This morning was a morning I have been waiting for with considerable anxiety for nearly a month, for this is the morning when Fallout: Equestria received its review from Chris of One Man's Pony Ramblings -- one of the most acclaimed and professional critics in the Friendship is Magic fan community. This was a review that I have known I would need to take to heart, for better or worse. Chris is not a fan nor a hater. He is a skilled, objective critic. One of the truly good ones. So you can imagine that I started reading with my heart in my throat. I am well aware of Fallout: Equestria's flaws, as well as the problems some readers have had with the story, so I was not surprised that his reactions were mixed. I only hoped the good would outshine the bad.

One Man's Pony Ramblings has posted the following review of Fallout: Equestria:

Impressions before reading: First off, a confession: normally, I write this part before I read the story (duh). But I completely forgot to do that before I left on vacation, so I'm cheating a bit here and doing my initial impressions from memory.

Much like the previously-reviewed Past Sins, Fallout: Equestria is an incredibly popular fanfic, with a very devoted base of followers. Compared to the former, Fo:E doesn't seem to have spawned nearly as much hatred and/or hype backlash, which I'm guessing is a good sign quality-wise. Also, Fo:E has spawned a truly massive number of spinoffs, continuations, and fanfic-fanfics (including one that's part of the main post, but since it's by a different author I'm leaving it aside), more than one of them 6-star stories themselves. There's clearly something about this work that resonates with a lot of people.

I've not read any of the story myself, and my familiarity with the Fallout games is extremely limited. I played the first game briefly before becoming frustrated with the impossible level of difficulty, probably due mostly the fact that I didn't realize going in that the game expects you to take at least one weapon ability as a favored skill, and I don't really know anything about the later installments in the franchise. However, I understand that this story is quite popular even among readers who aren't gamers, so I suspect (or at least, I hope) that that's not going to be an impediment to my reading.

Zero-ish spoiler summary: Two centuries after Equestria's version of a global thermonuclear war annihilates pony civilization, a young unicorn named Littlepip ventures out from her "Stable," a large-scale fallout shelter, and discovers a world at once totally unlike that seen in FiM, and at the same time disturbingly familiar. As she explores the land, she uncovers not only the crises of the present, but those which drove the ponies 200 years ago to turn the world into what it has since become.

Thoughts after reading: This is the first true grimdark story that I've hit (has it really taken eighty review posts to find a 6-star grimdark? My goodness), so I'd like to talk about the genre as a whole for a minute. Speaking in generalities, I like grimdark stories about as much as I like shipping stories; that is to say, while I have no particular antipathy towards the genre in principal, I find that the subject matter is generally a poor fit for the MLP universe and the writing quality to generally be pretty low.

The latter point is a broad generalization (though one that I think a quick glance through fimfiction will show is all too accurate), and doesn't really impact the way I view individual stories--I mention it only by way of explanation for my reticence to read grimdark without a specific recommendation. The former point deserves a bit of expansion, however. I think it goes without saying that murder, rape, cannibalism, and heck, even foul language, are not things which could ever be depicted on the show itself. More than that, they aren't things that could even be hinted at in canon. This makes it hard to write fanfiction incorporating these elements without divorcing one's work from the show it purports to take its setting from.

Note that I say hard, not impossible. There are a small number of stories which show that writing an absurdly dark and at times viscerally disgusting story which retains the core spirit of MLP is indeed possible. And Fallout: Equestria definitely belongs on that list.


An examination of why is in order here. As with any major alteration to the show's aesthetic, whether it be making the main characters lesbians, turning Celestia into a ruthless tyrant, or introducing guns, bombs, and nuclear missiles megaspells in place of apple pies, the most important thing an author must do is justify the apparent discrepancy between the show and the fanfic. Kkat does a relatively good job of this, showing in bits and pieces as the story progresses how peaceful, idyllic Equestria slowly turned into the unrelentingly horrific land it is in the story's present. After the first few chapters, I never seriously questioned the central premise vis-a-vis its connection to FiM.

But keeping the story tied to its kids-show roots takes more than just a halfway-decent explanation. Fo:E succeeds on this front not only by justifying its differences in tone, but by maintaining the show aesthetic wherever possible. From the punny names of towns and characters to the expert voicing and characterization of the main six (even those elements that seem out of place initially, such as the sinisterness of Pinkie Pie's role in prewar Equestria, are eventually tied back to the characters in believable ways), the story takes pains to show that it isn't just a war story with pony names swapped in; its a story about how ponies could find themselves fighting a war, and how they could find themselves sinking to horrifying depths in the wake thereof.

