Fanfiction Review: Around the Bend

It's time. We're tackling one of the most controversial authors in the history of the fandom. And while it would be tempting to look at one of her Conversion Bureau fics, for the sake of all our sanities (and because I want to talk about it more than...that universe), we'll be looking at her examination of the retcons and differences between Seasons One and Two. This should be some fascinating reading, after all...right?

Let's check our guts and look at Chatoyance's Around the Bend.

SYNOPSIS:

Twilight is sick of being called boring and predictable by her friends, so to prove them wrong, she sets out to take a side street. Only one problem: Ponyville doesn't really have that many side streets to begin with, and she's walked them all. That's when she discovers Shark Street, a strange road that was not there yesterday with a large gap in the middle. After a quick jump over the hole in Shark Street, she finds herself in another Ponyville, one where everything is wrong...

REVIEW:

Around the Bend, in Chatoyance's own words, is an equivalent to the old No-Prizes Marvel Comics used to award to fans who provided the most interesting explanations for continuity errors. Indeed, the story's very conceit is to provide an exploration of what makes the two seasons different and try to come up with a reason. And what's that reason?

That Twilight conjured Shark Street, jumped it, and is now in a broken, screwed up Equestria.

Yes, the entire opening of this story is a Jumping the Shark reference.

...You still have time to get out. Things are going to get rather ugly after this section.

A long while ago, when the story made it onto Equestria Daily (the only Chatoyance fanfiction to ever earn that honor), I was impressed by the first two chapters and even recommended it on those alone. And then I read the rest, and that recommendation turned to shame. (Didn't help that this was my first exposure to Chatoyance, and I futilely got into an argument that ended with most of my posts being deleted.) Now reading it again, after being exposed to more of just what kind of a writer and person Chatoyance is, and keeping in mind what she was building to, it's even more upsetting, and I can't even call those first two enjoyable.

Not that there's not any potential. The general uneasiness Twilight feels in this alternate Ponyville has all the pieces of a good suspense and mystery story. Certainly, her freaking out over that stupid cliff to nowhere from “Mysterious Mare-Do-Well” is funny enough, especially with the number of supposed accidents that happen there on a frequent basis. The prose is also quite purple, but still functional, and the end of the last scene with Celestia and Twilight is touching. Also, despite some of the issues I'll be bringing up later on, the pacing is generally solid and, outside of the fourth chapter, moves at a fairly good pace. But then you get to the festering underbelly of this story and its message:

Chatoyance doesn't like several episodes in Season Two, and is erasing them from her personal continuity. Not because they're bad episodes, but because they break from her headcanon that Equestria is a medieval fantasy society ruled by immortal gods.

...I'm warning you, there will be opinions from this point on. Unless you love seeing me in a blind rage, turn back now.

We've already discussed Mare-Do-Well, but what are the other horrible episodes she didn't like? Well, there's “Read It and Weep.” Because of the doctor with an x-ray Cutie Mark? No, because it made Dash like to read. I repeat, she makes a HUGE deal over how wrong it is for Dash to be reading. Oh, and she's also a total glory hound jerk who chews out Twilight for saving ponies from that cliff before she could, despite the story clearly taking place after “A Canterlot Wedding,” and thus after Dash was supposed to learn not to be like that. It's fine to say that MMDW was a stupid episode, but you can't just ignore the end of the episode and pretend like Dash remained the exact same kind of jerk the rest of the season.

Indeed, each criticism of her character just feels worse and worse as the story progresses. Pinkie is actually listening and speaking intelligently? It's wrong because she's supposed to be random and silly. Rarity is being overly dramatic and summoning couches out of nowhere? It's wrong because she's supposed to be kind and generous. Granny Smith suddenly hates snooty Canterlot ponies like Twilight, despite the face that the only time she expressed anything like that was in “The Last Roundup,” and that was just to cheer Applejack on before she went to the Canterlot Rodeo. And Fluttershy? She's her badflank persona from “Putting Your Hoof Down,” despite the fact that the episode was about how she didn't want to be like that and how she learned to be assertive in her own way.

This is where the story becomes an absolute mess. Chatoyance cherry picks episodes – or just specific elements and scenes of episodes – she doesn't want to address and shoves them into this sort of pocket dimension where everypony's a jerk, and yet ignores the fact that said jerkish behavior was ultimately something they overcame to become better ponies. At the same time, she flat-out denies any sort of positive development to ponies like Pinkie, who has to remain a silly pony forever rather than show any sort of real intellect. (Although I do get a small sense of satisfaction when she tried to write out her casually insulting her friends schtick.) All of the ponies are utterly flanderized beyond what even the show had to offer, and yet she presents it as proof of how much Season Two done goofed.

