Present Perfect vs. My Little Dashie · 4:54pm Aug 24th, 2014
(Reading (part 1) by Mic the Microphone)
(Reading (part 1) by slickdash)
This is stupid.
I'm literally in the middle of reading ROBCakeran's entry for the Outside Insight contest, and I realized, hey, is this the first of his stories I've reviewed since MLD?
And then I find out
I never fucking reviewed it.
For all that I talk about this story, for all that I wrote a fucking parody of it, I never actually wrote a journal about it, and that's quite likely because I read it long enough ago that I wasn't doing fic reviews.
And at this time, there's really no point in reviewing it. I mean, everything that can be said about it has been. Everybody's read it. Literally everybody, it's far and away the most-viewed story on Fimfiction to this day. And I come down hard on the "it stinks!" side of the fandom. It's maudlin, it plays for feels, the crapsack world the protagonist lives in is ridiculous, and it has some of the most unintentionally hilarious lines ever written in a fic.
It's such a lolcow, such a target for mockery in this fandom that there's really no point in wasting words lambasting it again. (Plus, y'know, ROB's a cool guy, he knows what's wrong with it and has moved on. Or would have, if people would stop caring about it.) So you can take the story that I linked up there as the full, deep-critique that would otherwise go here, and take this as an "Oh yeah" to make everything official. Uh, so, 1.5/5, I guess. It's not the worst story ever written, but it's the worst of the big-name players in this fandom, and I keep it as a reminder that we don't all have the same life experiences when approaching fanfic as readers.
When I first got into the fandom, I read the first few paragraphs and had to just stop. It definitely doesn't appear to be the worst story - and I can't say that anything I've written would be received as too much better by the people whose writings I really respect here - but it definitely grated on me enough to drop it quickly and move on.
No sense beating a dead pony, right?
If My Little Dashie was the first ponyfic I read, I would likely not have gone so deep into the fandom. It isn't terrible, but is what I would consider typical fanfic.
I'm very sad this wasn't a full on review. I have not read My Little Dashie, and I'm not sure I ever will.
I know that I am now in a very small minority here, but... I fucking love this fanfiction!
2397153
Actually, I gave Cupcakes a 1/5. (I don't consider the scores I've given in the past when scoring a new fic, FYI.) To be perfectly honest, Cupcakes is far better than MLD by virtue of accomplishing what it sets out to do, that is be creepy, unsettling and altogether distasteful. So by virtue of being more distasteful, it's worse, but at the same time, it's also a
bettermore effective story.And rainbow dash isn't even in character. She acts like anypony BUT rainbow dash
Reiterating, ROB is a cool guy and far more than just "the author of that one story". He's been working away on some cool new fic ideas (as much as RL permits him) and he has a good sense of humor over the whole MLD thing. (He thought the Rainbow Dash Presents parady was hilarious as hell, for instance.)
2397250
And having actually finished that contest entry, I can say that he has definitely grown as a writer. :)
The difference between an awful FiMfic like MLD and an awful FiMfic like FoE is that I am actually willing to read MLD.
I've never read it. I actually listen to bad reviews.
2397427
Wimp.
2397534
You say "wimp", I say "wise".
I'd like a review that grappled with its immense popularity. If it's so bad, why do so many people love it? It must be excellent in some way that is not immediately obvious.
2397687
It's not.
It's entirely about wish-fulfillment, and playing on emotions that the readers, those willing to have their wishes fulfilled, are too naive to know have been wrought in far better ways by many, many authors. That's what my final line about "life experiences" is getting at. This story is loved by the young, and the young-at-heart, who quite honestly don't know any better when it comes to writing.
And it's not just this story: plenty of stories that I've panned for being emotionally manipulative, or otherwise failing at pathos (that's my new word!), have been well-loved by this fandom, because half of this fandom is under the age of 20. And when you're under the age of 20, you haven't lived or experienced a whole lot, on the whole, and so you lack the breadth of experience to evaluate a story like this.
That's what I think, anyway. I do hate talking about this though, because it gets very needlessly "young vs. old" and makes me feel old because I'm on the old side. :(
2397807
That's not a good answer. Because it can be turned around and throw at anything that you like. There's always somebody smarter, or at least there could be. That doesn't mean that everybody's taste in literature is crap.
Good stories are stories people like. Maybe MLD is a story young people like, but that doesn't mean we can dismiss it. We should ask why they like it.
I think it's not wish-fulfilment. The ending doesn't fulfil a wish. It's a Sophie's Choice: Keep Dash, or let Dash go back and become the pony she could have, and forget him? That's the heart of the story.
