TThe Wingless Angel

• MLP: FiM
• Drama
• Sad
• Slice of Life

Carrot Cake recalls the day he met Pinkie Pie. The worst day of his life.

• Death
• Pinkie
• OC
• Mr. Cake
• Mrs. Cake

jnzsblzs · 13k words  ·  20  3 · 928 views

Summary

On a day of broken hearts and unnumbered tears, a day when it became impossible to believe in the good of the world, Carrot Cake will learn to believe in Pinkie. Because angels do not fly. Sometimes, they bounce.

Initial Thoughts

Quite coincidentally enough, I was messing around with some Cake Family ideas as this story was being placed in my folder. As a token of respect, I’ve put those ideas aside to avoid having them influence my reading. I also understand that this story was previously reviewed, but in order to try and be as objective as possible, I’ve refused reading that review at any extensive level. 

So. A Carrot Cake story with Pinkie Pie. I’ve read a few, but the description seems to promise a deliberation on the power of good, and possibly even how the miraculous can occur in the most simple of actions. I do enjoy the observatory note at the end: that angels do not fly so much as they bounce. It’s a cute and succinct touch.

Spoilers ahead, but you already knew this. 

Summary

It’s a story within a story, one that Carrot Cake is telling his children many years later. At the behest of his ailing wife, Carrot Cake rushes to the hospital, knowing already that bad news is sure to follow. But it is the sudden appearance of a pink pony which begins a rapid transformation from grieving husband to hopeful father-soon-to-be. A chance meeting with a stranger with his own share of problems, and a gruff encounter with a griffon janitor, further demonstrate the effect and pull of this pink filly, whose power to make ponies laugh, even in the darkest moments, serves as the story’s “light at the end of the tunnel,” as it were. In telling the story, Carrot Cake realizes how much he owes to Pinkie, and for this, is grateful.

Quick edit: I was referring to the strange stallion as Bright Mac, but that was an oversight on my part. In actuality that pony is not BM, so I apologize for the confusion there. As such, I've edited the review back-over to reflect this. Still, I think my points more or less stand the same.

Plot

I’ve certainly given it a “glow up” with my summary, but the plot is inherently simple. Though I easily guessed what unforeseen circumstance brought Carrot Cake to the hospital (and indeed, the story hints at it quite deliberately within the first three pages or so), it still seemed a simple premise. 

It seems, however, that, perhaps aware of this simplicity, the author attempted to add in several layers, lenses, motifs, themes, and other narrative bravado in order to accentuate the story beyond its bare minimum. This, while noble, resulted in… well, a really weird mess. 

I’ll try and break it down by going through the plots of the story, both main and sub-plot. First, I must begin by attempting to quantify how many there are. 

There are, in my view, four plots. The main one concerns what the story’s description briefly alludes to: Pinkie Pie. Pinkie offers a cake to Mr. Cake at what would otherwise be the worst moment of his life—his wife has just suffered an ectopic pregnancy, resulting in dangerous pregnancy complications, for which they are at the hospital in the first place. This cake that Pinkie offers could be said to be the “carrot” that brings Mr. Cake around the hospital looking for her. In a general sense, that’s what most of the story is devoted to, because in theory every other part of the story results from or is directly related to this piece. Thus, the main plot, in summary, is Carrot’s quest to find and thank Pinkie. 

The ectopic pregnancy becomes its own subplot, too, since Pinkie’s presence takes priority. Note that decision.

Another subplot is that of the mysterious stallion that Pinkie introduces Carrot Cake to. Later he reveals his name as Uncle Chuck, and it so happens that he’s here at the same hospital as Carrot Cake because the wife of Uncle Chuck is suffering from lung cancer. Pinkie’s reasoning for bringing the two together is that they’re both around the same age—and, if I were to extend some inference, it’s because they’re both being affected by a present trauma.

And perhaps the last subplot is that of Carrot Cake’s encounter with a gruff griffon janitor in the hospital’s Intensive Care Unit. In such a subplot, what follows is a series of arguments between the two, concerning the nature of the ICU, and how is it that such suffering of unprecedented levels could be allowed, even tolerated—not just by ponies, but by any living creature. This subplot winds itself back to the one about Pinkie and to the one about the pregnancy, when Carrot Cake returns to his wife’s room, and realizes what the griffon was truly trying to show him.

