Read It Later Reviews #29 – Every Mare Needs Her Stallion, Not a Princess, Let’s Find You a Date!, Felt Heart, Discord Applies for Citizenship Papers · 12:44am Sep 4th, 2015
This could also be called “four shipfics and a random story”. In my Rarity shipping kick, I read the rather strange Every Mare Needs Her Stallion as well as three RariLight pieces. Then, just to round things off, I read one of the highest rated stories on FIMFiction, Discord Applies for Citizenship Papers, which happens to also be extremely short.
How did they all stack up?
Read on.
Today’s stories:
Every Mare Needs Her Stallion by InquisitorM
Not a Princess by Monochromatic
Let’s Find You a Date! by Soundslikeponies
Felt Heart by Tchernobog
Discord Applies for Citizenship Papers by CCC
Every Mare Needs Her Stallion
by InquisitorM
Sad, Slice of Life
7,964 wordsAfter Fluttershy threw a tantrum in Ponyville's marketplace, Rarity invited her over for some good old girly gossip. The Fluttershy that turns up on her doorstep, however, is absolutely not the one she was expecting. Somefilly has a secret and Rarity isn't above using a few tricks to find out what it is.
Why I added it: Present Perfect recommended it.
Review
Fluttershy is happy.
Like, really happy.
And physically friendly.
And radiating beauty even more so than usual.
And showing unusual confidence.
And she refuses to tell Rarity why.
But Rarity understands, and even if Fluttershy can’t – or won’t – tell her, Rarity is more than happy to take advantage of her friend’s happiness for a very fun day out together. But as the day goes on, Rarity has an increasingly harder time not bursting from her curiousity. She has to know. Is it a stallion? Or a mare? Or maybe even… her?
This is a kind of strange story. Some folks have called it “difficult”, but I’m not sure if it was difficult so much as it was just strangely constructed – the story seemed to be pointing in a very different direction than where it actually went, and Fluttershy and Rarity’s overall behavior felt very much at odds with the eventual direction the story went. A huge amount of emphasis went into just how friendly Fluttershy was being that day, and while Fluttershy being happy – and her anger the previous day at a pony in the market – made sense in context, the sort of physical actions taken by the ponies are given a lot of emphasis and feel strange. While some of those make sense in light of the end of the story, a lot of what they were doing felt very intimate in nature, to the point where a photographer realized that he needed to leave the room. I’m not entirely convinced by Fluttershy’s actions that she doesn’t like Rarity, or that it isn’t reciprocated, and I don’t feel like the ending really successfully recontextualized a lot of that behavior – some of it worked, but a lot of it didn’t. And consequently, the story, interesting and well-written as it was, all kind of came apart at the end, and I was left having a hard time buying into Rarity’s final thoughts in the piece – what should have tied it all together and capped it off instead left me feeling like the piece wasn’t quite coherent.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
Not a Princess
by Monochromatic
Romance, Slice of Life
1,608 wordsWith all her fantasies about royalty, one would think Rarity falling for a princess would be obvious... except, Twilight hardly acted like a princess.
That's why Rarity loved her.
Why I added it: It made the popular stories box and I don’t read much RariLight.
Review
This is a short and kind of rambly piece about how Rarity likes Twilight the pony, not Twilight the Princess, because Twilight isn’t a proper princess – she has almost none of the attributes of a proper princess, and the only one she really does have is selflessness and self-sacrifice.
While I think the core sentiment is a very good one, this story never really came together for me. The story transitions from a third person Rarity ramble about Twilight Sparkle not really being a princess to a brief piece about Twilight being upset because Rarity rejected a job in Manehattan so that she could stay in Ponyville with Twilight. None of this is bad, but the presentation doesn’t feel quite coherent; the actual structure of the prose itself bothered me from time to time, but the real problem was that the second story in the piece didn’t really rely on the thoughts from the first half of the piece nearly as much as one might hope; indeed, the second half of the piece could have been easily written with them not being in a relationship at all.
I was kind of reminded of bookplayer’s excellent In the Service of the Princess of Friendship, but this story just didn’t have the same sort of impact as that story had, and I think that was because of the lack of cohesion. In bookplayer’s piece, all of the lines were pointing the same way, and the central conflict – to be a farmer who occasionally strapped on a piece of magic jewelry and saved Equestria, or to be a leader who occasionally went out and bucked apples – was a strong thread run throughout the length of the piece. Here, the two halves of the story didn’t really feel so neatly aligned, and consequently, the story didn’t quite come together for me.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
Let’s Find You a Date!
by Soundslikeponies
Romance, Comedy
41,071 wordsWhen Rarity finds out how little Twilight gets out of the Library, things get out of hand as she decides to take it upon herself to teach Twilight the ropes of dating. As Rarity drags her around, Twilight begins to have a good idea of who she wants to ask out.
