The chronicles of Project Horizons : chapter 12 · 1:12am Nov 3rd, 2018
What was that chapter ? I am completely struck by the sheer inconsistency of tone, character development, a visible video game influence in how the structure of the story is made and I cannot for the love of me try to make sense of the memory orb in this very chapter and ergo of all the fiction but to adress all these issues, I have to elaborate a bit so let us start.
Let's go.
So, before adressing BlackJack's unstable evolution, I have to talk about this chapter's tone. The whole fiction really have an issue with finding a good medium between angsty drama and campy action scenes and it is really hard to manage when the author tries to do both in the same chapter. In this chapter, we start with a scene soaked in spirituality with BlackJack once again extremely emotional in front of a pony who is extremely proud of what his virtue is and he won't budge for her petty sentimentalism that don't take into account the reality of the place she's in. She's doing a little bit of soul searching at that moment but nothing really major. The scene ends with a chorus of voices that symbolizes the quest for peace, unity in this god forsaken land and while it might be heavy-handed to have that kind of scene after such a detached scene (the death of three random ponies whose name weren't even mention were hardly a good trigger for it.) It is nice to have some moments to reflect.
However, this chapter also have what I can only consider a Looney Tunes villain whose existence is a pain in my brain. Virgo Zodiac isn't an antagonist or even a villain, she was so deep into stupid cartoon tropes that I expected Bugs Bunny to come up at any time. Long monologues, easily tricked in explaining her plans, "no one understands my genius", complaining in front of her enemy ? This scene was unnecessary and if it is to introduce a new set of what ? Twelve new bounty hunters ? I am not thrilled. This fiction doesn't need more meaningless antagonists, it needs to advance towards a goal. Back to tone, those two intensely diverse scenes doesn't work in the same temporality, they clash with each other and it really makes me feel like the author is just making a huge sequence of scene without a through line.
It is even a deeper issue than I make it sounds to be because the way this story is written, it gives the impression that two Wastelands tries to coexist : the dark and gritty Wastelands with horror and gore written all over it and... the campy Wasteland where Blackjack throws one-liners, enemies are a joke only to boost BJ's badass meter and all traps are easily countered. With the tone of a scene, the author is making such that there isn't one coherent Wasteland. If BJ is throwing a one-liner, even in front of a huge mutated dragon, she basically is invincible because in the campy Wasteland, the hero can't die, the hero only exists to be badass.
As for Blackjack's evolution... Well, that's a doozy. This chapter is trying to do everything and nothing at the same time. First, after twelve chapters, we have one of the first signs that, yes, BJ has been endoctrinated in a Stable for the major part of her life and it should reflect on her thought process. Here, it's with the comment that "All males love sex, they're wired for that." and her inability to understand how a male could dislike sex. It could be subtly inferred in the earlier chapters but the author never did anything with it, it was just a thought in passing. Unfortunately, this sudden "reminder" that BJ has been endoctrinated comes against the special snowflake syndrom that BJ was afflicted by. During most of the fiction, she questionned the very idea of being a leader simply because of your bloodline (when it was the entire concept of her stable), she considered leading some ponies to the death chair to be murder when it was supposed to be extremely normal for her (but conversely she doesn't think that eating processed corpses are anything near cannibalism, which would be logical if she was consistent with the endoctrination.) and she even treated P-21 as an equal and even a friend when she had been raised all her life to consider second class citizens and fuckbois.
As such this sudden comment felt... odd coming from her since there really was no comment made earlier that could have cemented that idea. A throwaway line could really have done the job like "P-21, we had a pretty rough day. Care to fuck me a bit, I really need some relaxation." It would have been out of place and purposefully so and would have shown how deep the endoctrination goes... but I was willing to accept it until... the masturbation scene.
Okay, small tangent, what's with FO:E and PH and this sick obsession with their character being so horny we have to share it with the reader ? Does a mare masturbating is something attractive ? Does it say something about her character other than she wants to be fucked ? I don't understand why both KKat and Somber seems so attracted to making their protagonists a flamboyantly sexual character for no god damn reason.
Back on track, the masturbation scene or at least the "preparation to masturbation scene" showed that in her youth, BlackJack DID consider males to be second class citizen fuckboisa and honestly, it REALLY feels like some kind of retcon. A narrative 'oops' from the narrator who just realized that he forgot to treat his character like... a character. However, the worst part of that is : she's already starting to realize that she might have been awful to him when this scene should have cemented that, in her mind, she did nothing wrong. Hell, how more powerful would that scene have been if she had actually chuckled thinking back on the fact that P-21 was a bit of a wimp in his younger days.
It would have made a perfect setup from the inevitable scene of confrontation between the two characters but in my version, she would have crashed hard because there would have been no doubt in her mind. Here, we can already see she's in denial but she knows she did something awful to him. As such, this scene pissed me off, it's a mess and it robbed us of a purposeful scene. This story has no structure and it shows, not just with the character progression being quite hectic but also... the main structure.
The "Your friend have been captured. One is in the north, another in the south." sounds so video gamey, I almost heard "Main Quest updated" when I realized that the next few chapters would be about finding Morning Glory (who thankfully popped up at the end of this chapter) and P-21. This story is padding itself extremely hard. Also, side note : BJ killed and mutilated random bounty hunters but she spared Virgo Zodiac because she was interesting ? This character is flip flopping so hard on her principles, she's almost on Pip's level of absurdity and hipocrisy.
Finally, I don't get memory orbs. Now that I know that Stonewing died at the end of the previous memory orb... how did they extract the memory we just saw ? Better yet, why wasn't it the memory of Jetstream since the one we're seeing in this chapter talks about removing the painful memory in question ? Also, the idea that you could activate a memory orb by accident is stupid. Activating when surprised, yes, because you're focusing on it but activating it when just trying to raise it up ? How is it possible for this thing to have existed as useful tools ? It is the most unstable device ever created also... what would happen if you raised two memory orbs at once since they're so easily triggered ? It's a nitpick essentially but damn this thing never made sense in FO:E and PH sure doesn't try to make it more believable (despite introducing password protected orbs.)
Closing thoughts : Please... let's get going ? This story is doing a lot of things out of order quite poorly and really needs a tone doctor because I don't think I'll survive reading scenes where it is so obvious that a character just gained plot armor... at least FO:E tried to make it so all fights were serious.
I'll agree that there should have been more in the way of sexual demands (or similar) directed at P-21 before this point, but it wasn't entirely absent. What happened seems to have been he made some points about how he felt about sex and Stable 99 and how Blackjack looked at males, and then she took it to heart way too fast, starting from way too early. Leaving aside the speed that it happened with, how you take it that she didn't extend that thinking to the other males of 99, instead seeming to think of P-21 as just a weird one can probably go a couple ways: if you buy her thinking shallowly and not really applying the data point that the one stallion from there she's ever really talked with outside the 99 system feels that way, then that aspect kind of fits. If you don't, then it doesn't.
4963708
Honestly, if it wasn't for the newer chapter I read, I could have agreed. However, the BlackJack of the past that we saw is simply... another character. She treats male like... subequines as if she was killing a bug or breaking a piece of furniture. It doesn't make any sense for Blackjack to never show a shred of her former self when she has been indoctrinated so deeply. Also, it really feels weird that BJ, the mare so sex hungry that she can't help but mention it once per chapter, never asked for it directly or even ordered him. It would have been a far better way to show a consistent character that would inevitably evolve rather than a BJ that feels... alien to the one we're being presented in the audio recordings.