Present Perfect vs. Cupcakes · 1:27pm Oct 29th, 2013
(I shouldn't link to any of them, but there are readings by Astro-Brony, Winged T. Spears, GutiuSerenade, Mic the Microphone, Sparrow9642, and Plagen Shiki.)
“I can't come up with any other fanfic that has inspired so much – rage, love, and everything in between – in so many people, in so many different disciplines of the fandom.” -RBDash47, Pony Fiction Vault 8/23/13
That’s about the best lead-in I can give you on this, my third and final pre-Halloween-fic-rec-journal journal. Are you surprised? Yes, it’s time for that most awful of awful fics, the one that put grimdark and character destruction on the fandom map, to the neverending sorrow of People With Good Taste everywhere (not to mention caused a dear friend to spend his fandom tenure constantly defending his moniker): Cupcakes.
This is actually my second time reading Cupcakes. I’d found myself recently saying that I should take another look at it now that I’m older and wiser. That'll learn me to do things ever. The first time I read it was probably back in 2011, probably toward the middle of the year. I more or less dared myself to read it, having heard so much about it and thus considering it a rite of passage for bronydom.
I didn’t react well.
I remember being on AIM at the time with a friend, and having to stop every few paragraphs to message him about what was going on. At the time, I described it as feeling my sanity slip away, as though I were the protagonist in an H. P. Lovecraft story. Before then, I had not thought such a thing possible.
This is most likely an exaggeration of just how effective Cupcakes really is. No doubt a lot of that was due to a much closer relationship with the characters at the time (nowadays, having not seen an episode of pony for months, I have to work to remember what they even look like in the show), not to mention a lack of having seen true horror in the fandom before. I’m pretty sure I can thank it for inoculating me against those depravities. The only things I’ve read since then that had anywhere near that effect on me are Love.Sick and Pattycakes. (Protip: DON’T READ PATTYCAKES.)
So, reading Cupcakes again. No mental scarring this time, but I did have to get up and walk away toward the end. There are a few things this story does well, foremost among them being visceral, no pun intended. Granted, I’m an extremely squeamish person, so of course it’s going to have an effect on me, but for being gorn, this is really top-notch and not easy to read by any stretch. I’m sure the fucked-up reprobates who like this shit really appreciate it.
The second thing this does well is parody. Okay, it’s not great parody, but I did appreciate it more this time around. Sgt. Sprinkles, in the interview linked above, says that he wanted to parody the fandom, and it really shines through in that first paragraph. It’s such a pat opening, it’s almost hilarious. For god’s sake, it ends with the line “Rainbow felt alive.” It’s tragic and hilarious all at the same time when you know what’s going to happen, and when you don't? The perfect way to be caught off guard. It really puts the reader into the same mindset as Rainbow Dash, pushing her as the true perspective character (until that breaks later on), which only serves the aforementioned viscerality.
The last thing this does well is the mystery. The line “Your number came up and, well, I don’t make the rules” is honestly chilling. Pinkie makes a reference to not shrugging off her responsibilities. It really poses the question: why is she doing this? Is it scarier to think she's being controlled or doing this of her own free will? The random nature of these murders is just as horrifying as the fact that she’s so placid about it all, not to mention they're going to continue indefinitely until everyone in Ponyville is dead.
(I once read a 'sequel' where Pinkie is captured and tried for the murders. Despite appealing to a certain sense of justice, it cheapens the story, was very transparently wish-fulfillment and was written extremely poorly. Held up against the original, that's quite the damning sentiment.)
Okay, that’s out of the way. I’m done praising this story because fuck it entirely. I found myself going, “Y’know, if Pinkie was actually a serial killer, she’d be perfectly in-character in this story,” but no, fuck that, fuck everything about this piece.
There’s no real attempt on the story’s part to build tension or anything that might make it worthwhile. It’s just gory imagery and torture porn. The mind can fill in a lot of extra details, but that’s no high mark on the writer’s part. Any such gaps are more oversights than leaving things out in order to create atmosphere. And yes, there are still a large number of rather obvious typos and other errors despite there having been a number of revisions made.
