Fandom Classics Part 224: The Last Pony on Earth

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

One week until I leave on vacation!  If you're working on/planning to do a guest post, this weekend is the time to finish them up.  I'll plan to put together the posts and e-mail everyone with the days theirs will go up on Wednesday, and then guest postage will commence on the 14th.  From the columns I've already read, I can promise you all that there's some good stuff coming up!

But until the 14th, this is still One Man's pony ramblings!  So head on down below the break to see what that one man had to say about starscribe's The Last Pony on Earth.


NOTE: This review contains ending spoilers. Don't worry, they're behind a spoiler tag you have to click to read... but since I can't figure out how to put multiple spoiler tags into a single post, that means that today's star rating is unspoiled. Just FYI!

Impressions before reading:  "Survivalist fiction" and "Pony TF" are not things I particularly enjoy independently, so a story which combines the two doesn't seem like one calculated to appeal to me personally.  I suppose it's a good sign that the premise would seem to disbar a few of the most obvious pitfalls of both genres, though (I can't imagine that, if the main character is turned into a little pony and trapped alone in what's left of a big city, he's either going to be showing off his oh-so-cool survivalist weapon-wielding, nor buddying up to all of the main six within the first three chapters).  Sometimes, two flavors taste better together than they do separately, right?

Zero-ish spoiler summary:  One morning, Alex wakes up to discover that he's a pony, and that LA has been deserted overnight.  As he tries to deal with both short- and long-term survival necessities, he's also forced to confront myriad questions: what happened to everyone?  Are there any other survivors?  Are those survivors human, or equine?  And most of all... what will become of humanity, if his ad hoc "community" is almost all that remains?

Thoughts after reading:  Partway through the story, everything abruptly fell apart for me--but for a reason which seems, for whatever unfathomable-to-me-reason, not to bother the vast majority of readers, even very attentive ones.  It's the same thing that rudely yanked me out of the 2014 Godzilla movie.

See, that movie is mostly set in "the present day," but the weird thing is that, as the movie progresses, it becomes clear that this is some alternate universe where Godzilla never existed.  The dozens of movies, the toys, the franchise... all of it clearly was totally absent from the AU in which 2014 Godzilla takes place, because otherwise somebody (or rather, everybody) would recognize these monsters.  When you think about it for even a minute, this AU should have radically divergent movie conventions and technology at the very minimum, and would likely be meaningfully different in everything from Japanese economy to the popular conception of what a "monster" is to language itself.  In other words, this is a really big thing to ask of an audience, to pretend that there was never a Godzilla before 2014.

As you probably guessed, Last Pony appears to take place in a world where "my little pony" never existed.  Not just FiM, but as more characters appear, it becomes clear that there has never been such a thing as MLP in this world (or, less probably, that at least a couple dozen people, and probably several hundred, had somehow never so much as heard of it in any incarnation).  The implications of this aren't so grand as that of missing Godzilla, but it still feels like a really big ask to me, with a lot of implications for our AU which really need to be explored.  I know I'm in the tiny-to-nonexistent minority on this, so I'm not going to harp on it in my recommendation or anything, but I did want to discuss it a bit before I moved on to the rest of the story.

The story's biggest successes and failures alike seem to be in the field of how it uses its diary format, so that seems like a good place to start.  And for the most part, it is good; the vast majority of the story, presented entirely in the form of Alex's journal, hews to necessary restrictions of that format, and moreover, uses it to good effect.  The way Alex talks about himself and the first couple of ponies met (spoiler: Alex is not, in fact, the last pony on Earth) do an excellent job of revealing a lot about Alex's PoV and inner turmoil without resorting to just telling the reader things that it wouldn't make sense for someone to actually say/write.  Moreover, the particular matters on which Alex fixates do a good job of painting priorities and biases without necessarily having the narrator be self-aware enough to personally identify them.  The conversational style of the journals fits well with the conceit that Alex is using a text-to-speech device, and a few breaks from the established format end up adding a lot to the narrative in a non-immersion-breaking way.

On the downside, starscribe does occasionally resort to lazy cheats like crossed-out text (especially ridiculous in this format, since it's clear that Alex went back into the document after narrating it and, rather than deleting the text, went to the trouble to add strikethrough.  There are at least a couple of places where this appears as if it could reasonably have been a deliberate choice on Alex's part--that he wanted the text to appear, but in strikethrough--but others where it's simply ridiculous).  The author also plays coy with certain facts well past the straining point of credulity, in terms both general and specific to Alex's character.  There's one in particular that's worth looking at, but since it comes as a late-story semi-reveal I'll break out the spoiler to discuss it in more detail.  If you don't want to know some significant stuff that comes toward the end of the story, you can just take my word for that.  Or you can read the fic yourself!  But if you do want to know what that coyness that I found so improbable was, click the button:

Okay, as you may have gotten an inkling from the preponderance of proper nouns I was using to refer to the protagonist so far in the review (Chris: master of foreshadowing!), "Alex" was a man who got transformed into a mare.  The problem is, Alex is presented as unambiguously male up until very near the end of the fic; he thinks of himself and his abilities in masculine terms, his concerns about repopulation are phrased in a way that would be ridiculously unnatural for a female to express, etc.  But then, boom, we find out that he was genderswapped a couple of months ago via casual gender reference.

