Wow. This was a grand story, had my on the edge of my seat the whole why through. Got to show us what happens to Twilight, Spike, and Fluttershy... please.
3341548 This fict is surprisingly well written, although it does have its flaws. For instance, some of the character building and drama is over done to the point that it becomes... cliche. For instance, you mean to tell me that Pinkie wailing in AJ's arms for 10 minutes didn't attract any zambie attention whatsoever? Or what about the party cannon firing squad or the death wubs as the Apple crew slowly walked off. You can't possibly expect me to believe that that wasn't an immediate horde alert. Also I feel that it's a bit rushed at times, like when Sweetie Belle transitions from bumbling little sister to asshole-Carl from TWD in less than a scene. I feel that that particular situation was a bit rushed, in terms that you could've fleshed out a little more backstory. Sweetie crying as the full realization of Rarity's death hits her, her sobbing in AJ's and Bloom's arms as she recounts the moments she spent watching Rarity fight of the zambies before seeing her get bitten and rushing to Sweet Apple Acres. Then again maybe I'm just an over-picky, insane dumash that shouldn't be allowed near any social media. After all, I only get about 12 hours sleep on a weekly basis but I'm sure you understand that pain . <In case it wasn't made clear I thoroughly enjoyed your story and hope for more. Have I followed you yet? Hmmmmm... I guess I'll go check after I post this. Aaaaaaaaanywho, see ya around maybe> Kbai
Curse you, you magnificent bastards at the Zero Punctuation group.
A few days ago I was getting all excited at the prospect of becoming one of their number; so excited that I rather breezed through their application questions with all the time and conscious effort of an assembly line robot. After all, it was filled with the usual job application guff: What attracted you to the position? Where do you see yourself in five years time? Where on the boss’ ball-bag are you most likely to tickle at the point of climax? But their amorphous nothingness clearly smothered the neon lights and day-glo arrows pointed at one little question in the middle: ‘What is your least favourite genre?’
Oh, you crafty cunts. Shame on you for putting such an obvious test of character in the questionnaire and puncturing my brain, letting all the air out and revealing it to be not nearly as magnificent as I thought it was. And shame on you, naïve younger me, for not noticing it! I’m sure you feel very proud of all that time you spent coming up with biting and snappy ways to rip that lazy stereotype humour story to shreds, but who’s got the last laugh?! Certainly isn’t me; I’ve got The Last Stand to contend with.
You may have noticed that this is a very long introduction for a review of a not particularly long story. That’s because when I first noticed The Last Stand slopping into my in-tray, spilling over the sides and sullying the rest of my desk with green gunk, I spotted the gore tag sprouting out of its knickers, and I felt the unmistakable warm, sticky trail of interest dribbling out of my ear to join the pool of filth. But after a cursory glance at the description my interest did something amazing; it solidified and starting bashing me smartly round the head for ever agreeing to this, because The Last Stand is actually a zombie story, and zombies are to interesting storytelling what breeze-blocks are to dentistry.
Now before I get some messages from perfectly well-adjusted types, I feel a clarification is in order, so here goes: yes, there are zombie stories that are good—Shaun of the Dead is still one of my favourite films ever—but those worked because they contained zombies, and were not about them. Going back to my incredibly clever breeze-block idea, you would want breeze-blocks to form the basic structure within which the main event has plenty of space to occur; you do not try and shove one into the main event, unless you want to end up some horrendous footnote in a medical textbook.
Shaun of the Dead worked because it was about a handful of infinitely relatable characters; they were strong, well-defined and the bounced off each other so well that their struggles were more absorbing than an entire warehouse of kitchen roll and tampons, and the zombies, though they made for an intense atmosphere and drove the plot, were not the main focus of the story. You could have replaced them with rabid dogs or overly aggressive Jehovah’s Witnesses and it would have still been just as terrifying. Similarly, Zombieland wouldn’t have been anywhere near as effective as other people have told me it is without the immutable badassery of Tallahassee.
