): Recommendsday blogger, fic writer and all-around awesome chap TCC56 does too, and in his latestGhost Mike's Ponyfic Review Monday Musings #114 · 5:00pm May 20th
Last week, I dove into a great new tool that Rambling Writer cooked up, one which allows one to check any Fimfic user and see how many and what percentage of their followers logged in during the last day, week, month and year. Plus any custom date range. Finally, a way to see how “active” someone’s follower count is! 
The comments were understandably giddy about this, with nearly everyone giving it a whirl. Many were surprised by the results, with even 2012-born users having over a third of their lifetime followers still being online in the last day, and nearly three-quarters in the last year. If nothing else (and there was a lot else), it showed that, whatever site traffic is a lot smaller than it once was, it still has a lot more people than one might think, and a greater proportion of “lifers”. The tool’s here if you want to check it for yourself or someone else, just bring the user ID and be patient with maybe needing to refresh on mobile owing to the layout.
To that end, there was something else I was curious about and which Rambling Writer, ever the wizard at Python and scraping data, was able to indulge me on. The prior tool was perfect for individual users, but not necessarily getting a bead on overall site traffic, in terms of how many users logged in during the last period. I knew that would be much harder, as it would mean going through all users individually, not just the ones on a given user’s follower page (the reason it can scan even the 6K+ follower users in under a minute). Then there were all the dead accounts, plus the problem of the innumerable bots that had leaked through from 2020.
Obviously, we worked out a solution. I suggested adding an if to the data parser to only check users with at least one follower. That would mean leaving out tons of legit people that never wrote but simply lurked and read, but it was something. Also, I could still get a % idea of how many legit users Fimfic has once you shift out the bots: the public site statistics page has historical graphs for stories, blogs and users, and while the latter is useless from 2020 onward, we can see that through to the end of 2019, there are 258,557 non-deleted accounts. Multiplying that by the growth in lifetime stories since then shown above (stories and new users don’t track perfectly to each other, but comparing them year-to-year, they’re within a few % apart from the 2013-14 drop off) gives us a rough estimate of 322,191 non-bot users. Lets call it 320K, to account for real users in the past dropping off slightly more than stories, what with a greater percentage of stories always coming from veterans rather than newcomers over time.
So, while I crunched those numbers, Rambling set off a data scraper privately (this was far too big to publish, going through every user ID). Eventually, it came back, and from the 97,298 user with at least one follower (just over 30% of the estimate of real users above) he got this:
- Online within last day: 13377 (14%)
- Online within last week: 17738 (18%)
- Online within last month: 22572 (23%)
- Online within last year: 35475 (36%)
- Online within last five years: 54640 (56%)
While I do suspect that this only checking users with 1 follower is weighing the results quite a bit (you’re more likely to leave quickly without doing anything after finding out Ponyfic isn’t for you, I suppose), meaning it can’t be directly divided by 30% for a site-wide figure, that’s still a hefty retention rate. Thinking 14% of those nearly 100K accounts log in daily, and that even since May 2019, a period several years past the fandom’s “sharp decline” in many eyes, over half of them have been here is mighty impressive.
Being a single bit analysis, not much to add to it. Just that it’s further proof that, while Fimfic isn’t a juggernaut anymore, it’s still plenty huge. It’ll keep changing, and we’ll still see veterans leave somewhat even if most of them are sticking around. But we got ourselves a real self-sustaining database and community of horsewords and their artists here, my friends.
Let's switch from horse numbers to horsewords now, no? Five fics, same as always, and quite the quintet this week too. As you’ll see. 
This Week’s Spectral Stories:
Rendezvous with a Batpony by Gulheru
Rarity Loses Her Innocence In a Poker Game by MrNumbers
The Importance of Being Earth Ponies by bookplayer
The Last Page by Holy
Sore Throat by gapty
Weekly Word Count: 28,834 Words
Rendezvous with a Batpony by Gulheru
Genre: Slice of Life
Twilight, OC, Bat Pony
12,222 Words
April 2024Reread
Sequel to Interview with a Batpony – Reviewed here
Twilight’s had a lot on her mind since she became a Princess, but the interview she had with the batpony Midnight Wind has rarely drifted far. She left with so many incredible answers, yet just as many questions still. Now that Midnight himself is back in Ponyville after a posting, and with many questions from other locals pooled up alongside her own, she hastens to schedule another interview, and probe out more about his kind and their ways.
