Site Post » [Interview] Horse Voice's "Biblical Monsters" · 12:13am Jan 18th, 2014
Today’s story is a controversial, yet powerful look at a meeting of cultures gone horribly wrong.
Biblical Monsters
[Tragedy] [Dark] [Human] • 10,947 words
At 3:15 AM, Adams woke me with a loud knock on my front door.
“Put your boots on,” he said when I answered. “There’s a biblical monster in my house.”
FROM THE CURATORS: As a glance through the story’s overflowing comments section will show you, this is a piece which is not afraid to be thought-provoking. Its final chapters take a swerve from quiet tension into some of the most unflinching Dark fiction in the fandom. What makes Biblical Monsters remarkable is how effectively it supports that twist. ”Horse Voice did a great job setting up his character and motivations to make the ending a tragically logical inevitability,” Chris said. Benman added: “The clues were there all along. The core themes and conflicts are constant throughout.”
We all agreed that the story, in Chris’ words, “practically screams ‘literary.’” The quality of the writing is exemplary. Benman went even further: “I decided a while ago to limit my FIMFic favorites list to ten stories. This is currently one of them.”
Read on for our interview, in which Horse Voice discusses thematic twists, anonymous villains, and lessons learned while handling controversy.
Give us the standard biography.
I was born on the side of a highway with a steering wheel in one hand and a sawed-off shotgun in the other. While being raised by a family of beavers, I taught myself to read with a bag of scrounged Reader’s Digests. I’ve worked as a night clerk, editor, paint salesman, lighthouse keeper, and full-time collector of publishers’ rejection letters. I majored in Creative Writing because I wasn’t good at anything else. When I graduated, my muse promptly ran away, and when she came back a year later, she smelled like a horse. The rest is history.
How did you come up with your handle/penname?
It comes from the Grimm’s Fairy Tale, The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids. In the translation I read, the mother goat tells her kids that the Big Bad Wolf disguises himself in a goatskin, but may be identified by his black paws and “horrible hoarse voice”.
Who’s your favorite pony?
Twilight. She’s the one most similar to me—overtly in some ways, subtly in others.
What’s your favorite episode?
All of the two-parters are tied for first place. Through them, we get a glimpse how far these characters and this world can be taken when liberated from the constraints of a 22-minute episode. This is also why I’m grateful for the IDW comics.
What do you get from the show?
It’s clean fun and good for some laughs. More important, it’s excellent raw material for fan work. I wouldn’t even have started watching if it wasn’t for the fandom’s creativity. So yeah, I’m one of those people.
What do you want from life?
Some peace and quiet. I don’t seem to be doing a good job of finding it, though. Maybe I should stop throwing stones at ideological hornets’ nests.
Why do you write?
Two reasons. First, these ideas won’t leave me alone until they’re written down. Second, these are the sorts of stories I would like to read, but no one else seems to be writing. If someone out there is writing stories along the same lines as mine, I would genuinely like to know.
What advice do you have for the authors out there?
If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding. Learn all the mechanics of the language. You’ll save yourself and your readers a lot of trouble. While it’s good to approach writing (or any art) from the heart, it’s also important to use your head.
Take the tagging system more seriously than I did. I didn’t initially put much thought into what tags Monsters should have, and on several occasions was (perhaps rightfully) criticised for mislabeling it.
If the time comes that you start getting flamed, don’t fight fire with fire. I did, and soon wished I hadn’t. Calmly addressing legitimate criticisms, and ignoring illegitimate ones, is better for everyone in the long run.
Finally, remember to use spoiler warnings when appropriate. For example: EVERYTHING PAST THIS POINT IS A SPOILER.
To what extent, if any, are Adams and the narrator meant to represent humanity as a whole?
On the surface, they are very different people. But if you dig deep enough, you find the one thing shared by all people everywhere.
This is a story about fear.
Do you think either of the human characters could have prevented the outcome of this story, or are they too hemmed in by cultural strictures?
Is it a cultural stricture to want to defend yourself, and perhaps your entire species from an apparent threat?
Evil actions may be influenced by culture, but culture is not the root cause. The reality is far worse. To make most people do bad things, you must only convince them that they, or things they hold dear, are in danger. Bigotry, war, and genocide are only a few of the evils fueled by fear. Don’t think for a moment that you are immune, just because of your particular culture or belief system. Control your fear, or it will surely control you.
To answer your question, yes, they could have—if they were not so fearful.