The fandom did not need this story and I will never understand why it got so damned popular. Why is the image of Pinkie the Serial Killer, or Pinkie turning her friends into cupcakes so enduring? I have no idea. Sure, it inspired a couple of things that I liked, like Crooked Trees’ long-defunct Ask Pinkamina Diane Pie tumblr (seriously, it was one of my favorite things when it was active), and, uh, I guess that one video with the Andrew WK song that was really gruesome but nevertheless kind of hilarious. But for every one of those, we get a hundred scenes in unrelated fanfics where Pinkie makes Rainbow Dash a cupcake with her cutie mark on it and Rainbow faints, or Rainbow or Pinkie dream about the events of Cupcakes happening and get all weepy. We have catch-phrases like “Now you take a nap” or “Why do they call it a hacksaw?” showing up in stories just to increase the edgy/horror quotient, kind of like Slendermane. It is never used well, and a Cupcakes reference is a sure-fire way to tank a story.
And let’s not forget the really ridiculous part: this story was written before Party of One. Despite the Ask PDP tumblr’s existence, Pinkie didn’t have flat mane in the original. I remember the cry of “CUPCAKES IS CANON” after that episode aired, and the whole mess just got messier for it. PoO is one of my absolute favorite episodes ever, but goddammit why did the writers have to give this fandom the allowance to make Pinkie mentally unstable?
Like it or not, Cupcakes is a godawful force of nature all its own, and there’s no stopping it. All we can do is take every opportunity to remind ourselves that it is devoid of literary merit.
1/5
The Conversion Bureau was actually a worse read, writing-wise, but seriously fuck this story.
And that’s the story of how Present Perfect didn’t read Cupcakes a third time. Thank God it’s over. Enjoy the spoopy fic rundown tomorrow!
Spoopy?
EDIT: I'm still giggling 2 minutes later.
Never read Cupcakes. Don't have the inclination to do so.
Please
destroyreview Cheerilee's Garden. Why that is one of the highest ranked stories on the site boggles me. It's the exact same thing as Cupcakes—torture porn with absolutely no semblance of characters—but it has the added stupidity of an entire building full of ponies unable to hear foals being tortured and murdered! Sure, the gore is well-written, but the gore effects in Hostel were good, but that doesn't mean the movie sucked.3spooky6me
I'll pass. Too squeamish.
It was Meh. I'm a person who thoroughly enjoys brutality and all that stuff that makes me horrible, the entire story was Meh. The gore scene would've been good in a story with sufficient pacing but the story's paced like superman throwing a high velocity rocket in the opposite direction of earth's rotation. Everything else about the story fit as well with it as the rest. Okay but nothing really satisfying. Pinkie was revealed as the villain immediately so there was no mystery. The story was so short that nobody had time to develop for this context. And I suspect the creepy factor of leaving tings unexplained was an excuse to not have to write as apposed to a creative decision.
All in all; you and everyone else whose said this, summerize it perfectly. It's gore and torture porn. It's not a meaty story, no pun intended, and it only exists because the author wanted a story where Pinky hacks up Rainbow. It got popular at the time because nothing else like that really existed in the fandom. Having read gore stories with effective pacing and good back story: Cupcakes could never get popular if it ws written now.
Ahh, Cupcakes.
I'll read that over and over again, just to crank out riff-joke material.
I've seen a story where Pinkie rips out Madame le Fleur's viscera and bakes them into cupcakes, in full 'gory' detail. I thought that one was pretty good.
But yeah, the worst part of 'Cupcakes' is how people feel the need to go 'wink wink, nudge nudge, see what I'm doing here?' whenever Pinkie mentions any kind of baked good to Rainbow, regardless of whether it's appropriate or not.
I think that the appropriate response is this:
Lol u mad?
The very presence of this story makes me uncomfortable. I feel sorry for anyone who was linked to the video and didn't know what they were in for, like I was. I stopped it when I realized what was going on, but it was still extremely uncomfortable.
Fuck yeah, Love.Sick.
Say Present, have you read Twilight, Revised yet? I've had more than one person liken that to one of the most horrifying stories on the site, and truth be told, I'd love to see you pick apart a story of mine beyond your two "I liked it" verdicts I've gotten so far.
Ooh, I got quoted! Kind of an honor, thank you!