I said in my review for Interview with a Batpony that, as much as I enjoyed it, I didn’t really find the need for more. Mostly that was because, as far as batponies are concerned, a little goes a long way, but another chief reason was that fic was also kept afloat by Twilight getting to be her adorkable self, and the mature-with-some-childishness rapport she and Midnight Wind kept up. Well, now I’ve read the indulgent interview followup that’s a whole 60% longer, and that aspect is expectedly but disappointingly less present. Leaving this a worldbuilding exploration in dialogue with even less to prop it up.
To his credit, Gulheru has put in measurable effort to introduce some wrinkles into the proceedings to keep it lively. Mostly these take the form of Twilight being more disturbed by some customs and practises the batponies follow, and after a while that trick too has diminishing returns. Without a comical Spike interjection towards the fic’s end like last time, there’s only a few other moments like the question from the CMC and a creepy coda to stray from the lore dump.
Said lore is still mostly interesting, though while it makes sense in-universe, it still makes the fatal mistake of assuming the reader remembers everything prior as clearly as Twilight does. After a while I gave up trying to remember what the numerous words in the batponies’ language mean, so it settled into mostly getting them from context. Which worked, but muddled the illusion. Otherwise, the customs here either fall into understandable practical societal constructions more common in ancient Equestrian times that the batponies simply never grew out of, and others. It’s also hard to ignore how much the fic is basically a setup for the followup non-interview sequel that currently has been running for nearly ten years and to the tune of just over a million words (
). Not necessarily so in story, minus a few observations, but more in tone and prose construction.
Perhaps I overrated the first fic on account of Scribbler’s reading (a recorded dialogue fic is tailor-built for an audio reading, after all), but this one ended up being the kind of lethargic waiting game with the occasional dopamine hit from a cool bit of lore that it looked like. Probably would have been better off with its points merged organically into said longform sequel rather than existing as its own thing.
Rating: Passable
Rarity Loses Her Innocence In a Poker Game by MrNumbers
Genre: Comedy/Slice of Life
Rarity, Mane 6
7,570 Words
September 2014
Rarity started off strong in the night’s poker game, but the drink the others took has made it much harder to read their tells (she isn’t drunk of course, a lady does not get drunk). When she has a winning hand but not the money to bet with it, she stakes a note with “Rarity’s virginity” on it to compensate. She doesn’t win the round, and though Fluttershy intends to return the note for free, Dash won’t stand for giving back winnings and trades for it. Once the hangover wears off, Rarity will have to settle this. Even if it means going all over town for the note.
From the use of that classic piece of fanart for the cover, the author, and the view count approach 20K, you’d presume this was a hoot of farcical comedy. I certainly did. And yet, it seems strangely muddled. Part of that is certainly the plot: the first quarter is the setup and the next quarter is just gathering the pieces together to begin the hunt to reclaim the contract to Rarity’s virginity. The characters only taking full action to fix things halfway in, while okay for a more dramatic work or a longer one, doesn’t fly for this brand of comedic story, and the result is that, after the first few instances of following the trail of who has the note, it becomes mostly summarised. In essence, the back half basically turns into a variation on the “Bart sells his soul” plotline, and it doesn’t freshen it up enough to feel more than stock.
Ah, but that doesn’t really matter if the comedy is there, right? Well, given I spend a paragraph on the plot and pacing issues, it’s not there enough to render other issues effectively moot as you’d hope from this kind of farcical comedy. Weirdly, this is because it’s rather subdued: other than the fact of what Rarity has sold and a appearance by Cloud Kicker with her WinningVerse-style characterisation of being a sex addict (because of course, though I don’t get the bit of her once being a guard…?), and the fact of opening with gambling and drinking, this fic is totally E-rated and within the show’s wheelhouse. Maybe the intention was to not seem like a vulgar comedy, which is certainly an impulse I’m all for, but the end result feels of two minds rather than one unified one.
