Read It Now Reviews #40 – Sleepless in St. Maretinique, The Kindest Silence, Twilight Sparkle vs. The Equestrian Cutie Mark Registry, Once and Future, Things Better Left Unseen · 4:12am Jul 19th, 2015
Horizon and Bookplayer released new stories today, and Baal Bunny and Estee each released one earlier this week. You know what that means – it is time to get reading!
Today’s stories are four stories from established authors whose works I enjoy, plus a fifth from a new writer whose very first story ever got featured.
Sleepless in St. Martinique by bookplayer
The Kindest Silence by Horizon
Twilight Sparkle vs. The Equestrian Cutie Mark Registry by Estee
Once and Future by Baal Bunny
Things Better Left Unseen by Take
Sleepless in St. Maretinique
by bookplayer
Romance, Comedy
9,013 wordsRainbow Dash doesn't do sappy. Mushy, cute, sweet, and romantic are also totally out. So of course she has a crush on an awesome pony who's none of those things: Applejack. Now she just has to find a not-mushy, not-romantic, totally cool way to tell her.
A trip for two to an island paradise seems like the perfect time. Swimming, volleyball, jet skiing, snorkeling-- plenty of chances for a really awesome moment. But when her dumb feelings only let her see sappy romance at every turn, her nightmares might just ruin everything.
Why I added it: Bookplayer is a good writer.
Review
Rarity gives Rainbow Dash and Applejack some free tickets as a result of winning a contest for a wedding magazine. She might have given them to someone else, but Rainbow Dash might have conveniently arranged a storm for that weekend, which definitely didn’t have anything to do with wanting to spend a weekend with Applejack and confess how she feels about Applejack.
You know, in a non-lame, non-romantic way.
Too bad they got the honeymoon suite. And cool ponies don’t like mushy romantic stuff. Or sleeping in the same bed as someone they like. Or cuddling holding onto another pony while jet skiing.
It isn’t Rainbow Dash’s fault this stuff keeps happening, right? Or that she keeps having these stupid mushy, romantic dreams.
This is an AppleDash shipfic, if you hadn’t guessed already, with most of the story consumed by Rainbow Dash being torn between liking Applejack and not wanting to seem mushy or romantic, because those things are totally uncool.
While the core idea of this story has been done… a lot, actually… this story still managed to entertain me. Why?
Well, first off, it uses humor to good effect. It isn’t a comedy, but it has a lot of good, funny exchanges, and Rainbow Dash’s resistance to being mushy is reasonably amusing.
Secondly, the character voicing was good. The lines sounded like the sort of thing that Rainbow Dash, Applejack, and the other characters involved would say, and Applejack was spot-on throughout the story.
Thirdly, the final day and night in the story were pretty strong, and the last dream had some really great dialogue and funny moments.
I had three little niggling complaints about this story:
The first was that the story felt like it got a little bit repetitive in places. Oddly, the story actually felt more repetitive early on in the story. This is probably because “Rainbow Dash needs to be seen as cool” has been done so much, and the early portions of the story – particularly the second and third days of their vacation – were shown in broader strokes. This probably was not a bad call, but the trouble was that it meant that there wasn’t quite as much depth to the story there, which meant that the story felt more typical. I’ve read that story before – several times, in fact. And when you are doing the same thing as others have done, and you do the broad strokes, it means that it tends to feel more samey. As the story went towards the end, it became increasingly detailed, and consequently, the feeling of sameyness went away.
The second thing was the writing being a bit rough in a few places. There were a few little errors in the text here and there, and one bit of repeated text (or possibly a missing line) that threw me a bit. Some of these will likely be corrected, but there were just a few little oddities like that that bugged me a couple times. Not the end of the world, and likely the result of a rushed editing process.
The third thing is that there is a referential joke dropped into the second dream which, while it made me laugh, also broke my suspension of disbelief and reminded me that I was reading a story, and probably diminished my enjoyment of that section overall even though it did make me laugh, because I had trouble getting back into the story for a bit.
One particular thing I wanted to note here as well:
Applejack was still chuckling. “We’ll let ‘em know we ain’t honeymoonin’, but we might as well keep the room. It’s got a nice view, and champagne, and plenty of snacks.” She popped a rose petal in her mouth.
I’ve always thought that the idea of ponies eating romantic flowers was adorable – combining chocolates and pretty flowers into one thing is both funny and makes sense, given, you know, they’re ponies.
And Twilight ate that flower at their table that one time.
