The above picture is very similar to how I looked after I finished reading this abomination.

I had no hope left for humanity.

I still don't.

Heaven? Hell? Nope, Just Ponies is one of the worst stories I've ever read. Norton Antivirus has deleted this lulz for your protection. However, a copy still exists and can be found by clicking the gdox link seen previously (thanks Iggy).

But I have been charged with reviewing Heaven? Hell? Nope, Just Ponies, of all things, and review it I shall, regardless of the pain it causes my mortal soul. Also, I think this is the longest review I've ever written for a single chapter of a story.

Fuck you all, I did this for you.

First, to start off, let's begin the starting off of the beginning by making an analogy. It's based on music, so you'll probably enjoy this a lot or get really mad at me, or both. Regardless of your faggotry,  I'm a big fan of the band Swans.

Swans is a very grating, ugly group that rejects both the "fun" atmosphere and commercial appeal of modern pop music and the childishly angry "fuck you" ones typical of "dark" bands. What you then have is a bizarre style that does its best to avoid appealing to anyone in the normal sense. It's not fun, it's not all that heavy, it's not "totally satanic and like anti-establishment and stuff, bro"; it's just ugly and unpleasant.

Regidar is also a fan of Swans, but he likes Nirvana, too.

Nirvana was far more pop-oriented (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), so they're much more listenable than Swans. A lot more people like Nirvana than Swans, since more listenable music is often more marketable. Both of them are very different, but both have nearly undeniable artistic/creative strong points that make people want to buy their albums.

There are also people who like Waking the Cadaver, who are these douchebags here:

Waking the Cadaver was a terrible slamcore band that was popular a few years ago and no one today has heard of (and rightly so). They were basically 16 year old scene boys who thought slamming us in the face with violence and sex and bad music were the fucking manliest things you could possibly do. Like Michael Bay's horror remakes--actually, it makes me wonder if there's some kind of common link, since they both appeal exclusively to the penis and are utterly without any kind of redeeming quality at all.

My ranting about music and Bay aside, I will now make three comparisons in the fanfic world that are about equal. Some people, like myself and Regidar, are fans of Fiddlebottoms, a writer who eventually disappeared from the site, most likely due to suicide. He was a very strange person and an incredible writer, but his writings were always impossibly weird and disregarded normal story conventions.

Other people also like Shortskirtsandexplosions, who is basically a normal writer with a lot of talent. Sometimes he gets wanky, but most of what he's put out has been both popular and artistically creative as well.

Then there are guys who are basically the slamcore douchebags of the writing world: impotent, uncreative, ham-fisted hacks, lacking in everything except unfulfillable aspirations, and possessing a sense of maturity and proportionality approximately equivalent to the average of a junior high lunchroom. And then there is The Coywolf.

He has already deleted one of their stories because it got bad reviews (though I never read it, I can say I probably agree with them based on what I know). The only story he has left is Fallen From the Stars, which is a crossover with Star Wars; naturally, the fact that it's a crossover led people to mistakenly assume it's good because the original material was good and upvote it en mass because it was added to the billions of crossover groups that autism built. While I admit I haven't read that one past the first chapter, I doubt anything coming from an antisemitic testosterone junkie with dubious intellectual competence would get that many votes if it wasn't a crossover featuring General Grievous. There are also spelling errors in the summary. gg fimfiction.

But I'm not here to complain about that.

I want to say right now that I genuinely thought coywolf's Heaven? Hell? Nope, Just Ponies was a troll fic when I first saw it. It's that bad. But no, it appears to be serious. I'm not sure what the author was smoking when he came up with some of this stuff. Just the name of the story, I think, should indicate that this is something to be avoided at all costs--But, as some of you know, I have a 10 mile wide masochistic streak.

And the badassness, oh, the badassness. It's loaded with more misfired gun fetishism and penis envy than any story I have ever read, except maybe Silent Protectors. Not that action with guns can't be done well in stories, or that ultraviolence is bad to write--just read something by Kalash93 if you want a good war fic.

But the most devastating blow to the story is really the fact that the author is not a good writer. There are spelling errors, homonyms, and an incredible failure for anyone to act like they're not in a cheap knockoff of Rambo 9000.