To that end, The Last Stand still had one thing going for it—or at least I tried to convince myself that it did—in the form of the existing characters from the show. Seven main characters and dozens more on the side that could lead to some very interesting situations if TheExhaustedBrony were to be true to their characters and write them with any degree of flair.
The story had an open goal. It had beaten the defenders and was sprinting to the try line. The FIA had declared its massive fuck-off turbo legal. It had a batsman too short to even see over the stumps to bowl at.
But this is TheExhaustedBrony we’re talking about, the luminary who copy-pasted entire segments from The Big Book of Romantic Clichés to bring us The Apple of my Heart. And as such, The Last Stand is not just a zombie story; it is the zombie story. Specifically, it’s the same story that anyone who’s seen, heard about, or been in the same room as someone thinking about Dawn of the Dead has a more intimate relationship with than a foetus does with its mother’s womb. The Apple sisters have holed up in a cellar to be safe from the incoming hordes, and now, for reasons that make little logical sense, they have to venture out into the unknown, slicing, blasting, and murdering dead friends on their way through to… it’s not well explained, with all the tragedy and drama of a child screeching about their grazed knee.
And to facilitate this, the characters that we all know and love from the show are not as we know and love them. Oh, they retain a few traits and stereotypes, and occasionally spit out a few references to events in the show, but that’s about it because they have to fulfil the clichéd roles assigned to them. They have been reduced to barely animated slabs of meat, stumbling around the landscape in some vain attempt to appear alive for the latest victim to be suckered into their mess of a story, still with their familiar face but with the eyes staring blankly, and groaning out of their slack jaws.
I wonder if this reminds you of something, yet.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be quite so obnoxious if it weren’t so bloody brazen about using these characters. And The Last Stand isusing its characters: it’s coldly using our innate affection for these cuddly fuzzlebutts to make us feel sorry about their deaths, without putting in any of the effort to make the reader care about them within the story itself. One particular moment of this happens early on, when the disembowelled remains of a popular fanon couple are thrown into the story for the author to generate some utterly undeserved tears. Yes, TheExhaustedBrony, those two ponies are dead and that’s fucking tragic, or it would be if you’d actually given me any reason to care about them beyond ‘everypony knew of their relationship’, or had given any indication of their importance to Applejack before they died.
It’s remarkable just how little there is to say about the main plot of this story; and it seems that the author realised this halfway through, too, because one of the ponies Applejack and co. encounter on their trek is Pinkie Pie, lodged firmly in her psychotic mode and surrounded by piles of corpses that she created before the horde could assimilate them. Because of course it’s Pinkie Pie; fuck forbid we have any other pony go on a mad rampage when we have another story’s testes ripe to be plucked.
Seriously; this wasn’t derivative enough for TheExhaustedBrony, so they had to chuck in a bare-faced Cupcakes allusion. And while they were at it, a scene from The Light in the Darkness, too, because Pinkie Pie is brought out of her pit of despair by a cooldown hug from Applejack. And then they leave with Pinkie back in her happy setting.
This Pinkie Pie scene brings me onto my next point about this story; if a good story is paced like a smooth, consistent bowel movement, then The Last Stand is paced like a turd that explodes from the rectum and pulls the intestines along for a guided tour of the u-bend. The whole scene, from introduction to reveal to cool-down to exit, takes about a thousand words, and the whole story races along at this speed, right from where we pointlessly skip forward three weeks within the opening paragraph.
Another aspect that made the previously mentioned good zombie stories work was that we, the audience, got to spend time with the characters away from the typical zombie scenes; that’s when the atmosphere is allowed to thicken, the characters can grow and relate to the audience, and you can build the sense of dread as the audience knows that the world is still crumbling around them. The Last Stand, however, spurts into the face like pure spunkgargleweewee, as the story clumsily judders from zombie death scene to zombie action scene and back again, as if it’s afraid that any moment where the characters are not locked into their cliché zombie movie roles will lead to them breaking free and moving on to breaking the author’s wrists for associating them with this mess.
