When war-hardened Sergeant Twilight Sparkle encounters orphaned friendship worker Fluttershy in a friendship emporium in the bombed-out town of Ponyville, they and about a dozen other characters take part in an elaborate adaptation of the first part of Miss Saigon.
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That's a heck of a long chapter. I wish I had more time in the morning. I'll get to it later. Consider yourself tracked.
Whoa. Long chapter. Favorited to look at later.
A good story, though it might have been easier to read if you split it up into two smaller chapters. This wouldn't happen to have anything to do with the Vietnam War, would it? Irregardless, this is a good story.
I'd love to track this, but it's completed despite being chapter one. Mind explaining that to me?
@Crushric: Not much to explain. It's a one-shot.
Incredible story. You are an enormously talented writer, and this is leaps and bounds above anything else on this site.
I love your writing style. Especially Bon-Bon's dancing scene was unadulterated genius; it spawned fluid, musical images in my mind, and really stuck with me. Also, Rarity in particular is very strongly written. I love the ingenious ways in which you combine the worlds of MLP and Miss Saigon, the ticketing scene, replicating Fluttershy's introduction scene, Rarity operating a whorehouse -- all of that was very smoothly and beautifully blended.
One small point, I feel that the fledgling relationship between Twilight and Fluttershy feels a bit rushed, as does Twilight's all-too-sudden epiphany. The same is true for Lyra, who isn't granted quite enough character development. I'm also not sure what was so particularly horrible about Trixie's behaviour, and feel that Angel's sudden appearance is a bit of a deus ex machina. I'm 100% sure that all of this is due to the plot structure determined by the musical, which I'm unfamiliar with.
You might wonder why you're not getting a lot of attention for this work of genius, which must be frustrating. The reason is that it's simply too good, too demanding. Its complex writing style and length scare off people who'd rather read the one millionth clumsily written 1000-word story about Twilight and Trixie making out (hmm, now that I think about it...). Do make sure to pass this on to EqD - they'll approve it in the blink of an eye - to get exposure to people who really care about quality. I'll make sure to pass this on to as many people as possible myself.
Summing up, you're awesome, this is a true work of art, please keep writing, end of story.
@Sparkle: Wow, um, I thank you for your very kind words, though I don't want to get into the matter of comparing it to other stories. (I will confess to having been unable to make myself care about My Little Dashie, though.) This story has already been posted to EqD, back in September, where it didn't get too much attention either. I would agree that part of that's the length; another part is that it's a relatively dark setting, which I only toned down so far for the purposes of a My Little Pony story, and that's going to be a turnoff to some. Honestly, though, I've long suspected the biggest turnoff is that while Miss Saigon has been hailed the "greatest love story of our time," that "time" is referring to 1990, and only so many people are familiar with it today. (Madame Butterfly, its predecessor, does little better, having been produced in 1904 and based on a short story from 1898.) It was a fun exercise in blending together plot elements and character moments from two quite different works, though, and there are a lot of themes (primarily through Dragonshy and Ticket Master, of course) and quotations from both. Rarity is nice to write because she's the most overtly complex of the mane six.
One of the great things about Miss Saigon, and hence a theme I tried to carry over here, is that it's very hard to point at any of the characters (other than Angel's counterpart) and say that they're evil. Everyone seems to make the right decisions, and yet it still ends horribly, because the events around them are bigger than anything they can control no matter how good they (want to believe) they are. Celestia's counterpart is little more than a plot device in either version, but she's much more likable in the second part, which is one thing I was sorry I didn't get to include. That blank-flank interment camp is a major plot theme in Miss Saigon, but here it's mostly just how we get to see Moondancer's character.
