Fallout Equestria is an unbelievable mess! · 7:58am Dec 18th, 2021
When I was 20 chapters into Fallout Equestria I posted this in the Post-Apoc Emproium discord:
So I'm 20 chapters into Fallout Equestria and little Pip is kind of getting on my nerves
I know it's a narrative and a lot of it has to be to drive the plot but her decision making keeps fucking shit up and endangering people
And then her whining about how she has a reputation for being a hero and it's got me thinking " if you don't want to be a hero then stop doing heroic things"
Her decision making literally almost got her killed with that ghoul doctor in the scooter building. She falls through the window and gets picked up by a manticore, picks up her gun with her magic and decides not to shoot it "because I have to see where it takes me" and then when she's stealthed she like "I'm not gonna kill the doctor yet cause I want to see what he's planning" THEN uses the memory orb and wakes up captured and about to be injected. Like, what the hell is wrong with her? Shoot the guy then view the orb, or, shoot the fuckin manticore so you aren't in a position where you're going to be killed by your own stupidity. Imagine if she didn’t give that filly her gun. little pip is dumb
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A mistake is a mistake. Like when she walked out of the vault for the first time and got captured. By the time she made it to tenpony tower she should already have been acclimated to the wasteland and is still "making mistakes" like when she walked through the door in the tunnel and got lit up by an armor piercing turret. The problem isn't that she's making mistakes, it's that she's not learning from them.
There hasn't been a point yet where she's like "hold up, I shouldn't rush around that corner, there might be a turret" and starts doing tactical cornering or something. There hasn't been a discussion yet like "look pip, this is the same kind of shit that got us kicked out of new appleloosa, you gotta start thinking things through better"
Cause like, She decides she's going to liberate the slaves, which severs trade-ties to the town, causes a bunch of the conductor ponies to get killed in an ambush afterwards, and crashes their train in the process which gets her and party kicked out of the town. This could've been a moment of self-reflection but she later decides to break into Pinkie Bells' barn to steal the Party Time Mint-Als recipe because Calamity made her addicted to them. That's small potatoes but she kept making decisions like that, decisions that got her and her party in trouble because she wanted to save somepony, or wanted something. Like walking into that tower without waiting for Calamity and encountering all those Alicorns. She came so close to dying so many times in that chapter it broke my suspension of disbelief a little bit It's just getting hard to believe that no one has pulled her aside at this point and told her to calm TF down, they just keep going along with her ideas.
Now that I’m 27 chapters in, I gotta say, this story is an unbelievable mess.
Meaning, it’s just not believable or immersive in any capacity. And I’m gonna explain why, because If I have to read this story to be able to “write” my own story, then I’m going to give my criticisms from a literary perspective.
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Little Pip is a stupid, self righteous, Mary Sue
Littlepip is a little bit of a Mary sue. She always gets herself and her crew into danger with no regard to their safety. Sure, there’s prose enough to explain her reasoning, but it’s mostly just “I gotta go save these people because it’s the right thing to do” I complained about this in my above quote, and it even got to the point where characters are calling her out on her behavior, but it just feels mean spirited and like their lamp shading it. I’m almost 700 pages into the physical copy and there STILL hasn’t been an in-universe conversation addressing these concerns in a way that is impactful or meaningful. Sure there’s some bitchy lines form Velvet Remedy, but nothing changes, it’s still Little Pip doing stupid shit, getting hurt, then getting berated by her team, just for it to happen again in the next chapter.
Although Little Pip mules and whines about shit like “My friends are my family, and curiosity is my virtue” but the way her actions are written, it betrays that regard to her companions and even herself. She gets shot by that automatic turret well into book, She goes off for a walk at Tenpony Tower and gets into an adventure with Alicorns, she looks at a memory orb while invisible and while the evil scientist was still alive. At this point it’s well beyond just dropping the train and getting kicked out of new appaloosa, at this point it really can’t be forgiven because she’s not acclimating to the wasteland anymore. She’s already killed plenty of ponies, been in plenty of unbelievable battles,. She should know by now to be a little more careful, or a little more tactical, but she doesn’t.