Make no mistake, a lot of the comedy here is funny, and there’s plenty of greatly winning moments of characterisation at the margins (though the bits with Rarity as the lead, and Twilight as the other one most present, do tend to repeat after a while). How Twilight deals with hangovers, and the brand her snark takes, Pinkie being Pinkie, peripheral bits from AJ and Fluttershy. I’ve also played enough poker to appreciate how into it the jargon during the game is too (it’s quick enough that the unfamiliar shouldn’t get lost). So it’s never not entertaining. I just expected a hoot and got a mild though consistently amusing piece. Probably not the common take, judging by its views and comments, mind.
Rating: Decent
The Importance of Being Earth Ponies by bookplayer
Genre: Comedy/Slice of Life
Apple Bloom, Applejack, Apple Bloom
2,345 Words
May 2012Reread
With her fellow Crusaders off learning to fly and use magic, Apple Bloom is left both bored and rather down. When Applejack notices this and finds out that her little sister feels this way because she’s “just an earth pony”, Applejack won’t stand for this, and enlist Pinkie’s help in showing her the true way of being an earth pony.
Evidently I’ve been spoiled by similar premises of Applejack showing Apple Bloom what an earth pony can truly do (my favourites all take the form of their earth magic, in particular one fic where they put Diamond Tiara in her place for making fun of non-rich earth ponies), so when this one is pretty much just the two elder ponies talking a bit about the part earth ponies played in Equestrian history, not showing, and it keeps to the present rather than cutting to said flashback to see it all play out, it can’t help but feel awfully slight.
This is a 2012 fic, of course, so a certain guileless and pure simplicity to such premises is commonplace. It does come full circle with a scene at the Crusaders’ clubhouse at the end, Pinkie’s contribution is well considered and characterised, details of why earth ponies matter impress even if the meat of the tale is stock now, and some episode links and callbacks (from an era where they tended to be pretty direct, with rather few of them) end up being remarkably well chosen.
By no means a wash, then: it satisfies on a mechanical level and is rather sweet, though it’s not exactly filling. But even a mixed effort leaning good with this much of a soul deserves admiration.
Rating: Decent
The Last Page by Holy
Genre: Slice of Life (Human?)
Sunset, Mane 6 (EqG)
4,433 Words
September 2016
Sunset only has a single page left in the journal she communicates with Princess Twilight. And with the portal down as Twilight struggles to reestablish a connection off their books being filled up, Sunset has been straining for weeks-cum-months on what to write for her final entry. The thought of living without the guidance she’s had for so long, and which set her on the right path, is too much to take. Even the support of her friends here and now isn’t helping.
It took me longer reading this than it should have to cop on this was set pre-“Friendship Games”, with not a single mention of the Twilight on this side of the portal. Honestly, that certainly could have been better communicated (the Humane Five are practising soccer early on, a side mention of the upcoming Games with Crystal Prep would have done it), because until it clicked, it was a persistent itch. I advocate strongly setting fics earlier than the most recent canon point at the time of writing (this came out a few weeks before “Legend of Everfree”), but if that’s a crucial detail, it needs to be communicated.
Anyway, stepping past that, the fic is a satisfying take, if hardly an exemplary one, on Sunset taking stock of where she is at this point in her journey, and being reminded that even if others got her out of a dark place, she’s not defined or reliant on their efforts, with the others bringing up many moments of her fixing things because of her, or having turned her reputation around so much that many fellow pupils come to her first, and so forth. As an exercise in probing out and making the character and the reader appreciate a character’s journey thus far and still to come, it’s solid.
The pacing and structure is rather wobbly: it doesn’t really have enough content for 4.4K, and thus there’s about twice as many scenes as is needed of Sunset moping and distancing herself from her friends before they stage an intervention. This applies within scenes too, with the dialogue of the Humane Five being in-character and well-defined but weirdly circular and protracted in the micro. And the moments with Sunset on her own are given over to numerous lengthy hundred-word-plus paragraphs that milk her sadness too eagerly to feel genuine.
It’ll work well for the numerous (for mysterious reasons) die-hard fans of Sunset, though unlike quite a lot of Sunset fics I cover here, it’s not transcendent enough for all readers.
