/mlp/ Fanfic Reviews

Five Score – A Prench Tale Vol.1

FimFiction Link - Short ID: 434490/five-score--a-prench-tale-vol1

Published: Mar '19Nov '20

Review in No. 37918006
Someone actually wrote a Five Score spinoff in the year of our Lord 2,019. I wasn't expecting much (I just read it because I've always liked PTFG shit), but it turned out much better than I expected. I doubt anyone else ITT will ever read this fic, but I finished part one (about 85k in length), so I'll write a little review anyway.

The Five Score formula, on the off chance you don't know it already: on the day of their 25th birthday, our protagonists (who all happen to have been born on the same day) wake up with cutie marks on their hips, and slowly transform into ponies over the course of several days. In this one, the protagonists are three French women (who happen to work at the same company), and the ponies are three OCs (presumably, after all these years, all the good canon ponies have already been taken by one writer or another).

The main characters:

>Ambre: a black trans woman. I was expecting her to drag down the story with a bunch of trans identity stuff, but once she gets TFed and realizes she has a fully functioning horse vagina, life is good.
>Sarah: the extrovert of the group. She turns into a pony stallion. Given Ambre exists, I was expecting the story to grind to a halt so Sarah could be angsty about gender, but instead she just gets on with her life. Like in the good old days when it was still legal to write TFTG without mentioning trans issues at all: it's weird for her, but she gets used to it over tiem, and anyway, she has more important things to worry about.
>Lawrence: not a dude, just French. She makes a hard turn from "worst character in the fic" to "best character in the fic" about 2/3 of the way through part one. She's a neurotic mess with some kind of crippling anxiety disorder who would be totally unable to function if not for the selfless support of her platonic BFF Sébastien. All of the freakouts and crying and cutting herself gets old pretty fast, and a lot of time is spent earlier in the fic on the other characters trying to help Lawrence keep it together as the transformation progresses. But then shit hits the fan, and the personality of her pony self, a sergeant in the Royal Guard, comes to the forefront. This is where she becomes the most interesting character in the story, thanks to the interplay between the human and pony parts of her personality.

Unlike in mainline Five Score, these characters live in the city, so they end up hiding out in Lawrence's apartment for the entire duration of the TF sequence (about 40k words). Not as interesting as running around town in a trenchcoat trying to stock up on supplies before they're too TF'ed to pass as human, but soon after the TF sequence is done, the action picks up suddenly as one of the main characters gets kidnapped by a group of crazies.

Overall, this has turned out to be one of the best Five Score side stories I've seen outside of the CMC one.