Fanfiction Review: Cupcakes · 9:28pm Feb 12th, 2013
Blogger: http://blogofpony.blogspot.com/2013/02/fanfiction-reviews-cupcakes.html
Well, there's nothing else to talk about, I haven't listened to the leaked song, and...well, I'm bored. So let's look at quite possibly the most infamous fanfic in FiM's existence. Let's look at Sergeant Sprinkles' Cupcakes.
---
SYNOPSIS:
Pinkie Pie invites Rainbow Dash to help her make cupcakes. But no sooner has she arrived than Pinkie knocks her out and drags her into her gore-filled basement, where she proceeds to torture her to death. Why? Because cupcakes are made of meat. I don't get it, either.
REVIEW:
Cupcakes is infamous. EVERYONE has heard of this one. It's practically warped the fandom's perception of Pinkie Pie, especially after she had her psychotic break in "Party of One." It has spawned off an entire subgenre of fanfiction, all of them devoted to topping each other in making the characters into horrible monsters and pouring out the gore. (Except for Pattycakes, but that brings its own brand of cheap, unsettling, disgusting terror.) So okay, everyone knows what this thing is without having to read it, but how is the story itself?
It sucks.
The big problem with Cupcakes, regardless of how it treats the canon, is that it goes straight for pure shock value. There is absolutely nothing to this story at all outside of just how far it can stretch Pinkie torturing Rainbow Dash before she finally dies. There are a few asides here and there, mostly to have Pinkie act silly will casually killing one of her best friends and pointing out her other victims, but the whole idea is to take My Little Pony and turn it into Hostel. That's something a first grade boy would think up, not someone I would hope is old enough to go onto 4Chan and post this.
But hey, Cupcakes isn't a serious story! You really need to lighten up, right? Well, here's the thing about Cupcakes. I get that it's a joke, but it's not very funny. It's basically just the same gag over and over again: Pinkie Pie is a psychopath. Perhaps it's just because this fic's been around and made such an impact that it's just granted now, but I really don't see anything clever in the way Cupcakes tells the joke. By the end, everything in here is so ridiculous that it loops all the way from being awful, to funny, and then right back to awful. And the original ending is just a repetition of how the joke began, only with Apple Bloom doing the killing this time.
The one thing that Cupcakes does marginally well is keep the ponies in character. Outside of turning meat into cupcakes, Pinkie is her usually bubbly self, making chit-chat and claiming Dash is her friend even as she cuts off her wings. And Dash is still loyal enough to avoid brushing off Pinkie's request for help and only starts freaking out once it's clear that there's no escape. But that does not excuse the rest of the story's faults.
So, why did this anemic story make such an impact? A lot of it has to do with when it was made. This was one of the earliest fics in the fandom, back when most Bronies were still fighting for survival on 4Chan. And like everything else that's wholesome and good in the universe, it's only inevitable that the Internet will find some way to corrupt it. But Cupcakes was such a massive shock that it had an immediate impact with fans, to the point where Sethisto only begrudgingly put up a page for it on Equestria Daily after being bugged for a month. And then "Party of One" happened, and all of a sudden fans were claiming that Cupcakes was now totally possible in the confines of the canon.
The story practically formed its own subculture, with stories like Cheerilee's Garden, Rainbow Factory, and its many, MANY sequels floating around. The sequels were especially interesting, as they managed to take what was a pretty bad story and twist it in several different directions. Some had it turn out to be a nightmare of Pinkie's, and she runs off to make sure that Rainbow Dash is okay. Others had the entire thing being a fictional work in-story (with one actually having it as an Alfred Hitchcock movie.) Still others showed Pinkie coming to justice, or had her continue her killing spree with bigger targets. The question I must ask, though, is why. Nothing in this fic is even worth contemplating about. It's a poor man's horror story that substitutes buckets of gore for suspense and tension. The writing is what you would expect from a 4Chan post (although a cleaned up version does exist), and outside of keeping some aspects of the characters in place, everything in here is horribly, horribly wrong.
FINAL THOUGHTS:
This fic sucks.
- 4 Days Remain -
Well... I would think you would try to review that fic... my main problem with it is that people do take seriously and think that is who Pinkie is supposed to act.
And that's why I won't read it.
Yeah, Cupcakes never really did anything for me. I wasn't even disgusted; I spent the time just asking "why."
