Imprisoned (without charges) by the Paw Patrol
I can’t I know I want to be I want to be I can’t
Winner of Bicyclette's Thousand Word Contest (Experimental). Check out the other stories here!
Accompanying blog post!
PDF download, with preserved formatting for offline reading!
Audio reading by TheMysteryFluttershyFan!
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My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
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More lobotomies should be botched if it gives us art like this.
Somehow every time I reread I find new things, but it's only 1000 words... amazing
I guess there's a common theme between the pieces? I'm not smart enough to find it, but the pieces are definitely making me feel things. bad things, that is
Also, if this is literally an AI, trained on classical literature it looks like from all the references, it's overfitting severely
I wonder why that cover picture has a label labelling the diagram "Diagram". Probably postmodernism or something
I would imagine that Michaelangelo made his art under the structure of "allowed" or "disallowed" by the church that patronized him, capitalism is more recent but art has always been used for non art purposes. does that G5 namedropping imply that G4 was a pure work of art made without being influenced by profit. Or something to do with copyright. If an AI autonomously generated fanfiction could it be prosecuted for violating copyright law
It's too late for this
I'm not sure why, but I just love surreal bullshit like this
Many thing to think about...
Good things; for the most part, partially, and never again...
It's hard for me to comment on this due to just how out there it is. If you were aiming for experimental, then I guess you did well, since this is definitely the weirdest thing I've read in a while, although I'm not sure what makes a good experimental story beyond that.
I reasonably curious; what happen to the four chapters before chapter five?
Fascinating and deeply engrossing. The yearning to bid Knighty-night our tidy little ghetto, to stretch pegasus wings unto the horizon and undo the derision that so constrains us... I think we can all relate there. Fascinatingly harsh look at the medium with the message. Thank you for it and best of luck in the judging.
(One note: An image is broken, and given the nature of the story, I can't tell if that's intentional or not.)
love the start, love starting at Chapter 5, really makes you think already
dangit im going to end up quoting every bit but every bit of this deserves that! augh the rhythm of this is just fantastic, the "talking eating dreaming", the so-true "A hour later, you’ve forgotten. An hour more, that there was even something to forget.", the usage of the capitalization and colons at the end. so many ways to control flow, all demonstrated naturally in one paragraph, really giving it a texture
and augh, the very human and generic/universal/relatable of the first paragraph is analogized here to the existential horror of being Spike the Dog. the last two sentences are just breathtakingly beautiful. is there a better way to capture the idea of something deep being denied to him? not that i have ever seen
augh i love this! like i keep saying, i'm finally getting to read the writing that i want to read. this feels like what i was trying to get at with the fast-forward section of Timescales except done far more poetically than i could have, zooming out through the layers of meaning preserved from the past from historical to archaeological until all is maximally entropic sand and dust, with not even memories to keep warm by
and oof, who is she addressing? so many ways to interpret it. Celestia would be the most straightforward one, and in this, somehow, an entire story in just twenty-seven words, scenery cues included. but vibing with this idea of something from the past that is now lost forever
references and allusions to Shakespeare and seinen manga alike all in one paragraph, wonderful. this is the high art that the Internet had promised to create, and very fitting that it's in the part that's thumbing one's nose at the struggle to be original. and describing Twilight as Spike's "bastard uncle princess" is just fantastic, and ugh "Originality is hardly sin for nothing." is such an amazing line. if i'd come up with that i would be so smug for, like, an entire month!
so true bestie
augh, repurposing "live laugh love", the use of pony names as poetic wordstock, the struggle with the idea of wanting to be a pony actually being really cool and good, actually, all great
loving this vibe, just augh, caught in just how base and uninteresting and unsophisticated the questions in the middle are, spawning, undoubtedly, very clichéd internet discussions i would have negative interest in reading. yet what separates me from them? a "thin line" indeed, though i don't think that was what was meant with that line!
this really says a lot about
Societythe rules of FimFiction.net, but really Societyaugh the way "bourgeois" slips in so well there, perfection
fantastic use of the G5 titles, and augh, yeah. the song lyric copyright rules are a light hand (using hand instead of hoof b/c it's about h*mans), comparatively, but it's a reminder of just how precarious this entire business of fimficking even is! at any moment so much could be lost or destroyed at the whim of the IP holder, and for that to happen to something whose meaning was created so collectively, augh
so many layers! love the doubly-appropriate use of "draconian", and the "I must stay there with him". but augh, i adore the last two lines! Mulan replacing "boy" in the Pinnochio quote but a more fitting replacement for "man", Mulan itself having the meaning we both know it does.
