TThis Piece Of Me

• MLP: FiM
• Drama
• Sad

Pinkie Pie has always been a mare that gives her 100% in everything she does. Lately, she has been giving less and less of that percentage. And now she's getting close to the negatives.

• Death
• Pinkie
• Main 6

The Sleepless Beholder · 7.5k words  ·  123  10 · 2.6k views

Description

Pinkie Pie is known as the party planner of Ponyville, the happiest mare you will find, one that's always willing to help or cheer you up no matter what. However, these past days, the mare seems to have been lacking some of that enthusiasm. 

Will her friends discover what's causing it before it's too late?

Initial Thoughts

This doesn’t seem like particularly new territory. Happy pony is sad? Well, we’ve all seen one variation of that idea or another. Still, I’m always curious to see what authors try to do with such an idea in order to perform it differently. 

There will be spoilers ahead.

Summary

Pinkie’s been feeling down lately, but it has less to do with depression and more to do with a real physical ailment. She teeters between wanting to keep it a secret, to wanting to not do anything with it, before realizing that happiness is something you live for, not die for.

Plot

To the author’s credit, the premise did not reveal the main subversion of this idea: that Pinkie suffers from a debilitating heart condition, specifically cardiomyopathy. In keeping it hidden beneath what would otherwise seem to be a dime-a-dozen Sad Pinkie story, The Sleepless Beholder actually managed to catch me off guard, and in a good way. I’ve actually read few stories that combined physical ailment with tropes such as this, so this was a welcome surprise. 

There is also the fact that this is revealed fairly early on in the story—early enough that the typical progression of such a story, wherein the source of the difference in a character’s behavior is revealed at the end, is also subverted. I believe such a decision allowed Beholder to write a bit more critically about the character and possibly explore the topic in a much more nuanced matter.

Even so, I must admit that something about that decision feels underdeveloped, regardless of whether it was a conscious decision or simply the one the story naturally took. For while Pinkie’s illness is provided early, and this does indeed allow more room for more story, I don’t think Beholder quite went the distance with it. There’s a level of introspection that the story demands, but most of the drama is simply presented de facto; that is to say, the drama occurs outside of the characters more than it does inside, which seems like a missed opportunity.

For instance, the conflict following the reveal essentially boils down to Pinkie refusing to get a heart transplant. She does this on the basis of not wanting to be any different, but her sister Maud points out that she was already different. But this moment of the story just sort of happens—it feels like, due to the inherently existential nature of it, as well as how it feels drastically different from how Pinkie typically acts, it would require more than just a single scene to explore it. Beyond just medical concerns, this is philosophical, and the story doesn’t really go far enough in developing where Pinkie got this idea in the first place.

I wonder if this ultimately is because of the story’s length—which actually leads to another point. Following Maud’s visit, Pinkie learns from Twilight that at one point she considered using dark magic to fix Pinkie, before Celestia stopped her. This is told in a single conversation, but it feels like more could have been done to develop that particular plot point. After all, this story has become more than just Pinkie’s story—it suggests a story about the nature of grief, and how it affects more than just the afflicted. Terminal illnesses do more than hurt the ill, after all.

And how the story resolves itself also feels underdeveloped. Off-screen, essentially, a donor is found. I was under the impression that part of the drama was that a donor would be difficult to find, just as much as I was under the impression that part of the drama was Pinkie refusing a donor, but neither impression seem to converse fluidly with each other. There’s a level of disconnect between what Pinkie wants and what ends up happening which suggests a level of nuance lost.

My issue is that this point of the story is simply given to us. Yet it feels it develops an emotional undertone, or perhaps a narrative “foil,” to the main story itself. In these 7k words, Beholder starts to develop such things, but that 7k limits what could have been done. If anything, I cannot help but think this story could easily have been at least a novelette’s length, roughly 10-15k words, if only to explore some of the more intricacies which it presents.

Ultimately, what the story’s plot does well is present itself as different from what we’d expect. Yet after that, it doesn’t seem to do much else with itself. I attribute this to length rather than a lack of ideas—there are many ideas touched upon, but I think the story would have benefited from going even further. Sometimes we have to let narrative determine length, and given the many bits and pieces that this story has tried to put together, I believe the narrative determines a larger length than what we’ve been given. 

Score – 7.5 / 10 

Characterization

Beholder decided to intersperse the narrative with fragments from The Smile Song. I’m not sure exactly why this was done, but it seems to be an attempt to juxtapose that song’s message with Pinkie’s character.

It works at first, but after the first horizontal break, it starts to become a bit grating. The repetition becomes needless given the nature of the story, especially after the main reveal. I’m not saying the decision to have parts of that song literally inform the progression of the narrative, but having it done over and over again in order to accentuate the juxtaposition between, essentially, what Pinkie says and what Pinkie does, feels forced.

