So Passes the Glory · 7:45pm Aug 7th, 2016
That latin named story I've had topping the feature box for this past few days, about that.
Just going to leave this here for no reason in particular...
About all... this. You might, first up, notice this is not particularly in the same tone as my other stories.
My lawyer advised me to say: I promised a blog explaining why I wrote this story, hinting that there was something else to it and that you might also notice that there are rather odd comments in it, particularly by Aragon and Horizon on the first page, and that I even deleted some of them due to """spoilers"""
Full disclosure, I don't really like this story. I don't dislike it either, but this story was kind of a joke to me. At me.
This story was originally written as a very specific piece of satire. I'm largely very critical of "Sad" tag stories, and how they take up a majority -- last I checked anyway -- of the top 100 fics all time. How they seem to do critically well while being largely forgettable, or mangling the characters to fit whatever the saddest thing the author can think of would be.
For the last Writeoff I loudly declared this quite loudly indeed, as most of the prompts strike me as terribly... well, emo. Was accused of sour grapes and the like. Didn't much truck well with me, as I'm incredibly thin skinned.
Sic Transit was written in a day, out of spite, with a very specific set of objectives: It needed to be completely unedited. It needed to be written based on the least original, most overdone premise I could conceive. It had to be every single sad cliche I could think of strung together, no exceptions, and just be that. It had to have a latin title, in the end, because of course it did.
The final criteria, then was to watch it do better than any piece of work I'd put genuine effort into. My original, incredibly cynical thought, was that it'd do better than any of my other Writeoff entries. The consensus of those who were in on the, well, joke agreed it would probably place around third.
It just about tied fourth with a story I helped edit. It was the best I've ever done in a Writeoff by quite a large strip. Cold in Gardez -- very unfortunately -- placed ninth this round, for comparison, and his work was exceedingly competent.
It was then, then, that I was curious to see how it would go when faced with a much wider audience. How would it compare to my last comedy, for instance. It turns out... pretty good. Distressingly well. Three times the votes and twice the views as my last story. Unfortunately that came with a much larger audience to explain this to than I was anticipating... Which is why I was meant to write this the day after, but have put it off until it's fallen out of the box.
I don't want this to be a 'gotcha'. This was never a joke I was playing on you, the reader, it was a joke I was playing on myself. I was the one being a cynical bastard, after all, and my cynicism came from understanding the genre enough to mimic it while not intentionally writing a bad story. Couldn't bring myself to making it intentionally terrible, just... as mediocre and as cliche as possible.
If you did like this story, that's the takeaway from it. Sadfics are emotionally manipulative by nature and, if it's the kind of story you enjoy reading, I hope you appreciate the catharsis. But they can easily follow a genre, a very trite formula, and still succeed at that while masquerading as high art. These stories also tend to get disproportionate levels of praise for what they are, I've noticed, because while the emotional manipulation is effective... there's often little more to the story. Because people take that emotional impact for what it is, without... hang on, let me just grab something real quick.
A comment I adored from Isseus;
Seriously, sadfics have become like clop on the site: No story, just some quick bodily fluids and moaning, then done.
So I'm hoping, if this blog post makes you uncomfortable, what you take out of it is to be a little more critical of the genre than you were before. And think I'm an idiot.
I didn't set you up to fail, reader. I set myself up to fail and failed at it.
Wlam left a very good comment, too, on how this story wasn't bad enough. I'll copy paste it on the comments section here so you can thumb it up on his behalf, as he was deprived of his rightful green thumbs the last time.
Also, for historical reference, as of this comment the story has 464 upvotes, 16 down.
Let's see whether this admission sways that one way or the other...
I'm just glad it wasn't an attempt to gently break the news that you are dying a little faster than we thought. Especially when I reached the part with Pinkie Pie.
I'm the lawyer he's talking about. I'm the one who advised him to speak like that. In case you're wondering.
