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Surprise In The Candle Light
Two ponies sat across one another at a small, intimate table tucked away in the corner of a restaurant. It was the sort of place that required a tie to get in and maybe a well-greased hoof to get in that century. But nonetheless, the two ponies sat at their table, ivory white cloth draping down, two empty plates, five forks, three spoons, and exactly seven knives accompanied by a single small coffee cup between them. At tall, cream-colored candle stood at the center, splitting the image of one another’s face as the silky orange light spilled across their faces.
The first pony, a stallion with a brown coat and black, slicked back mane dressed in a black dress coat, white dress shirt, and a bowtie—which caused some stir amongst the staff when they arrived for seating whether it counted as a tie, and ancient bylaws dating back decades were invoked to indeed say it did. After all, no one had worn such a ridiculous fashion statement since plaid was in style, and most, except lumberjacks, agreed that was a mistake.
Across from him, a soft-featured mare with a flowing golden mane, a dark blue evening gown and green eyes that popped against her pale blue coat. Coincidently the staff made no commotion over her attire despite most agreeing it was gauche to wear dark blue with a pale blue coat.
The two stared at one another, cheeks resting in hooves—certainly poor enough manners to get them kicked out, but the waiter let it slide on account of his generous tip given beforehand. The light flickered, dancing in one another’s eyes as they fell deeper and deeper into a trance.
A short cough broke their locked gazes, and the waiter poured the two glasses of wine and took his leave.
The stallion chuckled, turning a wide grin back to his partner. Taking the glass with a hoof—which, for some reason worked and no one ever questioned how one grips with hooves—he took a short sip. “Honey, I have to confess, tonight is a special night.”
“I knew it!” Honey—which was her name as well as his pet name for her and did cause a few scenes involving punched strangers—clapped her hooves together. “I know you can’t afford this place on your salary. Whose kidney did you sell?”
He merely laughed, brushing the question off with a hoof. “I swear I didn’t sell any left kidneys for this table.”
She squirmed in her seat. “That doesn’t rule out right kidneys.” Again, she clapped her hooves.
“I swear, your mother won’t miss it.” Daintily, he placed a hoof on his chest. “But I did bring you here for something important besides some playful banter.” With the same hoof, he reached down into his jacket pocket, and again—ignoring how hooves do such—he pulled free a small felt box.
The mare’s eyes went wide as her jaw dropped.
Another short cough as the waiter closed the lady’s mouth for her and took his leave once more.
“Would you marry me?” the stallion asked, his smirk growing so wide it almost popped right off his face.
She covered her mouth, and with a quivering voice said, “I have a small fib I’ve been keeping from you…”
He raised an eyebrow. “Is it that you love me and accept, which will make this stallion just the happiest?”
She shook her head. “I, too, am a stallion…” And with that, her ears folded back with her hoof falling to the table top.
Her partner placed his hoof on hers, raising his eyebrow repeatedly. “I know.”
The first pony, a stallion with a brown coat and black, slicked back mane dressed in a black dress coat, white dress shirt, and a bowtie—which caused some stir amongst the staff when they arrived for seating whether it counted as a tie, and ancient bylaws dating back decades were invoked to indeed say it did. After all, no one had worn such a ridiculous fashion statement since plaid was in style, and most, except lumberjacks, agreed that was a mistake.
Across from him, a soft-featured mare with a flowing golden mane, a dark blue evening gown and green eyes that popped against her pale blue coat. Coincidently the staff made no commotion over her attire despite most agreeing it was gauche to wear dark blue with a pale blue coat.
The two stared at one another, cheeks resting in hooves—certainly poor enough manners to get them kicked out, but the waiter let it slide on account of his generous tip given beforehand. The light flickered, dancing in one another’s eyes as they fell deeper and deeper into a trance.
A short cough broke their locked gazes, and the waiter poured the two glasses of wine and took his leave.
The stallion chuckled, turning a wide grin back to his partner. Taking the glass with a hoof—which, for some reason worked and no one ever questioned how one grips with hooves—he took a short sip. “Honey, I have to confess, tonight is a special night.”
“I knew it!” Honey—which was her name as well as his pet name for her and did cause a few scenes involving punched strangers—clapped her hooves together. “I know you can’t afford this place on your salary. Whose kidney did you sell?”
He merely laughed, brushing the question off with a hoof. “I swear I didn’t sell any left kidneys for this table.”
She squirmed in her seat. “That doesn’t rule out right kidneys.” Again, she clapped her hooves.
