Read It Later Reviews #34 – The New Crop, One Tenth-Bit, The Changeling of the Guard, Through the Eyes of a Soldier: Taking Hill 790, The Little Things · 10:41pm Oct 22nd, 2015
The Royal Guard is forever searching, forever seeking, and as one of its baleful eyes, so am I.
Though, ironically, I have about twice the pass rate of the average Royal Guard reviewer. So much for hating everything. 
Today we have three stories from the queue, along with two other pieces that I selected for my own reading enjoyment.
Today’s stories:
The New Crop by xjuggernaughtx
One Tenth-Bit by Estee
The Changeling of the Guard by vdrake77
Through the Eyes of a Soldier: Taking Hill 790 by That Hooded Fella
The Little Things by Princess Glitzy
The New Crop
by xjuggernaughtx
Dark, Slice of Life, Alternate Universe
15,885 wordsA long time ago, my family moved to Appleloosa, and we ain't had no luck since. We tried growing apples, but our orchards just never took right. Now, the bank's gonna repossess unless we can get some bits together real fast.
No, we ain't never been lucky, but in that ring, I don’t need luck. I’m one win away from saving our farm, and Granny says that tonight I’m fighting some fancy unicorn named Blueblood. I hear he's real fast, but there ain’t no way I’m losing with so much on the line.
This ain't gonna be pretty. In fact, I can just about guarantee it’ll be real, real ugly.
Why I added it: It was recommended to me by basically everyone ever. Also, it was in the Royal Guard queue.
Review
The grimy mirror in this locker room’s got three big cracks running across it, and when I look back at myself, my pieces don’t fit together right. The lines of my face are just a little off from each other. Most folks would say this mirror’s busted, but anypony that’s set hoof in here knows better. The reflection’s the truest in all of Equestria. You gotta be a little bit broken if you’re standing here.
The story of a boxer trying to win a fight to save the family farm, this story uses extremely evocative language to describe a fierce, desperate match between the big brick of a local hero and the well-trained outsider from the big city who is stronger and tougher than he looks. Our boxer has had a hard life – his mom, dad, and sister are all dead. His grandmother can barely keep things together. His sister is too thin on the food they’re feeding her. But he has to keep winning in the ring, or else they’re going to lose it all.
This might as well be a piece of original fiction for all that it really makes use of Equestria; the Equestria we see here – the Apples we see here – could just as easily have been original characters, for all their similarities with the show. Here, Equestria is in eternal twilight, the Apples (or what’s left of them) live in Appleoosa instead of Ponyville (which, apparently, doesn’t exist), and they do a poor job of it after fever claimed half their family.
This isn’t a bad thing, though; the story is extremely evocative. The fight is described excellently, as is Big Mac’s mindset. The struggle to win – to survive – is first and foremost in this piece, and the violence is brutal and unforgiving. Things are bad, and things are wrong, but he just doesn’t see any other way out of it.
This isn’t a story you should read if you’re looking for a pony story. But it is a story you should read if you want to read about the desperate struggle of a boxer to keep things right in his world, to see the awfulness of a boxing match from the inside, and to see what drives him to do the things he does in a world of poverty and not-quite-despair.
Recommendation: Highly Recommended.
One Tenth-Bit
by Estee
Slice of Life
9,707 wordsThere are things which are not crimes -- things which others are determined to see as crimes in spite of all evidence, truth, and reality, as long as their false perception gets them what they want. After a visit to Barneigh's Exclusive Garments And Saddlebags, Rarity has found herself on the receiving end of that self-enforced delusion, facing anger, accusations, and abuse of power for the smallest reason of all—
—one created by the smallest minds.
Why I added it: Because I’m feeling cheap.
Review
Rarity is detained after picking up a tenth-bit piece from the floor of Barneigh’s, an exclusive clothing store. Rarity believes that she is being detained by the management because they want to harass her and embarrass her into never returning – as a fellow fashion designer, she has nothing but distaste for the luxury goods that Barneigh’s sells, which are terrible and only sell because of the brand name (or so Rarity claims, anyway).
