FimFiction Link - Short ID: 510184/the-ending-of-the-end-revised-or-be-careful-with-what-you-wish-for
Published: Jan '22 — Jul '22
(Fillyanon, 1/3)
'The Ending of the End Revised, or Be Careful with what you wish for' is a one hundred and seven thousand-word longfic. A disgruntled and not a little bit crazy tabloid journalist uses one of Grogar's artifacts to bring ruin to the world, forcing almost all major characters of FiM to join arms and face him.
Dear lord, this was not a pleasant read. Let's start with the technicalities. I'm torn between calling this story an easy read and a hard read, because on one hand the prose is as simple as a bucket, but on the other the author just loves using extremely long sentences, mostly made up of the characters' names. While this does make for an initially funny parallel to 'The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny' as pointed out by other Anons, it gets olds quickly. This, combined with quite a few typos and other grammatical mistakes, makes this fic simply tiring to read. Several times I felt my eyes glazing over the text as I was reading because it simply goes on and on and on without giving the reader a break. Beyond this there is little of note. The descriptions are simple and utilitarian, the story hardly if ever bothers to describe locations or objects, leaving it up to the reader to imagine how things might look, if anyone even bothers to do so.
But far worse than tiring prose, the actual narrative itself is - for lack of a better term - a complete trainwreck. It feels like the author themselves had zero idea where to take things until the last five or so chapters, so the story swings rapidly between moods, locations, character motives, and focus. We go from Twilight suddenly turning evil because the OC antagonist made her doubt herself, to her joining the trio of Tirek, Cozy Glow, and Chrysalis who then proceed to terrorize a bunch of G5 ponies (because yes, this story also had to be a G5 crossover for some reason,) to finally the villains teaming up with the rest of the important characters and ending in a massive, chaotic fight scene, only for it to turn out that the whole thing happened in the past and the story to skip time to Sunny and her friends.
If that sounds like word-salad, that's because it absolutely is. As one might reasonably expect, due to how all over the place the narrative is, not a single character gets any proper time or chance to develop. Everyone is either 100% good or evil and whenever someone switches side it feels extremely jarring and unnatural. This is only further compounded by just how many characters this fic features. We got: The M6, the Y6, the CMCs, the Pillars, the Apple-family, Sunhorse and Moonhorse, the trio of villains, Starlight, Trixie, Diamond Tiara, Babs Sneed, Discord, Queen Novo, Grogar, everyone related to the Crystal Empire, and if this wasn't enough there are also a bunch of OCs thrown into the mix.
(Fillyanon, 2/3)
I might actually even be forgetting some characters, but it does not matter, because as mentioned before no one gets any screentime to have any relevance. You could cut half of the characters and nothing meaningful would be lost. Hell, the story would likely improve by a lot.
The only characters who even get anything remotely close to an "arc" are Twilight and the villains, but even that is handled extremely awkwardly. Instead of the author showing through actions that they have changed, they just keep reiterating (sometimes several times in the same chapter) that they have regretted their actions and would like to do good now. It's tiresome, OOC, and feels completely unearned. There are paragraphs worth of text in this story one could simply jump over and not lose any substance because the exact same ideas have been already conveyed to us, except with perhaps slightly different phrasings.
Before I move on, let's talk about the main antagonist, an OC called "Neigh Nanners." He is perhaps the most one-dimensional villain I've ever seen. There is nothing interesting about him and nothing even slightly sympathetic that could cause the reader to have a moral conflict. He is cartoonishly evil and so flat that it hurts. He hasn't even got any real plans beyond repeating the same few vague goals related to world domination and "ending Friendship." By the end of the story he also gains a religious fanatic / modern day crusader coat as well, but this too comes out of blue and adds nothing to the fic.
This would already be bad enough, but the author had to add insult to injury: While the character already starts out as a fairly obvious homage to Tucker Carlson, the author quickly turns him into a blatant parody of Donald Trump, down to him saying "Make Equestria Great Again." It's already a fairly risque thing to put contemporary politics into a fic due to how easy it is for these topics to make it feel like the story is just the author soapboxing, but when it's done this disgustingly on-the-nose there is truly no excuse for it. Even if every single other fault of the story was fixed, this would still completely ruin it.
Beyond this the author just loves exposition. Especially exposition of things we already know. I've already mentioned above how the main characters like to rant about how much they want to change, but beyond that we are treated to long descriptions about the events of episodes from FiM and the very fic itself. This would be fine if these were organic instances of characters remembering or reminiscing over past events, but instead they're nothing more than an overly anxious author's attempts at keeping the readers up to speed, even though this is completely unnecessary as both we and the cast already know what's going on.
(Fillyanon, 3/3)
The story also has no tension at all. Despite the author dangling danger in front of the readers and the characters endlessly reiterating how it's the end of the world, no one is permanently injured or killed and by the end everything is completely restored to how it was by a magical McGuffin. Around the end of the story Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon get grievously injured, but both of them recover without any issue. Flurry Heart is outright killed and the characters grieve over her for several pages only for her to be brought back by a deus-ex-machina like nothing happened. This is further compounded by just how absolutely overpowered the good side is compared to the antagonist. Five characters (including Big Mac) are turned into Alicorns by the Crystal Heart. Pinkie is turned into a Draconequus with all of Discord's powers. Sunset is turned into a creature even more powerful than an Alicorn. And finally Luna is turned back into Nightmare Moon, but it's okay because the Crystal Heart allows her to stay good. Also Grogar just appears randomly and joins the good side because he was apparently never truly evil and just became mad from the antagonist's artifact.
Finally the tie-in to G5 is just awkward. From the frankly ridiculous reason why Twilight cursed the unicorns to say "bing-bong" to the pointless post-timeskip scene with Sunny and co., it does nothing but offer a terribly flimsy way of connecting the two narratives in a way that feels neither satisfying, nor logical. It feels like just another thing the author threw into the mix just because they could or because they wanted to set up sequels that may or may not come out eventually.
Overall: 1/10 If I really wanted I could probably fill several more posts about all the little things this fic does badly. I suppose the nicest thing I can say about it is that it's at least a complete narrative with a beginning and an end, though I'm sure it's obvious how much I'm struggling to say anything positive. I guess I also find it impressive that the author wrote so much, but I'd be hard pressed to say it was worth it. The only thing I can recommend this story for is to be a case study of what not to do in a fic.
What a complete waste of time.