This is a really interesting thing that just happened, here, with this story. I think it's a perfect opportunity to stop and think about what it means, especially for us writers. Do you know that dreadful enemy always looming in the distance, the Magnum Opus Dissonance? Well, here we have the reason why such a thing happens.
There's a certain asymmetry when it comes to stories. Authors see all the work that went behind them, but readers only see the end result. This causes that some things that shouldn't be good by our standard is perceived as incredible by the readers.
Why? Well, some things that are cheap and easy to write and a total weaseling out of actual, skillful writing, is... perceived as actual, skillful writing if you don't know the trick behind it. Good writing can affect our emotions. In our minds, that means that if a story makes us sad, it must be a good story. This implies that something that's merely emotionally manipulative is seen as great, even though it might not be.
Can we say that there's objective quality to judge stories, and that emotionally manipulative stuff is bad? That only the writer is able to judge a story's quality? Nah. But there are tricks to use, and cheap ways to, well, fool the readers into thinking they read something that had more work put into it than what it actually had.
If you read enough sad stuff, eventually you learn to think like a writer, and you detect that stuff. Dunno if that means that said tricks are objectively bad, or if they just happen to work a limited number of times? But it's still a thing.
I personally didn't like this story. I sorta hated it. I also see why a lot of people liked it. I also see why I might have loved it a couple years ago.
Food for the thought, really. Full disclosure: Hahah, Numbers, you silly goose. You're too skilled to be unskilled, even in a skilled way. You failed at failing, but don't feel bad about it. That's the only way to learn, after all.
EDIT: I just realized that this might be read in a wrong way -- just in case: I don't mean that whoever writes using these "tricks" that I talked about is immediately a hack or a bad author. It's just something that, when you're starting, feels like the only way to write something that gets to your reader.
It's only as time goes by and you read this same stuff done again and again (or when you write it again and again) that it wears on you, and you start seeing it as just souless window dressing, instead of actual nuance. It's not something inherently bad; it's just something that, when seen a thousand times, gets tiring. This is more about experience than about morals or whatever you want it to be about.
4137196
Holy fucking shit dude.
4137202 yeah
That is a great quote by Isseus.
I've always internally referred to Sad tag stories as SadPorn. You may or may not be happy to know that I have not read nor have any intention of reading this story of yours despite adoring a number of your other works.
And now, ironies of ironies, it's back in the box. This story just wants to make its father proud. It doesn't understand what it was made for.
1st world problem:
being such a good writer that even an intended clichee story comes out pretty damn good.
also, the only thing i did not like about this story was that the introductionary blurb said something about celestia not liking it when luna goes there and then the story just never picking up on that point ever at all . .
and i was a bit surprised that sparklebutt was dead and applejack was not.
I didn't know Gloria was sick!
Huh. Well, good(?) job, I guess. I read it, didn't care for it, didn't up-vote or comment on it, thinking something along the lines of, "Well, everybody has off days, I suppose."
I guess it's time for me to write that epic HiE clopfic now. Even if I can't look myself in the mirror afterwards, I'll rake in the upvotes!
4137266
Well, I always thought you were a neat person, iisaw, but now you leveled up to Actual Cool Guy in my book. In my mind you wear sunglasses and can do sick skateboard tricks now.
With this, I mean it's neat that someone else had the same reaction as me when reading the story. I was afraid I might have gone too cynical for my own tastes! Sadly for you, this also means we think in a similar way, which means that you're pretty damn fucked now. Oh well. Can't have your cake and eat it, I'm afraid.
4137266
In the original Writeoff, Cold In Gardez gave me a very similar cadance of review before Georg followed up by giving it an A+
I dunno. It might've been a more productive use of your time to try to write a good sad story, to show people the right way to do it, rather than an effortless satire that will just make anyone who liked it feel stupid. Because for all the generic, paint-by-numbers sad stories on the site, a good one is just as legitimate, takes just as much skill, and is at least as capable of leaving a long-term impact on the reader as any other kind of story.