In the beginning? Sure. There was great characterization there. Claustrophobic in the giant wasteland and surviving on her own. Believable that she gets captured from her inexperience and creating a chekovs gun which leads to Montery Jack being executed later in the story.
A Mary Sue is a type of fictional character, usually a young woman, who is portrayed as unrealistically free of weaknesses. And that sue sounds a lot like littlepip, because by the middle of the story she’s got an arsenal of weapons, has come close to death several times but hasn’t died. Comers up with all these off-the wall plans that somehow end up working out, and if they don’t she’s not in trouble for long, and she’s surrounded by a band of unbeatable mary sues as well
Her team is too overpowered
But none of that really seems to matter. Because she’s got this nigh indestructible team to back her up, so there’s no need for her to learn, or fail. Not when she has Little Mackintosh and several other guns, a Pegasus with a battle saddle with a magical weapons and anti-material rifles, a steel ranger elder in power armor, a medic, a fucking radioactive gryphon, and by chapter 25, a zebra that knows how to do ju jitsu or some shit.
Even her team are all a bunch of Mary sues. Velvets characterization boils down to being a bitch to Little Pip and rolling her eyes at calamity like she’s saying “oh boys!”. Steelhooves is robotic and flat, sure he’s a ghoul who hooked up with Applejack, but beyond that, he’s so stoic and placid he’s nothing more than a floating head half the time who’s only purpose seems to be backup in firefights and a vehicle for conversation.
Calamity just flies around killing shit, bragging about how good he is at kill shit, and then by the middle of the book was reduced to the group’s driver when they repair a magical bus that takes them all over the wasteland.
Every fight ends with the group being victorious and suffer no real casualty or damage, and this point is lampshaded as well because there’s a point where someone says “we look like grim reaper ponies” and the story just continues onto their quest to [checks notes] free some slaves.
Why slavers? / Little Pip completed her main quest too fast
Why are slavers the main motivation driving the story? like, there’s an entire wasteland full of death, strife, inequality, tribalism, and slavery is what’s propelling the story forward? Not only that, but finding velvet remedy was LittlePip’s main quest, her reason to leave the vault, and she accomplished that by only her second town, when she just so happens to find out about slavers and decided “I gotta put a stop to this” even though she’s fresh out of the vault, just got captured, has no idea where Velvet Remedy is, almost gets killed by Calamity, but sure, fuck it, let’s get addicted to Mintals and go fuck up a bunch of slavers, conveniently find Velvet in the slaver town doing what? Helping the slaves? And then it’s like, lets fuck the town up, fight an Alicorn by dropping and entire train car on it, and then get ambushed and have the story LITERALLY GO OFF THE RAILS at that point when Little Pip decides to derail the train
That’s not even an in-universe fuck up either, that’s the author jumping the shark and completely fucking up the trajectory of the story from that point forward, and here’s why.
Thematic dissonance “More Equestria than Fallout”
You gotta think, Fallout Equestria is a blending of two universes. Fallout, and Equestria.
Fallout is an atompunk, retrofuturistic setting influenced by the post-war culture of 1950s United States, with its combination of hope for the promises of technology and the lurking fear of nuclear annihilation.
Atompunk (also known as atomicpunk) relates to the pre-digital period of 1945–1969, including mid-century modernism; the Atomic, Jet, and Space Ages; communism, Neo-Soviet styling, and early Cold War espionage, along with anti-communist and Red Scare paranoia in the United States; underground cinema; Googie architecture; Sputnik and the Space Race; comic books and superhero fiction; and the rise of the American military–industrial complex.
In this alternative atompunk "golden age", vacuum tubes and atomic physics serve as the foundations of scientific progress, while transistors are not as scientifically important in this world. As such, a bizarre socio-technological status quo emerges, in which advanced robots, nuclear-powered cars, directed-energy weapons, and other futuristic technologies are seen alongside 1950s-era computers and televisions.