Why I added it: I had read it previously, and am on a bit of a RariLight kick for some reason.
Review
When Rarity discovers that Twilight has never been on a date, Rarity tries to teach her friend about flirting, bar-hopping, drinking, and dating. Over the course of the story, Twilight flirts with Carrot Top, gets hit on by an OC named May Flower who really wants to sleep with Twilight, and Twilight comes to recognize that she has a crush on Rarity. But does Rarity know, or is she blind to Twilight’s attraction? Is Rarity just trying to let her down gently, or redirect her attention elsewhere? Or does Rarity just not know what to do?
A story about dating, flirting, attraction, and sex, this is a surprisingly unromantic shipfic. Instead of characters who are unable to spit it out, it portrays characters as having a wide variety of issues – while Twilight struggles with expressing her attraction openly to Rarity, she also struggles to quantify her attraction towards Carrot Top and May Flower as well. A lot of the attraction is fairly surface-level – attitude, flirting, physical contact, physical attraction, with some hints of deeper attraction for more complicated reasons. The story doesn’t really depict any character as being in love with anyone else, and instead portrays their reactions in a more mixed manner.
I struggled with the first chapter of this piece – the scene where Rarity is trying to determine whether Twilight likes mares or stallions is pretty awkward, and while it introduces Carrot Top in a scene whose consequences reverberate throughout the rest of the piece, really up through the first night in the bar, the story doesn’t really find its legs. After that point, though, things start falling more into the groove of things, and over the course of the piece May Flower, who at first seems very shallow and one-dimensional, gets more flesh added to her, while Carrot Top also ends up getting a bit more fleshed out. A lot of the characters feel a bit superficial, but that’s actually a core part of the story – that a lot of attraction is superficial, and that in the end, it isn’t really wrong to be superficially attracted to someone, but that a deeper connection can be made afterwards. This is something which isn’t really touched on very often in stories like this, but is very much a reality of a lot of casual dating – a lot of it is about seeing if two people work together without really knowing each other well to begin with, and this story depicts it as such in a surprisingly unromantic manner. The characters are awkward, but also ultimately honest about their feelings, and the story doesn’t pretend like what the characters have is true love.
The story really grew on me more towards the end of the piece, as Twilight tries to juggle the various ponies in her life and figure out how to actually approach Rarity and ask her on a date without messing things up, while simultaneously fretting about how to gently let down Carrot Top and successfully reject the very persistent May Flower, who is a lot less unlikable than Twilight thought at first.
That being said, the story did sort of struggle towards the start, and the story isn’t short – at 40,000 words, it is the length of a short novel. Still, I suspect that RariLight fans are likely to be interested in it, as would be anyone who is more interested in a less romantic brand of story about dating.
Recommendation: Worth Reading.
Felt Heart
by Tchernobog
Romance, Comedy, Slice of Life
34,587 wordsRarity discovers an old tradition involving the exchange of felt dolls as a sign of affection. This sparks a brilliant plan to play matchmaker with her friends, and between herself and Twilight.
But brilliant plans never go as expected, do they?
Why I added it: It was recommended to me, Tchernobog is a good writer, and I’ve been putting off reading it for ages.
Review
Rarity overhears Luna and Celestia talking about the ancient tradition of giving a doll of yourself to your loved one as a mark of your affection. Originally a familial gesture, it had evolved into a declaration of love before it had faded from living memory – save that of Luna and Celestia.
Rarity has long been nursing a crush on Twilight, and decides it would be a good idea to send a doll of herself to Twilight. But she doesn’t want to give herself away; she wants to gauge Twilight’s reaction first. And just sending a doll to Twilight might be a little bit suspicious. But Rarity has noticed the looks that Applejack and Rainbow Dash have been giving each other, and Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie have seemed awfully friendly lately…
This is a very cutesy story about dolls sent out to bring ponies together, and the conflicts – and eventual success in pulling their relationships out into the open – that they bring.