Also, saying sad stories are manipulative is kinda redundant, I think, because all fiction is manipulative in some way, whether it's horror, comedy, or whatever. And those other directions of manipulation are just as susceptible to lazy writing as sad ones are. Some of the most forgettable stories on this site, for example, are ones that make a half-assed attempt at being funny.
Disclaimer: I haven't read your story. I'm simply speaking as someone who's come across this kind of "I'm making a point lulz" story before and think they're usually in bad taste,
See, the weird thing is, I unironically enjoyed the story even though I've been around for years, in part because I don't check the feature box enough to see all these sadfics.
And, fair's fair, because I have such a reflexive, 'nah, fuck that' aversion to all the Ennui Of The Immortals claptrap that I unconsciously avoid most of the "Twilight grieves for her lost friends," stories that I do notice. I have read more parodies and twists on that formula than I have actual examples of the formula. I think the last one was Who Wants To Live Forever?, by Ri2, and that was three years ago. Strictly speaking it probably wasn't very good, but it was the kind of harmless wackiness that got a chuckle out of me.
Upshot of all this, I took your story as a straight sadfic which, while I was vaguely aware it was unoriginal in the grander sense, it was treading mostly unbroken ground for me. Funny how that works, ain't it?
4137291
Well, Georg (as skilled and talented a writer he may be; there are several reasons I follow him) likes to write his characters into abusive relationships, sometimes for comedic purposes. I always felt his taste for writing was a bit skewed, even if I'm probably the one more detached from trends and reality as a whole.
Sounds like you experienced a variation on Poe's Law. You never put any signposts in the story to indicate it being a satire, so it's easily unrecognizable as such. When I first read it I found it understated but also somewhat genuine. Also, "Dread Babysitter Eternal" was funny, and not at all in a 'poking fun at sadfics' kind of way.
4137294
It's hard to take you seriously if you criticise something and then immediately admit you don't know what you're talking about, mate.
All stories are manipulative, but good stories use that manipulation to teach a moral. That's what stories are for. Forgetting to give a message or to try to say something important and just going straight to blatantly playing with the reader's emotion for the sake of being perceived as an artist is, at least to me, more insulting towards your audience than simply trying to play a joke and seeing how it backfires.
4137325
The satire wasn't in the story so much as it was in its construction. Its existence? It's basically performance art.
Largely my intent, yes.
So, you may have noticed I just read and favorited this story. Now, not because I think it's your best work, not even close. Yes, there isn't really a plot, and what is there is incredibly cliché and done to death, as you intended.
You just executed the tropes too well for your own good, such that I was this close to tearing up. As I am a cold, emotionless bastard who didn't even cry at his own grandfather's funeral, this is no mean feat. So think of it less as praise for your writing, in this case, and more like an award for embracing the cheese so hard that you actually managed to tug on my heartstrings.
My big takeaway from this was the superb tomb designs, honestly.
4137274
Okay... legit terrified now.
4137191
4137201
This blog, and these comments should be archived for authors and readers alike to see where the perception of quality and the actuality of effort put into something can differ immensely.
I've run across this myself several times, and on my part, as an author that is aware of these tricks, it always makes me a little angry as I sit there and puzzle out in my head if the author did it intentionally. Did they short cut the work on purpose? Are they being manipulative for a reason other than to be perceived as a skilled writer?
But that's me.
Honestly, I lost interest in this fic after the first few paragraphs. I don't like sad for sadness' sake fics. But I can totally see why other folks might love it. It just felt tacky to me.
I'm pretty sure it was just a joke, but someone clearly doesn't actually read clop
I've seen a lot of people put more effort into fics that are primarily about sex than most of the "emotional catharsis bullshit" that ends up in the "popular" side-bar on any given day.
I know you didn't actually make the comment, but really it should be a comparison of all bad literature, on the site.
Bad sadfic: Here is a thing that is sad - you are sad now.
Bad clop: Here is a thing that is sexy - you are horny now.
Bad comedy: Here is a thing that is funny - you laugh now.
Bad fluff: Here is a thing that is cute - you diabetes now.
And so forth.