Overall this is a decent story; if you like AppleDash, you’ll probably like this. If you don’t like AppleDash, though, this isn’t going to be the story that changes your mind about it.
Recommendation: Worth Reading if you like AppleDash.
The Kindest Silence
by Horizon
Alternate Universe
7,099 wordsWhat if Rainbow Dash never existed to turn six young lives upside down with her Sonic Rainboom?
Harmony will always find its Element-bearers, and something certainly would have united six friends to wield them ... but a change as small as the flapping of a butterfly's wings can have enormous effects on everything that follows.
Why I added it: Horizon is a good writer.
Review
Rainbow Dash doesn’t exist.
Twilight doesn’t, either, apparently – or at least, doesn’t end up as Celestia’s pupil.
But there’s a certain course to fate, and a certain pegasus makes a cone of silence that still causes all of her friends to get their cutie marks… albeit, not always the same ones.
This story is divided up into three parts. The first chapter is a retelling of the characters’ cutie mark stories, but with deafening silence drowning out all the sound in the world, rather than the colorful crack of the Sonic Rainboom. Things turn out mostly the same for Applejack, but Rarity, Spike, Pinkie Pie, and Sunset Shimmer all have very different fates as a result.
The second chapter deals with the world championships of Shh (Fluttershy is, obviously, very good at this). Scootaloo is apparently the adopted sister of Sunset Shimmer, Pinkie Pie is near-catatonic, and Rarity is, apparently, Pinkie Pie.
The third is a cute, quiet little denouement.
I wanted to like this story, but I’ll be real honest: it bugged me. The central idea behind it was actually pretty good, though given one of the first stories I read was a story with a very similar central concept – a world where Rainbow Dash never did the Sonic Rainboom – I might be a sucker for stories like this. For Want of a Nail and In Spite of a Nail are both fun tropes, and this played with both of them. And I liked the idea of Sunset Shimmer remaining as Celestia’s apprentice (though I might be a sucker for that as well, for reasons with which Horizon is well-acquainted).
Unfortunately, I don’t feel like this story made good use of its premise. The idea of Spike being the Element of Loyalty, and things getting all switched around, was certainly a good one, but I think this story suffered from being stuffed with too many ideas and not really making very good use of them. Rarity felt like a lost opportunity – she just ended up another Pinkie Pie, rather than a Rarity take on Pinkie Pie, which sort of defeated the purpose. Pinkie Pie was a near-total non-entity, which didn’t end up working very well, given her status as a main character in the story – she seemed borderline catatonic, and she wasn’t really very engaging. Throwing in Scootaloo as well just didn’t end up feeling like it accomplished a whole lot, and it meant that there was yet another character to contend with. In the end, I felt like the story made a lot of promises with the first chapter, and then just could never follow through on them properly and treat them with the depth they deserved. The core of the story – the second chapter – just wasn’t as strong as the first, and it all ended up feeling like a bit of a letdown.
The best part of this story were the first and last chapters, but the middle just didn’t work for me, and I think this idea has been better executed elsewhere.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
Twilight Sparkle vs The Equestrian Cutie Mark Constellation Registry
by Estee
Sad
16,811 wordsAll Rainbow wanted to do was give her friends what she saw as the ultimate gift: the placement of their marks within the night sky. But the offer was a lie. And after Twilight finds out what happened with Rainbow's trial run, she heads off to confront the con artists and get Rainbow's bits back. After all, nopony can just go and create an official constellation just because they feel like it.
But recovering the money isn't that simple.
And neither are constellations.
Why I added it: Estee is a good writer and the topic interested me.
Review
Rainbow Dash gets conned into buying a constellation in the shape of her cutie mark from the (totally legitimate) Equestrian Cutie Mark Constellation Registry, which draws you a picture of your cutie mark in the sky, and then puts it in a book that they register with the copyright office.
You know, officially. Because the copyright office totally has sway over the constellations.
Naturally, when Rainbow Dash (who is super excited about not only getting her marks, but those of all of her friends as well) shows this awesomeness to Twilight, Twilight is very, very angry, and decides to get Rainbow Dash’s bits back.
And then she learns the horrible truth – that the company is not, in fact, breaking any laws, and is doing exactly what it says it is doing.
And has been doing it for centuries.
And going through the books of the old registry, she discovers that many did it not out of ego, but to remember a dead loved one, and to find them forever after in the sky.