But it is also a story which contains north of 30,000 words of Rarity not being able to spit it out. And it is primarily here that I felt like the story stumbled.
Best Young Flyer documents a relationship between Rainbow Dash and Scootaloo that has them getting together, breaking apart, Scootaloo briefly dating another love interest, the Best Young Flyer competition, and Rainbow Dash and Scootaloo getting back together at the end. It feels like a novel. And yet, it is only 32,833 words – more than a thousand words shorter than Felt Heart, which starts with Rarity learning about the dolls and ends with Rarity finally fessing up to what she did.
And it hurts because, while we see Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie come together, and Applejack and Rainbow Dash start to come into the open about each other, almost nothing happens between Rarity and Twilight, and yet, ostensibly, that’s the ship which drives the story into happening in the first place. Rarity is pretty clearly holding the idiot ball for pretty much the entire story, and Rarity’s plan doesn’t really make sense to begin with, which meant that I struggled with empathizing with her. Rarity wanted Twilight to find out about the doll, but for some reason she couldn’t just tell her? Indeed, the story repeatedly emphasized how much of a coward Rarity was, not wanting Twilight to find out, even as she gnashed her teeth over Twilight not finding out, and while I do understand the mixture of trepidation and attraction that people can feel over other people, the whole story ended up feeling drug out as a result. Time and again, when the story focused on Twilight and Rarity, nothing happened to advance the plot. After a while, I came to dread these portions because they ended up feeling frustrating to read, as they were all fundamentally the same – Rarity wants Twilight to find out, but not from her, and is also scared of Twilight finding out, and something comes up that stops Twilight from finding out.
That being said, other parts of the story were cute. Pinkie Pie’s dilemma over her own personal Fluttershy doll versus the extremely nice doll that Rarity made is cute, and the interaction (and bickering) between Rainbow Dash and Applejack was cute throughout the story. The very brief scene at the end of the piece with Luna and Celestia made me chuckle a bit, and the story concluded on a reasonably strong note.
But I wasn’t really left with a good idea of why these characters should be together, or why I should be rooting for Rarity’s ships. Applejack and Rainbow Dash are cute together, as are Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy, but the story didn’t really tell me why I should want these ponies to kiss. Even Rarity’s motives in pursuing Twilight felt underexplored. I can’t help but wonder if my positive feelings towards the AppleDash in this piece is because I already ship them – I was not left feeling all that positively towards Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie, whose relationship, such as it was, seemed to be built entirely on blushes and hugs and Pinkie Pie trying to make Fluttershy feel better about her doll. While Rainbow Dash’s relationship with Applejack was much more substantive – the two were actually secretly dating – I’m not sure if it would have worked as well for me if I wasn’t already a shipper.
By the end of the piece, I had the feeling that it took too long to get there. I didn’t hate it, but I couldn’t help but feel disappointed that it was mostly a fluff piece – something intended to impart warm and fuzzy feelings on the audience rather than do something substantive with the characters.
Recommendation: If you like slow-paced stories which focus heavily on ponies being cute together, especially if you already ship these pairings, you might enjoy this. But if you’re looking for something more complicated, or dislike FlutterPie or AppleDash, you’re apt to be disappointed.
Discord Applies for Citizenship Papers
by CCC
Comedy, Slice of Life
1,157 wordsDiscord, with the help of a pegasus, attempts to fill in a form designed by someone who never expected a near-immortal Dragonequus to try to fill it in.
Why I added it: It is one of the highest rated stories on FIMFiction.
Review
Discord tries to fill out citizenship papers, and discovers they are ill-equipped to handle immortal spirits of chaos. But you know, you have to satisfy the bureaucracy…
This story is basically a bunch of Discord complaining about filling out paperwork. On the one hand, it is quite predictable. On the other, it is quite short, and the ending was vaguely amusing. Still, it is hard to say that there was much real “meat” here; it is a very lightweight story that stays well within the boxes for stories of its type.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
Summary
Every Mare Needs Her Stallion by InquisitorM
Not Recommended
Not a Princess by Monochromatic
Not Recommended
Let’s Find You a Date! by Soundslikeponies
Worth Reading
Felt Heart by Tchernobog
Not Recommended
Discord Applies for Citizenship Papers by CCC
Not Recommended
In other news, chapter 5 of Mistletrapped is complete and in editing, and chapter 6 is being worked on.
