Muted Wubs by pabrony83
This is going to be an interesting week for stories that I am reviewing of them, three out of the four stories are tagged as dark, so let’s see if the inundation of stories from my favorite genera ended up being. So to start out with, we have Muted Wubbs. The story of human Fluttershy going through some shit to find love.

In terms of what I liked about it, I found the development of romance to be done quite well in terms of pacing. It takes its time setting up the romance between Fluttershy and Vinyl Scratch and doesn’t just jump into the romance and have the two of them start bedding each other from the word go. It takes its time and allows for the two to develop a relationship naturally. An interesting aspect of the story is that it is, for the most part, two parts, Fluttershy grieving and lashing out, and Fluttershy becoming whole again. This was nice as it allowed for the story to not devolve into ‘sad sack Fluttershy’ in the first part and isn’t rushed in the second part to give Fluttershy her happy ending. It feels a lot more paced than what I would have thought a 10 k word story would have been able to do. Finally, I really enjoyed that the story actually took on the topic of suicide. I don’t know of too many stories that actually tackle the subject, so reading a story where that was one of the primary topics was a nice change of pace.

Now, on to the criticisms. One of the hallmark characteristics of a dark story is a world or situation that is against the main character(s). In a dark world, hope and/or happiness range from a far off concept to actively disadvantageous. In a dark world, I should be reading it and I should know that things can or have turned south going mach 12. Here, Fluttershy is dealing with the death of a friend/almost lover and is lashing out, isolating her friends and about two steps away from getting handy with some rope and a piece of framing. But wait, that sound pretty dark, how are you not all over a story like this?

One, simple, reason.

Fluttershy has not one, not two, but 8 (or 9 if you count a character that never gets a speaking line) individuals that all want to see her succeed and overcome this adversity. That’s not dark, it qualifies as sad, sure, but not dark. With a dark story, I should feel like the character is isolated from help, or at least unable to receive quality help. This might just be me, but I use a scale to see how dark a story is:

1: Everyone goes home happy

2: The problem was solved happily but they saw a kid cry

3: The problem was solved peacefully but they had to make a kid cry by telling it bad news

4: Worst that happens is they get roughed up and make a kid cry by letting its pet die

5: Shit goes down and they see some horrible things but they can recover

6: Shit goes down and they see some horrible things they can recover from but there are long-lasting repercussions

7: After experiencing what they did, they permanently lose a lot of their pep and become more withdrawn

8: They can’t get over what they saw and did and have perpetual nightmares after this that can't really be fixed (non-crippling)

9: They have to check into a mental institution for several months or years to cope with what happened

10: There is no hope, they are driven to madness and despair, Cthulhu has awoken.

For me, I don’t start thinking of a story as dark until about 5-6, and this story is maybe a 4 if I’m feeling generous. The next issue I had with the story would have to be the overuse of contrivance, convince/ coincidentally, and asspull no jutsu. It may just be my love of realism, but a lesbian, falling in love with someone that is also a lesbian that never said anything about it, getting a letter saying that their love was a lesbian and then proceeding to hide and cry, getting found by ANOTHER lesbian that JUST SO HAPPENS to have experienced similar trauma, AND THEN the two of them falling in love rather than keeping it as a friendship, sounds less like a genuine story and more like the plot to a wish-fulfillment story. The amount of coincidences in this story is just absurd. I have no problem with non-heterosexual relations, It would be a little hypocritical of me to be, but when the story can be summarized as ‘two closet lesbians fall in love with each other, but one of them offs themselves, so the surviving lesbian falls in love with an equally traumatized lesbian because she just so happened to be walking past her when she was crying’ I get the distinct sense that too many stars were aligning to guarantee that that one lesbian is getting laid. And lastly, the progression of events. While this might be a good way to write a story, I’m not particularly a fan of each chapter taking place days, weeks, years after the end of the last chapter. For me at least, having the story read more like a cliff notes thing due to only getting the absolute most relevant parts of the story. We are never given a good deal of time to really come to understand why Fluttershy is acting the way that she is and see the little parts of the relationship that make it feel real and invest the reader in it.

Final scores;

Pacing: 7/10, from what is written, the pacing is well done and allows things to happen without rushing things. I would have just preferred that we would have seen the parts that weren’t written as those provide a better context for what is happening.

Feeling of darkness: 4/10, I was promised a dark story in the tags and got a sad story instead. While yes, suicide is a sensitive and dark concept, the surrounding mood just made the darkness that could have been there vanish for me. When going for darkness one of the key things to remember is a feeling of helplessness, isolation, and a problem that can’t really be solved.

Plot: 8/10, this had a nice plot line, a little on the bright and happy side for me but nice none the less. The thing that really made it feel nice was that the ending felt to some extents *by my definition* earned. The score would have been higher if there would have been fewer time skips and Fluttershy wouldn’t have become as much of a sad sack as she did for the first part.

Characters: 9/10, all of the characters were well written and came across as human, all except for Fluttershy in the beginning. This might be due to my personality type, but the way that Fluttershy acted was so illogical and self-defeating that I wish dearly that I would have been able to reach into the story and shake her by the shoulders for how dumb she was acting.

Total score: 28/40 or 7/10; this was a well-written story with a fairly solid premise. I just wish that there would have been more here, that the use of darkness would have been more in line with how I understand darkness to be, and contrivances would have been either eliminated or less obvious.

{An issue I had with the story that I didn’t feel fit into the review but bugged me was its tagging. It’s not really tagged properly from at least my definitions of the tags. Sex: It’s implied, but this only reaches the definition of suggested and was tamer in this suggestion then the ‘fuck me eyes’ Nala gave Simba in the Lion King. Gore: again, there isn’t enough there to really warrant the tag for me. The totality of the gore in the story was in about 4 or so sentences and hardly constituted more description than ‘there was blood everywhere’. Dark: I already said my piece on that. Slice of life: I don’t know what life I’m living, but obviously it’s the wrong one since I haven’t; had the dude I want to bang off himself before I could learn he too wanted to bang, then hook up with a dude that got suicidal after finding out the boy he wanted to date wasn’t gay, and get proposed to after only knowing him for three months at most. All while in high school no less. I don’t know how, but I would like to trade lives please}

6814473
Thanks for the review. Most of the tag issues that you brought up were to CMA. I have adjusted them accordingly upon reading this.

Most of the tag issues that you brought up were to CMA

Could you explain what CMA is?

I have adjusted them accordingly upon reading this.

Dang, now half of the review has been rendered null. Oh well.

But yeah, it was a good story, just a lot of little things that would have really raised the story to the next level were missing, and Fluttershy feeling that she was the architect of her own misery due to not really reaching out for help when just about everyone was offering was a little grating.

6814613
CMA = Cover My A**

6814619
Fair enough.

6814473
Might read this

6981450
Please let me know how you like it if you do.

6995813
I will certainly do that