These are, of course, rough generalizations, made for the sake of ease of access. It’s breaking them down that’s hard to do, breaking them down separately even harder.

I’ll start with Uncle Chuck. I don’t get it.

And I don’t mean, it made no sense from just a comprehension point; I mean, I don’t understand why it happened.

I will grant, and can assume with a great degree of confidence, that the two stallions—Carrot Cake and Uncle Chuck—exist together and are put together for the purpose of demonstrating a shared theme: that of trauma. Carrot Cake, after all, has to deal with his wife’s ailment, and so does Chuck. A further examination determines that this theme extends to the idea of shared, separate trauma, because in these instances, it’s not necessarily the husband-figures suffering, but the wives. This makes sense, and as a possible thematic insight, it really would have been an interesting one. 

The issue, however, is that the circumstances revolving around how to bring such a theme to the surface, and the exploration of that theme, and then the effect of that theme, on either the characters or the audience—is incredibly superficial.

I have to circle back around for a moment. Why is it that Carrot and this stallion meet? It’s because Pinkie brought them together. Why is Pinkie bringing them together? Because she recognized that Carrot was alone, at least for the moment. Why is that? Because she showed up out of the blue. And why does that matter to Carrot?

…No, really. Why does that matter to Carrot? 

His wife is in the ER. Carrot spends “hours on [sic] pacing the corridors without hearing a word.” And when the doctors arrive, they arrive with the… verdict. Which is, of course, the ectopic pregnancy.

Now, based on the quote, it’s safe to assume that Carrot’s been at the hospital for a long time. Hours, definitely. And based on how that quote ends, it’s implied that the doctors arriving comes after that time, and that Carrot is still at the hospital, presumably waiting for his wife to wake up. That’s realistic enough, and believable, too. He’s waiting in orange chairs, he’s waiting, he’s waiting, he’s waiting… he dreads the waiting, hates it, but he must do it, because his wife is at stake.

So why in the world would Carrot, of all ponies—Carrot who arguably represents one-half of the most realistic married couple on the show, beyond the fairy-tale goodness that is Shining and Cadance—suddenly shift his focus and concern away from his wife onto a random filly that gave him a cake? 

The author does attempt to explain this. After such a kind gesture, surely Carrot would not be remiss to try and find Pinkie and thank her? And that leads to all the other subplots summed up previously. Carrot even justifies such thinking directly: confronted by the enigma of Pinkie’s intentions, he cannot help but think that “my life [had been turned] upside down in the mere hours since she met me.” 

This would be fine and dandy, had not the subplot of an ectopic pregnancy and the unknown fate of Carrot’s wife been the catalyst for why Pinkie showed up, however aware of that she actually was.

To pull from my notes: 

Carrot reveals to the stallion that “‘Chiffon… had an ectopic pregnancy.’”

Is this the reveal? It is. Okay. That explains why they were going to the hospital, which was hinted at at the beginning. 

But though this was indeed foreshadowed, the fact that 12 pages had to pass before this topic was returned to is... concerning.

Certainly, you don't want to dangle the carrot too close, and you don't, but it's also a matter of you don't want the audience to think that you've forgotten about the carrot in the first place. As I was reading this, I was trying to figure out why Carrot would seem to do this. Even if I take into account that Pinkie being Pinkie is... well, explanation enough for her idiosyncrasies, it doesn't really explain the WHY of it. 

In effect, you supplanted one mystery - that of why the Cakes are at the hospital - for another - where'd Pinkie end up going. I believe that this was an attempt at having one large overarching plot being complimented by a subplot. Now, there are many literary theories about the necessity, execution, and prevalence of having a subplot, but the issue with this one is that it seems to take focus away from the larger one. It's not just a matter of narrative immediacy - that is, being the plot that comes up after the first is introduced. It's a matter of timing and "narrative space." 

These two instances could CERTAINLY work together, but their cohesion and organization leaves a lot to be desired.

