So I Wrote Something For a Cool Dude (The Sequel: Lost In Neigh York) · 6:26am Jul 31st, 2013
Remember that one pretentious blog I wrote at a cool guy's site?
Well, there's a second one up. Check it out there. Or, y'know:
If Sgt Sprinkles couldn't make me vomit, could RobCakeran53 make me cry? Ever since day one of my “MLP Fanfictional Career” (Nietzsche, shoot me now) I have had countless commenters read stuff like Background Pony or End of Ponies or Last Tears of Tartarus and subsequently ejaculate the proverbial “Wow! This is like Cupcakes meets My Little Dashie!” Seriously, is brondyom a mirror to the early millennium? When all critics could do was say “This movie is like Star Wars meets The Matrix!” Maybe comments like these is why I never read, for fear I too will feel compelled to relegate all of my thoughts into one spastic sentence, and realize that I would have said tons more by not typing anything at all. Perhaps, though, that summarizes my fanfictional legacy as a whole, but I digress.
I'm a Dashie; he's a Dashie. Don't you wanna be a Dashie too? Robby Cakes sure did... or at least he wanted to hug one. Really badly. I feel ya, lemur. Dem blue flanks. Amirite?
Going into reading this, it's next to impossible to shrug off some sort of weighted bias. MLD is almost as immortal as MLP on the Bronynet. It's the most favorited story on Fimfic, after all, and there've been countless fanarts, comics, spinoffs, audio reads, you name it. It's like the Citizen Kane of poni poni poni fiction, but instead of bizarre camera angles and faceless reporters, we've got a mind-wiped filly with a fetish for NASCAR and worn-out LazyBoys. There was once an epic meet-up at the 2012 Megacon that I had with Jake Heritagu, the author of Silent Ponyville, where—among a boatload of other things—we talked about famous fics, and he filled me in on the bare bones plot of MLD, about how it apparently involved an adoption system where humans raised ponies through foalhood before giving them back up to the land of Equestria. My response was something akin to a head nod, accompanied by “Wow. Huh. That's stupid.”
Thankfully, the real McCoy turned out to be mostly different. Forgive me, but I'm a fetishist for stories that involve amnesia or mind wipes or selective memory, so a part of me is at least somewhat appreciative of the plot device that MLD ended with. After all, I wrote that one thing that one time... y'know the story... with the mute superhero wielding the wooden sword? What? You don't remember that? Dammit, the shears are over there.
But I can only admit to appreciating the ending of MLD in theory, because the whole execution is just... like a failed Cosmonaut rocket launch. Hell, if you built a giant net out of Siberian elk guts and stretched it across the Pacific ocean, the ending would still miss its mark, making a tiny splash somewhere in the Antarctic, where even the Old Ones would be too bored to bother waking from their sleep.
Okay, so Twilight screwed up a magic spell. Alright, doesn't matter if we've seen that a million times, but it's digestible. So, the spell causes fifteen Equestrian days to equal out to fifteen Terran years. Yeah, alright. Any reason for that? Huh? No? Just because? Well, sure thing. Ahem. So, uh, the cast of the cartoon have all shown up at the dude's front door like it's a photo shoot, because they want to restore Dashie's memories and bring her back to Equestria? Well, that does make some sense. They are her friends after all, and ignoring the wyrdness of a) how they get to the human world of all places and b) how nonchalantly they treat being there, it makes sense that they would want to restore their old Rainbow Dash to normal, even at the price of erasing this brand new fifteen year-old creature standing in front of them—wait, wat.
Hold the phone. I can buy the kaizo fact that MLD's world is a meta one where the narrator is aware of the show, and yet at the same time is able to interact with elements of the cartoon, once they have been “magically” transported to his realm. I can buy the fact that the magic spell—through no explained reason—somehow forced a disconnect in both Dashie's age and in the passage of time between one world and the next. It's all setting up for a potentially dramatic plot device. But when the characters show up and insist that there is only one solution to this situation, and it involves utterly destroying fifteen years of innocent personal development, because of reasons, then I gotta wave a menstrual red flag or something.
