Well, the home stretch of Fallout: Equestria, when everything finally comes together! Or more accurately in terms of the story’s plotting and credibility, falls apart.
So when we left off in chapter 40, Littlepip discovered her new life’s ambition: becoming a cartoon supervillain!
There’s a party, and Velvet shows up again. Break out the confetti cannons, the terrible character has returned. Complete with eye-rolling kissy-kissy talk with Calamity.
Oh, and by the way, at one point Calamity refers to Littlepip as “my mare” and Velvet goes “excuse me?” and he’s all sputtery. Thank you, story, for reinforcing my only half-joke of a theory.
So Calamity has a bold plan for dealing with the Wonderbolts. So they head over to Tenpony Tower with Gawd’s kids to pick up Lifebloom, with the plan being that they’ll extract Calamity’s memories about stuff and force the Wonderbolts into them so that they’ll have a change of heart. So while Life Bloom is copying memories, Littlepip and her griffin friends go to do... something involving fighting Enclave. I honestly don’t really remember, but they meet another one of Calamity’s brothers, download something, and Kage dies.
So they get the stuff and head for the Everfree Forest. The Sky Bandit gets killed. It’s very tragic – it really was the most endearing character, despite the fact that it was an inanimate object. Actually, scratch that, replace with: t really was the most endearing character, because of the fact that it was an inanimate object.
When they get to the Everfree Forest, they come across, bum bum BUM, Fluttershy as a tree!
...
Y’know, Past Sins did something like this. I haven’t read it, but a lot of people thought that was pretty stupid. And then there’s a fight scene with Killing Joke and hellhounds and dudes are sweeping through with flamethrowers that aren’t burning the trees, and there are cockatrices and the Wonderbolts are pursuing them, and the whole thing just seems like the story’s trying to cram everything in here for the great big climax.
The whole thing is confusing. Xenith gets knocked out and there’s an albino hellhound that Velvet helps out and there’s also a bit with moss monsters and the alicorns show up and do this thing where they test Littlepip’s mental fortitude, and reveal that they’ve allied with Red Eye because he’s promised them alicorn stallions so they can have alicorn sex and make alicorn babies.
So they fight the Wonderbolts and they’re forcing the memory orbs of stuff on them. I guess that the thing with the Wonderbolts is supposed to be their one “look, we’re doing something other than murder” thing, but it’s confusing and they never really bother to explain why they’re going through all this trouble for these dudes when they've never really bothered with anything like this before. It just comes off as incredibly token and after the chapter it never comes up again. You'd think that maybe it'd come back for the final battle in chapter 44, but it doesn't. And that’s the problem with the story in the last act - the story had been up to this point been pretty good at introducing little things that come back later in surprising ways. But here we have a bunch of throwaway elements introduced and nothing is done with them. Like, Red Eye has this big fucking cyber dragon and it doesn’t actually do anything.
And furthermore, I think Calamity’s character development is mishandled. When the Enclave shows up he suddenly backpeddals on his gun-happy ways and starts showing restraint. I’m going to assume that the idea is that he and Velvet have this parallel character development. Velvet learns about the necessity of standing up and fighting, and Calamity learns restraint.
The problem with this, however, is that due to the context, it comes off like Calamity really hasn’t developed at all, because the targets of his newfound sense of mercy are only Enclave folks, ie folks he was already disinclined to shoot at. So it comes not at all like Velvet has had a positive influence on him and everything like he just feels bad because they’re his friends and he's full of shit.
They talk with the albino hellhound a bit, who talks about how the Enclave have been enslaving them and using mind-control helmets, blah blah blah stupid accent blah.
Then something completely unprecedented happens - a successful stealth mission. They sneak onboard an Enclave ship that’s headed for the Cathedral and sneak around, looting stuff, releasing some hostages, all that good stuff. There’s a bit where Reggie suggests they knife a few Enclave mooks if they come in range, and Littlepip rejects it and is all “No, that’s murder, and we don’t work that way,” and there’s an incredibly satisfying moment where Reggie tells her how full of shit she is. If the story had more moments where people called her out on her bullshit, this story would've been way more tolerable.
