Ghost Mike's Ponyfic Review Monday Musings #79 · 5:00pm Sep 11th, 2023
It was bound to happen again before long. After a month and change of blogs where I always had something interesting to wax about in the opening blurb, once again I am stumped for topics. Well, unless I just repeat recent things (latest Disney100 was 101 Dalmatians, great as ever, didn’t expect it’s graphic look to feel boosted much by the big screen, but it was, and the small audience seemed to dig it really well), and even I don’t want to do that. Let alone what you guys would want.
And while it’s been long enough since I dove into my backlog of backup topics that they’d probably feel somewhat fresh again, none of them really feel like something I’m all that energised by. So! Instead I’ll wax on something I was briefly discussing with a friend recently: guilty pleasure movies. It came from the Tremors films, of which I’ve only seen the first, which is a really good film without any caveats, but it got the ball rolling.
This can apply to television shows, novels and even gaming too, of course; feel free to substitute any of those in to the below.
It’s not a term I especially like, as it implies there’s something wrong with enjoying something that’s rather mediocre or bad, which I am not saying at all. World’s a happier place when we enjoy what we consume, after all, which I’m sure stands in contrast to a reviewer. 
But it is nonetheless the accepted shorthand, so in it goes.
That said, I don’t tend to have many of them myself: I generally don’t get ironic pleasure from my media, and am not nearly social enough to have ever really gotten to partake in “so bad they’re good” flicks with others, the only way such things can work. And while certain elements or parts of a movie can make me like that aspect, or even admire it, it doesn’t often translate to enjoying the thing as a watching experience. MLP’s own 2017 movie, I admire parts of, and massively appreciate it for being my gateway to the show and the fandom, but these days I can’t say I actually enjoy it much to watch. Most of the stuff I could call guilty pleasure flicks are, if not things I watched as a wee ghost (Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokémon), at least often tied to properties I did.
Still, I didn’t say I had none, and if pressed to pick, I’d probably single out Waterworld. Which probably sounds like a weird choice, and already I can hear some of you thinking “the ‘Mad Max on the Ocean’ flop that was the most expensive film ever made before Titanic? Really?” And yes, setting aside the legion of bad press and false rumours (contrary to reputation, it almost broke even in initial release after home video, for one), really. I’m surprised too, given I don’t tend to be overenthusiastic for post-apocalyptic films or violent action movies. I certainly can’t deny the majority of its flaws: acting that ranges from sufficient to missing the mark, scars in the writing from the troubled production, a tonal imbalance between most characters and the world versus the campy villains, both of which work in isolation but produce plenty of moments of unintended silliness when they cross. The action setpieces that are the main draw are, owing to clumsy editing and direction, largely only moderately thrilling. And, being a shallow thrills sort of flick (in a world with no shallow depths 
), the few moments of foregrounded messaging (as opposed to those inferred from the characters/world but unstressed) feel muddled.
And yet, I like it. It helps that the opening third is actually, properly good, with the dreary reality of a world flooded with water done via subtle world-building that culminates in the film’s knockout action setpiece, all while building intrigue and having an elusive, appealing spirit. But even in the rather draggy middle, largely cycling between the main characters bickering and the villains’ pursuit, it’s appealing enough as a travelogue that mostly makes the reality of a world like this feel present (set aside that the polar ice caps melting would only raise sea levels by a few hundred metres, not 7km+, and it’s acceptable enough), and the scenes dwelling on that, like a visit to an underwater flooded city, approach beauty. And the extended cut does fix some of its more glaring problems, character arc lapses and plot holes, if making it unquestionably bloated, as will happen for a cut originally made for a TV marathon that puts back in enough removed parts to reach a mini-series runtime quota.
Also, I don’t know if I’ve ever brought it up before, but James Newton Howard is one of my favourite composers, someone who kind of has a reputation as a replacement that can produce quality work on a short schedule (which he did again later for King Kong), without lapsing into the clichés of Hans Zimmer and his offshoots, and his old-school adventuresome music for this is so solid. Later, he would produce similarly captivating adventure scores for three miscalculated Disney Animation films in Dinosaur, Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet (not to say I don’t like them, but it is true), and recently did it a fourth time for the botch that is Raya and the Last Dragon. And for a film like Waterworld that has a protagonist content to rarely speak, good music means a lot.
