Rage Review: Fly Away, Sweet Scootaloo (NSFW) by K9Groomer719.

Introduction:

This is a review of Fly Away, Sweet Scootaloo by K9Groomer719.

The story contains both explicit porn and serious violence, both involving abuse of sympathetic characters.

Features the cruel and sadistic rape of Scootaloo, and some even worse events.

Tags: Mature, Sex, Gore, Tragedy, Sad, Dark and Alternate Universe. Note the "Alternate Universe" tag -- this universe must openly diverge from the mainline MLP: FIM world before the end of Season One, and probably did so implicitly before the start of Season One.

Long Blurb:

Scootaloo doesnt understand her feelings for Rainbow Dash. She takes care of business herself and is constantly found by her abusive foster father. She runs away and Dash offers to help her but Scootaloo wants more than just friendship.

"Takes care of business herself" means that she masturbates, and she's in point of fact only found once by Bubba. But the blurb is essentially accurate, as he probably found her other times before.

I. Overview

A. Setting:

1. Time - The Cutie Mark Crusaders have formed, so this must take place after S1E12 "Call of the Cutie"; and Scootaloo hasn't yet met Rainbow Dash, so this must take place before S1E23 "The Cutie Mark Chronicles." It's probably an alternate universe even before the obvious POD of Scootaloo's accident, and most definitely is such after this. This is around a year after Luna's Return, or YOH 1501, by my long chronology, and must be the same even by the short chronology (given "The Running of the Leaves" and "Winter Wrap-Up."
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2. Place: Sweet Apple Acres, Ponyville, Cloudsdale and ... briefly ... Canterlot. Specifically, the Cutie Mark Crusaders' treehouse, Bubba's house, Rainbow Dash's house, an impact site near Canterlot, and Ponyville General Hospital.

B. Characters: Scootaloo (main protagonist), Rainbow Dash (second protagonist), Bubba (antagonist), Beatrice (Bubba's wife), Matthew Bridleton and Lenna Bridleton (sympathetic secondary characters).

C. Plot: I'll quickly outline this chapter by chapter.

1. Home: Scootaloo secretly watches Rainbow Dash. She finds a spot of grass on which Dashie peed, deeply inhales the scent, and then goes off to the Clubhouse where -- now by herself and indoors -- she masturbates to a fantasy of her idol. Unfortunately, Scootaloo's foster father Bubba comes in, drags her back home and anally and orally rapes her, which is something he obviously does rather often.

2. A Family: Beatrice comforts Scootaloo. Lenna and Matthew come over to check her out for possible adoption, but Bubba comes in and spoils it with lies, driving off the nice potential adoptive parents. Bubba then demands sex from Scootaloo, but Scootaloo flees.

3. A Friend: Rainbow Dash encounters Scootaloo hiding outside of Ponyville, and becomes concerned for her. Dashie talks to her and offers to give her shelter for the night. Rainbow Dash flies her back to Dashie's cloud home, Scoots riding her back. Scootaloo literally orgasms at the sensation of Dashie moving underneath her crotch; Dashie does not realize what just happened.

4. The Night: Dashie gives Scoots a bath and a good meal, talks to her and discovers that Scootaloo is being severely abused (beaten, and Dashie may suspect worse). Scootaloo sleeps in the guest room but has a terrible nightmare of being raped and attacked with a knife by Bubba while Rainbow Dash watches.

5. The Leap: Rainbow Dash wakes Scootaloo out of the nightmare. Rainbow asks Scoots if she wants to sleep with her. They sleep. Scootaloo wakes up first and becomes aroused by Dashie's scent. She begins kissing her and then performs cunnilingus upon the still-sleeping Rainbow Dash. Dashie wakes up and is furious when she realizes what Scoots has been doing. Scootaloo flees in tears, and before Rainbow can stop her, accidentally plunges right off the edge of the cloud.

6. A Cutie Mark: Unable to fly, Scootaloo strikes the ground and is severely injured. Rainbow Dash, remorseful at her reaction, helpes get her to the hospital, claiming to be her mother (because Dashie knows better than to leave her at the mercy of her adoptive family) and finds her crippled for life, her back broken. Dash offers to buy her a nice electric scooter.

Meanwhile, Lenna and Matthew, who don't trust Bubba either, come with the police to have Scoots removed so that she can be formally adopted by them. Bubba laughs and says Scootaloo ran off.