I mean, just look at this single excerpt:

"Come back here you BITCH!" yelled a man in a black jacket, running after his speeding green army truck. He soon stopped running and fell to his knees.

"See ya latter fuckers!" shouted Rick at the top of his lungs, soon making his way off of the dirt trail and onto the road. He soon began to pick up speed at 30 miles an hour.

"This. is. THE BEST DAY EVER-" Rick was cut off by a bright blinding light that appeared right in front of him. He then felt some sort of energy flowing through every part of his body. And then, in an intent, he felt his whole body being thrown forward. But was stopped by his seat-belt. He felt the wind get knocked out of him at the impact of him and his seat belt.

"God...What happened." mound Rick as he unlock his seat belt and leaned against the truck's door, witch apparently opened. Rick then fell out of the truck and rolled onto his back.

"God why?" mound Rick. He felt like a concussion grenade/flash bang grenade hit him in the head. His vision was very blurry and all he could hear was a high pitch ringing. He got up, aimed his BERETTA 87 and said.

"WHOEVER JUST FLASHED BANGED ME IS GOING TO HAVE THEIR FUCKING SKULL CRUSHED INTO POWDER AND HAVE THEIR EYES PLUCKED OUT WITH THEIR BRAINS!!!"

I can't even begin to analyze these two excerpts because... where the fuck do I even start? My god, it's amazing how bad this is. You know what, I'll just cut the bitching and go to the very beginning. This is going to be a very long review. I can hear it breaking down the door as I type.

Youtube Video

Earlier I said that the story's name alone should have been a reason for you to avoid it. Well, if you were dumb enough to click on it anyway, here's another reason to avoid it: the summary. Just fucking read it, okay?

    Hi, name's Rick and I live in an apocalypse nuked world where everything is dangerous or dead. But that won't stop me from having a good time... Even if what I call a good time is getting pay back at a gang of well armed thugs. And I get payback big time by stealing their newly upgraded truck, tons of supplies, guns, and enough ammo to keep me happy for months. It just gives me a good laugh to get some good payback... That is, until I drive into a portal and end up surrounded by colorful, crazy (Sort of insane) ponies. Guess what, that's not it! They think I'm a monster that devours foals and kill for fun! Great, just great.

Author's Notes:

    I hope you guys like this story. If you where reading Reclaimer and want to know what happened to it, click here. If you want to know how this story is going to be updated and more, click here. If there's any grammar problems then please let me know. Also, story takes place a week after the events of season 4 finally: Twilight's Kingdom. This story is rated Mature for Gore and Language.

Yeah. To save time, I'm just going to make a list of everything that should have been a red flag after the title and the super-edgy pic had finished processing:

--Half the summary is in a quote box for no reason.

--It starts with "Hi, name's Rick".

--The phrases "pay back" and "well armed".

--In the next sentence, "pay back" becomes "payback", as it also does in the sentence after it.

--The entire summary sounds like a thirteen-year-old talking about a video game he likes.

--"If you where reading".

--"If there's any grammar problems" ("there's" is singular and "problems" is plural)

--It actually links to a blog called "How I make my stories".

Special attention goes to two things:

1. The phrase "apocalypse nuked world". I know what he's trying to say, and what it says on the surface, but trying to parse the literal meaning--that is, what the words themselves combine to mean without any context--is actually so impossible that I almost had a seizure trying to do it. It's like "apocalypse" has become a word halfway between a noun and an adjective, or else he thinks "apocalypse nuked" is itself a phrase that is an adjective. It doesn't make any sense adsadgsafgdshg

2. What the fuck does this guy actually do this crap for? He talks about "pay back" and "payback" three times in three sentences, but he never actually explains what the hell that refers to. He also says "It just gives me a good laugh to get some good payback".

What?

I get what he does: he lives in the desert because... he's a nonconformist... and steals shit from some gang to survive in the apocalyptic post-nuclear world. But he confusingly refers to this as "pay back"/"payback".

