Site Post » Reviews Round 15 · 1:38am Feb 20th, 2013
Pony fanfiction. Pony fanfiction never changes.
Twilight messed up a spell and sent everyone back in time a hundred years. Rainbow Dash had an accident while flying and broke her wing, casting her into a deep depression. Celestia is the real tyrant and Luna is simply a revolutionary fighting for her people.
Pony fanfiction never changes.
In the 21st century, fanfiction is still being written over any new material presented in the show. Only this time, that material is now going to be stretched out over a summer of no new ponies. Alicorn Twilight, and the Crystal Empire. These two additions to canon will force fanfic authors into quarreling, bickering masses, arguing over whether Twilight Alicorn should be a separate tag or not.
In the near future, FiMfic will be reduced to a smoldering pile of fanfics left in the wake of the ‘Alicorn Incident’. A large majority of the userbase will be destroyed by the resultant flame war, but a few will reach the relative safety of the underground ponyfiction vault.
You, dear reader, will be one of the few that survives the destruction, you and your family. For a century, you will live under a mountain of stone and “Twilight has wings now, TwiLestia is canon” fanfics.
But, at the advent of the new Justice League Seattle’s Angels, life in the vault will change forever.
ROUND 15
”Remember: if you’d rather be doing something else with your life...”
“Go do it!”
Destiny, fate; free will, choice. These things are so at odds with each other, and yet so intertwined. It's been said that a pony's cutie mark defines who they are and is a direct result of their destiny. Young ponies who have yet to discover their true talent, and therefore their true destiny, have not “earned” their cutie marks yet. But, is it not a pony's choices that define who they are, regardless of their buttmarks? Or, are those choices simply a byproduct of their destiny leading them on in inexorable path towards the attainment of their cutie marks? Can free will truly exist in a world that is governed by destiny? I don't know, but I do know that Ordem's main character, Summer Sirocco, wrestles with her destiny at every turn, and it makes for one hell of a story.
All her life, Summer has never been happy with the life she'd been given, but it takes her expulsion from the Royal Guard for her to finally make a change. Due to repeated insubordination, she's is relieved of her duties as a member of the Royal Guard, but instead receives an offer to join the Night Guard. But, Night Captain Quarrel, warns, joining them means giving up everything she has, including her identity. Now, for most people... ponies... whatever, I'm not racist, that would be an easy question to answer, but for Summer it's a little more complicated.
Ordem e Progresso is one of the most interesting character-driven pieces I have ever read on this site. It is so well-constructed, in so many ways, that, even as short as it is, it feels like a complete piece. Summer's character is expertly developed in a very short amount of time, and she's given real wants and needs, likes and dislikes, all these things which serve to make her seem more real. Through an interesting narrative technique, where Chocolate Milk flashes back and forth between her past and the present, we see why Summer is the way she is now, and why she makes the choices she does, even if it may seem like the choices she makes are the wrong ones.
I think what makes this story so special is that nearly everyone can relate to Summer in some way. Even if you can't understand why she does some of the things she does, you can at least understand her need to change herself, her need to be someone different. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has felt at some point in their life that they were headed down the wrong path, going somewhere they didn't want to be, being someone they didn't want to be. But for a lot of people, wanting to change and actually changing remain forever separated. Whether by choice, or by an inability to act, many of us never become exactly who we imagined ourselves to be.
Besides beautiful narrative, lively and realistic dialogue, stunning character development, and enviable prose, Ordem e Progresso's Summer Sirocco is reason enough to read this fic. Even if you might question her decisions, or think she's arrogant, irresponsible, childish, maybe even just wrong, you have to at least admire her tenacity.
All right, I've rambled long enough. Time to let someone else have a turn...
Ordem E Progesso. Oh, great... another one of those fics, eh? *Clicks link. Sees it is by Chocolate Milk.* Well nevermind, then.
While I normally find stories with latin names pretentious, this one doesn’t fit that bill. The subject matter doesn’t try to be overbearing, nor is there any angst beyond what is necessary for plot development. It is the story of a pony who doesn’t know her place in the world, and it sticks to that. We follow a short snippet of Summer’s life after her rejection from the Royal Guard. But how the story progress(o)es (see what I did there?), in my opinion, is both engaging but also a misstep.
