6-Star Reviews Part 109: Brotherly Bond

To read the story, click the image or follow this link

I'm just gonna throw this out there, but steak and kidney pie is delicious.  Anyone who says otherwise is either lying, or has never had any.  True facts.

Below the break, my review of Crash Jet's Brotherly Bond.

Impressions before reading:  I don't particularly care for Pipsqueak--I thought his part in Luna Eclipsed could have been played just as well by either a pre-existing character or a generic foal.   I still don't understand creating a new character if he's only going to be in one episode, and isn't even going to fulfill a unique role.  But just because I don't understand why he was introduced into the show doesn't mean I can't enjoy a story about him.

I am a little concerned about the story tags, though.  Sad and comedy?  There are some combinations which seem intuitive to me (shipping and comedy, dark and sci-fi, etc.), but sad and comedy doesn't seem like a comfortable fit at all.  We'll see.

Zero-ish spoiler summary:  Pipsqueak and his family move to Ponyville, where he must simultaneously deal with the emotional strain of losing his brother and the CMC's mostly good-natured attempts to socialize with him.

Thoughts after reading:  Let me come right out and say that I hated this story.  I don't toss the word hate around lightly; there are plenty of stories which I've been unimpressed by, or which I disliked for one reason or another, but this is one of the very few I can honestly say I hated.  I want to make that clear right off the bat because having such a visceral reaction to a story is obviously going to color any review I write, and I think it's only fair to make clear my disgust with Brotherly Bond so that you can take the rest of my commentary with as many grains of salt as are necessary.  That said, let's save the reasons for my disgust with this piece for later, and instead begin by discussing something more innocuous: the technical construction.

Frankly, it's not very good.  While spelling and word errors are virtually nonexistent, occasional tense slips (a pet peeve of mine, and many other readers) were a problem.  Other than that, there were a number of punctuation errors, mostly in the early going, but the most immediately obvious problem was the dramatic overuse of ellipses.  Now, I think ellipses often get a bad rap; to my mind they're very useful tools, even in narration, when used sparingly.  However, they are a fairly specialized form of punctuation, so the flagrant overuse of "..." in this story sticks out in a bad way, making characters sound like they're doing bad Shatner impersonations when they're supposed to be delivering serious lines.  So how bad is this case?  In the first chapter alone, there are 133 ellipses in less than 3500 words.

As for the writing quality itself, I was unimpressed.  Dialogue was flat and undifferentiated; beyond an occasional "Ah" for "I" in Applebloom's lines, there was little in any of the ponies' syntax or word choice to distinguish between them.  Narration was heavy on direct statement, and coupled with a large number of odd wording choices ("Harsh storms had more or less torn the village to near famine"), the overall effect was of a dull muddle.

Characterization was variable.  Besides Pipsqueak (who doesn't really have enough of a canon characterization to compare against), the Cutie Mark Crusaders were the other major players in the fic.  While Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle were both written competently, Scootaloo was transformed into a jealous, spiteful bully for the sake of the narrative, which seemed a poor fit to me.  And although it could probably be passed over as being outside the purview of a fairly narrowly-focused story, the introduction of several explicitly carnivorous creatures directly brought up several questions about the morality of eating sentient beings which were never addressed.

Structurally, there were some significant missteps.  While I didn't have a problem in principal with the fact that Pipsqueak's backstory was revealed piecemeal, in flashbacks, the way that it built up to a reveal seems to suggest that the fact that Pipsqueak's brother is dead should come as a surprise to the reader.  This despite the fact that it says right in the story description that Pip's brother is dead (well, "[lost] in an accident") and that even without that, it's immediately obvious from the first few pages that he's passed on.  The fact that the story treats this as a major revelation not just to the other ponies, but to the reader, makes the whole scene uncomfortably anticlimactic.

Also troubling was the story's reliance on cliches and trite truisms in favor of actual emotional development.  I've said it before and I'll say it again: having a character shed a single tear unironically never works.  It hasn't worked since Dante's Purgatorio (I'll admit, I had to look up the earliest recorded reference to a character shedding a single tear--as much as I wish I could claim to have known that off the top of my head, I can't).  And the fact that Crash Jet has characters shedding a single tear of remorse not once, but multiple times throughout the story, is only the tip of the cliche iceberg.

The transparent falseness which that sort of hackneyed writing represents is part of the reason I genuinely despise Brotherly Bond.  It is emotional manipulation at its laziest; an unabashed and yet halfhearted and thoughtless attempt to wring unearned emotion out of one's premise.  When this is done with a subject like the ever-popular Sad Luna ("Oh woe is me!  Nopony loves my night; how can I continue in the face of such indifference?" cue single tear, etc.) then it's "merely" poor writing on the part of the author.  But the sheer audacity to write about something as traumatic as losing one's brother in such an apathetic, indifferent manner is insulting.  To play such drivel completely straight, to unwinkingly aver that this kind of lazy, trite, cliche-ridden slop is worthy of emotional investment, is the height of arrogance.  An author who tries to write an emotional scene based on real life trauma and fails, whether that trauma is the death of a loved one, the slow passage into senility of a parent, or anything else, I can respect.  It may not work, it may not even be good, but I can respect the attempt.  But to simply string a few hackneyed platitudes together is an insult to both the story's readers, and to the very premise of the piece itself.

I'd like to go into a little more detail about why I loath this story so much, but since it involves ruining the conclusion, I'm going to cordon it off.  Click the tag if you don't mind having the ending spoiled for you:

The blatantly (and worse, poorly) manipulative writing really steams me, but I'd be less upset about this story if it built towards, and then executed, a satisfying conclusion.  Thematically, I mean: something like "Pip learns that he can have friends and be happy without betraying the memory of his brother" or "Pip discovers that he's strong enough to make it, even without Patches by his side."  Those may sound trite when I write them out like that, and considering what the rest of Brotherly Bond looks like, it's hard to imagine that they'd be presented subtly or believably even if the author had chosen to write them, but they at least would have been good messages.  They would have been both thematically satisfying and fairly unobjectionable, so far as such things go.

Instead, Crash Jet has the fillies get attacked by a trio of wolves while out camping, and then Pipsqueak's brother semi-reanimates to help Pip defeat the carnivores and escape.  What does Pip learn?  That he's too stupid, weak, and small to succeed without being baby-stepped through every conflict.  What's the larger message?  Your loved ones will always be there for you, literally, as long as you love them enough (corollary: if your loved ones don't speak to you from beyond the dead, it means you don't/didn't love them enough).

I find the morals espoused in this story despicable, and I don't think I'm reading too deeply into the story to find them.  The idea that sniveling dependence is a virtue (Pip is weak and helpless, unable to stand up for himself, unless his brother walks him through every step and personally brings him home) and the blame-the-victim mentality of the larger idea are abhorrent, and the fact that they are so casually presented, in the context of such a patently thoughtless piece of writing, I find deeply, personally upsetting.

So there's that.

Star rating:  ★☆☆☆☆ (what does this mean?)

I hate this story.  Brotherly Bond makes me angry just thinking about it.  I don't often say this, but I genuinely wish I had never read it.

Maybe I'm being unfair.  Maybe my own biases are preventing me from dealing with this story in an evenhanded manner.  I'm fully prepared to acknowledge that that may be the case here.  But I hated this story.

Recommendation:  I do not recommend this.

Next time:  The Promises We Keep, by Pascoite