Why does he steal their shit, shoot them, then giggle abut it, having forgotten whatever just made him angry enough to murder other human beings? Based on the summary, he's saying he does it for revenge, and then he says he enjoys getting revenge and implies that he actually just likes stealing shit and laughing at these people. If anything, these douchebags should be getting "pay back" at him, not the other way around!

This guy is a complete psychopath, by the way. You'll see.

So after reading all that bullshit, you should have realized that this is going to be monstrously edgy and like dude it's gonna be sooo badass bro. There's gonna be more fucking testosterone than there was in fucking 300.

But you don't truly understand. Not until you've opened it up and seen this:

Chapter 1: The Best Day Ever

Anyway, literally the second line of this story is this enthrallingly stupid list:

1. BARTETT M82 50 CAL. and BERETTA 87.[X]

2. Combat Knife. [X]

3. Gas-mask and Gear. [X]

4. Snack. X

5. Ammo. X

6. Backpack, Supplies, and jacket. [X]

Again, I will make my own list in response to this. It is not a list of everything that is wrong with the quoted material, but rather of everything that is wrong with it that I could come up with in under twenty seconds of analysis. I like to challenge myself.

--He linked to pictures of his guns and knife in the story.

--But he didn't link to pictures of the rest of the gear to make it at least consistent.

--This implies that he didn't care what they looked like as long as people knew what his guns looked like.

--This "My Little Pony" fanfiction links to a website called "killerdillard". Just think about that.

--The guy is living in the middle of the desert in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but he has has super duper tacticool guns

--Including a handgun with a pointless infrared scope on it.

--And a gigantic .50 caliber sniper rifle.

--"Ammo", he says, never specifying what he's low on.

--He needs a fucking list to remember these things, keep in mind.

--Wouldn't "snacks" fall under "supplies"?

That's not all of them, obviously.

I want to give special mention to the fact that this guy apparently chose his character's guns because they looked cool, not because they would be effective for that sort of environment. Why not just get a bolt-action .308 or something? That would be a thousand times more practical for just about any situation than a M82--the latter is designed to be fired on vehicles and equipment and bombs, not people. I could see it being useful in a group, maybe, but as the primary weapon of what he seems to be building as a lone wolf sniper, it's utterly pointless.

He has a severely limited ammunition carrying capacity due to the weapon's caliber, no support to get him more ammunition or kill faggots for him or anything like that, and each thundering gunshot is going to attract more bad guys as it echoes and echoes. What's wrong with a Springfield with a scope on top? Is there too much wood and not enough black plastic?

Here, use this.

Also, he acts like a retard with them later, so it doesn't really matter. Hurkadurr.

"Everything seams to be here. Thank god." mumbled rick, stuffing the paper in his coat's pocket. He then grabbed his guns off of a old wooden coffee table and got off of an old, stained, and a little torn couch. He then put on his backpack on, making a snap as the buckles of his backpack lock together. He then walked out of an old darken wood door, as soon as Rick got done locking the door, he took a deep breath of the fresh cold morning air.

Oh Christ I'm like a paragraph in and I already want to go watch Reality Check make an ass of himself instead of doing this. Should I review his new story after doing this? y/n

Anyway,

Everything seams to be

mumbled rick

an old darken wood door

no speaka anglais

Of coarse this deep breath was taken behind a black Toxin Hazard Gas Mask (THGM for short) that connected with his Toxin Hazard Suite

Thanks we needed to know it was a black Toxin Hazard Gas Mask (THGM for short, you non-military-knowing casualplebs) that connects with your self-insert's Toxin Hazard Hotel Room. One of the things you'll notice, since I'm going to point it out, is that the author keeps using homophones for tons and tons of words. Look at the last one. Suite is not the same thing as suit, god damn it! It's different k. Seam and seem are not the same. Grate does not mean great!

There's some weird, weird, weird shit about the Cold War. He seems to believe that the Cold War caused there to be a lot of toxins in the atmosphere and they only came down the night before when it rained. This is why he's wearing his Toxin Hazard Gas Mask (THGM for short) that connects with his Toxin Hazard Suite. I know, I don't understand it either.

