Ghost Mike's Ponyfic Review Monday Musings #80 · 5:00pm Sep 18th, 2023
I am often struck by random-yet-interesting thoughts as I go about my day. That’s not worthy of note. But just as I was pasting today’s reviews from my master review workfile into this week’s lot, I noticed the publication years of the fics, all different except for two, and spread over the site’s history. It got me to thinking: is that true of my reviews as a whole, or do I lean more towards certain years or eras of Fimfiction?
Thankfully, with the magic of date-specific searches in Fimfiction bookshelves, figuring this out was a cinch. Just used “published:<2012-1-1” and “published:>2010-12-31” for the first year, then worked my way forward. As well as manually making note of removed/delisted fics (I do so every time I notice the bookshelf and my Google Sheets archive have a number discrepancy). Would it be mostly even with only a slight leaning towards the most recent years off the Featured Box/site algorithms naturally favouring newer works? Would it reveal an undeniable bias in what kind of fics I read?
Well, let’s see. These were the results:
- 2011: 5
- 2012: 29
- 2013: 32
- 2014: 40
- 2015: 31
- 2016: 22
- 2017: 23
- 2018: 24
- 2019: 25
- 2020: 38
- 2021: 34
- 2022: 121 (96 reviewed in 2022)
- 2023: 10
Yowzers. If there’s one thing I didn’t expect, it was seeing that many fics from 2022. It’s easily explained, thankfully; me judging the Ancestral Tribute contest added 32 fics to that, of which I would have almost certainly read just a few otherwise. As did reviewing all 16 entries in the Who Crossed Over My Little Pony? contest, though I may have covered a decent few of those anyway. And during my first half-year or so, I was very prone to grabbing short new entries to fill up my weekly quota (veterans may recall my average word count then barely broke 20K, whereas nearly all weeks these days break 30K). As time went on, I weaned myself more towards fics I wanted to read, trying to make it less of a job and more just pure fun. 2022 fics still comprising 25 fics in my 2023 reviews (of 202 currently) does put it as one of my most frequent years still, but no longer an outlier.
Comparatively, 2023 certainly shows I’ve lapsed off picking new fics to fill up the schedule, with only ten to date. Which may not be a good thing – a reviewer should be staying somewhat current, you may argue – but I don’t feel it’s been much of a negative yet. Certainly, it’s at least somewhat because of site content, what with Mature fics of the lewd variety making up a larger percentage of fics over time.
But yes, besides the years during which I was actively reviewing (which naturally have somewhat skewed results), I think the results were fascinating, yet easily explained. 2011 has so few fics and many are ones that aren’t often suggested (though it is staggering how I hadn’t looked at one before my Fimfiction Launch Month Spotlight for Monday Musings #73). The 2012-2014 block (which had 20K+ fics a year) trends upwards, mostly reflecting on the recommendation algorithms. 2015 is about proportional to 2014 relative to the fics from that year. The 2016-19 timeframe, when growth was downward consistently, bucks this by reflecting the effects recommendations, other reviewers and the top spots on an author’s Stories page can have, been basically static. Finally, 2020 and 2021, despite continuing the decline, leap back to 2013-15 levels due to their recency.
Not iron-cast results (it doesn’t account for fics that are updated in more than one calendar year, though I have few of those), but pretty reliable, a mostly fair balance between a fic’s age and what years produced more. I suspect my results going forward will lean ever so slightly towards the older years relative to the 437 fics reviewed thus far, just off me excising my personal choices slightly more, but it will likely take a long time for that to be felt in these results.
Fellow Ponyfic reviewers, I’d certainly be curious to know what results you’d get from this. Go to your reviewed bookshelves, paste the above search string I used, and get cracking! 
After seeing my takes on today’s quintet (which were counted in the above calculations, of course 
).
Oh, and another batch of Gen 5 Make Your Mark episodes dropped today. Something I literally did not know until yesterday, mentally defaulting to it being the last Monday of September like last year, given how much studios follow patterns. Which is kind of appropriate, missing the date given how much the show is quieting down in promotion both from Hasbro and talk within the fandom as it limps to the end of its initial and only order in November. At least the extra week gives me time to get through them before UK PonyCon, though given there were no spoilers floating around for Chapter 2 last year, there’s basically no worry this time anyway.
It at least makes it fitting I have a Gen 5 fic this week for the first time in a while, though it being only the 6[supth I’ve reviewed this year is also rather telling of the show’s ability to produce attractive Ponyfic after the burst from the debut film. Even EqG, something I don’t personally care for much at all, has still gotten 15 fics reviewed this year (though, of course, several are fully in Equestria and only refer or allude to events or characters of the spin-off).