This story is sad. There’s just nothing happy about this story. The Constellation Registry isn’t breaking the law, ponies really, really want to believe that they can find their loved ones in the stars, and that they aren’t gone forever…
And logical Twilight Sparkle is sitting there in the middle of it all, being logical, rational, and wanting to avoid ponies feeling robbed – but she doesn’t know how to fix things. And she isn’t even sure if there is a way of doing so, not even with the help of Princess Luna, because what is wrong goes beyond the constellation registry, and into the beliefs of ponies themselves – beliefs they may well be using to comfort themselves and keep themselves safe and happy.
This story sort of highlights something I’ve noticed about Estee’s writing – it plays very well towards a certain stripe of story. I’ve found myself really enjoying some of Estee’s more melancholy pieces, such as this and Five Hundred Little Murders, where the worldbuilding and the generally slow pace of Estee’s writing conspire with the strong characterization that Estee gives his characters to really give the reader time for the emotion of the piece to sink in, as every bit of hope about the situation is squeezed out, and we come to see a sort of melancholic world. But when the same writing style is directed at other kinds of stories, frequently it makes them feel strange, such as Twilight’s Escort Service, which is in principle a funny piece about ponies thinking that Twilight is hiring herself out as an adult escort, as opposed to someone who is offering to teleport people around alongside herself. The strongest part of that story for me – and the part I remember most – is the kind of sad pony who hires Twilight to hang out with her at a party, just so she has company.
Here, it worked quite well, and the world building was all directed towards the plot of the story, and it felt like it all paid off pretty well in the end.
One other thing worth noting: this story is labelled as a sequel to Blessing, but it works as a stand-alone story; you don't need to have read Blessing to understand and enjoy this story.
Recommendation: Recommended.
Once and Future
by Baal Bunny
Slice of Life
4,423 wordsPonies and dragons don't have much to do with each other nowadays. That wasn't always the case. And it won't remain that way if one dragon has anything to say about it.
Why I added it: Baal Bunny/Augie Dog is a good writer, and this was a writeoff story.
Review
This is a story told in three scenes.
The first story is about Celestia making her first compact with the dragons. The second is about the abrogation of the compact after the queen of the dragons went on a rampage. And the third is about Spike coming to the dragon kingdom to learn about his heritage.
Tied together by the character of Porphyry, a dragon hatchling who later becomes king of the dragons, and Celestia’s presence in all three stories, this is really a worldbuilding piece about dragons, and how their brains are multifaceted, and not always in agreement with themselves, unlike the ponies, whose minds are much more coordinated.
Ultimately, this felt like a story whose sole purpose was the world-building; the three scenes are about establishing the way that dragons think, but the whole thing never really came together for me, and the depiction of their thought patterns never really struck me as feeling all that real. It was a potentially interesting idea, but I never really felt like the story went much of anywhere with it, nor illustrated it to the level that I really would have liked.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
Things Better Left Unseen
by Take
Comedy
5,021 wordsTwilight improves upon the portal mirror to allow her and her friends to see alternate universes. They quickly learn things that may strain their current relationship with Rainbow Dash.
Why I added it: It was featured, and the premise intrigued me.
Review
Twilight builds a machine that lets her view alternate realities.
Turns out that in all of them, Rainbow Dash is in love with at least one of her friends, or at least one of her friends is in love with Rainbow Dash.
This leads at first to mockery, then to horror as everyone ends up with their friend.
Unfortunately, this story didn’t ever really go beyond the obvious. Every world is a clichéd stereotype, and while that could potentially be funny, honestly, it just all kind of felt shallow to me. Every world was just a soap opera, with none of the characters actually acting like themselves, which significantly drained the humor for me. Two characters getting together could be funny in an embarrassing sort of way, but the way the story actually was, it just was so wildly implausibly written that it just fell flat. It might have been funny for the characters to watch – at least at first – but it wasn’t funny for me as a reader, and the fact that the story didn’t really go anywhere else with it – such as some implication that maybe there was some truth to some of the things in the images, that maybe they were a bit closer to home than might be liked – might have helped.
Also, the numbers seemed a bit on the high end; them being much closer to zero would have been funnier, as it would have implied that these things were just not that far away from the “real” Rainbow Dash, which would have been much more embarrassing.
This story had some issues with distracting language as well. In particular, it struggled with appropriate use of saidisms. For example:
"Friends! I'm so happy that you could make it on such short notice!" she cried out gleefully.
"Cried out gleefully" is one of those examples of a telly saidism (that is to say, a word used in the place of "said") that draws too much attention to iteself; you don't really want your said tags to do that unless it is particularly important, and here, it isn't.