So something I’d definitely improve a lot, but it just captivates me. And in this day and age, I’m immensely charmed by it being 95% practical and you feeling it in every part of the film being tangibly present. No, it doesn’t look like $175m in 1994, off the trouble of shooting on the open water, but even at barely half that, it’s a visual and tangible stunner.
In any case, liking something one knows is hard to suggest to others makes for a good discussion point. What are some of your guilty pleasure movies? Or television, books or games, if you prefer that. While you mull on that, mull on this selection of Ponyfic too.
This Week’s Spectral Stories:
All in the Presentation by Pineta
Who We Are in the Dark by NaiadSagaIotaOar
Records of an Academy Disaster by Fahrenheit
Experience by Bad Horse
A True, True Friend? by Blazewing
Weekly Word Count: 32,018 Words
All in the Presentation by Pineta
Genre: Comedy/Slice of Life
Carrot Top, Berry Punch, Twilight, Pinkie
1,422 Words
May 2015Reread
With Princess Celestia’s first visit to Ponyville following her student settling down there, Twilight Sparkle is naturally in a frenzy making sure everything is in tip-top shape. Even so, she didn’t have to be so dismissive of the honest mistake Carrot Top and Berry Punch made in writing the welcome for the Princess too long for the banner, demanding without a beat that they start over. Regardless, they set to it. It’s not as though Ponyville’s about to get run over by multiplying, food-devouring little winged balls or anything silly, after all.
You want a short, simple, undemanding little comedy that delivers what it wants and gets out, this had you covered. Character isn’t much of a priority here – Berry Punch isn’t any of her fandom depictions on account of her and Carrot Top just being placeholder frustrated mares doing what they can, little more than the incidental ponies the scripts use background ponies for – and yet there are still plenty of zingers that feel right, from Pinkie popping by as she looks for her musician kit pieces to subdue the Parasprites to the supplies’ vendor assistant’ one repeated line. And Twilight, in her few appearances, nails the Season One personality – not being asocial or rude, just blunt and distracted, and a bit oddly regarded by the townsponies as a result.
Plus, like all good comedies of characters determined to finish their job even in the face of disaster, it ends on a punchline that just makes you feel laughter and sympathy all at once. Really isn’t anything else to this, it’s an amusing little distraction, but it honestly works very well in its offbeat manner. Fitting for the offbeat use of onscreen English before the show codified no written language/illegible Equestrian for onscreen writing. This is a strong Decent.
Also, did you know M.A. Larson inserted the spelling-cut-short banner not just as a small in-character joke but as a nod to a banner with “heroine kills” from the classic Irish film The Commitments? You learn something new every day, folks.
Rating: Decent
Who We Are in the Dark by NaiadSagaIotaOar
Genre: Romance/Tragedy (w/SeX)
Adagio Dazzle, Rarity (EqG), Sunset
11,505 Words
February 2018
The last three months have been good to Adagio. She’s getting better at reading people without her emotion gem, and more importantly, she has a wonderful girlfriend in Rarity. They’re about to make themselves public on Rarity’s birthday, complete with the best kind of gift partners can give. The catch, is that Adagio, despite having relied on looking attractive and desirable for centuries, is a virgin. And, she’s determined to not let down what she’s sure is an immaculate image Rarity has of her talent in that area. So determined… that she agrees to something radical.
It is virtually impossible for me to separate this fic from the weight of expectations that came with reading it. Back in Monday Musings #67 in June, when I reviewed an identically-titled story by FoME, several users piped up that they were thrown for a loop when it wasn’t this story, which they consider immaculate. I checked it out, and saw it was an EqG story starring Adagio involving dating someone in the Mane 7 with sex as a topic of desire. All things very much not to my taste, but with it having not just a Royal Canterlot Library feature, but top reviews scores from the three other active Ponyfic reviews (PaulAsaran, PresentPerfect and LoganBerry), I couldn’t not read it. All of them acclaimed it for the intensity of its emotions, the strength of the concept of Adagio being basically blind to reading people’s faces, and how thoroughly its tragedy turned them around on Adagio as a character, if they hadn’t before liked her much. So, after some hemming and hawing, I read it.