Number of stories still listed as Read It Later – Important: 81
Number of stories still listed as Read It Later – High Priority: 329
Number of stories listed as Read It Later: 1649
Oh, you're on a Rarity shipping kick? They made me read this one time for SA. I didn't like it, but I don't like shipping. It was written well enough, and you like shipping, so you might enjoy it.
3367742
Made you, huh?
Those monsters.
More seriously, though, I do like the two things I've read by Acreuball. It actually is already on my enormous Read It Later list, but maybe I should bump it up...
3367776
They are monsters. All of them. Especially Corejo. He kidnapped me and dragged me to Baltimore last month. So rude.
3367777
So rude.
3367777
To Baltimore?
Now I know they're evil.
Huh. You actually pointed out the main thing I missed in Every Mare Needs Her Stallion. I should give that another read to see how I like it when my brain actually knows what's going on.
Well, then...another one of my early favs dashed again by the infamous TD. But, I'm total shipping trash, so...
Oh, I see that Twice as Bright is on the You're Next! list.
(by the way, that smile may indicate there are knives hidden behind my back.) Just give it a nice review, and nobody has to get hurt.
Ouch, slappin' down my recs like c-bills at a discotec! D:
3367847
I love shipfics, but I think over time my pickiness about them has only increased. Then again, bats was an early victim, so maybe not.
I dunno. I feel like there are some stories which work a lot better for people who are more shippy than I am.
Tchernobog is a good writer, though. I still have Mood Wings on my favorites list.
I am excited to read Twice as Bright. But I say that about everything on my "you're next" list and still manage not to.
3367866
The story is by no means badly written, but I felt like the ending made it really hard for me to really recommend it to other people.
3367952 Hehehe...no worries, I'm just giving you a hard time. I do think perspective is a lot of it. When I first came into the fandom, I absolutely had to be convinced that a ship made sense, and so I only liked fics like Twilight's List. In fact, I ignored A Bluebird's Song for over a year because it jumped into the ship so quickly. And it is still a valid criticism, but I'm comfortable enough now with the idea of shipping these ponies and/or have enough headcanon to backfill that it doesn't bother me as much anymore.
Also, while Felt Heart made my favorites list, Mood Wings did not. But there's no accounting for taste (and clearly, I don't have any)
Why does mostly everyone review my old stuff.
(although unlike most of those other cases you actually gave it a reasonably good 'rating' so I guess there's that)
If you're on a Rarilight kick, I recommend Injuring Eternity.
Of course, Injuring Eternity has sat in my "Uncategorized Favorites" pile for ages for a good reason. I'm not sure it's a good Rarilight story - or even a great story at all - but something in it spoke to me. I have no idea if you'll like it, but there you go.
3367988
I mostly don't review unfinished stories, which might be part of why. The only complete stories of yours which I haven't read yet are from 2012. I do need to get around to reading Equestria From Dust.
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I actually read it and reviewed it almost exactly a month ago. It was actually what kind of put me on the RariLight kick in the first place, because it got RariLight on my brain.
3367984
I haven't read Mood Wings in ages, admittedly, but I remember liking it.
And it isn't just about convincing me of the ship, it is a more complicated thing that I should actually make a blog post about because it is a much more complicated question than "convincing" (though frankly, Twilight's List does what it does very well).
Out of idle curiosity ... chronologically speaking, what's the most recent story you've read that cleared the "Recommended" bar? I know you posted some "Recommended Story Reviews" two weeks ago, but that's from stuff already on your favorites list, and it seems like your RiN/RiL posts have been kind of a wasteland. I know I did see more Rs/HRs out of you once upon a time; is ponyfic just in a lull these days?
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Ironically, the last recommended - in fact, the last highly recommended - was in Read It Later #28. So uh, the last time I did a set of read it later reviews, I had a highly recommended story.
However, that was two weeks ago. Last week I did four sets of Read It Now reviews.
Overall, only about 10% of my Read It Later and Read It Now reviews get at least a recommended, so having five sets without a recommended isn't terribly surprising (7.2% chance of it happening).
The thing is, what I choose to read has an enormous influence over my success rate; for instance, of the 5 Bad Horse stories that I hadn't read prior to doing these reviews, all 5 of them got a recommended or a highly recommended (and all three of the Recommended Story Reviews I did for Bad Horse stories also get HRs). I am now literally out of new Bad Horse stories to read, though, which means that I can't just go to him as a "proven source" for good stories - he can only show up outside of recommended story reviews if he writes something new. This is also true of Bookplayer, Absolute Anonymous, and Ghost of Heraclitus - I've read everything they've written and posted to the site. Indeed, Ghost only has one story that I haven't reviewed.