This Week’s Spectral Stories:
What is Missing, What is Lost by PaulAsaran
What is Destiny Against Desire? by SpectralFury
LOOK AT THAT GUY!!! by Inkblotter
For Every Answered Prayer by LunaUsesCaps
Mirrors in shadows by TonicPlotter
Weekly Word Count: 38,344 Words
What is Missing, What is Lost by PaulAsaran
Genre: Drama/Sad
Twilight, Celestia
10,727 Words
November 2015
Ever since she met her friends and saved Equestria for the first time, something about the Elements, and more specifically her Element, has felt off to Twilight. She was able to brush it off at first, but ever since she became a Princess, and especially after Tirek’s defeat, it has been a persistent feeling, such that she’s finally written to Celestia about it. When she gets a reply to meet her privately, Twilight departs for Canterlot alone. What the Princess reveals, however, will test Twilight’s faith and love in Celestia, both in accepting it and what she will do thereafter.
Whatever else you can say about this fic, it is an immeasurably well crafted, highly intense read, enough so that I had to pause and take rattled breaths more than once. And one that posits different takes on its tropes to mostly solid success. The primary outward one is the prompt it was written for, that of a “seventh element”. This ends up not being the major focus of the story, but neither is it paid lip service as a throwaway; it’s present as a suitable dilemma that starts and closes out the story and reinforces the aspects it applies to throughout the middle.
That, and Twilight’s own struggles with what she finds, is equally stellar. What got me most of all was the interplay between the two Princesses in particular is a real winner, making Celestia’s reactions and regret, and Twilight’s conflicting anger/frustration/upset, feel authentic in a story type where they rarely do. This is from an era in PaulAsaran’s writing where he was rather interested in playing around with conventional stories done a bit sideways and with technical finesse, and it shows, from the balance between dialogue, silence and thoughts as Celestia prods Twilight towards the first answer, to the use of scene transitions and not telling us everything to heighten the intensity, to the final open-ended conclusion being the right call.
The catch, as it were, is that to get to that point, this fic is still going through, or at last adjacent to, two rather irksome decisions common for this kind of story. The first being a Tyrant Celestia fic, and it does dance on the right side of that, largely by not overdoing how much we are shown. But what we’re shown, the deeds Twilight discovers, are heavily excessive, and considering how much the fic shies away from lingering on even the snippets we do get, even the fic itself seems to know this. Then of course there’s the historical revisionism, which I don’t think pays off and similarly is rather a lot of justification for something that otherwise doesn’t play out terribly differently and could have been accomplished with something closer to an internal conflict, one pivoting off the unease Twilight feels.
No mincing words, this is quite the phenomenal fic to experience it can provide if you let it, and if some of that is rather mixed and uneasy on my end, it’s not nearly enough for me to dissuade folks from looking into it. For a story borne in part out of an animation error, it’s got a lot of staying power.
Rating: Pretty Good
What is Destiny Against Desire? by SpectralFury
Genre: Drama
Twilight, Mane 6, Spike
4,502 Words
May 2020Reread
It’s the day after Twilight became an alicorn. The events of last night still have her head reeling, but now the excitement of the whole affair has diluted. Thus, after some discussion with Spike over breakfast on the kinds of duties a princess does, all it takes is a simple question to stop her cold: “Do you really want to be a princess, Twilight?” A question she can’t fathom an answer for, and thus after getting Spike’s opinion, she goes to the most reliable, trustworthy source she knows: her friends.
This is that rare breed, a fic that you could define as a fixfic (it’s not as hard-locked to that definition as some stories), yet one that is balanced and fair. It doesn’t demonise the canon events or throw around blame, or get all snarky and mock what happened either. It provides its alternative calmly and gets out without trying to sneakily justify itself. For that alone, it earned my respect several years back. It’s refreshing, and cathartic, but never vicious.
Which matters a lot, because the topic is a rather tried and tested one: that Twilight Sparkle not only isn’t an ideal choice for a princess, but would she even want to be one? Which actually makes it key that this came out in 2020, and not in the wave of such fics in 2013. Making it feels like an author and fic making measured choices rather than jumping on their gut reaction, or worse, the bandwagon.
It helps that the actual content is pretty solid too. The meat of the fic, being Twilight talking to all of her friends, has a pretty clear structure to it, and like many of the better fics, it uses this to its advantage both in the segregation and pacing, and also viewer expectations, switching between the Mane 5 having simple reactions typical of their personalities (Applejack), ones within that wheelhouse but expressed somewhat differently (Rarity), and others rather out of left field but which totally fit (Rainbow Dash). I’m not joking when I say Fluttershy’s response never left my head in the years since I first read this, and was the primary thing I remembered coming back to it.
