Welcome to WAR! I am SwordTune, the manager, representative, only employee, and sole proprietor of “We Are Reviews, SP.” Fresh off the factory line, today we have a review for “Rainbow Dash Is A Massive Fanny” by forbloodysummer.

TRainbow Dash Is A Massive Fanny

• Equestria Girls
• Slice of Life

Sirens or Shadowbolts, Rainbow Dash always wins. But one’s been outsmarting and embarrassing her in the school corridors, day after day, and she may have profoundly misunderstood the other. But she can’t NOT win, right? She’s Rainbow Dash!

• Adagio Dazzle
• Rainbow Dash (EqG)
• Main 7 (EqG)
• Shadowbolts (EqG)

forbloodysummer · 18k words  ·  35  5 · 2.1k views

Plot Analysis: Rainbow Dash has a wicked burn against Adagio that is going to knock her socks off. Determined to set the record “straight,” she confides in her friends at lunch that this time is going to be the time she scores her verbal victory over Adagio. But due to a quick reference of the Friendship Games, the conversation is steered towards the students of Crystal Prep and the issues with each one of them. 

Characters: There are too many, at least for the middle part of it. Rainbow Dash talks with her friends during lunch as they would on any normal day, meaning the whole cast of usual characters is present, except Twilight. At times, this causes the conversations to become very dense, with multiple characters chiming in just to stay present in the scene.

What results is the feeling that multiple characters just get simplified down to two groups: Rainbow Dash and then everyone else. Granted, the rest of the friend group is led by Sunset and Applejack, who have a large chunk of the speaking roles. But they are by no means an overwhelming majority, and the need to shift quickly between speakers and let everyone have a say does slow down the story a bit. 

And then there are characters who are not present, but are the topics of the story. These characters get talked about in some detail, from Adagio’s superiority at teasing Rainbow Dash, to the rest of the Crystal Preppers. As interesting as the conversation becomes, it’s a character soup, and reading through it, I found myself categorizing character as Rainbow Dash or Not Rainbow Dash because it functionally did not matter whether Rarity or Pinkie Pie or someone else was talking. Aside from small quirks in their speech, they served the same role of loading a lot of information onto Rainbow Dash. 

Dialogue: Where it matters, the dialogue becomes stiff and unnatural. Applejack’s countryisms are the only thing that distinguishes her lines. This is simply the result of what is being talked about, which becomes a focal point for the story. 

Namely, the EqG 7 minus Twilight, are discussing the mental health issues of the Crystal Prep students. The students treat it rather seriously, but the story is not able to make the distinction between talking about mental health and high school students talking about mental health.  A lot of the dialogue becomes weirdly formal, as if by trying to explain and understand the issues amongst themselves, they drop off slang and colloquialisms. The result is that the dialogue does not feel at all like dialogue, and one might say they can almost hear the author in the words of the characters.

Overall: In terms of enjoyment and readability, I rate this a 7/10. In terms of everything else, it’s a bit more complicated. 

This is going to need a bit of a breakdown, because the story is built like a set of parentheses and we may end up too deep in the weeds. At the beginning and end of the story, Rainbow is fixated on the indefatigable purpose of one-upping Adagio. Enclosed by these parentheses is the content, and there is a lot to unpack in the content. The gist of things is that the friend group slowly reveals to Rainbow that they have spent more time looking into Crystal Prep’s students, and in doing so, found new information that recontextualizes their actions. 

For example, the group discusses Sour Sweet and her alternating behaviour, and it’s here that Fluttershy appears to use WebMD for her diagnosis. They jump to the possibility that she may “hear voices in her head that aren’t really there,” but then they shift to considering that she may have a split personality disorder. Let it be noted that this is not wrong for Fluttershy to say; high school students aren’t normally equipped to discuss other people’s mental health. Schizophrenia, Schizoid Personality Disorder, dissociative identity disorder, bipolar I and II, and brief psychotic disorder, all have different criteria for symptoms and duration of symptoms, and there is no way Fluutershy would be expected to pick apart the details of each. 

The author does a good job of keeping the discussion vague and focusing on the social difficulties that Sour Sweet and the other students experience. With that said, as I have mentioned above, the dialogue does not feel like dialogue in many places. The voice of the author can almost be heard, and it is an important point to consider whether a reader who suffers, or knows someone who suffers, from mental illness will feel misrepresented or stereotyped by this story. It is acceptable for high school characters to be uninformed of mental health, but it is more distressing if a story steps on the line of presenting mental health inaccurately. 