Where the fuck is that in Fallout Equestria?
Sure, we’ve got a thin veneer of it, like the robots the group fights, or the weapons they use, but the theming of the universe is more Equestria than Fallout. Sure, it was written back when fallout 3 was the only fallout game, but everything in the fallout universe was just retrofitted or changed to be pony instead of blending both universes. That’s my opinion at least, and opinion is subjective, but looking at things objectively, stimpacks are magic healing potions, the enemy are zebras who use necromancy, the nukes are magic, and the Megaspells themselves, as vaguely described as a spell framework, are the main focus instead of nuclear annihilation. It’s just toothless. Where’s the atompunk? Where’s the communist or “zebra” paranoia (and steelhooves being a d-bag to xenith doesn’t count)? Where’s the industry, the science, the sci-fi?
Instead we got these insanely overpowered Alicorns who can teleport, turn invisible, generate impenetrable shields, amplify each other’s magic, use mind control, magically induce heart attacks, immune to radiation and taint, can regenerate wounds and lost limbs in radiation, and can supercharge themselves in radiation
Like what the fuck?
KKat didn’t have enough material to work with? There’s Fallout 1, 2, tactics, 3, and even The game Wasteland to pull from, and they have to go and invent this grossly overpowered buffoonery to have an antagonistic force in the story?
And oh my god, the introduction of Red-eye, the Pitt, and Unity is just fucking nonsense
Red Eye, The Pitt, Unity
KKat just ripped entire speeches from John Henry Eden to introduce Red-Eye. Not only were they ripping iconic lines straight from MLP to use as character lines through the entire story (I don’t really know why that bothered me, but it felt lazy), but pulling entire speeches from Eden, rewording them to fit into some slavery-driven Unity pipe-dream nonsense doesn’t make me immersed in the believability of this character, his beliefs, or his causes. it completely kills it. Especially after playing fallout 3 to get notes for my own story, listening to Enclave Radio, and having the speeches fresh in my mind right before I started reading them in Fallout Equestria.
I can’t mentally separate the characters.
Eden’s speeches were made to characterize HIM specifically.
Eden had originally been created to serve as an automated monitoring system for the Raven Rock military base, programmed to ensure continuity of government in the event of a national catastrophe, and was tasked with coordinating communications between the many government installations scattered across the country. He slowly became self-aware and began to study the extensive archives left to him, mainly those of the American government. His favorite entries in the database were those about the American presidents, thus he modeled his own personality on information based in those archives
Red Eye is a pony that grew up in Stable 101. Who believed that the Stable inhabitants were being close-minded, hoarding technology and medicine, so he killed them. Then he formed a slave operation in Fillydelphia.
Ripping these speeches which were supposed to characterize Eden and attempting to stitch them onto the personality of Red Eye just creates this tonal incongruency because it goes from turns from an AI's attempt to re-establish the wasteland with the Fallout 3 enclave to Red Eye’s attempting to join Fallout Equestria’s version of Unity: a telepathic hive-mind under the control of The Goddess in which all alicorns exist that was ripped from The Master in fallout 1, the founder and leader of the Unity, a mutant-led organization dedicated to the transhumanist transformation of mankind in post-nuclear New California.
It’s just a fucking mess, and that’s not even the worst yet!
The Pitt
When I was nearing the Fillydelphia part of the story I stopped and played the pitt DLC, not only so I could take notes for my own story, but because I hadn’t played it yet and I didn’t want my experience with the pitt to be butchered by reading about it first in Fallout Equestria (I’m glad I did)
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was not hit directly by atomic bombs during the Great War, the water from the nearby rivers soon became highly irradiated, changing the area's inhabitants in several ways over the following decades.
The main quest involves the player taking on the role of a slave in order to investigate rumors that the raider boss of the Pitt has discovered a cure for mutations that have plagued many inhabitants of the Pitt.
To surmise the DLC, you go into the steelyards, collect some scrap, fight in the pit, make your way uptown to meet the slaver masters, then fight your way out through a slave revolt taking out the cure, which is the slaver master’s baby that they were tying to use slave labor to find a way to pass the cure onto everyone.