Rainbow Dash returns to the hospital the next morning with a scooter for Scootaloo, but discovers that the filly died in the night -- probably by suicide. Scootaloo left a message or suicide note for Rainbow Dash and the CMC. It turns out that at her death, Scootaloo got her Cutie Mark -- "a little pegasus filly with the wings of an angel, hugging a purple heart. A brave little angel."

D. Theme: A Classical Tragedy, in which both Scootaloo and Rainbow Dash display hubris and suffer nemesis. One should be careful how one courts one's goddess, and one should also not assume that the harmless are truly harmless, as Scootaloo and Rainbow Dash learn, respectively. Love sometimes does not conquer all, and, if expressed ineptly, may harm the object of its affection.
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Quite dark, really, and on a very deep level rather than the superficial grimdark nonsense of which we see all too much

II. Character Analysis

A. Bubba:

Bubba is an evil Pony, and a fool. He's a classic sort of child-victimizing villain: he's clearly uncultured, not too bright, with just enough low cunning to figure out how to work with (corrupt, foolish or unconcerned) Child Services officials to get children put into his tender loving care. He beats and rapes Scootaloo because he's sadistic, he enjoys it, and he figures that he can get away with it. He's little danger to any competent adult, but he can terrorize his demoralized wife Beatrice, or a helpless little filly like Scootaloo (who, remember, is younger here than she is during most of the series).

The story ends before he suffers any consequences, but it seems unlikely that he will. Rainbow Dash and the Bridletons now have good reason to suspect what was really going on here. Rainbow Dash is liable to be furious now that it has resulted in Scootaloo's death, and Bubba was actually dumb enough to gloat to Matthew Bridleton in the following terms:

As they were all walking away, Matthew looked back at Bubba with eyes that could kill. Bubba smirked, "Too bad you didn't get to her first," Bubba whispered, "now you just get the sloppy seconds." He winked at Matthew and slammed the door.

which is tantmount to admitting that he raped her. This is seriously stupid, because the Bridletons are obviously fairly rich and influential Ponies. and clearly like Scootaloo. While I don't know the details of the criminal justice system in K9Groomer's Equestria, I may reasonably assume that raping children is not customarily rewarded with the keys to Canterlot.

I might complain about the fact that Bubba, in his name, nature and actions, exemplifies a very harsh, hostile and negative rural stereotype. On the other hand, this is in a fictional world that contains at least multiple positive rural stereotypes -- Applejack and the Apples, and the Pie Family (who are dour but also honorable) being the most prominent. There's no reason not to have a rural villain.

In my fanon, Bubba would almost certainly be one of the more degenerate Whiteys. No, not as in "Caucasian," but as in "resident of the White Tail Woods." Yeah, some of them are this bad, though they're mostly good Ponies.

I can see what's likely to happen next. Dashie will either go after him personally or recruit Applejack and Twilight to help ensure Bubba an even worse comeuppance than a beating from herself. The police will figure out that the "Scootaloo" who Rainbow Dash brought in to the hospital was the same one who the Bridletons are seeking. Notes will be compared, with the Mane Six adding their not-inconsiderable influence to ensure that Scoots' death is taken seriously.

Bubba will be very, very sorry that he gloated of his crimes to Matthew, as even a cursory medical examinaton of Scootaloo's corpse will show that she was sexually assaulted -- and with significant violence -- by a full-grown stallion. Bubba is quite likely to wind up doing hard time in the Pony equivalent of prison, or suffer whatever other punishment Equestria inflicts on stallions who forcibly rape little fillies.

B. Beatrice: Beatrice is caught in a tragic situation. For whatever reason, she made one very bad decision in her life: she married Bubba. This trapped her: Bubba is a violent, domineering sadist, and Beatrice is a passive, submissive masochist. Since then, her acceptance of Bubba's brutality and crimes have enabled him to continue his misdeeds (which probably go far beyond his abuse of Scootaloo, a house of cards likely to start collapsing as that is abused).

Beatrice isn't innocent, of course. She's an accessory at least after the fact to the beating and rape of Scootaloo, and someone like Bubba is probably guilty of other crimes, from culpability in which of course a stallion like that would do nothing to shield his wife. Her best hope for avoiding prison time is probably turning Crown's evidence against her husband. Sadly, in real life, wives in this situation often shield their unworthy husbands.