Before I say anything else, this story was brilliantly written. Images were concise and vivid, and the writing structure itself is beyond the norm of ponyfic—and arguably on par with mainstream literature. But that said, I have qualms with the delivery of the story.
It’s very segmented. Scene breaks are used to separate the time between the main character’s interactions with friends and family (and ultimately her decision). I can say that it does help trim away any unnecessary transitional flab and capture all of her actions to bundle them into a neat little package, but it does so at the cost of disrupting the flow of the story at almost any point it had the chance.
The story overall is one worth every second spent reading it, and then some. It jumbles many different emotions into less words than you would expect. On top of that, it’s believable. Everything feels natural, and happens at the right time.
Don’t skip this story. It’s easily the best I’ve read for this review team.
Ah, coming-of-age stories. This story trope builds on a human experience that is as old as humanity itself. Way back in humanity's tribal days, we had elaborate coming-of-age ceremonies that involved various rituals that would mark a child's passage into adulthood. It's definitely a type of story that's been told for millenia; as my history teacher put it, "Even motherfucking Ancient Greece had public performances."
Pictured: a motherfucking Greek.
Chocolate Milk's Ordem e Progresso is a unique twist on the traditional "coming-of-age" story. Whereas most adolescents in these stories come into situations where they need to grow up, Ordem e Progresso focuses around Summer, a filly who needs to sever ties with her former life in order to move forward. In short, she's got a lot of things that hold her back, and this story deals with her finally admitting that her friendships, relationships, and life in general are going in no real, solid direction.
I'm mildly torn by this story. On one hand, I enjoy the subversion inherent in "lose some things in order to gain others." On the other, Ordem e Porgresso is really a story about how Summer trades one set of extreme immaturities—appeasing others—for another extreme of "only appeasing herself."
I find myself disliking the main character of this story because she's a massive hipocrite. She hates her father because he abandoned Summer and her mother at an early age, yet she turns around and abandons her own mother in similar fashion—twice. She dislikes her mother for her delusion about her father's disappearance, yet she deludes herself by thinking that "my problem is I'm too nice to everyone."
In short, she's a shallow, hypocritical bitch.
In a twist, though, I can't necessarily say that has much negative on the story. The story's about an unlikable girl trying to get what she thinks she's entitled to in life, and it's reasonably well done for that. I can't say that she's a poorly-written bitch; in fact, quite the opposite: it required a token amount of planning on Chocolate Milk's part in order to engineer a three-dimensional look at a two-dimensional personality.
While that might not be the most glowing recommendation I've ever given, this story's definitely worth taking a look—just to see the character study of someone who's entirely self-absorbed and caught up in their own life. I can't promise that you'll like the story or care about what happens to Summer at the end of it, but I can honestly say that it is a decently made picture of a truly flawed, realistic character.
She hated this place. Home or not, she hated it.
When the Levee Breaks takes Daring Do, a character that I love unabashedly, and does something completely different with her: takes her away from adventure. Now, I'll admit to a bias against the [Sad] tag. Usually it's a bunch of weepy bullshit that's not actually sad to anyone except the person writing it because authors apparently have a hard time getting “the feels” right, at least in my experience. I find that this is often the case due to a lack of development/set up. Characters are just thrown into a “sad” situation and we're told “This is sad, shut up and be sad...”. But Levee decides to go a not stupid and angsty different route.
Who says you can't go home? Apparently Daring Do says that... she says that a lot.
In nearly every Daring Do fic she's somewhere very far from home, and, in fact, her home is usually never even mentioned. Yet, every hero needs a home, somewhere they grew up, where their parents, and friends, and neighbors lived, somewhere to go back to. For Daring, that place is the Riverlands, a ponified version of the Mississippi Delta. It's a sweltering hot, sweaty, dirty place that she openly admits to hating multiple times, and yet she is drawn back for a singular purpose, one I won't spoil here. But when she gets there she finds that nothing is different, and yet nothing is the same at the same time. She runs into old neighbors, lovers, and family, but maintains a cold distance from them that's easy to relate to if you've ever been away from family for a long period of time.
