'Fifty Shades of Brad': The Aftermath · 3:00am Aug 6th, 2014
We were all thinking this after that movie.
I owe a debt of gratitude to both PresentPerfect and Bad Horse, who both put up blog posts recommending "Fifty Shades of Brad." I posted the story at an unwise time, so it originally slid off the front page with nary a murmur of the outrage, indignation, and disgust I was expecting it to garner on the basis of the title alone. I was expecting a response somewhat like the one I got for "Human Shining Armor Gets Twilight Sparkle Pregnant," which is a similar sort of trollfic (though more elaborate) based on misdirection, but I was disappointed. These two saved the story from complete obscurity, and garnered me a crop of new followers in the process.
I admit the reactions to "Fifty Shades of Brad" completely sideswiped me. Here are some typical responses:
This was darkly hilarious.
Oh man, that went from hilarious to really damn dark.
Well, that's fairly depressing.
That was... really creepy feeling.
I did not know you harbored such disturbing thoughts.
This was creepy as... Hell I don't even know.
This is intensely disturbing.
Basically, downvoted because you've skipped the 'dark' tag.
I freely confess I don't know what you guys are talking about. This story grew out of a joke between me and one of my readers: I earlier posted a link to a blog post by Larry Correia in which he ranks authors from A to Z, with X-list authors being those who write "violent, pornographic bondage fan fiction involving My Little Ponies." I then suggested that I might write a story called "Fifty Shades of Brad" that promises to depict Brad tying Twilight up, and Twilight doing anything Brad wants, but the actual content would just be a guy tacking up and riding a horse.
So that's what I did. I struggled with it for a couple of days because it didn't have anything faintly resembling a plot, so I slapped an ending on it alluding to how the circumstances it depicts came to be. That was it. As far as I'm concerned, it delivers what it promises: it implies a character will be dehumanized, and one is.
As for the question of why it doesn't have a dark tag . . . heck, I never know what to do with that tag. This is not the first time readers have dinged me for leaving it off, because I can't tell when it's necessary. But then again, I'm a guy who writes stories about kidnapped little girls getting drills stuck in their heads, and about tortured teenagers being forced to kill their best friends with pickaxes. I don't know what's dark and what isn't.
Best comment:
I'm reading the comments and they're all like:
>Dark
>Hilariously dark.... It's just the story of a lonely horse in a stable.
Source
Flash Sentry knows what a mare wants.
2347438
I believe it's supposed to be a French fry, like the ones Twilight ate at the Hayburger.
The bit that made it dark was toward the end, when "Twilight" made mention of maybe once having memories of Equestria, and of her friends, and everything else in the show. That leaves the reader to conclude that she once had those memories, but something has happened to her that means she no longer remembers them and has lost most of her mental faculties.
AKA: Twilight has somehow had her mind wiped, turning her into a simple dumb creature, and is now used as a slave by Brad.
Up until that point it was just weird and silly. Once that hint was dropped, things felt dark.
Also, "Yay, one of the comments was mine!"
I was waiting to laugh at it, but then it got really, really disturbing with how Twilight could no longer remember her life before becoming Brad's horse.
It wouldn't have been dark without the hints toward the end that the horse really was Twilight originally, and that she had somehow gotten stuck in the human world as a horse slowly losing her intelligence.
Yeah. If her internal monologue had been about how she really preferred being a permanent sub to being a princess, that would have been really really different. Way toned down on the creepy scale, though still on it.
If she'd indicated that she did this on weekends and was mysteriously absent from the stable the rest of the time and even more mysteriously her absence was never noticed, it wouldn't be creepy at all.
My only complaint was that it was so darn short.
2347901
Yeah, what he said.
It reminded me less of "Fifty Shades" and more of "The Demolished Man."
2348108 Pretty much. Still I wasn't complaining
2348108 maybe Brad has the Golden Bridle from the excellent Well of Prirene?
To me, Twilight was suffering from/subjected to something akin to Alzheimer's, which terrifies me more than death.
So yeah, the end was a little dark.