This review is part of our Valentine's Day Review Bomb, with a new review each day leading up to Valentine's Day.

ELate-Night Scenes on a Buckball Pitch

• MLP: FiM
• Slice of Life

How can you love a game when you aren't sure who will win?

• Twilight
• Rainbow Dash
• Rarity
• DJ P0N-3
• Octavia

mushroompone · 3.6k words  ·  31  1 · 439 views

Overview

A series of ponies meet at a buckball pitch on a warm summer night. The stars are bright, the cicadas are singing, and the air is cool. It’s the perfect conditions to have a few frank discussions about life.

Characters

There are several characters in this piece - characters as in the ponies we know and love. But I think my usual approach will not do here. Just talking about Octavia or Twilight or Rainbow Dash feels like it’s missing the point. The buckball pitch itself is a character. The summer night sky is a character. The actual ponies are somewhat secondary, which will make this review a bit more difficult than usual.

The characters in this piece are all archetypes. The ex-partners. The awkward lovers. The wide-eyed child. You could arguably insert anyone into any of these roles, and the story would work just as well. This ends up being both a good and a bad thing. It helps focus the story on what it wants to talk about - the atmosphere, the mood, the scenery of the whole thing. These things are important, because they do really make the framing device itself seem like its own character, and it’s a good character. The buckball pitch itself feels alive, in a way that settings rarely do. It is a place where ponies can talk about love, about their lives, about the choices they’ve made. It actively invites these discussions, rather than passively allowing them. 

On the other hand, this means that the ponies themselves are rather flat. Octavia and Vinyl are paper-thin, and most of their conversation is exactly what you’d expect any two people of reasonable moral fiber to say in that situation, with no identifying details whatsoever as to the how or why. Twilight and Rarity suffer similarly.

The only pony here that feels fully fleshed-out is Rainbow Dash. She has a strong voice, and the story very much has something to say about her that wouldn’t work for any other pony, because we get real details about the issue she’s dealing with. This helps relate to what she’s going through, even if perhaps it makes it a little harder to imagine yourself in her horseshoes. It feels like an odd choice in a story like this - if all the main characters are meant to be blank slates, why make Rainbow’s scene so specifically personal? If the reader can step into the shoes of these ponies even with character-specific details present, why don’t we have any for the other two scenes?

I will reiterate, however, that the ponies are not the main focus here, and that it’s clear that having fully-fleshed out protagonists is not the story’s goal. The goal is inviting you, the reader, onto a field on a warm summer night, and letting you imagine the last time you broke up, or asked someone out, or discovered you weren’t where you thought you’d be as a kid. But I’ll discuss that in more detail in the next section.

Plot & Pacing

This story doesn’t have a plot, in the typical sense. It is a series of vignettes, deliberately so, because as noted previously, following the actual ponies isn’t the point. We’re following a series of emotions, tied together by a common theme and a common setting.

The theme here is clear, because it’s repeated several times. It’s about the difference between plan and reality, and things not working out as you may have intended, and how that’s okay. Every single scene has some variation of “things didn't go quite as planned” in it, and it works. While another story might have benefitted from more subtlety of theme, this one is short enough, and the focus is unusual enough, that being up-front about it helps.

This is especially so because the story isn’t about a particular plan that doesn’t work, or a particular character’s reaction to failure or change. It’s talking directly to the reader, and asking them to reflect on the time their plans didn’t work out. It uses universal moments that just about anyone could find examples of - a breakup, a proposal that didn’t go quite right, a change in what you want to do with your life. And then it tells you: All these moments are the same. Each of these summer nights is just like any other, and these ponies? They’re okay. Things are going to work out for them, and that means things are going to work out for you.

And this is the heart and soul of the story, and why it’s so good. It wants you to take a step back and think, and it does it with stellar atmosphere and simple, big problems, exaggerated for effect. 

It’s not perfect - the Vinyl and Octavia scene is definitely the weakest, and drags on a bit longer than it needs to, and the theming is a little muddled by the story not being sure whether it wants the characters to be completely generic or not, but overall, the story works really well. It’s a cozy story that talks to you like a good friend, without falling into the pitfalls often associated with breaking the fourth wall. 

Technical Skill

Once again, this piece makes my job tricky. The flow of the piece is fantastic in many respects. The narration has its own tone to it, especially in the way it invites you to think about the unique feeling of being out in the middle of a field on a perfect summer night. For the most part, the narrative voice is immaculate.

Which is why it’s all the more jarring to see errors that should have been caught in editing. The narration has a very distinct character, so things that normally would be minor, like slipping into Vinyl’s first-person thoughts:

I guess events like this were close enough to performances in her mind.

Or turning into what is clearly Rainbow’s voice:

It wasn’t, like, a big deal or anything. That first rainboom had kinda changed all of her “plans” or whatever. Who plans to suddenly bust out an aerial move that breaks every law of time and space and matter?

These things feel like a character in the story has reached out and yanked the reins away from the narrator. As a result they become much bigger issues, in a piece that could otherwise have been technically perfect. 

Rating

Character: 3.5/5 

The pony characters are not the focus here, but they could still do with a little more fleshing out. The framework, however, elevates the setting itself into a character with its own voice, and that voice is great.

Plot: 4.5/5

This is a story that wants you to teach you a lesson, without you feeling like you’ve been tricked into reading a moral allegory. It does this incredibly well, just by making each scene relatable to just about anyone, and inviting you to think about them in more than just the context of the story itself.

Mechanics: 4/5

A fantastic narrative voice, brought down slightly by a few jarring errors.

Final Score: 4/5

A story that’s all about delivering a particular atmosphere, so it can give you a safe place to think about life and love. The characters may be a bit weak, but the message certainly is not.

Final Thoughts

I liked this piece. “Cozy” is probably the best word for it. It evokes a sense of nostalgia, both for the decisions you made, and what could have been. I think this story has the potential to be even better with just a few small changes, but what’s here is great. It’s easy to read and has a lot of soul, and that goes a long way. Check it out, if you want something cozy and comforting, while still being thought-provoking.