Weekend Review: The Gentle Nights: Audience of One · 6:03pm Aug 15th, 2015
The Gentle Nights: Audience of One
Author: PaulAsaran
Genre: Romance
Word Count: 127k
Synopsis: Octavia Melody is calm, patient and longing to break the boundaries of class through her career as a musician.
Princess Luna is lost in the eddies of her past, struggling to belong in a new age that doesn't seem to want her.
A chance meeting after a disastrous gala gives these isolated souls a chance to find companionship and comfort. As Luna seeks solace in Octavia's soothing music, Octavia comes to recognize the princess's loneliness and fears. When it's your duty to protect other ponies' dreams, who protects your own? Octavia might just be willing to try.
Back in 2012, or thereabouts, when I was still largely a lurker on Fimfiction and had not yet written anything of my own, I started a romance-themed contest group christened Random Romance. The group has since, sadly, ceased operation, but not before we could accumulate a small trove of contests and entries. The first such contest we held, was for the prompt of shipping Octavia and Princess Luna. And the winner of that contest was a story titled The Gentle Nights, by a little known author by the moniker of PaulAsaran. The Gentle Nights was far from perfect—it was a 2.5k vignette with breakneck pacing—but it was voted the winner of Random Romance’s first contest and led to a friendship between myself and the author.
The Gentle Nights: Audience of One, however, is a retelling of that original story, intended to be bigger, bolder, deeper, and altogether better than the original in every way. And in this the story manages to succeed in almost every way.
The original Gentle Night’s biggest problem was the pacing. In that there wasn’t any. The story jumped from Octavia and Luna’s first meeting to literally a full year later, then jumps again another four months and then hits the end like a blind runner into a brick wall. This made it a little difficult to get into the characters’ heads and really feel the emotion. Audience takes the fully opposite approach, and crawls along at a pace that is more than deserving of the “slice-of-life” tag. This isn’t a bad thing. I would liken the pacing of this story to a snowball, slowly rolling down hill: it begins rolling slowly but surely, but as it keeps going the snowball grows bigger and begins rolling faster, and faster, until it finally hits the ground below with an explosion that you’d feel a mile away.
Audience of One starts off slowly rolling along and manages to avoid many of the pitfalls that other stories stumble over when they try to rush straight out of the gate to Act Two. Audience takes it slow, introducing us to Octavia, her friends, Princess Luna, some other side characters, and just thoroughly fleshing out the world that the story takes place in. Audience takes the time early on to make sure that the setting feels grounded, and the characters feel realized. When the second act rolled around, I felt as though I was knee deep in Audience’s earthen mud.
Now, I just want to emphasize, that saying the story starts off slowly does not mean the same thing as saying the early story is boring. The early chapters aren’t boring, they just choose to establish the setting, personalities, and relationships of the characters in the story without a lot of heavy handed exposition. There are no chapters in which “nothing happens,” because in every chapter something does happen, maybe not something exciting, but something that builds and adds to the overall story towards the climax.
The same thing can be said of the romance. Audience of One contains no “Love at first sight” or “whirlwind passions” wherein Romeo and Juliet fall in love, marry, consummate their passions, and kill themselves in grief all in the space of a few days. Audience can best be described as a “slow burning” romance.
Upon meeting for the first time, Octavia and Luna do not immediately regard each other romantically; quite the opposite, in fact. They regard each other with apprehension. But they strike up an unlikely friendship, and from that foundation begin to develop genuine feelings for one another. Though of course this isn’t immediately apparent to either of them.
My point is that their eventual romance feels natural. They don’t gaze into each other’s starry gazes and run off together, they become friends, grow fond of each other’s company, and eventually come to realize that they each might have feelings that run slightly deeper than mere friendship. Slowly at first, then grows faster and more intense as the story progresses.
The Gentle Nights’ (original) second biggest problem was the conflict. In that, again, there wasn’t any. Reading through it, you never get any real sense that Octavia or Luna are fighting for or against anything. The story says that the characters have problems and struggles but that’s not the same as actually feeling them. Audience solves this addresses this issue likewise to the first by going to the literary extreme on the other end of the spectrum.
The story’s has more conflict in within its chapters than a summit of world leaders. Every character has multiple conflicts with multiple antagonists. Octavia is struggling to earn respect and renown amongst the top elite in the musical world; she’s trying to write her own music—a skill that has always seemed to have been beyond her grasp. Her friends in the musical circuit are constantly trying to bring her ‘out of her shell,’ and even her neighbor, Vinyl Scratch requires her help with a ‘special’ project. And that’s not even going into her romance with Princess Luna!
Luna is dealing with the residual emotions of her fall from grace, the populace of Equestria’s fear and resentment of her, Celestia’s good-intentioned but ultimately unhelpful interference into her affairs, and nearly constant harassment from a creature that may or may not be the Nightmare reborn.
There was one little subplot that slightly annoyed me—concerning Octavia’s estranged sister—because it was built up enough to make me think that it would be a significant to the story but then ended up being resolved so quickly that it seemed almost an afterthought. Which, concerning the amount of work that had been put into it, I felt was a pretty poor payoff. But that nitpick aside, everything else is wrapped up very well.
The conflicts, excepting Luna’s torment by the Nightmare, are kept on the micro scale; everything feels very personal to the characters. Their not trying to save the world, or bring about world peace, they’re just trying to work through their own problems and build a better life for themselves in the process.
PaulAsaran is one of the best in the biz when it comes to plotting, and there’s enough subplots going through this story that even if you don’t like romance, Audience still provides plenty of substance.
Like I said, the story’s slow, but by no means is it boring.
Audience of One breaks the mold, but does so subtly. I definitely recommend it. Heck, I even recommend reading the original as well. Check ‘em out!
[Link To Audience of One] (Reviewed Story)
Yeap, Audience of One is everything I hoped it would be and more. The issues with Benjamina are not new, though; I was struggling to find a solid payoff for her where none existed. In that element I most certainly failed.
Everywhere else? I am damn proud of that story.
Thanks for the review, Bean!
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You know, rereading this, I realize that I never said anything about the actual romance. And then I realized that was because I liked everything else about this story way more than the romance! Was a definite first.