You know, sometimes when I express the opinion that I am not blown away by this fic, I often get explanations that it’s better if you’re familiar with the games. The funny thing is, I find that learning about the games actually makes the fic kinda worse.
I mean, Red Eye just doesn’t seem as impressive once you realize that the speeches he gives over the radio are directly lifted from John Henry Eden’s radio speeches in Fallout 3. I just find myself waiting for him to return and start going on about baseball.
There’s also that one "fuck you" quest in Fallout 3 with the ghouls at Tenpenny Tower, and knowing about how that worked just made the parallel in this fic look even cheaper than it already is.
And of course, the story’s constant treatment of violence as the only answer to every problem. You know, at the start of Fallout and Fallout 2, if you don’t want to make your own custom character, you can select from one of three premades, with one premade being a combat-oriented dude with high combat skills, a thief-type character with high Agility and Intelligence, or, and this is going to blow your fucking mind, a diplomacy-based character. Apparently the Speech skill is actually a bit more useful than fucking Gambling.
Bleh. I’m gonna be a bit rambly. This chapter didn’t actually have much of anything wrong with it. It actually had a couple cute moments, and apart from reaching angst critical mass the characters weren’t annoying. I actually think I liked it more than chapter 37, honestly. If I weren't told 37 was a big deal I probably would've just moved on. So this is probably gonna focus a bit more on some overarching problems I have with the story as a whole than anything wrong with this chapter in particular.
So anyway, after breaking out of Canterlot, Littlepip has to rescue Velvet from drowning, there’s stuff there, and she passes out. I notice she passes out a lot. I mean, seriously, add that to the drinking game.
Littlepip has this dream sequence where the black book starts fucking with her and I won’t comment on this scene because it’s actually okay and I can’t really think of anything wrong with it.
I take it from Littlepip’s internal monologue here (oh boy, another one) that those memory orbs were supposed to be gut-wrenching. Huh. Odd.
But anyway, SteelHooves is briefly immobilized and they have to wait for Littlepip to wake up and reboot his system. There’s also yammering and chatting about how Littlepip saw the memory orb. I remember back in chapter 35 how I mentioned that SteelHooves’ whole “thank you for failing, your were just too perfect before” was really stupid, but I guess the context here makes it slightly more sensical for his character. Guy needs a role model, I guess. Doesn’t alleviate the aggravation that is pretty much every designated sympathetic character singing the hero’s praises, though.
Also, Calamity is having a bunch of angst about the whole thing with the Steel Rangers at Bucklyn Cross. Again? I gotta admit I didn’t quite see this coming from him, so I guess I have to give some credit there.
So Littlepip meets with Xephyr, Xenith’s daughter, but she really doesn’t care about her being back and neither of them really want to be a part of each others’ lives, mirroring Littlepip’s relationship with her mother. Ooh, Xephyr’s father is a reference to the leader of the Khans, a group of Raiders, in the first Fallout. That was fun. For yucks I played a character with 10 Luck, so when I walked into the camp they thought I was the ghost of the leader’s father and promptly shat their pants, leaving me free to browse their bookshelf and pocket a couple of molotov cocktails, which was nice because I’d picked Throwing Weapons as a tag skill.
So they meet up with Derpy and Silver Bell again (hooray for a character I actually like) and it’s a generally cute scene, and Velvet makes her horn grow back.
You know, I’ve mentioned that the few characters I do like seem to either die or fade into the background. One of you lovely commenters commented that maybe I simply liked them because they didn’t stick around long enough to annoy me. There might be some merit to that thought. Silver Bell struck me as really interesting and sympathetic when she was introduced in chapter 9, but now she’s kinda just a standard “cute kid.” There isn’t really anything wrong with that, I guess, I mean, it’s still cute, at least.
I think that I’d actually be more interested in a story following Silver Bell, Monterey Jack, those two raiders from chapter 25, Strawberry Lemonade, and Caliber. That’d be a colorful cast, provided you could give them good characterizations and character arcs and stuff. I think the thing I like about characters like that is that they’re sort of just a cross-section of the Wasteland population. The random schmoes you might fight at random, so to speak. The core cast of protagonists is a little bit too “high and mighty,” so to speak. You have Littlepip, who very quickly gets raised to the pedestal of Totally Not the Messiah. Calamity, who is the only principle pegasus character introduced so far, an exile, and prior to his exile was hot shit in the Enclave. You have SteelHooves, and while him being a 200 year-old ghoul is made less stand-outish by the presence of other 200 year-old ghouls, he’s still Applejack’s former lover and a very important pony in the Steel Rangers. Then you have Xenith, who is pretty much introduced as being “exotic” despite being less interesting than the character she killed off in her introduction. And then you have Velvet Remedy, who is fucking annoying.
