tl;dr: read everything he’s ever written: A review of Fiddlebottoms · 11:45am Apr 25th, 2013
I've spent the year in awkward teenage exploration, but I’m an awkward teenager; this is much unlike Fiddlebottoms, here, who has perfected the image of the old man grievously injured by the world so completely that I’m actually beginning to believe it.
Old Man Fiddlebottoms: A Very Special Episode
I like authors for their stories.
That’s not to say I wouldn’t like them if they didn’t write, of course; most of the authors I like are charming people in themselves. I like Chuckfinley for Pipsqueak’s Day Off, I like darf for rainbow/Dash, I like archonix for Xenophile’s Guide, I like HamGravy for Baby Horse Rape 3: Electronic Twerking¹ and I like most of them as people as well.
But the one writer I’ve most wanted to write a review of is utterly unreviewable, because they’re all just good enough that I write one line in my head and give up. You might be surprised, but I don’t just bullshit these for the sake of bullshit; I write what comes to mind, and so in the end I’m not writing a review of a story insofar as I am writing a story based on my impressions of something I’ve once read.
In other words, I’m bullshitting for art, a phrase I’m sure the man himself would appreciate.
Right, let’s glance over a small handful of the works I’ve thought of reviewing, regardless of merit:
—Muselpferde: It’s metaphorical, I’m sure. There’s something to do with police states. There’s horrific violence and gore. Something something communist nazis. Vulgar.
—Celestia’s Big Day: Hilarious.
—The River and The Ocean: Title’s inspiring. Story’s trying.
—Rarity Versus Bukkake Ninjas²: Kind of meta, but not really. Satirical, but of what? Kind of un-self-aware even in its self-awareness, but is that in itself a form of self-awareness?
No.
Dialogue tags are weird. Last sentence could use a paragraphing. Funny.
—Discord's Ant Farm: Holy shit.
—So, What Happens Now?: Beautiful depiction of ascetic royalty. Minimalist.
—Love and Roadkill: Godlike.
—O’Marelley’s Bar & Grill: Put the whole of it back up and publish a separate rewrite, you revisionist fuck. Bloody brilliant.It’s as if each and every one is a victim of that insurmountable obstacle of being ‘good’, without fail, so unfocused that it can’t be challenged on any of the points it makes; each is easily summarisable by that lazy phrase ‘I like this’, and it’s utterly uncanny how a man can write twenty-nine stories and have so many of them be brilliant and yet impossible to review.
I’ve recently come to the epiphany, thus, that his stories are not so much works in themselves as they are works on him; his authorial character is so integral to his stories, so bitter and tryhard and yet effortless and well-I-won’t-ever-say-sweet, so heaped with so many layers of irony it’s turned into an awful metaphor as if I haven’t used that tired old cheap cop-out of an innovative metaphor a thousand times already and it hasn’t already gotten old but I’m still using it because I’m grasping for straws but am I really because my own acknowledgement of the fact is in itself a different joke that is unaware but might in fact be self-aware given that I’m using it to parallel Fiddlebottoms’ writing to a certain extent but now that I’ve pointed it out within the parallel itself is it still parallel and how long has this sentence gotten and is that in itself a sort of reference that he makes on occasion?
I’m not quite sure.
Indeed, this author’s character is the characterisation of not only his characters but his entire corpus. Almost every story he’s written is filled, intentionally or not, with an abiding attention to beauty, literary if not conceptual, but this intelligent beauty is directed offensively at nothing but itself: so edgy it turns about and cuts itself smooth and so horrifically aware of its own imagined impotence that in the end it doesn’t really say anything loudly enough to be heard; even in unreality it is ‘realistic’, but here I don’t mean that verisimilitude that honest writers convey, but that horrid, ugly cynicism presented as plain fact like some perverse Western rebellion against socialist realism that hasn’t quite forgotten it’s left the Cold War and no longer needs to prove the sanctity of its freedom to be depressed.
In the end, there is something deeply comfortable about his writing: it is an observer’s view, even in first-person, where every character—even the gods—are helpless against some eternal plight or are struggling against some inner demon or have already surrendered.
In other words, it’s comfortable because it’s easy, as is any other manifestation of absolute pessimism.
It just doesn’t make it any less brilliant³.
25th April 2013
Yishun, Singapore¹ This is not a real fanfic.
² This is a real fanfic.
