Fic recs, October 1st: Project Get! #1 · 6:38pm Oct 1st, 2014
As I said in the last rec journal, I've got some time before I'm done with my current audiobook. So...
Welcome to Project Get!
Recently (as I write this; it was a while ago), City of Doors did a featured review of all the stories in his RIL with low view counts. I liked the idea and thought I’d give it a try myself. I’m doing any story with fewer views than my least-viewed story, currently The JaAm Cycles at 194, regardless of word count, and presented from least viewed to most. Will I discover nothing but dreck deserving of eternal obscurity, or will there be diamonds in this rough? We shall see. The whole idea is to give authors more attention to their least-loved stories. (I grabbed the links ahead of time, so if there are more stories added to my RIL later, or if The JaAm Cycles goes up in hits, oh well.)
Oh yeah, and I totally realized this isn’t a contest so I don’t have to post them all at once, though I will let these journals post outside the normal three-day schedule, as contest journals do. I’ll break them down into groups of ten and label each journal “Project Get!” so you can keep track! Also, this will let me get around the “one story per author” thing, yay!
Oh, and I guess I only did nine this time somehow. :B Oh well.
H: 0 R: 2 C: 3 V: 3 N: 1
Crystal’s Opal by DegeTheMighty
Genre: Character Sketch
This is explicitly an exercise in getting inside a character’s head, as evinced by the author’s note. It’s otherwise just a short piece about a gem hunter seeking rubies at Rarity’s behest. It’s a tad perfunctory, at least in terms of needing a spot of proofreading, but the part about our narrator’s friend did give this a bit of weight. Still, it works as light reading, and is pretty decent overall.
Recommended If You Don’t Mind Some Typos
The Legend of Twix Bar. A Swooty Bell Adventures Story. by Protopony350
Sequel to Swooty Bell Adventures
Genre: Trollfic
Watch the adventures of Twix Bar as she does stuff and lives a full life full of Kellogg’s Rice Krispies®! Honestly, I think the only reason Swooty Bell Adventures is listed as a sequel is because it introduces Twix Bar. So if you want to know where she came from, go read that. But it stands on its own perfectly well, and it’s amazing. It doesn’t have the same issue as Swooty Bell of getting tiresome after a while. The author has found a voice and sticks with it, and the story is short enough that it never feels overextended. Plus, it’s exciting and hilarious, and there are a ton of bizarre charicatures of show characters in it. If you like The Spiderses (and if you don’t, don’t tell me, I will sad), you will like this. I need to read all the other Swooty sequels now.
Troll Recommended
Guiding Him Down a New Path by Sai-guy
Genre: Slice of Life
A couple tries to do right by their child. I’ve got a lot of feelings about this story. For starters, the first chapter is one of the most perfect things I have ever read. We’re introduced in short order to a group of OCs — a ship's captain, his wife and son, a pair of griffon mercenaries and their child — and then they start doing a bunch of stuff without any real explanation why, and it was great somehow. The characters are strong, what they do is interesting, and it’s entirely unlike anything you expect from an all-OC story. Then the focus shifts to what I expected to be the main plot: the wife, Squall, takes in the griffon chick while her parents are at sea, treating her as the daughter she never had and dealing with her trying to fit in at her son’s school. At around the halfway point, though, things start getting muddled. Perspective was a major problem, and not for the usual reasons. While it’s steady and the characters are, again, strongly-voiced, telling the story first-person from the parents’ perspective means that a lot of the action is relayed second-hand. There’s an entire chapter with no dialogue, for instance, and I found myself wishing I was out there in the schoolyard with the kid and the griffon instead of wallowing at home with mom while she hears about what already happened. Things get even more muddled after the foal has a magical mishap and whole bunch of teachers from the School for Gifted Unicorns show up one after another, spouting magical technobabble and explaining exactly squat. It was horrendously confusing, and while there’s obviously a lot of world-building that’s gone into this story, none of it is made accessible. (My other criticism, that the story is very heavy-handed with “respect other cultures”, seems piddling in the face of this.) I think that this is an unmarked sequel to the author’s other two stories, which would explain the depth of both character and world and why the latter is never explained, and that the point is to tell the story of the foal getting his cutie mark. But the second half of the piece doesn’t fit with the first, and all I’m left with is speculation as to its purpose. It’s still a really masterful piece of character-building, so on that at least I can recommend it.
Recommended If You Like All-OC Stories
A Lesson in Love by Compendium of Steve
Genre: Rickroll
This is from the third-ever writeoff, hence the colonated title, and judging by my original comments (they’re still kicking around!), it hasn’t changed much. It’s a comedically over-dramatic shipping fic whose dialogue is comprised almost entirely the lyrics to “Never Gonna Give You Up”. I think I have a little more appreciation for it now, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is horrendously silly and not really a good a story.
Vaguely Recommended
Life in the Air by q97randomguy
Genre: Headcanon Dump
A lone pegasus ponders the meaning of flight, which for a pegasus is the same as the meaning of life. If I read this correctly, it takes place pre-Unification, the main character is a friend of (not-yet) Private Pansy, and Pansy knew Clover and Smart Cookie before the whole Hearth’s Warming thing, which I find odd. Anyway, there isn’t a whole lot to this, and what’s there is obscured somewhat by the fact that the narrator is telling himself things he already knows. I just found it distracting, is all, and nakedly a headcanon dump. That said, there is some decent imagery, and it’s not terribly long, but I’m not sure what the reader is meant to get out of this.