Rating: Decent
Sore Throat by gapty
Genre: Slice of Life
Trixie
2,264 Words
April 2024
Some illnesses can mean not having to go to school. A sore throat, alas, is not one of them, especially with a test today, so off Trixie goes. When she sees how much attention she doesn’t get when she can’t verbally demand it, she starts to wonder why. She doesn’t like what she has little choice but to conclude.
Being the first fic of gapty’s I’ve read, I’m in no position to judge if this is typical of their work or not, either in tone, genre or writing style. Okay, I can as regards setting (gapty is an outspoken advocate of EqG over FiM to the point of being unable to engage with the root show much at all), and being about Trixie, but that’s about it. Whether this is typical or not, though, it did something that always improves a fic, which is that it surprised me pleasantly. Not just once, but twice.
From the outside, I expected a comedy about Trixie’s frustration at not being the centre of attention, and finding a way to demand it that would blow up in her face. Instead, I got a fic very rooted in her mind, where her insecurities inform the text even before she acknowledges them. At first it’s just a pervasive offness at no one saying anything to or about her when she’s around, but then as her other attempts to attract attention peter out without fanfare, and she withdraws into herself, considering why this is, it gets quite sobering.
Something about the way this is written, a mixture of narcissistic thoughts and clinical observations, feels fitting for Trixie in a moment of self-crisis, especially when it sticks even after she gets her voice back. It’s idiosyncratic, but not in the usual manner of an ESL writer (something I only found out after the fact). Whatever it is, it made the fic rather probing and fitting in a manner I didn’t expect.
The ending is quite a curveball to that, and could be argued that it doesn’t feel fitting of the piece, but it colours what this is about Trixie and even paints a particular obsession of hers in a light I’d never considered. I certainly count it as another pleasant and well thought out surprise. And a fic reportedly speed-written in a few hours (with revisions and edits later, of course)! Fair play. Hay, I’d even say it works better with EqG, as with ponies that point would feel oddly typical, like a cutie mark story.
Short and sweet, but quite substantial and raw. Certainly one of the better Trixie fics I’ve read in a while, human or pone.
Rating: Pretty Good
Spooky Summary of Scores:
Excellent: 0
Really Good: 0
Pretty Good: 1
Decent: 3
Passable: 1
Weak: 0
Bad: 0
How can we find and use this tool? I checked Rambling Writers' blog back to 2018, and didn't find it.
I am genuinely surprised by those numbers. I never imagined there were that many people still using the site. If you'd asked me before I would have considered half of that a very liberal estimate.
5782015
If you mean the one from last week… well, I link to it not only there, but at the start of this blog. If you mean the one I discussed today… well, I said it wasn't public, because it was checking far too much data to host. Rambling did this privately on his computer and send me the results. It took several hours to check every user, after all.
Regardless, as was also communicated or at least inferred, both last week's one and this week's one are new, so you wouldn't have found them going through old blogs, bud!
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It surprised me a fair bit at first too. I think the main reason it's so surprising is many folks took the "x users online" stat on Fimfiction's homepage not as literally as it is meant. Or didn't consider how easily folks can count as "offline" for it even if their tab is open – if your phone's gone into sleep mode for your browser app, you be offline from Fimfiction, for instance.
So, the usual estimation of about 4 times the online users to get daily users is woefully, woefully wrong.
There is a small caveat in these results took several hours to pull, so some users might have gone in just by virtue of when in number order they were checked. But that works both ways, so it probably evens out. 
On the other hand, looking at the amount of daily hits (2.66 million yesterday) to reach that from what folks estimated were the number of daily users would mean each user is contributing several hundred hits daily (and that's accounting for not-users/those logged out). Something obviously not true, given how many people might check Fimfiction's feed and then close without doing anything else. So it's not totally ridiculous!
Hm, I could make a dead beaten joke about you and EqG, so let's do others:
But how many of them are—may Celestia forgive me for uttering the word—Anon readers?
But is it in accordance with the data privacy rules? If not, I may go to court.
You were so happy. So careless. Now, after you've done it, you will never smile again. My condolences.
Dude, don't tell it publicy! It was a secret!
Alright, jokes done.