They're all things that we (as a total collective 'we', I'm well aware the majority avoid the clop) want to experience, but sometimes authors just show you a thing and say, "Here is a thing! React to it!" without thought, interest, or sometimes even a recognizable structure.
And you know what sucks? Popular culture has taught people that this is okay, rather than something to be avoided at all costs. Some of the most award winning movies are bullshit tragedies, or race dramas, or war re-enactments, that all evoke a large amount of sadness, or shame, or empathy... but without decent direction or focus. "This is stuff that exists/existed, be emotional about it!" and the critics/the academy fucking eat it up. There's very little care as to the quality of the emotional response, just the quantity of it.
I always use two movies to explain my view of this to people: Simon Birch and The Pursuit of Happiness.
Simon Birch is a shitty movie that will make you cry like a bitch during it, but you'll completely forget about it fifteen minutes after you're done watching it.
The Pursuit of Happiness is a phenomenal movie that will make you cry but will also give you profound joy and a hope and optimism for the future, and a belief that anything is possible (at least until the cynicism kicks in again), and fifteen minutes after you're done watching it, you and your friends will probably only be on how great Will Smith was, not to mention the discussing of the movie as a whole you'll be doing for the next hour.
So, to get back to the main point, yeah the state of emotional fics sucks. A lot of fics written to evoke catharsis are just dumb set-pieces for someone to look at until they achieve an emotional response, without any thought or genuine investment. But it's certainly not all of them, and hopefully Wlam made you realize that maybe your fic was genuinely worthy of being in the feature box. You might have intended it as a joke/satire, but your innate abilities as a writer made you able to take something that people got a lot of the same of over and over, and turned it into... well maybe not something new, but at least something different. And that's a mighty fine thing in a genre inundated with recycled content.
4137332
Ok, quick question/poll. If MrNumbers hadn't told anyone that the story was meant to be a satire, (and you hadn't seen any comments implying such,) would you have thought that the story was satirizing or parodying sadfics? If yes, please upvote this comment. If no, please downvote this comment. (If you think this comment is dumb, please leave a reply.)
Huh, and I was actually feeling bad I hadn't read it yet. (Cuz, you know.. It's you.) But I just don't like reading sadfics.
You know, I'm not sure if I feel trolled or not just yet. Surely that wasn't the intent, I know. All the same there's a feeling one gets when there's a joke at hand and everyone else seems to have caught it quite quickly. If you had just layered on standard "Orphan Scootaloo freezes to death in the street" sort of stuff I might have caught on. But no. You went and gave everypony their own lives, in brief, and showed how they affected the world around them before their passing. The extended lore built onto the Tree of Harmony (with some good AJ in there). A worried, but not explicitly bleak, look at the future from one who will have to live through it.
I guess you suck at sucking. It's a very Gomez Adams thing, so don't sweat it too hard.
The story struck me as a bit 'off' to be coming from you, but I had a lot of the same thoughts as in 4137191 (except not sarcastically), so I filed it under 'good for its genre' and chalked it up to an exercise in playing with same. I've certainly felt the urge to go 'no, you guys, if you want to write that kind of fic do it like this,' so that's how I took it.
4137329
It was never my intent to critique the story. That's why I put the disclaimer, so there'd be no confusion. I only responded to the blog post in which he explained his intentions. It's those intentions, and the thought process behind them, that I criticized. And since the story never mattered as much to the author as the point he was trying to make--he himself says he put minimal effort into it--I don't see how whether I read the story or not affects the validity of what I said.
That's exactly the point I was trying to make. Sad stories, in and of themselves, are not bad--no more so, at least, than stories that try to be funny or scary etc. What matters is how it's done. How much effort is put into it, for example, or how original it is.
To me, they're both equally lazy. If he'd put effort into a story that corrected the things he feels sad stories often do wrong, I could've respected that. But intentionally writing a mediocre story just to prove a point and making people who have read the story feel foolish is, to me, no better, and no less pretentious.