But at one point, she is notably kind to Scootaloo. So I hope her punishment is relatively light. Even though it's obvious that on other occasions she's been cruel to her. She obviously wants to help Scootaloo get out of her husband's clutches, and that goes a long way toward redeeming her in my book.

Or maybe not. See under "Scootaloo" for a darker possibility.

C. The Bridletons: They're good Ponies, but a bit out of their depth in this situation. They weren't expecting to encounter anypony as evil as Bubba. However, it seems possible that they'll pursue the case. They didn't trust Bubba (largely because of his enthusiastic slandering of what was obviously an innocent little filly) even before Bubba made his stupid boast about "sloppy seconds."

D. Scootaloo: This is of course very much not vanilla-canon Scootaloo, because of the major backstory assumption which K9Groomer791 has made. Namely, that Scoots has been badly-abused by Bubba over some period of time. She still acts pretty much the same on the outside, in most circumstances, but she's been prematurely sexualized, and desperate to regain a situation in which somepony or someponies love her, as her parents did before their deaths.

This sets up the main tragedy of the story, because it leads to the fantasies and false assumptions she has, and the poor decisions she makes with regard to Rainbow Dash. This in turn leads to Scootaloo's own death.

To begin with, at the very start of the story we learn that Scootaloo has a huge crush on Rainbow Dash. She fantasizes about making love to her, in an extraordinary degree of detail that makes one immediately suspicious -- if one notices that Scootaloo hasn't yet even made friends with Dashie yet, and that hence this is fairly early in the series -- as to how and why a filly this young is having so concrete a sexual fantasy.

Then, at her lowest moment -- when Bubba has seemingly spoiled Scoots' chances of being adopted by the Bridletons and she's run away, knowing that she really has has nowhere to go -- Rainbow Dash literally swoops down out of the sky, takes Scoots back to Dashie's own home, and treats her with caring and kindness, such as she has not known from an older Pony since the death of her parents. She bathes her, feeds her, discusses how to improve her wingpower, and gives her a nice comfortable bed in which to sleep.

This is the Pony she idolizes and fantasizes about who is treating her like this. She's fulfilling half of Scootaloo's desire by treating her, even temporarily, as if she were her parent or older sister. In stark contrast to Bubba, she demands nothing of Scootaloo, expressing interest in and concern with Scoots' problems. It's not surprising that Scootaloo is incredibly happy about the situation. Then, when she has her horrific dream, Rainbow Dash invites her to sleep with her. When she wakes up next to a sleeping Dashie, and smells the scent that she's wanted for so long, Scoots must have thought that her fantasy was about to come true.

A normally-socialized 11-year-old filly or colt would not have done what Scootaloo does next, because she wouldn't have been thinking in sexual terms. Nor, however, would a normal mare or stallion. Why? Because they would have internalized the social rule that mating should be preceded by courtship, and the even more important rule that mating without consent is rape, and that rape is very deeply wrong.

But this version of Scootaloo hasn't been normally socialized. Bubba's been having sex with her for probably some months now, and not once has he courted her or asked her consent. Scootaloo sees non-consensual sex as normal, and, if anything, to her perceptions Rainbow Dash has "courted" her simply by being a dominant and desired figure and being NICE to her.

It probably doesn't even enter Scootaloo's head that Rainbow Dash might NOT want sex. Her experience is that the socially-dominant figure wants and can be appeased by sex; her hope is that since Dashie has been kind to her up until now, that the sex may for once be good for both of them. (The fact that she both assumes this of a mare and knows exactly what to do to her sexually might make me re-evaluate the degree to which Beatrice may also have abused her).

Scootaloo was humiliated. She thought Dash would've liked what she was doing to her.

... and in purely physical terms, Dashie probably would have liked it -- had this sex been consensual and coming after courtship and the development of romantic love, rather than being rape by a near-stranger in her sleep. But of course, Scootaloo's experience of the initiation of sex has been non-consensual -- it's quite possible that Bubba sometimes just crawled into her bed and molested her while she was still sleeping.

Understand: the part that Scootaloo probably hates about sex is getting beaten up and used in ways that inflict pain on her. What Scootaloo was doing would not been at all physically painful to Rainbow Dash. Emotionally painful as hell, when she woke up and realized what Scoots was doing to her. But in purely physical terms, it would have been pleasurable.

