It Is Recommendsday, My Dudes #21 · 6:25pm Aug 11th, 2021
You know, I noticed I've got a lot of Trixie in the buffer for this blog series. I'd best start featuring her or I'll end up with Trixie Month. And we would never survive her ego after that.
The longer of the two pieces today is Ninjadeadbeard's the Legend of Trixie. While technically a sequel and part of the larger Anarchyverse, all you really need to know going in is that Trixie messed up a spell, accidentally sent herself back in time, became Starswirl's magical mentor and when she returned to her proper time started a relationship (and had a foal, Celeste) with him. (The story itself explains most of that, but knowing it in advance does help a bit. There are other Anarchyverse bits that pop up, but they're not essential.)
This tale picks up in the writings of Daring Do, who - now thirty or so years into Twilight's reign - has stumbled on to a journal left by the time-displaced Trixie in an ancient tomb. To discover just what happened during Trixie's chrono-vacation, Twilight commissions Daring to translate and transcribe the journal's contents.
This one's a great adventure tale of the dawn of Equestria, told by a lunatic. Trixie is an extremely unreliable narrator, which is commented on repeatedly by Daring (in between breakdowns as Trixie bootstrap paradoxes her way through history.) But between wild adventures and farcical comedy, there's also some nicely dramatic moments. Trixie is entirely unprepared for the situation she finds herself in - an Equestria far different and far more savage than her own, where harmony doesn't yet exist and scattered settlements of ponies struggle to survive against the elements and monsters like the true Grogar and the troggies.
There's a lot of fun in this one, particularly from both Trixie's irreverent way of telling the story and Daring's exasperation at Trixie glossing over or dismissing crucial historical moments that make the scholarly side of her drool. The world building, as well, is top notch and adds a ton of little details and context to things that we normally only see as legends or myths.
Second and shorter is Entropy by zaponator.
Starlight experiments with time spells again. It - predictably - goes wrong. Because Starlight is the magical equivalent of hitting something with a hammer until it works, she and Trixie end up in Ponyville. Hours before the end of the world.
It's not a violent end, to be fair. The planet simply has gotten old, its inhabitants are gone and the sun is soon to take its final breath. And in that desolation... Starlight hears somepony singing.
You want bittersweet? Here ya go. This story is damn sad - you see the end of Equestria, writ undeniably large. But the ending... well, let's just say that Starlight looks sadness in the eye and then shanks it in the ribs. It's a beautiful story with a touching ending. Real favorite of mine.
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the idea of trixie narrating an epic trixie adventure is super fun, and the entropy story looks like it has a lot of themes very near and dear to my heart
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Legend of Trixie is hilarious, but also has a bit of everything. It's also one of the greatest introspections of Trixie's character.