TBreathtaking Banality

• MLP: FiM
• Horror
• Mystery
• Sad

One day, Nurse Redheart is tasked with taking care of a patient that is far too normal – and that's the problem.

• Death
• OC
• Other
• Nurse Redheart
• Snowheart
• Sweetheart

Ice Star · 4.5k words  ·  84  8 · 2.6k views

Hello there, general review reader!

While on a technicality I am not yet officially ready to become a full-time reviewer and activate myself in this group yet, I do have around two or so authors who I promised reviews to in the last few months. So hey, let’s knock those out of the way!

Today we’re going to be having a look at Ice Star’s Breathtaking Banality, a fairly unconventional horror story.

Before we begin I’d like to address some things. Since this is a new group I’ve adjusted my review format a little bit. The biggest takeaway is that I am no longer using a score based system. Rather, I’m stealing the Present Perfect method of giving verdicts on stories and will assign stories a category: Not Recommended, Vaguely Recommended, Conditionally Recommended, Recommended, and Highly Recommended.

Got it? Strap in, let’s hit it! 

Banality: the fact or condition of being banal or unoriginal. Why is this important? Well, at its heart, this is a story about boredom of all things. 

We follow Nurse Redheart as she goes about her day, and it very quickly becomes clear to us that Redheart is bored. She’s tired of the monotony of her day to day duties, she’s tired of not being treated with respect, and she’s tired of feeling like the patients are using her as a sort of maid.

Redheart’s frustrations bleed into virtually every aspect of the story. Eventually she’s called to check in on a frail, elderly patient who’s near the end of her rope. The mare in Room 213 talks with Redheart for a bit, before Redheart leaves harboring an annoyance with her. Redheart then prepares for her night shift.

The first chapter ends here. The second chapter picks up with some startling news: the mare in Room 213 passed away during the night. Doctor Stable comforts Redheart, who cries on his shoulder.

This is all surface level stuff. However, the true plot of the story is never explicitly stated, but we do have enough information to parse it out. The key here is to look at the last line of the first chapter:

And that was completely understandable, some ponies liked their privacy.

But what if frail, ailing Wisteria Terrace wanted a psychopomp?

We’re getting somewhere now. For those of you who don’t know, a psychopomp is a mythological creature who guides newly deceased souls into the afterlife.

Get the picture now?

Nurse Redheart is an angel of death: a serial killer often active in hospitals or medical institutions, who are often delusional and sometimes feel as if they’re giving the dying a mercy by ending their suffering.

And here’s the horror we were looking for.

Let’s pause there for a moment, because I think this is a point worth talking about. What makes a good horror story? A while ago I believed that horror was nothing more than a gorefest jumpscare style genre and nothing more.

But I’ve since learned there are different types of horror, and I’ve even found a favorite kind: the one that just permeates dread. The kind that keeps you on your toes because you know something is wrong, even if you can’t figure out what.

And that’s where this story falls.

I’ll delve into that in a second. On the whole, the plotline is quite intriguing. It can be read in two ways: first that Redheart is a bored but good-hearted nurse and the mare in room 213 dies overnight, or second that Redheart is a psychopathic angel of death who murders the mare in room 213. The author doesn’t really try to leave things open-ended: in fact it’s very direct that the second option is what happens.

But I bring this up because of the execution of this plotline. Redheart gets away with this. And if the story were told from the lens of any other character, we as readers would probably believe the first ending to be true. 

What impressed me here was the author’s ability to meld two plotpoints of mind-numbing boredom and not-so-bloody murder into one coherent story. 

Nurse Redheart is characterized brilliantly here. The use of this background pony as an unreliable narrator is amazingly done: her angry rants on random things like the employment of doorknobs across Ponyville General to the various medical schools of Equestria really let us into her head.

And when the final line of chapter one comes, hooo boy do we discover what a twisted mind it is.

Again, this isn’t an open-ended story: the author is very explicit, especially in post-story notes that Redheart killed this patient.

But the leadup into it is what sells this story for me. We spend so long in Redheart’s mind and we learn so much about her that the pieces really fall together quite well. Redheart is an angry pony. She’s angry at the world and at her patients, for feeling like she’s just there to feed and clean them rather than help save their lives.

Perhaps it’s because of this dreary boredom that she goes insane. We may never know. But the truly chilling point of this story is how casual Redheart is. For proof look no further than the second chapter. She’s able to accurately fake being upset and convince Doctor Stable that she’s mourning this pony, then goes home and has a great night of sleep.

Absolutely morbid.

When I said this was a story about boredom, I meant it. 

The opening 4,000 words of this story are fairly thick. There are a lot of long sentences and a colorful palette of vocabulary, and the pacing takes its time as it leads us throughout Redheart’s day.

I do believe that this was intentional, but even if it wasn’t it plays to the story well. The opening paragraphs were able to pound in a sense of driving boredom, and really hone in on the fact that Redheart isn’t happy with her life.

But I do have to say the sentence length and murkiness may play against it. I personally was really driven to keep reading to find the horror of this story, but a casual reader who maybe didn’t look at the tags (shame on you) may get lost along the way and bail out before we get to the core of the story.