Vaguely Recommended
Freedom by Borg
Genre: Flight Fic
Interestingly, this was written for the same WTG as the last story. It’s also about a pegasus flying, but this one I feel I’ve seen before. That said, it does run through the headcanon on flight mechanics rather than dumping it on the reader, and the writing itself is rather pleasant. Still, nothing really happens, and the ending feels horribly tacked on, muffling a decently-crafted scene with cloying emotion. If you like flight fics, stop reading at the scene break.
Vaguely Recommended
The Journeymare Project by Scarlett Haze
800th Review of 2014!
DNF: 1/6
Genre: The Journeyman Project Crossover
An agent of the Temporal Security Annex is tasked with fixing the timeline ahead of Equestria’s first peaceful contact with humankind. I’d never heard of the game this is based on before looking it up, but I suspect the reason the crossover was attempted was due to the game’s time machine being called “Pegasus”. Unfortunately, after skimming the Wikipedia article, I got the feeling that this is more a ponification than a true crossover. Unfortunately, between that and the very lackluster writing — flat narration, focus on minor details, overdramatic dialogue, typos, and “a fine female unicorn that could show off her curves as well as her deadly spells and athletics” — I didn’t find myself particularly wanting to find out how this ended.
Not Recommended
The Death of Sorrow by Kaldanor
Genre: Sad
A pony tells the story of his father’s death. The first third or so of this drags a bit, an establishing monologue that sets up our narrator as a troubled but otherwise horribly plain pony dealing with his ailing father and trying to help out his mother. It edges up on “woe is me” -- though a certain forthright self-awareness helps it escape that emotional trap -- and the way the title is used is pretty melodramatic. Things pick up once he stops talking about himself and starts talking about his parents, and that’s the point when you realize this is based on real-life experience. The rest is well-crafted and heartfelt, naturally, and I think it makes up for any issues in the opening. This is a very quiet and tense look at what it’s like to lose a parent, and definitely worth reading.
Recommended
Blue Skies Bring Tears by A Hoof-ful of Dust
Reading by Illya Leonov
Genre: Vignette
Fiddlesticks tromps through the Badlands, thinking of her past. This piece is a marvelous example of how to use words well. Granted, they aren’t used for much of a story, as this merely sets a scene and lets us know how things got to this point, but they craft a wonderful atmosphere, both scenic and emotional. Reading this piece was a pure joy, and I’d suggest it for anyone who just really likes words.
Recommended
So, we're off to a bit of a rocky start. But I have hope we'll find more like these last two, or even Guiding or Twix Bar, that aren't for everyone but are at least memorable. Stay tuned for more!
Ooooooh, a story by Rael!
>reads review
Oooooh, that one.
Does it even really count as a Rickroll if you know beforehand what it is?
Correct on all three counts. The oddness is explained by this story being set during the first story I wrote and using its events. This story was just what popped into my head when I saw the writing prompt, and, having not written anything for a while, I went with it for fun.
That's not surprising if you didn't also read the story I put up the day after I posted "Life in the Air." They're really meant to be read together to show how different characters can have very different views of the same thing.
To be honest, "Life in the Air" is probably the weakest thing I've written. It was more to get it out of my head than to be a masterpiece.
2499780
And that's okay. :O Is that second story linked as a sequel?
I had pretty much the same reaction you did to "Guiding Him Down a New Path." I hated the choice of a completely non-dialogue chapter because the events were so integral to the story that I felt robbed by not getting to witness them and seeing how the characters actually reacted to all of it instead of getting a secondhand summary. The other thing that bugged me was that the mother came across as a huge Mary Sue who excelled at everything she tried, even on the first try. The writing itself was good, but the storytelling needed help.
2500092
No, it wasn't. I didn't think to do so, because they're not part of the same story.
To be fair, it wasn't all the low view count stories in my RIL. I just grabbed a few off the bottom end of the list for a while.
Huh. Also weird that Blue Skies Bring Tears has so few views. It was featured on Seattle's Angels real recently.
The Swoot is spreading.
2500415
I'm dismayed that Hoof-ful of Dust shows up as much as he does during the ten journals I have planned. :( He's a great writer!
I'm not sure if you mean this from a plot perspective or a world-building one. I assumed the former when I first read it, but I'm not as sure now. If it's the latter, I think only the various "-mancys" would really count as "technobabble," and those are both constructed in such a way as to be deconstructed in (at most) a few seconds of research and shouldn't need to be, given how I showed the characters using them.
So, I don't know where I went wrong. I probably could have done a better job — I admit this. But I don't know what, specifically, I need to improve about that.
After chapter five, it's kind of a ball of world-building and plot hooks for the at least three other arcs I'm planning.
I'll cross-post this from my other comment because it's relevant here too.
I have literally no idea what you mean by this. When I read it, I stopped for a bit and tried to figure out what it means, but I couldn't. Could you please elaborate?
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't thank you for the kind words and the surprisingly long review (almost 400 words!). So thank you very much.
Edit: Apparently I have your review to thank for a couple views and likes too!
2500839
All-OC stories are generally stigmatized as wish-fulfillment garbage. This rises far, far above that morass, and that it trips on its own mistakes rather than the overarching flaws inherent in the subgenre is laudable. I left you more feedback on the story. :B
2501287
So I see! Thanks for that and the clarification.