The manner in which Scoots tries to apologize shows that she didn't even understand the gravity of what she was doing to Dashie.

Scootaloo hung her head in embarrassment. "I'm s-sorry," she whispered, "I have f-feelings for you I don't underst…"

Whle at Scoots doesn't get is that it's not about her own "feelings" -- she was doing something really horrible to Dashie, and she doesn't even remotely get that either. She hates being raped by Bubba, but she thinks the problem with rape is the physical pain; she doesn't get that it's the violation of one's sexual integrity.

This understandably makes Dashie extremely angry, and sets up her doom. It's highly-relevant here that the key moment is Dashie's Armor-Piercing Question:

"SO," Dash yelled, "so you think that just because your foster father does this to YOU, that you can just do it to any other pony?"

Scootaloo wilted like a dying flower. Tears filled her eyes. She felt a sick feeling in her stomach. "N-no," she said softly, "NO… no, I'm so s-sorry, Rainbow Dash."

She took off and ran out of the room and out of the house, galloping away as fast as she could, down the crystal path, crying, humiliated, and hating herself. Was she no better than Bubba?

And now, far too late, Scootaloo gets it. She treated Rainbow Dash, her beloved idol who had given her nothing but kindness, with the same sort of disrespect that he treated Scootaloo. She can't face what she's done -- she wants to flee. So:

... Scootaloo didn't listen — she jumped off the cloud city and instinctively buzzed her little wings, but to no avail. She plummeted down to Canterlot, slamming into the ground.

I'm not sure if Scootaloo was -- yet -- trying to kill herself, or just to flee. Her instincts, unfortunately are that of a Pegasus, and it's quite possible that in her utter guilt and shame, her need to get away, she briefly forgot that she couldn't fly.

Her death at the end was obviously suicide, because she left a suicide note:

Dear Rainbow Dash,

I'm sorry I made you upset. I'm sorry I hurt you. Please don't think any of this is your fault — it isn't. I just can't stand to hurt anymore. I miss my mom and dad so much, I want to be with them again. I hope you can understand, and I hope you can forgive me. Please tell Sweetie Belle and Apple Bloom that I said goodbye, and thank you for being my friends. I am going to miss them. I am going to miss you the most, Rainbow Dash. That night I spent with you was the best night of my life. Please know that when you're reading this, I am happy again. I'm with my mom and dad and all my pain is gone, and I can run again and I can fly. Goodbye, Rainbow Dash. I love you.

-Scootaloo

which is, of course, unbearably sad.

One more thing: it was a very Pegasus thing for Scootaloo to do. She had dishonored herself to the one she saw as her role model, she had harmed her goddess, and she was crippled so unable to redeem herself by heroic deeds in her service. So she chose to redeem her honor by death. And it worked. Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy would have understood perfectly. So would the Pegasi of the Lunar Rebellion, or ancient Derecho, or still more ancient Pegasopolis.

Nice touch.

E. Rainbow Dash: As a Dashie fan, I love the characterization of Rainbow Dash in this story. Rainbow Dash is admirable, kind, noble and pure of heart, utterly worthy of Scootaloo's high opinion of her. Here's Scootaloo's (very smitten) description of her:

Rainbow Dash tucked in her massive wings and walked over. She stood before Scootaloo, majestic and compelling — big, powerful, graceful, the picture of perfection. Her cyan fur glistened in the last few rays of Celestia's setting sun; her muscles rippled beneath her fur; she was athletic in build and very strong. Her beautiful rainbow mane glistened like liquid silver. She was a sight to behold.

She tries her best to help Scootaloo. She talks to her, opens her home to her, bathes and feeds her and gives her a bed. At no point does she attempt to seduce Scootaloo -- it's obvious from the brief switches to Dashie's POV that Rainbow Dash is quite surprised to learn of Scoots' strong crush on her. (Canon Dashie, who has more time to get to know Scoots, clearly regards her as a surrogate little sister, but then canon Scoots isn't abused, prematurely sexualized and desperate for love the way that K9Groomer's Scoots obviously is).

Rainbow Dash makes some significant mistakes in-story, which are not only understandable but wholly in character. First, she misses that Scootaloo is sexually interested in her. This is because she sees her as a little filly, which Scoots IS. One can argue about Dashie's sexual morals (I regard her as having very good morals indeed), but any Rainbow Dash at all consistent with canon is far too honorable to take advantage of the trust of a little filly in such a crass fashion as to molest her.

