Changeling

[Link to original story here]

Science Fiction can be a hard medium to write, but if you do it right, the result is very rewarding. With stories like Ender's Game, The Running Man, and 2001: A Space Oddessy, one can create a enduring a grand story with interesting worlds, spectacular technological advancements and gadgetry, and alien species which may or may not be humanoid enough to have intimate relations with. Even visual media has helped add to this wonderful genre with TV shows like Star Trek and Stargate SG-1 and movies such a Star Wars (which is technically 'Sci-Fi Fantasy') and a series of films our fanfic is based on: the Alien Franchise, specifically the first movie Alien.

So how do you mix Alien, a slasher film that takes place in a spaceship and contains lots of allegory for rape and sex, and mix it with My Little Pony? Simple: replace the word "alien" with "changeling". Seems good enough on paper, though how does the "Sci-Fi" element fair in this story? Not too well, unfortunately.

At first glance this one-shot seems bad already from its description:

- This is an Alien parody, starring Cal, a rookie marine, and his new partner Bosco. They are aboard the newly established UESC(United Equestria Space Center). Although they are called out due to an unknown attack on a base on the moon, Perision 9. All hell breaks loose, as they struggle to regain control, and keep themselves alive. Twilight Sparkle plays a cameo as a scientist, inventor to assist the soldiers. If you like it or would like to contribute, please leave a comment. If not, don't say anything.

(The grammar of this description has not been changed from its original post. Also, close-minded much?)

The word 'parody' might scare some people off, seeing as there's no tag for Comedy in this fanfic's description page. There also isn't an 'Alternative Universe' tag, so in theory a good author would have to pull a backstory out from his or her ass in order to explain why Equestria suddenly has spaceships and other highly advanced technology. I suspect that 'Callathen' is not one of those good authors.

Our first problem is what the audience sees right at the start of this fanfic: Walls O' Texts, the likes of which could help build a skyscraper. I hard a pretty hard time reading this, and if its one thing that pisses off a reader, its having your story be hard to read. Being able to read is just about one of the most basic things you can screw up, because otherwise its just a mess of characters that probably don't mean anything. I've had more fun trying to decipher arabic. (No offense to those of Arabic descent or whoever speaks/write/reads in arabic or hebrew)

Problem number two? Lack of detail. I know Alien is, at its core, just a slasher movie in space, but the movie delivers exceedingly well on its execution, what with its minimalist soundtrack, believable acting, and tight, dark, and uncomfortable spaces that the crew members in that movie had to move through. There was also a scene involving an alien bursting out of someone's chest, which is freakin' awesome. This author, however, drops the reader right into the story with enough whiplash to made one's head explode. For example, the very first line of this story is "Cal awoke with a fright." Lets go ahead and break this down:

1.  I don't know who Cal is, aside from that the description has told me about him: A "rookie marine". From that lack of detail alone, one would except poor 'Cal' to be cannon fodder, except he's supposed to be our main hero.
2. This is all the detail we're given to this small, hand-waved moment of a rookie space marine waking up from presumably something horrendous into a sense of fright, where his biological response of 'Fight or Flight' kicks in from whatever horror was seen or heard. See, this all speculation on my part, because I just don't goddamn know what all happened.
3. The fact that this is treated so lightly means that this moment presumably has little to no meaning in the end, even though waking up from a nightmare is usually pretty a serious or scary event.

Expanding upon point number three, what makes Alien a good horror film as well as a Sci-Fi film is the overall atmosphere in the film. The film makes you feel scared and uncomfortable, because something dangerous and unknown is after our cast of heroes, who are trapped inside a dark and creepy place. Not once did I feel a sense of dread, paranoia, or any other emotion other than "minor annoyance". I've seen the use of starting out in an unfamiliar place or setting and letting the audience figure out what's going on as they progress through the story before, but its executed poorly here because I'm still left with nothing even with that element of mystery. Also, they use the portmanteau 'brohoof' (which is misspelled in this story with a hyphen in-between 'bro' and 'hoof'). Seriously, author? You went out of your way to use some casual Brony jargon in this excuse of a story. This might be a small pet-peeve on my part, but I'd imagine something like 'hoof-bump' would've worked better here.

The 5th-grader level of detail also adds something else in this story: boring characters. There's a MSPaint-quality picture on the description page of this fanfic describing what appears to be one of the marines in this story in combat, but I couldn't tell you who it was. Cal and his buddy 'Bosco'...Okay, just wanted to point this out: These are names given to human space marines, not pony space marines. Seriously, what's with people giving human-sounding names to freaking My Little Ponies? They sound boring compared to something like 'Firepower' or 'Demolition Hooves'. Cal makes me think of the word 'calligraphy', which this character is not associated with, and Bosco reminds me of Costco. A pony space marine should not remind me of Costco.

Back on topic, Cal and Bosco are interchangeable for all I care, along with all the other space marines. They all act like a prototypical soldier or marine and have little personality outside of 'Space Marine'. With boring characters comes a boring and non-suspenseful story as well, and in my opinion the worse feeling a reader can have while reading a story is boredom.

I also forgot to mention another problem: mediocre grammar. Here's a nice example from sentence one of Wall O' Text #2:

- Cal rose to the sound of people running up and down the corridors and the wailing alarms. Bosco stormed in,"Suit up", he said, slightly scared,"We got contact."

Every sentence in this story feels and reads just like that: Extremely amateur, little substance and flavor, a lack of imagination, and a feeling of being rushed. I'm not sure about you, but I don't like being rushed into things. I'm not sure if the author wanted to get this fanfic out in a hurry or just didn't have the time to really expand this story and perhaps even proofread the damn thing. Maybe this fanfic writer is just an idiot, or maybe he or she is completely new to writing.

Again, I don't know, and I'm not here to judge for the most part. I'm just here to critique pony fanfiction.

As the story progresses on, it even manages to butcher the famous chest-burster scene present in the original Alien movie, along with a sloppy explanation from Bosco about just how and why an alie-I mean changeling burst out of the chest of a scientist, who was "infested by something," meaning anything from HIV to cutie pox with this story's grand amount of detail.

- "Shit!", Bosco shouted, as he grabbed the thing with the his gauntlet, keeping it at a range. "Cal! Look at it!", Bosco said. "Whoa...", Cal said, inspecting it, "What?", Bosco asked, "These... things infest the bodies if organic life forms. But they grow at a spectacular rate".

See, usually people, or ponies in this case, make educated guesses after some experimentation or research, while Mr. Hardcore Space Marine here pulled that little theory out of thin air, which the others in that room make no qualm to question. I mean, that is the case with these changelings, but that was more like a lucky guess rather than a proper explanation. They also explain, again out of the blue, that these aren't your normal run-of-the-mill changelings, but rather mutated changelings that, rather than shape-shift and trap things in cocoons, possibly for 'feeding', act more like the aliens in the Alien franchise.

You know what this is to me? An Alien fanfic dressed up to look like a My Little Pony fanfic. You could replace everything pony about this story with humans and it would still feel just the same. Even the inclusion of Twilight Sparkle in this story doesn't make this anymore pony-related. Ironically, this imitation act is the most changeling-esque thing in this story and unfortunately the only way this story counts as a 'parody'. See, parody involves imitation to some degree, but its usually entertaining. I compare this story to the movie Vampires Suck, a schlocky and overall lackluster comedy that tried to parody the Twilight franchise, but ultimately felt like an even worse movie than the series it was parodying.

With no suspense, character, or actual horror, 'Changeling' is not a story I would recommend for reading, as there are much better horror stories out there, especially in the realm of My Little Pony fanfiction.

~ 30kbpm ~