Very morally ambiguous, and good interactive story telling,
Fallout Equestria’s The Pitt is garbage. A fucking toothless joke of what could have been a good way to introduce some struggle for Little Pip to deal with. They sure built it up like it was going in that direction at the start of the chapter twenty five
I’d forgotten what it felt like to be alone. I had spent my whole previous life alone. I hadn’t had any friends growing up; and my mother, as much as I loved her, wasn’t the sort of parent a filly could feel “together” with. Alone is cold and dull and miserable. It is a void that aches to be filled. And the little hobbies and distractions that I had turned to had never really filled that hole. Because it was a hole that could only be filled with companionship.
Growing up, the closest I had come to that was music -- the singing on the Stable Two broadcast. At least with music, there was another pony involved who was trying to make a connection. And I could pretend that pony was trying to make a connection specifically with me, not just anypony who was listening. The illusion was never perfect, and it couldn’t be held beyond the song. But while the music was playing, the mirage of friendship helped protect me against the cold.
Needless to say, it was the songs of Velvet Remedy which I had cherished the most. I had even fallen in love, I think, with my dream of her. I still remembered the hurt when my ridiculous and unrealistic mental image of her was shattered by the real thing standing in a train car, a non-prisoner in a slaver town. And even then, I think, I still clung to little fragments of my dream-Remedy until the day she shot me.
That said, I wouldn’t have traded my very real friendship with the actual pony for anything, much less for a relationship with my two-dimensional daydream. What I had was better. Far better. Because it was real.
When I left Stable Two, my life changed forever. And the most drastic change wasn’t the vast open wasteland, or the sickly sunlight that pushed its way through the clouds. It wasn’t the horrors and wickedness and cruelty I had seen, or the daunting amount of pain I had suffered, or even the growing river of pony blood drowning my hooves.
The most drastic change was friendship. And it started just a few days out of the Stable with a pony named Calamity.
Calamity was unlike any pony I had ever met. He was fearless and noble and just in a way that I could only aspire to. And he cared about me in a way nopony, not even my mother, ever did. He was willing to stand by me, even when I was being foolish and wrong. Not that we never disagreed, because we did often enough. But he gave me the benefit of the doubt. He trusted me and he was somepony I knew I could trust in return.
I freely admit that I had been jealous when Calamity and Velvet Remedy had started to gravitate towards each other. (And, in retrospect, I have to wonder: was my conviction that they were a couple already accurate or a self-fulfilling prophesy?) How foalish I was to feel that way. But friendship was and is still new to me, and I had many lessons to learn about it. (And many, many more to go, if the sheer number of Spike’s stories are to be believed.)
Only after I had come to accept their closeness, and take comfort in it, was my heart really open enough to embrace Homage. I had friendship, but the void goes deeper than that. I wanted more than companionship. I yearned for love and physical intimacy.
This could’ve been the perfect moment to characterize her a little more. Maybe have her reflect on the seemingly insurmountable task in front of her, maybe reflect on what brought her to this moment, but no, lets reminisce about music, love, and physical intimacy while she’s carted into a slave Pitt where it’s implied that she’s going to get raped by the guards but then she isn’t.
She meets some bully characters and gets in a fight with them, somewhere along the way she has a random and completely unexplained ideological shift to where she’s suddenly agreeing with Red Eye’s philosophy after spending the last few chapters only vaguely hinting that it’s not good rhetoric; and that’s it.
Then she fights some parasites, which are this story’s Troggs in the steelyard, then fights In the pitt, and this is where KKat just starts masturbating with the keyboard.
Xenith
I fucking HATED this chapter
Not only does it start with some epitaph about zebras being equestria’s enemy while spending the entire story not really focusing on them at all, but it’s insulting how xenith, the story’s zebra character is introduced: by some unnamed character giving Littlepip and the reader ALL of the backstory and exposition, standing right behind her the entire time, but when it’s Little Pip’s turn to fight Xenith, she’s placed into a life or death situation.
