It Is Recommendsday, My Dudes #90 · 8:01pm Dec 7th, 2022
I'm in a bit of a rush today - the holidays do that - but that just means I have to pick and get on with it rather than spending half an hour mulling over which stories I'm picking and why. (Not that this means they aren't good, just that I do have a historical problem with choice paralysis.) So today I'll give a fairly simple theme: authors who, at this point, are still under ten follows.
First up is an old hand who (relatively) recently started writing: Climaclysm. And in this case their most recent story, Hiraeth. While a sequel, it stands well enough alone and I think it rates better than Starry Darling. (Which is a good story as well, I just find Hiraeth more enticing.)
It's a simple setting: teenage Starlight Glimmer arrives home from school on her birthday. Firelight has all her favorite things prepared, just as he has every year. Her favorite cake (from when she was a foal), those little caramel candies she liked (when she was a foal), and everything is just how she liked it (when she was a foal). He does all he can to make the day right for her - and she chafes against it.
It's the subject matter I love on this one, and the wonderful struggle of the characters. Starlight and Firelight love each other, that much is clear. They just don't know how to live together anymore. He can't see that she's grown up and who she's grown into, but Firelight is trying as hard as he can to make his daughter happy and help her in life. (Moreso with the implication that losing her mother wasn't all that long ago.) Starlight, for her part, still loves her dad. But she's so angry and obsessed it makes everything harder, even just having a conversation. Add into that his inability to see how she's changed and the general teenage angst, and she ends up treating him far worse than she intended.
Plus there's the chilled ending scene, where his advice accidentally gives her the line of thought that would dominate Starlight's life for years to come. His push to help her find her own destiny sets the path for her to... well, you know where she goes.
As a note, 'hiareth' is a Welsh word roughly translating to the idea of nostalgic homesickness - a longing for home. Appropriate.
The other author today is JudgementalHat, a far newer author but one just as promising. The story in question is Crash Component, which has a bit of a background to it.
So back in early 2020, there was a Discord conversation in the main FIMFiction writer's channel between a few people - primarily Estee and SockPuppet, though a few others of us (myself included) played parts. It's detailed out in a blog here, but the jist and the story summary are fairly simple: airplanes have to test their structure against external stress. In our world the #1 issue is bird strikes, so we invented the chicken gun to fire a high-speed bird at airplane glass to see what damage it does. In Equestria, they've got airships and so logically would have the same concerns. But their top issue isn't birds - it's being hit by a rogue pegasus. So, logically, the chicken gun would be something a bit.. different. And therein lies the life of Birdstrike, pegasus crash test dummy and bearer of a terribly unfortunate cutie mark.
Now, this story isn't the first to use that particular conversation as inspiration (the other ironically being the first publish for RDT, an author I featured in the initial blog that spawned this series) but that doesn't make it any less funny. It's a wonderful absurdist comedy with an (appropriate) feel like one of Estee's own absurdist comedies - corporate interference, ponies not thinking before acting, and differing priorities catching poor saps in the middle show up throughout. It's a wonderful laugh, and is just so damn understandable in spite of the rampant stupidity of the characters making the choices. I mean, who hasn't been there?
...metaphorically speaking. Very few of us have ever loaded a frozen pegasus into a wide-bore cannon.
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