Following on that last thought, I was very impressed with the development of Littlepip as concerned her reactions to the world outside her stable. From the little things (she's lived her whole life in a small, enclosed space--of course the first thing she'd do upon seeing the outside world is suffer an attack of agoraphobia!) to the broader shifts in her understanding of morality (wrestling with fundamental questions like "when is it right to take another's life?" and "can preemptive violence ever be justified?"), the way she views the world gives the reader an easy introduction into the blasted hellscape which is the Equestrian Wastes, and one that's through the eyes not of a grizzled warrior or a jaded survivor, but a pony. Littlepip could be anypony from the show; lost, confused, and just trying to muddle through and do the right thing. The only difference is, she doesn't have the advantage of living in a world where nothing bad ever happens that can't be fixed within half an hour (less commercial breaks).

Oh, I should probably mention in here that no prior familiarity with the Fallout milieu is required in order to enjoy this story. A few references may be missed, but these are generally sufficiently integrated into the story to prevent confusion, and no prior knowledge of the setting is required to understand the plot or characters.

Another thing I want to talk about as it relates to this story is length. Too many fanfic authors seem to think that writing an epic-length story gives them carte blanche to fill their work with deathly dull monologues, pages and pages of backstory with no obvious relevance, and other assorted filler. I cannot count the number of times I've seen the author of a many-chaptered monstrosity claim that "It starts slow, but it gets really good around chapter X." Based on previous experience, this appears to be code for "Everything before chapter X is crap." Whether a story is two thousand words long or two million, it should still strive to be interesting at all times.

Despite producing 45 chapters the combined length of which exceeds that of War and Peace by a significant margin, Fo:E is rarely dull. Featuring numerous factions with conflicting goals and ideologies, dozens of antagonists of various stripes, and closely intertwined quests to discover both the events of the distant past and the purpose of Littlepip's life, there is hardly a paragraph which doesn't either advance the plot, develop one of the myriad characters who drift in and out of the story, or delve into fundamental questions about the world and how we interact with it. I found some of the fights overlong, and found they did become repetitive eventually, but even this was relatively minor (and I admit, I've never taken the same visceral joy from reading about fights that many readers seem to).

I've briefly touched on Littlepip already, but one thing that consistently surprised me was the depth of Kkat's characterizations. At first glance, or first introduction, many of the ponies (and other creatures) which Littlepip meets fall into readily recognizable roles: the shoot-first-ask-questions-later cowboy, the mild-mannered yet ruthless villain boss, etc. Yet few and far between are the significant players who aren't given expanded and nuanced characterizations as the story progresses. Both Littlepip's allies and foes are thoroughly humanized, to the point where its hard not to have some empathy with nearly every character in the story. This is not a story about "right" or "wrong;" it's a tale of good intentions gone horribly awry, and even the nominal villains often prove to share goals with the protagonists; what separates Littlepip from her foes isn't that she wants to make Equestria a better place and they don't, but that their vision of a better Equestria requires sacrifices she isn't willing to accept, or contains elements she can't condone. And the respect with which even the most monstrous attitudes are treated humanizes the entire conflict; this is one of the most intellectually honest ponyfics I've ever read in terms of how it deals with character motivation.

Although the tone of the piece is overwhelmingly dark, this story is full of levity. For the most part, I thought Kkat did a great job of allowing a few laughs in without jumping tone too drastically. Besides the name puns, the author takes a number of shots at both the show and game from which her story derives (mostly in the form of innocently asked rhetorical questions, as when Pip is exploring a long-deserted room and, finding a few bits of coinage, wonders, "What kind of pony went around putting money in random spots?"), takes a few jabs at both modern and cold-war policy makers, and includes a staggering number of lines from the show. The reason these turns so often work is because they're integrated into the story itself; when Pip asks who puts a few coins in a locked chest, it's a joke about Fallout's penchant for doing the same, but it's also a legitimate question. The relevance of the line isn't dependent on meta-knowledge, as too many shout-outs and fan-references are.