The second mistake, which stems from the first one, is that she invites Scootaloo into her bed after Scoots has her nightmare. This is something she probably wouldn't have done had she known that Scoots had a huge crush on her. But even if Dashie is a bisexual (mine is) and even if she thought sexually about an 11-year-old filly (mine wouldn't), she had no reason to think that Scootaloo would try anything while she was sleeping.

The third mistake, resulting directly from the intersection of the first two, was the anger she displayed when she woke up to find Scootaloo engaging in cunnilingus on her. This was not at all unreasonable on her part. Rainbow Dash -- who in my fanon would have been a 19-year-old virgin at this point in her life, and who is hardly promiscuous in vanilla canon -- basically woke up out of an erotic dream to find Scootaloo, the filly to whom she'd been showing hospitality -- raping her. How was she expected to react to this? Unfortunately, she was so shocked that she verbally exploded into anger at Scootaloo, precipitating her fatal flight and -- ultimately -- death.

Scootaloo in one sense was lucky that Dashie didn't simply start hitting her at that point. She would almost certainly have done so had she discovered an adult raping her: an adult would have known what she was doing and would furthermore have constituted a continuing physical threat until defeated. Against an adult, Rainbow Dash would not have held back. Physically attacking a young filly is, however, not within Dashie's normal behavioral possibility space.

Ironically, though, Dashie's admirable restraint may have contributed to Scootaloo's death. This is because if Rainbow Dash had simply smacked Scoots around, Scootaloo might have felt an expiation of her sin in physical punishment, and having taken this punishment, would have felt less tormented by the awareness of the immorality of her deed. Instead, Rainbow Dash made it obvious that she was revolted at and furious with Scoots, yet didn't strike her. So Scootaloo had to punish herself.

Rainbow Dash then shows the great heart that makes her truly awesome to me.

Dash closed her eyes and rested her head against the wall. Oh, sweet Celestia, what have I done? she asked herself.

Context. She's just woken up to discover herself being sexually-assaulted by Scootaloo. She yells at Scoots and fle But -- because she knows that Scoots is fundamentally an innocent filly, rather than an evil mare -- she in a matter of seconds realizes that her new friend (and she's still thinking in those terms!), shifts the blame for the situation to herself, and switches to protecting Scootaloo.

And this is why I think that -- despite the sad and tragic things that happen -- this story isn't actually Degrading to either Scootaloo or Rainbow Dash. Scootaloo wants love, and seeks it out despite having been repeatedly violated by Bubba. True, she tries to find it in a seriously deluded manner, and hurts Rainbow Dash, and ultimately dies herself, but she tries. She has not been crushed by her suffering. Her still essentially-good nature is symbolized by the Cutie Mark that manifests at her death.

Rainbow Dash is hurt by what Scootaloo does, yet her essential nobility of character shines through, and she quickly recovers from her rage when she realizes that Scoots' life is at stake here. Dashie, when all is said and done, is a heroine, and she tries to save Scootaloo. She fails, but the important part is that she still tries. Faced with the very obvious choice of not caring, she still chooses to care. She has not been corrupted by her outrage. This may become a darker Rainbow Dash than the one in the mainline universe, but she still remains a heroine; she will continue to do her best, fighting the good fight.

III. Other Issues

A. Xenofiction: There are two points in the story which will gross out many readers, but which I was actually impressed to see. These are the way in which Scootaloo reacts to the scent of Rainbow Dash's urine in the grass,

It was fresh, she thought, and she bent down and smelled the wet earth. A shudder went through her body, warming her privates. Beyond the smell of the ammonia in the urine, Scootaloo could make out a faint but legible whiff of Rainbow Dash's pussy. It was intoxicating — to her it was the best thing in the world.

and later to Dashie's direct personal scent, which proves her ultimate undoing.

The delicately sweet aroma sent Scootaloo's drunken hormonal desires into overdrive. She felt that shudder again in her privates and her pussy started to quiver and demand attention. She licked her lips as she worked her hoof inside, commencing the journey to self satisfaction.

The thing is, the Ponies are Equidae (Horse family, though not the same genus). They have superior olfactory senses to Humans. And thus, as I postulate in my fanon, their pathways to sexual arousal are more scent-based than is the case for Humans. This is good xenofiction; what Scootaloo feels is somewhat alien to most Humans, but close enough that we can sympathize.