4137256
Shall we continue to build palace after palace for the rich, or aspire to a more noble cause, and build decent housing for the poor? How does the Senate vote?
4137378
Right. It's not meant to to be satire in and of itself. It's just a demonstration of how you can half-arse the genre and still come out with something that-
Oh neverfucking mind.
Look. Satire isn't parody. You can mock something with satire without people ever realizing the intent. The intent was to get a mediocre sadfic to do better than most of my other stories, not to get a joke/bad/mocking sadfic written.
4137396
I told him he should have thrown in CMC tombs with little shields laid at their bases that were carried there by the granddaughters of Diamond Tiara or something.
Having thought about it some more, I'm going to say this: I unironically liked it, but that's mostly because I (perhaps wishfully) caught more than a hint of Lunajack at the end.
Because I'm shipper trash.
4137528
"MrNumbers wrote a lazy sadfic and people lapped it up," isn't what's interesting.
"MrNumbers wrote a lazy sadfic and it did far better in rankings than his good, competent (and not-sad!) works by a ridiculous margin," is interesting.
4137294 I agree with your point about manipulation, but take it one step further: EVERYTHING, especially that which we consider ''entertainment'' is meant to be manipulative in some fashion. Stories, Music, Paintings, Video Games, all of it is intended to tug at the strings of at least one of your emotions. After all, If it didn't tug at ANY emotions, what would there be for us as the audience to care about?
4137547
Only friendshipping, to console Luna after the obvious sinking of her TwiLuna hopes.
Obviously.
Obviously, we're all shipper trash here.
4137329
Can they not simply entertain?
So basically, me and the other three or four people who gave detailed editorial notes were totally wasting our time.
In hindsight, it should have been obvious. I remember going through it and thinking "this is massively underwritten for a MrNumbers story; there are basic construction techniques he's more than familiar with he's completely ignoring."
This also explains a lot. I actually debated suggesting you should make the chapter title the story title, because if you're doing this straight the chapter title, which is interesting and evocative, works a lot better than the very, very generic actual title.
4137528
I don't know that this is true. If people think that your satire isn't a satire, that means that either you've failed as a writer or (more rarely) the audience has failed en masse. In either case you haven't gotten your message across, which means your story didn't do what you wanted it to do, which is usually regarded as a failure.
That's not the same as writing a satire, tho. That's you setting out to prove a point about the readership, which is a different thing.
4137329 Prefacing this by saying I'm engaging with your statement in a vacuum, rather than as part of the conversation with Lightning Bearer as it relates to this story... I would actually disagree with your broader assertion, here, in that I don't think a story is bad if the author forgets to include a message or a lesson.
Partly, that's because I disagree that stories are for the teaching of morals, because I think that's too narrow. It's certainly a valid purpose for stories, but I don't think that stories which just set out to simply be, hmm, a spectacle, whether that be of adrenaline fuelled action or sappy fluff, are a bad thing. Shallow, yes, but that's not the same thing. We live in a hectic and at times overwhelming world; sometimes, shallow enjoyment is exactly what we need to unwind from the days rigours.
But mostly, I disagree because you seem to be demanding a lot of authorial intent with regards to messages, where I cleave very closely (somewhat ironically, given the last recording I sent you) to Death of the Author as a concept, and as such I put a lot more stock in the themes and messages that the audience takes away from a story than those which the author intended to put in. I don't think an author has to try to say something important with a story, for that story to say something important; quite a few classical masterpieces struck a chord with their audience pretty much by accident.
4137597
4137609
Well, that might just be personal belief, then, but as far as I know -- stories have a point. They need a point, in fact, because stories shape people. We're told fairy tales as kids 'cause that's a great way to teach a lesson. Most movies/books/comics you read, if not ALL of them, have a message or theme.
I guess it's not something to teach, or a moral per se. You don't have to end every story like aesop, trying to make the life of your reader a better one -- but be it because your story is "about" something, or because you as an author want to deliver a particular message, everything needs a theme aside from simply "it makes you sad." It's not a preachy thing, I'm talking about stuff like how The Shining delivers a message about addiction and family.