This makes little sense for a variety of reasons.  Even if we were to grant that Alex was uncomfortable enough with this transition that he would refuse to acknowledge it even in private, the obvious follow-up is "...so he wouldn't one day just start casually mentioning it, it would be kind of a big deal to him to acknowledge it."  But perhaps more importantly, it's something that Alex specifically wouldn't be afraid to acknowledge.  The character starscribe built up over 100k words is a fairly consistent one--which is a good thing, obviously!  But it also means that out-of-character behaviour sticks out very clearly, because the reader has a grasp on Alex's personality.  He might be in denial about the tranformation's permanence or long-term impact, but certainly not about the actual fact of his body; that's antithetical to his behavior in the rest of the story.  It's equally unconvincing to suggest that he didn't think it was worth mentioning, in the context of the kinds of details he did consider worth putting to paper.  I imagine this must have been intended as a clever reveal, leading the reader to think back and reflect on how we were never actually told that Alex stayed male after his ponification... but as-presented, it comes across instead as so out-of-place as to first appear a simple mistake, and when it becomes obvious that that's not the case, as a classic example of putting surprises ahead of characterization and storytelling.

That's enough about one aspect of the ending, though.  The majority of the story is about Alex and, eventually, a few other characters trying to scrape together a survival plan in a place that's quickly running out of modern conveniences like electricity and running water, is populated by a bunch of suddenly-abandoned hungry pets that are large enough to pose a threat to a little pony, and that can't support much if any growing without irrigation.  These parts of the story, as I noted before I started reading, aren't really a genre that I love, but they're undeniably well-executed.  Although the psychological toll is underplayed with Alex, it's somewhat explored in the other characters, in a variety of different direction, and there's just enough patina of believability to what they are and aren't able to accomplish to keep it feeling... well, extremely optimistic, certainly (apocalypse survivors will wish they could get half this much done), but at least vaguely believable.

With all spoiler-stuff noted, I'll say that Alex is generally a well-realized character as narrator.  Although there are a few slip-ups (he's well-versed enough in Tolkien to name his dog Huan, but he struggles to remember that a winged horse is called (a) pegasus? (maybe this points to an even deeper AU than I imagined--it's not just MLP that's missing from this world, but all knowledge of horsefiction has been suppressed!)), it's easy to get a feel for his fears and self-doubt, which come through clearly both in obvious ways and between the lines.  Part of this is that he's such a flawed human (pony), and that the author doesn't shy away from showing some of his deep-set misogyny or disdain for intellect.  He can be a little unpleasant to share headspace (journalspace) with, frankly, but in a delightfully realistic way.  He comes across as a little too obviously prepper-y a personality for me to really buy into, but not to the point of self-parody, and the suggestion that the few who transformed instead of disappearing helps ameliorate both this and some of the more convenient skills of his first companions.  Alex also has a good habit of showing an awareness of what questions the hypothetical diary-reader might have about his actions and setup, and tends to either answer those, or at least clarifies what he does or doesn't actually know.

Where the story lets down is in the reveals of some of those actual elements.  In some cases, as with the bit I talked about in the spoilers, there simply isn't any explanation (and bafflingly, Alex never even asks any of those who might conceivably know why).  In other cases, there's a revelation that, strictly speaking, tells us what happened, but leaves out some key whys and why didn'ts.  Generally speaking, I found that the story was good about answering questions (one of my notes, from about a quarter of the way in, was "what difference does it make that they're ponies, specifically?" and that was definitely answered in a meaningful way)... but not as good at providing satisfying and complete answers.

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

Despite my misgivings, I still considered three stars for this; it's a flawed work in several notable ways, but the vast majority of my reading experience was a low-key, just-believable-enough look at how a driven generalist might respond to an end-of-the-world scenario.  It's not my jam, by any stretch... but I've read enough really bad post-apocalypse/survivalist fiction (both ponyfic and non-) to recognize a more solid example when I see it.

Recommendation:  If you enjoy survivalist fiction, this is an above-average example that doesn't sacrifice "how people actually think and act" at the altar of "rigging up cool stuff."  It's not for people who are hoping for a terribly satisfying payoff, though those who simply fear there won't be any payoff can rest assured that this fic answers (almost) all its big questions.

Next time:  The Magic Never Fades Away, by Thyrai