Stable 17 by The Blue EM2

And we are back with yet another story about some fucked up shit, just my style. So, the story in question has to do with the MLP universe sort of being a hybrid between a documentary and ‘for kids tv show’ but it isn’t delved into too deeply. We follow the perspective of Cheerilee as she recounts the tale of some messed up stuff involving people being turned into ponies and dying due to the procedure being kind of shit. While reading the story there are screenshots of the show, and while interesting, they don't exactly work as well as the author might have intended. This is a technique that would seriously benefit from custom art, but unless the author can also draw or has a spare 1K just sitting around and burning a hole in their wallet, I can't say that they are bad, thus I find it to just be different and neither good nor bad.

As for what I liked about the story, this story understood how to work with pacing. While it is a ponified version of a youtube video, it still was nice for the story to open up as things went along and it neither felt rushed nor dragged out. I would like to say that the writing was well done too, in that it actually looked edited and looked over. I was hard-pressed to find issues with the grammar and spelling, the only real issue being that many of the sentences were rather clunky and didn’t flow quite so well. And finally, this story definitely qualifies as a dark story. The prosses of everything turning horrible, the delving into aspects of science that others do not approve of, the truth being a nightmare for anyone that learns of it, these are all qualities that make for a good dark story.

While the goal was to create a creepypasta, as stated by the author’s note, this really doesn't live up to that. If I am correct in my assumption, creepypastas are meant to be scary, no? Well, problem is, this isn't scary. Shocking perhaps, but not scary. I am scared fairly easily and most every creepypasta can keep me awake for an hour before I fall asleep, but this isn’t one. The problem is that the story doesn't present an idea that addresses an aspect of humanity that we would much rather forget about like in the Russian Sleep Experiment, nor does it create a monster that could just be real like Don't Let Them In. It's just the story of a father trying to bring back his daughter and a group of people getting access to the tech, and due to not knowing how it worked, everything went belly up. Now, this is indeed horrifying, but what here is really scary? The fact that an amoral individual placed self-interest before others' wellbeing? I’m sorry, but I have lived just long enough to know that this happens on the daily. Is it the fact that everyone is suffering due to this the scary part? That is kind of the predictable outcome. Is it perhaps Twilight finding out the truth? Well, I’m going to need someone to explain how that could be scary seeing as this isn’t Lovecraft where the truth is something nonspecific to the one leaning it and tends to result in immediate death or cannibalism. 

Final scores:

Writing; 8/10, This was well written and looked to have a lot of care put in to make it read like proper English, the only downside being that it doesn't posses the best flow in its construction, leading to sentences that feel clunky and hurt the story.

Pacing; 8/10, this was paced well, the issues I can see with it being that it doesn’t let the more disturbing things that happen sit with the reader and fester. There needed to be a little more information given to really get the point across to the readers that these were some disturbing things.

Horror; 3/10, Your mileage may vary with this, but for the life of me I just can't figure out what was meant to be scary. These are some disturbing things that were described don't get me wrong, but nothing presented here would be enough to keep me up at night out of fear.

Final score; 19/30 or 6.33/10, This was well written and it was evident that care was put into what was done here, the problem is that it just isn’t that scary.

Thanks.