@Niggoslav
 
You sure are passionate about your hatred of Horizons.

oh I may have forgotten to mention that, but Somber makes Raiderism like AIDS. Hey, you can’t spell raid without AIDS! amirite? 8D  
So yeah, as soon as raiders enter Stable 99, you just know shit gon go down later.
 
Also it has way too many goddamn government conspiracies. Unlike FoE where a lot of the mystery balls are just fun looks back at how the war was progressing and unessential to Pip’s quest, EVERY SINGLE ORB that blackjack finds is necessary to read through, somehow she manages to find ONLY those orbs pertaining to her quest and all the crazy black ops projects Fluttershy’s ministry got itself into (and Sanguine or Goldenblood were involved in) by trying to prevent ponies from dying without realising the old Lovecraftian staple of nearly everything you can find to prevent it being worse than dying. Way to fucking go, all of you.

Blackjack vapes her own stable. Twice even, technically.  
First, the ponies that got raped by raiders become raiders. Then they’re killed in a big epic grorious battel against the rest of the Stable. BJ’s stable has always had food shortages, so EVERYTHING goes into the recycler, even dead bodies. After being told they have to burn these bodies instead, the new overmare agrees. But the command doesn’t filter down. The bodies wind up being recycled anyway. The rest of the stable becomes infected. Then BJ sabotages the filtration system, combining it with the recycler, to produce chlorine gas, and finishes vaping the rest of the stable.
 
Yeeeeaah, Blackjack, you could have handled that one a lot better.
 
Basically Blackjack is the worst hero ever. She never never NEVER does something right except by pure accident. Every single time she tries to save someone, she makes the wrong choice in a moral dilemma, or is too stupid to realise there are other choices, and hundreds of ponies wind up dying.
 
Her kill count is TWICE that of the main bad guy’s. And the main bad guy is an insane mad scientist Mengele-esque giant ghoul pony who breathes radiation like a goddamn dragon. You have to fail pretty goddamn hard to beat a badguy like that in total kill count.
 
Also every single character.  
EVERY SINGLE ONE  
NO MATTER HOW YOUNG OR OLD  
IF THEY ARE A HERO THEN  
RAPE AS TRAGIC BACKSTORY  
In one case it’s even one main character raping another.  
And suicide attempts every few chapters, goddamn this bullshit, goddamn it to Tartarus!  
Oh and one of the characters becomes effectively immortal and unkillable at one point.  
Do you think she does something useful with it like leap in front of disintegration rays and grenade guns?  
No she cries about how painful living is and how cursed she is that she can’t die, and she also has the souls of the previous talisman holders inside of her and oh god they make me crazy and they made me kill my own filly waaahaaaaa ;-;.
 
GODDAMN THIS PIECE OF SHIT, AND EVERYONE THAT CLAIMED IT WAS BETTER THAN FoE, I’LL FEED YOU ALL TO THE ROCK CRUSHER
 
Basically if anyone tells you you will enjoy Project Horizons as a worthy successor to FoE, shoot them. They are lying, and some insidious mutant form of parasprite. Or they’re emo-loving DA hipster/troper little girls who think sadthingshappen = WRITING GOLD FOREVER  
“lk tis story if u crai evrytiem!”
 
I read FoE in two days. Writing fumbles and typos aside, quite enjoyable. You can feel that there’s a lot of ‘heart’ behind what the characters do, even when they do wrong. And the bad guy is simply somepony so fed up with the lolrandumb violence of the wastes he is going to do worse in order to A: build a respectable capital for a new empire and B: become a god, so he may micromanage civilisation back on track. He’s Ozymandias meets Ra’s Al Ghul. All ends justify any means and all that. And like Master, The Goddess thinks the wastes are survivable as-is if everyone simply stopped whining so much about conversion into The Unity (ie lets all become alicorns instead of super  
mutants)  
As a hueg fan of the original Fallouts I kind of feel I appreciated what was attempted more even, than one who simply came in at 3 and worked backwards (or not at all)
 
