Bad news, everyone, I’ve come down with a bad case of video games and thus couldn’t be arsed to continue chapter 37 just yet. In particular it’s been Dishonored, a game with really good gameplay and a lousy story, and Dear Esther, a game with a really good (if confusing) story and pretty much no gameplay. It’s kind of a shame that Dishonored isn’t quite so good in the writing department, given the inspiration it takes from Thief, a game that had pretty good writing, particularly in regards to its protagonist, Garrett, who’s a very colorful, likable, and charming character, as contrasted with Dishonored’s blank slate Corvo.
So this update is going to be a sort of from-memory look at a story called My Second Life. Do not bother looking it up on Fimfiction – it no longer exists. It was big during a little dark age of Fimfiction, when the site was glutted with fucking terrible Brony-In-Equestria stories. Basically, these stories tend (or tended) to follow more or less the same premise: “I am a fairly pathetic brony with no actual life to speak of. I spend all of my spare time on websites devoted to my favorite cartoon, and one day a portal opens up and I get to go frollick in Equestria with all my favorite characters from the show! And I get to date one of them!”
Now, I’m not going to say that all Human in Equestria stories are bad. I haven’t read them all. I’ve been informed that there are some, such as Through the Eyes of Another Pony, ARTICLE 2, and others that are actually pretty good. Apparently Through the Eyes of Another Pony fits the exact description above and manages to actually be pretty good. Or at least that’s what I’m told. My history with things other people like in this fandom does not bode well, but until I actually read it we will operate under the assumption that Through the Eyes of Another Pony is a good fic. My Second Life, however, is not a good fic. At all.
The Brony-In-Equestria genre was a plague upon fimfiction, and My Second Life was probably the most stupefying of them all, a towering 180-chapter behemoth that was on the order of five to six hundred-thousand words. I think I got through something like chapter 12 before it was baleeted by the author. Apparently he has super-religious parents and when they found the story they demanded he take it down or they’d kick him out of the house. Now, the–
Holy shit, I looked it up on fimfiction apparently someone actually saved the whole damn thing and put it in Google Docs... now I have to actually read the fucking thing... again... No, I refuse, I’ll do it from memory.
Now, in the Fallout: Equestria thread there was a bit of a discussion concerning this liveblog. Turns out the author of the story reads it! But anyway, the question was how seriously one should take this liveblog, and whether my opinions are totally genuine. That kind of confusion will be utterly delicious once I finalize my essay on how Littlepip is literally worse than Hitler, but I must say this with a completely straight face: My Second Life is the worst My Little Pony fanfic I have ever read. Why? Well, let’s dive right into it...
Our protagonist is Coal. If you read the story, you will notice a few things about Coal. Mainly, he is an annoying whiny twat.
Okay, I’m getting ahead of myself.
The first chapter of the story is basically Coal introducing himself to us. He’s a college-age dude who wakes up in the morning and spends all day on pony websites until he leaves for his 3 P.M. job. Ughh...
So Coal narrates to us in delightful first-person how lame his life is, how he lives at home and sponges off of his parents (which he actually admits to in a bit of self-awareness) and how the only solace he gets is in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and its online fanbase. Give the guy five minutes on /mlp/ and see how his love of the fandom lasts. He also spends a paragraph talking about how he’s into pony porn. No, seriously.
Anyway, Coal is hit by a truck and he finds himself in the Everfree Forest. I don’t remember the exact details about the explanation were, but I think it’s a variation on “Twilight fucked up a spell,” because that is always how it works in these “mystic dimension portal opens up” fics. You know, at least On a Cross and Arrow had a decent setup for Twilight to fuck up the spell.
Chapter 2 has him emerging, bleary-eyed, in Equestria, where he meets Rainbow Dash. Of course, he immediately starts squeeing inwardly, and we get a delightfully irritating shtick that happens in a lot of this guy’s dialogue. I’ve ragged on Fallout: Equestria a lot for its use of parentheses, but the thing is I was actually kind of wrong about that. This story, as it turns out, uses parentheses in dialogue to express thoughts that are not dialogue. On occasions I’ve seen a story use a thing in parentheses during dialogue, and while that might be a questionable practice, it makes sense if you use it as the character muttering an aside or something. Here, however, it’s a complete break in the train of thought just so the protagonist can act giddy.
And you know the real rotten problem with this fic is? The protagonist is a guy who is fucking obsessed with ponies. Him winding up in Equestria is probably the worst thing that could happen to him. He needs less ponies, not more, and as it is you have a story that’s roughly about a drug addict getting unlimited access to his fix of choice. Remember how I said that My Little Dashie was kind of creepy? This is worse.
Anyway, I think Rainbow Dash saves him or something, I can’t remember, and she falls asleep and he carries her out of the Everfree Forest. Then they meet up with Fluttershy, and we get a whole deal that goes on wherein the protagonist pretends he has no idea who any of them are. And he gets a glimpse of Fluttershy’s vagina.
The next several chapters involve fuck all happening as Coal stays at Twilight Sparkle’s house and meets with the mane six. As far as I got, there was no actual fucking plot. There were more annoyances with the writing, though. For example, the story starts in first-person, but it will often switch to third-person when the scene shifts to focus on the ponies. But then sometimes Coal will be in the scene with similar prominence and it’ll still be in third-person. I mean, I can appreciate a story that juggles different PO Vs, but there’s no fucking consistency here.
But anyway, there are a few highlights, such as Coal explaining human nudity taboos to Twilight, wherein the explanation is that humans can’t control their urges and that’d be bad if everyone was naked, which is somewhat undermined by the existence of various nudist colonies and stuff. There’s also a bit where he gives Rarity a massage and she admits to Twilight that she found it a turn-on, and there’s one chapter in particular that illustrates a major problem with Coal’s characterization.
One chapter opens with him having a nightmare in which the mane six are... torturing him. Or something. He wakes up in classic Catapult Nightmare fashion. Twilight asks him what’s wrong and they talk yadda yadda, before Coal immediately goes cheery and starts helping out with chores.
You see, another major problem with Coal is that his personality is like a fucking rubber band. One minute he’s all mopey and riddled with middle-class angst and the next he’s all bouncy and self-consciously “wacky!” It’s like the author doesn’t have any clue how characterization or consistent personalities actually work and just does what feels good at the moment.
And you know how I whine a lot about Littlepip being an angst-train? At least Littlepip usually has the decency to keep the angst internal. Cold comfort for me as the first-person narration means that I bear the brunt of it, but Coal actually whines to Twilight about how lame his life is. Look, I’m not gonna be all “if you live a cushy middle-class existence you should never complain about anything,” but... ughh. And Twilight actually starts crying at it and saying it’s the saddest thing she’s ever heard.
But anyway, he doesn’t want to be a useless sponge, so he heads to Applejack’s to get a job helping on the farm. And then he gives her a massage and Big Macintosh charges at him. Go Big Macintosh.
Anyway, that’s as far as I got. I guess that since it’s all on Googledocs I may just have to continue. But the thing that really boggles my mind is that this thing has fans. It actually has a fanbase and recursive fanfiction. I do not understand why. It’s terrible in almost every conceivable fashion. Coal is probably one of the worst protagonists I have ever seen in fanfiction, and I’m having a hard time deciding whether or not he’s worse than Rose Potter.
But as far as I got in the story, from what I hear the thing actually manages to get worse.
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