What I’m saying is I think it’d be a bit better if the story gave more focus to these random schmoes. The Walking Dead did well at this, as its cast of characters was a batch of random people who just got thrown into a horrible situation. These characters also serve to help show how, exactly, the Wasteland is supposed to be horrible and it breaks you and stuff, and I think they do a better job of it than Littlepip does when she starts narrating about her physical trauma. It’s just kind of hard for me to buy the stuff about how horrible and unforgiving the setting is when the characters are carrying around enough weapons and ammunition to instate a small junta. Also dresses.
So Littlepip narrates again how she feels bad about thinking of robbing her. You know, she never did say she was sorry for burglarizing her (yes, burglarizing, not stealing, there is a distinction between the two and Littlepip actually did do one of them) in chapter 9. Since the chapter isn’t giving me a whole lot of things to complain about here, I think I’ll interrupt the recap here and draw back on another slightly “bigger picture” thing.
I mentioned earlier that I didn’t hate Littlepip from the start. Of course, a bunch of you don't believe me, but I don't really care. Actually, at the start I think I had a bit of a non-reaction because I found her fairly bland. I didn’t find her actively unlikable until the story got a bit further. You see, in the first several chapters, Littlepip does a number of things that started to send up little tiny red flags. I ignored them at first because they weren’t really big deals and were largely justified or solved in context.
She shoots an enemy that’s running away. Seraphem’s blog pointed out that I was mistaken in my assessment of the room geometry... Though if he’s facing Littlepip with a hostage in front of him and the balcony is behind him, how the hell does he jump over the hostage in his attempt to escape?... Anyway, that happened, I went “okay, that was kinda dark, thought it’d take her longer to get to that point, but he was really evil, moving on” and so that wasn’t a big deal (however I do still maintain that it makes it harder for me to take her angsting about her karma throughout the story seriously).
Then in chapter 5 there’s that stable run, and Littlepip has some reactions that make me go “wait, is it just me, or is she just a little bit sexist?” And okay, that’s not a big deal, Calamity calls her out on this and it’s really more part of an overarching thing about how things aren’t the way they should be.
Then when Velvet joins the party Littlepip shoves a weapon at her and tells her to get ready to use it. Insensitive, perhaps, but they are under attack and Velvet is being fucking annoying.
Then she burglarizes an orphan. Okay, people aren’t themselves when they’re under the influence of drugs.
But the thing is, all these little tiny things add up, and Littlepip is really bland, so her good qualities don’t really do a whole lot to balance out her less-than-inspiring qualities, and I realize that her tendency towards moments of rather disquieting behavior was something of a trend. So come the end of chapter 12 and I just have to stop and say, “This character is a dick.” And that's the thing - overall, the character is a dick. I can take characters who are dicks, but only if they're interesting or entertaining, like Tyrion Lannister. He's funny. Admittedly Littlepip has come off as slightly less dickish in the last couple chapters, but I'm not sure if it's because of a genuine change in her character or simply due to a lack of opportunity. Her narration has also shifted away from self-righteousness to a newfound emphasis on self-pity, because both of those are such inspiring emotions.
So the party moves on and finds that there’s what appears to be two small groups of raiders fighting, one of which is a few foals. After figuring out which ones are the good guys, they take out the bad ones, Littlepip has a brief freak-out when the Black Book starts tempting her to make blood knives and she realizes that’s fucking disgusting and she’d rather just stick with telekinesis as her only thing.
So they save the kids and there’s a cute moment where they talk about how much they love the Stable Dweller (they don’t recognize Littlepip as such because she’s got new barding) and Velvet, who one of them actually likes more than the stable dweller because she’s nice and stuff. I do admit, that’s going to get in the way of the coming “I hate Velvet Remedy” rant, but I still think I can manage it.
So the kids are from a nearby town, but the raiders (and Littlepip does a lampshade hanging about respawning enemies because that’s somehow funny) killed all the adults in town and took the kids hostage. So they agree to go rescue the kids from the raiders, who are stationed at Fluttershy’s Cottage.
