[REVIEW] Down with the Universal Church of the Sun! · 6:18pm Oct 1st, 2014
So, as your concierge in the world of Ponyfics, I hear you're requesting something in the Adventure genre, with a twist of romantic pursuits, some laughs thrown in, told in the First Person, with a sprinkling of world building and character development. Oh, and you want the main character to be Princess Twilight Sparkle? Well, I have just the thing for you!
When a fanfic author (or any author, really) chooses to ride the popularity of a popular title, it can be a hit or miss proposition. On the one hand, you have a built-in starter audience of everyone who liked the title you're leaching off of borrowing from. On the other hand, if the original title left a bad taste in people's mouth, you might not ever be able to convince those people that they should give your fic a first glance, let alone a good look.
I never actually read Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code (in spite of my love for clever theories about the origins of Christianity told to political intrigue thriller stories) mostly because of the ridiculous hue and cry that surrounded the initial publication and popularity of the piece and all the hysterical back-and-forth from both the people who thought it was a direct attack on the Christian religion (Protip: It wasn't) and people who thought that any popular opinion against a book was automatically state-sponsored censorship. (Protip: It isn't) By the time the bruhaha settled, I was so sick of just hearing the words, "The DaVinci Code," I just sorta tuned it all out.
So when The Celestia Code came out on this site, I wanted nothing to do with it and promptly skipped it entirely.
When The Luna Cypher came out and not only rocketed up to the Feature Box but also received rave reviews from the readers, I investigated...and found out it was the sequel to The Celestia Code.
With a sigh, I opened up The Celestia Code in order to get the background needed for any sequel...and got hooked.
Even with the addition of a sprinkling of secondary character OCs, (which, btw, do NOT necessarily mean a story is going to be bad) this story is ABSOLUTELY worth the read. The narration, told from the perspective of our favorite purple pony princess, is spot on for what one would expect of her character.
And honestly there's not much more I can say without spoiling things, and the nature of the story is such that you can't really go into it without, well, seriously spoiling things. It is exactly the right kind of suspense-action-thriller where each and every reveal and plot point builds on the last creating a whole picture that you only get to see during the climax.
I lied, there's one more thing to say about this:
There was a DC miniseries a number of years back called Kingdom Come. (This was produced long before DC started their rather inept relationship with the fairer sex, so the treatments of Wonder Woman and other female metahumans is actually rather fantastic, it's a worthwhile read.) One of the author/artists, Alex Ross I believe it was, wrote an excellent forward wherein he explained that the essence of a good story is the "what happens next?" moments where you just HAVE to turn the page, HAVE to scroll down, HAVE to hit the next link because the not knowing is worse than the latest pop-culture earworm.
A corollary to this is for mystery suspense world-builders such as this, where the key to what happens next is buried in the what happened before. In order for the story to be properly built, the author, like a good architectural anthropologist professor, must simultaneously show you the building while creating excitement about the foundation. If you know anything about construction, you know that this is not an easy feat, as the foundation is the least interesting feature of a building while simultaneously being the most critical. A good mystery suspense story teller must master this skill.
And I, personally, think that iisaw is a damn fine architectural anthropologist professor.
Interesting. It's been on my to-read list, I'll have to give it a peek or two and a scathing word or three.
Nice review, but I think you told too little about the story itself.
2500236
That kinda is the problem with this kind of story, you can't really reveal much without spoiling stuff, and I didn't feel like doing a spoilers fic review for this.
It's probably one of my favorite stories. The reading of it was just so smooth and well paced that it felt both adventurous and fast while not being rushed. The world building was definitely a plus, only adding on to Twilight's adventure in every way possible. I've criticized other stories for this, but in Celestia Code, the setting is actually kinda important to the story and I like that!
2500236
Changelings! Dark magic most foul! Revolutionary archaeological discoveries! Princess Twilight Sparkle being adorkable and/or badass!