There is a wealth of stories that depict humans fighting back against an invading force as heroes. In Biblical Monsters, the cultural misunderstandings between Twilight and the humans she’s with present a real possibility that an Equestrian force coming to Earth would indeed be detrimental to the human race. Would you say Adams and his compatriot are heroes?
They certainly think they are, don’t they?
And we’re all heroes from our own point of view. Many people are wrong about this, but not all of them come to realize it. That realization is one of the worst feelings in the world. This, by the way, was one reason I put that stinger at the very end. I didn’t want the two characters to get away with what they had done. At the very least, they will soon learn that they are not heroes at all.
Why did you decide to leave the narrator unnamed in the text? Did you have a name in mind for him?
I never had any name in mind. There are plenty of stories out there with nameless everyman protagonists, but few make him the villain, and even less often, a villain who thinks he’s doing the right thing.
One thing I should not have done was specify that the Narrator was male. Leaving him sexless would have broadened his scope as an everyman, and more effectively driven home the theme. The worst part is, I only specified his sex because I wanted to take a playful jab at cloppers. (Said jab is near the end of the first scene in chapter three.)
The fear that ultimately drives the characters in this story stems from colonization, not religion. Why did you decide to wrap so much of the story in Biblical and religious references?
I wanted to invoke the death of James Cook. When he arrived in Hawai’i, the natives mistook him for one of their religious figures. To make a long story short, things went south for him after a while, and as he tried to leave the islands, he was ambushed, knocked to the ground, and stabbed to death. The Hawaiians then gave him a funeral in the manner of their own culture. Sound familiar?
But this was only part of the reason. With my first two stories, I discovered a talent for misleading readers and delivering themes by way of plot twists. In those cases, people liked to be fooled and surprised. This time, it looked like I was setting up a condemnation of religion. Then the fourth chapter came out, and the two characters with opposing ideologies put aside their differences to do a bad thing. After a whole story spent contradicting each other, they both arrived at the same wrong conclusion, for more or less the same reasons. Other stories have plot twists; this one has a theme twist.
I knew the fallout would be bad, but not as bad as it was. Some people who had been enthusiastic readers for the first three chapters started writing essay-length comments explaining why I was a horrible person. The initially huge number of favorites, followers, and green thumbs dropped rapidly in short order. People weren’t even trying to prove me wrong with logic or reason; they were spewing bile. For a short period of time, in a single comment section, Fimfiction resembled YouTube.
The pony thread on spacebattles.com, which until that point had given my story good reviews, might as well have been renamed the “We Hate Horse Voice” thread. In the end, they had to make a separate thread just to talk about how wrong I was, and how a first-contact scenario should happen.
Then there were those who wanted to see not only the two humans destroyed for what they had done, but also all of humanity. I expected the other two reactions, but this one surprised and distressed me. I can understand wanting to see the guilty punished, but what sort of person wants to see an entire species wiped out for the crimes of two nobodies?
Just as my two characters turned on Twilight when she said things they didn’t like, so too did these readers turn on me.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
The is the story I kind of wish I had never written.
The ending hurt some people much worse than I would have guessed. I recall some saying they felt the effects for days: insomnia, nightmares, nausea, and so on. By writing a story about ordinary people becoming villains, I became something of a villain myself, at least in their eyes. A few questions ago, I said it’s one of the worst feelings in the world. This is one of the reasons I took such a long hiatus after the dust settled.
(By the way, if you think the last chapter is painful to read, imagine how much so it was to write. I took the darkness in my heart and poured it onto the page. It’s effective therapy, but the result is never pretty.)
This leads into a request I have for everyone reading this. In the days that followed the story’s publication, Minalkra wrote and published an optional fifth part. He wrote it in the space of a few hours and published it practically unedited. Regardless, I liked it a lot and still do, because it introduced something to my story I could not provide: forgiveness. More important, it eased the pain of the aforementioned readers who were still recovering from the fourth chapter. At the time, it was exactly what we all needed. But several times in recent months, it has been unfavorably compared to the original. I would ask that people not do this anymore. Minalkra is not a bad writer, and I don’t want his reputation to be damaged because of first impressions.
One more thing. Often, when this story is mentioned somewhere, it causes heated discussion. Please direct all complaints to me, and be civil to each other. It’s my cross to bear.
(You can check out Biblical Monsters here. You can follow the Royal Canterlot Library's interviews at our site, or join the fimfiction group to get notified of new selections and suggest your own favorites.)
