FimFiction Link - Short ID: 538458/empress-cozy-glow
Published: Jul '23 — Aug '23
>I raise my neck, “Well, yeah!I mean, it’s not like he tore Tirek’s nipples off or anything like that!” before lowering it. “Can we still do that, now that we’re good, by the way? Tear his nipples off, I mean?”
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>“Of course I’ll be your mother, Cozy Glow!”
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>**My parents are also dead… That’s actually one of the primary reasons I started writing in the first place…
What the actual fuck.
Originally this story caught my attention because the premise seemed somewhat interesting and it updated fairly frequently. Still I put it off and only picked it up today. For something having so many views, I didn't expect this. I... I can't review this story. It reads less like a coherent piece of fiction and more like the author venting their frustrations and parent complexes through exaggerated and out-of-character puppets of Twilight and Cozy.
On one hand you got Cozy, who after locking away the magic decided to imprison almost everyone who held any power in Equestria and rule as a tyrant... until she suddenly decides to turn good because of a magical mcguffin... until the story twists again and it turns out she was good from the get go. I guess imprisoning ponies and stealing their magic was just an "oopsie" after all. The plot's main "conflict", if you can call it that, is her coming to terms with how she is not nearly as evil as she thought herself to be and deep down just wishes to be cared for and loved like the child she is.
On the other you have Twilight depicted in such an unintentionally unnerving way that I often had to double take just what exactly I'm reading. She acts and talks like the ponies of Our Town before Poochie got turned over, but the author constantly reaffirms (while Cozy is berating and hurting her first mentally then physically) that not only is Twilight acting out of her own volition like this, but that she's enjoying it. Let me stress this: Twilight goes from basically a servant of Cozy to becoming her *surrogate mother,* because "she loves her". Without once trying to free her friends, call out Cozy on being a petulant little shit, or do anything to dispel this aura of fucking Stockholm syndrome that permeates this story.
I don't want to claim anything like "this story was hard to read" or whatever, I was more annoyed and bored by the end, but it is regardless one of the most uncomfortable fics I've read to date, because the author wasn't even trying to act that way, their complexes just shone through that hard. Beyond the stuff that would make Freud salivate, the fic is just plain weird, the author randomly throws in a redneck stereotype OC who has like 10 lines total and makes Cozy realise the errors of her ways by stating really obvious crap. Then Luna shows up, randomly dunks on Cozy and then fucks off without doing anything. Then Discord shows up and drugs Pinkie. Then the story randomly ends with a 20 years jump forward...