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Keep Pretending · FiM Minific ·
Organised by RogerDodger
Word limit 400–750
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The Beast With Your Face
You compromised on the location.

You'd been away from Equestria for so long, after all. It didn't feel right to drop so suddenly back into high-society Canterlot. You had envisioned a small ceremony, a simple affair in the little earth pony village you grew up in. You'd even picked out the perfect, cozy little bower. Just you and Shiny and some close friends and family.

Aunt Celestia quickly shut that idea down. "You are a princess, Mi Amore. You are marrying the Captain of my Royal Guard. This will be an affair of state." Her tone of voice did not brook disagreement. A formal wedding it was, then; directly on the castle grounds.

You compromised on the dress.

You'd paged through all the bridal catalogues. It was all lovely, of course; yards and yards of silk and lace and chiffon, nothing to spark the imagination. But the photograph of the bride who approached the altar wearing nothing but her own coat of fur and a few wreaths of yellow roses caused your breath to hitch in your throat. "A Natural Wedding!" the caption had crowed. Yes, you'd thought. This one. This is it.

Naturally, it was decided that you would wear a proper bridal gown. The designer was Rarity of Ponyville, a smart, chic, up-and-coming young designer who also happened to be a national hero and savior of the realm. You quietly suspected a bit of tit-for-tat—broad exposure of your work at the wedding of the century in thanks for pulling Equestria's chestnuts out of the fire—but no friend of Twilight Sparkle's could be all bad, right? So you boxed your own idea up and put it on a high shelf and quickly stopped speaking of it. Raising a fuss was never the polite thing to do. It was unbecoming, you thought, of a pony of your station.

You compromised on the bridesmaids.

Diamond Rose and Lemony Gems, your old friends from Academy! You hadn't seen them in years! Certainly, they would be ideal; but before you'd even had a chance to mention their names you were informed that a trio of proper court mares had been selected for the ceremony, and that was that, you guessed.

Perhaps it was inevitable that, at the end of this road, somepony had taken your very identity from you, and the groom—your beloved Shiny!—along with it.

So, there you sit, in your miserable crystal prison, listening to the chitinous abomination titter to herself about her flawless ruse. How she—even though none of it ostensibly even mattered to her—had loudly demanded, and gotten, the dress she wanted, the cake she wanted, the entertainment she wanted. Somehow, the monster had received everything her black heart desired, down to the smallest detail. When she approaches the altar tomorrow, her face will be the only false thing about her.

Your heart quails for the future of Equestria, and for the fate of the poor stallion you love more than life itself. But for the first time since this terrible ordeal began, an odd and treacherous thought crosses your mind:

Which one of you is truly the impostor?
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#1 · 2
· · >>Bachiavellian >>Skywriter
I started this fic thinking, "oh we all know how this story ends"
but by the end I was pleasantly surprised!

This is an interesting character piece on Cadance, told in 2nd person. It puts a new spin on her experiences, and I like how it's set up with such simple clarity. There's not much to debate on this one, it tells its message and it's done. Very effective as a minific.

The one flaw that bothered me might be the intro. Celestia seems uncharacteristically forceful, and it rubbed me the wrong way at first.
#2 ·
· · >>Skywriter
Gotta say, this one doesn't grab me.

The reason for that is, it doesn't really jive with canon. It's really difficult to imagine that Princess Celestia, who eschews formality whenever possible, would force Cadance into a more formal wedding if she didn't want it. Also, by "a trio of proper court mares", do you mean the group including Lyra and Minuette? Because they're not exactly proper, and Lyra doesn't even live in Canterlot.

These would be minor continuity issues, except that these are the exact impositions which Cadance is resenting. When the things that are causing the conflict of the story don't actually make sense, that kind of torpedoes the fic as a whole.
#3 ·
· · >>Skywriter
Unlike Love is the Answer, I don't think the 2nd person perspective really adds much to the story, and it did make a couple of sentences feel a little heavy-handed to me, like the "Your heart quailed..." sentence. And I do have to agree with >>Haze that Celestia comes off oddly. This is probably compounded by the fact that she has the only speaking role in story that is otherwise entirely internal monologue. Upon re-reads, it does feel out of place.