I must confess that I am one of the people that ended up downvoting Biblical Monsters due to the last chapter.
Though I do not think I am one of the people that Horse Voices say spewed bile at him. I like to believe that I was somewhat reasonable throughout the entire thing
Regardless, I really enjoyed the first four chapters but had to stop halfway into chapter four. I can see how good it is, how much effort is put into writing it and just how clever the story is, but I cannot claim that to be enough for me to like a story.
I view the like/dislike button as one that represents one opinion of a story as a whole. I loved the vast majority of the story, but not the biggest part of it. I couldn't say I liked the story because it took a turn I was not comfortable with.
Anyway, a truly amazing story that I am surprised I did not see in the interviews earlier.
It was a good story that I would've been happier not to have read.
I should really go through all 922 comments next time I feel like hating on Hie (horse voice's stories excluded, of course). Maybe people like to think that in the inevitable Conversion Burea apocalypse there will be only good people, villains, and misled people that strangely resemble their middle-aged relations, and not good people that do bad things for good reasons.
This story didn't deserve this honor.
I wish you had never written it, too. But that said, you seem to understand why exactly it so badly marred people's perceptions of you and your stories. My problem with it was never the subtext, however, because of course you are right. People are reactionary, and ignorant, and bigoted. It's just how much more could have been done with it. I was gearing up for an engaging, realistic deconstruction of HiE, and then it turned out to be Cupcakes with class.
I think this story may have been a turning point in how I viewed the site, too. Before it was just a fun collective of horse stories with slice of life and self insert adventures and mediocre furry porn. After I realized just how dark and unpleasant it could be. It could present a realistic scenario where an ordinary person could drive a meathook through Twilight Sparkle's skull and get away with it. I can safely say I am a darker, more unpleasant and more pessimistic person simply by virtue of this story. It did the opposite of what stories are supposed to do, which is help you grow as a person. Which is why it is number three on my bottom ten stories on the site. Not because the story is bad, but because the message and its presentation are so ugly that they take a good story and turn it into a force of emotional devastation that does not ever turn back into emotional growth. I mean, 120 Days Of Sodom makes some good points about human society. It is also appalling in the extreme and presented with sadistic relish, which is why it is so reviled. I am happy to have mostly pushed this story from my mind, and I will be happy to continue to.
Funny part is, this story wasn't even close to what it is today in its first draft; in the original ending, the storm breaks and Twilight goes home. During copy editing, I told Horse Voice the story was really lacking and the ending sucked. He came back in a couple weeks with this.
You're welcome.
1729479
Exactly that. It was well written, well executed, sucked me right in, and I absolutely hated the ending. It literally made me feel ill, and the written word generally doesn't do that to me. So have a combination "well done" and "screw you", Horse Voice.
I got drawn into the story, loved every bit of build up, and honestly didn't hate the end. It showed off the darker side of humans, and it showed just how badly things could go when you act without full information. Where I in a similar situation, and if I had the similar fears as Adams, I can totally see myself acting in such a way. This is something I reconciled with several years ago.
While this story made me feel like utter shit after I finished it, it was not so far gone that I could possibly dislike it. The fact that it could draw out such feelings shows a truly great story. After all, art is not tied to any specific emotion, and I enjoy the haunting works just as much (quite possibly more, in fact), than I do the lighter ones.
Or maybe I'm a terrible person. Tough to say.
Eye twitch.
-Clay the Draconequus
1729280
You, personally, were reasonable. And of course, art is such a subjective thing, I can't begrudge any opinion that's expressed with civility. I'm sorry the twist ruined your day, but it was something I felt I had to do.
The fact that a piece of My Little Pony fanfiction generated such intense emotion is a sign of success.
Is there a way to block the site blog posts? Cause I didn't want to see this and want it off my feed thingy
It was a terrible story, that said, it doesn't mean it wasn't a good story. It is a very good story with tragic ending. Twilight in her innocence was feeding the fears of the protagonists. Unfortunately, & it has been said many time: It is man's nature to fear what it doesn't understand or comprehend.
I like the last touch when Princess Celestia arrives. The two "heroes" will not get away with it.
1729620
It's been ten months.
There comes a point where one must assume responsibility for one's own emotions. How much longer are you going to blame me for how you feel? It seems you're arguing against a theme you can't disprove. When you argue against reality, you can never win, and that's why it still bothers you.
