It Is Recommendsday, My Dudes #106 · 7:24pm Mar 29th, 2023
So this week's a little self-indulgent for me in a roundabout way.
See, my most recent story is an entry to the Science Fiction II contest. I've gotten a ton of great comments on it, but one of the most flattering is from a fellow competitor. They lamented that I'd made with the good words and was likely to beat them. Well, to that I reply: horse apples. I want to lose, because that means somebody else has written something totally awesome, so I win anyway because I get to read cool stuff.
But I also want to take a moment and show support for a fellow competing author who's got their own great works, partially as a thanks for a very flattering comment. Fortunately, they were already in my queue and give me an excuse to bring up another author I've wanted to for a while.
So hey DualSoul - this one's for you.
And by 'this one' I mean Possibly, Probably, Positively Platonic.
One morning, Starlight comes downstairs with the nagging feeling she's forgetting something. This is further suggested to be true when her housemates Trixie and Sunburst pass her a plate of pancakes with the words 'happy anniversary' written on them in chocolate. But Starlight remains confused. The anniversary of what, exactly?
Now, I will admit that I have a long list of tropes I enjoy. I've mentioned a bunch of them off and on across this series. And the absolutely classic "Wait, we're dating?" romcom plot is one of them. When done right, it's hilarious and this is a great example of it. Starlight is so wonderfully befuddled that it's adorable. Plus you get smug Trixie which is the second best Trixie (after Full Chaos Gremlin Trixie.) Even Sunburst gets in on that action, and he so rarely gets to.
It's all kept light and snappy without overstaying its welcome, which is so often the downfall of his type of story. It doesn't drag, characters don't act like complete idiots when faced with the evidence, and they do truly care for each other. As Starlight says: "This doesn’t change how I felt this past year. All this does is recontextualize what was already there.”
They're just so damn cute like that.
And that leads me to the other author today. Now, I've wanted to feature them for a while, but the right opportunity didn't come up. See, that's because FoolAmongTheStars is what you'd call a specialist writer. They write StarBurst romances. Almost exclusively just StarBurst romances. They're quite good at it, but go under a lot of people's radar because they're very specialized.
Which brings us to Love Potion Number 9.
Starlight was being helpful - she was assisting Sunburst to translate a book he'd been given on alchemy. To check her translation's accuracy, she decides to brew one of the more benign potions because... well, because Starlight. And that's why she's calling Spike in a panic, because Sunburst accidentally drank an entire pitcher of love potion.
So like the last story, this one's got a lot of adorable, good-natured fumbling because Starlight is a gigantic dork who isn't good at having feelings. And like the last one, it's got that good, snappy feel that doesn't outstay its welcome.
Character work here's solid - I particularly like Spike's role. He's only kind of a counterbalance to Starlight in the first half, but the portrayal here has him in his 'only sane one in a town of crazy ponies' going full blast, and he leans hard into it. (Seriously, Spike being the mature one is always just a fun juxtaposition.)
The 'punchline' for this is what really makes it. (I'm not sure what the proper term is for that in a story like this - climax isn't quite right either.) It's cute as hell and just makes me d'awww all over the place. Just sappy enough without going overboard, you know?
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That is a great mindset, kudos to this
Well, there's a coincidence: I read Possibly... very recently myself. Cute little fic, I thought.
What a pleasant surprise to wake up to. Thank you so much for the shout out!