I turn to literature for some examples that might serve as tools. In Hemingway's A Farewell to arms, (spoilers?) the final pages are spent with the narrator weaving in and out of the hospital room, waiting for his wife to give birth - a birth that ultimately results in the death of both. There are instances where he's simultaneously talking to other doctors, another person at the hospital, than his wife. He hasn't forgotten, but he's occupied, and this occupation makes sense - it provides credence to the implication that he's slowly realizing that everything's gone wrong, and now he's nervous. 

Similarly, Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina also has a tense pregnancy scene. Two, in fact, but the one I want to draw attention to is that of Lenin's wife, Kitty. Lenin is a goddamn nervous wreck all throughout. He's panicking, and the moment he senses even the slightest change, he fetches a doctor. He has to be ordered out of the room, and once he does, he can't sit still. He ponders about his life with Kitty so far, going between rooms, praying, clutching tightly at chairs, wringing his hands - again, he's occupied, doing other things, but Tolstoy still demonstrates Lenin's awareness of the situation by having him hearken back to the scene unfolding, often quite literally. By the time the child is born, it feels like we've gone on a nervous journey ourselves. 

Of course, these are longer novels which have a lot more time for the development of this subplot. But even so, I want to note that in them, even as the character's focus flits about, the tension of knowing what's to come - the birth, or failed birth - remains present. The reader stores that unconsciously in the back of their mind just as the character does. It creates an empathetic moment that reminds us of what's at stake.

My point, in addressing how these two plot points attempt to link up, is that the attempt is poor. There’s a level of blindness to it. The story attempts to be self-aware and bring the two together in a synthetic harmony, but the result is that the necessary suspension of belief in the justification of these two plots happening is shattered. And the fact that this point is just for these two subplots, out of the others, should demonstrate how concerning this is. 

I want to reiterate that term: self-aware. It’s a quiet piece of narrative technique that we often forget about, but which we do have an intrinsic sense for. A story is self-aware when it is conscious of its various moving parts and is able to spin them all fluidly; that is, self-awareness is the act of a story understanding the link between plot and subplot. This isn’t to say that every subplot must link to the main plot, but it is to say that the story is aware of the presence of both. 

Most narratives, at their simplest, do that. And, again, this story attempts that with the mysterious stallion and Pinkie showing up. But that attempt comes off as circumstantial and contrived. There’s no connection between so much as they have one common denominator: Pinkie. But rather than exploring that common denominator, which, again, seems to be the main plot of the story, the author instead explores something which, by the premises set by the story itself, is completely tangential to itself. 

This brings me to my issues with what happened between Carrot Cake and the griffon. It is, I will say, a closer fit to linking Pinkie’s gift and Carrot’s own sadness, but that’s because it skips the hurdles of belief that the previous subplot tripped over. My gripe, however, isn’t with that, but with what the story ends up doing with the exchange between Carrot Cake and the griffon. It’d be easier to simply quote what I mean: 

It was then when I understood the Griffin's message. Nothing will change death. Not yours, not your loved ones, not anyone’s. But to be happy, when you’re standing in the shadow of death, that is an invaluable present, no matter how fleeting that moment may be.

Cool. Even if it’s a bit preachy, I get what it’s trying to do, from a narrative standpoint. The relevance of one plot point comes up and succeeds the relevance of another. That’s fairly typical of fables, so this would get a pass…

If it weren’t for the fact that such a technique throws away the relevance of the conversation between Carrot Cake and Uncle Chuck. 

If I analyze this from a Formalist perspective, looking at strictly the structure of the text (page count, word count, length of text between section breaks), I would say that it is curious that this quote brings more importance to what the griffon said than what occurred between the two stallions. This is because, by my count and copy, the griffon-Carrot exchange lasted 6 pages; meanwhile, the conversation between Carrot and the stallion lasted 10. In fact, a lot of time is spent on the two talking about the future, about what the stallion expects Mr. Cake to do, now, and what Mr. Cake proposes to the stallion, that is, exchanging their places of business, and having the Cakes return to Ponyville. 