She gets her rib broken and her lung punctured in the fight with Xenith, which ends with Littlepip telekinetically choking the zebra and the crowd chanting for her to kill.
She’s won the fight and has to kill the zebra or she herself will be shot. The ONLY option for little pip to do is Kill xenith, or be killed herself. That’s the corner she was written into, and that was her only option. By all rights, she should have killed xenith, but instead? This bullshit happens:
My mind flashed to the memory of how the barrels opened. I didn’t need to pull them down, just flip the latches. Latches were easy.
My horn glowed brightly.
Stern pulled her anti-machine rifle forward and peered at me through its scope. “Finish it now!”
The latches on the barrels sprung open. All of them.
My PipBuck clickclickclicked urgently. True to Number Four’s predictions, most of the barrels held glowing green sludge. And weapons. The barrel’s released their contents, raining down implements of death. A magical-energy lance, a sword, a chainsaw (a chainsaw!?) and even a couple firearms. I let them fall where the barrels dropped them. It was the sludge I wanted.
The luminescent goop was barely translucent. I spun it around and over the inside of the cage, creating a glowing green curtain, thin as film but enough to obscure me inside. I didn’t want any of those griffins or guard slavers to be able to take shots at me. Immediately, I galloped into a new position; as I predicted, Stern fired a shot at where I had just been standing.
I felt tears in my eyes. The pain in my chest was burning, my breathing becoming more ragged as I tried to maintain focus in so many places at once. Each breath felt a little like drowning.
I wrapped another telekinetic sheath around myself, canceling out my weight, then extended it to wrap about the zebra as well. There was never any question that I would be taking her with me. The thought of leaving her behind here had never entered my mind.
My vision blurred. I forced myself to keep focus. My horn flared brighter, a layer of overglow erupting from it. It occurred to me that a keen-eyed griffin might be able to spot the glow of my horn through the curtain of muck.
But I needed to keep enough focus and channel enough power for just one more trick. And I needed more time.
I telekinetically grabbed the magical energy lance and wedged it across the double-doors seconds before slavers started slamming against them, trying to get in.
The curtain weakened, holes appearing along the top of it. One of those tears was almost directly above me, revealing the door in top of the cage which I had spotted earlier, bound closed with a simple padlock. I kicked off, sending myself floating upwards, my eyes fixed on the padlock. I had no bobby pins. My screwdriver had been stolen from me.
I should not need them.
Manipulating multiple objects that were out of sight was tricky, but I had pulled pins from grenades hidden in a sack. And I knew locks. I knew tumblers and internal mechanisms. I should be able to pick a lock with my magic alone.
Reaching out with my magic, I enveloped the padlock in a gentle glow. My own horn flared as a second layer of overglow burst around the first. Streams of light poured from my head.
I felt a bullet lash past me, followed by the sound of a gunshot. Below, the blows against the double doors were causing the magical energy lance to bend.
I was still floating upward, carrying the unconscious zebra. We were nearing the cage. But our ascent was slowing alarmingly. One of the griffins above fired down at me, but the shot sparked off one of the bars of the cage.
So to summarize, she has a mortal wound, a broken rib and a punctured lung, and she manages to:
- Magically fling slime everywhere, obscuring herself from view
- Lift herself and xenith out of the pit
- Telekinetically pick a lock while being shot at and holding herself up with another pony
- Run along the top of the cage, dodging bullets, while weaving
- Jumped out of the pit into the fun farm
- Was carried by the zebra up the tracks of the roller coaster
- Used her magic to help them climb
- Rode the coaster down the track , still dodging shots and rockets
- Used her magic to guide the coaster into a tunnel
- Lost her telekinesis and looked at some terminals and galivanted around the hotel
- Got attacked by an armored black alircon infused with radiation
- Killed it with some balefire eggs she had conveniently just found in the scene prior,
- Get surrounded on the roof, then saved by pyrelight
- Get captured somehow, and taken to red eye who gives her a quest after finding out her friends had killed the raiding party he'd sent for them
All while having a broken rib and a punctured lung. With all the exertion, running, dodging, falling, being shaken around, her lung should have realistically collapsed, but no, she’s healed with bandages in a stall and later mend by Velevet Remedy; all because KKat didn’t want to have to kill the sexy zebra character that was introduced in this very same chapter.
