You know, the funniest thing about the Apple Orb is that I had pretty much no reaction to, which is strange considering the subject matter. I mean, we had a reveal that one of the main characters brutally murdered a beloved character from the show and that caused the falling out with his lover. And yet here I am, apathetically typing in Google Docs with nary a reaction. I get that it’s fairly easy for me to feign surprise (or lack thereof) given that I’ve already read a number of spoilers, but this one I genuinely wasn’t aware of. My reaction to it largely amounted to "Eh, figures." Also, "'That’s not how you say died resisting arrest' is a pretty good line."
Anyway, I picked up reading from "The Butterfly Orb," which takes place during the megaspell attack on Canterlot, with Fluttershy having a freakout because the zebras are using her megaspells to murder everyone. Then she sorta shoos out of the picture while Rarity leaves a message revealing the location of the Black Book.
And this is how the sequencing starts getting to me. These things are starting to contain fairly important plot details, but according to the introduction at the start of this chapter, Littlepip doesn’t find these memory orbs until much later in the chapter and is just throwing them here like glorified scene transitions. It’s like in that musical The Secret Garden where the second act has very little material for the chorus and so they spend most of the act doing small musical numbers for scene changes. And none of you probably know anything about that musical. Shame. It’s a very nice show.
Thing is, I love nonlinear narratives. I like Assassins, which jumps around to different time periods and has bizarre anachronistic scenes like how you have John Wilkes Booth, Leon Czolgosz, Charles Guiteau, and John Hinckley are in a bar. I like Memento, which has one thread going in chronological order and another going in reverse chronological order until they meet in the middle. I like Pulp Fiction and Watchmen, but the thing is all of those are fairly consistent with their... inconsistency. In this story we’ve had these flashes of the backstory, but the main character’s thoughts have been progressing linearly. Now we have these flashbacks and they don’t tie into what the character is experiencing while she’s experiencing it. What I’m saying is it’s not particularly well-structured here, like it’s being shoved into the scene transitions because having Littlepip just sitting and spending a chapter wading through the damn things would just bring the plot to a screeching halt, so it’s better to cut the losses and just cut to them every time the protagonist blacks out.
Anyway, Littlepip comes to in library and is greeted by Wordsworth, a mechanical owl. She’s in the Ministry of Arcane Sciences and she discovers, to her horror, that her PipBuck has fused with her leg. She gets into a fancy healing chamber and has a bit of an internal monologue about how what she does has done permanent damage to her and she’s going to die young.
You know, I heard one person give the explanation that Littlepip isn’t really the one to fix the Wasteland, but she’s just clearing the way for folks like Velvet Remedy to do the real work, and she knows that she herself has no place in the world that she’s trying to build. Though that doesn’t really do a whole lot for me, as it basically makes her the Operative from Serenity minus the charisma.
Anyway, making her way through the place she meets back up with Velvet. Littlepip asks a perfectly reasonable question: "Why the fuck did you rush out onto the cloud-filled stage like that?" to which Velvet sputters for a bit before going "You wouldn’t understand."
I’m torn between stating the obvious ("it’s because you spend too much time in that memory orb") and sarcastically agreeing that nope, I don’t understand what coherent train of logic goes with that. So how’s this for a completely unfunny paragraph?
You know, I really, really hate Velvet Remedy. Oh, she’s no Coal or Rose Potter, but she’s probably the most irritating thing about this story. I’ve been trying to save most of this shtick for the upcoming Fluttershy’s Cottage thing, or her ragequitting the party in chapter 39, but it’s pretty difficult to hold it in. I can’t hold it in, even, what with me running to Skype and /mlp/ to bitch about it, along with everything else I bitch about. But again, I'm going to try to save talking about how much I hate Velvet here for a more opportune time.
Moving on, they meet up with Calamity. There’s some stuff with broadcasters, Velvet fretting about her pet, and a crazy alicorn that’s having a mental breakdown with its personalities arguing with each other, and then I forget what happens until the protagonists walk into an ambush.
Then we get the Star Orb, where we get a revelation about the four female unicorns who comprise the Goddess - Trixie, Twilight Sparkle, and two twins - and about which colors have which powers.