1463904 I ike the kind of in that sentence
As an aside I laugh because just after I read this blog I noticed an author I follow had posted a fic called cupcakes and was riffing off the cupcakes idea. Here's to excellent coincidence.
1463357
It's become my favorite word of late. I do love what the internet does with wordplay AND OF COURSE "POOP" IS FUNNY THAT IS IN THERE TOO :B
1463361
I would still say that it's kind of a rite of passage, but... Maybe not one that's as important nowadays. Certainly it's nothing that should be read for positive reasons.
1463423
Ugh.
Uuuuuugh.
I'm pretty sure I read that, though I may just be thinking of Sweet Apple Massacre. Which was at least funny.
1463616
The references are really the worst part. I would rather read this story again than see one more reference in a fanfic.
As to that other thing, that can be funny if done well. I wrote something with a similar idea that didn't really go anywhere once.
1463823
TR might be worth a vs. post when I get to it. :B
1463904
You really did sum it up best.
1463965
No. Cheerilee's Garden is huge. The CMC, DT, SS, Snips and Snails all get violently and slowly tortured. It's long, like 20K or something. SAM is only 1-2K. It's honestly more like Saw than Cupcakes. All the deaths are Rube Goldberg machines from hell. Example: SS is tied to a machine. In front of her is a drill on a track, aimed for her eye. She has a button that will stop it... But every time she pushes the button, the tank that DT is trapped in fills with acid. So, SS gets her eye gouged out violently, and all the while DT is being slowly dissolved alive.
Oh, and while this is going on, not twenty feet away, a school play is engrossing enough that an entire room full of adults somehow misses the shrieks and cries of agony.
Naturally.
>The fandom did not need this story and I will never understand why it got so damned popular.
I'm afraid I disagree. For better or for worse (HINT: it's not for better), you can't have a 4chan-based community that doesn't put out some shock material. And that's exactly what this is/was, really: a story that's meant to lure you in, then toss around the blood, while keeping the characters just close enough that you don't actually forget that they're Pinkie and RD. And if it hadn't been Cupcakes, it would have been some other story--Cupcakes just happened to be the first vaguely effective example to emerge.
The proper context for comprehending this story is to visualize it being posted piecemeal in a series of chan posts, interspersed with uncensored horse dongs and six parallel conversations of varying maturity. In that environment, its existence is suddenly far more explicable. And when you remember that, at the time, that parallel conversation/horse dong/Cupcakes environ was where nearly 100% if the "brony" community was gathered, it's not hard to understand why it achieved such a level of cultural penetration.
I don't hate Cupcakes, any more than I hate a tornado: it's destructive and ruins everything it touches, sure, but it's a product of its environment. Again: if Cupcakes didn't exist, we'd still have a functionally identical replacement.
1464373
nop
FWIW, there are two Cupcakes references that aren't shit, PP. Silent Ponyville, once you accept the framing device, makes use of it well. The Party Hasn't Ended also references it during the scene where Nightmare is trying to break Pinkie.
1464681
TPHE is the only 'good' reference to it I've ever seen. Because it's used as something that a being of pure nightmare is throwing at Pinkie to try and break her will to fight.
And Pinkie's response is a perfect 'LOL NOPE!'.
The author on this story:
"To be honest I think I screwed it up. I meant it to be creepy but also funny."
That about sums this story up. It's supposed to be black humor. I like this story for being black humor. But people are idiots.
There's a story out there that's basically Cupcakes except good: It's called A Fun Day. It makes Cupcakes look downright cute with how horrifying it is, but it's also written with a good eye for how to do the whole "sick sense of humor" thing. You won't like it. It will scar you.
Grimdark, in my opinion, is the hard shelled, soft centered oyster of modern 'net culture attempting to encyst the irritant of guileless positivity in a nacre of shock imagery and cynicism. (And that's as far as I'll abuse that metaphor, because I consider fiction of this ilk to be anything but pearls.)
To be genuinely happy is to be vulnerable, which is unacceptable if you want to present a veneer of "cool" and "edginess", and so taking a character like Pinkie Pie, a creature of innocent, sweet natured fun, and adding the undercurrent of "she's actually a gore splattered psycho" is a way to subvert and distance yourself from that vulnerability by turning it into the veneer.
As for me, I'm content to let happy be happy and let that inform my being. Darkness touches us all sooner or later, and I'd much rather have the light next to my heart when the shadows close in.