I do like this comic about Pinkie Pie finding it and reading it, though.
Well then.
I've never read it. I'm going to do so now.
What scares me the most about Cupcakes is when someone talks about how deep and thoughtful it is. They talk about it like it is some masterpiece of horror fiction. This happens frighteningly often.
4 days? Oh until Twilicorn and until the fandom has yet another hissy fit. Kinda funny how people say how different the bronies are, but when stuff like this happens, they completely forget the whole "Love and tolerate" thing they say for anything else and reveal themselves to be just as fickle as any other fandom.
Kinda like with Cupcakes. Every fandom has at least some version of dark stories like this. The settings and characters may be different, but the feeling remains the same.
I've read Cupcakes and wasn't impressed to say the least. The original version sucked hard on a technical level. Misspellings, poor syntax, and over all bad grammar abounded, making the story a horror on a completely different scale. Once you got past that, the story is just gore being thrown at the viewer to get a squick reaction. Was it scary? Nope. Gruesome, yes, but not scary. Was it funny? As you said, Insert, it was apparently a joke. A very, very poorly executed joke that falls flat and leaves everyone thinking it'd be better to have left it unsaid. Overall, I'd give Cupcakes 1 psycho Pinkie out of 5.
I heard somewhere that Sprinkles wrote Cupcakes because he was so annoyed by all of the ubiquitous Pinkie x Dash shipping that was going on at the time. In that context it makes a little bit more sense to me. It's still really poorly written, but at least there's something more behind it than "I want to write a lot of pointless, tasteless gore."
820830 You're joking?
Please tell me you are joking!
Also is your avatar a picture of Luna with a Taco on her head?
My favorite 'Cupcakes' ripoff is the one with Madame leFleur as Pinkie's victim.
What do you mean by 4 days remain.... OOOOH
Get it now 
God I am never reading that story. Screw horror.
Sorry for being an idiot, but mind reviewing Eternal or Past Sins? It'd be interesting to see how you think of Celestia in those stories (though Past Sins basically takes her for a fool).
I liked the PPC'ed (basically MST with somewhat direct intervention) version of it better.
Since you mentioned it, I'd actually really like to hear your take on Cheerilee's Garden, a story that I enjoyed immensely.
I haven't read it, but I'll take your word for it.... never had an interest in it...
820877 It was inevitable for the PPC to get involved. Not that any fucks were given when one of them decided to rip Cupcakes a new one.
Not gonna lie, I loved the puns.
Dude... review 120 Days of Blueblood.
Or at least the first chapter (it's pretty much the whole fic in a nutshell).
I dare you to do it! DO IT.
That basically sums up my thoughts on the thing. Well said.
820848 that sounds hilarious
820842 I am very serious, unfortunately.
And yes it is.
820959 Do you think he wants to subject himself to the horror of reading that story?
I read it once....................I have never felt so guilty for being turned on in my life.
I was disgusted with myself, the author, and the admins for letting that story see the light of day.
I totally agree with you. Cupcakes is one of the most awful Ponyfics were ever written and even after a lot of editing and correcting it still sucks. Unfortunately the community in my home country believed, this was a good horror story... until I made them a very good translation of it, and most of them finally realized how awful it is... Yes, this is the only reason why I believe, that this translation is worth 4 afternoons of mental suffering because of this piece of you know what...
820822
That comic says 20 minutes...how long is it, exactly?
821123
At least it wasn't Rocky.
Rocky is best insanity-induced party guest.
821144 You read it ONCE.
I on the other hand have to riff it!
Which means reading the same chapter more than once.
.... I don't even wanna know how you were turned on by it.
It killed any kind of sex drive that I had faster than cyanide kills pigeons.
So I'm sure IAH can survive reading one chapter one time.
821175
It's actually not terribly long. And in any case, somepony like Pinkie would have thrown that thing away and ran long before the ending.
821227
Could I perhaps get a word estimate?
821248
The original, unedited one? Around four thousand words or so.
I did find the immense contrast between the beginning of the fic and the body of it very interesting, although I would similarly never call it a good fanfiction.