Saidisms exist to add spice to your story, but when they draw attention away from your dialogue, that's a bad thing; they're meant to complement it, not compete with it. Saidisms with adjectives attached to them tend to be especially dangerous in this regard; while powerful tools when used judiciously, they draw even more attention to themselves, and thus can really be distracting. Using multiple saidisms back to back is especially dangerous; the more they’re used, the less impact they have individually, but they still act as a distraction for the reader, simultaneously weakening the impact of your text AND drawing attention away from the most important part of the conversation.
There was only one bit of the story that really worked for me, and that was the initial turning-on of the device:
"If you look at the numbers here," she pointed to a Nixie tubes set with the numbers 0.2239. "That's how different the world will be from ours. The higher the number, the higher the difference. You girls ready?"
They nodded and Twilight turned on the machine.
"Twilight! I love you!" Rainbow Dash cried out on the screen, tears overflowing from her magenta eyes.
Twilight turned off the machine.
This was funny; the humor is understated, very simply put, and you can just imagine the characters’ reactions after that. Indeed, this was the sort of thing which should have been followed up with a bit of dialogue about how this was a bad idea, with the characters’ expressions left to the imagination, because we can guess what they’d look like at that point from the reaction. When something embarrassing like this happens, quickly trying to change the subject matter (or try and get away from it) is innately funny, and drawing it out loses some of the sharpness.
Recommendation: Not Recommended
Summary
Sleepless in St. Martinique by bookplayer
Worth Reading
The Kindest Silence by Horizon
Not Recommended
Twilight Sparkle vs. The Equestrian Cutie Mark Registry by Estee
Recommended
Once and Future by Baal Bunny
Not Recommended
Things Better Left Unseen by Take
Not Recommended
One interesting thing that Estee’s story brought up for me is that an organization that names constellations rather than actual stars bothers me a great deal less than the real-life International Star Registry, and similar organizations. Stars are objects which really do exist, and the idea that someone might name them is plausible. But constellations are imaginary – they don’t really exist in the first place. Paying someone to draw out a constellation just seems a lot less shady to me.
Still, I don’t think I’d want to run the International Constellation Registry, even if any constellation I drew in the stars would be just as real as the Big Dipper.
I have to admit, the two dippers and Orion are just about the only constellations I actually can see…
Number of stories still listed as Read It Sooner: 68
Number of stories still listed as Read It Later – High Priority: 295
Number of stories listed as Read It Eventually: 1611
Honestly, that's a fair take on my story. I wrote the first and last scenes as context for the core story, because the core story was the one which fulfilled the contest prompt. I liked the context much better than the episode retelling, and without any constraints on the writing I would have dropped Chapter 2 (which I did last) and put something further afield in its place, but I couldn't just axe the weak parts, because then I didn't have an entry. Turns out that the constraint of "retell an episode" is hard to make an engaging story out of, because you are guaranteed to be telling a story that everyone already knows.
You saw how I tried to liven mine up, not really successfully. I haven't read the other contest entries yet, other than FanOfMostEverything's, but I thought that was fairly clever: it took the core episode so far out of context that I didn't realize what was going on till near the end. Of course, once I did, it got predictable. That, again, comes down to the prompt.)
I probably could have tightened the story up considerably with more time and another draft, but I don't know that the story's worth the editing time, given how much angst editing puts me through and the other projects I could apply that time to.
Anyway, thanks for the feedback!
(Oh, and you might want to check your post -- the story summaries of the last two stories are incomplete.)
Yup, DuncanR did a review of my story as well here: http://www.fimfiction.net/blog/513582/liab-14-takes-things-better-left-unseen
and he covered what you said and more.
My favorite part of the story was the turning on the machine as well, as that was the first scene that came to mind when I was writing the story. It all kind of just went down hill after that haha.
I am working on having less saidisms in my next story. Thanks for the review, I appreciate you took the time to read and write your thoughts.
3250930
Whoops! Thanks.
I really have no clue what to expect from the contest entries. Bookplayer's entry from this very blog post isn't even close to Sleepless in Ponyville, and yet it does fit the prompt in broad strokes (I have to admit, at first I thought it was a take on Look Before you Sleep, with them involuntarily sharing a bed and all).
I just didn't have any ideas off the top of my head for clever retellings of episodes, and I have other things I should in principle be working on, so I didn't participate. I probably should have; losing all my writeoff cred here, not trying to put together an entry in three days.
