Our Day in Disdain

Our Day in Disdain
Writer(s)	Rainb0w Dashie
Status	Incomplete
Type/genre	Slice of Life, Horror, Tragedy
Featuring	Rainbow Dash, OC, Mane 6
Story link(s)
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“All plant seeds kind of look similar. They share many traits. You put them in the soil, water them, and provide sunlight. They grow, but they don’t always grow up to be the same. It could be just as well that when the seeds have sprouted, grown up to be six feet high, is when you realize that they’re completely different and share not even a single trait.” - Lesson from Celestia | Part 5

As Rainbow Dash prepared to return home from the Wonderbolts on winter leave, she expects to attend the gala and spend the rest of the winter season relaxing with her friends. Instead she receives an urgent telegram summoning her to Ponyville where she is greeted by an angry mob and a shadow of her past. When it starts to threaten her friendships, Rainbow Dash realizes just how dangerous the situation is, and is forced to confront the ghosts of her past and the life she left behind. Lest the one she built for herself crumbles in her hooves. We all have days we feel we can’t survive. Sometimes our dreams are crushed. Sometimes our friendships fall apart. Sometimes the ones we love betray us. Sometimes sickness overtakes us and we may even lose the ponies we love. One thing that is guaranteed is that we all have our day in disdain.

Author's Note

Our Day in Disdain is a MLP fan-novel written by author Rainb0w Dashie. Conceived in June of 2011, inspired by the popularity of Pen Stroke’s Past Sins and Sargent Sprinkles Cupcakes, Our Day in Disdain was sidelined in pre-production for the next two years as Dashie worked on developing a synopsis and ironing out several plot-holes created from the first rendition of the story.

The story is considered to be Grimdark, Sad, and Tragedy according to the brony fandom’s jargon, but as any story it also has it’s fair share of cute, humorous, suspenseful, bittersweet, happy, and heartwarming moments. So the genre tags shouldn’t be what turns you away from the story.

For those curious readers, the actual genre of the story is Psychological Horror with a little Dark Romanticism and Gothic horror mixed in, and more information about these genres can be found below. I hope you enjoy reading my story as much as I do writing it.

-Rainb0w Dashie

A Little information about Psychological Horror:

“Psychological horror is a subgenre of horror fiction that relies on characters’ fears and emotional instability to build tension. It typically plays on archetypal shadow characteristics embodied by the threat. The elements of psychological horror focuses on the inside of the character’s mind. This includes emotions, personality, mental attitude of individuals, where characters are in a perversive situation that includes high-level immorality, inhumane acts, and conspiracies.” For more information, click here. A Little information about Dark Romanticism:

Dark Romanticism is a literary subgenre that presents individuals as prone to sin and self-destruction, not as inherently possessing divinity and wisdom. G. R. Thompson describes this disagreement, stating “the Dark Romantics adapted images of anthropomorphized evil in the form of Satan, devils, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and ghouls.”. Finally, whereas Transcendentalists advocate social reform when appropriate, works of Dark Romanticism frequently show individuals failing in their attempts to make changes for the better. For more information, click here.

Honorable mention to descriptionari, as thanks for all the times their website helped me find jumping off points when I was fighting my way through writer's block and learning to write this story.

Plot

[summary outside of fan reception]

Reception

Praise

Present Perfect Paid Review - Jan 28th 2021

Fimfiction Fic recs, January 28th!

It all started going wrong when a mare called Dashie returned to Ponyville. I'm very thankful to this story's introductory author's note, which has a short definition for "Dark Romanticism". One of its ideas is that people are inherently sinful rather than inherently good, so it prepped me to read a story that goes completely against everything MLP:FiM ever stood for. Not that I haven't read things like that in the past, but you get me.

Anyway, this is a very dark piece, with a lot of mystery to it. One of the biggest things I wondered about was Rainbow Dash: she's all over the description, the tags, even the cover art, but until the last published chapter, the story is focused on Rarity, Twilight, Sweetie Belle and Pinkie, and Rainbow barely gets a mention. The big questions, of course, surround this "Dashie", and we get some clues to start piecing things together before Rainbow shows up to answer a few. Dashie has been banished from Ponyville after doing some kind of wrong to a few of Twilight's friends, and while what she did in the past has yet to be answered, what she's returned for is another big point of contention. The CMCs take a big interest in her and are continuously told to just forget her, or that they're not old enough to know, which was a really effective method of keeping my interest up as well.

As I said, this is quite dark, and includes a lot of ponies crying and being hurt. By the end of the first part, Cheerilee's blind in one eye, Dashie's had her nose broken among other wounds, and Twilight is paralyzed from the neck (or shoulders?) down. <.< And the plot just barrels ever onward, which brings me to the writing. The scene-setting tends to be good, and I appreciate that we're shown a lot more about Dashie than we're ultimately told. But there's a lot of editing and proofreading mistakes, which is the really big downside here (assuming the dark stuff isn't a barrier to entry, of course). Despite this, my interest is still piqued just enough to want to continue, though a scene with Applejack clearly lying about her knowledge of Dashie was almost enough to break my resolve. This is an odd commission, because I have to end the review with:

Incomplete

Development History

otherwise known as development hell (section is WIP, will be filled to proper wiki page completion soon, don't mind the mess)

Inspiration

The budding 2011 mlp fandom,

mire, backdraft inspiration from concession comic

First Draft: The Equestrian Exile

Written while in (now defunct)Flankbook's skype group and early fandom facebook groups

Ponygoons and first submission to Equestria Daily

brought story to Pony+ community after pony purge in 2011 on facebook brony accounts submission to eqd, bad review, repsosne to bad review, pre-reader posted to /co/, brought into Ponygoons (now Round Stabkle Forum) IRC room and made fun of for reactions to criticism, would make fun for days, threatened to re-write the story as their own, they followed development until blog post whebn changed name to Our Day in Disdain

Name Change to Our Day in Disdain

Named after poem of same name wrote in high school [quote of poem]

MLPLounge, MLAS1 and fixing Our Day in Disdain

brought story to reddit after eqd review, entered into new stage of development during 4 year stay in reddit brony communities, story missed critical window to be posted to fimfiction due to fear of trainwreck explores (explaind in 10 year blog) and theri association with MLAS1

2015 - 2019 Hiatus

story put on hiatus as author persued a vending career inside mlp conventions, Waiting for you (link to wiki) was written in this timeframe, so to was the ratification of the rainb0w mythos(link to wiki) in which this story resides inside an alternate timelime that still follows the same universe rules set forth by the mythos

2019 revival

story revived and finally brought to fimfiction, met with reductive criticism (link to criticism once receptiohn section is finished)

2020 updates

part 1 of the story enters an intensive round of edits to shake it loose from the "trappings of a 2011 era google doc" and some of the Dashie sectiosn were rearranged to try to make flow better

Return to pre-production

story returned to pre-production with much of part 1 being revised/expanded to eleminate aformentuion flow problems, dashe sections were re-rearranged to author's liking

[list changes to story here, ex (x part of chapter 1 underwent the following changes)

Inspirations

misc

2012 news article