Bronydom Fanfic Reviews: Trust
Today's subject: Trust
Author: The_Incredible_Blunderbolt
Genre: Romance/Drama
Short summary: Rainbow Dash comes out to her friends, which inspires Twilight Sparkle to reveal a secret of her own...
Review: Yeah, it's still a one-shot, but I'm still opening my boundries a little - this one made it on Equestria Daily. So what sort of story makes it past the prereaders?
Spoilers ahead, not because I hate the story, but because the formula's so tight I'm not really revealing anything.
First of all, the formatting is appalling. After the first few sentences, the quotation marks are all glitched and replaced with meaningless symbols, making this story painful to read. Why the author didn't preview the story and try again with a different copy or format is unknown; how EQD's prereaders tolerated it is also a mystery.
As the summary makes clear, it's a shipping fic, and this is yet another fic where Rainbow Dash is the open lesbian; the story opens with her coming out to the rest at Twilight Sparkle's library. Didn't "The athletic tough chick likes girls" become a cliche around the time Billy Jean King won her first title? (Also, she comes out because Fluttershy talked her into revealing it to the Mane Six. That's practically a cliche in its own right.)
The Mane Six all accept it, thus giving us our only appearances from Applejack (the author does the accent passably), Pinkie Pie (who seems to be suffering fandom flanderization into "PARTYPARTYPARTY"), and Rarity (who doesn't get enough dialogue to have a character). They leave as it starts raining, and then Rainbow Dash comes back, saying she can't fly home in the rain...
Wait a minute. Rainbow Dash is a weatherpony. She breaks up unscheduled storms for a living. Wouldn't having trouble flying in heavy rain be a severe impediment to her line of work?
So Twilight Sparkle is more than willing to have RD stay at her home for the night, and they settle in for the evening, Twilight looking for the right moment to say something important. She finds a good book for RD (Spitfire's autobiography) and gives her a gift (an autographed picture of Spitfire - you know, there are three "primary" Wonderbolts, why did the fandom decide Spitfire was RD's favorite? Please don't tell me it's just because she's the girl...), but she can't seem to get RD's attention for long enough. Finally, after dinner, Twilight gets enough time to confess that she's in love with Rainbow Dash.
Rainbow Dash flips out, shouts Twilight Sparkle down, and storms off to the guest room, where she flashes back to being tormented by the other fillies at summer flight camp and being abused by her dam. Spike tries to talk to her, mentioning that Twilight had run off crying after the confession, but it doesn't do much. What does change things is finding notes from Twilight's latest research project - a relationship guide, which makes it clear that she wasn't just making a very tasteless joke about RD's sexuality.
Cue the reconciliation, the reveal that - sigh - Rainbow Dash's mother was homophobic and tried to beat the gay out of her, and that the other fillies at summer flight camp taunted her mercilessly over her lesbian tendencies, and RD offering to take Twilight Sparkle on a date one of these nights. The end.
I have no problems with shipping. I consider myself a devout neutral in the shipping wars (thought if pressed, I must admit I prefer "friendshipping" - stories that present the Mane Six as the closest of platonic friends; I love "The Light in the Darkness" for just this reason). However, this story lays out a few problems with shipping fics - they all seem rather the same. I've seen more than one that presents Dash as the product of a homophobic, abusive childhood, and RD considering a love confession to be a cruel joke is a plot point in what seems to be a third of the stories in which she's half of the main pair (including the well-done "The Party Hasn't Ended").
This one just seems to plod along to its conclusion. There are some high points here and there, but it really can't distinguish itself from the pack in any appreciable way. It has to rely on a questionable means to get its protagonists alone, and it suffers from there (why would RD suspect Twilight Sparkle of making a joke about her sexuality? She doesn't have that sort of skill).
Ultimately, while it isn't terrible, I am left to wonder how it got onto Equestria Daily.