Here is the second review for what I’m calling dark week, hope you enjoy Fake Smiles. by Perfectly Insane

I have found it. After looking for the last few years I have finally found a dark story that I can say matches and or rivals the Silent Ponyvile series in terms of quality. But I’m getting ahead of myself, let me start with the introductions.

You know what the best way to start your morning after dropping your parents off for a flight before the ass crack of dawn while sitting in a car and waiting for the donut shop to open is? That’s right, reading a story tagged with just about every dark and depressing tag one can find. I was requested to review this fic and after looking over how short it was I figured I could read through it before the donut shop opened. And let me tell you, this fic made not only my day, but my week.

Warning: This review contains spoilers for important plot details. If you don’t want to be spoiled, here are the ratings I give it, {Darkness: 10/10, Characters: 10/10, Writing: 8/10, Concept: 9/10, Total Score; 37/40 or 9.25/10}. I cannot recommend this story any higher, particularly as an example of how to do dark well.

To start out with, this story is EXACTLY what I mean when I say a dark story. Let me give you the run down. Pinkie is suffering from depression because she has to fake being happy (where the name comes from) and has had to deal with a metric fuck ton of unhappiness due to her not wanting to let others in for two reasons. The first reason is that when she had acted like her true self in the past, ponies thought that there is something wrong with her, and the second reason is that she is afraid and paranoid that if she reveals this to her friends that they will leave her or not want to be around her anymore. This is compounded by the fact that Pinkies family life was always shit due to her coat making it appear that her mother engaged in infidelity. Compounded onto this is the fact that she only sees herself as good at something that brings her no joy and only pain. And finally, all of this resulted in her becoming suicidal. But wait kidos, it doesn’t stop there. Not only is Pinkie a hot mess but also Fluttershy (depressed and suicidal) and to top it all off, Rainbow Dash gets to act as an impromptu therapist for them both on top of her own problems. But all of this would be for naught if it wasn’t for the expert use of realistic reactions to all this. What does Rainbow do first when she hears that Fluttershy wanted to end herself? That’s right, she decks her. How does Rainbow react to hearing about Pinkie planning to have the two of them have a monthly pow-wow and get unhealthily drunk? That’s right again, she goes with it. There are illogical, these are self-defeating, these are… human. What’s even better is that it doesn’t say ‘and then all the bad things went away’, no, fuck that, it flat out says these issues and destructive coping mechanisms are not only going away anytime soon, but are going to be encouraged for the immediate future (in the case of the drinking). It makes no illusions that such deep seeded problems go away, they just get coped with and emotionally overruled by other things. All of the characters feel real and flawed. There isn’t this pretense that all is good and wholesome, it dives headfirst into some of the ugliest and darkest aspects of the human condition and treats them with an expertise and maturity that one hardly gets to see in pieces outside of published works, especially fanfics.

That isn’t to say that all was good. One of the biggest problems I had was just how many things were belly up for Pinkie. That isn’t to say that such things are unrealistic, but the amount of shit that was wrong with her life was to the point that I was starting to see Pinkie less sympathetically and feel more like the author was pushing too hard to get me to empathize with her. The next issue would have to be the writing. There were several issues with the structure of how this was written such as paragraphs of dialog not being punctuated properly.

Dialogue may stretch across paragraphs without pause. To punctuate, put a terminal punctuation—period, question mark, or exclamation point— at the end of the first paragraph. There is no closing quotation mark at the end of this paragraph.

Begin the next paragraph with an opening quotation mark.

Follow this pattern for as long as the dialogue and paragraphs continue. At the last paragraph, use a closing quotation mark at the end of the dialogue.

The starting of paragraphs with ‘X said’ or the like when they relate to the last instance of dialog (I am not 100% certain if this is grammatically incorrect but this is the only author I can recall using this in their writing and it just look off to me), and the overuse of ‘X said’ or the likes in the writing. Other than that I really can’t find much else to criticize here.

Final scores;

Darkness: 10/10, this is the example I would give people for how to write a dark story at what I define as a level 7 or 8 darkness (see review for Muted Wubbs for darkness scale for me) as I cant think of ways to improve upon this without fundamentally changing the story in some way.

Characters: 10/10, these were well written, human characters. They have their faults and make poor decisions, but these things feel justified and I can can’t fault a character for acting illogically when the actions that they took were ones that a real person would make.

Writing: 8/10, there were some issues with how this story was written but nothing that tanked its quality to the point the editor in me was begging to get access to the document to fix the problems.

Concept: 9/10, this concept is hardly original, Pinkie being broken and in emotional turmoil and Fluttershy being an emotional wreck are probably some of the most common aspects to have in dark fics that utilize these characters, but the level of maturity and skill that these things were handles with was top notch.

Total Score; 37/40 or 9.25/10, This story was one I have been looking for for a long time. I can’t recommend this story high enough and can’t wait to see what the author does next as, as of this review, this is their most recent story.

This is a very nice review, very thorough and detailed. Thanks so much for the praise!

And sorry for the paragraph issuses, I’m glad it wasn’t grammatically distracting enough to take away from the story.