Speaking of the author’s broken wrists, perhaps those could explain why the story is written like arse; even the chapter that it claimed to have been proof-read, strangely. Then again, English words are renowned for having multiple meanings; perhaps they both thought that ‘proof’ in this context meant ‘blind, deaf and lobotomised’. I distinctly remember a sentence splice so obvious that I was surprised Mary Shelley hadn’t risen up herself to terrorise the author with a copyright claim.
And so that was that, I thought—this was an utterly bland and uninteresting not-distraction from the work piling up at my door—until I saw that the story apparently ended with one chapter remaining. Curious, I clicked on the final link, and immediately felt my jaw crash into my chest. It was a sort-of prologue, in which Rainbow Dash and Scootaloo first encounter the zombies, and, shock horror, I found myself interested by it! Yes, it was just as tediously-written as the rest of the story; yes, it featured the age-old cliché of Dash snapping her wing; and, yes, it was somewhat undermined by events in the main plot; but grated bollocks on rye bread, I was engaged! It was about doing something other than hunkering down, as these two proactive characters actively tried to outrun the apocalypse. Actually, that means that it was having to stay true to the characters, rather than having the characters conforming to the plot! And it was setting up an interesting dilemma, as Rainbow Dash accidentally causes an innocent pony to be captured by the zombies; maybe this might lead somewhere in future chapters!
3340684 You caught on. Gratz!
I've been waiting for this chapter, but it was worth the wait because it's. so. AWESOME
this story garbed my interest when i saw the picture
Wow. This was a grand story, had my on the edge of my seat the whole why through. Got to show us what happens to Twilight, Spike, and Fluttershy... please.
3341281 WOOPS!
I'm with a few others here, and I think that it would be awesome if you were to write chapters about what happened to the other main 6
this was good
I enjoyed it. Glad to see another chapter.
3341548
This fict is surprisingly well written, although it does have its flaws. For instance, some of the character building and drama is over done to the point that it becomes... cliche. For instance, you mean to tell me that Pinkie wailing in AJ's arms for 10 minutes didn't attract any zambie attention whatsoever? Or what about the party cannon firing squad or the death wubs as the Apple crew slowly walked off. You can't possibly expect me to believe that that wasn't an immediate horde alert. Also I feel that it's a bit rushed at times, like when Sweetie Belle transitions from bumbling little sister to asshole-Carl from TWD in less than a scene. I feel that that particular situation was a bit rushed, in terms that you could've fleshed out a little more backstory. Sweetie crying as the full realization of Rarity's death hits her, her sobbing in AJ's and Bloom's arms as she recounts the moments she spent watching Rarity fight of the zambies before seeing her get bitten and rushing to Sweet Apple Acres. Then again maybe I'm just an over-picky, insane dumash that shouldn't be allowed near any social media. After all, I only get about 12 hours sleep on a weekly basis but I'm sure you understand that pain .
<In case it wasn't made clear I thoroughly enjoyed your story and hope for more. Have I followed you yet? Hmmmmm... I guess I'll go check after I post this. Aaaaaaaaanywho, see ya around maybe>
Kbai
Can't wait for the next chapter!
Just finished reading your story, keep it up. This will surely give me inspiration - So in other words, thanks.
Whatever happened to you saying you would upload a new chapter sooner than later?
Where's that guy!!!!
This review is brought to you by Zero Punctuation Reviews
Curse you, you magnificent bastards at the Zero Punctuation group.
A few days ago I was getting all excited at the prospect of becoming one of their number; so excited that I rather breezed through their application questions with all the time and conscious effort of an assembly line robot. After all, it was filled with the usual job application guff: What attracted you to the position? Where do you see yourself in five years time? Where on the boss’ ball-bag are you most likely to tickle at the point of climax? But their amorphous nothingness clearly smothered the neon lights and day-glo arrows pointed at one little question in the middle: ‘What is your least favourite genre?’
