For some odd reason I imagine them all going “Nyeeh.”

This is funny as fuck. Even Boo is doing it! XD

@Ascendant 2.0  
I’d gladly talk to anyone about this sort of thing. If you’d like, just ask.

@BlueStroke  
Damn, if I could give awards for comments I would. I’d really like to hear what more you had to say about it and the original FO:E, as it quite interests me and because you partially put into words what I’ve had trouble expressing.

@decumos  
Thank you…  
I really did want to go on too.  
That comment could have been triple the length, seriously. I had a lot more to say.  
I’m currently writing my own FoE fic and am only on chapter three, but so far three is 45,000 words. And that’s after I split it, because it used to be mixed with two… It was a REALLY long chapter. So yea, I write a lot.

@BlueStroke  
I applause. You deserve all the cookies in the world.

@NounVerb  
Ok, geeze… These comments are making me mad to be honest. As someone who considers myself a writer, multi-media analyst, and actual study of psycholgy, I feel my say in this might mean something. (I also drew the image above)
 
Anyway, just gonna start by saying I though PH was great. Simple as that. The notion of overdoing may seem present in the story but overall but people forget the most important part here; there’s a reason everything in this book is done the exact way it is. Somber knew what he was doing and what his plan was from the start. He said so himself he had the entire book planned out before he even finished writing chapter 20. (Apart from the details.) what I mean by that is Somber didn’t just randomly decide to have new things happen on the way. No. He had it all put together early on.  
I constantly hear people saying they stopped reading the story because of ‘things they heard happen later.’  
As a writer… This makes me mad. Almost infuriated. In a mindset like that, NO book would be good if you iust saw something that happens later and judged ot from that. It doesn’t matter WHAT happens. As an analyst I say what matters is how it happens, why it happens, and what does what happens mean for the story. When. I tell this to people the usual reply from some one: ‘Oh but I heard that blackjack…’ And I just stop them right there and say “so?” Why does it matter? They can’t tell me a single detail about the actual situations besides the pedantic rumors or comments they’ve heard from people who look at this book in the wrong way and choose to hate it for many of the wrong reasons. Their opinions are fallacious, their arguments are fruitless, and I give up hope for those people. They are too adamantly ignorant to listen. I hope anyone who reads this does not follow their example.
 
When people say something about another ‘pointless death’ I don’t usually question them. But if I do, I ask one thing. What makes them pointless? Really? Obviously ‘pointless’ has a very specific meaning to it; Without a point. Nothing more. That’s one of the words people missuse widely along with Overrated and ignorant. I’m sure they understand the meaning, but often wrongly use them. Everything in this book has a ‘point’ to it. And it’s not just ‘to make the reader sad.’ While it does do that, it’s to be ‘realistic.’ Yes that’s right, realistic. What people forget is the world they’re living in here. They are living in a world shadowed by its grim past, epitomizing death and darkness as a whole. To kill off characters, do something dark, or anything like that only adds to the author’s purpose. To shape this world in the way that it was meant to done. The world is meant to be as dark as possible. If a bunch of characters didn’t die one could argue that’s unrealistic. To be brutally honest. The characters surviving oast chapter 16 was already a ludicrous unrealistic stretch but again HAD purpose; To symbolize the impregnable force that was this band of misfits when they came together; another point.  
Of course MLP:FiM is based around the concept of the power of fiendships and the benefits of such things. And most FoE stories don’t differ. You see that’s something I’ve admired about FoE; they are able to exemplify friendship in the dsrkest of times. The mane six are dead, but their legacies left echoes. Echoes that are shadowed by our various heroes seen throughout all of our favorite wasteland stories. Blackjack’s team obviously is quite the group… A ‘wandering therapy group’ if I may. Made up of ponies each with unique problems. One may say that it’s poor writing and a ‘simple’ way to make you feel for these crazy characters. But in reality it’s a genious way to show how even the most diverse group can come together and do what’s right (in the end at least.) It allows the reader to see and experience all these diverse and extreme mindsets. It’s a very good way to keep you characters from being bland, 2-D, boring, and so on as well give the reader to think about. Also, I don’t care what people say, the characters are wonderfully written and realistically done despite what one might think. In a wasteland like that it’s only reasonable to assume just about everyone has PTSD for one. And each of the characters suffer from some mental disorder or circumstance such as Rampage’s MPD, BJ’s depression, and so on. There is no argument that they aren’t done well, if not masterfully at that. The way the story goes about schizophrenia, PTSD, depression, anxiety, manic-depressives, self-destruction, altruism, etc, epitomizes them in the spotlight exactly how they should be; problematic. They are meant to seem extreme, to show people just how serious things like these can be, whether bad or good results. (Altruism in BJ’s case can be both.) It doesn’t matter, they’re are well written either way. People get mad at BJ’s constant depressing attitude. But that’s realistic! That’s what depression does to people. It drags you down into a dark place and makes you think. It isn’t a state of mind. It is literally a diagnosed disease and disorder. It blocks and numbs the reactive receptors in one’s brain. A depressed person literally can often be incapable of correctly perceiving and understanding what they are told of it’s bad enough. Depression literally makes your mind focus solely the exact reason you feel so bad and it takes serious will power to overcome the recurring thoughts. Trust me, I personally would know about depression. It’s not something one ever overcomes completely. It’s always there somewhere, really. (Ever wonder why Robin Williams committed suicide?) That’s not opinion or speculation, that’s neurological science. So the way BJ acts is completely reasonable for someone like her. Of course she is on the extreme side of the spectrum but nonetheless purposeful and correct.
 
