TGreen With Envy

• MLP: FiM
• Romance
• Comedy
• Slice of Life

Trouble is brewing. Either Starlight gets to the bottom of it in time, or she could lose Trixie as a friend... Or worse yet, she could lose two friends at once.

• Trixie
• Starlight Glimmer
• Phyllis

Thesmokinguy · 5.5k words  ·  98  5 · 1.9k views

Green With Envy

by Thesmokinguy

Summary

Working at the friendship school as student counselor has kept Starlight away from spending time with Trixie. When she finally gets the chance to pay Trixie a visit, Starlight notices that she is acting weirder than usual. In order to save their relationship, Starlight comes up with a plan to find out what is going on with Trixie.

She wasn't ready for the answer.

Initial Thoughts

Oh, hey! That’s a cool picture! In fact, I remember it being made/commissioned (I forget which) when I first joined a discord writing group where the author of this story wrote this one. Oh, man! I bet this will be a hilarious fic about Trixie potting herself in some desperate attempt to win Starlight back.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

Overview

Oh.

Kinda overhyped myself for this one, if I’m being honest.

That sounds harsh. Let me explain.

This story actually reads like an episode of the show might have run. And that comes with good and bad. It certainly feels like a follow up to the season 9 episodes where Starlight and Trixie work through some of their friendship issues and basically cement their future tenure over the School of Friendship, what with all the copious amounts of callbacks, but it ultimately comes across as a little too much like an episode. It’s too… safe. It’s still funny, no doubt. But from the main picture and the description, it sounded like we were going to get more.

Smokey has fallen for the classic blunder: Never start a thread story with a more interesting pic than the topic.

In the story itself, Starlight begins things by still being her overworked and busy self, magical summoning bracelet and all. And it bugs Trixie to endless frustration that Starlight can’t make time for her these days. Which… yeah. That’s a bit of a rehash of one of the episodes this story follows-up, and it doesn’t help that the events of that episode are mentioned, so the lessons were all learned anyway…

But where things diverge is that Starlight decides to be proactive about things. She realizes that Trixie’s bad attitude towards her these days could also be explained as her having a crush and being ignored. So, naturally, she sets up a sort of picnic-trap to get Trixie to confess her feelings so they can be open about their relationship.

And… that’s when things fall apart, from a narrative perspective and from a grammar one. The second half of the story more or less crumbles on these two fronts as it progresses, with misspellings, paragraph formatting, and misuses of basic grammar suddenly multiplying as the story hits its climax, and then the actual tension and plotting of the tale just fizzling out as it gets there.

There’s a rather nonsensical bit of the plot involving Starlight’s plant Phyllis that unfortunately isn’t as funny as I think the author intended it to be. The circumstances and logic behind Phyllis’ inclusion in the events of the story honestly just strain my suspension of disbelief a bit too far, since it makes Starlight… kinda dumb. Like, more oblivious and random than she’s ever been before. It takes me out of the story, and it doesn’t lead to a funny enough conclusion to really make up for that.

There’s also a subplot about that one sad pony coming back for relationship advice that sounds like it would have been a much funnier story if focused on. But it more or less just happens in the background and only draws a casual mention from Starlight and Trixie near the very end of the story proper.

Grammar

3/5 – You had me in the first half, not gonna lie
Major grammatical and structural flaws appear past the halfway point, and it’s very, very distracting.

Story

3/5 – Somewhat predictable plot, not as funny as advertised
The story is pretty much spelled out for you in the description, and there are no surprises anywhere to be found in the main plot. As a piece of romance, it’s fine. As a comedy, this lackluster drags the rest of the story down.

Characters

3/5 – Recognizably them, but without surprise
The characters within this story are very clearly who they’re supposed to be. There’s some exaggeration and lesson-forgetting going on here with them, but no more than in the actual show. The story is safe and does nothing revolutionary or surprising with the characters, unfortunately, leaving them to just sort of be in the story.

Final

Green With Envy is a short, romantically themed distraction of a story. If you’re looking for a nice little romance starring our favorite daring duo, you’ll walk away feeling happy and content. The story’s advertised comedy value is, sadly, let down comparatively.

To the author: I think this story had just a little bit too much going on. It felt busy with what was going on in it, and this makes the focus drift a bit. I think dropping November Rain’s plot, or perhaps finding another way to hint at Trixie’s displeasure at Phyllis’ existence… or just finding a way to have Trixie wind up plotting herself like in the story picture would have dramatically increased the humor of the piece.

Feel free to comment below.

<For Archive Purposes:6/10>