Our Mutual Friend.

Oh my God. Fluttershy and Discord.

Doesn't anyone see they're Jenny Wren and Mr. Riah?

Fluttershy is crippled by being earth-bound, Discord is a hated alien.

And she reforms him. She shames him into good behavior.

"...NOT. YOUR. FRIEND..."

"...you're the big, bad wolf!"

Comments

[Bad Horse]

No one sees that, because they never made a movie of it.

[Blue_Paladin42]

I am afraid I do not get the reference.

[TheJediMasterEd]

1601097

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend. His last complete novel.

I'm sure it's free for download somewhere, Have a look: it's quite good.

[TheJediMasterEd]

1601013

The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, already mentioned as a tavern of a dropsical appearance, had long settled down into a state of hale infirmity. In its whole constitution it had not a straight floor, and hardly a straight line; but it had outlasted, and clearly would yet outlast, many a better-trimmed building, many a sprucer public- house. Externally, it was a narrow lopsided wooden jumble of corpulent windows heaped one upon another as you might heap as many toppling oranges, with a crazy wooden verandah impending over the water; indeed the whole house, inclusive of the complaining flag-staff on the roof, impended over the water, but seemed to have got into the condition of a faint-hearted diver who has paused so long on the brink that he will never go in at all.

This description applies to the river-frontage of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters. The back of the establishment, though the chief entrance was there, so contracted that it merely represented in its connexion with the front, the handle of a flat iron set upright on its broadest end. This handle stood at the bottom of a wilderness of court and alley: which wilderness pressed so hard and close upon the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters as to leave the hostelry not an inch of ground beyond its door. For this reason, in combination with the fact that the house was all but afloat at high water, when the Porters had a family wash the linen subjected to that operation might usually be seen drying on lines stretched across the reception-rooms and bed-chambers.

The wood forming the chimney-pieces, beams, partitions, floors and doors, of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, seemed in its old age fraught with confused memories of its youth. In many places it had become gnarled and riven, according to the manner of old trees; knots started out of it; and here and there it seemed to twist itself into some likeness of boughs. In this state of second childhood, it had an air of being in its own way garrulous about its early life. Not without reason was it often asserted by the regular frequenters of the Porters, that when the light shone full upon the grain of certain panels, and particularly upon an old corner cupboard of walnut-wood in the bar, you might trace little forests there, and tiny trees like the parent tree, in full umbrageous leaf.

I want to go there and drink burnt sherry with louche companions.

(Steampunks try to write like this but never succeed. The reason is they take themselves too seriously. They don't seem to realize that Dickens was joking the whole time. But joking in earnest.)

[Blagdaross]

1601013 I can't decide if that's really sad or not sad at all.

[TheJediMasterEd]

And the thing is, I knew Jenny Wren.

Little-fine-boned lady from Arkansas. Wonderful, cheerful, chirpy creature. Spoke fluent Scots Gaelic. Played the harp, the wire-strung, Gaelic harp that you need raptor's claws to play well. Professional dressmaker for the collectable porcelain dolls called "jennies."

And blind as a bat. Which a mutual friend always drew her as.

I wonder whether I was her Mr. Riah. And whether or not I became the big, bad wolf.

[TheJediMasterEd]

1601097

Psst, BluePaladin--the whole thing online, for free:

Our Mutual Friend

"Take and read, take and read"

[Sylocat]

1601013

They made a play of it, though.