Anyway, the things you actually pointed at! I completely agree that Fluttershy and Twilight should have had more time together before sleeping. Whenever I reread this, the briefness of that scene always jars me, and it should be a lot stronger for the scene that sets up the friendship that empowers them through all the rest of the story. Fluttershy's hard to write, I guess. Sorry. Angel you're mostly right about, he comes out of nowhere in the musical and I could only find so many ways to foreshadow him here. He and Lyra, though -- whom you're wrong about, btw, her character and arc appear nowhere in Miss Saigon, and Trixie (along with Pinkie) are greatly changed/expanded from their brief appearance in the original -- serve primarily as illustrations of how Fluttershy and Twilight affect the world around them. They're a step up from the truly background characters like Sweetie, who clearly has her own elaborate backstory that simply isn't given any focus at all, but they're still more devices than full characters and Lyra and Bon-Bon don't quite get to be the full beta couple one might expect them to be. You can have opinions on whether or not that's a good thing, but that's really what they're there for.
Trixie, though. She's a tough one, and serves several purposes. Angel is made slightly more sympathetic than his Miss Saigon counterpart, and to an extent, Trixie stepped in to fill his role of absolute evil on a human scale. No matter how potent the message that bad things can happen despite the best intentions of everyone involved, it's still more plausible if there's someone who isn't a good person, even if their actions don't go so far as to create the whole problem. To some extent, the solar kingdom characters can be paired up by their initial attitudes towards the war. Lyra and Bastion don't seem to notice anything's wrong; Moondancer and Twilight have given up caring and just want to follow orders and go home; Celestia and Trixie are only interested in themselves, though Trixie takes it one step farther, incorporating wanton and conscious cruelty into her motives. It's not realistic to have nobody like that at all, even if, again, she does very little of actual far-reaching consequence. She's not the "higher-ups," and in fact it's not important to see their attitudes towards the war any more than it is to see Applejack's or Rainbow Dash's, because this is a story about the little people. Twilight worries that the pro-war anti-earth-pony propaganda may be intentional; it doesn't truly matter if it is or not.
That's all thematic. From a plot/action perspective, though, Trixie serves a much more obvious function of being Fluttershy's confrontation. Twilight is a lot more verbal and gets to have conversations with Rarity, Pinkie, and Lyra before getting knocked out. They share Angel, though you can debate how evenly. But Fluttershy is the real hero of the story, and Trixie -- cruelty instead of kindness, selfishness instead of selflessness -- is what she has to defeat. The thing about Miss Saigon is that it doesn't have a happy ending. Nor does the first act, which is all I really use here. The tangible change that makes a happy ending possible here is that Fluttershy has wings -- very, very loosely analogous to her counterpart's impregnation -- allowing her to fly to the roof. But that's cheap! So she has to defeat Trixie in order to earn the victory.
This is very good. Maybe it might make more sense if I'd actually seen the thing this is a crossover with, but from what I've learned on wikipedia, you did an excellent job of melding the stories in such a way as to stay true to MLP's worldview. :)
Plus I just like FlutterTwi.
I read this years ago! It was great.
Hi there! This story was recommended to me through this group.
This was a really neat story! I must confess that I'm not familiar with Miss Saigon or its related works, but this was still a enjoyable tale nonetheless. The use of characters was fantastic, and I love how each character had a role to play here. The development of each individual one was fantastic to see and I really wasn't expecting Angel's entry at all. I wasn't familiar with who Captain Yorset's equivalent was but that was just a minor thing. Further I think the motivations behind each character were fantastically established as well. Each one from Twilight to Lyra believes that they are doing the right thing, based on whatever information they have available to them and their own personal beliefs. Yet when confronted with someone with an eerily similar ideology, they begin to realize that it's not possible at all for them all to be heroes, and in reality, none of them are likely the heroes.
The war backdrop was brilliantly done as well, hanging in the background ominously throughout the entire story. It truly was reminiscent of a world caught in the lines of an active war, complete with how confident and uncaring the senior officers seem to be. The parallels to prostitution were present as well, but I think they were implemented in a very unique manner to not detract too much from the story.
I think I really liked this as it felt like a war-era story without being a war story: a story that focuses on the characters within rather than the larger battle.
Overall a great story!
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Thank you! "Yorsets" was a fanon name for one of the teachers at Twilight's magic exam, just standing in as a generic authority figure because there wasn't a very large cast to choose from back in the day.