It Is Recommendsday, My Dudes #100 · 12:15am Feb 16th, 2023
So hitting blog #100 and with the two year anniversary of #104 coming up fast, I've decided to do something special and a little self-indulgent.
One of the constant problems I've been wrestling with behind the scenes is when a story's too popular to talk about. Yes, one of the basic ideas of this blog has been to bring lesser known works and authors to the forefront and praise them - but what really qualifies as that? And just as much so, one of the other original ideas was to establish this blog as a list of "You gotta read this!" stories - something a new site user could look at and get the site's brightest. Which… precludes a lot of the idea of 'lesser known works and authors'.
I mean, where do you draw the lines for that? It's been a constant internal fight: where's the balance? There's been a bunch of times I felt I was skirting the edge, and there's a bunch of stories I love that I've been holding back on because a little voice tsk-tsks me as "You don't need to suggest that. Everybody's read that."
Well screw it. I'm just gonna vent out some of those so they stop bothering me. Now there will be a quick caveat: I still have a ton of reading of my own to do. I've been making it a project of mine to slowly work my way backwards through the site and read basically everything that's of interest. I'm only into 2017 right now, so there's an absurd amount of stuff I haven't read. Likely there's some huge names and must-reads that I haven't gotten to yet (and I assuredly do - my still pending longfic reading list is at nearly 10 million words) But never the less, here's some big guns.
And I start with the connecting theme of stories that, at their core, are about terrible fathers and their unique daughters.
Leading today with his first repeat appearance is The Hat Man with his foundational piece, The Iron Horse: Everything's Better With Robots!
The scene opens on an ominous robot advancing on Ponyville with ominous intent. It is then promptly struck by lightning and completely scrambled. This is how Twilight Sparkle - and the reader - is introduced to Turing Test. Turing - after being nursed back to functioning - starts off on a journey to make friends, discover her purpose in life, and stop a violent coup.
Now, I'll lead off by saying that in very broad strokes this story's got a pattern you see a lot: original character comes to Ponyville; meets and befriends each of the Mane 6 plus a few background ponies; faces off against their mysterious past; and so on. However, this is also probably the best take on that formula I've yet read. Too often in stories of this style the events are almost automatic. Turing, meanwhile, struggles most steps of the way both with the tasks and herself. She's a remarkably well developed character for being a character that technically starts with no personality: the story's a slow burn (as the 581k word count would suggest) and it takes plenty of time for Turing's self to develop at a gradual and realistic pace.
The other OCs along the way, too, are wonderful, particularly later on when the story goes into her past and starts to explore that. Gadget's a little too hypernerd for my tastes, but Mr. Vanderbull, Talon Turing, and the eventual elements from Turing Test's past are all quite fun characters.
That end game situation and her past is actually one of my favorite parts: the initially low-level current of tradition versus advancement builds to a fever pitch as things goes on, and the story treats both halves as correct (which is a wonderfully rare balance to strike) so that the struggle has better stakes. Sure we love Turing, but the reservations held by (for example) Princess Celestia aren't wrong.
Plus, the Maud romance is just so goddamn adorable and I love it. It makes me squee every time.
Today's other author is another returning one with a massive word count: the estimable Estee and the story that started their massive alt-u world, Triptych.
It's just after Twilight has become a princess, and she's still getting used to her new, well, everything. But she and her friends are called away from Ponyville to visit a distant town called Trotter's Falls. There's two quirks to this: the first is that they have been sent there not by Celestia or Luna, but by Discord who is his usual cryptic and unhelpful self about why they're being sent there. The second is more immediate, because Trotter's Falls is home to one of Equestria's most respected resources. Doctor Gentle Arrival, the unicorn who invented obstetrics and specialist midwife who has saved hundreds of foals and mothers from difficult births - including being responsible for both Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie being alive at all. The third quirk comes up just after their arrival with running into a mystery unicorn (later the titular Triptych) who's... well, wrong in so many ways.
This story's a bit hard for me to really go into without heavy spoilers (and I've already spoiled like three things in that blurb just for trying) because Estee's writing is like a sledgehammer. It's got a long, long wind-up and starts slow, but it hits like a freight train when it comes around. Triptych starts very slowly - and I mean it. The team doesn't even get told that they're going on a mission until about 25k words in, and they don't arrive at the actual town until 68k words. But if you can deal with the pacing, this is one hell of a story. I started at a slow, measured pace but there was a spot around halfway through that the momentum caught hold and I just shotgunned the rest at high speed.
For starters, it really establishes Estee's biggest strength: world building. There's so much going on here for establishing Estee's own particular take on Equestria, and it permeates their works as a whole. So much space in Triptych is spent filling out and expanding the world, and yet for the most part it avoids true exposition dumps. That takes work, and it pays off here by establishing some critical aspects (like how earth pony magic works) that really elaborate on canon into a deep, interesting hole.
The story itself's prime, too. It's a meandering mystery/thriller that slowly lays out all the pieces before snapping them together into a frightening flashpoint. And man while I figured out the bad guys were probably the bad guys from relatively early on, I didn't really comprehend the scope and severity of things until it all hit. But the context was all there, and looking back it was all obvious - in retrospective.
Triptych is also the gateway to the rest of Estee's library: about 75% of their work is in the same universe and there's a ton of really amazing stuff in it. I could name an easy dozen favorites, and Estee's both high volume and consistently entertaining. I mean, how many authors could write 9,000 words about salad spinners and have it be engaging?
New or catching up? Try Recommendsday: The Index for your story needs!
some high-octane recommendations! :D