Bottom line: wether you like it or not, people are gonna get a message out of your story. If your story doesn't have a message, which is what people tend to remember about the whole story once it's over and time has passed, then whatever you wrote is probably not gonna pass the test of time. All great stories have a message, subtle as it might be.
Like, a story can just be shallow fluff, but it'll still be about something, like the wonders of family. Numbers' story here was about nothing. It had no theme, no running moral, no nothing. If there's something in it, it's not because of the author, it's a reader inserting a message in the story to make it memorable. 'Cause said reader thinks stories should have a message, I guess.
That'd be related to Death of the Author, I suppose, which is a completely different nut to crack. Personally, I'm not a believer of the thing. If the author who wrote the story doesn't have a saying in what the story is about, then chances are he fucked up and failed to deliver a message. Doesn't make his intent less true.
The more attached the public is to the work, the hardest it is to accept the author's intentions, tho, I get that. I have a hard time thinking Farenheit is not about censorship, whatever Bradbury says. But fair's fair.
(And to be honest, when Barthes wrote Death of the Author, he was pretty much talking about using the author's biography as a tool to interpret the story -- saying that "this author's aunt was a Nazi, so obviously every fucking symbol in his work is a metaphor for the Nazis".)
Eh. Literature is complicated. But I stand by my idea that stories have messages -- but I understand that it might be an opinion and not a fact, so what the fuck do I know?
4137617
4137601
I agree with Muruschio in that it backfired, personally. Numbers wanted this to be a funny little meta thing, but it exploded on him, and a shit ton of people understood the fic in a completely different way.
He definitely failed in doing what he set up to do. He's just explaining what he wanted to do, it's just -- he clearly failed.
(Still love you, Numbers, bby).
4137640
Totally agree that a story should go somewhere, whether it results in an anvilicious aesop or not. I'm on the opposite pole regarding death of the author / author's intent, given that an author (Numbers included) could be unknown, silent, confused, or outright lying about their intent. Not that I think Numbers is lying here, but the failure of his intention doesn't negate the satisfaction that hundreds of readers found in his "meta over-troped sadfic satire turned feels-y cathartic meditation on mortality."
4137601
And I'm very sorry about that!
Which is why it was the title for it in the Writeoff!
As to this, and some others like
4137649 4137617 etc.
Chuck Finley nailed it. I'll even throw in "Unedited" for relevancy.
4137640
Agreed. The scope of my disagreement is limited to shades of meaning here; "a story should mean something," rather than "a story is a vehicle through which the author delivers a lesson."
Well, my own perspective is basically that literature, and to a degree all fiction, is fundamentally a collaboration between the text and the audience; the author's intent only matters insofar as it shows through in the text. Which it's quite likely to - they wrote it, after all. But the story the author wrote is not the story they intended is not the story someone reads; each step in that chain is separated by an imperfect translation, and both author and reader each bring different life experience to the table that influence how they interpret the text, and none of these interpretations are inherently less valid than any other.
The author's intent isn't wrong, merely... Unimportant. Or at least, not intrinsically more important than that of anybody else - though in practice, their familiarity with the story will almost always grant their interpretation a weight of expertise that the average layperson's does not. Then again, authors aren't infallible, and their very familiarity can blind them to alternate interpretations.
Like, you say that MrNumbers' story was about nothing, but what I got from it was partly a character study in how the Elements met their end, and partly about, hmm, let's phrase it as, "when the end comes, it's often not nearly as bad as you feared,"; there was a recurring fear that the death of the Tree of Harmony would be a great calamity, yet it turned out to be already dead by the time the story started, and nothing terrible happened within the scope of the story. This in turn was echoed by each of the Mane 6 meeting death pretty much as they'd have liked to.
Is that what MrNumbers intended? I think we can pretty conclusively say 'no'. Nevertheless, I don't think that makes it an invalid interpretation of the text.
