FimFiction Link - Short ID: 510257/cypress-zero
Published: Dec '22 — Apr '23
This story is a fanfiction first and foremost. For the negative connotations of this, the enjoyment I had reading it was dragged down by the way this story is unpolished. However, the author has a solid grasp on what makes the show worth writing fanfiction of. You’ll have to decide whether this makes the rough ride of the story worth it.
The [Adventure] is obvious, but this story for the most part spends its [Sci-Fi] delivering cyberpunk vibes with the main character on the run from an evil corporate-government amalgamation. Although she is usually enjoyable to read as a perspective character, her name Fokienia is unponylike and highly distracting; a story-wide search and replace helped me with that a lot. Searing Cold, by contrast, varies between not really being a character and being unlikeable whenever he shows characterization.
The great strength of this fic, though, lies in its ponyness. Cyberpunk is dark and depressing, right? Not here, the oppressive corpos aren’t nearly as soullessly malicious as a typical genre piece. It was very entertaining to read about ponies fighting each other with nonlethal weapons, generally being kind and solving their conflicts with communication rather than lasers. Well, there are lasers. The show-level violence doesn’t last all the way to the end of the fic, but it does stay for long enough to be an achievement.
What is not an achievement is the plot and prose. The main character’s backstory is often self-contradictory and the motivations of the cast are almost always unclear both at the macro and micro scale. There are many interactions where the back and forth is simply nonsensical. There is a constant stream of passages seem like they’re meant to evoke some visual, but fall on their face due to just not using the right words. This is on top of basic English mistakes like less/fewer/in/on and so on. Also, the ending is not good.
In the end, you'll have to decide if you want to wade into this very long, very fanfic of a story for some ponies, given how many stories there are on FiMFic that are better than just fanfiction. If you do, you can at least be sure that there are ponies in it, which is far better than so much of what it shares a site with.