This could have been the perfect opportunity for Littlepip to face the mortality of the wasteland, the harsh unyielding unforgiving realities of the wasteland, to go into the pitt, be forced into a decision that could change her mentality for the rest of the story (killing someone she doesn’t want to in order to save her own life), she still would’ve went to Red Eye anyway because she would have won the fight and that could have been vengeance fuel to kill him, but, no, she has to fucking mary sue her ass out of the pit, across fillydelpia, fight and kill some demigod of an irradiated alicorn, just to get captured anyway and then sent out on a quest.
Like what the fuck is even happening?
Campyness / lack of stakes
And insultingly enough, the whole story is tinged with this unbearable campiness
Holy Clopping celestia’s clit!
Holy sun baked mare pussy
Fuck me with luna’s wing!
At one point, Calamity even joked and called Little Pip “our intrepid adventure” when she was fighting the hellhound for the first time; that “how will our intrepid adventures get themselves out of this one?”, who, at this point, has already killed several alicorns in some hilariously unbelievable ways,
At this point I was already at a loss for hope for the writing of the story because it turned into a campy little adventure with no sense of stakes. They’re supposed to be in a wasteland where death could be around every corner and they don’t even seem to care. A fucking wasteland! A destroyed culture, a ruined irradiated land, with monsters and alicorns and raiders and slavers, but they don’t care, cause they’ve got a base at junction R7 and have all the firepower in the world and can fly around in their little magic school bus and share sodas with a dragon in a mountain-top cave and tell stories and laugh and smile about equestia’s past.
Meanwhile, the whole time I’m reading Spike’s chapter I was sitting there thinking to myself, “there’s probably a pony dying somewhere down there and I’d much rather be reading about him and his struggles than read any more of this monotonous campy bullshit."
Everything in this story is a fucking joke, like tee hee, lets give calamity a bath! oh merciful mareheat! like, you’re in a fucking wasteland, I know there’s supposed to be some lighthearted elements but half the time I feel like I’m reading scooby doo novel than a Fallout Equestria story. If ever finish this story and get to a part where Calamity or someone else eats a giant sandwich I’m throwing my physical copy off an overpass and praying it shatters someone’s windshield and causes a thirty-two car pileup.
No time to process anything that’s happened
By the time of writing this, I'm at the point in the story where they’ve already got 5 ponies, a phoenix, and enough firepower between them to take out a small government. They’re flying somewhere but get sidetracked when the big reveal comes that Steelhooves and the Rangers were sussing out LittlePip's vault and Littlepip demands they go to the vault to stop them from attacking.
And it’s like, they just pulled her from the pitt, there’s not going to be any downtime at all to reflect on what the fuck just happened? Not like any of the horrors of the Pitt were actually written about, sure some guards had whips and were big meanies to the slave character, but like, nothing was written that could’ve scarred Littlepip in any, or any of the other characters for that matter. I think Xenith might’ve been raped but the author sure doesn’t have the balls to go into detail about it or any of the other “Atrocities” littlepip constantly and self-righteously seethes about.
But like, they just keep going. They never stop, they never reflect, it’s just this quest then that quest then another quest, then a sex scene, then an another quest.
They’re just flying around in a bus and skipping the entire wasteland just to go from quest to quest to quest. It sure captures the fallout theme of questing, like someone played through a game of fallout 3 and just wrote down everything that happened and threw some ponies into it.