Case in point, Twilight is mentioned later in the dialogue. Rainbow Dash argues that Crystal Prep may not be full of mental illness, since Twilight is not like them. Applejack then responds that she has a severe case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Again, it makes sense for these students to make a mistake and misdiagnose others. They’re not not psychologists. But the story presents them as “having done research” on the Crystal Prep students. OCD is commonly used to describe people who are neat, orderly, or very particular. And while Twilight’s character does present a linked obsession and compulsion (schedules and the need to make schedules, respectively), these do not fit the criteria of OCD, in which the compulsive behaviour prevents one’s daily activities. In fact, the opposite seems to be true with how capable Twilight is, and the story does not suggest its version of Twilight to have more severe compulsive behaviour than the Twilight we have seen in the show. Going by definition alone, Twilight may present closer to OCPD, or Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder, which might sound similar but is not the same as OCD.

These are not all that the characters discuss in their dialogue, but I think they’re enough to capture why the story sends an unclear message. The group talks with Rainbow Dash and claims that Crystal Prep is an unofficial special needs school, one that uses wealth and reputation to encourage its students as well as protect them from social stigma. I think this is the most concerning of all, as the story goes out of its way to absolve Principal Cinch of her behaviour by posing the possibility she was trying to encourage them to not let their illnesses hold them back, treating her behaviour as “tough love.”

It is a question that can be asked, but I don’t think the hypothetical should overrule the events which this fanfic is based on. The ability for the EqG 7 to conflate Cinch’s manipulation with encouragement and tough love really drives home the cognitive dissonance between the dialogue and the characters. They claim to have gotten to know Crystal Prep better, but hypothesize that Cinch may not have been “at her best,” rather than figuring out if she was routinely manipulative and threatening to her students. 

For the Author: I understand what might have been attempted with this story. The brief review can’t cover it, but I have to note that it’s clear that everything was written with good intentions. Mental disorders have little visibility in stories, and when they do, the story can run the risk of focusing on the disorder rather than the character. However, the dialogue is presented such that it does not sound like a bunch of students bouncing ideas off of each other. Rather, it reads as if they are just tools for the story to tell a message about mental health. There’s a difference between portraying a discussion about mental illness and discussing mental illness through your medium. 

If you return to a story with similar themes or messages like this one, I would recommend polishing up the dialogue and focusing on telling a story before anything else. You don’t have to weave themes and motifs into your story like a professional, so try to step back, work on the story, and let the themes insert themselves as they come. All it takes is practice. 

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For the Reader: Your mileage is going to really vary with this one, and it may depend on how invested or aware you are of mental health topics. The side plot about Rainbow Dash getting dunked on by Adagio, that’s fine, that’s great. But with the core theme of the story, I can’t say I liked it and I can’t say I disliked it. It just felt weird, and parts seemed out of place. 

<For archive purposes: 7/10>

7528378
This is a really good review, and I very much appreciate you taking the time to write it out.

I absolutely agree about the conversation being Rainbow Dash vs Not Rainbow Dash. I'd like to think each contributor had their own voice, but the arguments fell very much into those two camps and nowhere else. I had hoped the dialogue would still feel natural, but I accept your assessment that it didn't.

My intention was to suggest that some of the things mentioned had been researched by the characters (particularly Fluttershy on Sour Sweet), but that others were more off-the-cuff (like Applejack on Sci-Twi), but I agree that wasn't clear at all. Regarding Cinch, and the conclusion of that bit of the story, I like the thought that even if she was demonstrably horrible as a person, she's done far more to help those in her care than any of the main characters.

I'm also pleasantly surprised you didn't mention the thing most other readers brought up as a problem, of the shift in subject near the half way point. The parentheses were a good metaphor, I hadn't thought of it like that before but you're right.

However, the dialogue is presented such that it does not sound like a bunch of students bouncing ideas off of each other. Rather, it reads as if they are just tools for the story to tell a message about mental health. There’s a difference between portraying a discussion about mental illness and discussing mental illness through your medium.

This is a great way of putting it. Definitely something to keep in mind.

Thanks again!

7528630
No problem! I didn't mention this but I'm aware this story is very old, so there are bound to be changes in your writing style from then to now. Keep up the good work!