It's inevitable that due to its massive length and being one of the earliest serious ponyfics, unintentional humour can pop up from time to time.
- Let's face it: for all the war, misery and horror the characters endure, nothing can change the fact that it's all being done by (and to) candy-coloured, talking Ponies.
- Kkat is a decent writer when it comes to tense action scenes, usually involving lots of gunfire, running, and nasty creatures out of the Equestrian Wasteland. Which unfortunately, have a tendency to lose the atmosphere with all the Written Sound Effects.
- Take Arbu for example. Littlepip's morally questionable massacre of cannibalistic villagers is derailed when the minimalist prose devolves into a few paragraphs of pfffft, pou pou, bangs, and so on giving the impression of a kid making silly noises or a toy water gun.
- For the most part, the fic stays serious and dark, evoking an atmosphere of desolation and violence. This normally works fine, aside from when the story does try to lighten the mood, which comes down to over the top suggestive innuendo, squicky cursing by Pip, and one-liners by Calamity that wouldn't be out of place in an 80s action flick.
- In the backstory, Pinkie Pie uses mind-enhancing drugs to spy on enemies of the government with her Pinkie Sense. This might be enough on its own, but what pushes it over the line is that through all the propaganda, smuggling, 1984esque surveillance and mounting paranoia, she still speaks in her usual ditzy hyperactive dialogue. "You're a bad pony!"
- That said, for some that adds to the horror more than anything.
- Unicorns can wield weapons by magic, but FoE's solution to earth ponies and pegasi using guns? They strap them to their bodies or hold them in their mouths, using tongue-operated triggers, making the cartoon horse gunfights even harder to visualise without breaking down into a fit of giggles.