Here’s my literary Philosophy: It’s not the events that make the story. It’s the character that make a story. It’s how the characters react to the events that matters. How purposeful the characters actions are. How and why did it happen. What does it really mean. THAT’S what matters truly. So stop focusing on the small stuff. Don’t let those things that you choose to hate for some reason bring down the story as a whole. Enjoy the parts that really make it shine. And that’s the characters. That’s the thing I believe makes this story shine above the original in some ways. The original’s characters are often weak and convoluted in ways I won’t bother getting into now.
 
So really, if you haven’t finished reading PH, I urge you to continue. It really is an amazing literary work. But don’t just read it. Remember what I said. Don’t focus on the what, focus on the how, why, and what does this mean for the story. If your favorite character dies get over it. Accept it. It is only realistic for these characters to die. Most though not all of my favorite characters died but not even once did I ever even think about how that would lessen my opinion of the story. In fact it likely heightened it. Not because characters dying makes a story better, no. I’m not stupid like that. Rather how and why they died. It was all very well handled by Somber overall. In the end, they are BJ’s driving force to go on and persevere. “Friendship ascends the grave.”
 
So again… READ THE STORY ALL THE WAY! Maybe you’ll find you’re really missing out on some things by deciding to stop. Just have an open mind and don’t focus on the things you don’t like. And even if you do, try to look past the surface of the event. Maybe you’ll realize it was a better part than you realized. Give it a chance. See the better side of things.  
(BTW, I could have gone one much longer trust me. I was trying to make it short here for your sake.)

@IceKitsune  
Really.
 
Hmmph.
 
I still think the story had a lot of good things going for it for a long time. It’s a shame it kind of fell apart.
 
The big bad scene for the main character suffered from the author trying too hard, and felt like an overexcited 12-year-old making up a character that’s as dark and angsty as possible. It just went so far I couldn’t take it seriously anymore. I also think that reading a grimdark story with lots of bad things happening for so many chapters should be enough of an inoculation to easily weather a Yet Another Bad Thing Happens To Blackjack scene.
 
I respect the attempt at writing a scene like this, but the execution didn’t work.
 
I’ve read the Eclipse scene from Berserk. That’s how you do this kind of scene right.
 