“I swear, your mother won’t miss it.” Daintily, he placed a hoof on his chest. “But I did bring you here for something important besides some playful banter.” With the same hoof, he reached down into his jacket pocket, and again—ignoring how hooves do such—he pulled free a small felt box.
The mare’s eyes went wide as her jaw dropped.
Another short cough as the waiter closed the lady’s mouth for her and took his leave once more.
“Would you marry me?” the stallion asked, his smirk growing so wide it almost popped right off his face.
She covered her mouth, and with a quivering voice said, “I have a small fib I’ve been keeping from you…”
He raised an eyebrow. “Is it that you love me and accept, which will make this stallion just the happiest?”
She shook her head. “I, too, am a stallion…” And with that, her ears folded back with her hoof falling to the table top.
Her partner placed his hoof on hers, raising his eyebrow repeatedly. “I know.”
Man, this feels kinda super padded. It's frontloaded with lots and lots of description, there's a few jokes and then it's over.
There's nothing wrong with writing a fic that's just jokes, buuut… if you're going to do that, my advice is to focus on cramming as many jokes as you can in. Put them in every paragraph. Every line. Every few words! The more jokes the better. Consider something like The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy; there's a joke in the second line, and fourth, fifth, and sixth lines. I'm not saying you need to be the next Douglas Adams, but I think the principle is sound: humor is subjective. If you're writing a story that's intended to make people laugh, go balls-to-the-wall with it.
As-is, this is perfectly serviceable description, and I did smile at one or two of the jokes. But on the whole, it just feels sorta weak. If it was a feghoot or something like it - where the entirety of the fic was focused on making the punchline hit as hard as possible - it might be able to get away with it, but yeah.
Still, I was never confused about what's going on, and the dialogue was clear and conveyed character. It's a good attempt, it just needs more oomph of some sort. Thanks for writing.
There's nothing wrong with writing a fic that's just jokes, buuut… if you're going to do that, my advice is to focus on cramming as many jokes as you can in. Put them in every paragraph. Every line. Every few words! The more jokes the better. Consider something like The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy; there's a joke in the second line, and fourth, fifth, and sixth lines. I'm not saying you need to be the next Douglas Adams, but I think the principle is sound: humor is subjective. If you're writing a story that's intended to make people laugh, go balls-to-the-wall with it.
As-is, this is perfectly serviceable description, and I did smile at one or two of the jokes. But on the whole, it just feels sorta weak. If it was a feghoot or something like it - where the entirety of the fic was focused on making the punchline hit as hard as possible - it might be able to get away with it, but yeah.
Still, I was never confused about what's going on, and the dialogue was clear and conveyed character. It's a good attempt, it just needs more oomph of some sort. Thanks for writing.
That trans joke in the end will have many people in a flutter, but I don't know how I feel about it yet. I did like all of the jokes in the beginning, though. They were cute, but like op said up there ^^ it needs a little bit more jokes.
It was very clear what was happening, although, in the beginning it had a cult feel to it??? (Probably just me lol)
It was very clear what was happening, although, in the beginning it had a cult feel to it??? (Probably just me lol)
Comedy based on characters joking around, I think, falls a little flat for a prompt like this one. The back-and-forth is funny, so it works in that regard, but it's difficult to really call a joke a lie. Even if it is a lie in the technical sense, when both parties understand that a statement isn't true, it doesn't fit the essential quality of a lie's intention, which is to deceive.
Without that deception, the plot really isn't influenced, so the statement becomes incidental rather than a part of what drives the story. It adds flavor, but not substance. Take away all the jokes that aren't really changing anything important, and the story here is just, "two ponies sit in a restaurant, one proposes to the other." And that's not a bad story, exactly, but there isn't much to it.
But, and here's where I could be reading this wrong, maybe there's a twist at the end that throws something unexpected. If Honey saying she's a stallion is actually true, now the story just took an interesting turn because now that element of deception is present in a big way. It throws the doors open to so much: how will this change things for them, if at all? How do they deal with whatever does change? Does this dishonesty have all kinds of implications for their relationship dynamic going forward? Are they gonna be okay and withstand whatever comes of it, or is this ship headed for the rocks?
Unfortunately, it's hard to tell if any of that interesting complexity that may have been suddenly introduced really exists, because it's hard to read whether Honey is joking or serious. Maybe that ambiguity is on purpose, or maybe I'm just overthinking things, but I'm left a little unsatisfied because this is one of two very different stories, and I'm not sure which one I've just read. That should be made just a little more clear, and I think this story would be where it needs to be - not that it should be on-the-nose, of course, but just enough to tell what's a joke and what's not.