Did I mention the summary is in first person and all this crap is in third person? Why the sudden change? The summary sounds like it's talking directly to you, not some kind of quote or "found" material. But the rest of it is in third person. It also looks like it was adapted from first person in many places. I guess what probably happened was that he wrote it in first person and then somebody told him first person is bad, so he changed it a bit and put a quote box around the summary.

"Perfect day for a sneak attack on those dam thieves."

Or those dam dirty trolls.

According to the narrative, this guy has been planning this attack for five months, despite just implying that he randomly chose the day because it was nice out and he had nothing better to do. He also has apparently been trying to trick those gangs of dam dirty trolls, I mean thieves, into going to war with each other for various reasons (it's italicized in the story and I don't actually understand why, so I'm just going to reproduce it mindlessly), because he thinks it's funny.

Also, he convinced them that he's part of another group "at least 60 miles away". Why 60? Why not 61? Why not 100? Why not 50? Is their boundary exactly 60 miles? What? I don't know, can't you explain some of this autism for once?

Rick had this whole thing planned right down to every signal detail to who would likely win and how armed each group would be. Everything was going according to plan.

The use of the phrase "how armed each group would be" makes me feel like this was written by a 12 year old. My apologies to the author if this is inaccurate, but the entire story literally reads like a Rainbow Six fanfiction I wrote when I was in like 7th grade. There's no consideration towards anything except trying to pack in a bunch of references to how super ultra badass the main character is. How he's cool as ice. How he kills dam dirty trolls and doesnt afraid of anything.

Just sayin'.

Also, I'm exactly three paragraphs into this cancer. Are you fucking terrified?

Three hours of hiking down latter

Yep, that's a fucking scene transition. It exists. I'll let you think of ways to insult it.

The factory was an old, steel rusted, three story building. The factory was a logging facility and was prospering until the war. There where three names that could describe the war in Rick's mind. World War 3. The Cold War. The Apocalypse.

First of all, it's were. Second of all, the Cold War (capped, tCW for short) is the actual name of an indirect conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. Are you saying that the Cold War was different here and there was direct nuclear engagement? Because then it wouldn't be called a cold war.

A cold war is a war in which the participants aren't openly fighting in battle, but rather are doing so through proxies and propaganda. Since an apocalyptic nuclear world war would by definition involve the most powerful nations on earth engaging in direct military actions against one another, it cannot be a cold war.

Who the fuck taught you history?

Here's some advice for people who are writing anything at all. If you're not 10000000% sure of something, look it up! There are only so many dumb errors like "apocalyptic nuclear cold war" you can get away with before it starts to mess with the audience's ability to take what you're writing seriously.

That brings me to something else that I'm going to introduce now and expand on later: we're given no backstory on this supposed world war anyway. That's going to come up later, along with the author's other "big mistake"; or, at least, one of the many, many big mistakes that are, collectively, this story.

But for now, let's deal with one of the other huge mistakes!

There weren't that many patrol as usual. Rick only saw three patrol groups. The groups had five to eight people in each group. They had there particular weapons, like AK-47s, FIVE SEVENs, and M1014s. These weapons where the usual in these groups. But that's not what he was aiming for. Onetime, Rick saw them carrying PKP PECHENEG into the factory. After 30 minutes of playing the waiting and watching game, (as he liked to call it) he saw movement up on on the dirt road.

And no, none of that was changed at all from the original. The pictures, the capitalization, that's all raw from the original. Holy shit, this guy. I can't even. Besides the fact that, being thieves and therefore criminals and therefore not the best and brightest (read: gang thugs hellbent on rape and pillage), they would probably carry less standardized/tacticool weapons around, having likely stolen them from dead victims or military depots... my god.

OP, what were you thinking? Why did you capitalize all the gun names? Why did you feel it necessary to show us what they looked like? Why couldn't you just say "a handgun", "a shotgun", "a machine gun"... and I guess the AK-47 is acceptable since it's so recognizable, but seriously... Are you getting paid to advertise these guns? It's the only valid reason I can think of for anyone to do that, unless they were retarded. And I'm not calling you retarded, OP. I'm just sayin'.

More advice for the budding writer: you don't need to say what kind of gun your character has. We don't care if it's a .380 saturday night special or a goddamn desert eagle with a jewhunter scope unless it has some relevance to the plot. Gun porn is no better than any other kind of porn, and it just makes you look like a fucking mall ninja, okay?