And that's not even getting into what happens at the end. She runs into Shining Armor and Cadance, who are both presented as complete goofballs, and we get a nice little rant about how Twilight couldn't have had a big brother because it would mean she would have broken out of her shell earlier and thus had no reason not to have friends. By this point, I am so unfazed by that argument that it's hardly worth discussing. And did you know that Celestia and Luna were creator gods who are awesome and infallible? Well, in this alternate universe, they are obviously charlatans who are faking moving the sun and moon, since there's no way a god would get defeated by something like Chrysalis. (Never you mind that Chrysalis herself was surprised she won, and only did so because she had a power source to feed off of. Otherwise, she would have ended up like a mosquito against a windshield.)

That isn't to say every Season Two episode gets thrown out. Discord is confirmed to have happened (although that kind of screwed up the whole “Celestia and Luna are Creator-Gods” thing worse than Chrysalis did), and “Hearth's Warming Eve” is presented as more of a myth created by the two than anything actually historical, which is actually in theme with quite a few interpretations of the episode and fits with the idea of a pageant to begin with. She also created a sort of “in-between” dimension to put episodes that could work in either one. But there's just a real sense of pettiness to the whole ordeal. Are there episodes I don't like in the show? Of course. But arbitrarily deciding that this didn't happen because it doesn't match what you personally think the show is reeks of Confirmation Bias.

And how is all this relayed to us? Through one long author tract after another. Yes, welcome to the other unfun part of Chatoyance: the fact that she never shuts up. I don't mean her stuff outside of the stories themselves, but rather that she can't help but keep projecting herself into every story she writes. Twilight here is practically turned into her author surrogate so she can tear down what she didn't like about the second season. After the first chapter, almost every line is Twilight constantly going “This is wrong” over and over and over again. And granted, that would be in Twilight's character, but the way it's written makes it very clear who's actually talking here. It isn't Twilight Sparkle, the adorable little purple unicorn; it's Chatoyance using her as a mouthpiece.

There's also a lovely aside where we hear about how Star Swirl the Bearded warned against industrialization because it'd destroy the world and how awesome he was to say that, and how horrible these ponies must be to be destroying their world for industry. Funny thing about Chatoyance is, she loves to harp on the Green Aesop, even when the story has absolutely no need or even room for it. It just feels woefully out of place and smacks, again, of headcanon being violated over actual canon.

That is ultimately what ruins the story. There are times when one should project a bit of themselves into a story, to help deliver the aesop or advance a plot element, but the entire story should not be this way. If the body of your work comes off as the crazy homeless guy on the street corner who rants about the government putting nanomachines in the water in order to make us buy stuff, then something has gone wrong.

This is what makes reviewing anything from Chatoyance such a nightmare. I generally try to judge stories simply by their own merits and not by the people who write them. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to get through countless novels, short stories, movies and plays because of ideological holdups with the creators and their political and social beliefs. A good story is a good story, and I would love to give Around the Bend a positive review if there was something in here I could actually praise. But the actual story here is utterly meaningless. You simply cannot divorce Chatoyance from the narrative, since she basically is the one talking to us.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

The idea of approaching inconsistencies within the canon is a long-standing tradition within all fandoms. Plenty of fanfics have been written trying to justify the ending to “Mysterious Mare-Do-Well,” make more sense of how Cadance and Shining Armor fit into Twilight's backstory, and explore the more minor players in the series like Celestia and Luna. That's what Chatoyance has done here...but she's bungled the job horribly. What should have been a nice, fun-but-serious examination of the two seasons devolves into a massive tract on all that is wrong with Season Two before shuffling off anything she didn't personally agree with to an alternate universe so that she can safely ignore it. And when she starts shoveling in things that are not actually violations of canon, but instead her headcanon, you start to realize why this story simply doesn't work.

I'm sorry to keep pounding this same point over and over again, but this isn't about Twilight discovering a new universe and dealing with the consequences it presents, but is instead a launchpad for Chatoyance's beliefs about the show and how she sees the characters. If I had to compare it to anything, it's like that Pun Pony comic where said pony drops any semblance of a joke to talk about how horrible the Mane 6 are. Perhaps there's a kernel of truth in there, but not only is it exaggerated and twisted to suit a predisposed point of view, but it's not what you came in there for to begin with.

If you like Chatoyance and find her work fascinating, that's fine. Like whatever you want to like. But when I read this story, it felt like an absolute waste. This isn't rectifying the differences between the two seasons; it's avoiding what she feels are inconsistencies for what feels like petty and arbitrary reasons. Overall, this story did nothing but introduce me to someone I would have been much happier not knowing and turn me off to the idea of Fanon Discontinuity even more than I already was. All in all, I award it zero points, and may God have mercy on her soul.