The ponies are lobotomizing Dashie. The argument against the emotional repercussions of this are brought up, but what about the ethical? Nopony seems to care about the essential murder that they are committing, and that really shoves the mane six (plus Celestia) thousands of miles out of character. Apparently, this is supposed to be an uber sad fic, but I can't even come close to shedding a tear because I'm too overwhelmed by how ungodly overlooked this act of identity annihilation is. Twilight and her friends don't question it. Celestia doesn't question it. The narrator doesn't... erm... exactly fight it. There's a whole lot of shouting and then a whole lot of crying, suggesting that the characters do not like what is being done, but it doesn't stop them from doing it anyways, and in the end, the act of restoring/erasing Dashie is important to the story's end because it wants to be, not that it needs to be, even though the explanation for it—if there even is one—is hollow at best.
Is the human world bad? I can't tell, because Celestia goes out of her way to compliment the narrator and how he took care of Dashie out of the goodness of his heart. Is it because humans aren't allowed to exist in the pony realm? If that was the case, then why does Celestia sympathize with the person so much that she allows him to retain the memories of his and Dashie's time together? That's not a blessing; that's grounds for psychological torment. I don't care if the narrator plays it off at the end, he's in the same lonely, destitute, cynical situation that he was in at the start of the fic, and in place of the one joy in his life is the memories of a companion he will never again commune with, like some mental sepulcher memorial to something that will forever be missing in his life.
I'd almost wish the narrator did have his mind erased, and then he would have discovered the note that Dashie left, and then thought “What the hell is this nonsense?” and then tossed the scrap of paper away like it was garbage. He wouldn't have known any better, but we—the marsupial alumni—would be left with a sense of dread and tragic ennui, for we have the power to read beyond the boundaries of what is explicitly given to us. But that's not the sort of device this story decided to use. Instead, everything feels... well... forced. It's sad just because. “You see the sad tag, right? This is a sad fic. Read it. It's totally sad, bro. For legit.”
However, it's not entirely fair to judge all of MLD from its ending alone. After all, I wouldn't know anything about that style of analysis, now would I? Fair enough.
Whelp, this fic does the absolute opposite of what I want to accomplish in literature. Namely, it is all about telling instead of showing. Now, as much as I get a word!boner over showing in stories, I can't put down telling completely. As long as the narrative is consistent and confident in the manner in which it gives us a story, then it's quite possible to make something interesting with even a telling technique. All throughout, I felt as though I was being told the story by someone, as if we were sitting in the same room and having an intimate conversation. I say this as a tongue-and-cheek way of excusing the fact that the story switches from present tense to past tense and back to present a lot, and I mean a whole freakin' lot. It's almost as if the story is casually written in someone's journal, and the author can't decide between sharing his present-day feelings or relaying a historical account. Heck, I almost wish the author had gone for a journal entry style of writing, because the story is ripe with that sort of deep-seeded intimacy and sincerity, and most of the segments are separated by time jumps. Also, journal writing makes the whole account inescapably subjective, so that you can kind of forgive breaks in tense or grammatical burps or what not. I should know; I used the technique as a lazy crutch all throughout that pretentious, stupidly long, ridiculously repetitive fanfic you all seem to like so much.
Still, Mr. Cakeran's narrative style just... throws me for a loop at points. This story also feels a bit slapped together, but in a different way than Sgt Sprinkles' Cupcakes is. MLD is essentially streams of consciousness, only not done too terribly well. Since the modernist period, western readers have been foaming at the mouth for a narrative style that interweaves a protagonist's thoughts with her or his experiences. Stream of consciousness is a device that helps enrich the reader's perspective on the character's motivations, misgivings, fears, and aspirations. It isn't, however, meant to be used as a transcription of the character's brainfarts. There were moments in the story where I'd chuckle out loud, moments where the narrator would describe walking home, describe that evening had fallen, describe approaching the front door to his house, and only then felt it was necessary to emphasize the fact that the porch light was on, because—duh—how else would a person be able to find his way home in the dark? Most lemurs (or at least those with editors) would reverse engines and alter the paragraph so that the facts weren't listed in obscure order, or with such bizarre specificity.
