FimFiction Link - Short ID: 525838/blood-guts-and-necessary-survival
Published: Oct '22 — Nov '22
'Blood, Guts and Necessary survival' is a five thousand and seven hundred-word HiE shortfic. An unnamed person is transported to Equestria where they turn into a bloodthirsty monster.
Let's get to the point, I cannot with a good heart recommend reading this fic to anyone. Even from a technical perspective, the fic is in shambles: The prose is ridden by typos and incorrectly written terms like "grow a custom" (instead of "grown accustomed").
However, even if we overlook this, the narrative itself is just an awful maelstrom of edginess, rushed pacing, and a sudden epilogue that seemingly kills the plot before any of the few questions it raised could be answered. As the (admittedly nicely drawn) cover art gives it away, over the course of the story the protagonist "slowly" turns into a Windigo-like creature (the mythological being, not the weather-creatures we're used to from FIM). Besides becoming pale and emaciated, he also experiences an extremely sudden increase in violence — going from being ashamed that he scared a few foals, to brutally hospitalizing Applejack, and finally devolving into a instinct-driven killer, who has no qualms about murdering Bon Bon in cold blood.
Now, edge has its place, it's why I have zero qualms about defending stories like 'Redheart's War', however, it also happens to be one of the things that has to be approached with great tact or else it'll just feel ridiculous. This story sadly falls into the latter category, as the protagonist acts with little to no care about anything. He takes his transformation with a similar irritation, as one would a mild cold. He also wildly switches between lamenting the fact that he is now a murderer and finding his new antlers cool. There is simply not a single redeeming factor in him that would make the reader the slightest bit interested in what happens to him. Perhaps, if he at least made an effort to not immediately start bashing heads in and tried to fit in, the jarring change would have worked as a plot point. Instead the entire fic is just wanton gore, without even granting us an answer to why the original Windigo chose the protag in particular and what relation it has to Equestria. Though this is not entirely correct, there is a single chapter in which the (now fully transformed!) protag spends some quality cute time with Derpy and Dinky... it comes as left field as you'd expect, yet ironically this weird, out of place chapter felt the closest to an actual interesting narrative in the whole story. Though cheesy, the idea of a creature such as this having to fight off its urges to protect the ponies he loves is far more engaging than what we got.
Overall: 2/10 If not for that single chapter, this story would be a definite 1. Awful pacing, uninteresting and crappy protagonist, and there is literally nothing pony about the story... Can't recommend.