So they make it through to the cathedral and the party busts in. They run around through the vault below, find out more about the experiments that these doctors have been doing with Taint, which suitably horrifies the protagonist.
If my explanation seems like it’s jumping around all over the place, it’s because a lot of things happen and honestly not very many of them were particularly important. In this, the final stretch, the story is jamming so many things into it that it gets hard to follow, and honestly not very worth it.
So Littlepip heads down to Red Eye’s lair, where there are a bunch of knocked-out unicorns. Then Autumn Leaf shows up. I rather like Autumn Leaf.
You see, there are a number of reasons that the Enclave are terrible. For one thing, they’re fucking idiots. Calamity explains about how their resources are limited and how they have a limited number of aircraft. And yet a few chapters ago we saw them shooting one of their own ships down because it didn’t feel like being a cartoonishly evil that day.
Now, the Enclave from the games were stupid cartoon supervillains as well, but they had two things that the Enclave from this fic sorely lack: an agenda and a face.
You see, the Pegasus Enclave has no real agenda. They’re a bunch of isolationists who are just sitting on their asses on the clouds and shitting up their own shitty corner of the shitty room. The only reason they come down is because they feel they’re being threatened by Red Eye and Littlepip.
The Enclave from the games did have an agenda. They were basically cartoon Nazis in power armor, and their master plan was to use a virus to wipe out everyone who was mutated, which is to say everyone but them, leaving themselves, the un-mutated master race, to re-establish their supremacy. They had an evil agenda and they acted accordingly. Then in Fallout 3 John Henry Eden had the same plan, though Colonel Autumn backed away from genocide and just wanted to use Project Purity as a means of giving the Enclave leverage over the surrounding Capital Wasteland.
And the thing is, even while the Enclave were idiots, they had an antagonistic face to give them presence and a sense of menace. In Fallout 2 there was Frank Horrigan, an imposing supermutant and the Enclave’s big weapon. In Fallout 3 there was President John Henry Eden, voiced by Malcolm McDowell and who, despite having the most Obviously Evil voice this side of Tony Jay, is oddly likable and charismatic. And at least they were funny in that game, what with piping Yankee Doodle Dandy over the radio. The Enclave in this fic, however, lacks a lot of that because most of what we see is them being completely incompetent. Their introduction has Spike casually murdering one of them, then later we hear about how their armor actually kind of sucks, and then we see stuff about them being panicky dipshits who destroy their own limited resources for the sake of being cartoonishly evil.
Colonel Autumn Leaf is as close as the Enclave of the fic comes to either of these. Without him, the Enclave are a blank, faceless mass of armored mooks who are so idiotic and incompetent it’s a wonder they even manage to fasten their guns to their armor without vaporizing themselves.
So they meet Red Eye, who paralyzes Autumn Leaf with a matrix disruption grenade before revealing his master plan to Littlepip. He’s gonna turn all three of them into a new alicorn God and lead Equestria into the future. He also means to get into the Single Pegasus Project and wipe out the cloud cover.
Aaaaaand here is where I get to why this story has shitty morals. Let us consider the main protagonist and the main antagonist.
Red Eye, the antagonist, wants to build an industrial infrastructure and shit so that the wasteland can support itself in a manner that isn’t scavenging or murdering others for their shit. Main problems are that he’s built it on an oppressive slave regime and he wants to turn people into alicorns.
Littlepip, the protagonist... has no real plan. Her method is just “shoot everyone I don’t like and hope that somehow fixes everything.” Which it does, because I can go eat a dick. Oh yeah, and calling her friends every time she comes across an orphan.
The thing is it’s the bad guy who’s actually working on building shit. The protagonist, however, only seems interested/capable of rubbing out everything she doesn’t like.
And the other major problem is that Littlepip and Red Eye are doing pretty much the exact same thing as part of their master plan: blow up the Enclave’s food supply.