Well, it certainly did do the part for Adagio herself. Unlike the majority of still-villain or bad girl depictions of the character, she is quite far from confident here, in ways that go beyond having something akin to blindness. Though it is mostly that: even though the reason of her having lost her amulet isn’t given until over halfway in, there isn’t a moment of the prose not dwelling on trying to read faces, parsing what the person actually thinks, losing herself in thought as she parses it out, and so on. This is true both of Rarity, whom she’s learned to read, and everybody else, who she can handle briefly in small groups but fumbles around more people or in intense, fast situations. The perspective writing is really, really strong here. so strong that I, the reader, couldn’t tell what the reality was of her being unable to read someone else on a key turning point until it was explained later. A lot of the story is like that, making her failures in both minor and major ways at reading others, and the knock-on effects, quite horrible to stomach. It’s a proper tragedy by the end of it all.
That strength would be enough to carry most stories, and it is not alone. This has smart pacing, is strongly evocative, is the rare story that is quite sexually charged while still being clean (yes, virgin and sex, I know, but trust me), and more.. And yet… I do still feel a little underwhelmed. It’s probably on the immense hype I went in with, but outside of Adagio herself and her specific condition, the rest felt merely strong, not exemplary. The author wrote it to explore someone coping with the loss of an extra sense once so strong for them, so I suppose my reaction is fitting. But being that the rest is still engaging in material I don’t care for, on top of having its ships be a thing just because and being almost fully human (only the sense Adagio lost and why really tie it down there), and doing it in a manner that is rather transparently just facilitating the main elements, I wasn’t blown away by the whole. Also, the ending, while appropriate and fitting, can’t help but feel wanting, especially as enough of the story has hopeful “it’ll work out” grace notes for it to feel quite right to end like that.
The hype is still true. This is a story even EqG-cold folks, and those who couldn’t give a monkey’s toss about Adagio, should read. It’s a real winner of style and prose, heartbreaking and ingenious. I don’t think it’s the absolute bee’s knees, but enough of it is that I understand enough why one would.
Rating: Really Good
Records of an Academy Disaster by Fahrenheit
Genre: Comedy/Slice of Life
Wonderbolts, Flatfoot, Soarin, Spitfire, Mane 6
9,277 Words (approximation, as the picture letters are transcribed in a bonus chapter but may lack margin busywork details at the margins)
May 2015
With the Wing Fling, the Wonderbolts’ answer to the Grand Galloping Gala (though they wish it were more) still five days away, and no new cadets to be trained, it only mildly panics Spitfire when she and Soarin are called to meet with Celestia and Luna. Forced to pick somepony to be in charge, both of the Wing Fling preparations and managing Reserve Wonderbolt training, she reluctantly chooses Fleetfoot to hold the fort for three days. Fleetfoot is ecstatic, if not quite for the noble reasons. She will soon find out that enthusiasm, and especially enthusiasm of a reckless variety, does not correlate with being prepared.
This is exactly the kind of escalating disaster of egos, heightened absurdity and more that you’d expect and desire from the tough, brittle Wonderbolts getting let loose. It is told mostly in written correspondence and reports among the Bolts and other Equestrian ponies/organisations, though about 40% of the story, mostly the bookending scenes, are in normal prose). These letters are custom pictures, with specific type/hoofwriting styles and all manner of extra joke baskets weaved from the presentation/details at the margins. Note that I say ‘extra’ – I found this fic unrelentingly funny, from Fleetfoot zoning out during Spitfire’s departing lecture and noting the broad strokes from her facial expressions (all while Soarin takes all the ‘food glutton’ accusation in stride), to Fleetfoot instantly monopolising her control to turn the stuffy pegasus-gala upside down, to Rainbow Dash getting more and more control of the Reserves, to the Mane 6 getting involved in different ways, to select other Wonderbolts either trying to manage things or going a bit bonkers themselves (this was when only Spitfire, Soarin and Fleetfoot had gotten speaking roles, so seeing Misty Fly be nearly as unhinged this early is interesting parallel evolution to her snarky personality in her few later speaking appearances)… it just keeps escalating and escalating, to delightfully delirious effect. Yet even Twilight’s final takeaway on the matter, feeling like something out of a parody fic, manages to fly.
