Well, there's nothing else to talk about, I haven't listened to the leaked song, and...well, I'm bored. So let's look at quite possibly the most infamous fanfic in FiM's existence. Let's look at Sergeant Sprinkles' Cupcakes.
Pinkie Pie invites Rainbow Dash to help her make cupcakes. But no sooner has she arrived than Pinkie knocks her out and drags her into her gore-filled basement, where she proceeds to torture her to death. Why? Because cupcakes are made of meat. I don't get it, either.
REVIEW:
Cupcakes is infamous. EVERYONE has heard of this one. It's practically warped the fandom's perception of Pinkie Pie, especially after she had her psychotic break in "Party of One." It has spawned off an entire subgenre of fanfiction, all of them devoted to topping each other in making the characters into horrible monsters and pouring out the gore. (Except for Pattycakes, but that brings its own brand of cheap, unsettling, disgusting terror.) So okay, everyone knows what this thing is without having to read it, but how is the story itself?
It sucks.
The big problem with Cupcakes, regardless of how it treats the canon, is that it goes straight for pure shock value. There is absolutely nothing to this story at all outside of just how far it can stretch Pinkie torturing Rainbow Dash before she finally dies. There are a few asides here and there, mostly to have Pinkie act silly will casually killing one of her best friends and pointing out her other victims, but the whole idea is to take My Little Pony and turn it into Hostel. That's something a first grade boy would think up, not someone I would hope is old enough to go onto 4Chan and post this.
But hey, Cupcakes isn't a serious story! You really need to lighten up, right? Well, here's the thing about Cupcakes. I get that it's a joke, but it's not very funny. It's basically just the same gag over and over again: Pinkie Pie is a psychopath. Perhaps it's just because this fic's been around and made such an impact that it's just granted now, but I really don't see anything clever in the way Cupcakes tells the joke. By the end, everything in here is so ridiculous that it loops all the way from being awful, to funny, and then right back to awful. And the original ending is just a repetition of how the joke began, only with Apple Bloom doing the killing this time.
The one thing that Cupcakes does marginally well is keep the ponies in character. Outside of turning meat into cupcakes, Pinkie is her usually bubbly self, making chit-chat and claiming Dash is her friend even as she cuts off her wings. And Dash is still loyal enough to avoid brushing off Pinkie's request for help and only starts freaking out once it's clear that there's no escape. But that does not excuse the rest of the story's faults.
So, why did this anemic story make such an impact? A lot of it has to do with when it was made. This was one of the earliest fics in the fandom, back when most Bronies were still fighting for survival on 4Chan. And like everything else that's wholesome and good in the universe, it's only inevitable that the Internet will find some way to corrupt it. But Cupcakes was such a massive shock that it had an immediate impact with fans, to the point where Sethisto only begrudgingly put up a page for it on Equestria Daily after being bugged for a month. And then "Party of One" happened, and all of a sudden fans were claiming that Cupcakes was now totally possible in the confines of the canon.
The story practically formed its own subculture, with stories like Cheerilee's Garden, Rainbow Factory, and its many, MANY sequels floating around. The sequels were especially interesting, as they managed to take what was a pretty bad story and twist it in several different directions. Some had it turn out to be a nightmare of Pinkie's, and she runs off to make sure that Rainbow Dash is okay. Others had the entire thing being a fictional work in-story (with one actually having it as an Alfred Hitchcock movie.) Still others showed Pinkie coming to justice, or had her continue her killing spree with bigger targets. The question I must ask, though, is why. Nothing in this fic is even worth contemplating about. It's a poor man's horror story that substitutes buckets of gore for suspense and tension. The writing is what you would expect from a 4Chan post (although a cleaned up version does exist), and outside of keeping some aspects of the characters in place, everything in here is horribly, horribly wrong.
FINAL THOUGHTS:
This fic sucks.
I'm drunk but hey I can still write. Anyway, I agree with you and it is funny but I was thinking the same way. It goes to show you that real horror stories or dark humor has disappear and anyone will take crap and say it smells like flowers. I feel that the story is not really funny because if you look at pulp fiction, that dark humor was funny.
ReplyDelete