³ I won’t go so far as to write an extended critique of his blogs, but I suppose a blurb would be relevant:
In some way, his gloominess comes across so extreme that it seems almost crawling towards pandering—I came to him from DontWannaKnow before the poor bastard turned into the saddest of attention-whores in the history of man, and there appears to have been the slightest parallel⁴—but the sheer cynicism shining through every aspect of his little fandom is tempered by a pervadingly altruistic sense of humour, and I can’t imagine the edgy fellow would mind if I used a self-describing quote from Hitler to apply to him.
But I won’t.
Because I’m better than that.
In any case, they’re brilliant and you ought to read them too.
⁴ Fiddu-sama wa honto ni tsundere desu!~ “It’s—it’s not that I like you or anything, b—but you remind me of this song and I’m so old and bitter, follower-san! Leave if you want, baka follower-san, I won’t miss you, I hate you so much~!”
>mfw Sorren got into a hissyfight with him while I was writing this
You can’t ruse the rusemaster.
Yo dawg, I heard you like ³, 'cuz you put a ³ in your ³.
I will have to check this guy out. :B
upload.wikimedia.org/math/b/a/4/ba403caf830a27ef9ce5f7762e7ed4ea.png
1033197
Fixed, you male.
1033237
The Golden Ratio?
1033242
Sure, why not?
1033237
latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex?v_{\text{c}}(t)=V_{\text{S}}(1-e^{\frac{t}{RC}})
You would rather have DontWannaKnow writing things like "A Fun Day" again? What you call attention-whoring, I call a possible redemption.
I'd never read anything by Fiddlebottoms before this post. His writing style is excellent. Discord's Ant Farm is very good, though the theme is a little cliche'. The one about strip poker is disturbingly creative, really lingers with me. I guess I'll read more of his stories, if I can do it without vomiting. He's very original. Not going to give me something predictable and trite, anyway.
But some of the things that draw you to him, repel me from him. Rarity begging to be dismembered? What is that about? Is it anything more than having so little discernment and so much nihilism that the only story objective one can pursue is emotional volume? Writing just to see how loudly he can shout?
I can read it as being a comic look at women who have a self-destructive love of submission. A letter from an author in a distant headspace, who's gone past the ability to cry about things and can only laugh at them, no matter how tragic.
It strikes me as not at all the same kind of thing as DontWannaKnow used to write, which was simply vile and evil-minded.
What do you want from fiction? What goes on in the mind of someone who followed the old DontWannaKnow? I don't understand.
I flipped my shit when I saw the footnote within a footnote. I think you may have just crossed a line that no mortal should cross.
1033309
I have two responses to this, and the first presupposes that your initial moral assumption is acceptable:
i.imgur.com/XMwXdCB.png
The second is that A Fun Day! is one of my favourite fanfics, and I've said as much in the comments section:
Totally hot, too.
In any case: I don't necessarily like Ham for the same reasons I like Chuck, and so I don't necessarily like Fiddles for the same reason I used to like DontWannaKnow. He was an attention whore from the start - genuinely believing that going 'I TROL U HA HA' was witty, though that was excusable up to the point he thought he'd won debates because he had popular support and actively went about whoring for it while simultaneously trying to court negative attention - but the later blogging was where it really got offensively ego-laden.
1033371
That's not art. It's monotony. It's like a painter taking a canvas and saying, "Just how red can I make this canvas?" Then he paints it all red, and you adore him for his single-minded dedication to red, not copping out with even a dash of blue or yellow.
What other things could we count as art by this criteria? For one, the exact opposite: A completely pure saccharin story.
Purity is the enemy of art. Even pure bile.
1033547
I seem to recall a painting composed entirely of red that had been lauded as "art" for some time.
Or maybe it was orange...
Point being, if there's an aesthetic purpose for the single color (or single mood in a story), it can have a similar emotional or intellectual impact to a more complex piece.
I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to think of a response to this, but I couldn't.
So thank you, I guess? I love seeing how others see me, and insightful commentary helps make the rest of everything worthwhile.
The part about comfort is pretty on the nose, and I honestly prefer more people tried to fight my bleaker attitudes.
1033309
I enjoyed your comments too.
As for the gore, there are two sides to that.
I write it because I find the process cathartic. Stretching violence and mutilation out until the result is a caricature of suffering and violence. It takes things that are very real and troubling, and it renders them ridiculous, so I can laugh and move on.
I read things like "A Fun Day" because the constant gore is numbing. When I was working on my unofficial sequel, I had to keep going back to the story to check on things like who did which injury, what ways did she suffer. The violence is so overblown that it quits registering.