But this ins’t an rpg, this is a story. A naarritive. A work opf prose and fiction. So there’s a natural expectation of it sticking with the themes that have been established, yet the characters just jaunt from one quest to another. None of them every really sat around and talked about how the wasteland was affecting them, their hopes, their goals. Nothing like “we just killed like 15 ponies” or “yo these alicorns are kind of strong, and they’re coming for us!”. No real scenes that seemed to restoke those fires of tension, or reinforce the brutality of the wasteland, not since page 220 (End of volume 1 of the physical book, end of chapter 12 in the digital story). Hell, they didn't even give a fuck about Littlepip's vault until the plot demanded they had to. They didn't care about it, let alone mention all that much for the last 500 pages.
I know that it’s modeled after fallout 3 because that was the only game that was out when it was being written, maybe New vegas was around because they mention Ceasers and Sunset Sapirillas, but no one is allowed to use that as an excuse because it doesn’t hold water. Yes, fallout is a game about going from quest to quest to quest, but in a narrative, to make the characters and world believable, you need to fucking reflect on it. The characters need to be shown that they are capable of being affected by what happens in the story. They have to stop and sit and think about why they are temperate enough to kill can kill any pony with a gun, but shooting a foal is a nono cause it makes velevet remedy sad. No one even thought about why they're on this dumb ass quest to kill slavers anyway. Yeah they all joke about how LittlePip is in charge, but after the first alicorn fight I'd have to endure while questing with little pip, I know my ass would be asking her why freeing the slaves was so damn important. (holy fuck that's a bad line! XD)
But nope, now we got a vault now to save everypony because wittlepip is so angwy! That’s my famwy down there. Grrr, Wittpip angwy, gonna go in and bang bang and then hoof my clit while thinking of homage.
Like honestly, what the fuck happened to this story?
The fallout themes of isolation, desolation, fear, instability, etc were baked hard into volume 1. I felt it, I read it, but where the fuck did they go? I’m on volume 3 now, and at this point the story just feels like a hot white nothingness. There’s nothing that made the story what it was in the first 12 chapters present at all.
All the characters are just heads that float around, dropping campy lines at eachother, occasionally getting into a fight to remind you that it’s an action story and not actually some teenage girls smut-fic. No one ever really disagreeing with each-other; and if they do, they end up going along with littlepip anyway, and they never ever stop and reflect on any of the insane bullshit that’s happening to them. They tolerate it and expect us to tolerate it too. Why? I can't say.
Final thoughts
I mean honestly, with how KKat has treated this story, I’d go out on a limb and say they don’t give a fuck about Fallout, it’s themes, it’s elements, because they bungled the fuck out of this story. They took something that already has monstrous stakes, an overwhelmingly tough atmosphere that can break even the most resilient of personalities, thought “nah fuck that, Alicorns and campy one liners, also lets make little pip a horny lesbian!” and created this gigantic insult to both Fallout and MLP’s Equestria that’s written so inconsistently, that it’s amazing that the only thing consistent about the story is that KKat has a consistent writing style.
I hate this story. I want my $100 back for the physical copy.
So... then stop reading it? No one's forcing you to. Even if it's you feel you have to through the lens of needing to do it for 'research' ["because If I have to read this story to be able to “write” my own story"], why continue? You seem to have the gist of it. If it's that bad then ignore the author's canon and make it new and better. If anyone complains, counter them with the AU tag. You shouldn't have to force yourself to keep reading something you don't like. As for wanting your hundred bucks back... why did you buy a physical copy to start? Is the original not still available for free on this very site?
5618170 There’s something to be said for engaging with a piece of media you don’t like. Reading and critiquing it can still be fulfilling, if not in the same sense that the author intended. And you can learn a lot about what not to do, how not to model your writing, by seeing another writer do things that provoke disgust, or contempt, or just. Boredom. As so much of Fallout: Equestria does.
...Though, I’m also confused why you’d buy the print edition without knowing whether or not you’d like it. AFAIK, the version posted everywhere else is just as trite and poorly edited as the print edition.
5618170
5618939
Because reading 13k+ chapters while sitting in a computer chair is uncomfy as heck, I like physical books, and when I was big in the convention scene (before the last bronycon) I wanted to support the fandom so I bought the physical copy and the art book.