Thoughts on Wellspring's All About Rarity and Ptolemy · 9:13am Dec 26th, 2013
Yeah, it's a bit stupid for me to write a blog post about shit that's not really going on with me when I've been silent forever, but here we go. Wellspring is someone I feel like is pretty under appreciated, and while I can't say I've ever actually communicated with the guy, I did really want to talk about two of his stories, because of how strongly I feel about them right now.
Spoilers for both stories in this blog post!
So yeah, this has been on my mind for a long time now and I feel like I should actually put down my thoughts into word form. Hopefully this is fine. This is a mature story with sex in it, but it would be a bit ridiculous to call this a clopfic. Let's put this out first: All About Rarity is easily my favorite story on this site. That said, it is clearly not a story without flaws, and if that is supposed to be a real metric with which to judge something I'm sure there are stories I've seen that have less flaws but I like less. AAR is definitely the most brutal story I've seen on here. Brutal not in the sense of a story that is written to be sad, nor brutal in the sense of being dark and violent. It's a story shown through the lens of a character who is incredibly manipulative and shows very few qualms about taking down everything in her way to get what she wants. There's nothing cute or heartwarming here. Just friendships and relationships shattered by the actions of a monster. It's difficult to explain this to someone, but while this is a dark story, it's not dark in a conventional sense. It's a story that deals with complicated issues of love and lust and adultery, and doesn't rely on a setting or some kind of shadowy organization to be dark.
The portrayal of Rarity works fantastically for a villain. She's not really powerful in any physical or magical sense, and for the most part she does not command that much respect from the high society that she wants. After Shining Armor marries Cadence, she is crushed by the fact that she is not married to the prince, and that single thought motivates her to become an absolute monster. Rarity achieves everything she sets out to achieve through manipulation and deceit, and that's exactly what I would expect from a Rarity villain. I've heard it said that the way you write a character who is much smarter than yourself is to make them figure out things much faster than you can, and that applies quite a bit to Rarity in this story. She always finds the right words to say, making it impossible for the other characters to really confront her. Even when faced with the evidence of her cheating with Shining, and in the latest chapter, her attempted murder of Cadence, she manages to avoid revealing what she's been doing by worming her way through conversation. I know people are hesitant about a story that portrays a character they like to be horrible, but it's really, really worth it. That's really the thing that sells the story for me. While Rarity is the villain and terrible all around, I don't see her as a caricature in the way most villains are. The story also doesn't try to have a villain that gets justified because they were doing terrible things for a noble goal; everything is presented at face value, and she doesn't do what she does for "good" or "bad," she does it to achieve her own selfish goals.
Having the story be told through the lens of the antagonist creates a ton of suspense that I haven't really seen rivaled in any other story. In particular, the reader knows everything that Rarity is doing but none of the other characters do. You never know when everything is going to blow up in her face. Every time Rarity has a conversation with someone, you're silently wishing for her to be found out. Having the reader know what's really happening behind the scenes and having the story itself be about what the characters don't know rather than what you don't know is a really interesting take on storytelling that I really like here. And we are made to understand that she knows what she is doing is terrible. How she thinks she does love Applejack but just can't be content to not have Shining. She certainly knows what's right and wrong, but can't fight against her desire to have a prince.
Let's talk about the other characters. This is where we start to find problems with the story. The beginning of the story almost purports itself to be a Rarity x Applejack shipping story. I think Applejack has to be the weakest character in this story by far, and I think it does hurt it. She fully lets herself get dragged along by Rarity's every whim, and there's no real sense of strength in her character. I understand that something needs to anchor the conflict between Rarity and the other Mane 6, but the actual implementation seems quite weak. Shining Armor himself, I don't find as bad. He does actually resist Rarity at some points, though it's a little ridiculous at points where he comes back to her even though it's clear how bad of an idea it is. You really do get the idea that at first he's just trying to help her out, and it spirals into something he has no control over. At its core, it's a story about Shining Armor trying to fight his addiction to Rarity, and he is probably the most unpredictable character in it. Now Cadence... this is how you make a character to feel sorry for. Throughout the story she thinks of Rarity as a friend, despite Rarity hating her. Rarity tramples on her really hard and she is unwittingly dragged along the whole time. The Cadence scene where she reveals she knows of her husband committing adultery and is unwilling to do anything about it because she wants to keep the illusion going on of her marriage being okay is truly heartbreaking, as well as the scene of Rarity and Shining talking to her in the hospital in the next chapter. The treatment of Cadence and Fluttershy really set the tone for the story: there is no place for innocence here. Rainbow Dash is fine as a character that knows what's going on but is powerless against Rarity's manipulation, and Twilight is a bit weak here, not seeming to care that much about the issues going on with her friends and family.