She then wakes up in Stable City, and while she was unconscious the story appears to have found a sense of humor. Okay, there’s a conversation here that has two jokes directly lifted from the show, but I’m going to actually try to stay positive.
Stable City is a town in Canterlot that is made up of ghouls. There are rude robots that insult the inhabitants while providing services. It’s a small thing, but it’s a touch of quirky humor that actually works a lot better than quoting a line from the show or having Homage chime in about orgasms. Boy, am I glad for her absence in this chapter thus far.
Littlepip and Calamity do some shopping for ammunition and the shopkeeper is a ghoulified colt named Caliber, and holy shit I love this guy. He delivers some exposition and Calamity manages to score on the Barter check, thereby making Velvet that much more of a waste of space no stay positive.
Anyway, Calamity isn’t a fucking idiot for once and deduces that the source of the Pink Cloud must be a dragon that ate the megaspell that was put onto a gem and now the dragon is sleeping and emitting the Cloud by snoring.
And this is funny. Why can’t the story be funny like this more often? It works! It’s fun to read and it’s clever.
You know, I’ve seen a number of remarks to the effect that I’m not enjoying the story because I’m reading it wrong and I’m twisting stuff, because how could I possibly not adopt Littlepip as mai waifu? Well, no, because I didn’t enter into this story with the direct intention of hating it or its protagonist. Sure, I was inclined to take a more scrutinous look, given the ridiculous amounts of hype and praise that I’d been subjected to, but my dislike of the protagonist comes from her being a dick, and my dislike of the story as a whole comes from it being a dull, irritating trudge. I am perfectly prepared to give credit where credit is due, and if the entire story was like this couple scenes, or like in chapter 9, or like in that stretch from chapters 18-20, or some of those bits in chapter 25, then it’d be a pretty good story. It wouldn’t be the second coming of Les fucking Miserables like some fans treat it, but it’d be fairly enjoyable.
But anyway, the point is that the story has suddenly turned good, and I really like this character. We have a ghoul who's over a hundred years old but is stuck with the body of a dead colt, and he's got a sardonic sense of humor and after delivering his exposition he promptly tells the protagonist to fuck off in a way that I found very humorous. A character who's not only likable, but doesn't worship the ground the protagonist walks on. It's like a big birthday present. Of course, he’s either going to get killed off or disappear into the background and never be particularly important again, because that’s what always happens when I come across a character I actually like.
Calamity and Littlepip have another chat about Arbu. More specifically, the bandits and Steel Rangers they killed in that town’s defense. Calamity says something that I roughly translate to "you know, we’re kinda just raiders who are pointed in a convenient direction." Amazing. This is the first time I’ve agreed with something that has come out of Calamity’s stupid, Dixie-accented mouth.
Littlepip has a bit of an "I’m a fucking idiot" moment when she realizes that the unicorn ghouls can just shut off the transmitters. I notice that the intelligence of these characters is wildly inconsistent - this instance itself isn't so much an example, but I'm saying in general that it inflates and deflates to alarming degrees, like the story’s being written by an indecisive balloon salesman.
There’s an audio recording, in which Scootaloo is crying and gives a massive "fuck you" to the inhabitants of Stable One, who she intends to lock up forever. Unfortunately that didn't quite go the way she intended, as some of the intended targets (the Ministry Mares and the Princesses, mainly) never made it in.
SteelHooves shows up again and takes them to visit someone, who turns out to be Star Sparkle! Twilight’s mother. Anyway, conversation, she’s an outcast because the alicorns are giving the good zombies of Stable City a hard time and her daughter sorta created the alicorns, and Littlepip and SteelHooves debate about whether or not to take her with them to Tenpony Tower.
There’s also some stuff about presents. Velvet scavenged some police barding for Littlepip and Littlepip got Calamity a bag of tools. SteelHooves snarks that the new barding doesn’t have enough bloodstains on it, and I swear these kinds of lines are almost creepy in how they line up with my usual wisecracks.
And now it's transitioning to the Balloon Orb, and that's enough for now!
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