Without that deception, the plot really isn't influenced, so the statement becomes incidental rather than a part of what drives the story. It adds flavor, but not substance. Take away all the jokes that aren't really changing anything important, and the story here is just, "two ponies sit in a restaurant, one proposes to the other." And that's not a bad story, exactly, but there isn't much to it.
But, and here's where I could be reading this wrong, maybe there's a twist at the end that throws something unexpected. If Honey saying she's a stallion is actually true, now the story just took an interesting turn because now that element of deception is present in a big way. It throws the doors open to so much: how will this change things for them, if at all? How do they deal with whatever does change? Does this dishonesty have all kinds of implications for their relationship dynamic going forward? Are they gonna be okay and withstand whatever comes of it, or is this ship headed for the rocks?
Unfortunately, it's hard to tell if any of that interesting complexity that may have been suddenly introduced really exists, because it's hard to read whether Honey is joking or serious. Maybe that ambiguity is on purpose, or maybe I'm just overthinking things, but I'm left a little unsatisfied because this is one of two very different stories, and I'm not sure which one I've just read. That should be made just a little more clear, and I think this story would be where it needs to be - not that it should be on-the-nose, of course, but just enough to tell what's a joke and what's not.
It took me a while to figure out how to classify this story. On a second read, the comedy seems more solid, but on my first read it often felt like the comedy was interrupting a more serious tale (and the final ... punchline? ... didn't help). For example:
Your first paragraph — and, incidentally, 100 of your 750 words — is pure scene-setting with two things that might be jokes if I squint at them from the right angle. "And maybe a well-greased hoof to get in that century" is breezy in tone; the overly specific counting of the silverware is somewhat absurd. To be honest, the concrete detail my brain most solidly locked in on in that paragraph was the single coffee cup and empty plates — there's an implication there that maybe with the ridiculous price of the restaurant, they're too poor to do more than order a single cup of coffee to share, skipping their meal. But I had to throw that idea out when the story made a point of the stallion's generous tip.
So the first 15% of the story is spent in giving me the first impression that the characters and their setting are the focus. There are one or two mild seasonings of levity, but the fact that the text is focusing so heavily on lavish and very straight descriptions (like them staring at each other past the candle) tells me that you're trying to play it lavish and straight.
There's no verb here, incidentally. Then the rest of the paragraph derails from wherever you intended to go with that sentence after you closed the em dash phrase, and never returns to the original thought.
Author, I urge you to reread this against the context of your first paragraph. You've made such a big deal of setting a serious scene that interrupting yourself four times in a row (the staff discussion, the bylaw invocation, the fashion judgment, the lumberjack aside) is making me question what sort of story you're trying to tell. If the core story is serious and the interruptions are comic, I don't know whether I'm supposed to care about the core story and be annoyed at the interruptions, or whether I'm supposed to treat the core of your story as a waste of time so that I can enjoy the digressions. Neither of those are good choices.
This is doubling down on that same problem. You are literally breaking us out of the story to make a stage-comic-style observation on "Hooves, how do they work?" If I knew that I was just here to laugh, this would be fine. But this feels more like someone leaping up from the audience to interrupt a stage play with a joke about the theater.
Now, it is certainly possible to pull off a David S Pumpkins, and start with a serious setup that you subvert halfway through. However, what makes that work so well is that it becomes immediately clear once the subversion is started that that was the point in the first place. The first David Pumpkins appearance doesn't just fling some out-of-context humor in and return to the previous plot, it gets the characters reacting to him, trying to analyze his appearance to the point that they can no longer be scared by the non-Pumpkins exhibits because they're too busy doing comparative analysis. In this story, while there is some great banter (props for the kidney exchange), I never felt like the humor kicked out the legs from underneath the serious story in a way that let me relax and enjoy the jokes. In particular, the marriage proposal itself is played straight (except for the little digression of the waiter closing Honey's jaw), and her response — disclosing a difficulty that her partner presumably doesn't know about, potentially throwing a wrench in the works of a happy moment — verges on drama:
The drama is immediately defused, but that's a very different thing from ending on a joke:
I just don't know what I'm supposed to feel here. (Never mind the trans-people-as-a-joke angle, there's just nothing particularly funny about him knowing, and I'm not even sure if he does know or whether this is part of the prompt-meeting lies.)
So, if the goal of this story is to be comic — and I think it is — go hard on the comedy throughout, especially at the beginning where you're setting reader expectations. Double down on that banter, which is the best thing about this. Find ways to integrate the comedy into the plot — like maybe have the characters comment on the hoof thing rather than the narrator breaking the fourth wall to point it out.
You did try an unusual delivery of humor here, which is an excellent experiment to do because you can't tell where the lines are without knowing what fails. I hope this helps you refine the delivery in the future, and thanks for submitting!
