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PRN Hospital: From Birth to Death

by Short-tale

Summary

Nurse Snowheart hasn’t been a girlfriend for long but she has been a nurse. She knows what the field is like first hand. Her new boyfriend Ace Bandage has had some troubling calls recently and Snowheart knows that pain. All one can do is listen and support.

Initial Thoughts

Alright… I took this story on sight-unseen. And from the tags… I’mma regret it. I know I am. I shouldn’t have agreed to this, just looking at the gore and suicide tags.

Still. Let’s see if I’m right about that.

My General Reaction

Right away, we’re thrown into the story with Nurse Snowheart (an OC) working at Ponyville Hospital with her sister, Tenderheart. Though, that’s not exactly clear at first. This story honestly has a few technical issues outside of grammar, and it really hampered me when I sat down to start reading.

We open, in media res, during the hospital’s nightshift, and the narration doesn’t make it quite clear what the relationship is between Snowheart and Tenderheart, since the close third-person narration seems to say that Tenderheart is part of a pair of twins… except that the way its worded doesn’t lend itself to making it clear that Snowheart is that twin. So, confusion, right off the bat.

Another issue that cropped up right away was that the story made no attempts to contextualize what was going on. I know this is a sequel, but there has to be some allowance for new readers. A small recap, or a little bit of Purple Pony Prose just in the beginning would go a long way to making the beginning easier to read through.

Snowheart hears that her boyfriend – yup. Not stallionfriend or coltfriend – is having a bad night. Apparently, he’s an EMT at the hospital, and poor Ace Bandage has just gotten off a brutal call.

Here, the story does something interesting. The story is split into two chapters, and it’s quite appropriate, considering the context. The first chapter shifts into a retelling of some prior call the local EMTs were on, one in which Ace aided in the birth of none other than Spitfire’s baby. It’s a nice little bit, actually. There’s even a bit of humor mixed in with the horrendous gore and icky birthing stuff, which the author doesn’t shy away from at all.

If the story itself had separated this little story from the rest, I’d be much happier. But, with no linebreak, it might sneak up on a reader like it did me. I would have appreciated some sort of demarcation, just to keep the past and present more clearly defined.

After this recollection, Ace then goes into detail on a suicide attempt he was called in on. There’s some humor here, in how the medics interact… but it really falls flat with the tragedy and horror going on around them. Kind of a huge mood killer. I get that this might have been intentional, but that’s not really an excuse.

Snowheart comforts Ace through all this, and their relationship seems to grow stronger from this sharing of trauma.

And… that’s it. It’s rather abrupt in how the story ends, and that somewhat works… and somewhat doesn’t. It fits, if you consider the theme of Birth-Death. There’s buildup to the former, while the latter comes out of nowhere, but that doesn’t always feel satisfying in a narrative. I don’t know. I’ve been turning over the story in my head for a bit now, trying to figure out how intentional that theme might have been, versus how likely it is I just mapped those ideas onto the story as I read it.

It’s an interesting idea, for a story. But it’s really held back by the odd structure of the story, the lack of context for some of the characters and events depicted, and just how bizarre the main character is. I legit couldn’t tell, at first, if Snowheart’s stilted, awkward dialogue was intentional, or if the author couldn’t write characterization. That was proven wrong, as some of the other characters had, well, character. Some of them even good characterization. But the bizarrness of Snowheart took me completely out of the narrative every time she spoke.

Grammar and Word Things

6/10 – Structural issues are worse than simple mistakes
Especially right in the beginning, there are missing linking words in phrases, a few spots where I noticed a lack of quotation marks, or two paragraphs slammed together by accident. The lack of a proper split in the narration between present events and past ones is jarring enough to where I felt that the author perhaps picked the wrong sort of viewpoint, or the wrong character to be the narrator.

Story/Plot/Pacing

6/10 – An interesting theme cannot make up for missing context
While I can give points for some of the Birth/Death elements in the narrative, I feel like the lack of a recap, and the lack of buildup from story-start to when the main rising action of the piece began turned what could have been a sharp bit of workplace drama into something of a confusing mire. Things become clearer as the story goes on, but it still feels like something crucial is missing.

Characters

6/10 – Interesting characters, except for the protagonist/narrator
Ace Bandage is actually kind of a sweetheart, and I really enjoyed his interactions with Klinger (I so want this to be a MASH reference, you have no idea) while the two stallions were on the job. Tenderheart seemed like she had some character to her as well, but the story doesn’t focus on her at all, and the kirin nurse Aloe Glow… well, she has the same problem as Snowheart. Namely, she’s a robot. No one talks like that. Not even Maud Pie talks like that, and she’s Maud Pie. If the characters are meant to be a bit mechanical and intellectual-orientated, even to an awkward degree, there’s better ways to do it that doesn’t hurt readability.

Final Word and Rating

PRN Hospital: From Birth to Death is an interesting attempt at the hospital drama fic genre, but one held back by a number of structural issues in how the story is told, not necessarily in the story itself. There’s a core of a good story here, and it wouldn’t take too much effort to rework some of the tertiary elements to make it a much stronger example of the genre.

To the author: Outside of maybe loosening up Snowheart’s dialogue a bit – seriously, it’s too much, dial back the robot-speech – I think what really hurts this story is its structure, and the way information is given to the reader. Especially for a sequel, you should provide a little more information upfront at the beginning of the story so the new readers like me can keep up. I was genuinely lost for the first part of chapter one. And when you have such extensive flashbacks, it could help if you split up the narrative visually, so that the readers have it spelled out where one starts.

Feel free to comment below.

<For Archive Purposes: 6/10>