By contrast, the heroes are so incompetent in PH (STOP HELPING US!), the badguys so ludicrously evil (We’re talking B-movie Hammer Films evil too. Sanguine, foals-in-rock-crusher-guy, is like Berserk’s Ganishka, and Deus is a gigantic rape-happy cyborg who does nothing but yell CUUUUUUNT!!!! a lot, and Steel Rain is basically Steel Hollywood Nazi, and Lancer is a fanatical idiot) that it took me I don’t remember how long but at least 3 weeks. Every 10-15 pages I had to stop and collect myself because someone just made another huge bullshit what-the-fuck move and I had to just put it away, curse like mad, and twitch uncontrollably until I slaughtered the entire city in Saint’s Row once again.  
Oh and there’s a hospital full of creepy murderous children too, if all the ‘constantly failing heroes against comically dark villains’ aren’t grimdork enough for ya yet.
 
I seriously can’t get over what a monumental fuckup Blackjack is. I mean goddamn, Vash the Stampede is less destructive, and he’s a walking nuclear arsenal that can be mind-controlled. And if you become FRIENDS with Blackjack? And you aren’t from her stable pre-gassing? Yea, buddy you just signed your death warrant. And that of everyone else you knew too. STOP HELPING US!

Read it, loved it. One might say it has flaws, but that didn’t keep me from experiencing a nigh-literal afterglow for two or three whole days after finishing the last sentence.

People need to realize overrated is not a synonym for bad. I haven’t read F:OE but have heard a lot of praise for it.

@Smartz
 
Grimdark for the sake of being Grimdark bugs the shit out of me.
 
Its like they can’t figure out how to make something compelling unless someone is either brutally raped or killed.
 
And this is coming from a guy who liked the Elfen Lied manga. If you know what that is then yes I guess I’m being kinda hypocritical. If you don’t well then suffice it to say that that manga has some fucked up shit in it.

@Yorec  
Well, I think a detailed rape scene is kinda grimdark, if you ask me. Combine it with some chapters of Killing Joke, screaming rooms, killing children, etc., you get a steaming pile of grimdark.

@Niggoslav
 
Horizon is that Grimdark eh?

After reading the other comments, I have one thing to say who think it’s overrated: Haters gonna hate.  
Seriously, you are picking at straws here. It is not popular because of its grammatical genius (which is irrelevant, seeing as the protagonist is the one narrating, so I think colloquialisms and grammatically incorrect speech is allowed), it is because people like ponies and people who like Fallout and people who like to see ponies in grim-dark dramatic situations love to read ponies in a Fallout setting. The only people getting a profit out of this are the printers and binders for their services, and neither Kkat or the people heading this feat is seeing a penny.
 
Some people do things for the sake of doing it, and if you are going to criticize, go ahead, but saying it is overrated is a bit silly, as no one forced you to read it, you didn’t have to pay anything to read it (except for your internet provider, of course) and the fact that you did read it all the way, I assume, shows that you had to have SOME interest for it at all. In the end, it’s just a fan fiction, literature someone decided to write on their own free time with an idea of “what if” stuck in their head and needed to vent it out somehow. Kkat used her knowledge of the Fallout series and My Little Pony and made a fiction of epic proportions and regardless of what anyone says, that is a fact.

Not the most overrated at all.  
In the end this was really a good fic.

I agree on the Project Horizons bit. I couldn’t stomach it past the third chapter, it was some of the cheesiest writing I have ever read. Every other line was Black Jack having a new moral dilemma.

I’m sure it’s good, but it is too long. I simply can’t read it. I’d never finish it and I hate unfinished things.

No. Fallout Equestria may not be one of the great classics of literature, but no f**king way can it be called overrated.
 
Kkat bloody made a fic that is much longer than LoTR. THAT takes dedication and effort.
 
I applaud her for FOE, and it has brought me many hours of entertainment, and even tears.
 
It is simply your loss for not even giving it a try.

oh, the bitchy guy made a good post while I was busy outlining my bigass mistake response. I kind of feel in certain parts where Pip makes bad choices she feels like she’s a PC making the balls-out stupidest choices possible for the lulz.
 
Yeah, I found the writing itself shoddy myself, but the concept and dialogue were nice. I wouldn’t mind the story being rewritten, peer-reviewed, and republished the way a normal book goes.
 
