Down the Memory Hole

Wallflower Blush492 stories ·285 members

Sunset Shimmer's entire world collapsed overnight. It did it without her even noticing. Upon finding out she has no idea why, and neither she nor Princess Twilight can figure out how it's even possible.

All she knows is that when she met her friends the day after, they weren't her friends. When she meets other students they still hate and fear her. When she tries to remind people that she's changed, they don't remember any of it, but they do remember all of the bad things with crystal clear quality.

Everything she regrets --from being a bully, to being a monster, to yelling at Twilight during the Friendship Games-- remains. Everything she's proud of is gone. With the entire world convinced the truth is a lie, no friends amoung humans, and time running out, Sunset races to understand, and hopefully fix, whatever has happened.

Meta Notes:

When A Friendship to Remember came out I remember being extremely underwhelmed. This is my attempt at taking the basic story and making it whelming.

Well, most of it. You see, most of the book (Chapters 3 to 23 of 23) is the official prose version of Forgotten Friendship, and that is the story here. I feel like the story, at its core, has some real potential, but it did not live up to that potential.

This is a straight up retelling, that means that while it is AU it isn't divergent. More . . . parallel. It doesn't spin off in a different direction, it just tells the same core story with different execution and details.

Chapters (1)

Comments ( 6 )

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Galaxy of Equestria

Galaxy of Equestria #1 · Feb 18th, 2018 · 3 · 4 ·

Retelling of "Forgotten Friendship"/"A Friendship to Remember"
This is lazy writing at it finest! Just tell what happened in the show.

chris the cynic

chris the cynic #2 · Feb 18th, 2018 · 2 · ·

8741825
It's already different, and will become moreso. The special did a fair amount of tell not show, for example. Mixed in with "Tell, but show something that contradicts it." Not planning on doing either.

chris the cynic

chris the cynic #3 · Feb 18th, 2018 · 5 · ·

8741825
Or, to take a different approach:

This is lazy writing at it finest! Just tell what happened in the show.

At its finest? Woo! I have achieved perfection. I wonder if I could expand into other areas. Maybe I could retell what people said in comments, with the same fast and loose style I used to adapt this story, of course. Let's start with yours.

You have earned a place in my Hall of Fame of Shame by being so lazy as retell what happened in a TV special that already had a novelization.

I have tried to attain absolute laziness for years, devoted countless hours to finding the precise minimum effort necessary to do things, and as a three-time World Laziness Champion I proclaim this act, telling a different version of the events depicted in the show, to be the absolute finest that lazy writing has to offer.

Wallflower Blush looked at the description and decided she wasn't even going to read the story before leaving her review. Ever since "A Friendship to Remember" had been published on December 5th of the previous year she had been constantly harassed by people who thought they knew her, and deemed her a monster for trying to destroy relationships by erasing memories.
Then came the animated version that completely failed to capture what it had been like for her to be completely invisible to the world for years on end, forgotten as soon as she was out of sight, always ignored, never acknowledged. As if the fact she'd been unheard, unnoticed, and unpersoned didn't matter.
Now someone was doing yet another version, this one using the novel and the animated version?
Why couldn't this "chris the cynic" girl just write her own damn stories? Why did she have to retell the already twice told tale of Wallflower's lowest point?
It was laziness. That's what it was.
Wallflower logged into her account, Galaxy of Equestria, and copied the relevant section of the story description, pasted it into the comment box, didn't use the quotation function (because she was a rebel, damn it!), and quickly punched out her message: "This is lazy writing at it finest!" (only boring people used pronoun declension, everyone else could tell from context whether it was meant to be nominative, possessive, or a contraction of "it is") and considered leaving it at that.
After some thought, she decided to add, "Just tell what happened in the show." True, she didn't know if the author had even seen the show, the book had been out for a lot longer, but it would take away from the cutting nature of her statement if it read, "Just tell what happened in the show and/or book."
Her work done, she hit "Post Comment" and moved onto other things.

Oh, what if I retell the comment in the style of epic poetry, as it would be composed if made by a pair of people who had been thrice displaced in the multiverse and don't like each other very much? Dactylic Hexameter means I don't even have to decide how many syllables are in a line on my own. And I don't have to think for myself because I'm doing it in the style of others.

Would that be even finer lazy writing?

Uria the Sacred Beast