4137640
4137702
I don't think stories necessarily need to "be about something" in order to stick in people's minds. A story can be, to twist a word, illustrative. If a story evokes an image, a feeling, a mood, etc. (maybe even a character or object,) strongly enough, then that will be what people remember about that story after reading it. Though I'm mostly talking about short stories (and really short stories) here, instead of proper narratives and stuff.
So you tried to write a shitty sadfic and ended up writing a pretty good sadfic? wtg. That sounds like something you'd do.
fwiw, I agree with you. Some comedies are exceedingly shitty, and we call those "a cheap laugh". Shitty sadfics and their ilk are "a cheap cry". They're easy, exploitative, low-hanging fruit. Pick a random tragedy and go to town.
I hadn't quite gotten around to reading the story yet when I saw this blog post. So of course, I had to go see what all the fuss was about. I mostly did not find it very sad. Makes me wonder whether that's because I knew in advance why it was written, or whether I've just become that jaded.
4137703
Nah, not at all. Providing commentary and editing is a skill just like any other, and it needs to be practiced. Like, I had to spend a good ten minutes ruminating on how Applejack should be seen to talk and act before I decided "Yeah, no, her voice is off." That's time well spent in my opinion.
What's interesting to me is not even that you set out to write a bad, generic sadfic and "failed" at it, but that you made a very late entry in a very crowded genre.
If you had written this in 2011 or 2012, it would have been cutting-edge. But because you wrote it in 2016, it is a latecomer to an extremely crowded field. That's interesting to me; when do fields that are innovative become stale? Does a good story become bad simply because of when it was published? When something becomes a cliche, does that cheapen it?
The form of this story, of Luna (but it could have been Celestia or Twilight) ruminating over the Death of Harmony is a classic one. It's such an obvious line to take; what happens when the destined heroes move on? Lots of people have done that. But they did it a long time ago. You couldn't write Eternal today (to pick one of many examples) and have it have the same impact even if it were the same story.
The other obvious choice for "what is the most cliched FiM story you could write" would have been "Princess Luna is having trouble adjusting to modern-day Equestria and is consumed with guilt over her actions as Nightmare Moon." That's a whole damn sub-genre onto itself and, again, back in 2011-2012 it would have been some cutting edge stuff. Now, if you wrote a story like that, like as not it'll vanish without a trace unless you're an established author already. I don't think Andrew Talon could write Progress today and get anything like the reception he once did.
And then you have the stories that have been running for such a long time such that the state of the art changed out from under them, like Myths and Birthrights or This Platinum Crown. They're not bad stories, and they sort of get grandfathered in because of when they started, but I don't think you could get away with starting them today and have them have the same reception.
It's all very interesting.
I read it, actually laughed a bit here and there. Rarity's wishes not being honored upset me a little. Fluttershy's seemed appropriate enough. Dash went down exactly as she would have wanted, doing something awesome. Pinkie mad me a little misty, but then, I can't help but react to Pinkie being sad even if I know I am being manipulated. Twilight seemed to have been glossed over when AJ showed up as a crotchety old coot.
I guess the problem was the premise. I don't believe Harmony can truly die any more than I believe Chaos can die. The physical avatars, sure. But I suspect some sort of rebirth will happen.
I feel slightly less guilty now. For an author whose work I normally love, when I read it, it gave me a resounding meh.
4137194 I'd be surprised if many of those upvotes turned around.
I think you achieved what you set out to do: write a generic, popular sadfic.
The result of this being that most people who read it got the feels they came for, gave it a thumbs up, and went on with their day/night without the story having had any lasting affect.
They most likely won't come back to the story again and won't even give it the consideration required to change their vote.
I remembered reading the story a day or two ago and double-checked what my response had been.
Just 'shy of favourite" library I have for stories that I'd most likely read again but didn't quite hit the level of 'favourite'.
I'd given it a thumbs up but hadn't commented on it or added it to any of my libraries, even the "
So sadly, yeah, job well done.
I'm vaguely reminded of the Angry Penguins kerfuffle with Ernest Lalor "Ern" Malley.