Life is more beautiful in the movies
Winner of the Quills and Sofas 2nd Anonymous Write Contest
Thank you to Wish for helping with the art and description, and Silent for listening to me rant about the fic
Chapters (1)
Seer
Joined 14th Jun, 2012 ·
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god DAMN this was good.. you nailed the feeling of a slowing dissolving love perfectly - that desperation to keep ahold of it and believe, beyond all reason, that time has been kinder than it is. it fits rarity and twilight perfectly as well; this need for things to be grand and dramatic and larger than life harshly contrasted with the bitter reality of a love slowly choking to death.... so good. u should be proud
What is the thing in the cover art?
This Line. I have no idea how to properly phrase what I love about it, but I love it so much.
I kept flip-flopping throughout this story. Wondering how much of Rarity’s problems were due to actual fading love and how much was just disappointment that it wasn’t like the stories. Either way, this was a great read.
Poor Rarity. Unless she is worrying about nothing.
11353799
More like she worries that there IS nothing. Or will be, soon enough.
Voice Of Experience
That question NEVER ends well. You ask & I'd bet the rent money you won't like the answer.
"You Don't Bring Me Flowers"
Barbara Streisand & Neil Diamond
Fantastic stuff as always, Seer. You have such a wonderful ability to bring out emotions in your writing, particularly when it comes to ponies going through them in the moment. Given this story involves Rarity longing for the past and dreading the future, those both come together fantastically.
I hope you'll forgive me for being critical. I'm only taking the time to do it because this shows so much talent. Take the first 2 paragraphs as an almost-random sample:
This has great things in it: The end of the world more than the end of a night, steeped in cocktails, sweat dabbed away with toilet paper from the ladies' room, how their dickie-bows had loosened, sculpted hair now scraggly. It also has one missing word, one grammatical error, and one clause that just doesn't make any sense (had borne stragglers to be blown).
That's what I see throughout this piece: brilliance dulled by elementary errors of craft. There are typos, POV ambiguities, missing commas, needless words, words and phrases that don't match the tone, and a lot of statements that are too on-the-nose. My early drafts look like that too. If you don't see them, I could PM you and point some out. Or fix as many as you can find, then send it in to Equestria Daily. I think they'll want to publish this story, but they'll work harder than I would to help you fix every grammatical error.
You mention Gone With the Wind, and no book has ever done better at this kind of tragic, loveless ending. If you can overlook the book's racism, you could use its last several chapters as a model.
The most-obvious difference is that Margaret Mitchell took 400,000 words to build up to those final chapters. The last breakup of Scarlett and Rhett was so devastating because she used those 400K words to give them both detailed, distinctive, remarkable characters; to show how those characters had been warped by their personal experiences; to show that they still had at least some qualities meriting our respect; to show how their attraction to each other, their fights with each other, and their suitability for each other, were direct results of their characters; to convince us that they (eventually) loved each other, if not at the same time; to show that there was literally no one else in their world whom either of them could ever love; and to convince us that Rhett's love was really, justifiably dead, and that it was the fault of both of them--that it had taken all of their great stores of bitterness, selfishness, cruelty, and fear to destroy a love so true and so right.
I'm not saying you need to write 400,000 words. You would need to, to rival the final chapter of Gone With the Wind. But there's a place for shorter stories, and you can use some of Mitchell's techniques in them.
Your story contains almost no action, and what dialogue there is, is too on-the-nose. Look at the indirect ways Mitchell conveys the same things, in action and dialogue. That's what "show, don't tell" means. I don't mean you should give up narration of internal thoughts -- you do that better than Mitchell does. And it's sometimes hard to find compromises between styles that contrast so much. Maybe you can't show like Mitchell does without compromising your ability to get us into a character's head. But maybe you can.
Re. interpersonal dynamics: Rarity has her own personal hang-up here, which you tell us is her expectation that life should be like the movies. That's a good start. Maybe this clashes with Twilight because of her pragmatic, scientific see-the-world-as-it-is attitude; but I don't see that in the story. I don't really see the show's Twilight at all. This Twilight is a bad stereotype of a scientist. I'm not convinced that Rarity and this Twilight were ever right for each other. Without seeing that, I can't be very sad if that love is lost.
Or you could go in a quite different but at-least-as-good direction by taking Anna Karenina as your model. That's a more-complicated kind of story than Gone With the Wind, so you're on your own there.
Really loved this when I read it for the contest. Can recommend.
Beautiful.
I love this story so much; the desire for sweeping romance and epic story met only with the dull humdrum is a very relatable emotion.
Hrm
This was a really compelling story, and it was sad seeing Rarity and Twilight's relationship fall apart like this. The comparisons to movies were a great through-line, along with the dance. Everyone felt really in character here, including Twilight's excuses for not spending time with Rarity.
ooh, love this opening! very cinematic
that is so sad! such a practised act of elegance deserves so very much to be seen and appreciated
so true that is how Twilight is
oof! love this visual, again very cinematic, like a black-and-white time-lapse of wilting flowers in a vase
so true… this is exactly how Rarity thinks, love it
aww but it sounds so nice!
again, love the imagery
well yes but Rarity does all these things in real life!
augh, a sad thing to not have anymore :( Rarity deserves all this and more!
this is so perfectly her, love it
oh, so ironic, after all that about heating! or poetic, rather!
and oof…
and a much deeper oof, that Twilight’s default wasn’t to want to know exactly what Rarity got out of those old romance movies…
so true! this is so, so Rarity
you know, i was hoping that it would end on an ambiguous note like this, and you delivered it perfectly. Rarity trying all along to match her real life to the cadence of her movies, and falling out of step each time, augh. you understand her so well, in a way i see very few other works do. it really is very beautiful. i love it so much. you have absolutely no business being this good, you know!