There are definitely parts where the story does start to come apart. I think it goes a little far in how much Rarity's friends are willing to believe. Applejack in particular is really egregious about it, since she is never even suspicious of Rarity cheating on her and can't be convinced at all that she really is. Both Twilight and Shining come close to finding out Rarity was behind Cadence's injury, but she somehow convinces both of them that she couldn't have done it. I really hate the excuse of "in canon, this totally would have happened this way," being used to criticize things like this, but the story really wears out Rarity's trust a few chapters before other characters actually stop trusting her. Having Rarity come out to Applejack about cheating on her completely apathetically and telling her that there was no way she had a chance in the first place also really clashed with her feeling remorse over it later. I get that the story makes a point to show Rarity being strong in all her confrontations, but we know she is actually quite conflicted about trying to be in 2 relationships at once and having her not give a shit about Applejack finding out is just not convincing. I also don't really want to complain about sex here when cheating is so much about sex, but the idea of this being a mature story with sex in it carries so much of a stigma that doesn't apply to this story that it really does seem to cheapen it.
Ultimately, this is a story that sounds quite unbelievable when summarized, but manages to be so good at telling it that you end up really believing Rarity could have done everything she does. I love it not because it's a story that tries to tackle "mature" themes, but because it uses some very powerful characters that feel very human, despite them being ponies.
Ptolemy is an older story but I only recently read through it. I would blame the fact that Wellspring has said he's going to be revamping it and splitting it into chapters, making me want to just wait for it to be changed, but honestly, that word count in a single chapter is a bit ridiculous. I feel like Ptolemy is also just a much weaker story, sharing themes but being much less effective at conveying them. I don't know what I can really say about this story that isn't going to just be criticizing it in comparison to AAR. I'm sure Wellspring is actually quite conscious about the problems here, but I did just want to talk a bit about them.
First of all, All About Rarity is effective because Rarity is not particularly powerful. Twilight in Ptolemy is so powerful that it really feels like nothing in the story matters. She can do anything she really wants and you just know things will work out how she wants them to because she's so powerful. The scope is also just way too big. Having Twilight recreating all of Equestria is ridiculous.
I really like to think of the stories in comparison to Makoto Shinkai's films. He started out with Voices of a Distant Star and The Place Promised in Our Early Days, having powerful themes of people being separated through the lens of interstellar combat and a huge device that threatens to destroy the entire planet. His best film, 5 Centimeters Per Second, scales all that down and has it still be about distance and relationships, but take place in our current world, having all the relationships be presented at face value. Both Ptolemy and AAR share themes of the main character and villain being so possessed by the drive to do something that they destroy all the relationships in their life to achieve their goal, but Ptolemy takes it too far, and scaling it back in AAR really helps.
Also, let me just say that it's gross that DARK MAGIC is the motivator in Ptolemy. Ptolemy's Twilight is comically evil, and that is not a good place to be. For all my praise about Rarity in AAR being a believable human character, Twilight doesn't do it at all. She is straight up a fantasy fiction villain. Having Pinkie Pie be Surprise in the story also makes sense... at the very end. The payoff is really not worth the confusion throughout the story. Ultimately a lot of the story doesn't really make much sense, and while it's well written, I can't really say it's all that interesting to me.
Yeah, that was a shitload of words about some stuff I didn't do and no one is probably going to read because of me. I did have all this on my mind and wanted to put it into words, though, so there's that. See you all later.