There are hiccups along the way, with the occasional immersion-breaking moment (it is right for the end to not tell us the answer to an extra question, but Twilight wouldn’t do so in the moment), or character voice that’s off (Dash’s response is fitting, but her dialogue is too eloquent and long-winded). But all in all, this is a remarkably controlled, calm and sincere answer to one of the show’s most controversial changes, and an approach I’m fully on board with. Whatever your feelings on Twilight becoming an alicorn, this is a solid read that should surprise you.
Rating: Pretty Good
LOOK AT THAT GUY!!! by Inkblotter
Genre: Comedy/Random
Other (Rob), Sprout, Phyllis
8,393 Words
September 2022
An ordinary day for Rob the earth pony turns very un-ordinary when he finds himself in the midst of an impromptu musical number by the citizens of Maretime Bay. Which wouldn’t be the worst, except on top of his other woes (social anxiety, low-rung job at Canterlogic, not exactly a looker), he also has a deep-set phobia of rhymes. Something songs tend to traffic in. And guess what word in particular that has symmetrical cadence with his own name this mob likes to end its lines on?
Woe is me for waiting a year to read a fic that reclusive Estee took the trouble to signal-boost. I suppose I baulked at the excessive length for its random, almost crackfic-like concept, but this addresses that hurdle in the best way possible: taking Rob’s problem utterly serious except for the fact of it, labouring over with his life story in the early going before we get to him being done-in with the song. And then it gets even weirder in the aftermath of the content of how “Danger, Danger” played out onscreen. Really, this is more of a dark comedy than anything, and I mean that as a compliment: Rob’s growing terror as the advancing mob and what it’s saying towards the end is equal parts hilarious and horrifying.
Something about the approach it uses makes things I don’t care for – the meta gimmick nature of it, naturally, but also the lampshading of G5 writing failings and some social commentary – simply work, and unlike many such comedies, this is actually funny, and not just wryly amusing. And it’s really committed to the bit of its character and the gimmick, with new verses for the mob song being good enough that I didn’t just skim them as I often do for lyrics or poetry in fics. Now that’s a rarity.
For fleshing out a one-shot character, filling it with genuinely interesting and darkly comedic content, being a gimmick fic that doesn’t mug for interest and makes things I don’t care for work, and the rare G5 comedy that’s actually funny (much like the film, most of the Comedy-tagged fics are more modest and cute smile-inducers), this is a solid recommendation, and only the rather sideways nature of its ambition, and that it still might not be to everyone’s tastes (though I encourage reading it even if you’re sceptical) keep this back from a higher rating.
Rating: Pretty Good
For Every Answered Prayer by LunaUsesCaps
Genre: Sad/Slice of Life
Characters
12,614 Words
Jul 2013Reread
Another stunt gone wrong has landed Rainbow Dash in the hospital yet again, all with an injury serious enough to require surgery. The boring wait is broken only by the little colt she shares a room with, a cocky sort that she soon bonds with, and not just over Daring Do either. And things start to seem better, especially with the great surgeon looking after them both. But then, she finds out something about the colt she’s not supposed to that changes everything…
So. Most of this fic is done really well. The material exploring Dash’s fear of hospitals that is the pretext and inciting incident is, though a little overcooked, a more than solid introduction. The kid Dash befriends is, once you get past a not-there modulation from making of her to liking her, pleasant enough. The chipper surgeon that puts Dash at ease is great, certainly one of the more present and personable plot role OCs I’ve seen in a while. On a broader scale, the whole fic uses extracts from Dash’s future letter to Twilight about her experience as scene transitions (and sometimes as breaks within scenes, like a narrated freeze-frame). There’s powerful imagery and deep realisation for Dash that feel organic. And for all the fic is looking to be a tearjerker, it’s respectful and doesn’t mug for it, knowing when to just present a fact and not linger.
Of course, there’s the unavoidable fact that the fic is resting on a very groan-worthy twist as regards the colt, and while I think it does a lot to earn the end result of it and ties it into Dash’s feelings about hospital that’s a natural evolution of her time there in “Read It and Weep”, it’s still that twist, and I can’t say I was emotionally stabbed on this read. There’s also some odd choices that break the immersion throughout; some real-world things in Equestria (video game, vending machines), an over-spiritual reflection towards the end with an enthusiastic but clumsy metaphor Rainbow Dash elaborates on, and one specific thing about the surgeon and Dash adds nothing to the fic except feeling like a checklist item.