Oh, you crafty cunts. Shame on you for putting such an obvious test of character in the questionnaire and puncturing my brain, letting all the air out and revealing it to be not nearly as magnificent as I thought it was. And shame on you, naïve younger me, for not noticing it! I’m sure you feel very proud of all that time you spent coming up with biting and snappy ways to rip that lazy stereotype humour story to shreds, but who’s got the last laugh?! Certainly isn’t me; I’ve got The Last Stand to contend with.
You may have noticed that this is a very long introduction for a review of a not particularly long story. That’s because when I first noticed The Last Stand slopping into my in-tray, spilling over the sides and sullying the rest of my desk with green gunk, I spotted the gore tag sprouting out of its knickers, and I felt the unmistakable warm, sticky trail of interest dribbling out of my ear to join the pool of filth. But after a cursory glance at the description my interest did something amazing; it solidified and starting bashing me smartly round the head for ever agreeing to this, because The Last Stand is actually a zombie story, and zombies are to interesting storytelling what breeze-blocks are to dentistry.
Now before I get some messages from perfectly well-adjusted types, I feel a clarification is in order, so here goes: yes, there are zombie stories that are good—Shaun of the Dead is still one of my favourite films ever—but those worked because they contained zombies, and were not about them. Going back to my incredibly clever breeze-block idea, you would want breeze-blocks to form the basic structure within which the main event has plenty of space to occur; you do not try and shove one into the main event, unless you want to end up some horrendous footnote in a medical textbook.
Shaun of the Dead worked because it was about a handful of infinitely relatable characters; they were strong, well-defined and the bounced off each other so well that their struggles were more absorbing than an entire warehouse of kitchen roll and tampons, and the zombies, though they made for an intense atmosphere and drove the plot, were not the main focus of the story. You could have replaced them with rabid dogs or overly aggressive Jehovah’s Witnesses and it would have still been just as terrifying. Similarly, Zombieland wouldn’t have been anywhere near as effective as other people have told me it is without the immutable badassery of Tallahassee.
To that end, The Last Stand still had one thing going for it—or at least I tried to convince myself that it did—in the form of the existing characters from the show. Seven main characters and dozens more on the side that could lead to some very interesting situations if TheExhaustedBrony were to be true to their characters and write them with any degree of flair.
The story had an open goal. It had beaten the defenders and was sprinting to the try line. The FIA had declared its massive fuck-off turbo legal. It had a batsman too short to even see over the stumps to bowl at.
But this is TheExhaustedBrony we’re talking about, the luminary who copy-pasted entire segments from The Big Book of Romantic Clichés to bring us The Apple of my Heart. And as such, The Last Stand is not just a zombie story; it is the zombie story. Specifically, it’s the same story that anyone who’s seen, heard about, or been in the same room as someone thinking about Dawn of the Dead has a more intimate relationship with than a foetus does with its mother’s womb. The Apple sisters have holed up in a cellar to be safe from the incoming hordes, and now, for reasons that make little logical sense, they have to venture out into the unknown, slicing, blasting, and murdering dead friends on their way through to… it’s not well explained, with all the tragedy and drama of a child screeching about their grazed knee.
And to facilitate this, the characters that we all know and love from the show are not as we know and love them. Oh, they retain a few traits and stereotypes, and occasionally spit out a few references to events in the show, but that’s about it because they have to fulfil the clichéd roles assigned to them. They have been reduced to barely animated slabs of meat, stumbling around the landscape in some vain attempt to appear alive for the latest victim to be suckered into their mess of a story, still with their familiar face but with the eyes staring blankly, and groaning out of their slack jaws.
