Gushing about a story I like

I'm catching up on Distaff Pope's Your Own Worst Enemy and I feel like I have to gush about this story and its predecessor The Unbearable Lightness of Being Sweetie Belle. I can't imagine anyone will read this, so it's largely just a place to display my thoughts.

Now Fanfiction gets a bad rap because it's often unedited and amateur, but anything that's completely unsupervised will have parts like that. Youtube has some awful videos and a lot of Twitch streams are boring and terrible. At the same time, Youtube channels like Tomska and Cinemasins have great videos that have a ton of time, thought, and love put into them. I've seen BriTANicK and Jack and Dean sketches that are funnier than most shows on TV. Similarly, I've read fanfictions that are better than most books. Was this paragraph necessary? No, anyone reading this has stumbled upon my page by accident and probably already reads fanfiction. Don't you just love meaningless fluff?

Anyway, the Unbearable Lightness starts off pretty standard and actually goes that way for quite a while. It's largely a drama story, but since it's set in Equestria, the author's not afraid to throw in magical plot elements that wouldn't work in a standard TV or book drama. It's near the end that it goes from just being a good, if not a bit drawn out, fanfiction to being something amazing. Without spoiling too much, the reader sees into the mind of a character who's slipping into depravity. They're addicted to drugs and alcohol, start to alienate their loved ones, and continuously justify their actions to an infuriating degree. These chapters are so uncomfortable to read that I actually felt like I couldn't breathe properly, but I also couldn't stop. The last few chapters immediately take the reader into the mind of another character and it's like coming up for air after drowning. Never before have I read something that genuinely made me feel like I've come back from the brink of death. Is that hyperbole? Probably, but the point still stands. I have 8 or 9 chapters to catch up on in Your Own Worst Enemy and the way that Distaff Pope mixes the very real experience of recovering from addiction with the supernatural dreaming world is outstanding. Was it done better in The Unbearable Lightness? Yes but most things in writing were done better in The Unbearable Lightness.

Drama's not even an area I'm interested in. My Top 5 Fanfictions are probably The Sweetie Chronicles: Fragments, The Unbearable Lightness, A Heart of Change, Backwards Through the Mirror, and the Hard Reset Series, with Alaborn's Clean Slate coming in at a close 6th. Of the top 5, this is the only one that doesn't focus primarily on magic and adventure. I think it says something that even without an interest in the topic it's one of my favorites.