Skywriter and Cold in Gardez have the issue of my having read a lot of their shorter stuff previously, so if I read their stuff, it is mostly longer stuff - and being a bit lazy, it is easy to go and jump at a shorter thing. I've been trying to keep myself honest and read longer things more often because it is rarer for them to be lacking in substance, and you can see in this review set I actually reviewed multiple near-novel length stories (and I am working on reading Changeling of the Guard as well for the Royal Guard). The only story of yours that I haven't yet read that you've posted in its entirety is the Versebreaker thing, which I am terribly remiss in reading. And I think I've read almost everything short by Estee as well; I think the shortest thing left by Estee I haven't read is 9,000 words.
I really should go through Aquaman and Blueshift's back catalogs, because they're both good writers who I've read almost nothing from.
And there's probably plenty of other such folks who I should be plundering the catalogs of.
Incidentally, I actually have a review written up for another story of yours that I have read and reviewed but I have a general policy of confining mature-rated stories to review posts which are 100% mature-rated stories, and consequently, I need to find more mature-rated stories that would be interesting to read and review. Finding interesting non-pornographic mature-rated stories to review is hard.
But... just looking at my history... my "You're Next" list is hugely successful in terms of turning out good stories; I've only NRed 3/11 stories that came from my "You're Next" list, and 6/11 have been either recommended or highly recommended. Logically, I should be reading nothing but stories I put on my "You're Next" shelf, because the stories I tend to promote there tend to be promoted for various important reasons - people have recommended them to me, they're well-regarded, they're by a good writer, and, most often, all of the above at the same time.
So clearly, if I spend time thinking about what stories to read, I'm much more likely to find good ones. When I just read them haphazardly, it is less so.
Read It Later #17 and #18 were when I implemented my "You're Next" list, and those had 1 and 2 recommended/highly recommended stories out of them. In fact, of the stories I've recommended in my Read It Later reviews since the time I implemented my "You're Next" shelf, literally every single story that I recommended or highly recommended came from that shelf save for Nyronus's Forever and Again, which I had previously read.
But I read almost as many stories off that shelf when I first established it than I have since. Some of that is because of the Royal Guard (Read It Later 21-25 were almost entirely such stories), and some of it is just plain old laziness or topicality.
I should correct that.
3368256
*reads and nods*
To jump to your thing in the middle about Mature story recs ... this bookshelf is where I file stories that I felt treated sex in unusually adult ways. As the description says: "Stories that offer commendably grown-up takes on sex, sexuality, and relationships: heartwarming respect, consent awareness, kink positivity, open and honest confrontation of taboos, etc."
Everything on that list, I at least felt didn't waste my time. The top of my rec list would be Isseus' Cadance In A Minor, though it's quite a longfic.
3368078 I think you and I are probably on the same page on this one, but I look forward to reading (and responding to!) your relevant blog post (when you write it). Also, if you do end up reading and liking Twice as Bright, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Cloudy Skies' entire backlog for your perusal (Lost and Found and Where Your Heart Is are particular favorites of mine, though Taken for Granite is probably his best, technically). In my terribly uncultured opinion, he's fairly consistent, quality-wise, though his oldest fics do get a bit weaker.
3368145 Unfortunately, I'd kinda say it is. I think, generally, whether it's fanfic, music, Youtube, or art, our best days are mostly behind us. But I tend to be fairly pessimistic about such things.
3368300
So good, I reviewed and recommended it even before it was finished!
3368317
I actually follow Cloudy Skies; I've just never gone through his whole back catalog. I read Taken for Granite as it was coming out and liked it; alas, he pretty much quit right after he wrote that.
I need to finish going through his stories, which was, in fact, part of why I added Twice as Bright to "You're Next". That and the fact that bookplayer once said that it made a more plausible argument for Celestia x Pinkie Pie than... all the shipfics had for some other ship that I don't remember.
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Incidentally:
I actually asked myself the question of whether or not things are going downhill when I realized just how heavily my favorites list was biased against post-2013 stories. After all, my highly recommended stories list has a whopping 5 stories from this year, and only 21 from 2014. There are 31 from 2013, and all the rest are from 2012 or 2011 (unfortunately, the bookshelves won't let you browse by approval date past the first page due to... I don't even know why, really).
