TBabe, Why Is She Saying That Word?

• MLP: FiM
• Comedy
• Random

Flurry Heart learned a few new words that Shining is way more worried about than Cadance.

• Cadance
• Shining Armor
• Flurry Heart

Soaring · 5k words  ·  196  8 · 3.4k views

Babe, Why Is She Saying That Word?

by Soaring

Summary

Flurry Heart learns some new words. Shining Armor is worried.

Cadance just wants to make sure she's not going to make her foal a mute.

Luna just wants to buy nuclear laxatives.

Initial Thoughts

Well that’s… what?

Okay, that description certainly caught my attention. And the cover art depicting Flurry screaming “Abortion” with a happy smile. Sounds like a classic ‘random comedy’, which I always enjoy, since they usually delve into silly shenanigans and give us readers a break from continuity and grim serious stories.

My General Reaction

This was a very odd sort of story. It definitely earns the ‘Random’ tag, though I hesitate to say it’s done the same for ‘Comedy’. It can be amusing, at times, but there’s a feeling that much of the humor is strained and forced.

I think, worse… the joke goes on too long.

The basic setup is this: Flurry Heart has started saying… well, gross and awful things. Shining Armor appears generally worried, but calm about the situation. And Cadance is, essentially, the main provider of jokes and silliness. She brushes off Shining’s concern quickly, and acts quite blasé about the whole issue, only to reverse positions as soon as her husband pushes back, switching to a stereotypical ‘concerned parent’ sort of model.

And it works, their characterizations. Shining being the “Straight Man”, Cadance the silly character, and Flurry the thing screaming “ABORTION”, “ERECTILE DISFUNCTION” and other absurdities as the dialogue permits. It soon becomes apparent that a small amount of Poison Joke got into one of Flurry’s bottles to cause this situation, and the two adults panic and worry over how it happened, as well as what to do about it now.

For the most part, this all works. The jokes are amusing, if deeply disturbing and dark in tone, and the characters fit their intended purpose and comedic archetypes well.

But, while the story is good, it could have been great. The trouble is, the initial setup is quickly established and the main thrust of the comedy done by the thousand-word mark. The story itself is over four-thousand words long, however. The addition of a loopy apothecary was interesting at first, but this new character’s, uh, characterization is a bit random, and more or less derails the plot. And while, yes, it’s usually foolish to look for plot in a random comedy, this story starts to make a real storyline of its events, so some adherence to more traditional story structure should be a priority.

The joke plays too long, essentially. And with all the long-winded and unnecessary asides made to pad the run-time, the whole thing drags severely in the middle. There are several jokes in the story that feel like a whole other story was cut into and out of this one. Just odd hanging-chads of story beats that go nowhere, and leave the reader wondering what they missed. Several jokes just feel incomplete, either without proper setup or without a proper punchline.

It’s still funny, but never hilarious. This may be partly due to the “Lemony” narration. A Lemony Narrator is a narration style that, though the narrator isn’t a real character in the story, still feels like it has its own characterization. Cute asides, odd tangents, and colorful metaphors and descriptions are the hallmark of such a style, and this story uses it a lot.

That’s a very subjective thing, mind. I personally like a little character in narration, but it can be done badly, and it can be done far too much. Whether that’s the case here or not is for every reader to judge, but I felt like the narration, while mostly fun, could go overboard here and there.

Technicals

3/5 – Odd sentence-phrasing lessens the ease of reading
Some of the jokes and bits don’t work only because it feels like someone cut something from the formula. Certain sentences sort of go nowhere, and leave me wondering if a joke was supposed to be there. Like the part where Cadance and Shining worked on some sort of spell with Celestia. I’m not sure if there’s a sexual innuendo there, but that whole paragraph feels like someone cut the context out of it.

Story/Plot/Pacing

3/5 – Very uneven pacing and very strange plot
There is a plot and a story here, worthy of about one-thousand words. The story itself stretches this out to four-thousand, to its own detriment. Some of the sillier events in the story (like Flurry being tossed through a door at the apothecary) are just too silly, and disrupt the flow of the narrative. There are several ways to cut down the bloat here.

Characters

4/5 – Deliberate OOC, fun but hard to follow
The characters are hardly similar to their show counterparts in anything other than broad strokes. Shining is serious, Cadance is funny (I’m stretching here), and Flurry Heart is a baby. That being said, they fit their roles as comedic devices fairly well. It’s only the oddities of the plot and missing punchlines and setups that hurt them in the readers’ eyes.

Final Word and Rating

Babe, Why Is She Saying That Word? is a fun, absurd take on a simple concept. The humor works, and it’s an amusing setup, though the jokes tend to run a bit thin by the end. It’s a solid, if not exactly groundbreaking bit of fun.

To the author: The two main points I’d advise you on are the general pacing and the pacing of individual jokes. It felt like there were a lot of jokes tossed in here, and very, very many of them fell flat or just didn’t make much sense to me. Perhaps they were too silly, or perhaps they referred to something I didn’t “get”, but a lot of the humor felt flat at times. And in general pacing, I felt like you could have totally cut the apothecary, or drastically reduced his ‘screen time’. The chapters are one-thousand and three-thousand words long, respectively, and this imbalance really causes the latter half of the story to drag.

Still, much of the humor worked, especially in the beginning. If you could maintain that level of humor throughout the piece, and perhaps cut down its length, I think this would be one of the greats.

Feel free to comment below.

<For Archive Purposes: 6.8/10>

7584394
Based review. 100% agree with what you said. The problem with this one is that I could have gave that intro a little bit more of a lead-in, however I have a tendency to also over-do the lead into it, so my run-up was removed to work with a more direct approach to the conflict. Either that or I could have yeeted the apothecary to ensure that the story didn't drag as it were. Either way could have helped the balance, but shaving some of the excess + unnecessary characterization for a one-off character could have helped this one like you said.

Sorry, responding to this in-between meetings, but I really appreciate this review. I will be coming back to this one to help improve my fics! Thank you!!