• Story: School Reunion (Update Part 3!)

    [Normal][Sad]

    Author: Blueshift
    Description:Twenty-five years later, Apple Bloom is an adult pony. She's married with two lovely foals, and is the respected mayor of Ponyville. However she never got past the heartbreak she felt when her two best friends moved away all those years ago and her world changed.

    All this is about to change though. Tonight is the first Ponyville school reunion and Apple Bloom is determined to finally put the past to rest and have the best night ever. What could possibly go wrong?

    Cutie Mark Crusader School Reunion go!
    School Reunion Part 1
    School Reunion Part 2
    School Reunion Part 3 (New!)

    Additional Tags: Future, regret, managing expectations, Krastos

    25 comments:

    1. Krastos the glue maker? geez Seth, This I gotta see.

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    2. Nice job showing how people change over time, not bad!

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    3. Solidly written, with a massive emotional punch to the gut. Definitely earned its [Sad] tag.

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    4. ^ All this praise, yet I see 2 1/2 stars. Some explanation would be nice.

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    5. I would have liked more Krastos, but it was a nice read though.

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    6. Better prepare myself for class reunions in some years.

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    7. Dunno about this one. It jumps around a lot in its pacing, but it generally errs on the side of moving too fast.

      I am legitimately curious about what the hell went on before this story started, but its already giving off vibes of "so much bad shit happened that my suspension of disbelief will be shattered when I hear it"

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    8. This is pretty well written, but a few things irk me. 15 years isn't long enough, that would make Applebloom around 23-25 years old, and she's already been mayor for 10 years. It would need to be like 25 years later to make sense at all. Also, I don't see why it was really necessary for all that destruction to happen. It doesn't add anything to the story for me, instead, it just makes me wonder "WTF?"

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    9. Read the second part, and, well, I can't get into it so far. It's just that the little things don't line up, like Cheerilee wouldn't be that old even after 25 years, much less 15. It's not that it's bad, it's just that I can't take it seriously. It's more random than it is sad. However, Dinky being a powerful mage is pretty awesome.

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    10. Pony years =/= human years

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    11. I would star-rate this, but the little widget's broken.

      It's not bad...just, not really sad either. It seems quite erratic and while there's the underlying foreboding, it's quite confusing. I.e., part 1 implies Ponyville was razed by a dragon, part 2 implies a war between the royal sisters and Krastos.

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    12. Spoilers

      Hmm. I seem to appreciate this more then most. The causal mention of Apple Acres' destruction especially. Not just for Applebloom, but the general idea of a family business upheld for generations gone...

      I assume we will learn more about Applebloom and how she got where she is. Wonder where you'll take it. On the one end it sounds as if she should be happy enough, but it seems pretty clear she is not.

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    13. I kinda agree with the others. It's very....I dunno, it's like the backstory was added for TEH DRAMAZ. Or as if it's a sequel to an unwritten story. Plus, never visited once in 15 years AND they don't even know what each other is doing? Sorry, I can't really keep up with that as being right...

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    14. BUT BUT..scoot and sweetie dont go to her school

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    15. @Anonymous Apparently they do, but the school's a half-day thing; there's a morning class and afternoon class. Applebloom's in one and Scoots and Sweetie in the other, at least at first.

      After the events of "Call of the Cutie", though, I would expect them to beg their parents (or in Applebloom's case, sister) to arrange it with Cheerilee so that they could all be in the same class.

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    16. For the most part it kinda feels like a solidly written sequel to a story that didn't get written cause the various back story cuts come off feeling kinda shoehorned in to add dramatic impact. as they are they just kinda mess up the pacing of the story and while its definitely sad its more sad because of forced dramatic elements and implied character death.

      The other main nitpick i have is that even though their grown up and you kinda expect older versions of the characters to have changed somewhat over time. it kinda feels like many of the characterizations are off base. not just against their canon interpretation but just against what most fans kinda peg a lot of the characters as.


      Apple Bloom feels like a shell of the character she represented in the show. even without the back story bits it feels like her personality was just ruined by her aging. it actually almost comes of as comedic in part 3 when Cheerilie is calling her out on it. like she's taking the reader's point of view "Why did you become like this. there's no way that this is how Apple Bloom should have grown up." I'm not saying the story as a whole is poorly written which in that respect its fine. But when you try to apply a "Kill Em All" mentality to a show like this it feels wrong and you can't really read it and take it seriously especially when someone like Applejack kinda just dies off screen completely unannounced and we're just hearing it as readers in passing as a flash back.


      Then Sweetie Belle her character felt way off, I may be kinda grasping at straws here but i could honestly see her getting over her stage fright by the time she was an adult and to have her reduced to a bit counter that's just kinda sad (not the sad you were going for but disappointing instead.) that she didn't turn out better off.


