Fanfic Flashback 2: So Many Different Ways to Prey

I think it's time for another slice of self-indulgence! Today, I'm going look back at the second fanfic I ever published on Fimfiction. This rather strange piece has the distinction of having by far the fewest votes (+7/-0) in relation to its view count (just over 400) of any of my ponyfics. Possibly people just don't know what to make of it...

"Butterfly!" "...run!"

So Many Different Ways to Prey by Loganberry
Zecora, OCs and Others
Comedy/Crossover; 2K words; Jul 2012; Everyone
A class of somewhat restless foals are told a story by Zecora (in rhyme, naturally) about the terrible time when the much-feared Newborn Cuties came to town. How they arrived, what they did and how they were, at last, defeated is entangled with the story of a pony named Has-Been.

Even after all this time, I still like what I did with this one: 1,500 words of reasonably decent iambic pentameter, plus a long description that's also in rhyme. Zecora's rhyming isn't exactly show-style, of course, but I don't see why she shouldn't vary her metre occasionally! Even the most obvious fault it has – that of a rather rushed ending – was, in this particular case, a deliberate stylistic choice.

Its main problem is that it doesn't make as much sense as it should unless you've watched both the Newborn Cuties cartoons, which only a few people can bear to do. There are several direct references to them, plus several more indirect ones. As such, this is a niche-appeal story even by the standards of crossover fics. I don't think it's entirely devoid of interest to the general reader, but it's certainly of rather less interest.

So Many Different Ways to Prey probably suffers a bit from its plain old Comedy/Crossover tags; really, it's a Random/Dark/Adventure/Comedy/Crossover fic at least, but I couldn't quite bring myself to abuse Fimfiction's tagging system to that extent! It also has a Joyce Grenfell reference, which I'm sad if unsurprised that nobody has picked up, and one of my worst ever last-line puns. Which is saying something! :D

I really, really need to do a reading of this one at some point.