You pity her. You see her, you speak with her for a few minutes, learn about the myriad of tragedies in her life (and there's always something new), and you just feel bad for her. You want to help. Really, it's easy for Rarity to let somepony stay with her for a little while, just until that guest truly gets back on their hooves, because the mare needs help.
You pity her. And when the pity runs out... that's where the self-loathing starts to come in.
Read it here
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Tropes Include:
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Jerkass Woobie: The unnamed mare. In the present, she is a monster in pony skin, who takes over Rarity's life, wrecks her house, and eventually steals some of Rarity's dresses for wake-up juice money. But at one point she was a pony who was so desperate to look beautiful that she was willing to take an illegal and incredibly dangerous potion to looks thinner, and she is what she now is because the potion has destroyed large chunks of her brain and she literally cannot understand that the way she acts is wrong. - No-Dialogue Episode: Comes close. There's one conversation between Rarity and her mother near the end of the story — and that's it. For the most part, we're told what's been said, but there's only a single section where the actual words appear.
- No Name Given: An imperfect translation hints as to what the mare's name might be, but we're never given the exact term.
- Passing the Torch: A dark variant. Rarity winds up hosting the mare because her mother is desperate to get that pony out of her own house.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: Let's just say that people like this exist and leave it at that.
- Skewed Priorities: Rarity's guest spends all her food money on expensive treats (and kicks half of them into the trash), drinks nothing but wake-up juice while never finishing a mug, and progressively fills extra bags with makeup. She's incapable of budgeting or judging what she truly needs for survival and near the end of the story, she checks herself out of emergency medical treatment because the doctors won't allow her to smoke in the ward.
- That Mare Is Dead: When Rarity finally learns about the unnamed mare's potion-induced brain damage, she quickly realizes that by this point the mare who started taking the potions is effectively dead.
- The Thing That Would Not Leave: Played for drama. Ultimately, two of the story's themes are compassion fatigue and the way Rarity progressively hurts herself because she's convinced that kicking the mare out will render her homeless.
- Weight Woe: Ultimately, the mare's problems stem from a potion which she takes to make herself look thinner. However, the Continuum's reliance on realism combines with the near-impossibility of local shapechanging to have that potion work via compression: it makes fatty tissue take up less space. This puts extra pressure on the blood vessels running through it — and a high percentage of brain matter is composed of such tissue. The mare has been going through mini-strokes since she started on the regimen, and it's cost her the ability to recognize that she should stop.
- Unsurprisingly, this potion is illegal, and any competent doctor would recognize the symptoms. This means that the mare would never have gone in for treatment, even when she started having strokes, for fear of having her secret revealed.
