For some reason this was a bit of a Marmite story (if you're not British, Marmite is something you either love or hate, there is no middle ground). It definitely went down a lot better on Fimfic than EqD, but then again most things tend to. Whilst I'm not 100% sure, it seemed that most of the people who disliked it felt that it was 'unrealistic' because the characters wouldn't act like that (which is actually the entire point of the story) and everyone who did like it liked it because it resonated with them. At the end of the day, while I do take constructive criticism to heart, I write primarily for myself, and I was happy with it.
In a nutshell, the story is about that moment you get when you wake up and discover you're older than you thought you were, you don't know where the time went, and you're unconsciously living in the past. People you consider to be your best friends are people you've probably poked once or twice on Facebook in the past five years, and everything happening 'now' doesn't seem nearly as important as things that happened years ago. If you buy into that premise, the story works; if you don't, it doesn't, simple as that. I'm pretty certain that most of the people who disliked it fell into the 'younger' age range where you think 'no, that would never happen', and most of the people who did are a bit older and think 'yeah, that DID happen'.
People change, people drift apart, and the memory cheats. The entire story is about Apple Bloom's disconnect from the life she's living at the moment, and fixating on the life she did have as a child. Of course, Apple Bloom's function in the show is a character trying to 'find' her meaning in life, so it made perfect sense to me that she'd be the one the story would focus on. In this story she's older, she's found (apparently) her 'meaning' in life, but suddenly found that it wasn't satisfying and everything didn't tie itself into a neat bow. When she was young she was constantly looking towards the future as the 'perfect' time, and now she is older and in that future she was dreaming of, she has found herself yearning for an idealised past.
Do people really change that much? Absolutely. We have expectations built around people from how we knew them, which doesn't always reflect reality. We want to think that when people are out of our sight, they are suddenly put into 'storage' only to reappear exactly the same. Of course someone you knew as a child won't be the same person twenty-five years later, their lives would have been completely reshaped by their own experiences. What I did find interesting in some of the feedback were people saying things like "Sweetie Belle wouldn't be like that!" mirroring what Apple Bloom was saying. It's there in the story guys, that's the point. People change, the world moves on and you have to move with it or face being constantly disappointed.
Everyone has a 'golden age' which they look back on fondly, yet at the time I can just about guarantee they didn't think it was. Perhaps at that time they looked back on an even earlier time as the 'golden age' or forward to a time when things would be 'better'. The past is a foreign country we try to contextualise in terms of neat chunks of 'history'. There's a lot of flashbacks in this story, I think some wanted to hear more about the 'past' being alluded to, but it was always meant to be just brief flashbacks, slightly lucid, fantastical ones at that. It isn't a story that is a history lesson, but one about surviving history, contextualising it and moving on. Apple Bloom is unable to do so, she never found her moment of catharsis and so couldn't break free of its weight.
Are we supposed to sympathise with Apple Bloom? In my mind, no. While the story is written from her point of view and asking us the sympathise with her, we should instead feel sympathy for her. Some of her frustrations are valid, and some are inexplicable until the end which does explain a lot of her strange outbursts and actions (and so the story is best read as one chunk). The reader is supposed to feel uncomfortable, the story hangs with a mood of 'this isn't right, this isn't how things are meant to be'.
It's marked sad, but in the end it isn't really. It's hopeful. Like Apple Bloom, to move on we need to recontextualise our lives and connect with the present rather than the past, find out own way to catharsis. After all, life isn't about where we've come from, but where we are going. A lot of people seem to forget that.
I realise some of that may sound a bit waffly, so forgive me! It's a subject I struggle with a lot to be honest, and personally, I find my catharsis through writing. And sometimes, I write about pastel ponies.