2397836
Take a look at the litany of sequels and side stories others have made for it. (I haven't, I shouldn't even be bringing this up.) Do any of them have the same "pony goes back to Equestria" thing at the end? Maybe it's possible that the idea of having a pony of one's own for any length of time supersedes the sorrow of having to give her back.
I mean, that's the best I've got. I literally can't fathom why anyone likes the thing.
2397161
Cupcakes is probably even bigger than MLD; I actually had someone read it to me before I was a brony over Skype simply because it was so ridiculous.
It is too bad it isn't on FIMFiction, because then, at least, something other than MLD would have the most views.
I dunno how to get 400k+ views on a story, though.
2398325
I don't think anyone could do it anymore, beyond "write popular story + wait ten years".
Also, I doubt Cupcakes would get beyond 150k views. Currently, MLD has over 400k. The next closest has 140k. Cheerilee's Garden, which is #5, has 102k. I mean, not even Fallout: Equestria is up there, though granted it's only been around for not even a year. It's a funny ol' thing, this here fic site.
2398441
I think part of it is that people probably look at the most viewed stories, and thus drive up viewership on the most viewed stories. Same for highest rated. The problem is that highest rated has a natural rotation as downvotes naturally pull stories through the top 50 or so over and over again over time, whereas that's not the case with most viewed, which is static.
It's weird how "Cupcakes", a kludgy, ugly, Halloween-Horror-Nights-haunted-house romp, has inspired far better fanfiction. "Cupcake Chronicles" by Milesprower06 (the first fimfic writer I ever read) is a good example.
)
(Pinkamena's best pony.
I've been warned that MLD is shmaltzier than your average Disney movie, so I steered clear.
I'm glad that MLD's writer is getting better at his craft.
2398637
Honestly, ROBCakeran's newest story, Bloomberg, is everything MLD should have been. It's an attempt to be emotional and heartfelt that actually succeeds without pandering or manipulating the reader, and it's quite good.
2397836
It may be the heart of the story, but I don't think the ending is what makes it popular. The middle is absolutely pandering wish fulfillment, with a pathetic life getting reformed with the arrival of Dash as this sort of surrogate daughter. The ending is less of a choice (as one option clearly has Dash's best interests at heart) and more just a carefully calculated band-aid rip to tear down all of the story's build-up in the most sob-inducing way possible.
Since the fic is a raw, early work, experienced readers will see the signs coming a mile away and they'll roll their eyes at the narm. For less-read readers (high view-count = more of a pop-culture fic = more readers that've read less other fics), they're more likely to be emotionally swayed by the cheap-yet-powerful tactics ROB employs there. And a story that evokes emotional response is more likely to be remembered. (In fairness, all author-intended emotional responses are the result of crafted choices by the author, so calling MLD "crafted" is an unfair critique. Rather, the issue is that the crafted elements are blunt and obvious, such that readers can see the signs of author manipulation. "Better" stories don't suspend disbelief even if the author is absolutely trying to get you to sob your eyes out.)
Of course, the argument always gets hypothetical at this point. "Well, if those same new readers read a good story that was actually sad, like <example>, they'd be twice as floored, and would forget about MLD." But a) most of these readers just aren't that invested in fanfic, and probably won't read much else, and 2) MLD just has too much cultural inertia and is hard to dethrone. It's the same way that Sunny Skies All Day Long still gets cited as "the best episodic fic" and hasn't been usurped by newer, arguably better examples like Celestia's Teeth.
I'm just baffled that thing has 10K upvotes.
I never read it!
And I never will!
2398909
Oh god don't you mention SSADL on this blog D:
Yea, I would have probably read it if it was just bad, but it has humans in it. That's a big no. Sort of like how I didn't read the Fallout Equestria stories because ponies with guns seems really dumb to me.
2405176
Ponies with guns is pretty dumb. FoE does nothing to dissuade me of this opinion.
2397836 I'm with you on this, Monsieur Horse. The story is aiming to have a strong emotional impact in certain kinds of people and obviously succeeds very well at that.
Does that make it a GOOD story? Or, do all its faults make it a BAD story despite how many people like it? I don't know. It's totally subjective. I would say it's a successful story, that's for sure.
I go down in history as the pre-reader who told Seth to go ahead and post MLD in the state it was in when it went on EQD. Times were a little simpler back then, and I basically said, "it could use editing for sure, but just put it up. Trust me, people will eat it up." Boy oh boy was I right on that one.
Going back on these old reviews, I can't help but feel like a lot of the old classics were just that way because they were the first.
5391512
Got it in one. :D