Ah yes Cupcakes, one of those things that EVERYONE here's about sooner or later, almost a rite of passage. For me it was when first watching Lesson Zero, back when I still bothered to peruse the YouTube comments. The scene at Sugarcube Corner, where Twilight goes to pick her batch of backed goods of course inspired a whole bunch of comments that my nacent brony knowledge pool couldn't make sense of. Still it didn't take all that much googling to get the gist while still sparing myself the gruesome details, and I quickly put it on my list of things never to bother with again.
...Then sometime later I read Silent Ponyville, which of course makes a fair amount of reference to Cupcakes, even becomes a prequel in one altering ending. After that I found myself ponding the idea more and more, yet still I baulked at the idea of actually reading the fic, until one day I realized, that in my refusal to read the fic I was giving it a sort of power over me, and so I sat down and I read it (the updated grammatically edited version). It was exactly as terrible as I expected, but was nothing else, and so powerless to "forever corrupt my view of ponies" like so many people like to rant. I read the sequels, the alternate endings, the spin-offs, and the copycats (Rainbow Factory being by far the most disappointing the lot). Eventually I found my way A Precious Rainbow, and that fic... that fic made all the pointless gore in some measure worth it, and then I found myself done thinking about Cupcakes and it's ill-conceived-ill, foo the most part at least I still acknowledge it's existence and all even dwell on it occasionally, but it fills me with niether fear nor rage because it's just not worth any of that, just a work of fiction and not a very good one.
821433
Ah yes, the early days of the fandom, where everything was a Cupcakes reference. Pinkie has a mental breakdown? Proof that she's psychotic enough to make ponies into cupcakes. Twilight just buying some cupcakes for her friends? They're made of Rainbow Dash. Of course, none of these were references; the production team cannot read fanfiction without bringing about a host of legal issues and the episodes were written well before that little piece of fandom ever came into existence.
Just goes to show that complaining about pandas isn't a new thing.
821476
Stupid pandas and their stupidly finicky dietary habits and stupidly undersized infants, it's like they are trying to go extinct just to make us feel bad.
820870
Yes, Past sins does play Celestia for a massive fool, but there is somthign worse than that with the story.
I am a buisnessman, i am taking marketing right now, and we have a story called the "New coke inccident." What happened was Coke marketed and did everything correctly, but as we all know, New Coke made everyone freak out. It was only a success in california and Canada.
At the same time, Past sins is baisically the same as the New Coke story. At first i didn't see it because it was one of the first fics i read, but after the second time i was just stunned, Nyx was a massive Mary sue.
At first i didn't say anything, fearing i was the only one, but then i learned that i was not alone so i resisted the peer pressure and opened up.
Sure, its susposed to be a light story used to be easily confused to the show, but at the same time it just doesent make sense how people love the character so much.
She comes to ponyville out of the blue and everyone loves her off the bat.
She's full of angst
Twilight, who needs help raising spike, doesent tell Celestia at all which makes me scratch my head
she's uber powered.
Celestia turns a complete blind eye to the bad guy.
She defeats all of the major threats without breakig a sweat, and remember, even if she has her full power, she's still a month old!
She just turns cheek when she gets bored and expects everyone to love her.
She decides to turn good.
She saves the day without anyone dying in what was susposed to be a massive attack on ponyville.
She has a full recovery.
and last but not least, and this one pisses me off the most, She just gets off scot free. (and you can't argue that people in the other stories still don't trust her, because you can't go outside the boundries of the standalone story.)
Also, this is a personal question that was on my mind even after i read it the first time, Why the fuck didn't anyone try to do anything when she took over?
Wouldent the other nations of the world be like "WTF the sun's not comming up ? " and yet they still just stay home and take it?
Wy wouldent the country revolt and destroy her reign?
There is no cult of ponies who worship Celestia who would pull some crazy stunt to bring the old alicorn back?
And celestia, I know she doesent want to hurt her, but at one point, you cross the line, eventually you gotta put the livlihood of your nation before your personal values. Key example, the U.N. is a PEACEkeeping agency, PEACE. why exactly did Black Hawk Down happen when UN PEACEkeepers wanted to help Somalians?
and personally, this is the one that I would FUCKING LOVE to do except i respect Penstroke enough to not ask him for permission, is... why wouldent an assassin be hired to shank the shit out of her? she has the maturity of a filly, she would be very easy prey for a hired professional.
