Paul's Thursday Reviews CCLXXII · 9:56pm Nov 11th, 2021
Of all the things I could talk about today, I find myself thinking of one particular event of the last week. As mentioned last time, I spent pretty much the first third of this month house-sitting for my parents. One night I went outside to walk the dogs and I noticed a small fire alight in my neighbor’s yard. I didn’t think anything of it. People burn all the time in those parts, usually to get rid of all the excess sticks and leaves that accumulate over the weeks and months.
When I woke up the next morning and, again, walked the dogs, I found the smoke was still in the air. It may sound strange to some of you, but I really like the smell of smoke. It reminds me of camping trips and those Thanksgiving days of my youth cooking turkey on the white brick pit my father made by hand in the swamp. But that morning struck me as unusual, because there was so much smoke. I promptly went to investigate.
Between my parents’ place and the neighbor’s is a stretch of dense foliage, roughly twenty feet wide and going from the road to the woods out back. It’s just dense enough to make walking through it a struggle, but not so dense we can’t see the neighbor’s place on the other side if we get close. Turns out, I was wrong that my neighbor had started the fire in his yard. He’d started it in that densely wooded strip of land.
The good news is that it was a controlled burn intended to clear out the low-lying foliage and debris. The trees were unharmed beyond a little burning at the bottom. The timing was great, because cold Fall nights in Southern Louisiana leave everything extremely wet, making it a lot harder for the fire to spread. This burn had also been planned between him and my parents, a fact I didn’t learn until a few days later.
But at the time I was thinking about how we’d all dodged a bullet. If that fire had been set just a week prior, when things were still bone dry and moderately hot, we could have had a full-on forest fire on our hands. I get that it was a burn of opportunity given the good weather and all, but I have to believe it would have been better to wait until my parents were home and/or inform me so that we could help keep an eye on it. It’s one thing to start a fire in a clearing fifty feet away from the woods, it’s another to set one right in the middle of it! The whole thing felt dangerously irresponsible.
Nothing came of it, and it’s clear by the burned parts of the ground that he at least worked to keep the fire from spreading to the forest proper. But for me it served as a stark reminder about fire safety. Be careful out there, folks.
Alright, enough yapping. We’ve got reviews!
Stories for This Week:
Unfinished by redsquirrel456
Rules of Engagement by I-A-M
Breaking the Ice by Krickis
Recall Memories of Midnight by Tangerine Blast
Total Word Count: 181,076
Rating System
Why Haven't You Read These Yet?: 1
Pretty Good: 2
Worth It: 1
Needs Work: 0
None: 0
Unfinished
111,841 Words
By redsquirrel456
Princess Twilight Sparkle has been having a dream. Every night, over and over again. It is of another pony, a stallion who is so much like her, she’d almost swear he was her. She feels a deep longing to meet him, but the dream always ends without that happening. It’s ruining her sleep, making her cranky and anxious.
She has no idea that he’s just as desperate to meet her.
In this unusual and quite confusing tale, we find Twilight Sparkle and Dusk Shine have become connected through the power of the Element of Magic, a connection that manifests in their dreams. The story is set in two parts: first, their mutual drive to find one another across dimensions. Second, the consequences when they finally pull it off.
The Need to Know crowd is not going to be happy with this one. Even when the story is telling you what is happening, you really have no idea what is happening. Something about Twilight being the origin for an infinite number of stories and questions about whether those stories are real and even if they aren’t does it matter and something evil is trying to destroy all those stories because that’s just what it does and Twilight can see and know everything in all worlds except when she can’t and… and… Yeah. When the story is over, Twilight acknowledges that even she doesn’t really understand what happened.
None of this is to say that the story is bad. Far from it; it’s an emotional roller coaster ride. Heck, the latter half of the story drops right into horror territory, complete with inexplicable monstrosities pursuing our favorite ponies across a world ravaged by… well, an abomination. Characters will fall to darkness and despair. Many will die. And all along you find yourself wondering if a happy ending is even possible. I would argue that the one we got was… bittersweet. Yeah, a lot of crap went down, but the ending makes it seem like a positive outcome is on the way.
Alas, we will probably never know more than what the story gives us, which is confusing at best. But it was still a fun piece, complicated and potentially meta in its nature. I don’t think it’ll work for everyone, but if you’re the type who loves to theorize using the bits and pieces offered then you’ll probably view it favorably. It’s got a nice emotional element to it despite being a bit too strong in the Tell.
I enjoyed it, even if I wish I understood the big picture a bit more. Give it a go if you’re interested in seeing Dusk Shine and Twilight Sparkle work towards a mutual goal in a grim and perilous setting.
Bookshelf: Pretty Good
Previous stories reviewed for this author:
New Author!
