Warning, essay explaining follows:
 
For my sins, I finished Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons.
 
So, some context I suppose, and partially critique. But to begin this story, I suppose I should talk about my history with Project Horizons. Spoilers abound, if anyone cares.
 
I started reading Project Horizons when I finished the original Fallout Equestria. This was after FoE was finished but Somber was still punching away at Project Horizons. I was making a good clip, generally setting a pace of a chapter a night or something like that. I forget the exact chapter number, even after re-reading the entire story. But it was after tank Deus appeared and when they just got to Elysium circumstances in real life caught up with me and I had to put the story down to focus, and derailing myself I left it aside to linger.
 
Thinking back to that time I remember thinking that Fallout Equestria was a great story, perhaps publishable. Project Horizons also pretty good, it made me tear up. I also knew nothing.
 
Fast-forward from when I stopped reading PH, I got a new job working the night shift. I didn’t have much to my job and I could listen to music on my phone and/or iPod. So with little else to do and not willing to dry up my music I began listening to audiobooks. American history first, then branching out into and beginning my taste in philosophy. I started listening to readings of the classic novels and contemporary ones too, where I expanded my mind as far as literature goes. I will not forget the feeling I had when while listening to a recording of Kenziboru Oe’s Death by Water (which I borrowed from the library and ripped onto my computer) when I figured out what the story was truly about.
 
All the same, eventually I decided to go back and retouch the FoE stories again. I re-read - see: at this point, listened to - the original Fallout Equestria story in the form of its audiobook project. Coming back to it, I realized I held it in far lesser esteem than I did before, but it was still a good book. My complaints were in the grand scheme of things to come: comparatively minor. Kkat had issues it seems with packing the story with gunfights which I felt bogged the story down. And to boot at that the detail she approached these conflicts down really weighed heavily on the narrative. The story could be edited to reduce the amount of gunfights or even to approach them and some other things in a much more minimalist take. Criticisms about how redundant descriptions of actions or sensations can be stretched across the other FoE story I listened to, and Project Horizons. There is only so much one can take of one hearing about cordite for the 100th time and other things which should be taken as a given.
 
I also delved into Heroes, though this was via EquestriaNarrator’s reading of the story which I don’t think is entirely finished. But Heroes is basically forever incomplete now too so that hardly matters. I felt that Heroes was decent and I’ve happily re-listened to it several times over as a time-killer without offense.
 
Then there was my second attempt at Project Horizons, via CrazedRambling’s production. I believed he did a good job, in fact I think about every reader I’ve listened to did a good job with the tools they’ve been given. And I’ve listened to LibreVox audiobooks!
 
But by my second experience with Project Horizons with CrazedRambling, I knew I had issues I never knew before. Somber’s writing felt repetitive, and his choice of phrases narrow. I was annoyed with his constant invocation of “mind” in the thirty-odd chapters Crazed did. And from previous non-fiction readings I had immense qualms at Sekashi’s telling of how Zebras came to be.
 
But I came quickly to the end of that, and with no more of his production of PH, I left it behind me. For a time. I began stretching out my reach some more, expanding my field. Finding new things, picked reading physical books back up in my spare time, and even discovered lectures as my interest in philosophy matured and I began exploring that. I opened up a Discord, and some FoE fans joined so I opened up a section for Fallout Equestria talk. And that’s when I got inspired to take on PH again, this time completely. Actually by the time I was taking on CrazedRambling’s reading is when I think I had the Discord, but I don’t care to cross-reference any dates or the backlogs in the chats to see if I was bitching about the story then as I started to when I made my third attempt.
 
My third stab was with VisualPony, who once after getting used to his accent I settled in. I appreciated his endeavor to add depth and variety with voice work, though it didn’t exactly reach the production values of CrazedRambling. But knowing the size of PH this can be forgiven, because - and if VisualPony ever sees this or anyone sends this along - I can understand the complications of the logistics of taking on a recording of something as immense as Project Horizons. Few narratives reach out into the millions of words and I’m sure there’s very, very good reasons there’s not a lot of audio productions of anything as long as or longer than War and Peace (even if it may be argued there are factors now that mean we’re probably never going to see market published novels being that long ever, even). I was even charmed when VP wrangled in voice acting assistance.
 