Much like Ordem, where this fic really shines is in its characterization. Daring is headstrong, fearless, brash, and yet naïve, ignorant of a great many things, and it all comes together so well that it's hard not to appreciate this fic simply for its characterization of Daring alone. But more than just that, Cynewulf also delivers and incredibly engaging narrative that puts you inside Daring's head, letting you in on her innermost thoughts. The major characters, there are only a few, feel surprisingly fleshed out for such a short piece, and Strong in particular stood out to me as a particularly great character. It's a little uncommon to see OC's that are so well-used and aren't just blank templates. Plus, while I wouldn't go so far as to say this fic actually made me “sad”, per se, it did evoke certain emotions that one could potentially describe as “sad”. Though, I would liken it more to a sense of understanding and empathy.
Anyway, wanna read a [Sad] fic that isn't whiny, angsty, weepy, bologna? Well go read When the Levee Breaks, you dumb idiot.
You would not believe how hard it is to find a clip of that on youtube...
I don’t often read introspective stories. They often dribble with an unknown substance best kept far beyond arm’s reach. That said, this one would have never lit up on my radar, let alone have even been considered worth the spending time reading, if not for a friend of mine. He threw it my way, said it was interesting, and went about his merry way. I’m glad he did.
This story is a great example of how to mesh a character’s feelings with the narrative being told. There is apprehension in Daring Do’s voice, both in her direct thoughts and narrative thoughts. It goes hand in hand with her slow trek back home. It gives a closeness with the main character, but it also causes some problems.
The biggest fault with this story is how slow it is. It drags its feet like a zombie towing a semi. Large portions of narration are clogged with backstory that, for at least some of the time, doesn’t feel necessary. They do create an overarching feel for the story itself, but sometimes feel too tangential, or at least approached in a less-than-optimal manner. But then again, the whole “thinking back on it all” aspect is what makes this story what it is. It succeeds in its ability to roll everything together and give its climax a deserved magnitude.
The best stories always hit home and ring true with their audience. It might sound like a vapid truism, but really, writing a great story is often times as "simple" as creating realistic characters and putting them into relatable situations. While very few of us have fist-fought demons or started our own private investigation firm, great stories translate those distant experiences into common ones that everyone's felt at some point.
They're irrespective of nationality, race, or age—human experiences that both the old and the Jung know about.
Cynewulf's When the Levee Breaks is a story about Daring Do in a surprisingly relatable, melancholy role. She's not barreling down some ancient Aztack ruins and searching for treasure; she's… coming home. If you've never left your parents' home, you'll learn soon enough that there's a lot of truth to the ancient adage, "You can't come home again." It's a sub-experience of the "time keeps moving forward whether you want it to or not" meme, and it's probably one of my favorite human experiences to read and to write about.
When the Levee Breaks is an incredibly masterful take on this most human of experiences—and it's told with My Little Ponies. Between estranged families, old flames, and years' worth of regret of "I should have worked harder at keeping in touch," this story hits on almost every possible angle of something I very much enjoy.
I don't really have all that much bad to say about this story. The usual, lame critique of all well-done stories comes to mind: "Why did you do this with ponies?" However, that's as bullshit a critique as it is self-defeating (it implies non-pony stories are better, but it's often applied to pony stories that are apparently good enough to join the upper echelons of "real fiction").
I recommend you take a look at When the Levee Breaks. It's a well-done story in both a technical and on an emotional level.
No, these are definitely tears, that I shed as I think about my long-deceased parents. My wonderful, kind, loving, dead parents had passed away from death and were no longer here, on account of their being dead.
Everybody loves a good parody, at least, they should. I guess some people are just Stiffly Stiffersons and they need a good pranking to set them straight. Anyway, they say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery... but I'm not sure I agree with that. Given how much My Little Dashie has been parodied, laughed at, and made fun of, I'm not sure I would call that “flattering”. However, while it may not be flattering, it's usually damn funny, and, to my knowledge, ROBcakeran53 has been a pretty good sport about MLD parodies, openly admitting that the original doesn't deserve half as much attention as it's gotten. So good on him for not being a Stiffly Stifferson, because you know I hate Stiffly Stiffersons. I love to prank them for hours in my basement.
Ving Rhames and Bruce Willis in my “prank” room.
