Pannic Reads Stuff He Hates

We Come Full Circle

So once upon a time, I started this liveblog and proceeded to take shots at Fallout: Equestria. Then some dude read my blog and decided to make a fic based on it. This is Fallout: Equestria - Duck and Cover! This story is by hahatimeforponies, aka CaptainHoers. Those who are familiar with CaptainHoers in the ponysphere may be most familiar with his recently-completed tumblr, "Ask Firestarter Spitfire." I haven't read it. He also does some animations, the most relevant of them for this blog being "TOFFEE." What's our description?

After unwittingly rescuing some prisoners from a band of raiders, Atom Smasher is hailed as a hero by the citizens of the little town of Colton, and ponies are falling over each other to sing her praises and send her on borderline-pointless errands. However, Atom might be just about the last pony the Mareseyside wasteland wants as its champion. Not because she just fell out of the never-finished Stable 512 - it's that she might actually have less of a conscience than the raiders, slavers, bandits and baddies she's been charged with fending off.

Who's this Little Pip everyone keeps talking about?

Now, essentially, this story operates as a satire of the original story; "The protagonist is a violent sociopath. Let's have some fun with that." In fact, when I read that description the first time I was put off, because I went "isn't that basically just the original story with a comedy filter?" And then it turns out that was completely intentional. And is in fact directly based on my liveblog. Well, shit. This is gonna get, like, meta or something.

Now, this thread has come up in our FOE thread a few times, with a few people stating that they kinda gave up on it halfway. Well, let's analyze this and have a look at what works and what doesn't work. The funnies and the thbbbbbts.

So let us begin. What's the first paragraph look like?

War. War sometimes changes.

Alrighty. So it looks like we're in the "spoof" vein of comedy for sure. Like Spaceballs or something.

Comedy is tricky, depending on what kind of comedy you're going for. On one end of the spectrum you have something like Groundhog Day, which is really a relatively serious story in which a lot of silly things happen. On the other end we have something like Airplane!, where story really isn't a concern and it's all about firing off as many jokes as you can. I think the latter is probably more difficult than the former, because it relies entirely on its jokes to carry it. In something like Groundhog Day or The Music Man or Pygmalion - all of which are comedies - the story's ability to make you laugh is important, but if it isn't enough, it can at least get by on the strength of its story. Something like Airplane! doesn't have a story to fall back on. If it doesn't make you laugh, well, fuck.

In fact, I don't really like Spaceballs that much. As far as Mel Brooks' goes, I'm much more fond of The Producers and Young Frankenstein than I am of Spaceballs and Blazing Saddles, simply because the former two function better as straightforward stories. The other two ain't bad comedy movies, but if you aren't laughing at, like, every joke they throw out, then you're in a little bit of trouble. And heck, just look at how badly today's spoof movies fail, following in the footsteps of Seltzerberg. Who were really honestly just following in the footsteps of Airplane! But y'see, Airplane! had a gag every few seconds, and almost all of them hit. When something like Airplane! doesn't work you get something like Epic Movie. And everyone suffers for it.

This is going on a tangent and I've reviewed, like, a paragraph. Two sentences. Well, a sentence and a word. Total of four words. This is not an efficient use of blog.

I mean, it must have changed at some point, right? I somehow doubt ponykind always had the ability to turn the entirety of Equestria into that charred stuff at the bottom of a barbecue. We probably don't have it now either, otherwise we'd just be blitzing it all the time.

Where was I even going with this? Man, if this wasn't the most pretentious fucking way to start off a story. Start with an Aesop about the brutality of war, that'll go down a treat! The hell with that. You're here to hear my story, not hear me spout nihilistic crap about genocide or whatever.

"Start with an Aesop." Ohhhhh, sorry there, that's strike one: Using TV Tropes terminology outside of TV Tropes.

You've probably heard of the Stables, right? Those big bunkers with corporate-run social experiments that usually result in everyone inside dying or going insane, shoddily disguised as balefire shelters? Now that I think about it, there's not a lot of 'stable' about them. The big metal door at the front locks shut like a bank vault to keep the 'precious' life inside safe in the event of everything going tits up... 'vault' seems an awful lot more descriptive. It sounds like 'stable' was some marketese crap that a pre-war advertising agency came up with to try and sell the concept of spending the rest of your life in a hole in the ground to a retarded public. But whatever. Everyone calls them Stables, so in the interests of clarity I'm gonna stick to that.

