Fic recs, September 15th! · 1:43pm Sep 15th, 2014
This is a note that Aquaman’s winning Outside Insight entry I Am Demon has been posted to Fimfiction! I’ve made the appropriate changes to my review blog.
Also, the writeoff is in voting now! Check out all the majesty! The 8k word limit hasn't seemed to done much to decrease the overall word count, though. :B
H: 2 R: 1 C: 2 V: 0 N: 1
My Domestic Equestria by Pascoite
Genre: Creative Nonfiction
Pascoite has done what I was unable to: published nonfiction on Fimfic. This is a chronicle of “pony play time” stories he’s enacted with his four-year-old son, and dear lord do you need to read this. The kid is just adorable as heck, and I loved the Axe Cop vibe I got from the names he gives to the characters he creates. (We need things like this to remind us of the ways children, especially young ones, approach the world and creativity.) The writing is of course top-notch, and we get a little peek into Pascoite’s private life, which is always scandalous and exciting. (The experience, that is; his life is anything but scandalous.) The one thing that stood out to me about this was, well, my own reaction. I’m not one for having kids, but this rather made me wish I were, so I could have an experience of this sort. It’s just heartwarming and adorable all-around, and you won’t likely see another of its sort.
Highly Recommended
Hello, Sedna by shortskirtsandexplosions
Reading by Sharpieboss
Genre: Science Fiction
A lone pony astronaut discovers a system of planets and investigates a derelict spacecraft in orbit above one of them. This story is just beautiful. It’s skirts at his skirtiest, yet never does the writing feel frivolous or wasted. It’s perfectly paced, never rushing to the “good stuff”, as befits a story set in zero-g. On that note, this is also excellent sci-fi. Sedna, for those whose knowledge of modern astronomy stops at “but Pluto is still a planet to me!”, is the planet which orbits our sun at the furthest distance. I read about it not long ago, and, not to diverge too much, just take a look at this image of its orbit and note that the purple circle is the orbit of Pluto. The solar system is way huger than I was ever taught. Anyway, this does end up fitting into the “discovery of lost human civilization” trope that exists even beyond ponyfic, yet I feel it breathes new life into the old genre. A large part of this is the main character’s optimism, never feels forced, in the face of the sheer hopelessness of her assignment. Also helping the atmosphere is her foreboding about “the pistol”, which we see a few times before its use. If there’s a flaw here, it’s lack of poniness. The themes explored at the ending include hope and friendship, so those at least fit, but really this could be about any smaller-than-human extraterrestrial species, minus a few details here and there. I’m certainly not going to hold that against this piece, however. It left me feeling awed, and as if there were some ineffable thing absent from my life. If nothing else, it’s good equine sci-fi with excellent imagery.
Highly Recommended
Memories Don’t Burn by MythrilMoth
Reading by Goombasa
Genre: #savetree
Twilight and her friends cope with the loss of the library. I don’t think I’ve made too big a secret of my disdain for the whole #savetree thing, and now, as we look more forwards to season 5 than backwards to season 4, I can’t imagine feelings on the subject are still as high as they once were. Still, this actually managed to get me on one detail that I hadn’t thought of before: Twilight’s gala dress is toast. D: Now that I’m broken up about. As for the rest, though, it plays out pretty much as you’d expect. Heck, the moral is in the title; you barely have to read this. I do appreciate that it goes beyond the mourning and cleanup to actual construction of a new library (aside: why can no one come up with a decent “real” name for the Mayor?). Whether this works or not as a story comes down to whether the truisms within come off as trite. Given that I have never experienced the catastrophic loss of my home (knock on wood), I can’t really say.
Recommended If You’re Still Broken Up About the Dumb Tree
Never Stop Smiling by P3RROHAMBRE
Reading by Indubitably Ponfied
Genre: Epistolary
After Pinkie Pie dies, Rainbow Dash writes her a letter to get her feelings out. This is every sadfic ever, mashed together with a really bad shipfic. The shipping is perfunctory, Pinkie dies from secret disease, and this becomes a future fic by the end. (Also, there’s just a ton of shipping. Along with the aborted PinkieDash, there’s Rarishy and Appledash by the end. Twilight gets to be a lonely nerd.) This isn’t even so bad it’s funny, it’s just a waste of time to read because I’ve read it so many times.