Reality can't be argued against, but it can be accepted. If you don't accept things you can't change, you'll always be miserable.
Okay, now I am facinated by the story, but utterly terrified to read it. :
what do? 
1730173 And there you go again with more darkness and pessimism. You know, it's oddly hypocritical that you go on at length about how the reaction impacted you emotionally as a writer for all time and how you wish you could erase it and yet you expect me to get over my emotional reaction to the story. It can change you to write this story and get feedback to it but it can't change the people giving feedback.
Not to mention you may wish to actually read my Arceus-damned comment before criticizing it. I said a) I had accepted the theme, and the fact that I had it shoved in my face was what made me darker, b) had washed my hands of it, unhappy as it made me and c) I did not blame you for it, but that did not stop me from hating it. I have moved on from just how much I disliked it, and tried to develop away from the much more negative view of bronies it and the subsequent fallout of it, along with the Twilicorn controversy, gave me of this fanbase, but the fact of the matter is it changed my opinion of this website and subsequently my behaviour on it in a very permanent way. This is not to slight you or tell you you're pure evil. It's to tell you the consequences of what you wrote. Isn't that what the story was about? Being ignorant of consequences?
So here's something for you to accept. There are many versions of reality. Mine is one. Yours is one. You see things in a much darker light than I do, and you have made me darker and nastier to others as a result. You took this clever, thoughtful story you had built and filled it up with darkness to make a point everyone already had gotten. Life sucks. Ordinary people can turn into monsters Yeah, so? Stephanie Meyer can figure that much out. The point of FiM is that people aren't always evil. It's to show the better part of living, while still showing life as it is. And here you are turning my statement about how I am less pleasant for reading the story into a statement about how I am a troubled person who can't let go of a story for introducing me to a very nasty part of the fandom. I am saying it reduced my love of this fandom as a whole, by changing my tone to how I approached it. I am not saying it made me into a monster or a villain or anything like that. It was a singular experience, both story and reaction, that opened my eyes to just how unempathetic and unpleasant the fanbase of such an optimistic and happy show could be, and I adapted to deal with this as a result.
I do not blame you, the author, for this, but rather your story. I am highlighting a mistake you already acknowledged and pointing out my agreeance with it. By saying it is my fault for reacting to your story this way you are repeating your mistake of not understanding your audience, and by accusing me of not letting go you're repeating your mistake of underestimating the power words can have over people.
Interesting. I didn't know that 'Biblical Monsters' generated such heated responses.
Biblical Monsters is amazing. For days it haunted me, I would spend the wee hours wondering how a man could be so very, very wrong without actually being very wrong at all...
Nothing about it torments me so much as the knowledge that it took me months to spot the pun in "Horse Voice".
This is only proof of how seriously people can take a work of fiction...It's just a very good story that does a very good job of tugging on the emotional strings. I'd say if people took it so hard with the ending, the fault lies with their own inability to see a fictional character for what she is.
I found it emotionally jarring in how the story ended, but I appreciated the work and effort the author put into the story. It's magnificent in its own right as a cautionary tale in regards to any instance of First Contact. Take for example in the Star Trek universe, instead of accepting the Vulcans as friends, Humans acted as they did in this story. What would people have said then? Hmm?
A tip of the cap to a brilliant short story. It was an insta-fav for me!
1730253
I don't understand. How did my story do this, when Cupcakes, Pattycakes, Cheerilee's Garden, and Sweet Apple Massacre didn't?
And who's unempathic? It couldn't be me, since you've seen my remorse at unintentionally hurting people, when I only wanted to warn them that their own fear could turn them into monsters. Help me out here.
1730161
Go to my userpage, find the top-right module, and hit the red "block" button.
I don't understand how people come to take stories like this one so personally. Tugging on your heartstrings, sure, but making you chew out the writer for daring to write it? Why?
Stories are DESIGNED to provoke certain emotions, so not liking it is perfectly normal, but... You don't attack the guy making pizza just because you like sushi better.
I loved this story but truth be told if some how they ever came to our world this would most likely happen as we are a fearful race and it made me sick and ashamed for being human.
1730348 I think all the comments you get that are well hateful stem from the fact that it was so real unlike cupcakes and patty cakes you have what could be first contact with a alien race. how our fear rules us you show that even with all of our tech we have made we are not much removed from our primitive past as we like to think. that's why I liked it even if it made me sick to be human because we all know that we would think the same way they would and don't none of you say you would not because till we each are placed in that sort of context we don't know the strength of our fear or our will to over come it.