What keeps this not grounded, but believable, is how show-derived much of it is (all the Mane 6 come off of a prior instance in a specific episode, often with other callbacks to such minor details as Applejack’s sleep-deprived baking with Pinkie in “Applebuck Season”). It could be indulgent, but the results are so giddy I’m disinclined to care. Even the jokes about an Equestrian Secret Service, normally not to my tastes in the slightest, manage to work.
Perhaps due to how well wielded the gimmick is, the fic flies by, only really sagging for the overlong denouement that is also somewhat sincere in a way the story otherwise isn’t. But otherwise, this is an unrelenting laugh riot you’d be wise to not pass on. Even if the Wonderbolts, and thus fics about them, aren’t always your thing – this wields the tonal discordance of their setup with great abandon.
Rating: Really Good
Experience by Bad Horse
Genre: Slice of Life
Celestia, Twilight
1,259 Words
April 2014Reread
Being thousands of years old, Celestia has experienced pretty much everything the world has to offer her. But there is one ordinary thing, so common to the normal pony it’d never occur to them, that she’s never experienced. Thus, today, she’s deigned to ask Twilight about it, and has taken her somewhere very special to do so.
Pulling off a story where so little happens, and the one thing that does happen is very simple and basically the raw concept, even at a slip of a length that doesn’t even hit 1.3K, can’t be easy, so I’m grateful that this does. This is very much a light atmosphere piece, the first half being loosely from Celestia’s perspective as she observes a sunrise where she and Twilight dwell on a hill, the second half being dialogue-centric as Twilight gets the wrong impression and Celestia builds up to her question. The tonal pivot between these two is seamless, and most of the technique used in the visuals of the first half work really well too, from a brief poem of a song to a few unobtrusive used of 2nd person – even the purple prose that intrudes on things a little only registers marginally.
It is, basically, a nice, sweet, pleasing little nugget of a story, the kind that even with as well done as it is – among other things, it ends pretty much perfectly – isn’t overtly memorable. But as something really warm that’s a pretty stellar showcase of how to show and not tell without it feeling overdone, it’s kind of great.
Rating: Pretty Good
A True, True Friend? by Blazewing
Genre: Sad/Slice of Life
Spike, Mane 6, Luna
8,555 Words
April 2014Reread
It’s not the first time he’s been left behind by Twilight and the others while they go off together to do something, yet something about this particular instance has left him very glum, and reflecting on how often this seems to have happened, especially lately. Yet he’s the good faithful student, and so he holds his tongue, until a particularly troubling dream, and the resulting visitor, prompts him to voice his worry. Is he… even their friend?
I was curious, upon returning to this fic, what earned it a spot on my Favourites list, over the other Spike Mistreated Antidote fics, as I think of them. After reading it afresh, I can only conclude it was for being one of the first I read. This isn’t a bad fic, or even a weak one. It is functional and earnest, clearly borne of passion beyond the long description confirming it was a mouthpiece for their feelings on Spike being neglected. But it is also rather standard, with very little to set it apart from any other fic on the topic. Which isn’t that big an issue, it might only mean such fics are victims of their own success. Except even in this, that is undisciplined, indulgent and over-laboured, both in the prose, and how much is said by the characters and told directly to us. Which does make it rather drag, especially in the second half when Spike first speaks up.
It having a Spring 2014 publication date is key, as Season Four was, after all, where Spike was most often getting left behind or a peripheral player with a few lines in any given ensemble episode. This ends up meaning not just general feelings of sadness at past incidents, but the specific episodes, where said incidents are recounted with nearly the same words every time Spike’s feeling left out one too many times comes up (at least three times, by my count). Similar uses of over-detail and hammering the point in dot the whole fic (often in paragraphs that could do with being split up), and on top of making it drag, it makes the resolution rather too convenient and sunny for the fic’s overall tone, in a manner that struck me as rather inauthentic, no matter the fic has Spike ask for reassurances that this won’t happen again.
