Read It Now Reviews #29 – Pinkie Pie Startles a Blind Filly, Never the Final Word, I’ll Kill You With My Tea Cup, My Brother, the Tooth, You Can’t Have Everything Your Way · 10:47am Apr 3rd, 2015
After doing another revision of chapter 4 of Mistletrapped, I thought I’d try and read a few short stories and do a quick set of reviews.
The stories I read today:
Pinkie Pie Startles a Blind Filly by Flutters is Shy
Never the Final Word by Horizon
- Elementary, My Dear Twilight by GhostOfHeraclitus (a sequel to PoweredByTea’s The Wrong Fork)
- Sheepish Talk by Themaskedferret (a sequel to FanOfMostEverything’s The Perfect Barnstorm)
- Hunka Hunka Barning Sludge
I’ll Kill You With My Tea Cup by Cloud Hop
My Brother, the Tooth by Georg
You Can’t Have Everything Your Way by Xepher
Pinkie Pie Startles a Blind Filly
by Flutters is Shy
Sad, Slice of LifePinkie Pie really should have known better, some folks who could see were startled something fierce by her welcome wagon. That poor little filly had no idea what hit her.
And now she has to live with it.
Why I added it: Someone linked to it from the Writeoff Skype and I was hoping it was going to be about Pinkie Pie running over a blind filly with her welcome wagon.
Review
I was disappointed; it was actually a sadfic about Pinkie Pie getting a restraining order placed against her after she terrified a blind young filly with her very loud welcome wagon.
Feels, man? You’re going with feels?
More seriously, the biggest problem with this is that the show has already kind of gone over someone not liking her welcome wagon (Cranky) and Pinkie Pie dealing with inadvertently hurting someone’s feelings while trying to be welcoming. As such, the idea didn’t really feel that fresh, and the ending didn’t really do anything for me because I never really invested in the story emotionally, even though it was fine in and of itself.
There’s nothing really super wrong with this story, but it doesn’t really feel like it goes anywhere that you haven’t seen.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
Never the Final Word
by Horizon
RandomWhen a story touches you deeply, sometimes the only appropriate reaction is to respond in kind.
This is an open anthology of minifics which continue or revisit other authors' fanfics — embracing and extending, and reflecting on questions raised by the work. Due to the nature of the collection, this contains spoilers for other authors' stories, though each chapter contains a link to let you read the source first (and a spoilered summary, if you want to jump right in).
Why I added it: These stores are often great, and one of them was a rare work by GhostOfHeraclitus.
Review
Unusually, none of these three are really “sequels” or “codas” in the usual sense, rather being things which were more inspired by the original work rather than being direct addendums to them.
Elementary, My Dear Twilight by Ghost of Heraclitus
This idea was summed up as “Rarity as an upper-class Poirot-style detective”, and Ghost of Heraclitus wrote a couple of little denouements which were basically examples of Rarity figuring stuff out based on ponies’ clothing and behavior.
Unfortunately, while this is a great idea, these are more ideas than stories, and thus, while excellent comments, are more fragments of scenes than actual things unto themselves; they lack any real greater significance. GhostOfHeraclitus himself noted such.
Sheepish Talk by TheMaskedFerret
A sheep explains why she named her son lanolin.
I wasn’t very fond of this; the story was kind of boring, really, as the story behind the name just wasn’t that interesting.
Either that, or I’m missing a really bad pun.
Hunka Hunka Barning Sludge by Horizon and Bad Horse
For some reason, Horizon didn’t reproduce the first half of the story this was based on in the entry; you need to read the blog post for the story to make any sense.
That being said, it is a complete story that Hemmingway would be proud of, and it made me chuckle.
Recommendation:
Elementary, My Dear Twilight: These are really more fragments than codas, so any recommendation is kind of meaningless. They’re the sort of thing you’d reference if you wanted to write about Rarity deducing things about ponies based on their dress/manners/behavior.
Sheepish Talk: Not Recommended.
Hunka Hunka Barning Sludge: Worth Reading, especially if you like feghoots.
I’ll Kill You With My Tea Cup
by Cloud Hop
Alternate UniverseOnly a few hours after she learned of the Griffon Empire's invasion, Princess Celestia surrendered herself to the griffon army and asked for an audience with the Griffon Emperor.
The Emperor thinks she's here to negotiate Equestria's surrender.
He's wrong.
Why I added it: It was at the top of the featured story box.
Review
With a name like that, you can guess what is going to happen in the story.
A fairly typical “Celestia is ungodly powerful and cannot be defeated by mere mortals” story, this has “Celestia” come to parlay with the griffins to negotiate surrender – namely, the surrender of the griffins to Equestria. If they refuse, she will simply kill them all herself.
