• Member Since 10th Jun, 2020
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LockandKeyHyena


i write stories sometimes. your resident lightning dust apologist

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Rarity never quite liked the concept of soul flowers. 
They were ugly, unnecessary, and the sheer number of them marring her coat demonstrated a recklessness from her soulmate that she frequently bemoaned was going to get them killed one day.
Never did she hope for her prediction to come true.


This is the first installment in the Soulflowers series! If you follow me on tumblr you’ve probably been waiting for this to come out for a while and it’s finally here! There is some light description of wounds and death in here, but I don’t think it was anything worthy of a tag.

In case it wasn’t clear, this takes place in an au where whenever your soulmate gets a scar, you get a matching set of flowers on your skin/fur.

It’s my first proper attempt at fanfiction so please be understanding haha. It’s just a one-shot atm but if people like it enough I might expand on the individual couples’ stories in the future. Other than that, I hope you enjoy!

Chapters (1)
Comments ( 5 )

Aw this is such a sweet story!! The idea of a young Rarity throwing a temper tantrum over the "wrong" flowers is absolutely priceless...

I love the way you've characterized both Rarity and Rainbow Dash in this story. I feel like they're some of the characters folks most often run off the rails with, as they're pretty easy to reduce to some flat stereotypes. These versions feel a lot more rounded out and well-rendered, though ^^ I'm really excited to see what else you do with this concept!!

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ahh! thank you so much! i’m pretty happy with how this came out and i’m excited to expand the concept in the future! :D

I like fics with Soulmarks, soul flowers ect.

Rarity remembered the first time she experienced death. Peering down into the casket her grandmare almost looked to be sleeping. She might have even been able to convince herself of that fact had it not been for her parents shooing her away to play with the other foals when she innocently asked why her pa’s flowers, of which he usually showed off with such pride, were wilted and grey.

So, does that mean Rarity's father was soulmates with her grandmother? Or is 'Pa' meant to refer to her grandfather. Though, either way, hearing Rarity refer to one of them as 'Pa' feels off to me.

Perhaps packing her schedule with as much as possible and leaving herself no time to think was some pathetic way she tried to remain a sense of normalcy since that night.

Think you mean 'Regain' there.

Hmm, intriguing concept - a rather flowery (Pun not intended but appropriate) method of demonstrating such a connection, but one with interesting implications.

I do have two major issues though. Firstly, while I do like the fact that you don't just frontload what soulflowers are and how they work right out of the gate and instead let it come up naturally through the story, I do think it could be made clearer throughout. To be honest, even after reading the whole thing, I was still a little unclear on it.

I think the idea is that they appear whenever one's soulmate is hurt or in danger of dying, probably in a manner decided by the nature of the injury and they don't seem to go away, even though realistically that would make them more flower than pony after a while. And they wilt when your soulmate dies, though no idea if they then drop off or if you're just stuck with moldering flowers on you for the rest of your life. Also, does everypony have them or only some, since if everypony had them, I'd imagine there couldn't ever be in or out of fashion any more than 'having a head' could be.

If nothing else, I think maybe a full description at the end would help somewhat.

The other issue: I think we needed to see a lot more of the interaction between the two in that last scene and possibly beyond. And I don't say that because what we do get feels rushed (it is a little, but not unbearably so, at least to me), but because of the nature of the story and their connection.

See, with any story involving soulmates and variations thereof, you run the severe risk of things getting extremely uncomfortable, due to the questions that it raises about predestination and free will. To be honest, it often comes across as nothing more than "the author says you gotta smooch, so you gotta smooch". However - and I'd like to stress that both this problem and the solution are just in my view - it can be made to work if and only if the writer makes the romance and falling in love seem completely natural, such that even without them being 'soulmates', it would likely have come about.

That way, it seems less like "There's something - fate, cosmic forces, authorial intent - forcing you to be together and you have no say in the matter" and more like "You'll happen to run into someone you'll just click with and for whom it'll be natural for you to fall in love with, and the only reason 'fate' knows that is because, from the point of view of the space-time continuum, it's already happened." It's not that anything in the present is forcing the future to go a certain way, but that the future is reaching back to make things in the present this way.

I'm... positive I'm explaining this terribly and I apologize (though, in my defense, time travel and temporal shenanigans are notoriously hard to parse grammatically), but the point is that you need to have as much interaction and natural chemistry as you can to avoid it seeming like something's forcing the pair to be together regardless or in spite of their wills and desires. And, while the story isn't terrible in that regard, I do feel it could use a fair bit more.

Still, an interesting concept executed pretty well. Definitely keep going with this - seems like it'll be well worth seeing where it goes from here.

“In case it wasn’t clear, this takes place in an au where whenever your soulmate gets a scar, you get a matching set of flowers on your skin/fur.”

I don’t follow the memes or the latest trends but I’m pretty sure this isn’t a common trope.

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