But with that out of the way now, the lava hot take on all of PH:
 
It’s the biggest nothing out there.
 
Sure, it’s a big book and the characters cover a lot of physical ground within the story, but to what end? A lot of shit happens, but at the end of the day it felt unwarranted, the long way around to something that shouldn’t ever have deserved the long-way treatment. Somber goes at great lengths to pack in as much as possible but it just feels, empty. Wrong.
 
At several points in the story, especially starting when Rampage enters the story I can’t help but feel that there were a multitude of options of just telling a better story. And other things beyond simple world building issues that would have helped to really hack off a lot of the story’s dead weight. If a story is more than a plot, a theme, then the lack of a clear theme beyond the meme of “Jesus allegory” really drowns the story in itself.
 
Going back to Kenziboru Oe’s novel, Death by Water: What can I say that story is about? Generational conflict. How about video games, Undertale? I buy into hbomber’s analysis that it’s “perverted sentimentality”. Hell, I’d look at Fallout Equestria as being more of a political tale than anything, less a story about a mare bringing selfless justice to the wasteland but organizing it and removing the enemies of the organization of ponies to make their own future before retiring away into the clouds and leaving terrestrial affairs be, which is why I’ve drawn Pip as Le Incorruptible Hellmare of Le Revolution!
 
But I can’t have the same success with PH, because as soon as it picks up something remotely interesting in its own story, it throws it away. I have a friend who tried to do a Anti-Oedipus analysis of PH but got so frustrated he had to throw the project out and while reading it I tried to come to some free-interpretation of the story itself, and I just can’t.
 
Here is where the picture here comes into effect: throughout PH, Somber constantly alludes to souls. Which has to be a thing in the story for some significant aspects of it to work. But never does he try to explore what a soul may be, even when he has two characters whose entire identities and conflicts are just that: based on the soul and what it means to have one, if a pony can. Rampage and Lacunae, and later Boo. But never do they try to figure it out, and even if Blackjack isn’t smart enough to come to any conclusions she is travelling with two others who are smarter but we never see anything from them. In a much broader sense this lack of expression from P-21 or Glory seriously harms their character as they offer little more than unexplained binaries or pats on the back for BJ when she’s down, and the occasional sexual tension.
 
Any attempt to rationalize what a soul is doesn’t happen until much later, after Blackjack suffers her own crisis of identity which would have been another interesting plot of its own: how much does a individual have to change, before they are no longer they? It’s a very Buddhist topic.
 
But by the time Somber comes around to souls, he changes the definition several times. I remember typing out in my discord chat something to the effect of: “FOR FUCK’S SAKES THIS IS THE FIFTH TIME YOU CHANGED WHAT A SOUL IS”
 
At one point it’s said that anything without a soul is a monster. And at one stage at least, Black Jack was without her soul. Does that make her a monster? What about when she goes to the Moon with Luna’s soul and not her own? We get some allusion to how it causes mental instability and her character does change. But nothing is said for identity, or no conclusion seems to be reached as to what. I imagine someone would say it’s something we’d have to figure it out on our own: but Somber doesn’t even provide for us a firm set of points from which to work of off, not like the Socratic Dialogues which do that.
 
The exploration is never done with Rampage, at no point in even walking to somewhere there’s a discussion of it, one which might be said would help her settle her issues before Somber abuses Memory Orbs in the plot to do it. Neither with Lacunae, she just sort of dies. If being an individual comes down to have memories of experiences had, then even in that moment the experience of that moment would have by the slim logic been enough to prove to either: they exist. Boo herself develops this later awareness but it’s not brought up whether she is her own self, or a receptacle for being a Discord clone.
 
<Remainder in source>