Two ponies sat across one another at a small, intimate table tucked away in the corner of a restaurant. It was the sort of place that required a tie to get in and maybe a well-greased hoof to get in that century. But nonetheless, the two ponies sat at their table, ivory white cloth draping down, two empty plates, five forks, three spoons, and exactly seven knives accompanied by a single small coffee cup between them. At tall, cream-colored candle stood at the center, splitting the image of one another’s face as the silky orange light spilled across their faces.
Your first paragraph — and, incidentally, 100 of your 750 words — is pure scene-setting with two things that might be jokes if I squint at them from the right angle. "And maybe a well-greased hoof to get in that century" is breezy in tone; the overly specific counting of the silverware is somewhat absurd. To be honest, the concrete detail my brain most solidly locked in on in that paragraph was the single coffee cup and empty plates — there's an implication there that maybe with the ridiculous price of the restaurant, they're too poor to do more than order a single cup of coffee to share, skipping their meal. But I had to throw that idea out when the story made a point of the stallion's generous tip.
So the first 15% of the story is spent in giving me the first impression that the characters and their setting are the focus. There are one or two mild seasonings of levity, but the fact that the text is focusing so heavily on lavish and very straight descriptions (like them staring at each other past the candle) tells me that you're trying to play it lavish and straight.
The first pony, a stallion with a brown coat and black, slicked back mane dressed in a black dress coat, white dress shirt, and a bowtie—
There's no verb here, incidentally. Then the rest of the paragraph derails from wherever you intended to go with that sentence after you closed the em dash phrase, and never returns to the original thought.
which caused some stir amongst the staff when they arrived for seating whether it counted as a tie, and ancient bylaws dating back decades were invoked to indeed say it did. After all, no one had worn such a ridiculous fashion statement since plaid was in style, and most, except lumberjacks, agreed that was a mistake.
Author, I urge you to reread this against the context of your first paragraph. You've made such a big deal of setting a serious scene that interrupting yourself four times in a row (the staff discussion, the bylaw invocation, the fashion judgment, the lumberjack aside) is making me question what sort of story you're trying to tell. If the core story is serious and the interruptions are comic, I don't know whether I'm supposed to care about the core story and be annoyed at the interruptions, or whether I'm supposed to treat the core of your story as a waste of time so that I can enjoy the digressions. Neither of those are good choices.
Taking the glass with a hoof—which, for some reason worked and no one ever questioned how one grips with hooves—he took a short sip.
This is doubling down on that same problem. You are literally breaking us out of the story to make a stage-comic-style observation on "Hooves, how do they work?" If I knew that I was just here to laugh, this would be fine. But this feels more like someone leaping up from the audience to interrupt a stage play with a joke about the theater.
Now, it is certainly possible to pull off a David S Pumpkins, and start with a serious setup that you subvert halfway through. However, what makes that work so well is that it becomes immediately clear once the subversion is started that that was the point in the first place. The first David Pumpkins appearance doesn't just fling some out-of-context humor in and return to the previous plot, it gets the characters reacting to him, trying to analyze his appearance to the point that they can no longer be scared by the non-Pumpkins exhibits because they're too busy doing comparative analysis. In this story, while there is some great banter (props for the kidney exchange), I never felt like the humor kicked out the legs from underneath the serious story in a way that let me relax and enjoy the jokes. In particular, the marriage proposal itself is played straight (except for the little digression of the waiter closing Honey's jaw), and her response — disclosing a difficulty that her partner presumably doesn't know about, potentially throwing a wrench in the works of a happy moment — verges on drama:
She shook her head. “I, too, am a stallion…” And with that, her ears folded back with her hoof falling to the table top.
The drama is immediately defused, but that's a very different thing from ending on a joke:
Her partner placed his hoof on hers, raising his eyebrow repeatedly. “I know.”
I just don't know what I'm supposed to feel here. (Never mind the trans-people-as-a-joke angle, there's just nothing particularly funny about him knowing, and I'm not even sure if he does know or whether this is part of the prompt-meeting lies.)
So, if the goal of this story is to be comic — and I think it is — go hard on the comedy throughout, especially at the beginning where you're setting reader expectations. Double down on that banter, which is the best thing about this. Find ways to integrate the comedy into the plot — like maybe have the characters comment on the hoof thing rather than the narrator breaking the fourth wall to point it out.
You did try an unusual delivery of humor here, which is an excellent experiment to do because you can't tell where the lines are without knowing what fails. I hope this helps you refine the delivery in the future, and thanks for submitting!