What I remember is this:
The utterly bleak world, Scootaloo's continued obsession with Dash and her desire to live even past the point where it made sense. How she was so easily convinced that it was all a dream, in her last scene.
At it's best, what I look for in a fanfiction like "A Fun Day" is an environment so burnt out that flat notes which would otherwise be lost, can instead provide an understated character to things. To use your later analogy,
It is like covering a canvas with red so that people can see the slight indents and grooves on the canvas, which would otherwise have been lost in a mess of wasteful color. It gives life to things that would otherwise be lost.
That said, apparently a lot of other people don't get that particular numbing or catharsis, so I dunno. Niche audience, what are ya gonna do?
1033547
But the little splotches of black and wrinkles in the canvas even in spite of the commitment make it so much more beautiful.
That analogy doesn't work on a person who likes modern art, really. I'd like it even if it was perfect. Pure colours are really quite dashing, especially in contrast to the world around them.
1033805
I know, right? I think in America they call that an 'edgy teenager circlejerk'.
1033740 I seem to recall a painting composed entirely of red that had been lauded as "art" for some time.
There've been many equally-boring variations on the same theme. There was some artist who once had nearly the entire basement of the DC Hirshhorn Museum, all of whose paintings were the same: One to three black horizontal stripes, one to three brown horizontal stripes, and one to three beige horizontal stripes. I recall another "artist" who did nothing but paint canvases black. That was his entire artistic output.
It was stupid. It was not art. It was committed out of a desperation to do something new, rather than something good, and supported by post-hoc justifications.
That Amit finds AFD totally hot
makes his/her argument suspect--there's something else entirely that Amit likes about it, that's more like pornography than art.
1033805 It is like covering a canvas with red so that people can see the slight indents and grooves on the canvas, which would otherwise have been lost in a mess of wasteful color.
That's something different than what I meant. It sounds more interesting, but I can't figure out what you mean when you say "It gives life to things that would otherwise be lost." I don't see any understated things in AFD that couldn't be understated and more effective in a more-conventional story. It's very difficult to use understatement in such a story; even outrageous things come across as understated. So I see it as having the opposite effect, of washing out anything subtle.
What it sounds more like is John Cage's 4'33", which was supposed to make the audience listen to itself and background noise. Again, not art. "Art" comes from the word "artifice". When all you can do is point people at nature--at things that occur without design, like the fibers in a paper or coughs in an audience--you've given up on art. Nature and naturalistic patterns are a fine thing, but presenting it as art is a misunderstanding of what art is. It's little different from hanging a generic Motel 6 landscape painting on your wall. Which is also okay, but--not art, not now that we have cameras. I can step out my door and get the real thing for free. Or just stare at the patterns in the carpet.
>Stretching violence and mutilation out until the result is a caricature of suffering and violence. It takes things that are very real and troubling, and it renders them ridiculous, so I can laugh and move on.
The closest I can relate to that is the kind of resigned sad humor you see in Fiddler on the Roof, Rodney Dangerfield, or Woody Allen. Things that should get the sad tag and the comedy tag at the same time. It's ironic that knighty forbids that on fimfiction. That's part of why these things are sad--because people pretend they don't exist.
I can't laugh at these stories we're talking about, though.
>I read things like "A Fun Day" because the constant gore is numbing.
I write bleak stories to try not to feel numb, and because pain forces me to write. I'm working on a story right now about why writers like me write, here. I'm curious whether Fiddlebottoms feel the same.
>The violence is so overblown that it quits registering.
For me, it doesn't.
I write mostly bleak stories. Twenty Minutes, Burning Man Brony, Corpse Bride, The Green Hills of Equestria, Friends With Occasional Magic, Moving On, even Detective & Magician... these all go to bleak places. Some come back from them. Some don't. But they're not from unremitting bleakness. I always try to show what happened, why people find themselves in these bleak situations, why they can or can't get out of them, and make them understandable. I try to tackle the issue and get a handle on it.
1034132
1. I hate the term "edgy" because it implies that I care about where the edge is. People who write T-rated trollfics do that. I do not, my stories are mature because the story I wrote had some mess in it and I do not care enough to edit it down or argue with mods about content restriction.
2. It isn't "teenage" anything. That ageist statement might be made, however one only has to look at the wave of gritty reboots and the critical approval they've met to see that adults and professionals who should know better make the same mistake.
It is a simple fact, people are lazy. Calling someone "smart" is an easy way to ignore them, and accepting a cynical statement removes the burden of trying. Better just to stay in your little hole in the wall job and keep your head down.
