatment of this premise,
- this romance and this friendship,
- this story.
A part of me wants FlutterDash and is disappointed that that didn't eventuate - but you told the better story and I love that.
Some places were big blocks of exposition, which were difficult to wade through. And... uh... that's actually my only criticism. Huh. I'm not sure I've read a fanfic before that I could find so little flaw in. It's possible some things could be better than they are, but I'm not a good enough writer to spot that or tell you how. I guess now I'll have to go and read your own review of it (since I just noticed you blogged about such).
I entered this story skeptical. I left it with a new favourite.
Aaaaaah, so sweet
438878 I hope you'll make a sequel to this. There aren't too many polyamorous fics out there and you pulled it off perfectly. Also the thought that they might still fall in love with eachother strikes a chord within me
yes.... Yes... YES!!!!!!! This is so AWESOME!!!!!!!
Pinkie Pie, you're so awesome when you're random!
Okay.... The ONLY thing that explains my thoughts of this chapter, was this:
i1147.photobucket.com/albums/o552/Spirittai1/My%20Little%20Pony%20OCs/YougetmebutInounderstand.jpg
I learned nothing, but it was awesome
The "NO" was really surprising but it wasn't such a bad thing. This chapter(story?) definitely needs an outro(I would hate to say epilogue -- that would be a step down from where you have brought this) It is headed towards a good ending without saying a ton about the future but I think some words about the next morning would poetically wrap this up. Loved it. My heart hurts now.
This fic doesn't have enough love. I very much like the FlutterDash interaction and conclusion here. I mean, I shamelessly throw them together myself, but this was deftly handled in a way I'm still happy about.