Fanfiction Review: Short Cakes

It's been three days since the finale. Is it safe to come out of the bunker now?

Well, in any case, let's look at Cloud Wander's Short Cakes while munching on canned peaches. Because nothing tastes more perfect for a post-apocalypse like fruit injected with preservatives and tinged with rust.

SYNOPSIS:

It's a typical day for Pound and Pumpkin Cake, now six months old and still adorable babies, as told by their own thoughts and those of the ponies and animals around them.

REVIEW:

Point of View is one of the hardest narrative styles to execute successfully. It requires the writer to expertly transcribe the thoughts and feelings of the main character and make the reader truly feel like they're one with them. Compared to the more common third-person limited (which places the audience as an outside observer, but still limits their perspective to a single character at a time) and third-person omniscient (which pretty much has no barriers whatsoever), it's a far harder thing to sell to a reader, especially when the main characters are baby magical horses.

Short Cakes manages to execute this style very well. The story is broken into smaller pieces detailing the thoughts of each character, with the most attention being paid to Pound and Pumpkin. Being babies, both characters are free to perceive the world around them in a different way from the other, older ponies, and the story does a good job extrapolating on the personalities established in “Baby Cakes.” Pound is adventurous, thinks the outside is an entire separate universe from the bakery, and thinks all proper nouns out in ALL CAPS. Pumpkin has all her toys named and imbued with personality (even if her main way of playing is to chew on them), thinks the closet is the Gates of Tartarus, and adores her twin brother. Like the episode, these are very simple personality traits, but they make perfect sense for infants to have, and help to establish their character quickly for the audience.

The other narrations, while not quite as interesting as the babies, are pretty good in their own right. Gummy hilariously gets his own segment, echoing Pound's earlier narrative style as he describes what he sees around town. The Cakes both get their own additions, and while Cup's narrative helps expand on her view of her children and Pinkie, Carrot's feels kind of ancillary to the overall story. Pinkie also fell a bit flat, as it seemed to lack any of her usual energy and bounce outside of one or two jokes.

The story does take a rather dark turn towards the end, but it's nothing major and helps tie things together nicely. (I won't spoil whose thoughts close the story out, but trust me, it's hilarious and touching at the same time.) As for the writing, while most of it is very good and fits the perspective perfectly, there are also quite a few points where it switches from third to first person, as if going from a character's actions to their thoughts, without any sort of marking or indication that we've changed. This makes a few sections more difficult to read than they should be.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

A few quibbles with the writing aside, this was a very solid story from beginning to end. If you like introspective tales about the ponies we watch and read about, then this is one worth checking out.