I admit that Formalist theory is a weird lens, but as a tool of literary comprehension, it demonstrates that there’s a strange difference in narrative emphasis. Because so much time was spent on setting the scene between Mr. Cake and the stallion, on spending time in that scene, on going through the scenarios, I expected that it would pay off, that it would mean something to Carrot afterwards. Instead, the Griffon scene takes precedent, and the stallion is cast off to the side, even though the theme of shared trauma is far more potent and viable than what the griffon espouses.

And what does the griffon say to Mr. Cake? A large bit of philosophizing and moralizing about God, life, death, the ICU ward—but done in a way that’s so inorganic it hurts. The argument they have just.. Happens, and there’s no real explanation for why it has to occur—the same issue with the encounter between Mr. Cake and presumably Uncle Chuck, given the above throwaway line.
 
The author may argue that Uncle Chuck's scene does resolve itself and that it does connect back to Mr. Cake, but my issue with that is that it doesn’t resolve itself in relation to the connection between what brought Mr. Cake to the hospital and his dealings with Pinkie, even though it seems that’s what the story was heading for. The intent missed the mark. The logic of the narrative falters, and so the cohesion of that narrative also suffers.

This begs the question: what’s even relevant at the end? If Pinkie is the main plot (to speak abstractly), then surely she’s relevant. But since she also functions at the catalyst for the rest of the subplots, and since she also serves as the catalyst for the plot revolving around Mr. Cake and the ectopic pregnancy, can we say that she’s relevant for all three? I don’t think so. And we certainly cannot say that Uncle Chuck's conversation is relevant, given what the griffon janitor says; but at the same time, it’s hard to say that what the griffon says is relevant itself, given how it’s shoved in. 

There was certainly an attempt to make each component relevant, but the weight simply doesn’t add up. Something needs to be removed, and it looks like the story actually ended up doing that at the very end, however intentional or unintentional that may be. And because of that, the plots become a contrived mess; their ability to function together in the story is limited; their presence, power, and capability are diminished. 

Score - 5 / 10

Characterization

With how little exposure in the show, compared to other characters, the Cakes have gotten, I would have not been surprised to see a varying interpretation of Mr. Cake throughout “Wingless Angel.” He is, along with his wife, in the unique position of having an established characterization, but one that isn’t so set-in-stone that interpretation proves impossible. And given the context of this story, which presumes to set itself before the events of the show, it stands to reason that even more freedom of characterization was to be found.

First-person narration has the bonus of being able to center-set a character’s, well, characterization almost immediately. It comes with the territory: how they refer to themselves and the audience, how they re-tell the narrative, how intimate they get, how distant they keep—these are all effects. There are certain rhetorical techniques that may show up to accomplish this: passive voice, which Holden Caulfield of J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” employed abusively; confessional, such as the likes of Edgar Allen Poe’s unnamed murderer in “The Tell-Tale Heart;” and so forth. Effectively, though, it is the diction of the character—the way they speak about anything in the narrative—that helps determine who they are.

That said, I don’t know who this character is. 

I first started to get an inkling of doubt when I came across this line:

They’d be the perfect serial killers, I think to myself for a moment

This is Carrot, by the way, speaking about his children—whom he has shown, throughout every season of the show since their inception, to love, cherish, and adore. Even if we try and account for this by saying that Carrot’s inner world and outer world function at different levels, it’s hard to justify such a 1) hyperbolic statement in general and 2) one that comes from a sweet-sounding gentle-stallion.

Then we have lines like this:

As if the world out there was just trying to mock how insignificant I was

I note in my comments that this, while appropriately morose for the implied situation (Carrot is talking about the worst day of his life, after all), comes off as defiantly melodramatic. There’s no real set-up to justify why Carrot would think this—and yes, the plot does try to explain why he feels this way, but as mentioned in my Plot section, that falls flat on its face in trying. 

As we get into the hospital setting, we have this long line of thought:

I guess that is why grief is such insidious killer. It makes you desire the very thing that keeps you down. Like a drug without a high. And it’s honestly unbelievable how good you are at rationalising the objectively worst thing you can do. Like me sending Pinkie away because she was supposed to be with her family. It sounds so honest, so logical, dare I say noble? Yeah, just what a wounded person needs. A shot of ego to deaden the pain of stupidity until the latter kills you.