Quite honestly, it came as a surprise to me too. I just wanted to write about her sore throat. But leaving on only the realisation felt a bit off, and one of my favourite Trixie traits is how much she likes her passion unlike anybody else (almost all Trixie fics of mine revolve around Trixie and magic tricks). So it kinda evolved to that ending.
Huh, and here I thought if I would've set it in FiM, it would get better traction. Oh well, pleasent surprise it turned out better this way
Somehow, this makes me sad. We should demand authors to write good Trixie fics!
Thanks a lot for that review! It was a pleasent surprise from my side
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I mean, a notable chunk, but only as much as the output of said fics and their traffic indicates. Ditto for clop. Those things are a valid part of the stats, but they come by so legitimately, and only as much as they are contributing stories.
In all seriousness, yes it is, because this is data publicly available already. If one is browsing their follower list, the boxes for each user show when they last logged on, and one can see that on the user's profile page. All this tool is doing is grabbing it all in one go.
For what it's worth, I did wonder if I'd come off a bit harsh in the past (I don't think so, but I did consider it), so part of incentive for reading a fic of yours was to see who the quality was like. I almost read a FiM one, but decided that would be a cop out, and I should do the fair thing and read one in the territory you specialise in.
And you did good! The FiM apathy doesn't bleed into the fic, it's just focused on doing right by itself, so it worked for me as well as it would for anyone that isn't already head-over-heels for Trixie. Not a negative, that, only meant in the sense of the character not giving the fic a free pass automatically, which I think is valid.
Something our writing can surprise us. And I see a lot less fic with Trixie doing this than would seem right (doubtless you see even less, with how much you like her), so I did like how it turned into an origin story for her being a stage magician.
Possibly it might have in views, though it still did very well (over 130 liked and 1.2K views for your follower size isn't easy even with a prime spot in the featured box). But yes, when I clicked that the ending more or less made it a cutie mark story, but in the world of EqG, I thought "you know, it works better this side, it would feel more typical if it actually was a cutie mark story, as opposed to just being analogous to one". And those types of things can really boost a story!
Well, I don't read a lot of her. In my two years and two months of reviewing, I've only covered 18 fics with Trixie tagged, and of course only a chunk of those are Trixie fics, once you shift out the "one shots that can credit nearly every character who appears even briefly" ones, plus those that are Starlight fics where Trixie is merely along for the ride rather than it being about her. So my sample size is not very representative!
For what it's worth, the last Trixie story I reviewed that got a higher rating was over a year ago, The Destiny Trap, in Monday Musings #54, though two more recently (Âme Câline in #99 andGifted With Care in #94) share the Pretty Good rating. So saying it was the best/one of the best I'd read in a while wasn't hyperbole!
Mine too!
And it was probably clear, but I meant pleasant surprise in terms of what I figured the fc would be, then liking even more what it turned out to be. Not that I had preconceived notions because it was EqG or anything – sure, I carry those sometimes, but if I'm gonna read a fic, I leave those at the door. But that came across well, enough, I think.
"The Importance of Being Earth Ponies" does fill a niche to my interests, although it's not the only one to do so. I've waxed early and often of how FIM dearly missed having a Celestia episode (one where she doesn't hold the idiot ball, thank you
) and a "Earth Ponies are cool, too" episode.
My own favorite entries to the genre likely don't need introduction: Maran's Earth Ponies Are Overpowered is perhaps the gold standard, and Tex's comic One Special Talent is one of my enduring favorites. There's a certain early-series charm to the subject, as you've noticed, and the early publish date of TIoBEP marks it as being from such an era where we had twenty characters and three races to build a world around. While perhaps it doesn't measure up to deeper dives, for those interested in the subject it is definitely a "Awesome, two cakes!" moment.
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Tbh, it would be quite bad to let a story influence it. Give a story as much of canon what it needs, add easter eggs when possible and let it evolve. For example, I don't particularely like Wallflower (even strongly disliked her at first), and yet I gave her fics she's the main character of. And this writing made me appreciate her as a character—not as a favourite, but a great choice of writing a character.
Don't speak to me or my descendants ever again!
I actually hadn't read either of those! Gave the comic a read just now, and yeah, that end point was delivered so well I can see why it would have stuck to many. As for the fic, added to my backlog.
