Review of the story Journey to the Centre of the Rainbow by The DJ Rainbow Dash

The reviewer would like to apologise for the exceedingly long delay in completing their treatise on this story; their mind had become stuck in a holding pattern watching far too many documentaries on the Eastern Front. We hope that this will not alter their style in any way, shape, or form.

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Tell you what, seeing this story hove into view gave me a pretty good idea of how the Soviets must have felt eyeing Finland in late 1940. Ooh, look at this hapless little story, I thought. This seems to be your fairly standard shipfic-schlock, with very few news ideas to defend itself with. There’s the unrequited love of a close friend, there’s the title composed of such leering innuendo that one need only look at it to hear the guffaws of the moron who thought of it (glass houses) sullying one’s ears, and the earnest attempts to shove two characters, whose interactions together have barely extended beyond one introducing the other to a book series, into each others hooves. Now, my magnificent brain may not have seen action in quite some time, but I’m sure its abundant size and our huge stockpiles of quips will render Journey to the Centre of the Rainbow mere target practice; why, it will be almost too easy for a morale booster!

But, alas, rather like the Finns, this story managed to turn the tide in our little spat, thanks to its excellent use of two key factors: knowing the territory and ingenuity. And as a result of this, my resolve as I plodded through the first few chapters wavered and any criticism I had bogged down under the weight of how much I was actually involved in the story, although it didn’t bog down in the way that causes twenty-thousand of me to freeze to death without actually seeing battle. My critical side did regain the initiative somewhat towards the middle of the story, but by the end it had recaptured much of my lost interest and brought itself to a close with my mind in a stalemate.

You see… there’s no way I’m going to be able to continue this review without getting this out of the way first: Journey to the Centre of the Rainbow is a good story. Not great, and not one of my favourites, but it’s definitely above average, and certainly not just ‘not bad’. And with my throat still burning with the bile of watching hundreds of thousands of men hose down Panzers with their own innards, I think I’d like to get the reasons why I consider it good first.

Going back to what I said earlier, this story certainly knows the territory of ship-fics, and that the vast majority of them fail for two reasons: lack of faith to the characters, and not exploring enough of the lush and bountiful Raum of things to do with them. The story opens with Twilight in all of her neurotic glory, over-thinking what seems to be a trivial little problem, but it isn’t without good reason: she can’t think of what to get Rainbow Dash for her birthday, because she wants it to be something more than a material good. Because she wuffs her so!

But Rainbow doesn’t know it.

And that can hardly count as a spoiler!

What follows is a chapter of beautiful bickering between Twilight and Spike, as they throw pots and pans at each other before moving on to Katyushas, and then finally on to ideas as to what to get Rainbow Dash as a gift, before the whole story shifts into a trans-Equestrian trip as part of Twilight’s gift. Not only does this trip demonstrate a variant of rainbow motif that, honestly, I think is really fresh way of constructing the story, but it also allows for the magical realm of Equestria to be showcased to a frankly magnificent extent, to the point where such epic world building feels almost wasted on a silly romance story.

Speaking of the romance: that works too. There. I said it; it goes beyond the usual ‘oh my beloved doesn’t wuv me and we have nuthin in common and that’s so sad but oh wait what it turns out they do and we so do so that’s okay thanxbi!’ routine so popular with these ‘atypical pairings’--although given that TwiDash is the hot-pairing of the day that label hardly seems appropriate--and actually explores the development of the relationship, charting both the reasons for Twilight’s admiration/affection and Rainbow’s burgeoning feelings. Granted, they aren’t done perfectly, but we’ll get to that later, and to drag out the reasons now would detract from the main point I would like to make: a relationship of any kind between characters is only as believable as the circumstances surrounding it and how well those are established; the justification, if you will. This justification can be take many forms (common interests, complementing personalities, personal chemistry and enjoyment of the other’s company, admiration of acts, simple physical attraction, necessity of working/being in the same place, similar values--or lack of any of these if theirs is an antagonistic relationship) but suffice to say that Journey to the Centre of the Rainbow pulls this off well. Not perfectly, but well.