However, I think that view of things is wrong. I think the actual cause of this is because a lot of the stories that ended up getting widely recommended are older - the longer something has been around, the more chance it has to be recommended. The newer something is, the less likely it will have been recommended by someone.
So the actual cause of this is very probably that I just have an easier time finding old good stories than new good stories, and because it is easier to find old good authors than new good authors - someone who was good two years ago is easier to find out about than someone who is good today.
I am no less likely to at least recommend a story in my Read It Now reviews than my Read It Later reviews, but I am vastly more likely to highly recommend a story in my read it later reviews than I am in my Read It Now reviews, and I am 27% more likely to find a story worth reading in Read it Later than Read It Now, which suggests to me that my Read It Later stuff is just better filtered.
Also, when I first joined the fandom, I used a bunch of good writers' recommendations to find stuff to read, so a lot of the really distilled "good stuff" was from 2012, because I joined in early 2013.
Completely fair review, I must say. It's definitely more about the fluff, and the concept of the dolls themselves. Also, at the time, I didn't particularly think RariLight could work in the first place. Or if it did, what it would be based on, how they'd interact, etc. Monochromatic then came later and showed us all how it's done. Who, funnily enough, told me Felt Heart was one of the fics that got them starter on the RariLight kick!
While it's definitely the fic I'm most proud of, it does still have its flaws. I'd probably write it differently if I tried again. Perhaps a more flirtatious Rarity, and simply an oblivious Twi - and Rarity makes it a game for Twi to find out, maybe taking some of the books herself and forcing Twi to go to specific places to figure it out...
3368508
Well, you know what they say: to understand recursion, you first must understand recursion.
Honestly, I have never really cared for Rarity shipping for some reason. As much as I take your word, I just can't bring myself to read a concept I've tried and not enjoyed. Sorry if that sounded harsh, but I was told that honesty is the best policy.
3368683
From my response over on his story:
The End Changes Everything is a fine trope. There are stories which do this very well. But the thing is, when the ending changes everything, everything should fall into place - all the behavior should still make sense in the new context. Indeed, it should make even better sense than it did before - and indeed, there are elements in this (such as Fluttershy's aggressive behavior) which make a lot more sense when you realize that Fluttershy's dad got divorced from her mom, and Fluttershy was freaking out from it, and also seeking comfort.
Where this story fell down was that a lot of the behavior didn't make sense when recontextualized in the form of the ending - while some of the behavior is perfectly cromulent in the new context, maybe even more so than before, it didn't make sense for everything, and thus while we swung around to understanding some of Fluttershy's odd behavior, we actually swung away from understanding some of her other behavior.
Fluttershy's behavior towards Rarity was recontextualized in the end to be familial in nature, but that didn't feel like a plausible recontextualization for a lot of the behavior being shown - it didn't feel like the behavior of family members, but of lovers, and the ending seems to say "No, that's wrong".
Basically, the story didn't end up making sense to me, because the recontextualization made some things that made sense previously no longer make sense. The story ending up with Rarity freaking out over not being daddy's little princess anymore relied on an emotional transition which happened at the very end of the piece; there was no mention of parents at any point prior to Fluttershy's dad showing up, nor any real lead-in to that freak-out. While "I just want to be loved" might arguably be a theme, there's still quite a bit of behavior that doesn't really make sense in the final context of the piece, and a lot of it - the physically intimate behavior - was given a lot of emphasis but didn't feel like it made sense in the end.
3368656
There's nothing wrong with that. Well, unless you're avoiding Spring is Dumb. :V
I remember being really frustrated with Felt Heart, because it had all the makings and setup of a great romance, but then just never quite crossed over the threshold and out of cutesy fluff.
3368395
Twice as Bright is one of the best shipping stories on the site (outside of one very awkward singing sequence), and it sells Pinkie/Celestia perfectly. But Cloudy Skies' real masterpiece is Lost and Found. Long, but worth the time.
3368300 Cadance in A Minor is indeed amazing.
I couldn't agree more about Felt Heart, even if I did largely enjoy it (FlutterPie is my very favorite uncommon ship). It's really sad but so many otherwise great RariTwi fics have Rares completely out of character in that manner. Yes, most people read Rarity romance fics for melodrama (or if they aren't, I don't understand why one would be reading them), but melodrama does not equal being socially inept for thousands of words of dialogue.