Friday's Featured Fic: Therapist Visit · 2:07pm Jan 16th, 2015
Title: Therapist Visit
Author: ABagOVicodin
Genre: Sad-Luna
Word Count: 35k
Synopsis: Luna's disposition worsens after Twilight Sparkle once again outdoes the Princess by fighting back another evil foe. Princess Luna wishes to speak with somepony, and finds that a therapist is her only possible choice.
Sad-Luna. It’s startling at times just how expansive a sub-genre this is. It seems like at any given time, there will be at least one story about Luna moping around, being sad in either the featured or popular stories box, and according to Fimfiction’s newfangled search engine there are three-thousand stories tagged with Luna+Sad, comprised of over forty-three-million words. Like I said, expansive.
But Therapist Visit stands apart, both narratively and mechanically.
At first glance the plot seems fairly typical, Luna’s depressed, and in the wake of Twilight Sparkle taking down every threat to Equestria like a rainbow blasting Judge Dredd, is starting to question her place in Equestrian society and decides to seek out advice from a therapist.
However, the first thing you’ll notice that sets this story apart is that the entire story, from beginning to end, is composed entirely of dialogue. No descriptors, actions, nothing.
The second thing you’ll notice, is the Therapist. The titular Therapist is both the central character and the driving mechanic behind the entire plot, but he never actually speaks.
The Therapist is a completely silent protagonist.
And this in a nutshell, is how Therapist Visit distinguishes itself from the pack. The Therapist never speaks, everything that we know about him comes from the dialogues of the other characters, allowing the reader to make out the Therapist to be whoever the reader wishes. His entire character is a stand-in for the reader, and while we do find out a few things about him, on the whole he’s a blank slate.
This causes the reader to imprint traits and emotions onto the Therapist which make him universally likable to the reader without actually having to be developed or explored. It’s not something that I see very much of in fanfiction, and it’s splendidly executed.
Being that the entire story is composed entirely of dialogue, this means that the reader doesn't have many of the cues that they may be accustomed to, and it would have been all too easy for the author to just have the characters say “Oh! I’m feeling so much better today than yesterday!” But to its immense credit, the mental and emotional states of each character throughout the story are never that obvious, but can usually be deciphered without much ado based on how each character talks to the Therapist.
At just over thirty-five-thousand words, Therapist Visit won’t take up too much of your time, but you’ll be glad you spent it nonetheless. It’s a good story, told in a unique fashion, and really does manages to do something new with an old genre.
Check it out! You’ll be glad you did!
Okay, consider me curious. To my RiL it goes.
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Hope you like it!
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Okay . . . your comment confuses me.
Firstly, Twilight isn't even a character in the story, and secondly, the story is about Princess Luna overcoming her feelings of being useless, not actually being useless. But whatever you decide, it is entirely your choice.