1730637
True, but bear in mind that while most creatures feel fear, only humans ever think about it as a concept. One of the great challenges in my life has been to learn not to let unexpected fear reactions control my behavior. I guess one of the reasons I wrote this was to put the problem into a tangible form, so I could come to better understand it and deal with it. I like to think I've made progress in the ensuing ten months.
Thanks for reading.
1730121
If that's the turn the story has to take... then that's the turn the story has to take.
I should really write an in depth review of Biblical Monsters from my pretty dark perspective of the world, I think it would be fun. If I remember correctly I was one of the few people at the time of its release who didn't hammer you over Twilights death, I think I should give my reasons why also, and also why I view all these "ET RUAND MAH LIFE FUREVAH!" comments you got screaming at you as a bunch of pretentious fantasy bubble encapsulated nancy boys.
Just remember that in the end the fallout would have been worse if you killed Fluttershy, because nobody seems to have the balls to do that in an effective manner, goodness knows the combined shrieks might have made the world's combined human population hemorrhage all at once.
It was a dumb story with a retarded ending that wasn't even a tenth as deep as its author likes to think it is. Stupidity oozes from every molecule of its so-called "characters" (and I use that term lightly). It's not so much a tragedy as it is a complete farce, and I will stick to that opinion till the end of my days, no matter how much down votes I get for that. That the author blocks people for not thinking his story is "deep and dramatic" did not help my help my impressions in the slightest, either.
1730348 The thing about those stories is that none of them were serious. They were all stupid trollfics made for entertainment reasons only. They were easily forgotten like a penny dreadful or a bad horror movie. Yours was one we were supposed to take seriously, and one that was made expressly with the intent of unsettling those people who saw it, not the intent of getting attention. Half the stories on that list mentioned were made for a cheap laugh. The other thing is that I expected those stories. They did not come out of the left field midway through what was looking like it was going to be a thoughtful, meditative deconstruction of religion and atheism. Also that we know they will never come to justice beyond their own guilt, something we know may not be true in all of those other stories. The story deliberately leaves you as void of closure and uncomfortable as possible.
And not in the good way, because again, these are all things about reality I and most of the people who stuck around for the ending already know. MLP is a chance to see it isn't always like this. Just because you build a sandcastle doesn't mean you expect to rule a sand kingdom, and you do not need somebody to kick it down to make a point about how awful the non-sand world is.
As to who's unempathetic, that would be the bile-spewers who vilified you as being the source of all evil in the world as opposed to a person who made a mistake in the way they wrote an ending. The people who turned your comment section into Youtube. It was this in combination that made me realize that there was a much darker part of this website that I hadn't come across before, and that I couldn't always be restrained and kind (I still try to be empathetic and compassionate), since it can pop up in basically any story at any time.
(Also, please forgive the double post)
1730814
Yikes. You really take no prisoners.
I would, as always, be interested at see your thoughts. But looking at the numbers, it seems those who disagreed with the story were a vocal minority. So, uh, don't get yourself into any flame wars on my account, eh?
1730835
No problem, It will be more an in-depth discussion of the aforementioned literature rather than me spending my time bashing people with different viewpoints, indeed I think the detractors may have very legitimate criticisms. Having said that, the fandom has a bad tendency to take interpretations and storylines such as this, as a personal attack on their headcanon and get overly vicious about it, which as we saw occurred with overly dramatic "Mah lif, tis ruinedz" in BM. its really something that needs addressed because, frankly, I think it gives us as a community a bad name.
Keeper of Jericho:
Just so everyone is clear on this: The actual reason I blocked this guy and two others is that they were posting long, wordy comments--practically mini-essays--going on about how I was a horrible person, rather than trying to contribute meaningful discussion.
I believe at least one of them was also downvoting every single comment that approved of the ending, because after they were blocked, the downvoting stopped.
1730824
Ah, now I begin to understand. Perhaps it was meant to happen, and you were spared an even worse surprise later on. Forewarned is forearmed, after all.
1730844 I imagine something would have done this at some point. It does not make it any less unpleasant or make the story itself free of blame, that said.
In any case, I think that's enough remembering this story. Would you mind if I just poofed from this forum on it now?
1730851
Of course not. Sorry I rained on your parade.