Security ponies manhandled her, and now she’s being questioned by an angry, aggressive cop who doesn’t have anything on her, but wants her to have done something wrong, and who has already decided she’s clearly a criminal.
This is all stupid. Rarity is late for an appointment, her hip hurts, and all this posturing and poor behavior is pointless on their part. But the police pony just won’t give up.
A story of harassment by a store and a police officer who is effectively working for said store, this is fundamentally a cathartic piece, I think – the cop is a villain, Rarity is a generous, honest person who is being terribly wronged, and in the end, the cop gets his comeuppance once Rarity finally gets to her meeting. The cop is a terrible person and it feels good to the audience to see him get his comeuppance.
This story is fundamentally meant to highlight the unfairness of the situation at times, when a police officer harasses an honest citizen because they want to feel their power and lord it over someone else. The catharsis of catching the cop doing bad things feels good to the audience, and the question Rarity is left with at the end – what happens to the poor ponies who aren’t friends with the princesses? – is meant to leave the audience disquieted.
Yet, at the same time, the emotional manipulation is quite blatant here. The cop is a pretty two-dimensional character, a jerk with a badge, a bad cop who just likes lording his power over others, who takes bribes or is susceptible to influence to harass people on behalf of powerful ponies, who fears punishment but who simultaneously feels confident he will never get called on it. It is a fairly standard “bad cop” character, and the whole story is built up around this. The whole thing sort of has a certain aura of preaching to the choir – while the emotional manipulation of the audience is fairly deft, it is also pretty obvious, and the story doesn’t really go beyond that particular all-too-common arc.
Recommendation: Worth reading if you don’t mind clichés.
The Changeling of the Guard
by vdrake77
Adventure
62,846+ words (incomplete)Description
Why I added it: The Royal Guard queue.
Review
A changeling drone cursed with curiosity has been trying to innovate in Queen Chrysalis’s hive. Building rooms in new ways, thinking up new designs… true, a drone, a builder, was not supposed to do new things. He was supposed to rely on tradition. But it would be all for the best if the designs worked, right?
Naturally, they don’t, earning the changeling a strange audience with Queen Chrysalis, followed by a swift banishment from the hive. The drone, unaware of the ways of the outside world – indeed, incapable of understanding even the basics of survival – manages to get lost in the Saddle Arabian desert. While his turning into a white pegasus might get some of the heat off of him, in the end, his lack of understanding of the need for water nearly dooms him, and he would have died where he fell, were it not for the generosity of a kind band of wandering merchants who takes him in, despite his apparent lack of memory, lack of a cutie mark, or lack of just about anything a pony might have. Their intervention educates him about the world at large, but he knows that their attempts at getting him “help” in Canterlot would doom him.
And so he sets off again, in search of whatever it is he wants to do with his life as an exile.
Fundamentally a coming of age/finding yourself story, this piece focuses on the travels of the changeling, as well as his attempts at figuring out what he wants to do with his life. The story has a great love of the protagonist – who eventually settles on the pony name of Idol Hooves – making achievements in ignorance, his lack of understanding of what is going on, combined with his own abilities, resulting in him sometimes acting terribly brave without realizing it. From foiling one of Ahuizotl’s plots without even knowing what he did to trying to help ponies in ways that would ordinarily be very dangerous (and, as it turns out, is still dangerous to him), his unfamiliarity with the world leads him into and out of danger at times.
The story starts out pretty slow, but picks up a bit once he meets Topaz Showers, an entomologist who helps him fit into pony society and is also totally not his girlfriend. The fact that Idol Hooves does not even recognize the possibility that anyone might think the pair are in a relationship leads to a fair bit of comedy, doubly so as he occasionally does strange things which could very easily be misinterpreted. Indeed, Idol Hooves’ near-complete ignorance of pony society is a constant source of amusement in the story, as well as creating tension as he repeatedly puts his disguise in danger due to his ignorance. The story steadily improves over time, and is outright enjoyable by the time he actually joins the Royal Guard, some 50,000 words into the story.