It also strained my suspension of disbelief on what raiders generally were, and how far they were going to go. Their actions weren’t tied to their motivations and character enough for it to be believable. It felt like the author deliberately and clumsily making things bad for the character for the sake of chasing controversy. You want to have raiders that peel the skin off of others in many small pieces to punish ponies who they don’t like? Fine, there’s historical precedence for that kind of behaviour. You want to show the main character in a helpless state undergo a terrible process from a first person perspective? Fine. I’m sure we all remember the opening cutscene of Quake 4. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJwyjWpP4XA] But the way this was done? It didn’t have enough character or plausibility to give the acts any meaning.

@NounVerb
 
Not really IMO because again it felt completely pointless to me so it can’t really be done with dignity. However if I try to take my feelings out of it I guess it’s not any worse than Morning Glory’s death. Which, by the way, I also felt was similarly pointless and was there just to get rid of a plot point he no longer knew what to do with.

:D

@IceKitsune  
Do they at least do that character death with dignity? After I get caught up with Murky Number Seven again, I might be interested in reading PH up to that point.
 
Or until they bring in the “mysterious stranger” character.

@Background Pony #45F4
 
If PH became a cartoon or visual novel I imagine it’d be like Game of Thrones given Glory’s and Blackjack’s relationship.
 
Or rather BJ’s sexual philosophy overall.

PH is a very visual story with some amazing vistas and action sequences. It would be better served by having been written as a cartoon, game or comic book. The first-person narrative is allowed to run amok too often. There’s a lot of navel-gazing and filler that hurts the pacing and would be skipped over completely if it were scripted for visual media instead.

@IceKitsune  
He probably knew killing blackjack every book couldn’t keep the shock and awe factor so he turned his sights on her lovable, sexually confused companions.

@Valiant_Effort  
I liked Scotch Tape (heck I even liked Blackjack) but not enough to keep reading, considering how much I was sick of the story by that point. P-21s death just felt so completely pointless and more like it was a lets screw Blackjack over once again move, rather than a death that had a purpose in the story. It just happened to have been my last straw really.
 
At times it felt like he was trying to emulate A Song of Ice and Fire, but to me while Martin feels like he’s at least trying to be realistic with his deaths and to put forward the whole not everyone would survive in this type of setting idea. In PH it felt like to me all the deaths and most of the bad stuff that happened to Blackjack were more about just making Blackjack miserable rather than anything else.

@IceKitsune  
What about Scotch Tape?

@IceKitsune  
To actually finish my thought: I managed to make it up to P-21s death before I just went “nope you killed off everyone I cared about in this story I’m done”

@AaronMk
 
I actually did like it for quite some time and then Golden Blood came back, it was at that point when I really started to question if I wanted to keep reading it.

@IceKitsune
 
Admittedly I really like Project Horizons, or at least the earlier stuff. “The Boat scene” may have been a good tragic way to end it, but the cyborg stuff that happened later wasn’t bad. I too stopped reading about the time the tank became a thing, and like what NounVerb said, the things that I hear happened later feel questionable to me.
 
And that too is coming from a hobbyist writter, who has a thing going with over a dozen story threads; but that’s all technically one RP so I feel that excludes itself from this argument (and besides, all but one at least indirectly contributes to the central story, the other is just sort of slice-of-life stuff that to me serves to be perspective).

@decumos  
PH was really good until Somber decided that good storytelling involved nothing but bad things happening to the main character, then it became average. After that it became pretty bad when he decided “Hey I know, let’s just kill everybody!” It’s far from the worst fanfiction I’ve read but it’s not anything special that’s for sure.

Oh, come on, PH is awesome.

welp

@NounVerb  
I always kept saying I would go back and try and catch up but that’s probably not going happened.

I was more or less into the story, but things really started to fall apart for me after they got the tank. I’m avoiding details because they’re spoilers.
 
I also heard from conversations, that things get stupid later on, and that the author makes several choices that I really don’t like, including killing off characters I like.
 
A story can only juggle so many major plot threads at once before it collapses under it’s own weight.
 
A real shame. This seemed to really have a lot going for it for a while.

Ah Project Horizons a.k.a. Fallout Equestria: Everyone Dies. Seriously he even kills the main character at least twice.