I remember reading a spot where the narrator describes his quiet misgivings over a factory possibly being built over the park he frequents with Dashie, but then I remembered a spot way early on in the fic's prologue where the narrator implied a longing for the same kind of factories after they went under and caused the city's economy to tank in their absence. Then there was the moment when the narrator moved to a new house. Why? Because he got a new job. Oh wait, he also found time to go to a casino. Wat? A casino?! It's mentioned once, but then it's never talked about again. Or how about the time when the narrator promises to buy Dashie an Indy 500 ticket for her birthday, but then mentions that she doesn't need it because she could just sit, unseen, on a cloud above the event, but—no, wait—he'll get her a ticket anyways, because it's the thought that counts. I know all of these instances must seem like frivolous details, but they're indicative of the way in which the author writes the entire story as a whole. He'll pause to insert relatively innocuous details before carrying on as if the train was never halted on the tracks to begin with. It's nice to know that RobCakeran53 is so focused on the nitty gritty stuff; he just doesn't seem to believe in the backspace key.
Would changing this fic's style from that of telling to that of showing improve it? No, but rather, it would establish the blueprint for a much longer and much more intriguing story. Through and through, this story feels like it's half-baked. I mean, the plot is actually relatively solid, and though the explanations for story elements (or lack of them) are somewhat goofy at points, it is the making of something that is much better than itself. That is the sort of story that would benefit from a far more visceral presentation, something that should be about five times as long, filled with scenes that focus exclusively on talking, on character development, and on the descriptive details that the author obviously has a healthy hankerin' for. While reading this, I kept wanting, begging, to see the scenes of the narrator and Dashie and just those scenes alone. Could you imagine that? A My Little Dashie written in third person past tense that showed the human and the filly meeting, taking those first awkward steps, sharing lessons on how to talk, cuddling, growing old together, and then reaching the point where they’d ultimately (and dramatically) have to split?
There was only one key scene in MLD that I felt was an example of what I would have wanted to see, specifically where the narrator comes home from shopping to witness Dashie watching an episode of My Little Pony. We have drama, we have suspense, we have dialogue and emotes, we have heartstrings pulled (kind of, sort of), because everything is being shown to us, and we have the foreknowledge of the emotional relationship between these two characters to understand and feel why this sort of an altercation is painful. That's why, in this day and age, it's okay to just write scenes where crud happens and characters do stuff without the narration having to embellish it too much, because the audience isn't entirely dumb as mud and they can connect the melancholic dots themselves.
Vimbert the Unimpressive, ol' candle-stick-head himself, has a slogan that he uses in editing, “Never assume the audience is stupid.” I don't mean to suggest that Robby Cakes thinks so little of the marsupial alumni, and I'm not wanting to pull a Pinkie!Gein on his literary guts, but he seems to get hung up on whether or not to let us witness sad stuff while in motion or to just outright explain it all. Ironically enough, that very scene I mentioned—where Rainbow Dash gets angry at her “Daddy” and flies out of the house in a huff—is ruined by the fact that the narrator essentially summarizes the whole ordeal within the very first paragraph that introduces the entire sequence. If this was indeed a journal entry, that might make sense, but the story doesn't exactly follow that schematic to a T, and what we have here is a scene that could have been awesome, that utilized the swell mechanics of showing us stuff, but was ultimately deflated of all its tension because the narrator still felt the need to tell us everything from the beginning. F'naaaaaa.