Not Recommended
A Hiccup in Reality by Twinkletail
Reading by Midnight29
Genre: Comedy
I saw the newly-commissioned cover art on DeviantArt and just had to know what this story was about. It’s far better than I anticipated. The premise is simply that Discord has the hiccups and is changing things at random. What the mane six get afflicted with is hysterical, Fluttershy especially, and results in a lot of textual puns that I quite honestly enjoyed. We get a short scene from Discord’s perspective, a little decent character-building, and then he fixes everything when his hiccups go away. If there’s any downside to this, it’s the abrupt and entirely non-comedic ending, but given that it’s short and hilarious up to that point, I think it’s worth it. The only thing I would change would be “more”.
Recommended
Like Romance, Just Different by TheBandBrony
Reading by Doctor Cobra
Review #1300!
Mature: Sex
Genre: Romantic Clop
Braeburn just wants a romantic night in; Soarin wants to fuck. To start with, I was disappointed that this feels like a companion piece to something else. Soarburn is a popular ship that I’ve never had any strong feelings about, and I was hoping this would get into how they met. Sure, their relationship seems well-developed (again, making this feel like a sequel or something), but you can’t just make Braeburn a male Applejack stand-in: the Wonderbolts have a lot more reason to go to Ponyville than Appleloosa. So, that doesn’t end up being a factor, but the result is nevertheless cute. That, unfortunately, is my main problem: the dialogue feels like an internet chat session discussing all the cute/funny/awesome things they could do with each other. Character has been thrown to the wayside in favor of "wouldn't it be great if?" For instance, Soarin’s juvenile macho self-aggrandizement is amusing, but he’s never struck me as the self-aggrandizing sort, at least not in private, with nothing to prove. The sex I of course skipped, but the writing seemed passable, and I'll give the author credit for not rushing to get to it. And while the ending is a little too “fuzzy”, it’s still kind of nice. Just as I have no strong feelings about this ship, so too do I have no strong feelings about this story.
Recommended for Shippers Only
Twinkie will be pleased
Why do you keep reading it?
*eyetwitch* S'not a planet
2456876
I'm not a smart pony. :(
2456881
You're not a planet. >:V
I usually call her "Mayor Marion Mare." Mind you, I'm the sort of person who'd promote Major Major Major Major.
2456969 I call her Meir "Mayor Mare" Mayer in the one story I've written that includes her.
2456969
2456993
After reading that story and thinking about the idea, I have since decided that "Mayor Mare" is actually her full title, akin to "Lord Mayor", and her actual name is something completely otherwise.
2456969 There is no one who wouldn't promote Major Major Major to Major. It's necessary for universal equilibrium.
2456917 No, I'm not, because I don't orbit the sun on my own, my own gravity hasn't made me round, and I haven't gravitationally cleared my (nonexistant) orbit of most debris :P
2457160
Well maybe you should try harder. :|
2457370 You callin' me fat!?
2457838
I'm calling you not fat enough. :V
2458062 pistols at dawn!
-Ha! I also don't really like calling her Mayor Mare. On this one other site where I roleplayed for a while, she was named Vanilla Latte or Vanilla Rose, both of which are better names in my opinion.
-Bringing up Pluto's status reminds me of the Rick and Morty story where the change happened because Pluto had been so extensively strip-mined that it actually shrank. I didn't bring that up earlier when I was gushing about the show because it's not even the least interesting part of the episode it's in, but it's still kind of a neat idea.
2458062
Well that took a turn for the weird. I'm gonna go get some popcorn.
Have you ever considered ordering by recomendation? I noticed that the two HRs were on top, and those are the only ones which I read in their entirety. Everything else I just skim through.
I'm not ungratful, mind, these reviews must take a lot of work to write up, and I appreciate that. It's just I'm not all that interested in reading how bad a story is.
2459939
If I did that, then you might not read all the reviews. I put as much work into writing up the bad stories as the good (well, when I put in any work at all), and though I have no illusions that people don't just scroll through checking on the ratings, I'm not going to make it easier for people to skip things. I post them in the order they're read. :)
>tfw you'll never get rec'd by PP
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