And yeah, I reckon it’s a necessary risk given that the core of the story really hits in the last line of the first chapter and then in the 600 or so words in the second chapter. I’ll concede that point. Cutting back on the denseness of the opener would likely detract from the sense of boredom that feels key to the story, but on the flip side it may inspire readers to keep reading for the twist that makes this story about a lot more than being bored.

Ultimately, while I’m being picky here, I really did like the way the story came together. Bravo, you author person you.

Usually I’d recommend an author try to employ sentence length variation, but having read another story by this author I’ll just vaguely throw it out there: I can say with certainty the author has enough experience (and in all honestly probably more experience than I have) to safely ignore this advice, and in reference to my previous point, the density can be quite effective in this particular scenario.

On one other point: there was a section in the story where we are briefly introduced to the character of Nurse Coldheart. I actually thought Coldheart was Redheart referring to herself under a different name and this kind of confused me for a bit: eventually it became clear these were two distinct characters but threw me for a bit of a loop. The structure of the sentence could probably be reworded a tiny bit just to clear out this little hiccup. 

This is a story about boredom, yet it manages to not be boring. I find that amusing in and of itself. The author executes very well to keep this story from becoming mind-numbing and maintaining an aspect of dreadful, hidden horror, and they manipulate their pieces in such a way that truly makes this a memorable read.

I’ve never considered angels of death the way the author represents them here, but having read the story now I am a big fan of this characterization. The spite, the anger, the bitterness that drives Redheart is so rich and so well done that it’s sold me completely. The author clearly has done a healthy amount of research into these individuals and presents them incredibly well throughout the story. A very, very enjoyable story.

If you’re looking for something a little unique in the horror genre and are willing to tough it out to the end, pick this one up! 

So I’ve been made aware this review comes on the heels of a… rather unfavorable shall we say review, and I hope you found these points a little more useful or helpful than the last one was? I honestly didn’t have much to critique on here. Your take on the horror genre is much-appreciated and I found this piece to be very well put together. So good job, gold star for Ice Star. 

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Thank you for the review! I'm glad you found so much enjoyment — and so much to say — about my story. I noticed that you did take note of the sentence variance, something another recent review touched upon. I always try and swap up different techniques for different kinds of stories. If a story is more introspective, or from the point of view of certain characters, and falls into genres that require slower pacing — well, then I use longer, denser sentences. It do be an Ice Star thing. I've always favored the more compact, spliced prose for action and comedy. (Poetry, though, that's a different story.) I might have some other stories that do deviate from this trend, and perhaps I should go back and read them, since it's been a while since I've used that habit.

Since you're a fan of background ponies, I figured it was worth mentioning: Nurse Coldheart is me misremembering the more common name of the background pony commonly called Nurse Snowheart. She's a canon background pony who has been in the show since the start. She almost always appears in scenes with the character called Nurse Sweetheart. I thought that her name was worth keeping, and I liked 'Coldheart' too much to change it. To me, it gave Coldie a nice blue/red oni background horse vibe going on, all without making her mean.

(That and I can come up with my own names for the background ponies, okay!)

You can see her here. By the way, where was it you found the passage where Nurse Redheart and Coldheart came across as the same character? I would like to fix that, but it wasn't highlighted in the review.

7336506

No problem!

I figured you probably meant Snowheart, but hey, Coldheart is a neat little name as well.

The section I mentioned was here:

Nurse Coldheart was taking bites of her daisy sandwich that were daintier than they had any right to be. Next to her, Nurse Sweetheart was chattering incessantly, her fatty lunch of Sugarcube Corner leftovers currently untouched.

“Oh, Coldie, don’t you feel so bad for that poor little filly in room 112?”

“Diamond Tiara?” Nurse Coldheart asked, well, coolly. Nurse Redheart always found that to be equally enviable and off-putting about the older mare.

“Yes, that poor dearie! To have broken a leg when she was supposed to open her cute little treehouse is just a tragedy!” Nurse Sweetheart’s lip was quivering already and her eyes were a little more than damp. Everything was a tragedy to her, and it was to the point where Nurse Sweetheart was comparable in sensitivity levels to Ponyville’s resident nopony Buttershy, or something like that.

“Of course,” Nurse Redheart said, “it’s always a shame to see such a young face here.”

So it's not until three paragraphs in that we establish Redheart is here, and it threw me off because were were following her up until this point. Given Coldheart is the first mentioned character I automatically thought this was Redheart referring to herself as Coldheart.

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So it's not until three paragraphs in that we establish Redheart is here, and it threw me off because were were following her up until this point. Given Coldheart is the first mentioned character I automatically thought this was Redheart referring to herself as Coldheart.

Okay, reading over this, I can see how you came to this conclusion. Would it be better if I fixed up this to make Redheart being there easier to realize, or did you get what was going on right after it was established they were two different characters?

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I'd suggest that you add a brief, maybe one line sentence about Redheart in the beginning, then intro the other two. Once I figured out they were different characters everything came together quickly and it's really a tiny little thing. All in all it doesn't detract too much and it's not impossible to readjust.

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Alright, if that's the case, I might just leave it as it is. Thank you!

7336561

Glad to have been of assistance! ^^