And from my notes, which I now quote for convenience:

You had me convinced in the first two sentences... and then the character cohesion falls apart by the third.

It feels like you're forcing Carrot Cake to SAY these things, even if this was a younger him. It's pushing the profundity to a level that doesn't mean anything. At that point it's no longer clear if this is Carrot Cake or an author shoving themselves in their character's place. 

Famously, Hemingway argued that the best way to write characters was to distance yourself from them as much as possible. That's not something I necessarily agree with, but I understand what he was referring to: the author has a lot of sway and influence even with the most naturally occurring of characters, and one has to be careful to avoid becoming their character themselves. The traditional author nowadays will argue (most probably) that every character is, in some way, an aspect of themselves, so distancing is no longer a fully viable option. 

At some point or another, you DO have to let your characters live their lives. Even if they serve the express purpose of arguing a point, such as the gentleman in Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata," there's gotta be something that suggests that what this character says and does IS ENTIRELY WHAT that character is SUPPOSED to say and do. Forcing a viewpoint forces characters into caricatures - the kind that appears in an allegorical, "Everyman" play, to pull that reference.

On the note of an Everyman play, a deeply religious play by all accounts, I have to bring up this paragraph:

Now kids, to understand this you must know that Griffons unlike Ponies, are thought of as a religious bunch. At least in the eyes a typical Manehattenite like I was back then. I don’t know much about their religion but I was pretty sure they venerated some sort of perfect benevolent creator of all life to whom the good griffons ascend in the afterlife. Now this picture I had about their god was in a rather stark contrast with either his words or my knowledge about Pinkie at the time. Fortuitously, I was able to extrapolate upon the aforementioned juxtaposition in sufficiently eloquent yet expedient manner.

I… don’t understand the intent behind having it here. Was it trying to be funny? If so, it’s a tone that doesn’t fit the rest of the story. Ignoring the last sentence, was it trying to examine what the Griffon said about God? If so, then it doesn’t make sense that Carrot would even comment about this to his children. It seems like an argument wormed its way into the narrative that didn’t come organically but which tickled the author’s fancy so much that they wanted to put it in, if an argument can this be even classified as. 

These are but some of the few quoted instances of where it seemed like the characterization of Carrot Cake was falling short of whatever the author intended. A pattern emerges: this Carrot Cake is wishy-washy, morose, and melodramatic. And, again, we can try and claim that this is a Carrot Cake whose characterization stems from the traumatic experience of the plot, but, again, because the plot falls apart, so too does that particular justification. It’s not Carrot Cake, is what I’m saying. And I’m not even sure if it’s even a shallow representation of Carrot Cake, because I could not find an instant where the hint of that character shows up. 

I have far less to say about Characterization than Plot, because the same common problem emerges throughout the story: a forced kind of characterization, as opposed to an authentic, natural one. Fan-headcanon may give some leeway, but one has to be able to justify their fan-interpretation of a character. I don’t think the story does that, and certainly not enough. 

Take out the fact that this is the Cakes involved. Replace them with, say, an OC married couple. All of a sudden, it makes some sense that they should behave this way. But as it stands, this is NOT Carrot Cake. I don’t recognize him. 

Score - 5 / 10 

Syntax

This part of the review is going to be a bit different from older reviews, because it’s going to attempt to dissect organization of ideas not from an abstract method, but a clinical one. 

I am aware that English is not the author’s first-language, so some issues of grammar can be explained away by this. However, there is a specific technique the author employs which needs to be examined, because it is causing a much larger problem: shifting tenses.

This is a story of two tenses: past and present. The present tense is the one that appears when Mr. Cake tells the story to his children, and the past is, fittingly, when the memory of that story takes on a life of its own and becomes its own narrative. This is an incredibly tricky thing to pull off, because the reader’s ability to shift between two different timeframes is always under fire.

