"Cross over, children, into the LIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT!" * · 1:22am Jul 28th, 2015
That means you should all go over to Patchwork Poltergeist's and read The Silver Standard. The payoff is "Berry Pinch Ruins Everything Forever," but you really should work up to it and besides, it's good from the beginning. Very good. So good that I wonder why our commenting circles don't seem to overlap --ours, the dutiful students of literature dutifully honing our craft, and hers, who have their chops (or at least she does). Anyway go have a look.
I was gonna call this THEY SAVED BEVERLY CLEARY'S BRAIN but I found out Beverly Cleary is still alive at 99, God bless her. And Patchwork Poltergeist kinda reminds me of her. Why? Well...
I read Cleary's books when I was a kid. They weren't really my speed--no pirates, or mile-long spaceships, or space pirates in mile-long spaceships--but my oldest sister left one lying around one day and I started reading it. I dunno why. Maybe I was bored, or curious, or just being a jerk and looking for material to tease her with. Maybe all three. But they hooked me.
Because the kids in them, while likable, were also believable. They were like me, not just as suburban white kids from the West Coast but as kids who recognizably thought and acted as I did, for good and ill. I mean, didn't you ever read a children's or young-adult book as a child and think these kids are nice , but they seem kinda stupid (you know, like the Pevensys from the Narnia books)? These kids weren't like that. And they were the first I remember encountering in my reading who weren't.
I think the first one I read was Beezus and Ramona, about a girl named Beatrice Quimby who goes by "Beezus" because that's how her name is pronounced by her younger sister Ramona, a character whose only purpose seems to be to cause chaos, rock like Amadeus. But in Ramona Quimby, Age Eight you learn that this raging snotball of an Ur-punk-rock-girl actually lives by a set of complex but rational rules based on what she understands of the world around her, and on her own rich imaginative life, which at her age seems a part of that world.
(If you think you've seen this dynamic before...
...yes. Yes you have.)
And then there was this boy, Otis Spofford. He's introduced in Beezus and Ramona as a straight-up jerk, not so much a bully as dirty, disruptive and verbally cruel. Yet she devotes another whole book to him and you find out that he's actually a pretty normal kid making do in trying circumstances, who by the end of the story learns and grows a bit. And against all expectations you find yourself sympathizing with and even rooting for him.
You see what happened there? Cleary introduced these characters as chaotic and destructive, yet as she revealed more and more about them you began to understand and even like them.
This is precisely what Poltergeist does with Diamond Tiara and, most especially, with Silver Spoon. Because The Silver Standard is her story after all.
Like Otis Spofford, Silver Spoon is who she is because of factors outside her control--her parents, their standards, and the circumstances that brought them to Ponyville. And like Ramona Quimby, Silver Spoon's behavior is suddenly comprehensible, even sympathizable, once you understand her inner life and her perception of the world around her.
There's a lot to criticize in her upbringing, in her worldview and the values her parents have instilled in her. Her faults proceed from these things. And yet in the hour that is literally darkest, she summons up a calm and dignified gesture that soothes the fears of everyone around her. It's an act of courage and noble grace--and you realize immediately that it proceeds directly from those things which are also the source of her faults.
This is, I think, the best thing about Poltergeist's writing: not the (quite good) storytelling nor the prose that bears you along like a calm stream, never drawing attention to itself but taking you nonetheless past a varied and vivid landscape. Rather, it's the presentation of her characters as integrated and entire, not as bundles of contradictions (as we often perceive real persons) nor as flawed personalities (as we often rationalize them), but as whole persons wholly comprehended, in which virtues and flaws are obverse and reverse of the same traits. Exactly as light and shadow go to make up a whole image--chiaroscuro.
Make no mistake, Silver Spoon and Diamond Tiara are still some pretty broken characters. There's a lot of darkness about them. But Poltergeist shows us that it wouldn't be there without some light, and--a kindly god is Jabim, whose heart is sore if any thing be lost--that light is gentle and amending.
Like I said, go have a look. Cross over. 
* "I shall call her--Mini-Medium."
Dat moment when somebody totally gets a thing you made.
Chiaroscuro is pretty much the heart of most things I write. Your comment for Tether was really darn spot-on, too. (And also reminds me I should reread The Tale of Desperaux sometime soon.)
This also reminds me I should really get off my butt and write that essay journal/giant rant on writing kids. There's an irritating tendency to make everyone sappy angels or...well, pretty much just sappy precious precocious angels. (Unless it's Diamond Tiara, in which case she's the lovechild of Satan and Regina George.) Really, that's a tendency in a lot of media, because people think of childhood with nostalgia goggles or adult glasses, and that does a huge disservice both to the character and to actual children.
Children are inexperienced, not stupid. They're just as complicated and confused as adults are, maybe more. From an adult's eyes a snowball fight is cute, but to a kid it's Normandy.
...Basically what I'm saying here is Lilo and Stitch has one of the best written child characters I've seen in anything ever. Aside from the pitch perfectly weird Lilo (from the outside in, kid logic is bizarre), Myrtle is a spot on mean little girl. I can remember a lot of Myrtles.
I've never actually read much of the Ramona-verse, since when I was a kid I didn't want to read anything without a talking animal, so most of my Beverly Cleary was Mouse and the Motorcycle, though even then you saw many of those well-rounded young characters all over the place.
Yeah, I've noticed that. I suspect the answer is Skype. There's a whole circle of people on fimfiction that you can never enter unless you spend hours each day on Skype. Or in the fimfiction chat.
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I don't know: are Skype and chat really that big a part of FiM? I don't use chat, and I only Skype with one person, who isn't in the fandom. Yet I'm in you're circle.
Maybe I'm just weird (er) (than most Bronies) (God, isn't that a thing to contemplate?)
Late to the party, but I've been reading Silver Standard, and it's just as good as you said. It humanizes our favorite petty bullies very, very well, showing their insecurities and reasons for their actions. We usually see them from the Crusaders (especially Applebloom's) PoV, and it's easy to start seeing things as black and white.