Shame on me!
Though I guess I did release a story...
3250939
What got me was the fact that the episode's moral has to remain the same. D: That removes an awful lot of wiggle room, because everything you change has to hurtle back around to the original ending.
Oh, by the way: in case you missed it, Pinkie's not comatose. She's paralyzed by her fear of heights during the entire Cloudsdale sequence (this was established in the first scene of Chapter 2). And, yeah, I definitely regret not being able to develop her and Rarity more. I wasn't able to work in any of the sequences where they interact with each other, which would have established that they have identical Cutie Marks.
3250957
The word I meant to use was catatonic, not comatose; I thought I'd fixed that, but apparently not.
Gotta admit that it didn't end up coming off very well, though. I did remember that she was afraid of heights, but because we saw so little of her otherwise, it was really hard to grok her behavior.
You're on a roll here.
You mean adverbs.
The Dippers are asterisms, but a point for using a real ellipsis. I suggest that you use more "⸘Interrobangs‽".
Well, if you can find the Dippers, then you can also find the Ursae. The Big Dipper forms the tail and hips of Ursa Major, while the Little Dipper is Ursa Minor.
3250930
The way I saw it, just plopping different characters in the same context wouldn't be enough; they were going to react in different ways. The situation had to be tailored to lead the new protagonist to the same lesson. As you noted, that meant that while I could plot a new course, I still had to pull into the same harbor. I think you made it work quite well by altering the background more than the foreground.
3250930 Er, where can one find FoME's entry?
3251472
Sorry, should have linked it. FOME's "Fruit Of The Problem" is here, and this post links to all of the entries.
3251710 Thanks!
3251282
To be fair, I can actually find Cassiopeia, I just have no idea how they got "that's totally a beautiful lady" out of it.
I guess they were pretty desperate in the days before the Internet.
3250957
Even after reading:
Three or four of the entries, I'm still not quite sure I understand the parameters of Skeeter's contest. I think my various brain parts must not be coming together in the proper way...
Mike
3251999
That may not be a flaw of Skeeter's rules, but of people failing at executing on them.
The rules of Skeeter's contests were, in essence:
1) You must write a story with the same moral as an episode in the show.
2) That story cannot star the protagonist of that episode.
Bookplayer interpreted the moral of Sleepless in Ponyville as being "You must face your fears". The protagonist of that episode was Scootaloo, so she couldn't use Scootaloo. So instead she wrote a story about Applejack and Rainbow Dash (who, while in the episode, weren't the protagonists of the episode) going on vacation, and Rainbow Dash facing her fear of confessing her feelings for Applejack.
Horizon, on the other hand, took Sonic Rainboom and changed up the protagonist (Fluttershy instead of Rainbow Dash), but it was, in many senses, a rewrite of Sonic Rainboom (at least in the middle chapter), with a different central ability, and the rest of the story explored the ripple effect of that core difference.
3252309
So...
A person could've taken the "I didn't learn anything I didn't already know" moral from Super Speedy Cider Squeezy and written a story in which anypony other than Applejack doesn't learn anything new? Or would a person have had to go further and have, say, the Flam Flam Brothers come to town with a machine that controls the weather and then go through the whole plot of the episode but focused on Rainbow Dash instead of AJ? Or would both of these concepts have qualified under the rules?
Of course, these are questions I prob'bly should've asked Skeeter a month ago, but it's only after reading the entries and your summary of the rules here that I've come to a shaky enough understanding to even start asking questions...
Mike
3253470
Possibly! It would have been an amusing use of the rules. I'm actually kind of sad I didn't think of that, because I actually HAVE a story idea which contains that exact thing.
3252309 3253470
Personally, I was going by the rules post, which has a little more context for the rules TD listed. Notably, it's not just the moral that has to remain intact; the actual rule reads, "you must keep in line with the spirit of the episode itself." The examples given suggest that the moral is the focus of that, but my personal reading of "the spirit of the episode" is more restrictive than that. I mean, I could browse through my favorites and find a dozen stories in which the (non-Applejack) main character learned nothing, but that doesn't mean that the story has anything to do with SSCS6000. I suspect this is "I know it when I see it" territory.
(My submission almost certainly took the rule too literally; I stuck to both the spirit and letter of the episode and pulled its drama from the context. *shrug* It was the best idea I had.)
3253565
Yeah, I forgot about the spirit of the episode thing.
The entries I've read thus far both subscribed to it just fine, though.