Unfortunately, this story, for all its amusement value, has its flaws; the story starts out fairly slowly, and while it does a great deal of world-building, it isn’t always enough to keep things interesting early on. The entire story is told in first person, apparently from some point in the future, and Idol Hooves’ voice at times is inconsistent – towards the beginning, he talks about how ignorant he was at the time, as if he is looking back on things from far in the future after he was much wiser, while other times he takes a closer view of things, talking as if from his point of view at that point in the story, without any real reference to his future point of reference. There are a few other odd inconsistencies here and there, such as the changeling attitude towards cannibalism, as well as his reaction to Topaz Showers’ bug collection which felt a bit strange given his own carnivorous nature and lack of negative reactions towards dead things previously.
The story also struggles to maintain tension for most of the earlier parts; there is precious little tension for most of the earlier parts of the story, and while there’s a brief bit of tension with Topaz Showers in the wilderness when Topaz ends up getting messed up from being fed on emotionally, it is defused within the space of a chapter or so. It isn’t really until Idol Hooves and Topaz Showers make it back to civilization that the story really starts to be compelling, and given that’s about 32,000 words into the story, that’s kind of a long time to tough it out.
Still, I can’t say that I’m not going to be following the piece now that I’ve read it and caught up to the present. Ultimately, the question of whether or not it is worth reading comes down to one question – are you willing to put up with tens of thousands of words of setup before the story really gets strong, and are you willing to put up with a story that is, in the end, incomplete, even if it does update reasonably often?
Recommendation: Worth reading if you’re tolerant of slow starts and incomplete stories.
Through the Eyes of a Soldier: Taking Hill 790
by That Hooded Fella
Gore, Tragedy, Alternate Universe, Human
2,566 wordsIn the war-torn nation of Equestria, 552 kilometers east of the capital of Canterlot, there lies a hill. A hill surrounded by a forest thick with life and prosperity. A hill and forest that seemed to have gone untarnished by all, but time and local animals. A forgotten hill, in a forgotten forest, in a country that would love nothing more then to forget the atrocities of warfare.
It is upon this hill, and forest that Apple Bloom and the rest of the battalion set their eyes, a grim determination in all of them. For they had been ordered to take this place, and take it they would, but they would not take it for the glory of Equestria or the supposed honor a victory would bring. They would take it for their survival and the survival of the pony next to them; they would take it for the survival of their families; and they would take it for the survival of the town only ten miles from the hill.
For these reasons, they would fight and die in a forgotten forest, on a forgotten hill, and in a war that they prayed none would ever forget.
Why I added it: The Royal Guard queue.
Review
Ba-bum, ba-bum
Bullets whizzed by her ears as Apple Bloom ran from her cover, one grazing her helmet with a loud clang, ripping it from her head. The mare stumbled for a moment before tripping from the brush beneath her. Her face dug into the scorched ground, ash and dirt filling her mouth as she lifted her head. To her right, a mortar pounded the earth, sending a screaming stallion end over end to land on his muzzle, caving his face into his skull.
Turning her head from an all-too-familiar sight, Apple Bloom scrambled over to a nearby tree, leaning against it for but a moment. Her chest heaved as she sucked in the hot air of battle. Dirt and ash clung to her exposed fur and covered her now unprotected face and head. In her hooves, she clutched an assault rifle that felt like lead in her arms.
Lifting her head, she slowly peeked around the side of the scorched tree, attempting to see where the humans had positioned themselves on the incline. The mare got a glimpse of their loosely straight line on the ridge before she was forced back into cover by concentrated rifle fire. More mortars went off around her, one hitting a clump of downed trees, sending out debris and wood everywhere.
Apple Bloom cried out in pain as some projectiles managed to dig themselves past camo fatigues and underneath body armor. A rather large chunk stuck from her foreleg, which she immediately grasped with her teeth and yanked out. The wood hadn't seemed to have penetrated any major veins, so she was safe for the time being.
Safe being the epitome of irony at the moment.
A war story about a war between humans and ponies, this story really has very little context – it is little more than a scene in a battle, as a battered battalion tries to take a nearby hill.