More or less what I was getting at, eeyup. The fic's too simple and bare-bones to merit a higher rating, but I do strive to indicate where such a fic might still scratch the itch for people who like its particular niche. Something I do here, maybe not as much as yourself, but pretty close for sure.
Oh yeah, no. Check the date on this story, Mike - I wrote this story when I was eighteen; I wasn't actually all that good at writing yet. The fandom also had much lower standards back then, and its membership was much younger.
I didn't actually structure or plan anything I wrote until Mare who One Lived on the Moon, and it shows. Every story written before that is one I only keep up for archival and humility reasons, since most of them are horrendous. If I ever get stressed talking to someone new about their writing, this is one of the stories I look at to remember what I was like when I started out, and get some perspective.
I think this is true of most people, but I learn something from every story I write. Every story you go back loses you something I won't have learned yet. Virginity Poker's my primordial soup.
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I mean, I saw and noted the story’s age. You act as though that would tell me your age too (maybe you’ve expressed that in enough blogs that you consider it a known fact by now, I don’t know).
And also, the rating and review wasn’t that harsh, lol. Still noted plenty that worked! I suppose I was just coming to it from the direction of a lot of “this is gut-bustlingly funny” praise. Doesn’t mean I can’t acknowledge it being an author’s earlier work.
And I’ve read ponyfics from all over – I’m well aware the average standards of fics was lower then (I don’t know about much lower, mind), between higher output and most authors being younger/not having written for as long.
Anyway, some background info I didn’t know, but as my notes were about the fic and not the author, they don’t really change the review, anyway. In any case, having read some recent works of yours, I know what you can do.
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I more mean; "God, Mike, I'm sorry you had to see my old highschool fanfic, if you're that hard up for stories I should just get something fresh on the stove for you. Good heavens, my friend, I keep such things out for the animals, not for the guests! Mercy me, I should start putting up signs on these old things, someone is going to get sick one of these days..."
Your review was great, as always.
Now I've given it a whirl. Allow me to post my results:
I am so giddy right now.
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You'd better believe I checked you when the tool was first made available!
Obviously that most of your followers are from 2017-on (less than 100 from before) is the main reason for your strong retention rate, and the only reason it's not even stronger is for the relative shortage (for obvious reasons) of followers in the last few years. Curiously, a fair number come from minor spikes in 2017 and 2020 over select fics (Beautiful Lives, Beyond the Herd and the three Sister Sidestep fics), even though said fics didn't do hefty numbers, by any stretch.
But given how your blogs and stories often struggle to gain traction, I was curious what you'd make of this showing that you do have a strong enough "active" following to theoretically prompt higher turnout. Possibly the same inclination to "heavy reads" that folks can't easily dip in and out of we discussed before.
Eh, probably not worth losing sleep over. Happy it made you giddy, bud!
Interestingly, you have less of a percentage difference from Monthly to Yearly than most folks I checked (only hawthornbunny and I, and we have notably less followers). Though that's actually a good thing: it means you're grabbing lifers more than casual readers to a greater degree than most folks. Daily and Weekly are the ones that really matter in terms of current reach, sure.
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The increase in followership coincides neatly with my increasing output, so that makes sense.
I think the 2020 one was mostly because of the political controversy that went down that year, towards which I made a nexus-based contribution (a blog linking to other blogs) that drew partisan traffic my way and other ways. So less because of my fic-related output at the time, methinks (though my output did improve notably during 2020 as an outlier post-2018 year, to be fair, which muddies the causal waters a bit).
Not by the standards of hard-hitters like FanOfMostEverything and Wanderer D, but by my standards those were unusually popular fics. It's noteworthy whenever I break through the 1k view barrier, let alone multiple k views.
These days, I think it's more that I simply have the awkward middle ground of having notably obscure character tags on the one hand, and of only making it big with more generic popular fics (e.g. the Fluttershy Discord one Calendar Chaos) on the other. Overall, I simply don't have an equivalent of a central epic-classic style of big draw, so it probably makes sense that I skew more toward a few niche loyalists than a broader fanbase.
Makes sense on my hypothesis. Course, that means if I ever get something more dramatic in my output, the story might change. Hope springs eternal, eh?