Twilight stars — reluctantly — in today’s featured story.

Twilight is Annoyed
[Dark] [Tragedy] • 2,429 words

Twilight has been alone for a long time. She’s not sure how long anymore, but the color of the sun is giving her some ideas.

Twilight stopped dreaming a long time ago, but she is now plagued by visions. Visions of the past. Visions of the worst moments of her life.

Twilight is feeling really annoyed right now.

FROM THE CURATORS: As longtime ponyfic readers, we are always looking for something a little different — so when Present Perfect noted in his nomination that “I can’t say I’ve read a dark fic quite like this before,” the strong execution of this story’s style brought us around to quick agreement on its feature.  “I’ll call it another example of Pony horror done right,” AugieDog opined, while Soge praised its freshness: “It is a clever idea, a more-or-less by-the-books take on ImmorTwilight that still manages to bring something new to the table.”

That novelty was in this story’s memorable depiction of its protagonist.  “I really love how the author chose to represent Twilight, and establish her inner conflict,” Soge said, and Horizon agreed: “The way this pulls off its slow reveal while keeping Twilight broken and unmoored is a big thing right.”  The prose was a major contributor to that.  “What works best is the sentence structure,” Present Perfect said.  “So many begin with ‘Twilight’, which just drives home how alone she is. Her actions are choppy, there’s little in the way of transition from one to the next, which along with her constant repeating of actions sells her fractured and damaged mind.”

Oddly, we found ourselves approaching the story’s laconic, direct style rather differently.  “A little more subtlety would have gone a long way here,” Soge said.  “However, it is a striking, memorable fic, able to convey much through style and atmosphere.”  AugieDog admired its restraint, though: “The way everything’s so tamped-down here — the emotions, the language, the storyline, the grammar — it just all works really well.”  And Chris disagreed with them both: “I say, there’s nothing wrong with hitting the reader over the head with a two-by-four as long as you let them hold the wackin’ stick themselves,” he said.  “Subtle? No. But even as it abandons nuance, it still gives the reader freedom.”

Read on for our author interview, in which Protopony350 discusses breadcrumbs, robot obsessions, and double-necked guitars.

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