TThe Great and Powerful Centaur

• MLP: FiM
• Slice of Life

About thirty years ago a human found herself in Equestria. Eventually she meets a low ranking noble and made a deal with him, she became his wife and eventually gave birth to a centaur Trixie. This is Trixie's story

• Gore
• Sex
• Human
• Alt. Universe
• Trixie

Viper Pit · 56k words  ·  153  13 · 3.8k views

The Great and Powerful Centaur
Read: 7754 words, 4 chapters
Rating: 5/10
Recommendation: Skip unless you really want to see a more sympathetic take on Trixie’s struggles

Somewhere, somehow, an anon finally got her dream of marrying a pony. Okay. Okay. Round of applause over. Because, you see, that made Trixie, in this AU anyhow, and she most certainly did not get the best of both worlds. It turns out that being born a centaur isn’t exactly good for one’s health and neither, apparently, is being considered a freak of nature.

Inspired by her mother’s stories of magic and monsters, Trixie sets off to see the world and entertain it too. However, a run of bad luck and an actually interesting deconstruction of her premier episode leave her in Ponyville, homeless and injured. That’s about as far as I got, anyhow, and there’s a good reason for that.

Reading good writing, in my opinion, doesn’t feel so much like reading as it does dreaming. Its immersive. You can escape into it. Here, however, Viper Pit’s dragging first person narration kept me firmly on my seat - and not at the edge of it either. Trixie here isn’t naturally the egotist she is depicted as in the canon; rather, she’s a much more introverted and self-conscious person for whom the ego is absolutely just an act. While this could work, it also means that Trixie’s perspective becomes dramatically more dull and less exciting.

Of course, her reception in Ponyville is less than stellar. However, she’s more disappointed than furious, especially after she realizes that the citizens think she’s genuine and not just an underprepared (bad) actress. This actually results in quite a heart-warming scene between her and the Mane Six and this momentum is carried on into the Ursa attack, where Trixie is actually a lot more heroic than in canon.

However, that’s where things grind to a halt. Trixie is hospitalized and the better portion of two whole chapters is devoted to her, in a hospital bed, expositing and being exposited at about the downsides of being born a monster centaur. This could work, if not for the fact that it smashes the narrative to halt and Viper Pit’s writing here doesn’t have the necessary charm to it to push through about 2500 words of melodrama.

Furthermore, I can’t shake the feeling that a lot of Trixie’s suffering seems almost contrived. Yes, she couldn’t have predicted the majority of Ponyville holding the stupid ball that day, but the stuff with the heart condition and Trixie’s general bad luck seems to almost to try pull sympathy off of backstory - not anything she consciously does. She nearly starts out a failure not because she made bad decisions but just because the world seems to hate her. Some people might be fine with this; I, personally, am not. It isn’t bad writing and it certainly can be very effective in making a sympathetic character - Nabakov does this well for both Hazes in Lolita, for instance - but Viper Pit’s near-robotic prose doesn’t pull the heartstrings hard and often enough to make in seem genuinely sincere.

Plot: 4/5. Effective deconstruction
Characters: 2/5. Uncharismatic
Style: 2/5. Lets the plot down
Execution: 2/5. Workable, maybe enjoyable if you like Slow Burn
Overall Rating: 10/20 = 5/10

To Viper Pit: I’d say that you really should rework the opening of The Great and Powerful Centaur first and foremost. Clearly, the writing does pick up later on, but a lot of people - potential readers - will be turned off if we have to slog through the opening before it gets good. Liken it to a meal: You have four courses of unsalted, unsweetened porridge with the vague promise that, if you eat it all, there might be a fillet steak, a glass of cognac, and a plate of key lime pie at the end. A lot of people aren’t going to stick around and find out if that’s true or not and, if they do, they’re going to be full of “porridge” and unable to properly appreciate the genuinely good work that’s been put into the later chapters.

As always (whenever I remember to add this bit) thank for reading this review. If you enjoyed it, feel free to check out my other work here and here.

Comment: Unlike my other reviews, I didn’t read this to completion. I don’t plan on always doing this and definitely won’t for shorter fics, but the opening chapters are what most people read first and thusly, they’ll be what I read, and subsequently base my review off of, too.