All I can say is, Natural if you think any moment in FoE was facepalm-y, then I hope you never skim Project Horizons, because what the fuck kind of drug cocktail do you need to take to think threatening a slaver with bomb collars on his whole troupe, even the children, is a good idea. Also by playing it close to the hilt of the original trilogy, FoE at least keeps its world somewhat sane and rational. Project Horizons is godawful Warhammer40k territory, with loads of grimdork for the sake of grimdork, with a cackley maniacal baddie with a more one-track mind about evil and destruction for the lulz than Kefka Palazzo and Zeras Innocentius combined.  
You want to know how grimdork it gets? At one point because the heroine is taking too long to decide to give him the useless macguffin, he feeds a whole entire city into their mine’s rock crusher. Also the author of THAT trainwreck turned Raiderism into some sort of ragezombie AIDS. Can’t spell rAIDS without AIDS!
 
Also shameless anime parodies everywhere. Search ‘stronghoof’ on here.  
While I thought that bit was funny, it was funny because it was a sudden out-of-place comedy moment in a shitty fic full of mental impairment, grimdork dismemberment, and attrition that even the Death Korps Guardsmen would envy.  
Also a batch of evil ponies with gimmicky Marvel-esque super powers.  
There is way way WAY too much dumping of everything the author has ever read into a single location. Now THAT is how you write an unsalvageably bad epic fanfic.
 
Also every single decision the heroine makes winds up killing at least 30 other people (of any species) at a time. You would think she would get the hint the ‘heroing’ business is not for her.

I think it’s a waste of paper, those poor trees. But, people with money need to use it somehow…

@stringtheory  
I read Upheaval. It doesn’t get stupid-crazy amounts of attention, like FO:E or Past Sins, but it gets plenty. I think the most underrated fanfic I’ve read would be The Age of Wings and Steel . Unfortunate wording in the description turns away would-be readers by giving the impression that it’s about a Gary Stu alicorn OC, when the main character is not even remotely the same thing as Celestia and Luna. He’s a born cripple more than anything else.

tl;dr note: only the first paragraph of that post is important to everyone else. :v  
Pip’s a great character IMO although the fandom connection feels like it forced the author to dive into the rampant lesbianism angle a bit too often. I can’t remember her NOT checking out a flank of anybody but raiders. Srsly girl, control your dang mountin’ instinct a bit! Need to wander the wastes with a package of icy water balloons. If Twilight Sparkle’s ghoul mom had been younger when she turned I bet Pip would have checked her out too!

If anything deserves this treatment it’s Project Horizons, not the original. Blackjack is a stereotypical fanfic woobie shit, and her team is made up of equally broke-ass emo basketcases. Littlepip, removed from the confines of another literary work and pushed into a historical war’s context, would be every bit as good and believable a character. Well except for the rampant lesbianism. You could remove the technology and write largely the same story about a Celtic teenager a generation after trying to survive after Boadicea was killed, or a Saxon/Mercian woman trying to survive the Norman invasion, replacing the memory orbs with carvings, paintings, and scrolls about life before ‘the end of our civilisation.’
 