      I can't really speak for Twist being out of character i actually found it a bit funny she didn't notice she even had a lisp but then again i'm sure that's actually rather common that people don't notice their own accent or speech impediments.


      its definitely not a bad story but either needs a prequel to establish some of the background scenes a bit better or a rewrite without the dramatic stuff and some redrafting to fix the pacing since the time frame does seem to fall prey to "Comic book time" scaling

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    17. I had been wondering where this went. And I have to say that getting more of the backstory pretty much did break my suspension of disbelief. The way it is told in this story is at odds with the way it needs to be told to justify the characterization of the story, and it kind of ruins everything.



      Applejack's death is clearly the point in Applebloom's life that basically destroyed her emotionally, and yet even in Applebloom's own flashbacks it is treated with almost casual disinterest. Just touched on and then glossed over. And this carries over to basically all of the the events that happened before this story.

      The backstory is treated as a major life-changing event for everybody in the story, but the context is all wrong. Either the story hypes it up but the characters don't seem to actually have been changed by it (which is the case with most of the players) or the character's treat it as the major event that it was but the story doesn't put any weight on why (as is the case with Applebloom's reactions).

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    18. Thanks for the feedback!

      There are some things people have issues with, but everything there is an absolutely deliberate choice. One day you wake up and you're nearly 30 and working in an office counting paperclips, and you think "hang on, wasn't I supposed to be an astronaut by now?" People who were the most solid friends in your life are now reduced to yearly pokes on Facebook. It happens.

      We aren't shown exactly what happened in the past because we see the story through the eyes of Apple Bloom: she wasn't there, and we have to rely on her to tell us. As a reader we are meant to have sympathy for Apple Bloom rather than to sympathise WITH her; that is a deliberate narrative disconnect and I think it puts people off. In my mind it is the right move though.

      It's a story about Apple Bloom's search for carthesis and validation. She can't get carthesis because she wants resolution to events that happened long ago and far away, and that frustrates her, knowing there's literally nothing to rail against. She HAS validation but she chooses to ignore everything she has achieved and turn her back on her current life, instead looking for validation in two places she can never get it: Applejack and her Cutie Mark.

      Don't forget that the events in this story took place years ago. We remember the past, but we don't dwell on things that happened in 1991 now we are in 2011.

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    19. Really? No-ones said this yet? Well then...
      Ah AM a big pony!

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    20. I loved it and glad you finished it.

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    21. I enjoyed it...

      Until the last chapter, It is solidly written yes, however I had M Night Shamylan "WHAT A TWIST!?" going of in my head near the ending, and that same M Night Shamylan blew up in a "WHAT A DOUBLE TWIIIIIST" Right near the ending(Last few sentences). I feel it came out of left field and very little was done to lead up into this plot twist. To pull a dual surprise like that, there needed to be some more chapter buildup, its far to short a story to do that.

      All that said, it was well written, and charachter descriptions were solid. I especially enjoyed what you did with cherrilee and Sweetie belle. The breakdown of Applebloom was allright as well, however with more buildup via having more chapters in this fic, it could have been 20% more potent.

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    22. @ DJ Midli

      Thanks for that. Oddly enough someone else commented that it could have been shorter! I didn't want to make it too meandering though, and wanted to keep focussed on Apple Bloom.

      The 'twist' at the very end was what I constructed around; if you read it again you'll see that it is signposted from almost the very beginning, and Apple Bloom's intereactions with various characters and her attitudes suddenly take on a different light. At least that was the intention!

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    23. It's... feels flat. So very flat.

      I get the idea behind the paper pusher who see his life one day and wondered what went wrong... it's just done so wrong I can't feel myself emotional invested in your story.

      It doesn't feel like My Little Pony.

      It doesn't feel like a Drama.

      There is no character growth in the chapters, since everything happened offscreen and they may as well be O.C. for all it matters.

      There is no sense of Nostalgia, probably the very crux of your story. There is a backstory, but there is no sense of longing, of love or snark or even curiosity, like "The Wonder Years". Things happened, bad things (because?) and now the world is a different place but you can't feel the emotional investment from the characters to what we could call the plot.

      About the intention, It didn't take off. there is no different light because there was never a thing to compare it. Grand ideas need great works and this just doesn't cut it.

      Why Sweete Belle became and accountant anyway?

      Why Apple Bloom became a mayor? What did it take her so much time to get her cutie mark? What is there so much Narm in the fight between sisters and How in the hell Apple bloom managed to run for so long without dying by a stroke half way?

      It's just Meh!

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