I'm Atom Smasher, and I was born in Stable 512. The funny thing about Stable 512 is that it was so far down the list of Stables to be built that you can barely think of it as a Stable at all. Sure, it's a bunch of tunnels and they managed to plate the walls and floors, but there's panels missing everywhere, half the life support systems have never worked, and the outer door was never finished. Seriously, the only things standing between Stable 512 and the Mareseyside wasteland are two regular locked doors. It mostly did the trick I guess, because as long as I've been down there, we've never had anything nasty get in. But I'll get back to the top-notch security later. I have to talk about me some more.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet our protagonist: Atom Smasher. Now, as this is our first chapter, we will see how the story establishes her.

Yes. She narrates like this pretty much the entire story. Like the original, we have the narration in first-person, and the writing style is very informal.

She's also a pegasus. I'm just gonna mention that so we don't get confused when I talk about her flying.

I guess it behooves me (if these puns keep coming I'm just going to strangle myself) to say what I did in the Stable. All these Stable Dwellers that fall out of their cosy little cots and manage not to shit themselves for long enough to survive ten minutes in the wasteland are always like "I was my Stable's marriage counsellor! I was a hairdresser! I was a PipBuck technician!" You have to remember that Stable 512 is probably the least stable Stable that had ponies living in it (FUCK THERE'S ANOTHER PUN).

Very informal.

So Atom Smasher talks about about the stables, the kinds of problems that ponies had when moving in (assigning jobs to ponies is a little tricky when everyone has special destiny cutie marks and the stables don't always quite suit that). There's actually a slight error here.

They tried going on like they had before, just in the environment of a Stable. Immediately all the farming-type ponies were out of a job, because all the food came out of machines. Not ten minutes into the apocalypse and already there's an unemployment crisis. And it's not like ponies are good at upskilling either - they've got their destiny pictured on their butt, so whenever they try to do something else they're all like 'b-but this isn't my special talent' and get all depressed.

The stables in FOE have indoor orchards. Which... kinda makes less sense in some respects, but whatevs.

But that actually isn't too bad of an error, 'cause it's easily explainable by the fave that Stable 512 isn't actually finished. As such, Atom Smasher doesn't even have a PipBuck. It's a fake thing with stickers on it.

Atom Smasher's special talent, of course, is blowing things up. That doesn't get much use down in the stable. She mostly spends her time with cherry bombs and shooting her NERF gun at people.

So, at age nineteen, she gets bored and goes up to the front door. No real reason. Just bored. Usually when I get bored I don't really do anything. I just sit and think boring thoughts. Which is really easy when you study accounting.

I would have been like nineteen or so when I found the Stable's front door. Or, rather, the doorway. It had taken me a couple of weeks to find a way to get through the last two doors - those two locked doors I was telling you about earlier. Cherry bombs don't cut it on blast doors and there isn't a normal door lock to pick, so it was a right pain in the ass, but I did it. After all this trying, I got this second door to unlock, and I spent a full two minutes just shoving and bucking at it to get the rusty old thing to open, and when it finally twisted off its hinges, I got hit with a wave of cold, wet air. I mean, most of the air in the Stable is cold and wet, but it's also clammy and recycled. This was weirdly fresh, but probably radioactive. If I were stepping out of a proper Stable, I might have had my PipBuck start clicking like crazy, but Stable 512 had maybe two working PipBucks ever, and one Geiger counter besides. The thing on my foreleg was a bit of scrap metal with a sticker on it. I'm not sure how happy those peach farmers were to find out that the Stable had a fully functional printer and stacks upon stacks of sticker paper, but all of the food was artificial nutrient goop.

Did I just spend a paragraph on walking through a door? If that's how this is going to go then this is going to be a really long story.

This story is off to a pretty slow start. Most of the humor in this story comes from the characters behaving in silly ways, some of the wackier worldbuilding elements, and Atom Smasher's narration. And trying to get humor through in the narration is problematic when your character is as obnoxious as Atom Smasher.

But I think the problem here is that, with the story going for as broad humor as it is, the humor is a little too... well, it's not that it's lacking jokes, but most of the jokes are in the sort of snark territory. That's really not enough to carry a comedy if you don't have a strong story, and this fic is off to a slow start because the only humor we have so far is Atom Smasher's narration. And Atom Smasher, as you may have gathered, is not a likable character. At all.

So I break down this door and I'm into the 'hallway' of the Stable, you could call it, and the big steel door is just... not there. It's not like it was opened and someone forgot to close it, it was just never put in place. Maybe someone stole it, if they wanted a gigantic piece of scrap metal to melt down for something.

Good, that's actually pretty funny. Better.

So, upon entering the wasteland, in...

Huh. She actually spent less time in the Stable than the original did. That's pretty crazy. And also like in the original, we don't, like, get a look at the protagonist's life or relations with other stable members. But then again, the story isn't going to return here to wring emotion out of people we didn't know getting gunned down, so that's not as big of a deal.

