It Is Recommendsday, My Dudes #6 · 6:36pm Apr 28th, 2021
Today, we've got a Pony-on-Earth piece and an Admiral Biscuit one.
To most people's likely surprise, that's two different stories and not the same one.
First we have Ride the Pony - Five Dollars by Irrespective.
Pony-on-Earth isn't a rare genre but it's also reasonably uncommon. Fewer still break the mold of not either being fun slice of life stuff or 'human adopts adorable small pony' cuteness. No - here, we're going dark.
At the state fair, a man charges five dollars for children to ride a pony around a tiny circle.
The small horse is saddled and leashed to a mechanical turnstyle, limiting it to that small, claustrophobic space. Shackled to the machine, carrying small children for a short ride, being fed and barely kept up as they travel from fairground to fairground. That's all life is.
A grandmother pays the man five dollars to let her granddaughter ride the pony. The pony resists. Something inside it says no for the first time in many, many years.
And then the grandmother whispers something to the pony in the Old Language. "What are you doing here? You're Equestrian."
The following chapters aren't quite as dark as the first, but they don't pull punches either. The humans rescue the pony and scramble across the county, trying to stay ahead of the police and get the Equestrian home again.
It's a rough little adventure, wonderfully harrowing and just uplifting enough. It would probably be written a bit differently now - what with G5 info coming out and all - but it's a potent punch of a story and quite enjoyable while fitting in a frequently unused genre niche.
Of course, you can't talk Pony-on-Earth without mentioning Admiral Biscuit. Likely all of us are familiar with his work - and he's a master of the craft and particularly of creating earnest and well-researched slices of Earth life that just happen to have a small horse embedded into them.
This is not one of those.
This is a full Equestria story, but it's also one of the most surreal stories I've read.
It follows the daily life of Langoustine Bisque (Langy) with the same masterful touch Admiral Biscuit has for other slice of life stories. The twist is that Langy is the operations chief of Canterlot Substation Six, which pumps product up the Canterhorn after the pipeline carries it out of the soup mines to the west.
Yes, you did read that correctly. That's The Soup Must Flow.
The entire story is about the daily grind of running a pumping station that distributes split pea soup from the soup mines to major cities. It is played 100% straight and with the slice-of-life aplomb that Admiral Biscuit excels at. It is absurdly silly in the best way and absolutely does not blink as it stares you right in the eye and says things like:
“Unicorn Range Five reports tail of cazuela clear,” Dots reported. “Water buffer following, then a light zuppa pavese.”
Langy’s ears perked. “Light?”
“That’s what they say. Broth only.”
It's hilarious. It's surreal. It's beautiful.
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goddammit, the soup one XD
The Soup Must Flow is one of Admiral Biscuit's best, and that's saying a lot. It's a gorgeous, and surreal, story.