1463965
I look forward to that day.
1464102
noiamnotfuckingreadingthis
1464373
The most insidious part. They aren't in-character per se, but close.
Anyway, you're right. Whether or not it was Cupcakes, something like this would have twisted itself up out of the bowels of the internet sooner or later. Maybe if it had been later, though, it wouldn't have garnered so much attention. We're really hurting for fandom-spanning epics nowadays just because the fandom is so big.
The moral of this is 4chan is fucking terrible. I don't care if they invented the fandom, that site is a cesspool.
Also they invented reminding people they invented the fandom to make themselves look better.1465266
But Pinkie's so cute with flat mane! :( Just look at her in MMC!
1465578
Sure she is, but judging by what happened at the salon scene in "Best Night Ever" it would take more mane gel than is currently available in Equestria to keep it like that for more than a few seconds if she's in a good mood.
My little infographic was more about emotional/mental states than hairstyle.
for those of you out there listening in on a text reader:
Happy Pinkie/Sweet Pinkie is greater than Angsty Pinkie/Psychotic Pinkie
In my headcanon, the only reason Pinkie prefers being called Pinkie as opposed to her full given name is that only older relatives and utility companies call her Pinkamina. The whole Jekyll/Hyde split personality thing is for the orangebirds.
Cupcakes resulted in Something Broke, which I like to listen to despite it being far from my favorite genre. And it's probably one of the first pony songs I heard.
Regarding Cheerilee's Garden, I won't lie - I enjoyed it for what it was. It delivered everything you expected to get from it, plus a little extra in the sequel Scarlet Harvest. I don't recommend you read it if Cupcakes bothered you so much though.
1465578
Wuss.
1465790
The sequel was even dumber!
1465781
no flatmane pinkie is best I totally agree about the naming thing, though. Actually, the lack of "Pinkamina" being a Thing when this was written helps keep that edge to the scenario. Being able to, in any way, attribute the character break to a second personality cheapens the concept and lessens the impact.
1465790
I remember that song. :O
1466158
110%
1466159
I don't disagree, but it did its job well and I enjoyed the rather ironic ending. It'd even be tragic if the author had done a better job on it. I guess I just don't read gorn with the same expectations that I'd have in other stories.
1466389
Well, I've always said of clopfics, "it's just porn" is not an excuse for bad storytelling, and the same applies to torture porn. It CAN be done well, it's just hard to do.
I roomed with Sprinkles at January Bronycon like, two years ago?
Fun fact: I am more likely to stab someone than he is.
1467372
I believe this.
The only time I read this story, I decided to read it backwards, so I could pretend that Pinkie was putting Rainbow Dash back together.
It was so nice of her to do that for Rainbow.
I'm very particular about my grimdark (or maybe just dark) fanfiction, and this is the poster child for how to do it wrong. Cupcakes takes characters and changes who they fundamentally are in order to tell the story without giving them a good enough reason to be different. I much prefer stories where the dark elements of the narrative come from elsewhere, like an OC, and the canon characters react to it, like an obstacle they have to overcome. If you want to go with Pinkie Pie harboring insecurities strong enough to change her hairstyle, fine, but we like her because she's so dedicated to making them happy, WHICH IS THE OPPOSITE OF TORTURING AND KILLING THEM.
I actually do like some parodies of this story, in particular the Mentally Advanced one, but I wish this fic was much less influential.
1467372
I also believe this. I feel lucky to have avoided your wrath at Bronycon.
1467718
In self defense, of course!
But yeah I've never read the thing. I don't honestly feel a need to, because I've almost certainly roleplayed far worse. That and everyone told me the writing is shitty.
1468364
Well, you know
hahahaha
Pacce can confirm that I came really close to knifing a guy that same January while we were out gathering booze because I thought said guy was following us and going to try and mug us.
Pacce was like nooooooooo just keep walking.
1468886
It is. :|
So this is what happens when I work too hard, sleep to long, and then party too much. I miss shit I could have given a shit about. Eh what the heck. I am job.
This is how the fandom reacted to Cupcakes.
This is how the fandom should have reacted.
And this is the only way I have been able to read fics like this since first reading Cupcakes "unbuffered".