FimFiction Link - Short ID: 501630/i-have-no-wings-and-i-must-fly
Published: Aug '21
'I Have No Wings and I Must Fly' is a seven thousand and five hundred-word horror oneshot. Rainbow loses her wings and then her mind.
First things first, the prose itself is fine for the most part. The story is easy to read and the author did a good job with how they segmented the story. Every scene feels just the right length for a short story like this. I personally like when a story uses a bit more literary devices, but I rather read a simple but solidly-written story over one that stumbles upon itself, so I won't consider this an issue.
The plot for the most part is decently paced. While the roughly eight thousand words means the story has to be somewhat fast, I appreciate that the author took care to depict Dash's slip as slowly as possible. In a way she goes through the famous five stages of grief, however, as one might except from the tags, there is no happy ending to be expected. I also really like how the reason for her losing her wings was justified. It plays into RD's boastful and reckless nature, but also her deep care for Scootaloo and I enjoyed that it feels so "believable."
But just as the narrative starts well and ends in a tragedy, sadly I can't stay positive through the entire review either. I understand that the M-rating gives authors a certain amount of liberty and perhaps even some expectations to fulfill, but the way the characters talk in this story is just comically unfitting. I understand that they are under a lot of stress, but Fluttershy's casual earth pony racism and AJ suddenly joking about killing herself was very immersion breaking. This isn't a matter of being offended, mind you, it just comes so out of left field and are so wildly out of character, that it knocked my right out of the story. Similarly FS calling Angel a "stupid, useless woodland creature" is just so completely unlike her and so is Pinkie saying "nucking futs." I really don't mean to sound like I'm just bitching for no reason, rather I just want to emphasize how randomly these things come up and spit into a narrative that was very much turning out great until this point.
The rest of the story is largely foreseeable. I don't really consider this a a negative. The ending is largely serviceable, there are only two things I consider a bit of a moodkill. Why does Twilight force Fluttershy to go with her, when she is perfectly capable of going down alone? And while I do mostly like the last paragraph I think the last sentence would have been improved by cutting it down to be about half size. Drawing it out so long backfired for me.
Overall: 5/10 This is one of those cases where I both really enjoyed the story and found it deeply frustrating. If you can bear wildly OOC dialogue, I can recommend it, but otherwise you'll probably feel the same way.