Oh, better call the fire department, I can here the Past Sins fans lighting their torches already
821725 All very good reasons. She does get things a little too easy IMO. personally, i find the story entertaining, though i won't often re-read it. Still... if you read Winter Bells, it gets better and Nyx does get some development.
Personally, Penstroke's better story is Better Living with Science and Ponies.... he needs to make a sequel.
821725
Don't forget how she's constantly played as the victim. His newest stories have Shining Armor being the antagonist, unable to reconcile with Nyx. The comments are littered with people saying how "mean" and "not understanding" Shining is. They seem to have forgotten that Nyx was, directly or indirectly, responsible for the most scarring period of his life. She effectively mind-raped him, possessed his body, forced him to hunt down his one true love, caused him to turn against the country he had sworn to protect, created a famine with her sunless days, ect. ect. He's suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a mental illness that can cause hardened soldiers to commit suicide to escape the constant agony. Don't forget to multiply that by the Nth power for every other pony in Equestria that lived through her reign of terror, such as seeing their loved ones stripped of their free will and made to bend the knee to a tyrannical child-god.
And people say he's not being a good uncle.
Makes me sick, it does.
821782
You should read the above. And Nyx doesn't get any development, she gets empty filler that serves little to no purpose.
821476Honestly when i read cupcakes i laughed. I mean it's just pastel horses disembowling one another. See what's wrong with that? Pastel colored horses in dark settings Kills the tension and any seriousness, which is why i think Fallout Equestria is the absolute biggest pile of shit the Brony fandom has ever shat out and treat like gold, but there is other reasons.
821725 everybody seems to be getting rowdy about this story. Frankly, I have never read past sins. But I have read ALOT of articles about how much people hate it, and I'm starting to wonder. should I give it a read, so far it sounds like a poorly consturcted fic that deals very little in the reality of pony life, and is all about getting people to love a shallow, poorly made, brat.
but hey (insert picture of luna shrugging here) I don't actaully know. So what do you think. Is it worth my time, because if it isn't than I really don't want to bother.
To be fair... it DID see the rise of Silent Ponyville.
And Silent Ponyville was awesome.
Yeah Cupcakes wasn't that enjoyable and the references made to it in many stories are both amusing and bemusing. However, it continues to have large influence on the fandom.
822287
Past Sins has its faults, true.
But, it has more fans than haters. You can't deide based on the opinion of others. It and its sequels are constantly featured and Pen Stroke has 3000+ watchers for a reason.
821725
Eh, I liked Past Sins. The only real complaint I have with it is that the pre-return of Nightmare Moon is so short, only about two months or so.
822287
im going to come out, I am an opinioniated person. take what I say with a grain of salt.
To be honest, reading it is your decision. Penstroke is a very good author, he does a great amount of world building in the story, but with it, he leaves many holes and areas that leave you questioning the story, (see :'Why the hell didn't anyone else do anything?' rant). personally i don't have much against the story. BUT the thing is, the main character is a mary sue, meaning that everything goes her way and the story practically bends to her whim. So, you see the conondrum.
to be honest, if anyone else tried to do this concept, it would crash and burn, badly, because a brief and spoiler rific as i can sumarize it, "an alicorn filly is made from NMM's ashes. eventually she returns to power and defeats Celestia luna and captures the elements of harmony. She has a change of heart and decides to be a good guy but doesent understand why ponies hate her. Blah blah blah details later she is returned to being a filly and has no punishment and everyone forgives her on the drop of a hat."
fuck, when i was looking for a editor, when a guy found out my OC had a relation to an alicorn, he dropped me imediately. So...yeah.
BTW, i blame this story for all the shitty alicorn OC stories out there. just kidding
822472
we don't agree on much, do we?
822496
...have we disagreed on much in the past? Sorry, I don't remember who you are.
Oh, one point, though: Nyx knows exactly why ponies hate her. What she doesn't know is how to make them stop hating her, other than to surrender and return Luna and Celestia to the throne, something she is unwilling to do for most of the fic.
Oh, and also, you're making her "change of heart' seem like a sudden thing. Give the fic some credit: it spends hundreds of pages and tens of thousands of words on her change of heart. It wasn't sudden, and in all honesty the reign of Nightmare Nyx is my favorite part of the story for precisely that we get to see Nyx gradually shift away from Nightmare Moon and become just Nyx.
822554
1. ...Django Unchained?