Now, you could do a thing about how sometimes the price isn’t worth it and sometimes it’s better to do the moral thing rather than the practical thing. But the problem is that Littlepip’s alternative to Red Eye’s plan isn’t practically or morally superior. In all honesty, almost every facet of Littlepip’s plan is orders of magnitudes worse. Red Eye’s might be trying to build a civilization on the foundation of slavery, but at least after he fucks over the pegasi civilians he has contingencies. He’s actually accounted for things like industrial infrastructure and agriculture. Littlepip, whose bright new future is built on a foundation of mass murder (because that’s so much better than slavery, you know), has nothing.
“But Pannic,” you might be saying, “what about the Gardens of Equestria?”
What about the Gardens of Equestria?
You see, there’s a problem with the Gardens – they aren’t actually part of the plot. They don’t move actions or motivate the characters or drive the plot in any meaningful way. They’re actually less relevant to the proceedings than any given Macguffin. Its only purpose in the story is to give Littlepip an incredibly flimsy justification for her actions in the final act here.
Her plan is to basically fuck up the only functioning agriculture in the setting, and hope that they’ll be able to activate the Gardens and make the land arable. But there are a lot of problems with this plan...
For one, it assumes that they’ll be able to find the remaining elements at all, nevermind within the timeframe they’d need. And that assumes that the ponies they have as is qualify for it. And that also assumes the damn thing works as intended, and that what it does will provide for enough food for everyone, and that’s assuming the ponies can make that smooth of a transition to an agrarian society after two hundred years of scavenging. And in the meantime, there’s the matter of all those terrified, starving, possibly brainwashed refugees who are going to be forced into a hostile environment with little in the way of fending for themselves, what with their government and military being in shambles.
Or, to put it short, if Littlepip wants me to believe that she can show the ponies a better way, she can start by building a fucking orphanage *.
But I guess that’s what the whole “villain of the piece” bullshit is about. In order to do the right thing and save the world, she has to do the wrong thing and fuck the world over. Huh.
So they have the conversation and Red Eye is mostly being pretty cool because he’s the only good character in this story. He offers Littlepip the opportunity of joining her willingly, but says she doesn’t have to and that he’s got plenty of other unicorns and he can just use one of them. He also has bomb collars on all of them so that Littlepip can’t just shoot him, which was pretty clever. Of course, Littlepip refuses, and Red Eye tries to just jump into the vat. Littlepip, however, stops him in midair with her telekinesis. And that’s where Red Eye’s intelligence ends, because he forgot that Littlepip was very good at telekinesis. Seriously, Red Eye? “Things Littlepip is Actually Good At” isn’t a very long list, and you managed to forget that the most powerful telekinetic in the story is really good at telekinesis?
Then Autumn Leaf reveals that he still exists and he has a trump card, and has hellhounds attack the place, killing Red Eye, though Littlepip manages to keep the unicorn captives from exploding by using the Canterlot Broadcaster in her PipLeg to block the signal. At first I thought this was neat because it allowed the villain to demonstrate that they’re a threat, but after talking and thinking about it some more, it actually kind of ruins the whole scene. By having Autumn Leaf pull that stunt, it makes Littlepip’s choice completely meaningless. If she had agreed to follow Red Eye in his plan, Autumn would still have released the hellhounds and Red Eye would have, in all likelihood, died anyway.
So with Autumn Leaf paralyzed, he and Littlepip make a deal. He’ll help her turn off the explosives, and she’ll reboot his armor. So he gives her the instructions to disarm the explosives, and she shows some real character development by demonstrating what she learned from Arbu... By murdering him in cold blood when he has absolutely no way of defending himself!
And then she’s all “I realized that I wasn’t Red Eye. I was Applesnack.”
Personally, given the choice between being a Magnificent Bastard and a murderous asshole... I think I’d pick the former.
But of course, the real lesson l from Arbu was that murdering your enemies in cold blood is better than killing them in a hot-blooded rage. Great moral there. And that’s it for now. Be sure to take very good notes next class, when guest lecturer The Doctor will talk to us about the proper application of genocide.
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