And of course, this famous scene, raiders have shat up the place, they’re being pure evil and have to die, Velvet grabs a shotgun and goes on a rampage. Might’ve been a little bit more effective if the narrator didn’t reference the “shotgun surgeon” perk, as putting the reference in there just takes me out of the scene by reminding me “oh yeah, this is a video game.”
Also, Velvet Remedy, during her nuts bit, goes “I’ve never killed a pony before.”
Um. Yes. Yes you did. Thirty chapters ago. On the train. With the slaver you shot full of needles. I actually went back and checked the damn thing, and she did indeed kill the slaver in chapter eight. Might want to get your memory checked, Velvet, it wasn’t all that long ago. Aren't I supposed to be the one that utterly fails at reading comprehension and shit?
And thus ends a character trait. It will not be missed, for it never amounted to anything. Actually kind of refreshing that she’s finally dropped the pseudo-pacifist pretense and has just joined lock-in-step with the rest of the "shoot everything I don't like" crowd, though she breaks down into angst about it and how the raiders don't make any fucking sense. And now for me to do something I’ve been wanting to do for a while.
Now, you’ll notice that I have on many occasions stated that Velvet essentially boils down to a fluffed-up strawman who exists to show that trying to find solutions other than violence is stupid. to which I have heard endless cries of “no she isn’t!” Well, allow me to explain myself. Let us examine the facts:
The protagonist and most of the party members have no problems at all about the use of lethal force, and have routinely used that as their go-to course of action for virtually all of their conflicts. Said characters are flatly uninterested in attempting an alternative solution except in cases where they are outnumbered and outgunned. They’ve also shown themselves to be fairly unacquainted with concepts like pity or mercy, except for things like letting an attacker bleed to death rather than put her out of her misery, or giving painkillers to a dying pony who didn’t actually attack them. And of course, their methods pretty much always work and usually have positive outcomes.
The sole exception to this mindset is Velvet Remedy, who is consistently shown to be ineffectual, weak-willed, and incapable of coping with reality. Pretty much as soon as she joins the party, Littlepip shoves a gun at her and tells her to get over herself and get ready to start shooting, which she goes along with after a little bit of complaining. And as the story progresses, she very easily caves to whatever trigger-happy plan the other party members are concocting. Well, with one major exception: Saving Monterey Jack, a plan in which Littlepip specifically wanted to avoid killing anyone.
I keep hearing about how she calls them out on stuff, but the thing is that doesn’t really happen except on very rare occasions. As such, she raises a token objection that has pretty no impact after it is said, with the rest of the party moving on with what they were doing, taking nothing she says to heart. The two times when they've bothered to try her ideas about diplomacy it was fairly quickly shown to be a dumb idea and they abandoned it at the first opportunity. So far the only victory she’s had in that category amounts to one Steel Ranger. In the thirty chapters and hundreds of pages she has been a major character in this story, it has been hinted at maybe a handful of times that there is any merit to her views whatsoever. Versus the every single time that problems have been perfectly solved through the application of brutality. Totally gives me the impression of balance.
And while the other party members never learn anything from her, she certainly comes around to seeing things their way. Well, I guess Calamity gets better at shopping as a result of being around her. That’s something, I guess.
Sure, the story says that she’s good in that regard. I recall that bit in chapter 32 where Velvet and Calamity are giving the “why we’re in a relationship” talk and Calamity says “maybe there is something to your diplomacy” despite the fact that at no point has he shown that he gives any credence to that at all. That actually falls under an overarching problem the story has in regards to “show, don’t tell.”
So, in short: Yes she fucking is.
She’s also just very annoying in general. Personality-wise she's like Rarity, except completely unentertaining.
So then they go back to Maripony, Littlepip gives over the Black Book, the Goddess finds out about the memory orbs and is deeply confused and troubled. The Goddess goes over the Star Orb a lot and takes the Black Book. Then Littlepip gets a notice that Xenith has set them up the bomb. Shit gets real, the Goddess panics and orders her alicorns to flee, some dude from the Enclave shows up and wants to make a deal with the Goddess against Red Eye, and then kaboom.
Chapter ends on Homage delivering a broadcast corroborating the kaboom, before the Enclave interrupts her broadcast with the whole “we’re coming down to save you” bit.
I’m actually inclined to root for the Enclave here. I mean, they got Homage to shut up.
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