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Starlight Glimmer and Sunset Shimmer Are Dead
[Comedy] [Crossover] [Random] • 3,837 words

Two magical prodigies cast in Twilight’s shadow stumble about in somepony else’s story and try to find meaning in their lives.

An affectionate parody of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Which is in itself an absurdist and existentialist parody of Hamlet.

FROM THE CURATORS: With many of our featured authors, we face a difficult choice of which of their RCL-quality stories to spotlight — and in this case, we decided that good things come in small packages.  “I’ve been trying for months now to work up a pitch for either of Oroboro’s 100,000+ word epics, The Heart of an Author or Fractured Sunlight, but this story displays all the author’s positives without making anyone take a week off to read it,” AugieDog said.

Chief among those positives was Oroboro’s way with words.  “My favorite part of this is how the dialogue changes when it stops being ‘their story’,” Present Perfect said.  “Everyone talks like an overblown stage actor; it’s quirky and marvelous and just a fascinating way to show what’s going on.”  That deft touch extended from the small touches to some larger ones.  “This story certainly chooses its fourth-wall breaks well, and every one of them got a grin out of me,” Horizon said.  “The narrator judging the story with ‘Then she galloped off to save her marefriend or whatever’ was a great blend of subtle and satirical.  And I love that it effortlessly shifts back and forth from that sort of hilarity to sober discussions of stories and our role in them.”

Our biggest debate was over how authentic this was to the source that it drew from.  “This does just enough to distinguish itself from R&GAD to be a fresh take on the subject,” Chris said, “but I don’t think this makes any cogent statement about secondary realities or fictional existence the same way the source material does.”  To AugieDog, however, that was a positive: “This takes the idea of the existential metadrama and makes it absolutely Pony,” he said.  “Yes, Starlight and Sunset come to realize that the story they’re in isn’t about them at all, but their reactions to this state of affairs are nicely free of angst, and the ending gives the two more leeway than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern get in the last scene of their play.” And Horizon thought this was best evaluated as its own story rather than as a statement on Stoppard’s play: “Whether or not this is meaningful in the meta, it’s profound in the small and does make a statement in the large.  Like any good crossover, it stakes out ground of its own in between its two sources.”

Read on for our author interview, in which Oroboro discusses normal speaking voices, great lunches, and Japanese-accented orcs.
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