And that’s the end of my positive section. If you would like to skip the negatives, then leave this review with my personal opinion that this story is by no means neither flawless nor a waste of your time and investment.

But now, as a self-aware Hitler would have said when he appointed himself head of Army Group A, ‘It’s time for things to get much worse!’

The biggest flaw in Journey to the Centre of the Rainbow is perhaps its most subtle one: the way its written. It’s not written incompetently by any means, and I’m certainly regretting spending some time coming up with a comparison of overused commas to bones around Volgograd and being unable to use it, but there’s a distinct issue with the tone. Yes, it describes the acts of the characters well enough, but, while not being overly flowery, the prose does seem somewhat disconnected, as if the events were being reported on from thousands of miles away, by someone sealed in a concrete bunker who had no issue with throwing several hundred thousand more poor innocent words into its attempts to add more passion to the scenes.

This doesn’t make the story uninvolving, but that is largely due to the intense focus on the characters and how well they are portrayed; the issue becomes far more apparent during more descriptive moments, particularly with those of the locations that the trip is centred around. Said descriptions do their job of painting a basic, flat picture but do not add any depth to it; there’s little sense of awe or majesty in bland, simplistic details and being told how amazed the characters are at the sight, rather like how the report of a million casualties in a battle is a statistic, but this:

I was killed at Rezhev,
In a nameless bog,
In fifth company, on the left flank,
In a cruel air raid.

I did not hear the explosions
And did not see the flash.
Down to an abyss from a cliff,
No start, no end.

And in this whole world,
Till the end of its days,
Neither patches nor badges
From my tunic you’ll find.

-- Tvardovsky

Is somewhat more tragic.

This tonal issue feeds into the one problem I had with the characters’ portrayal, or, rather, one character’s portrayal. Simply put, Rainbow Dash should not speak as formally as she does in this story, or at least not as consistently as she does here. Not that she should speak as if every extraneous syllable is like a bayonet hacking at her wings, and nor should she sound like a complete fucking moron, but there are certain words and sentence structures that are just too rigid to sound natural coming from an impulsive, action-oriented speed-demon, even in her mellowest of moments. “Well, I always assumed ponies who lived in the city generally were outgoing and social,” springs to mind, as does the majority of her last chapter.

Speaking of that last chapter: the pacing. It isn’t as bad as other story/ies I’ve reviewed for Zero Punctuation Reviews, but, good fuck, I can’t help but concur with the sentiments of one commenter on the story, and ask for Dash to just shut up and kiss Twilight already. Admittedly, that is something of a contentious example, given that this was the culmination of both the story’s main motif and the budding relationship between these two snugglemuffins. The same is not true for the treatment of the character Jadestone, which ranks alongside the decision of Stalin to keep a whole forty divisions around Manchuria for entire duration of the Second World War in terms of misdirected priorities. Or should that perhaps be the splitting of Army Group South into A and B without any extra overall strength being added by Hitler, in terms of misapplication of resources.

I know that the story is operating to the schedule of its rainbow motif, and to be fair it isn’t like the story is skimping on juicy details so that more nothing can be added in its place, but I can’t help feeling that Jadestone’s resonance with the main couple’s dilemma does deserve greater exploration. Have her personally regale Dash with her struggle between dreams and romance and have Dash tear herself inside-out at the time with this new niggle, rather than have it briskly related to the audience at a later date with all the passion and excitement of a speech by the General Secretary.

Speaking of Jadestone, on the first read-through the events leading Twilight and Dash to her seemed to be fairly contrived, and to take the plot out of the characters control. Then again, given the fantastical setting, and the fact that the only alternative for the story to earn its adventure tag would have been a clichéd, ultra-typical moment where a character’s recklessness got them into trouble, I can appreciate the choice. And now it feels like I’m nitpicking.

As I said before, despite its presentational wobbles, Journey to the Centre of the Rainbow is a thoroughly decent story and I personally recommend it. To that end, it’s rather like Soviet Storm, the Russian documentary series; I wonder where that comparison came from?