I once had a talk with Propmaster, the author of Red Wings and Solem Perditum, about the difference between sad fics and happy fics. Props contended that a happy fic, much like the greek “comedy,” is when there is a goal that the main character wants, and after much strife and setbacks, the character achieves that goal, ultimately relying on the strengths and gifts that had always empowered the protagonist from the get-go. What, then, would a sad fic entail? I suspect it would be the absolute reverse, where the character starts out as having achieved something happy and fulfilling, but then has that stripped from him or her, while being powerless to prevent it, in spite of their inherent gifts.
In MLD, we really don't witness “happy” and “fulfilling” events, but instead we're told that they have happened, through a series of scenes that amount to abridged paraphrases of what should probably have been longer, meatier, and far more intimate sequences. I feel as though the entire story is being fed through a foggy projector, and all the photo negatives have aged with time, much like the protagonist's album will as he sits in his dad's lazyboy for another fifteen years (or thirty) wondering “Huh, did a lot of nice things happen to me in my life? I can't tell, because every time I think about them, I sound in my head like Tolkien trying to write a make-out session with an inflatable alligator.”
To the story's credit, it's vague enough to be relatable to just about everyone. If that was Robby Cakes' intention, than he's a Nietzsche dayum genius, and he deserves even more envy than I have the capability of throwing at his (undoubtedly insanely handsome) forehead. Just go back and look at that stuff: the narrator has no name, lives in a nameless city, is overwrought with generically relevant issues such as loss of parents, urban pollution, ennui with a rat race routine and horribad economic environmental stuff. Dashie's “daddy” is essentially the beta male hero of our age, surviving angstily in the wasteland, right after, I dunno, Barack Obama's grinning poster face smashed through the heart of America like that big stupid starship at the end of Into Darkness. What's more, the main character is a brony, with such intense dependency on pastel colored horses that it borders on downright sickening. Whether or not the protagonist is an extreme stereotype, most of us can still relate to him, at least the portion of us who are brave enough to not only read pony fiction but also to create a Fimfic account and put MLD on our favorites list. My Little Dashie commits the genius act of making itself open and digestible to just about everyone, and in that vein the fic’s relatively tame and vague style of story-telling is undeniably perfect.
However, is it poignant? Does it make me feel as though I've gained anything from reading it? Has it moved me in any way? Regardless of whether or not that's the job of fanfics in this day and age, I still have to put some major emphasis on it, because that's evidently the big deal with MLD. It's supposed to make everyone cry. Just like Cupcakes was the pony creepypasta equivalent of 2 Girls 1 Cup, I suppose it's only fitting to call My Little Dashie the... uhm... pony “crypasta” equivalent of... The Notebook? I dunno.
To be perfectly honest, not only did I not cry while reading MLD, but I can actually think of a moment in Sgt. Sprinkles' friggin’ Cupcakes that was more saddening. I refer specifically to the moment when Rainbow Dash, butchered and bloodied beyond recognition, pitifully mewls “I want go home” to Pinkie Pie. That single line alone, planted in stark contrast in the middle of what is otherwise a laughably gratuitous exercise in nihilism, is something more emotionally provocative than the entirety of RobCakeran’s legendary story.
You wanna know why? Because Sgt Sprinkles' was, for the briefest of moments, a magnificent bastard who knew when and where to inject emotion into his story without having to tell us that he was crushing the bloody little easter egg before our eyes. Hell, he probably planted it there just to be ironic or stereotypical, cuz that's the kind of crap you'd expect to hear in a Hostel-style story where a character's will is being broken, but it didn't stop me from wanting to get up from Sedna, walk across the house, hug one of my mother's cats and pretend through all the fur and the claws that it was a healthy and wholesome Rainbow Dash instead.
It's funny, really, that MLP is beset with so many, many fics in the genres of Grimdark and Sad, and yet the two thematic epochs of such categories are—against the test of time—planted on wet sand at best. Still, are they any less important for where they stand? For what they stand for? For what they have provided the fandom and will continue to provide it?