And if you agree with this statement, you prove my point.
dear princess celestia
today i learned that horse words are serious business
i'll read this thread later when i'm cogent
1034138
I'd question the question on its basis, but then I remember that I detest artistic pornography.
I was joking, anyhow. The only sexual thing I could find in it was Scootaloo's devotion; the rest is just an entirely different fetish. I genuinely found it entertaining because of its devotion to bleakness and nothing more.
They don't automatically filter it for a reason anyway. Wasn't it Wanderer D the one that wrote that rule up, or am I mistaken?
I just write to make people happy and get ideas out. I swear, you people are on something.
1034138
That seems to be a very mechanistic description of "art". The word may descend from artifice but art is far more than representative depictions. It's a participatory thing. Art is the interaction between the piece, the environment and the viewer, and the emotional, physical and intellectual reactions that result from that interaction. Art is contextual: an old master rolled up in a basement isn't art; that same old master framed and hung in the most appropriate context certainly is... though if you were to photograph the basement and the old master rolled up and covered in dust, hang it, frame it and call it "Popularity" it would also be art.
I'm usually first in line to whinge about the latest winner of the Turner Prize (most of it is trite rubbish) but I never deny that it's art. The whole point of art is to invoke a response.
The origin of the word itself is irrelevant to the current meaning. Language evolves, and art is not about the methods of production, but rather the resultant effect on the viewer. So nature can be art, if suitably framed and presented, and that carpet you mentioned can be art. And the wall can be art. And a hole in the floor can be art. And even a pile of shit on a paving stone can be art if you remove it from its original context and place it where it wasn't meant to be. It'd be stupid, but the very fact that it generates such a response is what makes it art.
If you want artifice you go to an engineer.
1035455
No, no - you don't understand, only everything I write is art, just like everybody I describe as 'bad' is in fact a effeminate hermaphrodite!
I'd so totally buy a painting of that photograph.
1034138
I've done what I can to explain gorefics, after that it comes down to genre.
For comparison, I don't like shipping. A little bit of it in a story is tolerable, provided that it feels necessary, but stories whose primary purpose is FlutterMac (or whatever) fill me with a deep sense of sadness. I imagine 300 pound men stuffing bonbons into their faces and sing-songing to their plushie waifus, attempting to obtain their emotional needs through horse fictions.
This isn't really true, nor is it really true that people who write/read gorefics run around torturing animals in their spare time. They are just a person who does a thing I don't understand. There is no higher moral to it.
I find gore satisfying to write because of catharsis. The why of my writing is simpler. I write because I write. I no more choose to do it than I choose to breath. The thing is both reason and justification in itself.
The story about author-changelings felt a little more elitist than I'm comfortable with.
1035305 I was joking, anyhow. The only sexual thing I could find in it was Scootaloo's devotion; the rest is just an entirely different fetish. I genuinely found it entertaining because of its devotion to bleakness and nothing more.
I'm relieved. Couldn't tell that you were joking.
1035745 The story about author-changelings felt a little more elitist than I'm comfortable with.
Fair enough.
I never understood catharsis. It's supposed to free you of some emotion, but I often think I feel the emotion more strongly after "catharsis". Maybe I'm supposed to measure again two hours later.
1035305
The Wander D one I remember is "no Sad|Tragedy, it's redundant". I don't know about Sad|Comedy. It sounds perfectly reasonable to me, but I can't actually picture such a story.
Welcome to the herd, Amit.
Personally, I enjoyed A Fun Day for its portrayal of the Mane Six; the story manages to keep their characterizations disturbingly recognizable (with the tiny little change of them all being unrepentant child-killers.) I like seeing how far you can twist a character and still have her feel like herself. If Pinkie still likes parties but is also a cannibal, is it still Pinkie? If Twilight likes to study but also has
wingsa drinking problem, is she still Twilight? And so forth.The actual murder and gore alternately bored and repelled me, and I skipped a lot of it. I guess I like to see characters psychologically harmed a lot more than the physical equivalent?
As for this Fiddlebottoms guy, I have to say I find him to be tremendously witty and clever. I've only read one of this stories, but "So, What Happens Now?" was a terrifically moving little vignette with some great turns of narrative phrase. Admittedly, most of my impressions of the man come from his comments on my stories, but he's one of my favorite (and most critical) commenters. I definitely need to read more of his work.
1035789
Is that so?
Really, the only reason a writer would find it impossible to write sad comedy would be be that they simply weren't good enough to portray that emotional nuance.
So I need to write more stories about ponies exploding? Got it.