It may be relevant here that K9Gromer719 is a dog groomer. The Canidae are even more scent-oriented than are Equidae, and so she would be very aware of the ways in which beings much more scent-oriented than Humans might react to the world. Scootaloo, of course, is sapient, so she should have more self-control -- but she's also young, naive, abused, and desperate to be loved.

B. Tragedy: This is true tragedy in the Classical sense of the term, not merely in the sense of having an unhappy ending. Classical Tragedy requires that the hero or heroine fails not because of a lack of heroic qualities, but because the protagonist is driven by those very heroic qualities to attempt something beyond her power, an act of hubris which btings on the heroine's destruction or nemesis.

What's interesting is that the full Classical Ancient definition of "hubris" included crimes which degraded others, sometimes in a sexual manner. In other words, crimes or mistakes of disrespect. And both Rainbow Dash and Scootaloo are guilty of this in-story!

Scootaloo aspires to be Rainbow Dash's lover despite being too young for her and having no real understanding of how love works. Rainbow Dash offers her friendship and aid, but Scootaloo wants more, and tries to take it while Dashie is sleeping. This breaks their friendship, and leads directly to Scootaloo's crippling. Though Dashie forgives her, Scootaloo no longer wants to live, Nemesis claims her.

Rainbow Dash assumes that she can solve Scootaloo's problems, and especially that a young filly is no danger to herself, as Dashie is a warrior of notable prowess. So she trusts Scootaloo, taking her into her home and even her bed. This is too much faith in Dashie's own (very limited) psychological skills, and she does not realize that she is dealing with a filly who has been very badly socialized due to chronic sexual abuse.

So Scootaloo assaults her in her sleep, and Dashie must suffer not only the shame of rape, but the much greater shame of having fatally failed her friend (it is a measure of Rainbow Dash's heroic heart that the latter bothers her much more than the former). Though her punishment is less, for her sin was also less, Nemesis has also claimed her -- though She is content with wounding rather than slaying Rainbow Dash.

This is a depth and sweep of dramatic power that one does not expect in a clopfic!

C. Possible Flaws:

1. Scootaloo's Leap

Would this have crippled her? There are two reasons she perhaps should have survived unscathed or only lightly hurt.

The first is that Rainbow Dash was racing to the rescue. And we know that Rainbow Dash can dive very fast indeed, far faster than terminal velocity. She canonically saves several Ponies by doing just this in S1E16 "Sonic Rainboom," the same season in which this story is set. In fact, she can dive at supersonic speeds (terminal velocity for a Human would be about 120 mph, and the speed of sound is around 660 mph at sea level, so she can dive well over five times as fast as a large mammal can fall in atmosphere). Given that she can fly supersonic on the level, she can probably dive about eight to ten times faster than terminal velocity.

Ah, but Scootaloo jumped before Rainbow Dash had reached the edge of the cloud. Rainbow Dash (who remember was emotionally-shocked from being assaulted by a friend, and physically-groggy from having just woken up) would have had one of two bad choices to catch up with her: dephase with the cloud and fly downward through it, which had the serious flaw that she couldn't have tracked Scootaloo's trajectory while in the cloud; or fly horizontally to the edge of the cloud then dive after Scootaloo, which would have left Scootaloo falling while Dashie was flying in a perpendicular direction to Scoots' own downwards vector.

So it's quite conceivable that Dashie might fail to catch up to her in time to prevent her collision with the ground.

The second is that Pegasi in flight are rather obviously levitated and protected by a "flightfield" (never named in show, but at high speeds you can see its interface with the atmosphere), a telekinetic force field which also provides some protection against collision (obvious because Pegasi can crash at speed without serious harm to themselves, or deliberately ram to batter through solid doors; Changelings can employ a variant of the same effect when bombard-deploying themselves into a ground action). So why didn't Scootaloo's flightfield save her?

The answer is simple. Scootaloo can't reliably generate her flightfield in the air, which is why she can't fly. We've seen that a Pegasus can screw up and fail to generate her flightfield properly, both in Scootaloo's obvious case, and less obviously with Fluttershy (especially in "Dragonshyness" and her flashback in "The Cutie Mark Chronicles.") Scoots may well have switched off or powered-down her flightfield at the moment of impact, causing her to be critically-injured.