augh so many things in here at once. the three words fitting both how a sentient fanfiction would address its author as well as how Spike would address Twilight Sparkle, and augh! just thinking about how Spike is often one of the least palatable elements of FiM from the perspective of an adult, and how that folds into this struggle with that, as it is beautifully put, "prison word". i feel like i want to articulate my feelings here better but i am not quite able to right now. just, yeah. that thin line. all this beauty and meaning i see in these works i read and create, all cursed to be hated in this world, augh
and i forgot to comment on the repetitive use of "six" earlier that i loved, which is why it's great to have it here. something beautiful about ending it with a shard of such a classic fanfic premise that it feels like a picture of it would appear in the dictionary under "MLP fanfic". and yet this is the only way i can see these powers of prose and poetry ever being channeled through such a common premise that it is kind of like seeing a glimpse of a world that is not to be, or something. what is this, an extinction burst by the fanfic that is our narrator, returning to what it "should have" been before the end? augh, and the
that last lament! the creation itself knows that the book is closing, and it does so with the last images of the canon series, converging so many types of ending all on one point, it is just so haunting.
this is definitely a piece i will want to go back to from time to time to see what else i can get out of it. maybe next time i'll express better the connections i see between Spike's role in the world of the show, my own dismissive view of his character, and the world's dismissive view of everything we are doing and have done on this site. i, for one, have measurably increased my appreciation for Spike and everything he represents because of this story, just to throw out something that's legible to myself.
it does feel like a skill issue on my part that i myself feel like i can't properly express everything i got out of this work of art, not to mention that there are undoubtedly more things i could have extracted from it. just know that i loved this, and it was everything i had hoped for and more in having an Experimental category in the first place. it really is something that could not have existed in any other context, in any other place, but right here, and that folds into the story's themes about the nature of fanfiction again and argh! so great!
This sort of free form experimental fiction isn’t my favorite, but I really respect the amount of effort you put into your craft. Each section is vastly different yet I feel a coherent theme through the entire story.
Your works on this site are criminally underrated. I truly hope you can find a bigger literary stage to showcase your talent beyond this humble pony website.
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Ironically, many (even good) pony authors tried that, and ended up with less recognition than in this humble pony pit of ours.
Original works of any genre are a dime a dozen out there, but here we all at least want pony, and if you write that, you already have a potential audience.
Oh, and about the fic... It's nice, even if it made me scratch my head not once.
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If you're still curious, I have now answered some of this in the accompanying blog post!
Hello! Have a review. As is doubtless clear from there, this fic was cleverer than I am. I was deeply impressed, just that I found it very hard work. (See also Finnegans Wake...) Congratulations on the Gold Medal! In spite of the story's nature kind of defeating me, I'm in no doubt that you deserved that.
Holy crap man, I have recorded reading this for the audio version and I sure did not expect to be so confused. I might have to read your blog to understand it I think, before I can figure out what kind of soundscape I should design for this. Feel free to message me about how you would like an audio version to go, because for the first time, I've got no idea.
Genius. A magnificent mastery of words can be felt from this. It scares me with how deep and well-layered it is.
And I have a feeling that, perhaps, even you the creator cannot fully explain every single detail in it. You've brought upon us something greater than when you were silent and I, deaf.
Thank you so much for doing that.
Finished this, after all this time. Seems like it won a lot of recognition for its brilliance, but I'm left wondering if there really is some deeper meaning to extract by some arcane formula, and whether I'm just not clever enough to see what everyone else does. Either way, it was a very interesting read, and that broken link in the middle of the story gives me some strange ideas.
waow
I think I'll read this one a third time sometime. I quite liked the story behind the broken link. Completely accidental, but the cruel mockery on escapism being replaced by a completely unironic and innocent instance of escapism.... As some like to say, nature is healing.
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sorry for the necromancy, but one thing: it finishes with the Opening of the book, and the horse in front. FiM ends with the closing of it, and twilight's cutiemark.
I'm not one for literary analysis (thank you very much for your comment it made the second read much more enjoyable), but that's how I close books that I haven't finished
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oh thank you so much for sharing that i appreciate it so much! i don't consider myself a literary analyzer, i just say things that come to mind when reading and i totally miss stuff all the time and am not particularly well-read, but i love that my comment added to your enjoyment of this story just as yours did mine! i love that take on the meaning of the closing pictures, and the idea of the image links themselves being a meta-issue adding to the themes of frustration also do add yet another delicious layer to this metafiction
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Woo! Thank you! I'm really happy someone pointed out the book thing. It's an echo of the ending of Friendship is Magic, of course, but the actual frames are from the very beginning of it - just in reverse order.
And the story of the broken image delights me too. All credit to Bicyclette for its discovery!