Rules of Engagement
49,488 Words
By I-A-M
College student Sunset’s Shimmer’s on an eight-month dry spell. Her friend and ex Rainbow Dash notices and decides that the single best solution to this problem is to bring Sunset to an upscale strip club lounge. Sunset is skeptical but willing to go along. What she never expected was for The Last Note to be owned and operated by the Sirens. Or for star dancer Aria Blaze to give her a freebie.
Might need to turn down the air conditioning for this one, because it gets unrepentantly steamy. I mean yeah, it’s rated M and yeah, you’re told right there is the description that it starts off in a strip club. I just wasn’t prepared for I-A-M to be so, er, descriptive with everything.
Yet this is not porn. The encounters might be steamy enough for pornography, and I won’t blame anyone who thinks the sex scenes take up a little too much of the wordcount. And yet underlying all of that is a very real story in which the surliest of Sirens pursues the Wild Baconhair. Their relationship is a struggle from the start, with Aria fighting her predatory nature, Sunset trying to understand the mercurial woman’s behavior, and their respective friends trying not to get caught in the crossfire.
It should be noted that I-A-M writes this under the assumption that Adagio, Sonata and Aria are bonafide siblings. Doesn’t make a big difference to me, but I know that matters to some people. We don’t see either of them too much, but I loved Adagio’s “protective older sister” vibe and Sonata’s pleasantly mature role as their lounge’s financial watchdog (and barkeep, which, seriously, barkeep Sonata sounds awesome and I’m not even sure why but I want lots of art of that promptly). There’s also some surprising Siren lore that really clarifies Aria’s position in this relationship, and the backstory will be great for the worldbuilders.
Plus, Tempest Shadow as a Mexican bouncer. The ‘Mexican’ part caught me off guard, but this has all my ‘yes’ regardless.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the rest of the Human 7. Like the Sirens, they don’t get a lot of time in this story, but when they do show up it’s always valuable. Especially Twilight and Applejack (though Rainbow gets a few nice moments all on her own).
On the one hand, this story could have been bigger than it is. Right now it’s mostly “Sunset and Aria have a lot of vivid sex oh and they fall in love in the meantime”. There’s nothing wrong with this approach. This is one of the extremely few instances were the sex serves as more than gratification for the viewers. I applaud how I-A-M was able to write these scenes such that they become reflective of the changes in the ongoing relationship. I think I’ve only ever seen that pulled off so well on one other occasion, and I think Rules of Engagement did it a lot better. I-A-M basically uses the sex scenes as the major vehicle for the story’s progression. It teeters on the line of excess, and maybe even slips over it once or twice, but I’m more than happy with the effort taken in the approach.
My self-conflict comes from the awareness that there’s so much we missed. Where’s the resolution with Twilight? Why are we telling Applejack this little Carnival story when we could have witnessed it directly? We got Adagio’s side of things, why doesn’t Sonata get an opportunity for that? And let’s not forget all the little nonsexual nuances and firsts of a relationship that don’t exist at all in this story.
I think I get it. I-A-M didn’t want to write a traditional love story. If I’m reading into things correctly, they wanted the sex to serve as the plot’s vehicle from start to finish. And I get that. It’s fresh, new, exciting. Different. But it comes with the caveat that if you’re looking for those scenes more grounded in romantic tropes or exploring who these characters are outside of the bedroom (and other places they may feel like, er, ‘sullying’), you’ll be out of luck. It also runs the risk of the relationship feeling shallow or, perhaps, unrealistic.
For my part, I really appreciate what the author was doing here. It’s bold and risky, but pays off in spades. I am more than willing to reward the experimentation. The depiction of this pairing was interesting and unconventional, and I find I liked it overall.
Bookshelf: Why Haven’t You Read These Yet?
Previous stories reviewed for this author:
New Author!
Breaking the Ice
11,761 Words
By Krickis
Sequel to Looking Glass
A few years ago, something terrible happened between Applejack and Sunset Shimmer. Now that Sunset is giving friendship a real try, that something stands between them, a wall that strains their friendship. Sunset decides to use the coming Christmas to do something about it. It… doesn’t work out like she hoped.
This short story is centered around the one big thing that never got resolved between Applejack and Sunset in the prior story. Here we see a Sunset Shimmer struggling to understand how to be a friend and, as we can expect from someone who has never tried something before, faceplanting hard. Luckily for her and Applejack, they’ve got Pinkie Pie around to help smooth things back into place.
Applejack may be Best Human in this AU, but Pinkie Pie really showed her worth with this story. I loved how she was able to intervene in a way that wasn’t wild or unorthodox without sacrificing the fact that she’s Pinkie. I also love that Fluttershy is the secret weapon to makeconvince Sunset to do just about anything, and Pinkie knew it.
...Which reminds me that I’m really looking forward to Playing House.