>>The protagonist makes as many bad decisions as good ones, ends up getting people killed  
That isn’t exactly fair of Pip. She does exceptionally well at adjusting for a naive stablemare from an idyllic stable. Nearly all her mistakes came about from biases and inexperience, a majority of the worst excepting Arbu and Autumn Leaf came near the beginning. Our little girl, snif she grew up so fast! I find it ironic she keeps trying to push away the mantle of hero because she has so much going for her on that barometer. Hell, causing hard-ass Gawd to bring together raiders and slavers into a functioning society as mayor and slaying an evil dragon would be enough heroism for any one normal hero, and she KEPT ON GOING RIGHT AFTER.  
And even her bad decisions had a moderately good outcome. Her half-assed infiltration plan may have gotten Blood killed (or at least killed a little early), and got her way too close to being trapped under Red Eye’s influence, but she was able to free Xenith. She got Kage killed, but she got the Pegasus Project information out of the deal, which was necessary to save Equestria. I kind of hope she sent Gawd a long note or memory orb about all the great things Kage’s sacrifice resulted in whenever she takes a break from moving the weather around.  
If anything I would say Calamity makes more bad decisions because he is supposed to be ‘experienced’ with the wastes, but he always shoots first, and he bears more responsibility for what happened at Arbu than Pip, since his attacking the bandits and getting them all killed without the ability to mention what was going on got them stuck there and believing the townsfolk had nothing sinister going on.  
Another mistake of Pip’s early on was taking the Steel Rangers at face value. She could have saved the children of her stable as well maybe saved Elder Sabre if she’d pushed Steelhooves into taking up Applejack’s mantle earlier. It had this air of “Something is not entirely right” but she was too busy staring at Blueberry Sabre’s aged yet firm plot. If she pushed on SH more the fragmentation may have happened sooner, in more private surroundings, and they’d have been able to talk her out of raiding stables, leaving only Nova to deal with. With a CHA critroll on her speech check she might even have brought Sabre over fully!  
The train fight was handled poorly as well, she got too obsessed with finding Velvet, alerted the slavers early, and resulted in getting all the trainponies killed during the escape.  
See though, her mistakes are all from the naivety she had upon leaving the stable, or from pure inexperience. Poor Communication Kills indeed. It’s her teammates’ fault for not remembering she just GOT OUT of the stable and not explaining things, or for wallowing in self-pity. SH or Calamity could have filled her in on weapons and tactics the slavers would have, or what rangers actually do to stables, and I believe she’d have made much more reasonable and informed decisions.  
As for Autumn Leaf, I believe her desire to avenge herself, the disintegrated filly, and Friendship upon an enclave, any enclave, is what really made her shoot him. A stupid decision indeed, for she could have put the bomb collar on him and forced him to escort them safely to the ground. By not having a ranking officer to escort them, they got shot down, resulting in half of her freed hostages being killed.
 
One other minor mistake, goes over to the Canterlot section. I think she screwed up with the “Gotcha” gag with the balefire launcher. Should have continued onward and taken out Nightseer only. That instance probably screwed her chances of getting any assistance from the alicorns post-Goddess at all. An amusing lack of restraint for someone who turns herself into a bullet sponge to protect less insane raiders.

@Yurp  
Glad to see someone else knows about Upheaval, most underrated fan-fic ever  
I have to agree on the ‘stuff seems shorter on the internet’ point, I’ve read 5.78 million words on FiMfiction alone over the 25 weeks I’ve had an account, I read plenty of books, but the internet allows for easy access to content, plus fan-fiction is awesome

@Vree:  
Well, I can agree with that–  

:face palm:  
Well, never mind then. What’s next, are you going to pull the “you’re jealous” card?
 
I know it’s a fanfic, but with something that “big” in our community, you’d expect that the writer would know how to write. A few creative writing courses would do wonders.
 
A lot of people don’t like it because the actual writing of it is kinda poor, and it’s basically the script to Fallout 3 with some name changes (at least at first).
 
It’s follows Fallout a little too closely, like it was suppose to be satire, but it’s suppose to be taken serious. That’s a bit lazy too.

Yeah, sorry. >.>

Hey Vree, shush.

What I ignored was three paragraph of you going on about he ripped off this, copied that. >.> And claiming that he’s more successful than the original Fallout (whaaaaaaat?) or that he makes money of it.  
I mean, critique is one thing, but when you are so obviously just shitting over somebody’s effort, don’t be surprised if you get called out.
 
I can’t really comment on the grammar. It probably had as many mistakes as people say here. But as a writer I found Kkat okay. And, come on, it’s a fanfic, it never claims to be more. It’s laughable how you are going green with envy for some supposed recognition he gets, when it’s all just within this fanfic fandom.

The story is actually extremely well done, and while the backstory does follow parrelels with the original Fallout universe, there are many major and minor differences.
 
I plan on getting this.
 
Also, for those of you who don’t wish to read it just because it has over 625,000… It is your loss, because I believe that it is a wonderful story filled with many engaging characters.

@Cedric Bale