Friendship is Absurd Chapters 25 and 26 Commentary

Standard warning to read these chapters before reading this, as I spoil jokes. But, before we get to the commentaries, a few announcements.

This is probably going to be the last of the commentary blog posts I do. The main issue is that it doesn’t seem people are interested in them. First, they don’t get many views at all. This might be okay if there was at least a sense people cared about them, but they get barely any comments either. Note that this isn’t a complaint; I am not in any way owed attention for these. But they take a while to make, sometimes taking time away from writing the actual story, and if people aren’t interested there’s not much purpose to doing them.

So, from now on the current plan is if I have anything I really want to make an out-of-story comment about, I’ll try to put it in an author’s note or a comment instead, though they’ll probably be much shorter (an awfully long blog post is more permissible than a similarly long author’s note).

Anyway, commentary time. Let’s begin with “Lightning Falls”.

Well, okay, not much to comment on here; this was a fairly straightforward chapter, in my view. still…

I rather liked the explanation Trixie gave as to why she needed Lightning Dust’s help. The basic idea is that they balance each other out; when Lightning Dust was the sole writer it was just a bunch of action without anything else, whereas Trixie’s was overly comedic.

Also, Trixie’s prospective opening narration was actually something I wrote for when I was briefly considering the idea of doing a Mare Do Well story to show what the series was like in universe, but ultimately decided to scrap it. Better to leave it more to the audience’s imagination. But I did get that opening bit, so I decided to include it here.

For whatever it’s worth, I always imagined the Mare Do Well comic series of being in a similar style to The Tick, with the Trixie-exclusive issue being more like that of Freakazoid.

The “Just one, but it takes six episodes” is the punchline to the question “How many Dragonball Z characters does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

Rainbow Dash and Soarin being so forgiving struck me as a bit odd in the original episode, hence the revised ending. To be fair, as pointed out here, Rainbow Dash didn’t have much of a leg to stand on in the original considering she lied about being crippled (which was quite frankly even more selfish than anything Spitfire did—at least Spitfire was doing it for Cloudsdale rather than just herself, whereas Rainbow Dash was doing it only for herself), so maybe that was why she was more okay with it. But hey, twisting the original series for comedic effect is what this story is about, so I opted to go with a dramatically different ending.

Favorite joke? Even if it wasn’t that great, I did like the “with blackjack! And pies!” part.

And now it’s time for Two Plus One’s a Crowd.

This chapter got a lot of attention (the story got more views in the week this was put up than any previous week, including the first!), and I think part of that might have been me editing the story’s description to one more “feature box friendly.” Only so many characters will appear on the main page if you hit the feature box, and previously it was cut off midway through a paragraph. The new description doesn’t do that and also gives a better idea of what the story is about for people viewing it through that format. So while the adjusted description didn’t bring it to the feature box, I think it may have helped it stick around in it for a while, and of course get more attention.

The title was a tough one. For a while I had “Three’s Quite Loud” but never quite liked it, and somehow just ended up with this title.

Now, in an earlier commentary I mentioned that I attempted to do a parody of “Keep Calm and Flutter On” but had difficulty really making it work, but that I planned to use some of the jokes for a later chapter. Well, it’s here, and the beginning of this chapter is for the most part a copy/paste of what I wrote up for that, the main adjustments being that it’s about taking care of a sick Discord rather than reforming him, Suri getting replaced by Gilda as one of the guys having to take care of Discord (I needed someone who could fly), and a bit of a silly digression into a “Would It Matter If I Was?” parody that wasn’t in the original.

Chrysalis's statement of "The task. The task for you. The task chosen especially for you to do, your task. That task?" is taken from The Emperor's New Groove, when Kronk says the same thing, except with task replaced with poison and referring to Kuzco rather than "you." Of course, in that case it's him being genuinely clueless whereas here it's just Chrysalis deliberately screwing with them.

The ‘I Hate Sauerkraut’ story is a reference to the Weird Al song “Albuquerque” where the narrator tells a long and rambling story only to say the whole point he’s trying to make is just that he hates sauerkraut (which, outside of a mention at the start of the song, is never mentioned again until that point).

A cut joke was the narration always saying “the worm (wurm?)” whenever referring to the Tatzlwurm, but I thought that was a little too goofy and kind of repetitive. Also, I had some other narration gags in the chapter (heck, the first sentence has one), so I felt it was a little too much.

Looking back, one thing I’m a little bothered by is that the rocket launcher, which apparently could kill an ursa major, only wounded the Tatzlwurm. Well, I guess we can assume that that was just a stronger version that Gilda used back then, hence why she had to go grab it rather than just carrying it around with her.

And… that’s it. Wow, didn’t have much to say about this chapter either. Sorry. This might be part of why I’m cutting down on these commentaries, they take a while to make but then I find I don’t have much to say. I do think my favorite joke was probably just the upper class way the Tatzlwurm talks.