In general, I’ve seen authors use this technique effectively by splitting up their paragraphs between what should be written in the past and what should be written in the present. For instance: if a story is largely present-tense, then a good chunk of that will stay that way. That includes the narration, dialogue, descriptions, etc. Then, when a memory or past event surfaces, the story will experience a “break,” either a paragraph or section one, and the tense will shift into past-tense. Done effectively, an author will be able to transition in and out of these moments, bringing the reader to a much more intimate textual understanding. 

“The Wingless Angel” tries that. And then, sometimes, also doesn’t. 

By that last point, I mean that past- and present-tenses will appear together in the same paragraph, which confused me quite a bit. Here’s a quote to explain:

I remember sitting there in those ugly orange plastic chairs flooding the entire corridor, oblivious to the world. I cried and cried without ever intending to stop. It all just seemed so unfair. One day I’m the happiest pony in the world living with the pony I loved the most, doing the job I’ve always wanted to do in the city I was born and raised in, looking ahead for the joys and challenges that laid ahead. It seemed perfect. I stop for second because I know what is coming. It's happened every time I’ve ever thought about this, and I've had ample opportunities to do that in the last fifteen years.

A cursory glance reveals that, oddly enough, we’ve got a different tense in each sentence.

• Present (“I remember”)
• Past (“I cried”)
• Past (“It all just seemed”)
• Present (“One day [I am]”) and Past (“...I loved the most”)
• Past (“It seemed perfect”)
• Present (“I stop”)
• Present perfect (“[It has] happened”)

The bold text is particularly striking, because it doesn’t carry a syntactical cohesion, or at least the kind that it should. And it’s hard to say why it’s in the tenses that it is. For one, Carrot here is talking within the context of a memory, so you’d expect it to be in the past-tense. But it’s in the present first, then past, then progressive present (several -ing words that serve as participles, or verbs that function as descriptors). I ended up getting confused, because I wasn’t sure when Carrot was talking to the Cake twins, and when he was actually within his own memory. 

This is just one example, but it’s a pattern that shows up several times throughout the story. It seemed almost reckless, and made getting through it much harder than I’d anticipated. At times, the narration was straightforward past-tense; then we’d get thrown an aside or a direct reference to the Cake twins, which would throw the temporal balance and clarity out of whack. The reading would slow, and I’d have to back up and comb through the sentences slowly, if only to figure out what path I was being led on. 

This creates an issue of organization. Clarity is incredibly important with your writing, beyond just narrative scope—if you’re unable to communicate along the bridge of sentences effectively, then no reader is going to want to read what you have to say. 

I’ll be the first to tell you that English tense structure is just bogus. It’s actually why I encourage many writers to try and stick to one tense as much as possible—at least that way, you have to worry about only one kind of conjugation, however bogus that part of the language is. 

Another syntactical matter I have to address is something that came up in the Characterization section: instances of hyperbolic sentences. As explained in Characterization, where this showed up was where I could no longer believe in the presentation of the character. But from a Syntax POV, these are examples of sentences  that push themselves just a bit too hard, in order to try sound different, profound, or at least, “not cliche.”

Here’s one example:

Yet I was sitting there alone in my orange plastic chair morosely chewing on that dreadful disgrace of a cake, I almost felt the fangs of my gloom sinking into my neck, injecting their woeful poison into me. But the colours of the world around me were slowly fading as I was submerging back into my memories I suddenly grabbed onto a thought.

Ignoring the issues of characterization, it’s such a strange attempt at saying that that Carrot Cake is... Well, “upset” would be too simple, but perhaps “perturbed” would suffice. The emotion should be supplied well enough by the image of him sitting in the orange plastic chair chewing morosely. That’s enough to get across what is meant. But by throwing in words like “dreadful disgrace,” “fangs of my gloom,” “woeful poison” (as if there are any other kinds of poisons), the quote pushes itself too far. It tries too hard to get at the meat of the emotion, when the meat has already been presented. 

This isn’t just a problem midway through the story. It’s there from the very beginning:

The false sweetness in my beloved Chiffon’s voice is more ominous than a thousand ancient prophecies.

That’s a bit much. 

