Ponyfic Roundup 505: Spotlight on Twidark

Read it Later story count: 94 (-1)

Words read this week: 47,512

In case the author or anyone else wonders why I'm reviewing such an ancient fic: it's been on my Read it Later list for so long (literally years) that it was time either to drop this or to give it a chance. Since it's not ridiculously long, since I really enjoyed a more recent Isseus fic – Tough Little Pony (PR 212) – and since I found the question posed in the longdesc interesting (see below) I chose to give this a chance. 12-year-old fics have a decidedly mixed record with me, but let's see how this one does.

Twidark by Isseus
Twilight, Spike, Celestia, Mane Six and CMCs
G4; Dark/Comedy/Horror/Slice of Life; 48k words; Jun–Jul 2012; Teen

Twilight goes darkside.

Not a terribly informative shortdesc, so I'll quote the last part of the longdesc: "Are there limits to what Twilight's magic can do, and what lies beyond those limits?" A question that caught my eye and got me to read this fic. Those mixed-up genre tags are in fact not misleading: this really is quite the mixed-up story. Deliberately, I think, since its central point is Twilight's descent into mental anguish after she discovers darkly magical Necroponicon book, and how this impacts on her closest friends. This isn't handled in the unremittingly grim way that some authors do, and there's plenty of gentler fun around the edges, especially with the CMC early on – but be warned that ponies do get hurt here, and not only Twilight. There are some odd sidelines at times, one about a rock band being almost Douglas Adams length, and they do make the experience a little rough. Still, Twidark has enough capacity to surprise just when you think it's settled into predictability that it shades into the threes. ★★★

Naturally, this is a Spotlight and so if you head on into the dark, you will probably be eaten by a grue spoiler.

I'm not really qualified to opine on how well this story treats the kind of mental breakdown Twilight experiences. All I can say is that I found it quite disorientating at times, which I suspect was what was being aimed for. Certainly her inner voice – or voices, I should say, as the "good" version, Inferno, turns out to be greatly important – is disturbing to quite a high degree. I was very relieved that there was (eventually) a reasonably happy ending, since with a [Teen] rating you never know.

An important factor to note about Twidark is that it takes quite a long time – well over a quarter of the word count – before anything particularly dark actually happens. The opening few chapters are more slice-of-lifey and take us through S2-era Twilight's everyday life. Well, with a couple of changes to allow for the fact that she's a hero these days. These are generally fairly fun, even if the Mare Do Well and town dam stuff dates the story in pretty unavoidable fashion.

Characterisation of the various ponies is fair enough for the era, though as usual it did take me a little time to re-acclimatise to what the Mane Six were like back then. And, indeed, what Ponyville itself was like. In spite of the deep and dark goings-on, this is essentially a domestically set tale rather than the more ambitious, wider scale we tend to see later on. I don't think that's a bad thing, since the key characters here are Twilight(s), Pinkie Pie, Celestia and Discord.

I'll take a moment here to say how interesting I found this story's Discord. While he doesn't always sound spot on how he does in the show, the pre-reformation character is right there. This guy is seriously dangerous. The question, of course, is how much of him is real and how much is in Twilight's head – but as we see with the attack on poor Pinkie (a particularly tough part of the story to read) what Twi does in her unstable state can have very severe real-world consequences.

Twidark's final chapter is much longer than the others at over 10,000 words. An awful lot of writers do this with their fics, and sometimes you do get the feeling that they just don't want to let go. Here, at least, something actually happens – it's not, as I had thought to start with, simply a very long "and now everything is all right again" chapter. Indeed, Pinkie's reveal that she thinks Twi has come to the hospital to kill her is genuinely shocking, as it should be.

The writing is decent and readable, though it's decidedly old-fandom in some of its descriptions ("the marshmallow pony"), AJ-speak is at the "Twalaight" and there's a little more explaining who various canon ponies are and what they look like than you'd likely get today. A few textual oddities as well, most intrusively the use of an acute accent for apostrophes (eg "don´t") and – though fortunately much rarer – the rendering of "id" (as in ego) as the entirely different term "ID".

Going on my limited experience of his (non-Mature) stories, Isseus seems to write fics that disturb as much as they entertain. That's definitely the case with Twidark, and the relatively straightforward, unexciting nature of the prose may even make the sudden twists (another example being Discord's reveal about his origins) stand out more. The fic isn't as smoothly or confidently flowing as Tough Little Pony, understandable given that it's significantly older, but it's still interesting.

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Next time, I shall be starting out on fics that were recognised in the Thousand Words Contest III. After some thought, I have decided that I will be covering all 46 of these, but that I will be taking a fairly long time to do so, with non-contest editions of Ponyfic Roundup in between. A very low word count next week, as I'll be looking at the eight Honourable Mentions. Yes, one author got two.

It's Time To D-D-D-Duel by D-20
The Royal Snitting Room by gloamish
In Darkness, a Light by Pascoite
Heavy Things by Pascoite
A Fall, Unnoticed by Not That Anon
You Were My First (Snatch and Grab) by RedHoodie21
The Cake Job by GeodesicDragon
Click! by marmalado