Still, I liked the structure and motiffs, here, with the strong repetition and the parallel sentence structures. It allows the themes to come across very clearly, which is very hard to do in a minific without being hamfisted. While I don't agree with everything this story tries to do, your execution is definitely clean.
#4 · 1
· · >>Skywriter
Echoing the above, I think a more reluctant Celestia ("I know it's not what you want, but we have to do a big show for the sake of city/national morale", or some such) would have fit, but otherwise I was on the train, first-class ticket in hand for this concept. Cady as the opposite of a Bridezilla—a Bridegekko, if you will—is a really cool concept that I've not seen before. Doesn't totally jive with canon, but that's okay sometimes for the sake of executing an interesting idea. The contrast between Chryssi getting everything she wants and Cadance getting nothing is a hard hitting parallel to real life, intended or not, and I appreciate that too.
#5 · 3
· · >>Aragon
Most controversial? I'll take it!

Thanks to >>Rao, >>Bachiavellian, >>R5h, >>Haze for weighing in. The major repeating complaint for this one seems to be perceived OOC Celestia, and I will fully admit that my practically-unconscious-at-this-point headcanon for Oldest Princess may be getting in the way of peoples' enjoyment. This should probably be analyzed.

On the other hand, I will also fully admit that this is a story about my own wedding, not the actual Royal Wedding in canon, so discrepancies will exist.

It is always interesting to me what level of authorial distortion is judged acceptable for each individual character. You can write Twilight Velvet any way you like, even though she has a canon personality now, and no one bats an eye; but start presenting alternate versions of Fluttershy and you can almost hear the doors slamming shut. Perhaps it's just the fact that main characters have that much more screentime so you've got more time to develop hard opinions? I've been thinking it over quite a bit lately.
#6 ·
· · >>Skywriter
>>Skywriter
I think the issue (for me, at least) was less that Celestia was re-imagined as something different, or rather portrayed in an alternative way, and more that this difference that you're setting up doesn't really hold up long-term?

As in, the genre of exploring the hidden depths of a character or set of characters during a given scene is as old as fanfic itself, and taken as that, this story's good. But the problem is that we have seen more of Cadance after the wedding, and this interpretation of her relationship to Celestia/her own princesshood doesn't really... mesh well with that?

Like, I read this and I went oh hey, that's a cool reimagining of what Cadance was feeling when all this shit went down. But then you try to place this Cadance in the rest of the show -- that time she visited Twilight, the whole Crystal Empire thigamagig, how she's raising her daughter, etcetera -- and you don't get anything different. There's no sense of irony, or tragedy, or relief, or anything. Like, to give a shitty but easy example: if she spent the entire fic here going 'golly gee gosh I sure fucking hate children I hope Celestia doesn't force me to have one' we would think of Flurry Heart and go ah-hah, see, that puts everything under a new light.

But as it stands this one only works if Cadance's story, canonically, only goes all the way up to the wedding. As far as that goes, this reinterpretation is neat. But seeing how Cadance is ingrained in the mind of the reader as a character who, in the future, will certainly do a series of things that seemingly have nothing to do with this hidden depth you gave her -- it all ends in this kind of '...okay? So what?'-ish sorta feeling.

Story was well-written and stuff, but yeah,I think it was less OOC regarding Celestia alone and more a lack of perceived purpose to the alternative interpretation of the characters and relationships, when put in perspective. This doesn't feel like it's the same universe as the show, because we can't follow the logic trail that brings us to seasons 3 to 8. And because we're already feeling a modicum of disconnect because of that, Celestia sticks out harder (and is easier and more intuitive to point out as the 'main problem').

Or, uh, unno. My two cents. Been thinking a while why this story feels off, case you can't tell.
#7 ·
· · >>Aragon
>>Aragon
I am flattered to at least have had it stick with you enough to mull over!
#8 ·
· · >>BlueChameleonVI
>>Skywriter
It's a great story! It just kept bothering me why I wasn't liking it as much as I should, 'cause I dug the execution a lot but it kept nagging me. I was like, mulling over this while in the shower. Getting shampoo all over me eyes and shit, so focused I was.