I'm happy that we have a RobCakeran and a Sgt Sprinkles. I'm happy that we have stories that got successful because the fandom chose them to be successful, just like they chose for MLP to be successful. I'm sure you could ask both authors if they meant for their stories to become so legendary, to become so epitomized in other fan works, to be so viciously and ruthlessly analyzed by hairy basement children such as myself (if you can call all of this an “analysis,” but hey, Floridian basements aren't known for having much depth). Still, both dudes seem to be cool lemurs, even with the popularity that their works have given them, and if there's any standard for fanworks—or creative endeavors in general—it's to pursue bettering ourselves, and making stuff that is somehow superior to and more impressive than the material that has come before us.
Stuff like Cupcakes and My Little Dashie set the bar for a lot of stuff to come later. Whether or not one considers that bar high or low, it's the stuff that people have used to measure many fanfics, including my own. Understanding that and acknowledging that is the first step in finding ways to be different, to be innovative, and to be expressive in such fashions.
Crap's gotta pile up somewhere, even if its only difference is that it's less smelly than the crap packed tightly beneath it. Isn't that right, Mr. Sturgeon? No? Nnnngh... for Nietzsche’s sake, the shears are over there...
F'naaaaa
-SS&E, with editing assistance by the holy zebra of Noble Jury, Pilate
You wrote a Zelda fic? Truthfully?
...
Got a link? Pun may or may not be intended.
~Skeeter The Lurker
Couldn't have said it better myself— well, that's actually impossible for me to say it better than you, because I like the knowhow and garble. All in all, a rather decent deconstruction, my fine Skirts.
1251375 dude, that pun was brilliant, regardless of intent.
1251376
Agreed. Oh so very agreed.
1251379
Too good to resist.
~Skeeter The Lurker
God damnit so many dead links to tvtropes.
Coated as it may be in Dr. Pepper, I have to say the article (in two parts) has some really solid and spiffy analysis. I am especially fond of the juxtaposition you utilized to tie the topics together into a cohesive, comprehensive, and dynamic thesis that covered some excellent perspectives. Ultimately, I think you also covered the most important point pretty well: these are not good stories, but they are stories worth talking about in the broader context of audiences, their demands, and fads of the fandom. In that vein, the meta-analysis was equally apt.
Is it just me, or is the Magnum Opus Dissonance getting stronger...?
I thoroughly enjoyed reading that. Thanks!
Aight, aight. I've said my piece on Cupcakes and on MLD so many times before that I won't here. After all my views on both are pretty neutral. But 2 thingies:
Technically, as I understood when I read the story, they were using a spell to restore Dash's memories from before she was sent to Earth. The ponies did not know if the spell would allow her to retain her memories of her time on Earth in addition to her original ones. That was left ambiguous so that the reader could decide their own emotional response to either outcome and choose to believe whichever they felt was preferable.
Also, while I enjoyed reading this and find myself agreeing with the majority of your analysis, I feel like you used an awful lot of analysis to tell us that the two most overrated stories in the fandom are overrated.
I don't believe MLD would have been nearly the same story (or as successful as it was) if it had taken the journal approach. Just as you conjectured it above, I believe that the reason the story succeeded as it did was precisely because of the generic protagonist/situation, and our ability to see it as more than just reading someone else's journal.
After reading it during it's EQD debut, I remember watching the responses for several days on DeviantArt (I left a reply of my own, but for the life of me I can't find it). While a majority of the responses were the simple "This made me cry" remarks, the more in-depth ones usually touched on how they felt in relation to the main character and his situation. But it was more than a simple, single person having that experience by themselves: it was an entire fandom people, still young, seeking it's identity, and trying to establish and expand a common connection. MLD worked perfectly for that because it gave people a way to feel their own situations expressed and projected into someone else's story, and that created something to rally around.