Horse Voice
Funny how you equal "your story was bad because of this and this reason" with calling you a horrible person. In any case, while I didn't call you a horrible person back then, I certainly do now, because I have no respect for authors who delete and block people who took their time and effort to write out a detailed comment to try and explain why they didn't like your story. When you have that little respect for your readers, you shouldn't be surprised that you get no respect in return.
In any case, we can bitch about this until the cows come home, fact of the matter is that you deleted the evidence. I know I didn't call you a horrible person while you will play victim forever saying I did, neither of which can be proven anymore. Doesn't matter anyway. I'm done and hopefully so are you. May we never run into each other again, that would be best for everyone.
This was an amazing story. I remember loving the ending for just how dark it went without being silly or stupid.
I doff my hat to you, Mr Voice. Your writing talent and jimmy-rustling abilities know few equals.
As I read this, I immediately disagreed. Is it your fault that some people are unable to bear even the thought of a fictional character having a tragic end in a fictional story? You wanted to share a few thoughts with us and, while not accepting them is fine, not even being able to listen to them is overreacting at best.
But then I remembered that when I was reading Werther in high school, my teacher told me that a lot of people committed suicide in the book's wake, and I thought that no one story was worth being published with consequences like this. Sure enough, no one killed themselves because of Biblical Monsters (as far as I know), but the underlying principle is kind of the same, isn't it? So yeah, I may or may not just contradicted myself. The high school version of myself, at least.
I can think of about 20 just off the top of my head.
Personally, I laughed after reading it. It came off as incredulously shoehorned. Maybe I'm jaded. Meh.
This man has an interesting and creative mind. His abstract way of thinking stretches beyond the way certain readers read and visualize a world. While readers turn to Logic, the writer is constantly redirecting to a goal. I love that!
I'd like to chat with this man and know a little more about his past and educational background...
Man that was a deep and real quote about evil. Phew. What a read. This should be included in the paperback reprint of Biblical Monsters lol.
Just dropping in to say that this story is the reason I actively avoid reading anything Horse Voice writes. It was a good story in and of itself, but I despised the surprise ending with a passion. I was not expecting it to turn into a tragedy involving my favorite character's horrifyingly unfair death, and I certainly didn't appreciate being fooled into reading the type of story I would have avoided had I had any sort of a fair warning.
Chalk me up as a friggen lover of your work here.
Read the whole story in one go, and thought the ending make perfect sense. Now that I think about it, it shares a few similarities with It's About Time - especially about creating your own future.
I and many others are super glad you wrote this, and I don't believe you should regret any of it.
Thanks man.
No long and philosophical criticism. Just... Worst Ending Ever. Not because of the content but because of the execution: Horsey Vocce's silly desire not to "spoil" things for his readers with trivia like correct tags; and a lack of respecting reader genre preferences. It's like a joke that ends with the punchline being an actual punch. Was it funny? Maaaaayyyybe. But my black eye isn't.
tl;dr Unintentional trollfic ftl.
People seem very torn with this story, I'm not sure if I should read it.
1731806
You SHOULD. Especially since you have the benefit it's initial readers didn't have: fair warning. I haven't read all the comments here, so I don't know if the ending has been spoiled for you or not. If it hasn't, go into it knowing that the ending is VERY SUDDEN, that it certainly deserves the [Tragedy] tag, and that the story actually ends on a cliffhanger.
When I initially read the ending, I actually checked the date to see how close it was to April 1st. I honestly thought it was a joke chapter, and that the 'real' chapter was still being written. But this was because I was reading the story as it was being posted chapter by chapter, and the first three chapters told a story that seemed like it was going to continue for a good bit longer, not end suddenly in the next chapter that got posted; and also because the story was incorrectly tagged and didn't have the [Tragedy] tag. You know there's only four chapters, and you know it's a tragedy. You'll likely have a better experience reading this than I did.
I'll repeat the criticisms I've stated several times previously. The story's ending just didn't seem like a natural conclusion to the course of events. The unnamed protagonist does a 180 in several thousand words, going from a relatively calm, rational individual to paranoid murderer with little explanation or reason. The intended theme of "people make tragic mistakes" seems more like "humans suck and are raised in such a violent and paranoid culture that they'll kill at the drop of a hat."
It really seems like the story was going in one direction and then the author assumed direct control and forcibly veered the story off the [Grimdark] cliff. The comment by 1729774 suggests this isn't an unfair assessment.
So this is why that alt. ending has gotten so much notice lately ...
1730857 please don't let this get you down. It was a thought-provoking piece.