Really, the only part of this fic that stands out is Spike meeting and talking with Luna in his dreams about it, and even that isn’t excellent by any stretch, basically using the same template in the rhythm of the dialogue as “Sleepless in Ponyville” – and only two weeks after “For Whom the Sweetie Belle Toils” aired! Spike pretends nothing’s wrong, Luna catches him out in her eloquent way, he comes clean, she says she understands with a comparison to Celestia, and urges him to speak out, and that bottling it up won’t help, and things will work out. Nothing else. And unlike the rest of the fic, it is gotten through with a near-minimum length of space, making it feel rather lopsided and downplayed. But off not being a stock element for these kinds of fics and featuring the rarely-explored dynamic between Spike and Luna, and done well (there’s an openness between them that is distinctly different from how Spike and Celestia usually interact).
This probably sounds like a very negative review, but I will reiterate: the fic is functional and earnest, and it is not altogether without grace notes and personality, even with the Mane 5’s chorusing of Twilight’s apology towards the end. But a lack of discipline, fear of not spelling everything out, passion leading to indulgence that weakens it as a reading experience, and very little noteworthy within the bowels of Spike Mistreated Antidote fics, renders this one I can’t actively recommend.
Rating: Passable
Spooky Summary of Scores:
Excellent: 0
Really Good: 2
Pretty Good: 1
Decent: 1
Passable: 1
Weak: 0
Bad: 0
Tremors is one of the greatest films ever made, and I will die on that hill!
I kid, but only slightly. It's one of my most beloved films. As is 101 Dalmatians, which I love the rough inked look of, and wish someone would recreate.
Other guilty pleasure movies I enjoy include Tremors 2, Gremlins, and Battle LA.
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It really is so unique, merging the UPA graphic looks with the Disney house style and making it work. Though, alas, Walt Disney was so dissatisfied with the look that he said they were never going to do that again, and that Art Director Ken Anderson would never hold that position on a film (though on his final visit to the studio, he indicated he'd come around and saw the value in it after all, the last time Ken saw him before his death), which might have had something to do with the following xerography films reverting to traditional backgrounds.
Honesty does compel me to note its direct-to-DVD sequel from 2003, while very clearly digitally coloured and naturally over-bright, does a pretty good job at recreating the film's style of backgrounds in a digital pipeline. And by the standards of those knock-offs, it's not as bad as many of its brethren either.
I haven't seen Gremlins (yeah, I know
; young enough to not be a child of the 80's), but my understanding is that it's quality and competent enough to be a properly really good flick. Also, my understanding of Tremors 2 is that it is a direct-to-video movie that only became so after the script was written for theatres, and through some clever lower-scale effects, turned out good enough that the studio sat on the finished film for two years, considering releasing it to cinemas, before they relented after not getting the internal support. Between that and it's reputation, it certainly strikes me as well above a guilty pleasure flick, especially given many monster movies are just that. Just perhaps not of the "can recommend it to those who don't normally watch monster movies" caliber, but that's no sin.
The Deacon of the Deez is one of my all-time favorite movie villains. If you're interested in learning a little more about the making and lore of Waterworld, check out the YouTube channel The Atoll, which exists entirely around the subject. I especially recommend the video about the Deez itself.
I suppose if I had to pick out another guilty pleasure movie, it would probably be the 1995 Mortal Kombat. It hasn't aged well, but it came out at exactly the right time for me to appreciate it and I still say it captured the overarching tone and intent of the franchise in a way video game movies just couldn't do at the time, still wouldn't for decades, and mostly still don't (although some recent exceptions are providing hope).
Glad to see not only the other Who We Are in the Dark, but also Records of an Academy Disaster. They might be entirely different in every conceivable way, but they're both thoroughly excellent. When it comes to Fahrenheit's stories, might I recommend you read Daring Do(esn't Need a Special Somepony)? Line it up around Valentine's for thematic purposes and you won't regret it.
