Our society pressures people to be thin, no matter how unhealthy the obsession can become. What if we were idiotic enough to start treating other forms of self-harm the same way?
Running out of options, maybe Wallflower Blush would finally try to stand up for herself.
But she might overdo it.
...
Contains or references: anorexia, bulimia, related eating disorders, cutting, suicide, bad parenting, mass media giving terrible advice about how to look more attractive, Sunset Shimmer doing crimes, an innocent green-haired girl gone bad.
I thank bananachips for prereading a version of this story, and for helpful correspondence about it. This story's flaws, however, are not bananachips' fault.
(I made the cover image from show art. Details in the Author's Notes.)
10633518
Wow, you must be a fast reader?
Most.
(Angry bughorse noises)
In the sense that one has Sunset and the other doesn't.
Brilliant inversion of a tired trope, especially the turn at the end. Lovely bit of madness. Thank you for it.
NOTE: The first sentence of the above paragraph was dumb of me to say, but I'm leaving it there, because the alternative is cowardice. Can't learn from your mistakes if you never admit you made them, folks.
10633837
MFW the entire foundation of my library about a character with canonical suicidal thoughts going through the same things I've gone through, extensively informed by my personal experiences and struggles with self-harm addiction since I was 11 years old, and written with the intent to portray self-harm addiction realistically and without ever glorifying the thing that ruined my life, is a "tired trope"
cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/692239896773001217/800491961001312256/20190701_154740.jpg
10633865
I say that independent and irrespective of your work. You do excellent work with the concept, but I feel like it's been beaten into the ground elsewhere. I don't mean to belittle the severity of the concept or your stories.
... Well, not consciously. I apologize for doing so anyway.
10633865
Scampy, I'm glad I got to read the comments you deleted before you deleted them. Because I really liked them.
Also, I was glad to see your comment on Monochromatic's The Choices We Make. I was wondering what you might think about my Author's Note linking to it, and it seems your comment supports that.
I'm not sure this story was written with the best execution. The intent to invert cliches about media depicting suicide only works if it inverts bad cliches. To understand what's a bad cliche, you have to understand the difference between glorifying and simply depicting something. One of those is important, because it can serve to reach out to people who need something that understands them or serve as an outlet. As someone who has struggled with suicidal depression before and made many attempts in the past, I can understand why it can be tired of seeing bad depictions in media, but you don't write the subject with care. For satire, understanding your subject is vital.
Even as a person who struggles with these issues, I do enjoy dark humor about the subject. This wasn't it though. It was very well-intended, but naive in execution. Your author's notes really show off that you don't seem to understand the subject or why people write about it.
I would really suggest reading up on respectful and disrespectful depictions of subjects like self-harm and suicide. These are vital for improving your ability to portray the subject. Also, please don't beef up the word count of your stories by sticking the author's notes where they don't belong. This site includes a feature specifically to showcase the author's notes. Use them.
You also don't seem to understand that people of all genders struggle with eating disorders and extreme body image issues. You don't need to create a world where that happens, we already live in it. If you want to show these issues in a new and interesting way, there are examples on how to create a setting that can show social issues that are in some way inverted or play out differently than they occur within real-world settings.
I didn't upvote this in good faith, but I didn't downvote it either. But you really should understand why readers are giving you feedback that appears more hesitant or negative.
10633837
10633865
I'm gonna have to side with Scamps on this one, FOME. Also, the concept of dark comedy lambasting things like suicide and self-harm is so consistently done that there are episodes of Tom & Jerry and The Looney Toons that play it for laughs. I wouldn't necessarily call this a brilliant inversion. Now that's not to say this story isn't well written and funny in places, I was legitimately laughing at the whole first scene with the family meal, but it's funny in a way that leaves me subtly off-put by the entire thing to the point that I kind of had to cringe my way through the rest of it.
I got some real laughs out of it, that much is true, and to Mockingbirb: your talent for comedy is definitely on display here. It's the subject matter that comes off a little... barren. I'm not sure how else to put it. It doesn't precisely fall flat, but the way it does fall, at least for me, isn't a particularly positive landing.
The writing quality, true to most of your library of work, is good, and as I said above the comedy is executed really well, but yeah, the moment I saw this pop up I had to read through it, and I'll be honest, I was kind of hoping it would be better. Take that for whatever it's worth.
Despite my earlier critique, I'm gonna be honest, I had to stop reading for a while to laugh at this line. This was solid gold.
10633893
I really appreciate this response.
10634111
For whatever it's worth, Scampy, I checked my records of stuff by you I'd read, and the only thing I found was a positive reaction to at least one of your stories about Wallflower suicide. It was "Synthesis."
10634111
10633893
I like to think that when FoME said "Brilliant inversion of a tired trope, especially the turn at the end," he was not only talking about things separate from your (Scampy's) stories, but to a large extent talking about things that have little or nothing to do with Wallflower suicide (EDIT: or 'cutting,' either,) at all. The last 3/5ths at least of the story have a lot more to do with other topics, such as how Equestria Girls movies handle the redemption of troubled youth who are bullies. Any such turn at the end has nothing whatsoever to do with suicide (EDIT: or self-harm), I am happy to say.