Today’s story: Eighty-eight paragraphs.  Two sisters.  One poignant examination of love and loss.

Statistics
[Sad] • 1,042 words

Sometimes, all we need are a few stats to shed some light on a subject.

FROM THE CURATORS: Our shortest feature yet — which barely clears FIMFiction’s thousand-word minimum — illustrates that what makes a piece of fanfiction exemplary is being exactly as long as it needs to be to tell its story effectively.  “Statistics packs a lot of punch for something so small,” Bradel said. “I read this back when I’d just joined the site … I started skimming it to refresh myself, and even that got me teary-eyed.”

Stories that draw emotional depth from the relationship between Celestia and Luna are common, but we all appreciated the novel twist this brought to the genre. “This uses an original device to good effect, and that is exactly the sort of thing I love for us to feature,” Chris said.  Present Perfect agreed: “For all this looks like an accountant’s ledger, it was rife with emotion and ultimately accomplished what it set out to do.”

And what it accomplished was to imbue those numbers with gravitas — a remarkable feat, considering that the story contains nothing but the titular statistics.  “The typical abstraction of large-numbers math is that ‘one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic’,” Horizon added.  “This is worth reading simply for its inversion of that.”

Read on for our author interview, in which xTSGx discusses moral debates, lion mercenaries, and the Great Hnnnng War of 2012.
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