I think what makes a parody good is maintaining a healthy closeness to the source material, but not directly copying it. I've seen countless MLD parodies that simply have the same scenario play out to less than humorous effect, but what makes My Full-Sized Goddess Horse special is the way presentperfect so accurately recreates, not only the narrator, but also the feel of My Little Dashie. From the defeatist attitude, to the constant references to dead parents, and the, as present himself puts it, “self-imposed martyr complex”. He even manages to parody the grammatical errors, like comma splices and random tense shifts.
But, besides just being funny, I think the best parodies are the ones that are a thinly-veiled commentary on the source material, and presentperfect does just that. From revealing how ridiculous a notion it is to want a cartoon horse in your apartment, to showcasing the narrators own self-induced delusions about his dead parents, MFSGH manages to be the best parody of My Little Dashie that I have ever seen. To borrow words from another, presentperfect is the Weird-Al Yankovic of My Little Dashie parodies. It's the Straight Outta Lynwood to ROBcakeran53's Straight Outta Compton.
Now, the only problem with this fic, and it's not even really a problem, per se, is that if you haven't read My Little Dashie then a lot of the jokes will probably go over your head. Having said that, it's still well worth the read, but it will probably lose a good bit of its charm. However, given the My Little Dashie is the mostly popular fic on FiMfic, I'm going to assume most of you have read it...
Uh... Okay. To be honest, I don’t have much to say about this story. I liked it, yeah, but there’s not much substance to it. It’s a basic parody of a famous fic, and not much else.
Parodies in their own right are often very shallow in terms of meaning or endearment. That’s not a bad thing, mind you; parodies often must be shallow in order to keep the situation light-hearted and funny. Otherwise they become awkward without intending to.
Or they shoot for that awkwardness as the means to their humor.
This one did just so. It contained all the necessary (and overabundance of) angst and contrived events to make it funny in its own right. Though it’s cheap, easy humor, I giggled throughout. Take that how you will.
In all honesty, I've never read My Little Dashie in its entirety, and excluding bets / bribes / coercion, I probably never will. It's basically someone's idle fantasy of "What if I had a pet pony," updated to fit bronies, and the excerpts I've read are more than enough for me to realize that its popularity is based on what is written, not how skillfully it was executed.
Present Perfect's story, My Full-Sized Goddess Horse, is a parodic subversion of My Little Dashie. As the titles alone will tell you, this story is about a human finding the adult Celestia, not a helpless Rainbow Dash foal. The humor in this is mostly referential and pokes satire at the fandom—from things like tired memes to the passive misanthropy of "humans bad, ponies good!" that seems to have infiltrated a lot of individuals' mindsets.
Speaking of mindsets, I love how delusional the main character is. Without delving too much into my personal life, I've hit a few rough patches in the past, so I can definitely attest to how this story really hits on the futility of a negative worldview. This story's main character lives in a misery of his own creation, basically, and a bulk of this story's humor comes from pointing out that things are rarely as bad as we, the pessimists, make them out to be.
If I had to say something about this story that I didn't like, I'd probably mention that most of the humor is derivative and referential. Granted, it's referencing things that attentive people in this fandom already know about, but the few times where Present Perfect tries for a gag that's directly related to the story… they tend to fall flat. However, in a work such as this—one that parodies an original that is rampant with "not trying" and grammatical errors—it's difficult to tell how much of that is intentional.
My Full-Sized Goddess Horse is short, humorous, and entertaining. If you think that My Little Dashie was way-too-far overblown for how simple an idea it was, I recommend giving it a look.
Pony fanfiction. Pony fanfiction never changes.
The end occured almost exactly as was predicted. Too many fanfics, not enough new ideas.
FiMfic was nearly wiped clean of life. A great cleansing, an atomic spark struck by M.A. Larson’s hands, quickly raged out of control. Spears of Alicorn!Twilight fics rained from the skies, entire groups were swallowed in flamewars, and fell beneath the mighty ban hammers.
Ponyfanfiction was almost extinguished, its spirit becoming part of the fallout that blanketed FiMfic. A quiet darkness fell across the site, lasting many years.
This is the future of FiMfic. This is the future that we have seen. Driven by the desire to not repeat past mistakes, a team of top men engineered a time machine using the last computer systems available to us in order to send a crack team of ponyfanfic reviewers back into the before times. Before our hubris and e-peens destroyed us.