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Personally I think they missed the boat there. I wouldn't want every animated movie to have that look, but a few films just gravitate to it and make it look wonderful. Maybe with films being allowed to experiment a bit more these days we'll see someone resurrect the look.
And I highly recommend Tremors 2. The quality goes sharply downhill after that however. Off a cliff. They can still be enjoyed but ... They're not good, while the first two are very well regarded.
Gremlins 2 I also recommend after Gremlins, but as weird as Gremlins is (they couldn't decide if they wanted it to be a black comedy, a cute boy-and-his-pet story, or what, and the resulting mishmash is kind of incredible) the sequel goes in a very wild direction that's effectively the result of the director NOT wanting to make a sequel, the executives demanding it, but then handing him millions of dollars with no executive oversight. The result is ... Well if you don't know what happened behind the scenes, bafflingly strange, but if you do know, weirdly hilarious (Want to see John Wayne kill gremlins in a shootout? If you get the VHS tape, you can!).
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I can't disagree with this, as after 101 Dalmatians, the following decades and change of xerography flicks have largely just given in to the limitations of the technology without finding much ways to turn it into a strength. Excepting the Winnie the Pooh shorts and the later 1977 compilation film, which feels narratively and tonally suited to it, it's not until The Rescuers that we start to see it advanced enough to do interesting stylistic things again. And largely only in small, marginal ways.
I do have a weird tendency sometimes to pick up and remember behind-the-scenes info for movies I've never seen; in the case of Gremlins 2, it's largely from me wanting to know everything about Looney Tunes: Back in Action, Joe Dante's other "given a lot of money for a vanity project" flick (as I am animation historian and huge fan of Looney Tunes), and the one that basically put him in director jail where Gremlins 2 weirdly didn't. Which thus let me to at least know about the financial/executive/creative three-way free-for-all that happened for that flick.
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I'm still undecided as to whether the portrayal of the Smokers is a strength or a liability for the film, but I cannot imagine anyone but Dennis Hopper playing the Deacon. That clip (incidentally, the cutoff for the "best" opening third and one of the less well-known additions to the extended cut that I find fully positive) shows why fantastically.
It's also a bland role, but I like his lieutenant the Nord if for no other reason he's played by an Irish actor that isn't one of the half-dozen each generation that become big in Hollywood.
I've actually watched a lot of videos from that channel, including the one on the Deez just last week!
The film is so undiscussed on the internet that much of the info available on that channel just isn't available anywhere else, and while I wish they were faster-paced, the mix for each topic of in-universe lore, production details and the shooting logistics is really something. Especially for a film whose bad financial reputation meant hardly any media was made for it after 1995, thereby theoretically limiting how much info could be out there.
And yet, there's a lot there. It's great!
I've hardly ever played that series, and haven't seen that film, but I've gathered this to be the case. A friend once said it was because the filmmakers recognised the source material's scenario was basically a gloss on Enter the Dragon and thus flipped the film around to gloss on what the series glossed on; I don't know if this is true, but it seems reasonable.
I'd seen it and even your review of it, but passed on it as it didn't seem all that fantastic and I don't care much for Daring Do, but I may have to reconsider off this extra endorsement, my friend.
Waterworld may not be a great movie, but it's better than its reputation. It got saddled with a ridiculous budget and expectations, and when it didn't remotely live up to either, its fate in the popular imagination was sealed. Personally, my favorite Cosner "guilty pleasure," using your "I don't actually feel guilty, but I get I'm liking a thing that's objectively flawed and that this is the accepted shorthand" definition, is The Postman, which is so ridiculously hammy that only a heartless monster could fail to be a little charmed by its sheer dedication to tugging on your heartstrings in the most unsubtle way possible.
On the other hand, if you actually liked Draft Day you absolutely should feel guilty about that.
And I've read all of these but In the Dark! Pretty much agree with you on all, though as for Friend?, I'll note that in addition to you reading it early, it might have seemed a little shinier at the time because so much Spike apologia is so bad, that a merely functional fic seems better by comparison than it might in isolation.