Like its predecessor, this was an all-around great story. Delightful character growth, strong characterizations all around, and a warmhearted conclusion. This has all my approval. The one and only catch is that it is resolving an issue from the prior story new readers won’t know about, but I think it did a decent job of making the nature of the event clear, so that’s not that big a problem.
Bookshelf: Pretty Good!
Previous stories reviewed for this author:
Looking Glass — WHYRTY?
Great and Powerful, Darling! — Pretty Good
Recall Memories of Midnight
7,986 Words
By Tangerine Blast
Prequel to Spark Visions of Twilight
In this anthology, we get to witness the lives of each of the Mane Six before the return of Nightmare Moon in the Nightmare Timeline.
This was… curious. Some of the scenes seemed important. Others seemed to be of no consequence whatsoever. I think, but am not 100% sure, that these are presented in chronological order, and that makes perfect sense. What I can’t grasp is why the author chose the specific moments they did.
Pinkie’s I get. Seeing how she went from a rebel leader to the meek and traumatized thing we know in the main story is pretty important. I appreciate Applejack’s scene, although it seems odd that Tangerine would skip the actual event on which it is apparently about. I also appreciated Rainbow’s, which shows us exactly why she decided to join Nightmare’s personal guard.
Then you get Twilight’s. Which tells us nothing. No, really, it tells us absolutely nothing. As it is, I don’t know why Twilight’s story exists. Fluttershy’s makes some sense, but it’s all focused on Rainbow. In many ways, Fluttershy’s situation is still nebulous, and I don’t appreciate that. And let’s not forget Rarity; why are we having her witness Nightmare Moon’s return – which is exactly what you’d think it to be with absolutely zero surprises – when we could be learning why and how she came to work under Nightmare Moon?
So… yeah. Some really good stuff accompanied by some real headscratchers. I just don’t know what Tangerine was thinking for some of these. There were so many options to choose from, but for at least half these stories the author decided to go with things we didn’t need to see.
I’m leaving this one miffed. There’s nothing wrong with the writing or the presentation, I just can’t wrap my head around some of the author’s decisions. I feel like this should have been twice to three times as long and focused on entirely different things.
Bookshelf: Worth It
Previous stories reviewed for this author:
Spark Visions of Twilight — Pretty Good
Stories for Next Week:
Inflorescence by Reptilicus
The Mistress of Dreams by McPoodle
Menace to Propriety by PatchworkPoltergeist
Mission of Mercy by Rose Quill
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Rules of Engagement has two sequels, FYI.
Rules of Engagement has multiple sequels which address most (though not all) of your questions about it - including the Twilight payoff, perspectives from the other sirens and Bartender Sonata (including art).
First off, thank you for the glowing review. I can honestly say I was not expecting someone to reach back into my library for this trilogy, To confirm your thoughts in your review, yes, this series was actually my first real foray into telling a solely romantic story--while Feather had strong elements of romance, it was also an ensemble cast, adventure, and thriller as much as anything else. The Rulesverse stories were just romance, and they were written to see if I could interweave sex into the story as a major means of driving development and narrative, rather than just to excite. I purposefully bypassed the other romance tropes in favor of these, for that reason.
Regarding your thoughts on the other Sirens? To be honest, I wrote this largely after I had completed most-if-not-all of Featherfall, and I wasn't in the mood to write another epic. I wanted something short, sweet, fluffy, and dramatic, hence the trilogy + short story dumping grounds layout. I will admit that Rules of Hospitality is the meatier of the narrative-based ones, centering as it does on Sci-Twi and Sonata's relationship, but Rules of Etiquette establishes a lot of the...shall we say 'ground rules' for the series almost more than Hospitality does because it features Adagio, the head honcho of the Lounge.
At any rate, thank you again for the time you took to review this story of mine. The Rulesverse is near and dear to my heart, and I'm glad you enjoyed it! I'd love to hear your thoughts on Etiquette and Hospitality if you find the time!
Cheers
Rules of Engagement sounds like something I want to read sooner than later. :D
I would like to know what level of detail you were expecting of a Mature-rated story set in a strip club.
Eyy thanks for the review! I'm glad you enjoyed the story. It was definitely written more for fans of WWB/Looking Glass, so I agree that it's not as good for people unfamiliar. You'll find most of the shorter stories in the series are meant more for readers of the series as a whole (with a few exceptions) but with the context of things as you go, I do hope you enjoy them!
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Oh, I'm well aware of the sequels, the first of which is already on my schedule. I'm very much looking forward to it!
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A mature rating doesn't automatically necessitate the level of sensuality this story went through, and going to a strip club doesn't guarantee wild, passionate sex. Some authors would just write a girl taking off her clothes, slap on a sex tag and think they're being "oh, so risque!"
I saw "Mission of Mercy" in the next week list and got unduly excited. I was wondering how I missed you adding one of my stories to a shelf.
(I'd guess GaPJaxie might have a similar reaction for Familiar, but you probably read his prior to mine.)