I wonder if this reminds you of something, yet.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be quite so obnoxious if it weren’t so bloody brazen about using these characters. And The Last Stand is using its characters: it’s coldly using our innate affection for these cuddly fuzzlebutts to make us feel sorry about their deaths, without putting in any of the effort to make the reader care about them within the story itself. One particular moment of this happens early on, when the disembowelled remains of a popular fanon couple are thrown into the story for the author to generate some utterly undeserved tears. Yes, TheExhaustedBrony, those two ponies are dead and that’s fucking tragic, or it would be if you’d actually given me any reason to care about them beyond ‘everypony knew of their relationship’, or had given any indication of their importance to Applejack before they died.
It’s remarkable just how little there is to say about the main plot of this story; and it seems that the author realised this halfway through, too, because one of the ponies Applejack and co. encounter on their trek is Pinkie Pie, lodged firmly in her psychotic mode and surrounded by piles of corpses that she created before the horde could assimilate them. Because of course it’s Pinkie Pie; fuck forbid we have any other pony go on a mad rampage when we have another story’s testes ripe to be plucked.
Seriously; this wasn’t derivative enough for TheExhaustedBrony, so they had to chuck in a bare-faced Cupcakes allusion. And while they were at it, a scene from The Light in the Darkness, too, because Pinkie Pie is brought out of her pit of despair by a cooldown hug from Applejack. And then they leave with Pinkie back in her happy setting.
This Pinkie Pie scene brings me onto my next point about this story; if a good story is paced like a smooth, consistent bowel movement, then The Last Stand is paced like a turd that explodes from the rectum and pulls the intestines along for a guided tour of the u-bend. The whole scene, from introduction to reveal to cool-down to exit, takes about a thousand words, and the whole story races along at this speed, right from where we pointlessly skip forward three weeks within the opening paragraph.
Another aspect that made the previously mentioned good zombie stories work was that we, the audience, got to spend time with the characters away from the typical zombie scenes; that’s when the atmosphere is allowed to thicken, the characters can grow and relate to the audience, and you can build the sense of dread as the audience knows that the world is still crumbling around them. The Last Stand, however, spurts into the face like pure spunkgargleweewee, as the story clumsily judders from zombie death scene to zombie action scene and back again, as if it’s afraid that any moment where the characters are not locked into their cliché zombie movie roles will lead to them breaking free and moving on to breaking the author’s wrists for associating them with this mess.
Speaking of the author’s broken wrists, perhaps those could explain why the story is written like arse; even the chapter that it claimed to have been proof-read, strangely. Then again, English words are renowned for having multiple meanings; perhaps they both thought that ‘proof’ in this context meant ‘blind, deaf and lobotomised’. I distinctly remember a sentence splice so obvious that I was surprised Mary Shelley hadn’t risen up herself to terrorise the author with a copyright claim.
And so that was that, I thought—this was an utterly bland and uninteresting not-distraction from the work piling up at my door—until I saw that the story apparently ended with one chapter remaining. Curious, I clicked on the final link, and immediately felt my jaw crash into my chest. It was a sort-of prologue, in which Rainbow Dash and Scootaloo first encounter the zombies, and, shock horror, I found myself interested by it! Yes, it was just as tediously-written as the rest of the story; yes, it featured the age-old cliché of Dash snapping her wing; and, yes, it was somewhat undermined by events in the main plot; but grated bollocks on rye bread, I was engaged! It was about doing something other than hunkering down, as these two proactive characters actively tried to outrun the apocalypse. Actually, that means that it was having to stay true to the characters, rather than having the characters conforming to the plot! And it was setting up an interesting dilemma, as Rainbow Dash accidentally causes an innocent pony to be captured by the zombies; maybe this might lead somewhere in future chapters!
Oh, TheExhaustedBrony, perhaps you’re finally getting it!
Wait… what?
This is only a tacked-on oneshot, and this is all we’ll get?
The Ultimate Bland, I advise you to follow the example of Applejack, and blow yourself to bits so that the rest of us may survive.
3444635 I'm unsure about this one, but thanks for taking the time to review this story anyway.