Speaking of forced, a lot of the emotive appeals come across the same way. Characters sob and cry and continue to sob and cry, and tears run down faces. I admit that writing sadness is a difficult thing, and people do cry, and over something as tragic as what this story presents, it makes sense, but there’s a sense that it’s overdone. For example:

“I wrote what we all wanted to do before…” Tears started to fall down Twilight’s face. “Since we may not have much time…” Twilight finally broke down and jumped on the bed to hug Pinkie with all her strength. “I don’t want to lose you! I can’t!” She sobbed desperately. “Our friendship shouldn’t end this way!”

In such a quote, we have several indications of sadness. There are the tears, but there are also the ellipses, the word choice in the dialogue, the pauses in the dialogue, the changes in tone given the exclamation points, the verb “sobbed,” and the adverb “desperately.” I don’t think the author needs to have all of this; in fact, at most I would keep the punctuation and the tears falling. All the other indications feel tacked on, and therefore unnecessary. The author can trust the reader to know that Twilight is upset without having to handhold them through the entire scene. 

Some of the characters also feel unnecessary, but only because they are there and don’t do much else. Berry Punch, the Cakes, and some of the Mane Six appear almost like “tokens,” getting a few lines here and there but not quite contributing as much as I might have hoped to the narrative. I suppose this is partly due to the constraints of writing in a limited third-person perspective, and also due to making Pinkie the sole narrator of the story. At that point the suggestion I have is to consider writing from multiple limited third-persons, if only to possibly illuminate more of the characters’ perspectives. 

Yet, the best characterizations arguably come from the supporting Pie cast. Maud, especially—though I think her interaction with Pinkie in the beginning is a bit too short and a bit too telly, it’s also an incredibly sweet scene and demonstrates how close they truly are. Having written Maud before, I know how difficult it can be to convey emotion through a pony who is generally and outwardly emotionless, so I must applaud Beholder for managing to strike a good balance between Maud’s bluntness and Maud’s sweetness. 

Still, I believe the main gripe is the same I had with the plot—the story needs a bit more. The Mane Six, for instance, could use a bit more time on their own, dealing with Pinkie’s decision, before the story wraps itself up. There’s great potential for dramatic revelation and tension, here, if Beholder ekes it out. 

Score – 6 / 10 

Syntax

This is a bit harder to judge, since I know English isn’t Beholder’s first language. Sentences do feel a bit clunky, but I can sense there’s a level of another language that gets in the way of English construction. It therefore makes no sense, at least to me, to fully judge the syntactical structure, since English is weird and clunky enough even for native speakers.

That said, there are some issues of capitalization and punctuation that cannot go without saying. 

“'Cause I love to make you smile, smile, smile. Yes, I do. It fills my heart with sunshine all the while. Yes it does.” She sang to herself as she walked to the stairs. “’Cause all I really need's a smile, smile, smile.” She continued as she descended the steps, already wanting to just go back to bed. “From these happy friends of mine.”

“sang” and “continued” actually read as dialogue tags here and not separate actions, so I would say that the words that denote who is performing these tags (“She”) ought to be lower-cased. 

There are also points where the narrative dips into thought, but it writes thoughts with both italics and quotation marks. This would be fine on its own, had not the narrative also written emphasized words within dialogue also with italics and quotation marks. I believe, for the sake of consistency, the story ought to decide to stick to one form or the other. Thoughts could be expressed solely as italics. Emphasized dialogue and words can be expressed with both italics and quotation marks, if it’s so needed. 

Score – 7.5 / 10 

Final Score – ( 7.5 + 6 + 7.5 ) / 3 = 7 / 10

Final Thoughts

What the story does well is invite a difference of narrative. It presents a unique situation and includes measures to develop that situation. What it doesn’t account for is that the story needs more, rather than less, in order to feel complete. It does function as a story, but it feels underdeveloped and incomplete. 

<For archive purposes: 7/10>

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Thanks for the Review Jarv. There're many points I didn't consider when writing it.

Originally the story was going to be much shorter, with only a longer Maud scene, but I felt like it would take a lot out of the story if it ended with just a few words. As you said, the story is more about the grief for a loved one (since that was the experience I was using to write it) rather than Pinkie itself.
As for the donor, I didn't really want to make it known because I wanted that scene to be sudden for Pinkie, (again based on personal experience) and had her "forced" to make a decision.

The thing with the Smile song, I used it as Pinkie's coping mechanism to keep pushing forwards rather than juxtapose her feelings, but it may have gone a bit too far.

There's room for improvement I see, so I hope to learn something for the future.

Have a good day!

PS: I actually laughted when you talked about it being unexpected because that seems to be a sort of secret formula in my writing