Today’s story explores a side of Trixie we know all too well, and today’s story explores a side of Trixie we’ve never seen before.

Great and Powerful
[Alternate Universe] [Drama] [Sad] • 3,470 words

With nowhere left to go, the Great and Powerful Trixie finds herself returning to Canterlot, the city she tried to get away from so long ago …

FROM THE CURATORS: Like Trixie herself, there’s a lot more to Great and Powerful than first impressions would indicate.  “This story looks like a typical ‘sad Trixie’ fic at first, as we see her morosely reflecting on her ill fortune and general misery in her old(er) age,” Chris said.  “But a bit less than halfway through, it throws a wrench into the works which caught me totally off guard.”  Present Perfect agreed: “I really want to call this just another Sad Trixie, but I can’t.”  It wasn’t only the twist which impressed us, but also its execution.  “This flows seamlessly between canon and what could easily be an AU, and ends up feeling larger than its word count,” Soge said.

Given our curators’ different approaches to fiction, however, what was most remarkable about this story was how much overlap there was in what we found praiseworthy.  “It makes good use of intentional repetition, and manages to be almost completely opaque about what actually happened without alienating the reader,” Chris said, and Soge echoed his appreciation of that: “There is something kinda vague, almost mystical in its presentation.”  Another point of agreement was the thoughtful use of MLP’s wider world.  “There are also a few really clever inclusions of minor bits of canon,” Chris said, which Present Perfect appreciated too: “I can’t be down on a story that turns ‘Trixie doesn’t trust wheels’ into an immediate, serious issue,” he said.  “And that salt and pepper metaphor! That’s not the kind of thing you ever see in fanfic.”

Neither was the overall tone of the piece, AugieDog thought.  “The word I want to use is ‘elegiac,’ but not in the modern English sense,” he said.  “In Classical Greek and Roman times, an elegy was more than just a funeral poem … it often dealt with endings, but they could be happy endings, sad endings, satyrical endings, et cetera.  Here, we get two endings, both of them happening at the same time and in the same place but both of them at least a universe apart from each other.  And they’re both wonderfully elegiac, the first in a poetic and sad way and the second in a ‘recalling a life well-lived’ way.”

Read on for our author interview, in which Between Lines discusses Arctic trips, Crackerjack boxes, and Slinky Jengas.
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