Bardo

Sunset Shimmer lives a thousand million lives

content warning

wanting to want to die, wanting to die, pregnancy, miscarriage, intimate partner violence, choking

info

entry into the (Un)Happy New Yuri contest, whose name i literally just realized is a pun! hard to pick a category so i guess uh

Doomed Yuri: A relationship that is not bound to last or to end well for the parties involved.

and something about pet the koi sure

Chapters (1)

Comments ( 10 )

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Mockingbirb

Mockingbirb #1 · February 1st · · ·

Wow! Congratulations on the timing!

Oh. Incomplete. Well...fractional congratulations?

Mockingbirb

Mockingbirb #2 · February 1st · · ·

Kinda weird that you left the story status at "Incomplete," though, imho.

Edited to Add: Ok, (before I was very far into reading the story), I'd been thinking of making a joke about how leaving the story (official status) as "Incomplete" was like, meta thematic super dramatic splematic or something. But maybe you seriously mean that thing I wanted to joke about? Or maybe you don't (or didn't), idk, I mean, it's a bit late to ask (about your original or previous intention) once I've asked the question.

P.S. I see the top "also liked" story on this story right now as the story is brand new is an M rated story about finding nude photos of your crush, and ig that's kind of appropriate really considering how Midnight Sparkle was going on about having seen every atom, everything about and inside everyone and everything during that special one point something seconds or whatever.
😛

P.P.S. You changed the story status to 'Complete.' NOOOOOOOOO! 😛

Oroboro

Oroboro #3 · February 1st · 4 · ·

Alright yeah this slaps

BifauxnenStroganoff

BifauxnenStroganoff #4 · February 1st · 3 · ·

I love the smell of existential agony in the morning.

What a story to wake up to. Damn.

AltruistArtist

AltruistArtist #5 · February 1st · 5 · ·

This left me with a pit in my stomach (in the best way possible).

You are so overwhelmingly good at crafting stories centered on existential dread that nonetheless remain firmly grounded in empathetic, human emotions. This story gave me so much to think about, but also so much to feel in equal measure.

I love explorations of how omniscient characters define love and make meaning for themselves despite always knowing everything that is and once was and will be. It's always felt, to me, like such a natural metaphor for the condition of being human. How do we define what matters to us when we know it will inevitably end? How does Sunset reconcile living out an existence that can only ever be a fabrication with the knowledge that it otherwise would have been real in another life?

Your choice of using Sunset and Midnight Sparkle to explore these themes was just sublime. Midnight is an otherworldly magical entity that emerged from a desire for enlightenment and Sunset has always been characterized by her ability to change and fight against what is believed to be true. They're the perfect representatives for a story about human will combatting entropy.

The long, unbroken passage near the end is such a stunning moment of writing, and the context it appears in really affected me. This is merely one of the unquantifiable lifetimes Sunset has lived and loved with Applejack—or, any of her friends in any of these possible realities—and it's written as though it's being uttered within the space of a final breath. There is no time or use for punctuation. This will all end as soon as the air runs out.

It's smart and it's moving and this is to say nothing of all of the small moments within. So many of the descriptions were so vivid that I felt Sunset's grief as though it were my own. I love the recurring motif of how Applejack seasons her eggs, how this resonates thematically with the function of eggs in a literal sense, of fertility and conception and continuation and the children they have (or didn't have), and how all of these elements work to craft a warm, domestic life that is ultimately unreachable in any way that's real. And yet, it still mattered. The distant, pretend love that Sunset maintained was just as real as Applejack's, even if it was noticeably not the same.

This is transcendent yuri. This is more than an appreciation of the love between women; it's an exploration of the reason for it.

I'm excited and honored to be competing with you, Bike! Best of luck in the contest!

Forcalor

Forcalor #6 · February 1st · 2 · ·

It reads a bit like oversimplification of a more complex topic namely, the idea that another reality is decidedly a simulation removes a lot of nuance in my opinion, but it kinda goes beyond the scope of what the author wanted to convey and achieve, but coincidentally I was drawing recently some inspiration from Bardo Thodol and can appreciate the usage of the term.