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My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
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The comment is much obliged. Thought you were only commenting on the first chapter, given where you made the comment, but you went through the whole story, I'm guessing now.
Could you provide any examples for your critique, however? It'd be very helpful to us, as we're pretty much in this for the long haul now. Glad you enjoyed it, though.
I gave this a look back when it was first being released, and to be honest, it didn't really grab me. I haven't read the source material, so I felt like I was missing out on the parody, and the genre of ditzy chipper tongue-in-cheek sociopathy has never really been my thing. It was really interesting to come back and browse through some of the later chapters, because this has come a long way. It seems to me like it's doing a Trigun pivot, where this thing that has been played for laughs from the start suddenly turns out to have depth.
In so doing, it's exposing some weird tensions in the story: because the primary driver of the story continues to be Eye Lash, who is, well, Eye Lash. As everyone else around him is building up character in ways that deepen my investment in them, he just cuts a swath through every scene he's in, less a one-dimensional character than a force of nature. In a way it feels weird to see the attempts at deeper characterization for him — it feels kind of like a compromise, like when the dude playing a chaotic evil barbarian in your tabletop game refrains from killing the king not because he wants to, but because the other roleplayers have been shooting him death glares all session, and he's breaking character to keep them from kicking him out of the group. Maybe this is an artifact of the chapters I skipped? In the first chapter or two his character wasn't particularly well defined other than as the homicidal comic relief, and that's awkward to tack anything serious onto. The fact that the other characters spend the entire story planning around him, too, feels like he's robbing them of agency, which is a shame because the interludes really drew me in. Little moments like the quip about Vex's father the warship, and introducing some genuine character drama with the slow reveal of Velvet's secret, and the captain's hidden charity ... you've got this gripping character work going on, and when they're struggling with payroll and supplies and have to divert to Trottingham and Vex has to tiphoof around the truth and they get set up as victims of a misaimed con you've got these very authentic conflicts that are perfectly capable of carrying a story, and then Eye Lash shows back up again and all I can do is wince along with the characters and watch the train wreck.
(That's a legit story to tell, just not my cup of tea.)
For that reason — and because of names like "Space Jam", which break me out of the story every time I read it — this is also in this weird grey zone between a parody and a random comedy and a serious story; it feels like on the whole it's transitioning toward the latter, but there are some elements where it just can't shake its roots, and that keeps the tone meandering. Again, this isn't necessarily a bad thing; take a look at, say, The 18th Brewmare of Bluey Napoleon and you'll see I'm pretty much the king of wandering tone. So that isn't meant as criticism so much as a roundabout frustration that the presentation of this particular story isn't working for me. For all that, though, this was excellent reading; I meant to skim a chapter or two to see how it had developed and ended up reading through to the end of Chapter 9. So, overall, kudos on the unexpected growth here, along with some wicked turns of phrase and smooth prose.