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Basically, yeah. I can't bat for it as some sort of under discovered classic (though I hear the study show at Universal Parks that still runs to this day the world over is phenomenal), but it can be a pretty darn cool thing, if one gels with it.
It might have had a better chance down the line if its extended cut wasn't so hard to find – before 2019, recordings of late 90's/early 2000's broadcasts that were censored for a PG rating was the only way to see it, and even from 2019 onward, it's only some select Blu-Rays, with (to my knowledge) no digital availability for it.
For what it's worth, old movies get brought up less and less these days to the point that it's more likely that when Waterworld does get mentioned, it's by a fan/someone who appreciates it, relative to even a decade ago. As I only first saw the film a few years ago, this feels natural enough to me, even though I know for most of its life, it was a damp squib reputation-wise and those who grew up on it have only really become prolific chorusers in the last half-decade or so.
I've seen very few flicks with Costner in a big role (Dances With Wolves is the only other one that I can instantly recall), and that doesn't include The Postman, so I can't comment on that, but I do know of its narrative and thematic similarities to Waterworld, as far as the role of the protagonist goes.
That's very true, and the only reason such a thing didn't get much of a mention here is because I tend to be very good at spotting obviously bad fics, and thus not reading them. More so now, but even back in my early 2018 fic reading days, I'd had enough browsing experience in fandoms past to correlate a reasonable estimate of the the baseline writing quality from the packaging.
I like Naiad's writing, but that's one of the few of hers I haven't read. Fahrenheit's story was good and fun.
Also, there's a game I played one year at Bronycon, where the winner is the first to pick a movie they genuinely liked (you're on the honor system there) that rates below 50% on Rotten Tomatoes. There are a number of "bad" movies I liked, but many still edged above that threshold. Took me a while to find one that didn't.
Of course, you can't play the game much,, since once you find a qualifying movie, you could just use it again. Honor system not to, I guess.
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Not to mention our very own 2017 Pony movie qualifies for that (currently at 48%, and to my knowledge after the initial wave of reviews that had it at 60-70% dipped it below 50 it never recovered above that), so anyone at a Brony con who likes the movie (which will be a hefty chunk, naturally) can just default to that.
There’s actually quite a difference, I find, between a film dipping below 50% (where it can often still be mediocre, just a more commonly-agreed kind), and those below 40%, which tend to be properly bad. That would increase the difficulty!
Honestly, that game would be harder if you restrict it to more recent movies as it’s actually less common for films to get scores that low nowadays, between relaxing critical standards (to a degree) and flicks sometimes getting a pass just for modern messaging, among other things. But that’s for some other time (read: probably never, I like keeping such topics out of this friendly space
).
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Now that you bring it up, you did have to choose a movie that came out after 2000.
It’s hugely surreal to me to imagine someone would go into a story of mine with a substantial amount of hype. Thanks for reading, I’m glad you gave it a shot!
It’s been basically a billion years since I wrote that story and since I read it, so I don’t have anything particularly interesting to say, but to me it’s definitely stuck in my head as a story with a fun premise more so than one where I really knocked it out of the park, so I wouldn’t be massively surprised if it doesn’t hold up quite as well as some very flattering people would have you think.
But I’m always delighted to hear that this story works for someone who doesn’t care about Adagio. While I got into writing and reading fanfiction precisely because I cared a lot about the characters, I think if the reader needs to bring their own investment, that’s a sign of a weak story. I try to assume that readers might know more information going in than they would for original fiction, but that you ultimately still need to convince them to give a damn. If it persuaded someone to care about Adagio, that’s exactly the kind of success I was hoping for.
All of which is to say I’m not that annoyed that a reviewer finally didn’t give it their highest score :P
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Yes, I'll second that recommendation! Tremors 2 is that rare sequel that doesn't suffer from the "sophomore slump."
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And The Postman was such a good book!
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But never fear, because what came after Tremors 2 more than made up for it.
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Nowhere as bad as Howling 2, though! Biggest quality drop ever!
Thanks for the review. All in the Presentation was a light bit of fun I did for a writeoff. I was being just a little mischievous as I found the prompt "All In" too serious, so I was using it in a way that was rather different than intended.