FimFiction Link - Short ID: 506872/contamination
Published: Nov '21
'Contamination' is a five thousand and seven hundred-word G5 oneshot. The M5 find a can of the eldritch food in the lighthouse during renovations and they elect to try eating it. It goes about as well as one can imagine, ultimately resulting in Sunny discovering a new food she likes and the hospitalization of Sprout.
One might reasonably ask what's so special about Surströmming to warrant not just one, but two fics. I'll be honest, even after reading this story, I still don't know the answer. Except perhaps that it's an easy source of gross-out humor, but more on that later. I don't think I can say anything too surprising about this fic. It's a comedy SoL story, with very little actual stakes and mostly just about the ponies trying to cope with the horrid stench of rotten fish. The prose is competent, the author puts their skills to use to ham up just how badly it smells with surprisingly long lists of analogies and metaphors. The humor, however, for me was extremely hit or miss. Hitch declaring the lighthouse a quarantine area of possible contamination was amusing, it plays on his need to exercise authority well. Sprout becoming a jannie was also funny enough. However, the fic's insistence on lowbrow humor was more tiring than anything. First Pipp streaming that Zipp and Hitch are vomiting from the stench. Then Sunny burping so hard on Sprout he loses consciousness. Then the others being afraid she might fart on them so hard that they too get knocked out. It's just not my cup of tea. It's perfectly fine if you enjoy such humor, I'm not trying to act as the joke-police, but if you're anything like me and don't particularly enjoy the punchline being something disgusting happening, many of the jokes will not hit. Which is a shame, because otherwise the author's style is fairly enjoyable.
Overall: 5/10 Your experience may vary wildly based on your sense of humor, but unless you're particularly into smell-based jokes, you're probably not going to miss out on much if you don't read this.