This will be you:

And for the love of fuck, if you really find it necessary to specify the gun... make it at least fit the situation. That should be applied to everything, actually. Never choose anything for a story based on how badass it looks or sounds, especially if it doesn't fit well with the rest of the story. And don't type the names of guns in allcaps with links to pictures of the guns, please. I beg you. We honestly just do not fucking care.

Anyway.

These thieves are apparently killing random people at a factory for reasons I neither understand nor care about. Or they're just blowing shit up for no reason. I guess they're trying to rob the factory for... some reason... which is odd because it's like a logging place I think, but this story doesn't make any sense about anything else and I'd be a little disturbed if it started making sense now. They're doing that, and this guy comes along and shoots them because he's the good guy and they're the bad guys.

Rick Climbed down the rope ladder and ran to the edge of the woods. He then keeled, looking through the scope of his  BARTETT M82 50 CAL. and aimed it at the truck that was killing off the patrol groups. He aimed at the head of the gunner. He pulled the trigger and the gunner fell off of the truck with his head no longer intact with his body. Rick quickly aimed at the driver and pulled the trigger again. The bullet hit the head of the driver, splattering blood allover the trucks windows. The truck a made a quick tern to the right and did some barrel rolls, crushing what was left of the patrol group.

See, I told you he was going to get retarded with his oversized mall ninja weapon later on. Absolutely no concept of how to effectively use a gun beyond imitating the TOTALLY AWESOME scenes he's seen in action hero movies and probably some Counter Strike shit. In fact, I doubt OP has ever fired a weapon in his life--he's probably played games quite a bit, but I sincerely doubt he's ever touched a real gun; he'd probably piss himself with terror if he shot an actual M82.

Also, it's turn, not tern, and lol barrel roll.

His thoughts where interrupted as he heard a fain help me. Rick turned around to see a man on his belly, chocking and coughing up his own blood. He was crawling over to rick, bagging for his help. Rick walked over to him, knelled down and said.

"You know, I heard the same thing come from my Grandpa as you basters tortured him.

I laughed. I actually laughed out loud as I read this for the first time. Then I cried. It sums up the fic so well:

Also, I'm starting to understand where all of these errors came from. I think OP was just unbelievably lazy about writing it, so he used a speech-to-text program to actually dictate his fic to a computer. That's why we have all these homophone errors: because of OP's speech impediment. This is actually supported by the fact that these errors don't just happen once, they happen consistently. Look:

But lucky for you I have mercy on my enemy, unlike you basters."

See?

Grandpa was tortured with a vaginal douche.

Or maybe a baster is some kind of derogatory racist slang word and I'm just missing all the social criticism because I'm a sleazy whore who spends all her time high, drunk, having sex with old businessmen for large amounts of money, or screaming at younger, less successful men over tumblr for having penises, and actively ignores all aspects of reality that do not exclusively serve her ego. Yeah that got a little off track, but it's kinda true in a way.

at that last word, Rick plunged his Combat Knife into the man's skull, slowly twisting it and plucked it out. Rick then stroked his Combat Knife agents the tall dry grass, cleaning the bit's of brain and blood off. He got up and ran across the field to the factory's back door.

I should really be disturbed by how much the author seems to fetishize this kind of violence while continuing to regard his self-insert as the hero of the story. It's the kind of thing that indicates a predisposition towards engaging in a repeat of, say, Sandy Hook. But I honestly can't do anything but laugh madly at this after seeing Rick refer to his grandfather's torturers as turkey basters. It's literally driven me insane.

And it gets more horrifying, too--I guess the author meant his character to be a war-hardened bastard baster with a good heart underneath his gruff exterior. The typical action hero, you know? A good man trying to play by the rules of an evil world that forces him to do evil things. So to show that his character is good under all the emotional armor he's been forced to grow to defend against his surroundings, OP has him execute his enemy's medics for no reason.

Wait, what?

