FimFiction Link - Short ID: 499762/but-would-anything-matter
Published: Jul '21
7.7/10.
Pros:
>drapes itself in the despairing horror oneshot genre quite effectively
>good fight scene
Cons:
>has the classic "I'd rather hear the context about shit hitting the fan than the interpersonal drama that makes vague references to it" feeling most horror oneshots invoke
>Applejack is a retard at the end. You went through all this shit. Just get off the fucking train.
A "shit's in the process of hitting the fan" horror oneshot with a hopeless, despairing "gutpunch" ending, it tells a brief story of AJ and Dash fleeing Ponyville in a freight train as a vampire apocalypse fucks everything up and leads to an action fight scene with several vampired Ponyville BPs. Why's there vampires? What happened in Ponyville? Why isn't Celestia keeping the sun up permanently instead of continuing the day/night cycle like it's nothing? Shut up, it's a horror oneshot, you don't get to know. Enjoy some lesbian drama and AJ killing herself and Dash in the end. It did the despair stuff quite well, but I still wish more context for this stuff was done in horror oneshots. Really kills the mood when I'm more interested in what isn't said than what is.
It was also amusing how much the author wanted this to take place on a freight train, like he'd gotten the cover art commissioned before he wrote it. They're fully automated for some inexplicable reason and make scheduled stops despite freight not exactly being the quickest thing to load and unload.