In fact, it may be worse than that. Scootaloo also doesn't KNOW how to fly and in her panic and desire to escape, she may have actually been generating downward thrust. In that case, she might well have augured-in, striking at greater than terminal velocity, leading to kinetic energy far beyond the ability of her flightfield to protect her against, while making Rainbow Dash's attempt at a rescue more difficult -- especially if she were flying erratically.

2. Tear-Jerker or Narm?

The ending, with Scootaloo's death and the appearance of the angelic Cutie Mark symbolizing that Scootaloo has been forgiven her sins both by Rainbow Dash and (perhaps) by Divine forces, is positively Victorian. like one of Charles Dickens' MLP clopfics, which I'm sure he would have written had he lived today! This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it may be a bit over-the-top.

On the other hand, I got misty-eyed over it.

On the gripping hand, I cry at my own fanfics. I'm a big softie.

So I'm not sure of the answer.

3. Incomplete Denouement:

We never find out the answer to some important questions.

a: How was Rainbow Dash changed by her experience? She was raped by a friend she was trying to help, then failed to save that friend from death despite her best efforts. She's been humbled, and even if she never speaks of the first-named point (why blacken Scootaloo's memory?), she knows it happened. Does she continue to be the gusty good-humored warrior we know and love from the main worldline, or is she shadowed by this shame and failure? How does this affect her friendship with the rest of the Mane Six?

b: What happens to the Cutie Mark Crusaders? They're not really characters in the story, but it's occurred to me that there are now only two of them; one has died tragically young (we don't know if they know that this was by suicide). Do the CMC split up? Do they recruit new members? Do Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle simply become closer friends?

c: What happens to Bubba and Beatrice? Scootaloo's dead, Rainbow Dash knows that her foster parents were beating and at least one of them raping her; and Bubba was dumb enough to boast of raping her to Matthew Bridleton. I would be very surprised if they evaded all consequences for this, given that the Bridletons are obviously rich, and Rainbow Dash a national heroine.

I can see why it was left out of the main story, though -- it might distract from the focus and impair the story structure. This is the same reason why Looking for Mr. Goodbar doesn't discuss the hunt for the Goodbar Killer -- the real story was the heroine's self-destructive and self-defeating quest for love in all the wrong places, rather than the police hunt for the serial killer who slew her.

, IV. Rating and Awards:

I am astonished at how good this story actually is, given its low vote ratings. For the first time ever, I rate a story.

It's a clop fic which contains the beating and rape of a sympathetic little filly, that same filly's sexual fantasies and misguided sexual assault on her benefactor, followed by her crippling and suicide. This is probably why it's hated. But it's a very good story, with a genuine plot, good characterization and powerfully-executed theme.

It is, however

Certified Flamebait, as it contains all the aforementioned elements. In fact I don't know if this is precisely Scootabuse or Scootalove, as while Scootaloo is horribly abused by Bubba and dies of the indirect effects of it, and Bubba in-story suffers zero punishment for it, the story also represents Scootaloo as misguided but essentially good, and ends for her in forgiveness, redemption ... and death.

It also gets gets the

Bandwagon Betrayal Banner by appearing at first glance to be a clopfic about rape of and by Scootaloo, but is actually a well-written tragedy.

Conclusion:

This is an excellent story which I highly-recommend to anyone who can make it through the darkness and tolerate the extremely explicit sex scenes. It's the best thing I've ever read from the Recommended Stories folder on this site. I strongly encourage the author to write more -- she's really good.

Comments

[Lazy_]

One thing I absolutely hate about some readers, is that they want all of the meaning, messages and thought to be thrown to them on a plate. They expect the writer to make everything blatantly obvious, and if what the writer is trying to imply doesn't agree with the reader then they immediately hate it.

This is a problem which angers me to the very core. It also applies to this story. It's in the god damn 'Rape' folder for fucks sake, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. These particular readers refuse to look past the words on their screen and just see an especially dark clopfic. When actually the writer has written a message, a moral behind her story.

'Fly Away, Sweet Scootaloo' isn't just about a small pegasus with a twisted outlook. It's a slice of real life, where a child who can't understand even herself is exposed to some of the nastiest bits the world has to offer. It's about a child who's so overwhelmed by guilt, regret and sorrow that she is willing to take her own life.
It's sad that people are too blind to notice what the story really is.