Hold your ground but do not be unkind. (Ponyphonic, "Shy Heart") He/him. Ponyfic Roundup reviews every Wednesday.
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Some ponies are attracted to mirrors like moths to a flame, endlessly preening and posing before their own reflections. Silver Buck has come to hate mirrors with a passion – so why does he spend each new desperate day in their company?
Now has a reading by... er... me!
Cover image adapted from Mirror Shards by Marina Shemesh at publicdomainpictures.net
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At first this seems like a meandering meditation on not very much... but then that ending hits, and ironically enough, all of the pieces come together. Well done.
6100451
Of course! I'm good at those! But seriously, thank you for giving this a look and I'm glad you found the ending satisfying. This genre is a bit of a leap into the unknown for me, so feedback is even more welcome than it usually is.
I really enjoyed this, but I think that I did not really catch the deeper meaning, or that meaning has lost its way somewhere inside my head or became fuzzy, because I'm not sure I completely understand it. Nonetheless, this is still quite beautiful.
Stories with deeper meanings. Stories like these. I liked this. I'm sure if I completely understand it, but I like it.
USS Enterprise NCC 1701
6100786 6102358 It's deliberate that not everything is explained, so that's not necessarily a problem. Depends: if you want to ask about something specific, go ahead. Otherwise, I'm just grateful you liked the story.
6102490 Huh? Where's the Star Trek relevance to this story?
6103488
You wrote a story with a word-length of 1,701 words. Surely, it is deliberate.
6103877 Heh, I didn't even notice that! But no, not deliberate. It was actually 1,698 words before a couple of last-minute changes I made just before submitting.
Uhhh... yep. I'm definitely missing something.
Anyway, two quick notes:
Not possessive. Drop the apostrophe.
Semicolon abuse! This should be a dash.
6110658 Sweetie (not necessarily Belle, but...) has got herself trapped in the mirror world. Silver Buck is trying to rescue her. The stuff about mirror enchantment explains why he can't just get a powerful unicorn to magic her out. That's it, really. Nobody would call this a great work, but it was interesting to write.
Thanks for the notes! Those things are always welcome. I'm going to argue with one of them, though!
Why? I wouldn't write "...and the year bad luck it brings" if the period were one year. I'd write "...and the year's bad luck it brings". I'd certainly say that. (Okay, I could rephrase to "...and the seven years of bad luck it brings" and avoid the problem altogether. Maybe I'll do that.)
No argument here, though. After I've edited it, I'm going to slink away and write that out 100 times.
6110826 Annoyingly, I even looked that up as it looked odd at a glance.
Having done a much more exhaustive search, it turns out that it does count as possessive.
Objection sustained!
I love this story! It's short, but it definitely hits a point. I'm a sucker for philosophical stuff, so I was already going to favorite it. I didn't expect that ending, though. So awesome...
6111301 Thank you for reading! Glad you enjoyed it.
Wow, this was really good! but it was sad at the same time.
It leaves me a feeling of wanting to know more.
6124273 Thank you for reading it! That's the feeling I was hoping you'd be left with -- I deliberately didn't explain everything in terms of background etc.
At first it just seemed like the simple ramblings of a pony. But upon reading the ending, everything made sense.
Bravo, good sir.
6135033 Thanks! Glad it all came together for you. :)
Okay, I am really impressed by this! I thought that, whether intentional or otherwise, there were any number of little aspects of this that could be a lot deeper than they first appear. (For example, Silver Buck constantly trying to destroy the mirror and therefore his reflection, as if he doesn't like what he sees and what his life has become - and has to do that to save Sweetie. Or maybe I'm just a nutbar.) I do hope that the Sweetie in question isn't Sweetie Belle, but I do like the way that it doesn't make that clear one way or the other. After all, we know she has magic, which (assuming this was set in the future or near future) could land her in some serious trouble if she'd been testing it out on a mirror.
I did think at first, while reading this, (always to be recommended when writing a little review or comment
) that it was actually Silver Buck who was trapped on the wrong side of the mirror. Hence his comments about feeling trapped and alone. But then there is that twist at the end, when in fact it suggests it isn't him, but Sweetie, who is trapped and he feels equally alone and trapped because he can't get her back and presumably doesn't even know if she's still alive on the other side, or where she could be by now.
I'm guessing that the pony he mentions, who became a princess, is Twilight, but I'm not quite sure who the other one is - the pony that could have become a princess "had she followed a truer path" - unless that was maybe Chrysalis? (Or Big Mac.
)
All in all, really impressive work!
6232765 You're right, the identity of "Sweetie" is left deliberately vague. It could be Sweetie Belle -- after all, she could have learned about "the tyranny of appearance" from Rarity -- but then again it could be another pony entirely. I wrote this in an almost fairytale way at times, and in fairy tales timelines can be bent and curved in ways that don't quite match a real-world calendar. Which leads me to:
Silver Buck is referring to Sunset Shimmer. The comment about how her and Twilight's lives "crossed because of mirrors" is the clue there.
Finally, thank you very much!
6233196 Ahh, yes of course. I should have thought of Sunset Shimmer, but I had only been thinking of characters that had been in the main show episodes. So I'd completely forgotten about her. That makes good sense though.
I hadn't twigged it was Sunset Shimmer, but I too was beginning to think he was stuck on the other side!
I've never watched the film so I guess that didn't help!
6300058
That bit was deliberate misdirection on my part, so I'm glad it worked! Sunset Shimmer... her character evolves over the two films, so it's tricky to give a one-sentence explanation -- but the "had she followed a truer path" bit refers to the fact that long ago she was Celestia's pupil herself, but she went to the dark side rather than doing a Twilight. And mirrors are important in both films.
Thank you very much for reading!
The ending baffled me a bit, but I sense there's no deeper meaning than a reason why he is where he is, yes?
6857430 Pretty much. This isn't my usual type of fic, but I thought it would be interesting to experiment a little. Who the narrator's "Sweetie" might be -- beyond a unicorn -- is deliberately left up to the reader. However, there was a faint echo of Lilith from Terry Pratchett's Witches Abroad in my mind as being involved somewhere in this particular world. Thanks for reading!
Yes, perhaps he will one day find a mirror that breaks under his hooves.
And perhaps someday he will buck, and meet no resistance. Perhaps there will be a ripple, and a stumble.
Perhaps he will find her.
6893096 Perhaps. Or perhaps he will end up in a high school full of weird bipeds.
I´m back again^^ This reading was much better, may I ask you where are you from? (Because of your accent ;) )
The story itself was interesting and had something depressing, until he at the end revealed why he had chosen this monotonous life.
I had not expected that^^
7006949 Thanks! I did this reading much more recently than the Kicking Back one, so I've learnt a little more about how to speak in them.
I'm from England. To be more precise, about 20 miles away from Birmingham.
7007265 Hm, England, okay. It´s a nice accent to listen to
What would you say, did he choose this entire job and his apprenticeship because of Sweeties accident, or had he already been working in that business when it had happened?
7007458 His backstory explains why he can do this. What happened to Sweetie explains why he does it now.