You can guess how this unwinds from there, with a Chronicles of Riddick reference at the end.
All in all, there wasn’t really a whole lot to this story; the protagonist doesn’t even have to be Celestia, and doesn’t really have much of a personality, simply being a near-omnipotent force of nature who has the griffins sorely overmatched. Some folks enjoy this sort of thing, but it doesn’t really add much to the power fantasy genre that it belongs to, and I didn’t really feel like it did anything tremendously unique with her characterization or any other aspect of it.
I feel like stories like The Sun Burns Brightly did a much better job of this, as all there really is in this story is the overpowering, without any eye towards greater consequences or what it means for Celestia or anything other than “don’t mess with (AU) Celestia.” It is just a brief scene of Celestia winning, and doesn’t really seem to have much to say beyond that.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
My Brother, The Tooth
by Georg
ComedyShining Armor is a tooth. Really. Princess Luna says so.
Why I added it: It was featured.
Review
Luna reveals the super secret origin of the royal guard – that they are all secretly made from dragons’ teeth, sown in the soil and then grown to maturity with magic. If you use teeth from the same dragon, you can even get remarkably similar guardsponies!
Naturally, Twilight freaks out and goes to talk to Princess Celestia about it.
Recommendation: Worth reading if you like dad jokes and references to Greek mythology. If you don’t, you probably don’t want to go out of your way to read it. Still, it is very short.
You Can’t Have Everything Your Way
by Xepher
Slice of LifeWhen Cadance comes to foalsit Twilight Sparkle, she finds the young filly playing a pretend game of cards with her stuffed animals. Curious, Cadance joins the game, only to find Twilight is far more serious about her betting than she lets on. Can she help Twilight learn what's really valuable?
Why I added it: It was featured, and was originally supposed to be for a writeoff.
Review
This story is a bit of an odd duck, in that it is about Twilight Sparkle as a filly, and it seems like it is going to be cute… but it actually is about Twilight Sparkle as a filly, and you realize that she’s actually a clever little brat. Still cute, but she also shrieks when she doesn’t get her way, and there’s something a little bit off about her.
Amusingly, this is almost certainly a more-accurate depiction of Twilight than a lot of the more cutesy stories, because Twilight actually isn’t a very nice pony at the very start of the series.
If this story has a major weakness, it is that the explanation of the wager at the end – the fact that you can’t actually “win” love, nor is love limited in the way that filly Twilight thinks it is – is a pretty tired trope at this point, and seeing it explained yet again, in a way that didn’t really feel particularly novel, was a bit of a drag.
Recommendation: Worth Reading if the trite ending isn't offputting and you want to read about bratty filly Twilight playing poker.
Summary
Pinkie Pie Startles a Blind Filly by Flutters is Shy
Not Recommended
Never the Final Word by Horizon
- Sheepish Talk by Themaskedferret (a sequel to FanOfMostEverything’s The Perfect Barnstorm)
Not Recommended
- Hunka Hunka Barning Sludge
Worth Reading
I’ll Kill You With My Tea Cup by Cloud Hop
Not Recommended
My Brother, the Tooth by Georg
Worth Reading
You Can’t Have Everything Your Way by Xepher
Worth Reading
All of these stories are pretty short, but none of them really knocked my socks off, and your world will not be forever less if you don't read any of them; still, a few of them were decent, and none were outright awful. I personally enjoyed Hunka Hunka Barning Sludge a fair bit, but I’m terrible like that; terrible feghoots are the best kind of feghoot, but your mileage may vary. My Brother, the Tooth was a lesser story in the “jokes my dad would tell” genre, and You Can’t Have Everything is a story which managed to get the idea of filly Twilight shrieking in my head – a sound I really didn’t want to hear in the middle of the night.
In other news, expect at least one Mistletrapped update in the near future.
Number of stories still listed as "Read It Later – High Priority": 284
Number of stories listed as “Read It Later”: 1555.
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Fixed.
And yes. I'm going to try and get as much of Mistletrapped done tonight as I can while I'm on a roll, though I'm getting pretty fatigued. I was hoping reading a few stories would perk me back up, but it didn't really end up working.
WAIT WAIT WAIT
FERRET WROTE SOMETHING?
SET PHASERS TO READ
Wait they have a writeoff Skype now? But I thought I was in every Skype group! I'm omniscient or whatever for Skype. Noooooooooo!
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Yeeeeeeeeeeeees!
2939649
obviously you have to start participating in the writeoff now :V
2939648
See, this is why you gotta keep an eye on Horizon - he finds all sorts of interesting stuff.
2939649
Eyup. There's a thread on it in the Writeoff Association.
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Well, he has a few times.
2939652
Well then he needs to pay more attention to the group. >:B