Outside, I quickly found out why the air was so cold and wet. In Mareseyside, it rains all the fucking time. Seasons and weather just aren't a thing in the Stable, and now here I was in the Great Braytish summer. I miraculously emerged during a dry spell, but the ground was still wet and muddy. The sky was streaked with murky grey, which seemed to reflect the lifeless, soggy countryside. Husks of trees dotted the landscape of rolling hills, and some charred buildings sat in clusters on the horizon. But most of all everything just looked and felt wet. The air and ground were saturated with moisture, and even without rain, I could feel the omnipresent dampness beginning to claim me too.

So here we have our first indication that this story is not set in the same place as the original. This isn't the Equestrian Wasteland, this is... Braytish. 'Cause the author is Irish.

Weather. Weather never changes.

Oh, good. Another joke.

In an amusing spin on the "the wonder of the outdoors" scene, where the FOE protagonist will stand slack-jawed in awe of the amazing outdoors where you can't see the ceiling (my character has 9 Intelligence, Bethesda, why doesn't he have more dialogue options that aren't stupid?), Atom Smasher slips and falls in the mud and falls down the hill and all. It's a pretty amusing twist on how the stories usually go, but I think physical comedy is better suited to a more visual medium, and, well, this kinda goes on for a few paragraphs.

Being a pegasus, she tries flying, but it doesn't work so well for her. This goes on for a few paragraphs of narration that I don't really think bear commenting on. After failing, she decides to just go on walking.

And eventually she comes across a pair of merchants. Blah blah blah a lampshade about how gun design doesn't make a lot of sense for non-unicorns, these merchants are named Sand Dollar and Hard Sell. Thankfully for her, they don't shoot her when she starts popping foam darts at them from behind a rock. Something Hard Sell explains to her.

He picked up both my darts and stuffed them in my nose. "If you'd tried that trick on raiders they'd be ventilating your skull by now. I'm Hard Sell, and my jumpy pal here is Sand Dollar."

Anyway, they start explaining to her the details of the setting and the like. Since she's a massive dick, she doesn't take them seriously.

I stared at him blankly. I guessed caps referred to currency based on context, but playing the part of the oblivious Stable Dweller was more fun to watch.

Basically, Atom Smasher is a video game player character. That's pretty much the central joke. She doesn't take anything seriously and just does whatever she feels like at the time, with nary a consequence. Now that there are actual characters she has to bounce off of, we can start to see some amusing interactions.

In any case, Sand Dollar has a present for her.

"Say, Atom..." Sand started. "If you want to make yourself useful, I think we have just the ticket for you... Sell, get that jumbo revolver wheel. I think we found what it fits!"

Hard Sell rolled his eyes and rummaged in the cart. A roll of charred Nerf darts floated into view.

"Hey! More darts!" I went to grab them, but Sell lifted them away from me.

"Careful with those! Sell, show her what I mean." Sandy's lovely assistant picked one dart off the roll and tossed it down the road. Upon hitting the ground, the mud burst with a loud pop and flung little drops everywhere. "Nearly blew my leg off handling them. And the best part?" We came to the crater, and the dart was resting on the side. Sell picked it up and returned it to the roll. "I spent a good half a day just throwing them, and they work every time. Enchanted, probably. And if they fit in that toy, you've got yourself a pretty handy grenade launcher."

"Cool! Gimme."

Giving reusable explosives to the violent sociopath. Great idea.

Hard Sell isn't parting with them unless she pays for them, but Sand Dollar decides she can have them if she guards them on their trip. That seems to suffice, so she joins up with with them. She reasons that she could just kill them and take their stuff, but then she'd be out in the middle of nowhere.

Now, the next running gag here concerns perks.

Level up! Wait, what? New perk: It's Nerf or Nothing!

You deal lethal damage with foam-based weapons.

Yep. At the end of every chapter, Atom Smasher receives a new oddly specific perk and makes a surprised interjection. It's actually fairly consistently funny, so I won't comment too much on them.

When writing up this blog post I actually stopped for a day right before she meets up with the merchants and stuff. After that things start moving a little more because Atom Smasher has characters to bounce off of. The first half of the chapter is really dull. We got nothing but Atom Smasher talking in our faces, and the laughs to be pulled from there are limited. It also suffers a bit from trying to drive humor from lampshade hanging. And lampshade hanging just really isn't funny. Not if you do it directly. And no, don't one of you people bring up Order of the Stick or something Joss Whedon wrote or some shit like that.

Anyway, we'll have to wait and see if chapter 2 is funnier.