TThat Sinking Feeling

• Equestria Girls
• Drama
• Sad
• Slice of Life

I sink into the darkness, hearing voices all around me, and I can only think

• Second Person
• Wallflower Blush

The Sleepless Beholder · 1.3k words  ·  19  2 · 449 views

That Sinking Feeling is a story that is for all intents and purposes an extended metaphor. The kind that compares something as complicated as life and day to day existence to something as wide and vast as the ocean. I personally am a big fan of ocean metaphors, in fact I use them quite a few myself, and this story utilizes it in a unique way, while giving us some insight into a very fitting character.

Let’s hit it. 

The story doesn’t exactly follow a set plotline. Rather, as I said before, the story really serves as one big metaphor that compares life to the ocean. In the story, we follow Wallflower as she muses about her life and the things that led her to where she is today.

And then… and then the story kind of negates itself. The ending most certainly stands out, as Wallflower kind of denies the entire thing by calling herself out on her failures. 

Other than that, there isn’t really that much more story to discuss I feel. I’ve definitely been where Wallflower is, and I definitely have some sentiment to her situation. But I think that’s a bit more fit for the other sections of this review. 

The only real character at play here is Wallflower. Her sister appears as an antagonist at the end and can be interpreted as a driving force, but she isn’t really prevalent enough for me to really say anything solid about her.

Wallflower definitely has a lot going on as a character, and as such she’s a pretty open ground for interpretations such as this one. Her character arc here is pretty heavy and carries a great weight with it, and I think that overall we really do get a nice feel for her character here.

In particular Wallflower promises to try and do her best, reasoning that it’s really all she can promise. But she’s told it isn’t enough. And that’s a hard hitting line if I’ve ever seen one.

So yeah, the character work is solid. Well done by the author! 

So let’s talk about the metaphor itself. I personally feel that the author could have extended the metaphor just a bit longer, but the comparison of waves was a nice touch. 

The pacing of the story was pretty compact, meaning that everything was pretty short and to the point. There are some occasional bits where I don’t quite agree with the narrative, for example the claim that Wallflower doesn’t have problems because she “knows how to fix them.” That claim to me kind of contradicts itself.

Beyond that there are some grammatical knacks I found, including some suspect verbs like in the line

At first, they were just a dozen, but soon turned into almost a hundred, too many to keep track of who each of them was.

Where ‘was’ should be ‘were.’ Beyond that there were some minor grammatical cues like missing commas and spacings between paragraphs and the sort, but overall the story came off as mostly solid.

So overall, this story was a pretty nifty one for being an extended metaphor. The character work is tight, and overall I think the story hits most of the points it needs to. That being said, I do wonder if it falls short just a little bit.

I think it might just because of the volume of stories I’ve read at this point that the concept of an extended metaphor is a bit common for me, to the point where it has to be coupled with something else to make it stand out to me. So I guess that overall this story doesn’t quite do enough for me to call it a favorite, but don’t get me wrong, it’s still pretty solid. 

If you’re a fan of Wallflower character pieces, I think that you’d really like this one. 

Pretty neat work! I think that if this was a little bit longer and did a little more with the metaphor idea this would stand out more to me. But don’t get me wrong, you did a lot of great things here. Keep it up! 

(For archive: C)

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Thanks for the review Parade, didn't know these kind of things were usual to you.

the claim that Wallflower doesn’t have problems because she “knows how to fix them.” That claim to me kind of contradicts itself.

This is actually something that I've told to myself many times, it is a logical contradiction, but when you're so lost like I was at the time, you belive it anyways, until someone manages to point that out to you.

That's also why there's a big contradiction at the end, because when reality strikes, in this case by Wallflower's sister, you believe yourself the failure, because that's how everyone sees you as.

Hope to bring more sotires like this in the future. Good luck in your proyects.