TThe New Foal Institution

• MLP: FiM
• Sad
• Slice of Life

A good christian teenager volunteers at the nearby New Foal Institution for a week.

• Narcotics
• Human
• Alt. Universe
• Rainbow Dash
• OC
• Starlight Glimmer

Penguifyer · 7.6k words  ·  21  7 · 707 views

Author: Penguifiyer

Disclaimer: This is a Conversation Bureau story. This is a subset of fimfics which involve an institution on earth - created by equestrians who somehow ended up there – that turns people into ponies. These stories also often include war, either in the present or the past, and a strange phenomenon where the turned humans all literally lose their minds and become hollow husks. This might have something to do with the original story, where this idea comes from, but I don’t know because I haven’t read that.

Summary:

The new foal institution is a story about a guy named Job going on some sort of religious(?) mission in a… Sanatorium? Mental Asylum? Crazyhouse? Not sure. Anyhow, it is a place for the ponies the invading equestrian forces created during the recent war between the Humans and the ponies. 

But these “New foals” as they are called in the story are nothing like the average ponies in Equestria. They are misfigured shells of their former selves, without purpose or much thought, and they need constant supervision. This is where the place from the title: The New Foal Institution” comes into the picture.

It offers a place for the tormented souls to rest easy for the rest of their miserable life, and it even has some rudimentary ways to counteract the effect of the serum and letting the victim keep their minds.

But what other secrets can be hidden inside those walls?

Preamble:

Alright, I’m not trying to make this a habit, but once again I think we ought to take a look at the writer’s bio because it has an interesting connection to this story. Mr. Penguifier’s bio says: “I write what I want”

I don’t know how it relates to his other stories, because I haven’t read them, but this is a commendable notion. In fact I don’t think I could have said it any better! I think no one should ever try to write anything other than what they want.

One thing though:

They should really decide what that is, before they put it on paper. 

Review:

I’m really not sure what this story is about. It is a sort of loose collection of episodes, clumped together into chapters by wordcount, rather than any structural coherence. It tells a story, or rather elements of a story, it definitely has conflict, climax and even a resolution, but not for a moment does it attempt to explain how each of those are connected to one another or the story itself.

First there is the PoW character Job, who’s about as boring and one dimensional as his name. He goes on a religious mission where he witnesses a few weird occurances, which changes him in some pretty meaningful ways. But because, as far as we know, he had no prior opinion about the things he learnt, or background that would predispose him towards any particular line of thinking, he doesn’t actually change at all. He just forms an opinion. 

Which isn’t particularly hard in a world where everything the character meets points him in one particular direction. In that sense he doesn’t form his opinion, like a normal human being weighing (or disregarding) the pros and cons of his decision, because there aren’t even cons to it.

Unfortunately, the author introduces how he forms his decision in a fairly plot convenience manner. I wished that the author could consider developing the character by allowing him/her to judge and weigh the pros/cons. This would aid greatly in the characterisation.

I’m not saying he is wrong, but he should have given Job (and thus the reader) the opportunity to decide about his fate. The world however makes that choice for him.

Making his “Character development” feel rather irrelevant.

And despite how much the world seems to influence the main character we don’t learn a whole lot about it either. We have a few tidbits about how the new foals came about, but basically nothing about how this whole cascade of events is viewed in the world.

Are there people who are still Pro-pony despite their war crimes? There must be because they let them live in their world after they were defeated. (Or maybe not, it’s not clear if they are aware there are actual, pure-blooded ponies living among them) Are there people who are radically anti-pony who wants to murder them all? I guess, the ponies did a whole heap of horrible things and people tend to loathe others for far less.

And how do the ponies view their own actions? We hear one pony ramble about something on that topic, but she is drunk as a skunk, so who knows what she really thinks.

I think when a literal new continent gets jammed into the pacific ocean, (I think that’s the background of the original story, we know nothing how it happened in this universe.) that would have somewhat more earth shattering effects of people’s life than the main hero vaguely remembering that his cousin was turned into a pony.

Not that any of this matters, because the conflict has very little to do with either the world or the main character.

So around the end of the story we find out that the serum that turns people ponies and takes away their mind, also poison ponies and they suffer a similar fate, albeit a lot slower. The first pony we meet Blue Wing, turns out to be one of the ponies trying to get away from this fate. 

And one of her companions is working on a cure but having been suffering from the symptoms of said serum her mind is slowly fading making her progress more and more difficult. 

The last and only real stake in the story is whether she succeeds or are the ponies doomed to oblivion.

Obviously this conflict is very much embedded in the world of the story but deep down it’s fairly inconsequential to anyone other than the three real ponies we learn about, so it could be in any other world, it would be similarly dramatic.