On the one hand, this is reasonably well-written – the descriptions of the battle are reasonably evocative, and it does a generally decent job of depicting the horror of war. Screaming shells, people dying, not even necessarily knowing why what you’re doing is important, but knowing it is essential to succeed…
On the other hand, this story is tremendously generic – everything in the story has a terrible feeling of “generic war scene.” Every single piece of this story is something I’ve seen in a war story or a war movie before.
Likewise, despite characters being labelled as Apple Bloom and Rainbow Dash, they’re given very little actual character in the context of the story, and the ponies might as well be humans. I have no investment in any of the people depicted here, and thus their deaths mean nothing to me because they’re all generic soldier #543 to me, or generic heroic commander #6, taking generic hill #790.
Recommendation: Not Recommended unless you really like war scenes.
The Little Things
by Princess Glitzy
Romance
1,027 wordsIt's the little things that Rarity notices. An occasional glance her way. The slight blush whenever she talks about finding her true love. The content smile when she sits next to her. She's always known, just never let on. She can read her like a book.
Why I added it: RariLight.
Review
The story of Rarity and Twilight’s non-courtship leading up to Twilight Sparkle finally asking Rarity out, it is the story of all the things that Rarity noticed that told her that Twilight had a crush on her – as well as all the things that Rarity did to try and get her to confess, and the influence that Twilight had over her own habits and life, and how she changed Rarity’s idea of what she wanted in a partner.
While I generally have a soft spot for stories like this, here, it just didn’t really work for me. Maybe it comes on too strong, with us being told that Twilight is going to confess in the second paragraph of the piece, which immediately answers the question of what Twilight is going to do about it, and how it is all going to end. Maybe it is that the story comes on strong in other ways as well, with Rarity’s affection for Twilight coming on early in the piece. But whatever it was, I just wasn’t pulled through this piece emotionally the way I should have been; it felt emotionally flat, without much in the way of rising action or climax.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
Summary
The New Crop by xjuggernaughtx
Highly Recommended
One Tenth-Bit by Estee
Worth Reading
The Changeling of the Guard by vdrake77
Worth Reading
Through the Eyes of a Soldier: Taking Hill 790 by That Hooded Fella
Not Recommended
The Little Things by Princess Glitzy
Not Recommended
Always nice to find something as great as The New Crop in the queue.
In other news, I beat Saint’s Row 4 the other day, and I think I shall be writing a blog post about it, as it was an interesting experience in more than one way, and touched on a few converseations I’ve had in the past about agency, power fantasies, and video games. So stay tuned.
Number of stories still listed as Read It Sooner: 87
Number of stories still listed as Read It Later: 355
Number of stories listed as Read It Eventually: 1697
Number of stories in the Royal Guard queue which need to be reviewed: 65
The Changeling of the Guard is a fun one, I've been following it for a while now, and The New Crop is excellent of course.
I'll take a look at that Estee story.
I'll let Juggy know. He'll be proud.
I'd wondered about The New Crop, since Dark AU fics in general tend to drastically diverge from the tone of the series, but if it's as good as all that anyway, I can take a look.
I remember One Tenth-Bit from back when. It's... a very Estee story. Fun, but I have to be in the mood for some deep-rooted cynicism along the way.
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It is very good, but it might as well be a work of original fiction (and in fact, probably should be). That isn't really a bad thing, though; it was something I definitely thought was worth my time.
And yes, Estee's stories are... remarkably cynical. I really adore them sometimes, though.
I disagree. The appeal of the story is all in Rarity's voice, her mannerisms, her thoughts, her melodramatic try-hard put downs of the store, her outrageous and petty reasons for having gotten into the situation. The story is just fun to read, and the plot is only window dressing. Some stories are made great just by the characters alone.
An utterly cliche and dull plot can still be entertaining if the central character is awesome. Check out the movie This Must Be the Place to see the perfect example of boring plot+great character=good story.
I'm honored to be put in the 'Worth reading' list! Thank you so much for the review!
All fair criticisms, as I've said before. Changeling starts slow; if I ever go through a rewrite I'll try to fix that.
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I look forward to reading more of it.
Funny that I should come over across another review of yours. It seems to me that stories I like, you dislike.
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Ah, but do you like the stories I like?