The room had beds along the sides walls, most of them full of bloody bandaged bodies. In the center of the room was a bed with a man in it. The man had his entire right arm torn off and was coughing up blood. Then two man came into the room holding a man on a stretcher. Rick then aimed and fired two shots. They both fell dead to the floor with a bullet wound to the head. Rick then walked through the old factory, aiming his BERETTA 87 at every corner, making sure that there wart any of those basters in his way.

I sure hope there wart any of those basters in his way.

The worst part is that he has no real reason to kill these people other than that he doesn't want to bother not killing them. We've already established that it was the other gang that killed his grandfather (or whatever the bullshit freudian excuse for this psychotic rampage was), so why does he also need to slaughter these people, too?

They obviously have enough humanity to establish a fully functional medical center for their wounded and have done nothing wrong so far, so how are we expected to think of them as the bad guys when Rick just fucking shoots them because they exist?

Rick is a complete douchebag, oh my fucking god.

This character is unlikable. He does all kinds of horrible things, including executing wounded men and shooting apparently unarmed medical personnel, but the narrative goes out of its way to justify this. He has a tragic backstory of having seen his grandfather die, boo fucking hoo. This is presented as a completely reasonable excuse to murder people and be a dick in general. And while it's great to have protagonists with flaws who won't acknowledge their flaws, you, the writer, have to at least be aware that they're flaws in order to write the story well.

The biggest problem with this story is how it's so wrapped up in its own testosterone-filled bullshit that it can't even see past the idea of "I am right because I am the hero". It's a really dangerous way to think, because it creates a dual sense of victimization and superiority at the same time: "I am me, and being me automatically makes me the hero of my life's story, and being the hero means anyone who disagrees with me is a villain, and anything I do to the villains is fine because I am the hero, because I am me."

I'm sure the author isn't that bad, though--he seems alright and likable for the most part. But this character is just disgusting and obnoxious, and unintentionally a much more genuine psychopath than the knife-waving Pinkies that shit up fimfiction stories. That could have been a really amazing character to watch as he's imposed onto a peaceful setting, if the author had known what he was fucking doing, but instead, we have the usual badass whose bad acts the story goes out of its way to excuse.

Another major problem with this that I haven't even touched on yet is the fact that creating and showing an entire post-apocalyptic world is completely useless if you're going to change worlds after one chapter and make it a fish-out-of-water story instead. If, say, Fluttershy had ended up on this empty, destroyed earth, that might have been interesting. If the story had started with ponies and introduced Dick Rick after a little while, with none of his world shown, that would have worked as a character-driven story.

But to make a world-driven story work, you have to make the world relevant to what you're going to show. It's doubly hard with AU stories. And since this dipshit already left the world we were introduced to and went to Equestria, it's no longer so. We have only the outcome of the character to focus on, rendering the introduction of his world a total waste of time. Maybe it would have worked in a movie, but again, this is not a movie! Movie stuff doesn't follow the same rules as writing, because they're entirely different mediums of entertainment.

That's about it for this cancerous assfest. I'm not gonna touch the second chapter, as much as I'd like to dissect the implications of a gun nut using the Star of David as a symbol of black magic. I just fucking can't. Christ, this is so bad. It's one of the worst stories I've ever read in my life. The sheer lack of basic logic is itself frightening and impressive to behold. Maybe I'll review the second chapter of this fic eventually, if Kalash93 doesn't, but I hope he does.

Somebody please read his other fic, Fallen From the Stars, and tell me if it's anywhere near as terrible--I'd expect it probably is, but I can't say for sure because I really just don't want to think about the fact that it exists, much less look at its contents.

To close out, let me rehash the last few lines of the first chapter.

"

"God...What happened." mound Rick as he unlock his seat belt and leaned against the truck's door, witch apparently opened. Rick then fell out of the truck and rolled onto his back.

"God why?" mound Rick. He felt like a concussion grenade/flash bang grenade hit him in the head. His vision was very blurry and all he could hear was a high pitch ringing. He got up, aimed his BERETTA 87 and said.

"WHOEVER JUST FLASHED BANGED ME IS GOING TO HAVE THEIR FUCKING SKULL CRUSHED INTO POWDER AND HAVE THEIR EYES PLUCKED OUT WITH THEIR BRAINS!!!"

Youtube Video