Come now, join us in our effort to bring under appreciated fanfiction back into the spotlight and so draw away attention from what might become the greatest disaster of our age. Show us any fanfics that we may have missed, ask us questions about the future, and come sit around the proverbial campfire and discuss ways in which we may better ward ourselves against our own demise.
When the Levee Breaks?
Lol Zed Lepplin
You should do more monologues.
You want us to read all dat?
therecessivegene.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/ain-t-nobody-got-time-fo-dat-sweet-brown-31241125-480-330.jpg?w=600
847984 There you are again Regidar...
848020
848027 Not really, People just need to think! and besides, there's ALWAYS AU.
Pfft, only one story to tell indeed.
Honestly, I won't be surprised if Twilicorn causes a civil war.
The Great Split of 2013.
Also, I'm already liking the choice of stories. Will have to read later.
Hey, I read a few of these a while back! Glad to see they made it here.
best part of this was the Oedipus picture
I will laugh (or cry) if fimfic ends up dead in the future.
Fucking finally.
>tfw you can't tell Latin from Portug--
@_@
OH MY GOD WHAT YOU GUYS DID :D THANK YOU!
alexmagnet you are my favorite pony now I love you ;_;
848229
I do what I can...
"My Full-sized Goddess Horse" is right up there on top of my list of MLD parodies.
848229 I know, right? One would think that this particular phrase was a little better known (it's Brazil's equivalent to E pluribus unum, basically, only they went the extra mile and put it right on their flag).
Oh, and congrats on showing up here.
No but "AnthroPonies" should be a separate Tag. Some people REALLY care about that! I don't care, as long as I know what to picture on my "Head TV" when I start reading.
Ni
Ordem e Progresso deserves more love. I'm glad to see it getting some here.
848548
Too bad the author left the fandom. I was rather close to him and real life caught up as we were churning out these fics. But it's a good legacy he left behind.
848299
I'm also very glad that you guys included Ordem e Progresso. I loved that fic when it was written for the writeoff, and I had no idea it was on fimfic, nor who'd written it.
848979
What a shame. D:
848979
I hadn't even been aware of that. Hope he's doing well wherever he is.
848496 It's only on our flag though. We don't take it too seriously, it's almost always either one or the other (sometimes neither).
849309
Oh! He's doing absolutely fine. He didn't leave for a 'bad' reason. I still keep in contact with him once in a long while, but he has a very busy high profile life. So, all the best to him and his exploits!
I have only read one of these stories, and thus only have comments on the first: Ordem E Progresso. I remember the birth of it—not long after I joined the /fic/ board on Ponychan, which is much more of a writing communtity than a grotto limited to any one location. /fic/ is everywhere, but I digress. I must admit, I am impressed by the quality that was produced in a mere 72 hours, given the prompt: Setting The Rules It's quite a shame that our dear Chocolate Milk vanished not long after. I still wonder whatever became of him. In any case, I recall a small bit of controversy that sparked when I rated the story much lower than most ponies had, and had placed a less popular story above it. My thoughts on the matter being that I thought it lacked flair.
I have to chuckle at myself, now, because I seldom find myself in the same mind as I was, when I find something I've previously written. The other story had been a joke—nothing more, but a well played one at that. Ordem E Progresso was an attempt at a compelling and dramatic tale. A feat that I believe it grasped at upon first arrival. I have not read the story since it's origin at the write-off competition, and thus have not seen any revisions made to it, though I must tip my hat to Mr. Chocolate Milk, wherever he may be. 
Edit
I must also apply hoof to face, as I have only just now deemed a possibility for his choice of name.
Pinkie Pie: And what are you laughing at?
Applejack: Chocolate milk.
Um...Is my ghost fic original?
The real problem is no one ever thinks up original intros anymore.
I'm constantly seeing Ponies on Earth fics involving My Little Dashie circumstances, or Human in Equestria involving someone dying first.
Most OC alicorns are made either over powered, characterless, or a mixture of both and no one ever thinks up a good OC Alicorn with a reason to not be a total badass unless you go with "The Abundance" which is a sequel to another great fiction.
Pretty much I love seeing original works that differentiate, but it doesn't happen often.