Of course, some do fall flat. Every chapter ends with "level up" note, saying what new perks Littlepip is gaining as she adventures. Perhaps Fallout fans will find them more humorous than I did, but the extended meta-joke didn't work for me at all. In a work with a relatively serious tone and a complex and complete narrative, using a video game framing device felt cheap by comparison (and worse, completely unnecessary. It isn't like the level-up notes contained any plot-relevant information that couldn't be gleaned from the story itself without difficulty). And as long as the subject is on meta-whatever, I wasn't particularly happy with the way Pinkie's prescience was handled. Without getting into spoilers (too much), I think that there was the potential for a decent explanation for her virtual omniscience, but that it was never fully developed. As a result, some of her leaps of intuition stuck out in a bad way.

As long as I'm talking about problems, there's a staggering overuse of exclamation marks at times ("I turned to the second, but not quickly enough to stop him from swinging his magically enhanced sledgehammer right into my ribcage! The pain was blinding! I could hear the ribs snapping under my armour!"), and there are also some editing difficulties, especially in the first third. Nothing overwhelming, but in several of the early-middle chapters there are fairly regular missing words and other simple errors, and the problem never entirely disappears (Also, the occasional use of "buck" as a synonym for colt is confusing, at least to me). Apparently, Kkat is aware of these errors, but doesn't want to go back and correct them, saying she's finished with Fo:E. I don't have any real comment on that position, other than to say that it makes an interesting contrast with the seemingly continuous revisions to Past Sins.

But despite some technical flaws, the story construction is generally excellent. It's told entirely from the viewpoint of Littlepip, but the author finds a number of ways to bend the viewpoint in unusual and interesting ways. Concussions offer a chance to misremember or blur events, memory orbs (magical devices which store a memory from another pony, and can be "viewed" by unicorns) provide a chance to see things both from the distant past and the near-present from a variety of perspectives, and both memory loss and inter-temporal communication are used to good effect. The story also does a good job of showing Pip's perspective subtly enough that it isn't immediately obvious, but becomes readily apparent through repetition and/or in hindsight. Her use of mind-enhancing drugs, and their effect on her, is only one of the most obvious examples.

I've said a few times now that this story is extremely grimdark. Plenty of stories are, but there are relatively few that manage to be both extremely (read: frequently) violent and still wring some shock from the horrors which they tell. The problem is repetition: reading about someone getting their head cut off (assuming the author both has a modicum of skill and isn't playing it for laughs or something) is arresting, but reading about the eighth person getting their head cut off isn't. There's no shock value; it's old hat. Kkat both uses and averts this by showing how Pip grows inured to violence even as the reader grows jaded by the constant bloodshed, demonstrating how quickly innocence can be lost. Yet at the same time, those scenes which are supposed to be shocking never fail to be so; each time reader apathy begins to set in, the author finds a way to up the bar enough to provoke a reaction.

The ending... ah, I'm going to have to break out the spoiler tag again. If you haven't read the story, know that I thought some elements of the story's ending were anticlimactic in a bad way. Not awful, but not good. For more details, see below:

The spoiler section has been edited from this review. If you have already read Fallout: Equestria and wish to read the spoilers, you can find them by visiting the review.

Finally, let's talk content warning: in case the number of times I've typed grim and/or dark in this review isn't hint enough, there's a whole lot of violence and bloodshed, some of it quite graphic, in this story. Not to mention there's a fair amount of body horror and fate-worse-than-death stuff. Also, some parts of the story are pretty sexual in nature (and the side-story in the main post, if you decide to read it, is basically porn). Long story short? This one isn't for the kiddies.

Star rating: ★★★★★

I waffled on this one a bit; on the one hand, I'm not really enamored with some aspects of the ending, and not all of the comedy really fit (though it's true that a surprising amount did, all things considered). But when I think about how astonishing it is to write a story so long which is never dull, explores each of its characters so fully, and manages to ask more than a few fundamental questions about life along the way, it seems to me that we're talking about one of the best fanfics ever written. It may not be perfect, but Kkat has accomplished something really special with Fo:E, and that deserves to be recognized.

Recommendation: Obviously this story isn't for anyone who's going to be put off by length; even for fast readers, this is a story that requires several dozen hours to consume. But I'd recommend it to almost anyone undeterred by the length. Even people who don't normally read grimdark, even people who don't like shipping (yes, there's some of that in here), even people who don't normally read OC stories, even those who don't normally read crossovers, all ought to give this a try. Those who absolutely can't stomach swearing and bloodshed will have to give it a pass of course, but other readers will likely find that Fo:E is one of the most complete fanfics, from both a structural and thematic perspective, ever to be written.