This post contains Spoilers for Fallout: Equestria.

As of this writing, the first chapter of my TrixieFic has been submitted to Fimfiction. I spent months on the story as a whole, yet I have no way of knowing how people will respond to it.

I have to say, I'm a little nervous.

I have no excuse for not updating more frequently. I have neither a job, nor schoolwork to do. Writing is pretty much the only thing there is to do to pass the time, seeing as my interest in the modern videogame industry has waned somewhat since everything turned into a brown military shooter with chest high walls.

So day after day, I sit in front of my computer, and I write. Or rather, I go in with the intention of writing. Usually I'll be distracted by something else. On the rare occasions that text gets put to virtual paper, it's rarer still for said text to be more than five paragraphs. You can bet on at least one of those paragraphs getting cut somewhere during the long and arduous editing process. In short, writing isn't fun, but I do it anyway for those rare instances where everything comes together, and I actually produce something I can enjoy reading long after the final draft is finalized.

Taking into account that I'm never satisfied, it makes sense how I'm the same way about other people's writing - books or fics, it doesn't matter. I rarely finish books I start, and I haven't read an actual pony fic for months. For a self-proclaimed writer, that's pretty sad.

I'm not sure what it was that gave me my aversion to pony fics, in all honesty. The point of most of them is to make the reader feel good, and 'feel good' writing should be easy to read. I suppose my problem comes more from the speed with which these writers can send out work. I have to say that personally, I'm jealous of most writers in this fandom. It seems easy for them to produce good quality work in a short amount of time, often while balancing jobs or schoolwork. Fallout: Equestria was written by one individual. He thought over ideas at his work place, and wrote when he got home. At one point, there was a chapter released every week.

While it lasted, I loved Fallout: Equestria. It felt like an honest adaptation of the games to ponyland, and LittlePip herself was a protagonist I could root for. The parallels to the show were less defined, but there all the same. I can imagine Kkat scrolling through the wikipedia list of all the enemies of Fallout, and methodically picking the most similar thing from the show to represent it with. The same goes for most of the technology in the story. I also liked the fact that any romance in the story was developing tandem with the events in the story, but never driving them 100%.

That's not to say that the story is without its faults. For one thing, I think Kkat dropped the ball on most of the names given to the OC ponies. Oh sure, Calamity, Velvet, Steelhooves - these are all fine. I'm talking about the supporting cast. You know, the ones all named after certain kinds of food.

I also thought the story got too dark for its own good sometimes. I know that it was the kind of story where dark and bad things happen, but I still couldn't help but think that LittlePip was so unlucky, it was starting to look almost manufactured. In the games, when you went with a "good" string of choices, chances are things would turn out good all over. In FE, it was like every single time something good happened, Kkat crushed our hopes and dreams with another disaster happening, or another innocent death. Sometimes both.

Maybe it was different in the first two games. I don't know.

LittlePip also vomited far too much. I can understand shock, I can understand disgust, and if it only happened a few times in the course of the fic, it would be fine. But it seemed to happen a lot - and every time she started losing it, I couldn't help but think it was Kkat trying to increase the tension. It's a more common ploy than you'd think, and it got old quickly.

All that pales in comparison to the way he ended the story. Like the Mass Effect fans, I wanted a happier ending than what I got.

Kkat, if you're out there and you're reading this, tell me why you decided to do that. You had managed to do something that I'd never seen done before - you made me care about an OC. Why on earth couldn't she have happiness after all the horrible experiences you made her go through? I suppose we, the readers, are supposed to take solace in the fact that she'll be around forever... but I still thought it was a downer ending. At times, we care more about a single individual/pony than we care about everyone else. It's a trick of storytelling. If you've managed to make us care, don't abuse that victory in the future. I still like the story, even though I'll probably never reread it now that I know it ends that way.

I have Fallout: Equestria to thank for making me into an obsessive person when it comes to fics (Why post my story if FE is so much better? What's the point?) and I also have it to thank for proving to me that an OC can work in a story. Small victories, but I'll take what I can get. I suppose I also have it to thank for making me reticent to reading pony fics. I gave hours of my time to reading FE, and I did it while it was still being posted. After all that time, for it to end in disappointment the way it did actually made me partially regret reading through it. In many ways, it's exactly like Mass Effect 3's ending, except less expensive.

So now, here we are, about six months later. TrixieFic's first chapter is being processed. Time Well Spent is still being worked on, piece by agonizing piece. Kindness of Strangers is... it exists, I have notes and part of a draft for the fourth chapter, but I don't know how to keep it interesting. I'll get back to you on that. I've got plenty of time to think it over, after all.

I think I need to read more books. Excuse me.