Fact or Fiction by The (late) Big Bad Borox, Revisited: Largely the same amount of grammatical problems, and the same story

A few months is a long time. Long enough for Big Bad Borox to become Barnside, the hero of… barn sides, I guess. My personal head canon is that the current author is actually the adopted daughter or son of the original Big Bad Borox, who died as he lived, balls deep in a hog and firing two assault rifles into the air.

Thank you Cards against Humanity and Mad Libs.

Fact or Fiction has been chugging along, and recently broke the 100,000 word mark. And I’ll just say here that as the story progresses, the mechanical problems become more and more apparent. I can overlook misused “it’s” and the likes for 10,000 words… 50,000, even. But when you get to 100,000 words, it definitely takes away from my reading experience.

Now onto the story.

When we last left off in Chapter 19, the party had just been split up. Rainbow Dash, Daring Do and Wheat Biscuit’s family (hereafter called the “Biscuits,” by me… and now by you), were captured by Torrent centaurs, leaving Pea Gravel and her pet unicorn from chapter 16.

And now let’s check on Equestria, where… Volm is dating Lightning Dust.

Get the bucket.

Carl, get the bucket!

Alright. So that’s still a thing. Just to recap, Lightning Dust has been under Volm’s control since Chapter 15, but whatever he had planned for her has yet to play out. So far we know that it involves getting Lighting Dust to fly with the Wonderbolts. It happens in chapter 20. Volm causes Lightning Dust to cease up in the middle of a big dive, break her legs and go into a coma for a few weeks. Volm releases her from his control, and then uses the publicity from the accident to start a cybernetic limb enhancement industry in Equestria.

I’m mostly confused, but that’s probably me not keeping all the subplots straight in my head. On the one hand Volm gave Pea Gravel her robot limbs, so if anyone is going to be the illuminati to Equestria’s Desu Ex, Volm is a great candidate. But what purpose does this have? Volm has mind control powers, multiple bodies, shadowy familiars and who knows what other powers. Why bring cyborgs into this mess?

I have two theories: 1) he’s going to control the cyborgs and take over Equestria.
2) it’s just to mess with ponies.

And I’m not excited for either of those outcomes. There’s already too much going on in this story. Pea Gravel has barely found anybody. The Cutie Mark Crusaders subplot has disappeared at this point. The rest of the Mane 6 have been shoved aside. Volm is plotting with the Princesses. Twilight and Cadence make an appearance in a later chapter. And I’m supposed to believe that all this will get resolved eventually in a satisfying manner?

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We do get a few big answers in the next few chapters. For one thing, the Torrents bring the bigger portion of the party to their capital. Rainbow Dash and Daring Do are treated quite nicely by the Torrent Prophet, and the Biscuits are taken in as gardeners for the Torrent palace, which is the best possible outcome. We get more of the history and power structure of the Torrent. They’re a cult that worships Tirek, which was formed by Tirek’s surviving disciples after his defeat. Empowered by what Rainbow Dash and Daring Do told them, they plan to attack Equestria. Overhearing their plans, Rainbow Dash starts to plan an escape.

Also there’s a monster entombed under the Torrent capital.

In the meantime Pea Gravel finds her old swordsmith. Not one of her party; just a human swordsmith living in the woods who’s been having demon problems lately. She hunts the lepuric living in his mine to bring back metal ore so he can forge her a sword. The lepuric blood poisons her, and she is bedridden for a few days. While she’s down, the unicorn from chapter 16 has a run in with an orc mage who curses the swordsmith. The swordsmith dies from the curse shortly before Pea Gravel wakes up.

Oh, and the unicorn from chapter 16 gets a name in Chapter 28. He’s Sparky now.

Fact or Fiction is heavy reading. There’s a whole new set of lore here, and the mechanical issues just keep stacking up. You have to be really into it to remember all the details, and Chapter 20 is when it dawned on me that this isn’t going to end anything soon. I now firmly believe that this will take 300,000+ words to resolve. That can easily fill 3 or more books, depending on your publisher. With that in mind, let’s look at the beginning.

The beginning clearly happens just before the hero turns the tides and saves the day. It shows the aftermath of what happened while Pea Gravel was away. This is an opener used in some books, but most of all it’s used in movies. I have Megamind off the top of my head. It works in movies, because they’re 2 hours long. The audience can easily remember stuff like that, especially when they’re just watching moving pictures. But imagine the Wheel of Time series where the ending requires you to flip back to the prologue of Book 1 of 14. You can get away with something like that in a movie, a short story, a novella of no more than 30,000 words, but when you start getting into epic adventure territory it all falls apart. If there’s a clever payoff, most people will miss it because they don’t remember something they were reading 2 or 3 years ago.

Getting lost is also an issue in stories of this magnitude, and there’s been little effort to prevent it here. The main objective of Pea gravel’s journey is now in the backseat to a bunch of things. With the revelations in the latest chapter Sparky will probably be getting a lot of development, Rainbow Dash and Daring Do are having their own adventure, Twilight and Cadence will be doing something eventually, and what’s with Tuff? He was such a big part of the first act, and so far he hasn’t done anything too useful. With more plotlines it becomes harder for the reader and the author alike to keep everything straight, and there’s the added risk of a story stagnating. Eventually everyone might lose sight of what the goal was in the first place, while subplots are constantly being piled on.

A story like this is difficult to review in an incomplete form. I can’t say for sure that the prologue won’t work because I don’t know how it’s relevant in the grand scheme of things. I don’t know if Volm’s plan makes any sense. It is worrisome that the story seems to have made so little progress at this point (6 out of 18 months), but at the moment the story seems in little danger of dying.

Overall, Fact or Fiction still has its charm even at 130,000 words, but only time will tell if it’ll wear out in the (super) long run.