Math graduate; amateur and autodidact of all things nerdy; feel free to drop me a line!
Rumble is a great flyer, and more diligent in his training than anypony else; but he's still not at the level he should be, if he plans to make it as a future Wonderbolt. Why are some ponies—like Rainbow Dash, like his brother Thunderlane, like his best friend Eddy—born with all the talent in the world, while ponies like him have to suffer just to attain mediocrity?
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Is it just me, or does Eddy sound like a seapony's name?
I liked this story very much, on several levels. The main one is that it touches on the reality that not every dream is achievable, but also that not every dream needs to be achieved for a life to have meaning. To achieve fame - not success, but fame - takes many things to go right, luck being far from the least of them. But on the other hand, striving for fame itself is a hollow, or at least rather unadmirable pursuit. By realizing and, more importantly, accepting that pursuing your passion isn't diminished by the absence of eventual fame Rumble shows a type of maturity that many adults still struggle with attaining - that doing something you love is its own reward, and that if it isn't, they might be spending time doing things they don't really love to begin with.
The ending is good, the pivot feels like it's fitting for Rumble at the end, but it feels like there's some missed opportunities due to the setting at large.
Namely, for the majority of the show, we only see one real "Flight Exclusive Sport", and that's the Wonderbolts and Stunt Flying (who also do competitive racing? and I guess sometimes fight if the tirek episode was anything to go by?) I mean if you take it analogous to running, then sprinters and marathoners have completely different body types and training regiments, and if you take it analogous to swimming then there's stuff like Racing vs Diving.
If you stretch it, you can probably stretch it beyond cardio speed/endurance tests. Like a Pegasus version of wrestling where both contestants start while hovering and the first to touch the ground loses, or a mix of volleyball and soccer where it's the simple "get the ball to the other team's goal" but it can't touch the ground, and it can't be held, so it's just continuous lobbing and spiking.
I can see that sort of dynamic slotted into this story: Rumble's fixation on this very specific athletic path being "that's the most popular flying sport" and "My brother took this path, so should I." And going to "I guess I should find another sport" feels a lot less drastic than "I guess I should give up on competitive athletics entirely"
Like I said, not a real major problem with the story itself, the resolution was fitting, just some thoughts the story prompted.
9751927
Thank you, these are precisely the themes I hoped to impart with this piece. I wrote this story, and more recently revisited it and published it here, at a time when these lessons were particularly necessary for me to swallow.
For a show where nowadays everypony is becoming a princess or a Wonderbolt or saving the world, I think "contentedness with mediocrity" has become a gap in the writers' moral curriculum. I was excited when it appeared Sunburst's first appearance was headed that way—a young precocious unicorn ushered off to a prestigious school where he ultimately couldn't cut it—but instead, they took the easy way out and just made him the world's most talented non-practicing wizard.
9751896
A bit late, but Eddy actually means a circular motion of water, i.e whirlpool