Simplify, simplify, as Thoreau, perhaps ironically as a member of the Romantics, put it. I myself share a lot of these problems with hyperbolic descriptions. The best piece of advice turns out to be an equation: examine your draft, and see if you can’t cut out roughly 10% of it. I’ve found that I end up cutting away the hyperbolic more than anything else, and getting much closer to the meat of the emotion.

There were several other smaller problems, such as commas being under-utlized, and a wavering between wanting to use quotation marks where Carrot was telling the memory and not using them when he was in them, but these can be addressed with the help of an editor. 

The big issues of organization and clarity, though, loom in a dysfunctional state.

Score - 7 / 10 

Final Score - (5 + 5 + 7 ) / 3 = 5.6 / 10

Final Thoughts

There’s a reason why I’ve set up my reviews with this format, why I have these three sections. It’s because these three seriously affect the other. Plot cannot function without Characterization, but Characterization can only occur if there is a Plot. And the Syntax—an umbrella term for the conveyance of information to both—will serve no purpose, however flowery, if it does not pertain to either. 

“The Wingless Angel” and its review are demonstrations of this. 

If I had to choose one word to describe this story, it’s “unfocused.”

This story… tries so much to do so much, but because of that so much ends up working against it. Under-developed plot lines are one thing, but unfocused ones cause only more problems. This is a story that teeters between moralizing and preaching a lesson that feels completely shoe-horned in, and being unable to condense itself to all of its necessary points and structures. Even the ending, which wants to try and wrap everything up in a neat, organized lesson, comes off as rambunctiously unnatural, as though the author felt that they had run out of space and needed a quick and easy fix to make it seem like the story was leading to a point. 

By far the most concerning feature is the characterization of Carrot Cake. Not once throughout this story did I believe this was him. Not once. Even if he has minimal screen time within the show, I caught no semblance of who he was as demonstrated in the show, save, perhaps, by the fact that he’s supportive of his wife. I grant that this is mostly headcanon territory, but it’s a headcanon that suffers from the same problem as the narrative: it’s unfocused and under-developed, and comes off as an attempt to force a particular worldview onto an established character, rather than letting the character develop that different worldview on their own. 

As characters are the means by which the flow and direction of a story are accomplished, characters that do not allow for such accomplishments become flat and obtrusively obvious in their depiction. Consequently, the narrative falls flat. And when that happens, no amount of moralizing or philosophizing, however interesting, will save either. 

I have a marked up copy of the story with all of my comments. If the author is interested in seeing it, send me a PM, and I’ll be happy to provide. 

Another subplot is that of the mysterious stallion that Pinkie introduces Carrot Cake to. It’s hinted, though never directly said, that this is Bright Mac, Pear Butter’s husband, and it so happens that he’s here at the same hospital as Carrot Cake because Pear is suffering from lung cancer. Pinkie’s reasoning for bringing the two together is that they’re both around the same age—and, if I were to extend some inference, it’s because they’re both being affected by a present trauma.

I love you Jarvi but this part is sooooooooooooooo wrong.

Let me just leave this one here:

The few-but-deep wrinkles on his face that stood testament for a life well and truly lived, made me realise that in this case “about my age” meant a good 25 years older than me.

That being said the the bright mac connection was actually there in a completely different way.

So because this happened after the Rainboom and because we know Aj left her home to live with the oranges before the rainbow and by that point both her parents were gone.

Which meant there was no solice that awaited them in ponyville, but chuck couldn't have known that because he wasn't particularly close to the apples and he left the town months ago.

Though this is mostly just an easter egg.

Edit: But now that I think about there are at least 11 different reasons why Chuck can't be Bright Mac. Did you even read the story? :D

7300225

Did you even read the story?

He wrote a long detailed review for it so I am sure he did. Show a bit more good manners towards a fellow reviewer.

Cover art’s cursed.

7300226
Sorry, I wasn't saying it completely seriously. I should have put an emoticon in there. Obviously I appreciate his effort, though that was a really-really harsh mistake

7300225
I'll admit that I missed that detail - I think that the reference to the wives knowing each other threw me off and made me think it was the Apples there at the hospital. That mistake is definitely on me.

7300227
It is? Oh boy