2. All I remember is , "I have taken over the world Muwa Ha ha ha ha h- Okay Im bored. Im so bored blah blah blah, I cant make constelations why wont anything fun happen? why don't i have my cutie mark, Wah! Oh, hey CMC's nice seeing you, my second in command threw you in a dungeon and even though i want to let you out right away I shouldent, Even if I have absolute power. Blah blah blah, I wanna let the sun up, its too dark! " Lets sun up and goes to ponyvilleexpecting aaive warm reception, "Why wont you love me! Boo Hoo. Its not my fault that I banished the princesses and locked Twilight in a dungeon.. well it is but still, spell nexus made me do it. Wah!"
3.I live my life surrounded by whiney people. ONe of my best friends in middle school was the biggest bitch in the world, he stopped talking to me when, after listening to him piss and moan about never havign money for two weeks(this happened to be when halo 3 came out and he was left out), i told him to get a job and shut the fuck up. So naturally, reading a story that's main character is a pussy is naturally not going to be appealing to me. (Just look up "the awakening" by Kate Chopin, now THAT was a fun term paper write after i ripped the story apart in my teacher's face and then included that i used the book for kindling for a bonfire!)
822446
let's also remember that penstroke has written better pieces and of course, the beer goggle effect comes into play. Lastly, I used to think that getting featured meant somthing, but the sad part is that people only will give famous authors a chance, which gives the rest of us little to nothing to go on when we get trolled and voted down. Hell, and that's terrible is hilarious and it didn't get featured.
I actually remember the first time i submitted a story, how i watched the featured box for hours and got pissed off, i remember what the stories that made it and took all the spots.
Twilight and Chrysalis make waffles(and have sex)
Fluttershy's talking Vagina
one was a 2nd person romance fic with Nurse redheart
and the last two were anthro clop fics.
I was foaming at the mouth for the rest of the night.
I'm proud to say I've been in the fandom since the early days, and I still haven't read Cupcakes. I watched the Rainbow Dash Presents version of it, had a laugh at that, and I'm satisfied with that being the extent of my contact with it.
821175
Not long enough that it'd take 20 minutes to read through. That said, it doesn't say it took her 20 minutes to read through it, it's 20 minutes to read through it, locate Rainbow Dash, and then start hugging her in desperation.
As for Cucpakes itself, my thoughts on Cupcakes are...weird.
Considering how infamous the story was for being gory and being bad, I was surprisingly underwhelmed when I actually read it. Yeah, there's some description of the torture, but it isn't horribly graphic. And the story, while certainly not good, didn't seem that bad to me. It felt really, really dumb, but not bad exactly.
I think what--sort of--redeems Cupcakes for me is the fact it seems self-aware of how dumb it is. I can't read it and think "the author expects me to take this seriously." Even WITH the torture (which really isn't as graphic as it could have been), the whole thing just comes across as silly, especially with Pinkie Pie acting surprisingly in character (outside of, you know, the whole homicidal killer thing). This self-aware factor is something that seems conspicuously missing in all the attempted knock-offs.
It's interesting you mentioned Cheerilee's Garden in conjunction with it (and frustrating, because I hadn't heard of it before, and like an idiot I actually read some of it), because I think Cheerilee's Garden was an example of what I'm talking about. Unlike Cupcakes, Cheerilee's Garden took itself really seriously and the torture was done in noticeably more graphic detail than Cupcakes. Because it can't even qualify as a joke in the same way Cupcakes did, all you're left with is a lengthy series of detailed graphic torture (at least Cupcakes kept itself short). I suppose on a technical level it's superior to Cupcakes in that there aren't typos every other sentence, but on the other hand that in a way makes it worse, because it makes you take it more seriously, again throwing out what actually sort of worked with Cupcakes.
I'm not quite sure I'd consider Rainbow Factory to be a Cupcakes knock-off in the same way you do, though. To me, the knock-offs are the stories that are just an excuse for a bunch of torture, like the aforementioned one. Rainbow Factory was actually relatively short on that. There was violence, but none of it was really described in much detail. I guess my point is that Rainbow Factory felt like it was more than just an excuse to have torture scenes thrown at the reader's face.
On a side note, though, any problems I had with Cupcakes or Rainbow Factory are negated by how much I loved the Rainbow Dash Presents versions of both of them.