The story actually starts with an Intro and a Prologue... why it has both of these I'm not sure. It also has an epilogue and and afterwards. I don't really have anything to say about these, they basically just establish that Equestria got hit with nukes and we start in Stable 2, an explanation on what a Pipbuck is (basically the "Pipboy" from the Fallout games), and that the protagonist's name is LittlePip. I will not be referring to her by this name. I will call her "Our Hero." Now, onto the story itself.
Now, Our Hero is not particularly special. Her main talent is repairing Pipbucks. One of the first things we learn about Our Hero is that she is a lesbian, and all her life she's had a crush on Velvet Remedy, the stable's star singer. This is actually a somewhat funny take, as the fandom is riddled with female/female pairings due to the abundance of female characters and a fan base consisting largely of heterosexual males. For myself I've always been a het shipper at heart, with the occasional gay. Anyway, Our Hero has always had a crush on Velvet Remedy, who I will be referring to as Prissy Whine for as long as I feel like it.
Prissy Whine asks Our Hero to take her pipbuck off for... maintenance, I think, I kinda forget what reason she gives. Shortly after, she runs away from the stable. Our Hero is then blamed for her disappearance and, after uncovering an encrypted message on the pipbuck that tells her the code to open the stable door. And thus Our Hero enters the wasteland.
The first major problem with this is that the beginning is very dull. I'm going to (mostly) copypaste a bit of TL;DR I made in the main thread. Y'see, a lot of readers do agree that the beginning parts of the story are the weakest, and that it gets better later on. My issue is that I don't think it should take as long as it apparently does.
Part of telling a good story is making sure the beginning gives the readers a reason to care. A guy from Pixar once gave a seminar on telling a story, and an important thing is that you "start with a promise." Or to talk about something less abstract, I will refer to one of my main areas of interest: opera.
Mozart's last two operas were The Magic Flute, a German singspiel, and La Clemenza di Tito, an Italian opera seria. Now, which of these have you actually heard of? And no, hearing about it from me doesn't count.
Y'see, The Magic Flute is the one that's remembered. Well, for one, opera seria was kinda a dead form already by the time Mozart was writing it, but let's look at how these two operas open. In The Magic Flute, after the overture we instantly get action - the young Tamino is being chased by a vicious serpent, and he's at the edge of despair. Not only is there onstage action, but it's musically dramatic as well, given us an operatic scena as Tamino gets a solo and the three ladies appear and vanquish the serpent before chattering about how hawt Tamino is. We're given action, melodrama, humor, and misogyny all rolled into one operatic sequence.
La Clemenza di Tito, on the other hand, starts with... recitative. Between a woman and a castrato (or, for modern productions, a woman and another woman in drag). These two lovers are scheming about how they want to bring down a ruler that we haven't seen and don't really care about (if we were in Mozart's contemporary audience we only really came for the castrato playing Sesto, anyway). Three and a half minutes of recitative before we even get a proper duet. Sure, we get a ton of gorgeous music, but it starts with fucking recitative. With stuff like this it's no wonder folks abandoned opera seria for opera buffa. I mean, look at Mozart's three famous Italian opera buffe:
The Marriage of Figaro: We start with a duet between Figaro and Susannah, Figaro measuring the floor and making plans for a bed, Susannah singing about how happy she is that their wedding day is nigh. It's cute, charming, funny, and beautiful.
Don Giovanni: Leporello is pacing outside back and forth, sings an aria about how he bemoans his lot as a servant standing guard while his master goes skirt-chasing. Then we meet Don Giovanni and Donna Anna and the action starts: we're given a rape and a murder!
Cosi Fan Tutte: Two lover boys arguing with an old misogynistic crank, the argument for which sets up the plot of the opera.
And in all three of these cases we're given Mozart's very charming music. In La Clemenza di Tito we're given three and a half minutes of dry recitative (seriously, that's actually the musical term for it).
Now, with Fallout Equestria we don't get that much. They live in a stable. The protagonist maintains pipbucks. She's a lesbian and has a crush on the singer, who runs away and the protagonist decides to go after her because all the ponies blame her so she decides to take it upon herself. Okay. Not really prompted to care. Somehow I imagine that the parallel in Fallout 3, the guy's father running off and the subsequent breaking out of the vault, was a bit more dramatic.
Yes, Prissy Whine is actually one of the main characters. Unfortunately, her characterization isn't really established at this point.
In the next chapter Our Hero staggers out into the Wasteland, and we are treated to some actually good descriptions. While I find many faults with the story, I do have to concede that descriptions of locales are done very well. But I have another problem in that these flowery descriptions don't seem to mesh with the way the character talks - a lot of her dialogue and remarks tend to be terse and snarky. In any case, she blunders into a party of slavers who take her prisoner, along with another pony named Monterey Jack. Surprisingly, the slavers all have names and character quirks, which is a nice effort considering that they all die shortly. Oh yeah, and they threaten to rape her. Joy.
The slavers then get into a skirmish with some Raiders. Our Hero demonstrates her intelligence by observing the slaver with the shotgun (named "Sawed-Off") and figuring out how the gun works. The slavers are all killed in a shower of delightful gore. Then the raiders threaten to rape Our Hero. Double Joy. Thankfully, this does not seem to be a recurring thing. The raiders die (I forget how) and Monterey Jack attempts to hold up Our Hero. Of course, Our Hero uses the knowledge she gained of the shotgun to talk her way out and keep her stuff.
The Awesomeness by Analysis bit doesn't seem to stay a consistent character trait, however, which comes to a problem I will elaborate later.
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