Compare the initial reactions and responses to most modern comments and reviews. There's a very different tone about them. Sure, there are still the people, particularly those still new and fresh to the pony party, who leave the same simple comments of how it brought them to tears as before. But now that our fandom has matured and holds a much more well established identity, we've also become more critical on deciding the things that define us, and the merit they hold. It's like the innocence of Derpy in season 1, when compared to the whole season 2 debacle.
Had I held back on reading MLD until today, I most certainly would have viewed it in a different light than when I read it during the initial hype. And yet, it's the people who did read it then that continue to propagate it's alleged epicness through the filter of nostalgia. Even if it isn't truly the best example of what we have to offer, it nonetheless earned it's significance for what it was able to accomplish while in it's prime.
Just my thoughts. I don't have a fancy degree in literature though, so meh.
Okay, your technical criticisms of the story are flawless. But that critique of the ending? I'm going to have to disagree with you there.
It could just be my memory has edited out all the awkward parts that conflict with my headcanon, but I don't recall any mention anywhere of Dashie losing her memories of those fifteen years. I can agree, after she got her memories back, she would no longer be that same fifteen year old pony. However, seeing as how they were, arguably, both the same person, it can easily be viewed as 'restoring lost memories'/ 'fixing brain damage', rather than 'replacing one mental existence with another'. Looking at it like that, the rest of the M6 are perfectly within character, as they are simply helping a friend, and not harming anyone at all.
As for Celestia 'tormenting' the guy - what? He'd just raised Dash as his kid. And she's allowed him to retain both his memory of that, and sufficient proof to convince himself he didn't just hallucinate the whole thing. Now, I'm not going to pretend to know how a parent would react to having their child erased from existence, but I do know that, given the choice, I would _never_ choose to forget _anything_ of importance to me - no matter how painful those memories are, they are _mine_.
Taking the guy's memories would be an atrocity that no 'good' person could ever condone. And leaving the poor guy wondering if he had lost his marbles for fifteen years is only a bit better. But on the balancing act between 'my nation and people' and 'charity for all', Celestia made the best choice she could.
Those were my two main criticisms. However, you also complain about how the spell makes fifteen days in Equestria last fifteen years on Earth. No, we don't know that. For all we know, that could be the natural rate of temporal progression for both worlds (if you're curious, assuming that relationship was constant, that means an hour on Earth is slightly less than ten seconds in Equestria). What we _do_ know is that the spell de-aged RD for some reason that is never properly explained. That isn't so much a defence of MLD, though, as it is a prompt to 'complain about the right thing, darnit!'.
Thanks for giving me better reasons to hate MLD. I had always just said I didn't like it because rd never acts like rd and it's written terribly without emotion. RD is never given a chance to grow besides...mowing the lawn.
These fridge logic plot holes are so much better for when I try and make others feel bad about liking things, which every good brony should do.
1251407
I was just about say something along those lines dammit.
Ahem.
Unlike the other story, I actually read this one, way back when I was taking my first steps into the fandom. I both despise it and appreciate it for a variety of reasons, but every time I think of this story, something in particular is always at the forefront of my mind. That leads me to the one thing I don't think you really touched base on and what I know I'm going to butcher in my attempt to explain, and that was the necessity of this story to the fanfiction community.
On a whim I went back in time to find the first sad story the fandom wrote, and I think I found it. Coincidentally, it also involves Rainbow Dash. But, golly-jee, look at how it's presented. It was posted on January 23rd, 2011. Holy hell, it's plainly stated: "I have absolutely 0 sad dash pictures to go with this, so here is something slightly relevant." Were we really that young at some point? But then go look at My Little Dashie, which seems to have first been posted on DeviantArt on September 26th, 2011. I don't know how many sad stories had been churned out in the time between, but MLD was created just nine months after the fanfiction part of this fandom seemed to have awkwardly been birthed, or at least the sad part of it was (heh).