The author’s way to bridge the gap between the conflict and the story is to make the main character feel very passionate about this conflict which would be a great way to involve the reader, but it falls flat because the main character sort of just “fell in love” with the ponies. Not literally, but him siding with the ponies seemed completely forced.

One day he was reasonably sympathetic towards them, then he had the opportunity to save a new foal from his mind collapsing in on him and after that he just became enamored with the whole cause. 

Now it would have been a completely viable way to do this, had we known anything about his stance on the issue previously. Or just really anything. Character development is a journey. and this story managed to include the road, and the endpoint but he forgot to tell anything about where this journey started. And without that it’s just meaningless.

And without our support for the main guy, through whom we see the story, the conflict of these ponies is almost meaningless. It might have some residual meaning, based on the fact that the conflict involves several characters we know and love from the show, but at that point the story is just abusing the fact that it’s a fanfiction.

So we have a main character, that we don’t know enough to establish any sort of connection,  a world that sounds intriguing but we barely scratch it’s surface, and a conflict that’s barely even in the story. (I mean it’s literally resolved in the epilogue which in theory is set after the story ends.) 

How can we make all this better?

Well for once I think this story would benefit from a change of perspective, someone more connected to the conflict with a more established background would clear out many of the problems this story was suffering from. (Hem, Blue Wings, Hem) If you want, I can elaborate on this idea more, but I don’t feel this is the place for that.

In a more general sense, I would really recommend for the writer to study the Hero’s journey from Joseph Campbell. It’s a culturally well ingrained pattern that just keeps churning out great stories to this very day. Campbell would go as far to argue we all live a hero’s journey and that’s why we are attracted to this whole cycle of events.

So I think the easiest way to grab this concept is through the explanation of Dan Harmon the writer of the critically acclaimed television show Rick and Morty. So in his slightly abridged version of the original concept, every story should have eight parts in a particular order.

I think it would be beneficial if we went through them quickly and see what points this story hits and what it misses. For comparison I also included the story points of Harry Potter and the Philosophers’ stone, as an example how to do this properly.

So yeah, there is some work to do here. The spots in the table is a way to represent how much is missing from Job’s journey to make it credible. Now the odd thing is most of them are in the story, they just don’t happen with Job. For example the pony looking for the cure pretty much experiences number seven in the last chapter. Or Blue starts out at number two whether we know it or not at the time. 

The one that is missing, sorely, is number six. No one sacrifices anything to achieve the goal. Job definitely doesn’t, he only gains stuff throughout the story, Blue has lost most she ever cared for, but that’s already happened by the time we met her, and the pony looking for the cure, ultimately saves herself from losing anything more. A triumph only worth as much as the sacrifices the heroes made to achieve it.

One can argue this is not a hero based story, and thus the hero’s journey doesn’t apply to it, but that would ultimately lead back to my idea of changing the perspective and dropping Job altogether. Which is a viable path, but I think not the one the author was trying to go for.

Conclusion:

In conclusion “The New Foal Institution” is a forgettable story told through a gimped perspective, set in a fascinating world, which gets completely ignored. It’s disjointed to the point that it almost feels like it's a picture created by jamming together pieces of two or three different puzzles. With that being said all those puzzle pieces are solid pieces of work so with some focus, and good guiding principles, they can be used to create something beautiful.

Until then: 4/10

7328797

I wished that the author could consider developing the character by allowing him/her to judge and weigh the pros/cons.

I think this is the definitive point of the whole review, and it's a point which we see a lot in poorly developed stories. I'll include myself in the mix, since I know I struggle sometimes with letting characters face consequences - can't help but love that which we make, but that's beside the point.

Something that the writer Charles Baxter wrote was that the ability for a plot to resonate with readers after it's been resolved depends on the characters being able to take responsibility for their actions. Whether or not their actions were reprehensible or admirable isn't quite what he means, but rather, that the characters exhibit some kind of reflection on them. The effect is something he called a "dysfunctional narrative," though his term takes on more historical contexts than strictly literary.

Ultimately, characters make choices, not in accordance to the plot, but in response and in opposition, in some ways, to it. Characters who don't make choices are flat characters, and the result is a flat plot.

Sometimes I think if there's a mistaken notion, or at least an unconscious one, that Plot and Character are two different elements of a story. But really, they're so intertwined that we can't really separate the two. When a story is under-developed, usually that's because one of these is forced onto center stage at the expense of the other.

7328797
You know, I’ve thought for a while on how I should respond to this and I keep going back to the same question:

Why do you think I wrote this story?

To be clear, I’m not saying this rhetorically or combatively. I’m actually curious about what you’d say especially once you consider the inherent risk associated with its premise.