The fanfiction community was so young back then. Most stories probably existed in >greentext or on—gasp!—Fanfiction.net. I vaguely remember GDocs being the go-to form for fanfiction. Our abode of Fimfiction didn't even come around until July of that year, and even then it was sorely underused compared to where it is today. I'm sure not all the credit goes to My Little Dashie, but if there's anything I know about that period of time it was the pure and unadulterated creation that was being spat out. This fandom creates like no other now, but back then I think it's safe to assume there were little to no filters, no criteria, no standards,
no condom; there wasn't really any bar to separate the good from the shit from the complete shit. MLD at least took itself seriously, to an extent, and that's something I greatly respect about it. With all these sadfics nowadays being compared to MLD, gosh, can you imagine what we would do, where we would be if that story didn't exist? I can't. As much as I don't want to say it, this community needs that story and all its overhyped glory.I won't reword all that you said. Yes, My Little Dashie is a poorly written, if possibly well-intended, piece of garbage that forcefully shoves a square peg into a round hole. In retrospect, this story would be condemned if it was posted today. It'd get laughed into the red so hard knighty would have to extend the rating bar. Give it to a confident editor and they'd return a list of comments longer than the story itself. Send it off to Equestria Daily and it'd get perma-rejected before the email was ever opened. But we love to hate it. It serves as a reminder of how far we've evolved beyond that naïve youth of ours. Truly, My Little Dashie is a legendary pile of trash, but it's legendary for all the right reasons and then some. That, in my opinion, is what makes this story so special.
shortskirts, pls analyse fics more often.
1251384
Not that you're wrong about him writing Zelda fics too, but the 'mute hero with a wooden sword' story he refers to is his 2.6 million word, OC-centric Teen Titans epic. He's mute and has a wooden sword. The shears bit is because he's neutered.
/explaining the joke
It can be found here.
If you're still curious.
Seriously? After splattering Background Pony all over the nets you think anyone's going to believe that?
How about you do it?
I'm sure marsupials would spasm over MLD written BP-style. 
Less rambling, more stories!
1251617
2.6... MILLION.
Holy fuck.
~Skeeter The Lurker
1251852
And that's just the two acts he finished.
He planned six.
1251879
... So, no only is he doing one on MLP, he has one on TT as well?
Goddamn, SS&E... Write much?
Don't stop.
~Skeeter The Lurker
1251891
Man that's just the surface of the rabbit hole. Most of it he deleted ages ago, but once upon a time he had X-Men and Zelda epics to his name as well.
People may argue about his style and quality, but there's no question the dude knows how to pump out huge numbers of words.
Really enjoyed reading these two critiques; especially the way you took a look at both the story itself and the state of the 'Brony Community' when each was released.
...But still, feel free to punch anybody who compares your fics to either. People have got to learn someway or another.
1251906
The style makes him so unique. That and the amount of words he can put out.
~Skeeter The Lurker
Honestly, I never really thought about the ending to it that much as I was crying too much already to even form coherent thought.
MLD was an alright, adorable little story. I didn't cry once during it, though. After some point, it just felt...predictable. Could just be me, though. I've probably read enough sad to be quite jaded when it comes to sad stuff. I just didn't find it to be that spectacular.
The absolute best thing* about Cupcakes and My Little Dashie, is that they made it possible for these two wonderful parody videos to exist:
Rainbow Dash Presents:
Cupcakes-
http://www.dawnsomewhere.com/rainbow-dash-presents/rdp-cupcakes/
My Little Dashie-
http://www.dawnsomewhere.com/rainbow-dash-presents/my-little-dashie/
-----
* Also known as "the only good thing."
Pretty good article. Thanks for the plug. You might enjoy this MLD parody...
Thank you for expressing in glorious 3-D what the story left me looking for. Sometimes it takes a pile of words to really understand a different pile of words.
I just want to say, that picture is terrifying.