On balance, far more works than doesn’t here, so I feel confident saying a reader is likely to dig it even if such sadfics are normally something to steer clear of (though this one manages to be bittersweet at the end, to its benefit). With the above elements smoothed out, it could have been something really special as a whole. As it is, it’s most of the way there, and worth the dive.
Rating: Pretty Good
Mirrors in shadows by TonicPlotter
Genre: Dark/Sad
Twilight, Changelings
2,108 Words
March 2013Reread
The aftermath of her brother’s wedding still has Twilight shaken something fierce, enough so for her to take a walk in the woods to try (and fail) to clear her thoughts. The reality of what those monsters that attacked them were like, and how close she and her friends came to losing everything… you don’t get past that so easily. Thus, her resolve is thrown into disarray when she finds one of the expelled changelings, fatally injured from a crash landing and about to succumb to its wounds.
It was very hard to shake off poor assumptions going into this cookie-cutter premise, and at first the fic looked to deliver on those assumptions. Twilight’s opening thoughts are sufficient but largely undermined by the need to transition between paragraphs with directly quoted thoughts that do nothing but spoil the immersion and mar the flow. And this continues when she first sees the changeling.
I was surprised, but things do improve after that, and the story doesn’t play the card of Twilight’s hatred of changelings getting fully invalidated either, taking great pains to highlight the otherworldly culture and lack of empathy from the changeling’s final words. Leaving her sympathy diminished but still standing against her anger. The final note of the fic in particular is reasonably strong, so the fic does at least improve consistently as it goes.
It still starts off shakily enough, and never shakes off the cobwebs of its premise nor the shakiness of its prose, for it to be something to recommend, but it’s worth it if you’re curious.
Rating: Passable
Spooky Summary of Scores:
Excellent: 0
Really Good: 0
Pretty Good: 4
Decent: 0
Passable: 1
Weak: 0
Bad: 0
Okay, I couldn’t resist, because I am a statistics nerd, so I grabbed the review-by-year stats from the major Ponyfic reviewers I knew and was bothered to source (read: the ones with a single “Reviewed” bookshelf
):
PRESENT PERFECT [6787 stories]
TCC56 [276 stories]
Titanium Dragon [1090 stories]
Just one observation each per reviewer:
TD started in 2014 and was most active from then until 2016, at which point he tapered off, stopping altogether in Spring 2020. As a retired Fic Reviewer, he’s not one I’ve ever mentioned much except in passing (and for the few fics of his I’ve reviewed). Suffice to say, he tended to have higher standards, or perhaps it is more accurate to say he erred on the side of not recommending things that were harmless, cute diversions, so only 400 of the 1K and change fics he reviewed got a Recommended or Highly Recommended. Though that doesn’t account for his Worth Reading ranking, which lacked a public bookshelf for me to check by.
Present Perfect primarily reading via audio readings these days is the secondary catalyst behind so comparatively few fics from the last two years (the other being reviewing less), as there are very few dedicated fic readers still active of a sufficient technical/reading quality.
And TCC56, on top of starting around the same time as me, just a few months prior, is working his way back through all of Fimfiction (at least, looking at each fic to decide if it's worth peeking inside, and then again to continue reading), and hasn't gotten to the heavy early years yet, so his output is concentrated on the years he has looked at (presumably back through to 2018, or maybe late 2017).
Took me a minute or two to figure out what I was doing wrong with the date filters, but:
Note that the numbers above do not include any stories that got a "None" rating. While I do have a list in GDocs, the whole point of the rating is that I didn't consider them worthy of saving to a bookshelf, so I'd have to get that count going through the stories one at a time. I'm also not including stories that are de-listed. According to my personal archive, that leaves 143 stories (~6% of the total) missing from the above count.
Your criticisms regarding What is Missing, What is Lost mirror some my own reservations I often feel towards it years later. If I had to pick any one thing I'd want to change, it would be the contents of the book, not just what happened but how it is recorded. I mean, it's meant to be a historical text but it doesn't read that way at all. Even so, most of the story I am very proud of, and I still consider it a highlight of my library. Glad to see you (generally) approve!
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).
Oh, your "None" rated fics aren't bookshelved at all? I'd just assumed it was Private. Either way, that was one reason I didn't grab your stats (the main one, of course, was I typed the blurb and bonus comment up at midnight, was far too knackered to check four different bookshelves for your stats, and knew you'd be curious enough to do the work for me.
Anyway, I don't know offhand at what point your reviews went down from 10 a week to 5 a week (and then to 10 every two weeks this year, which is functionally the same), but I'm betting it correlates closely with the drop-off of the 2012-17 corridor having more fics from you. Meaning maybe 2019...? Details, details.
A curious thing with a fic like this is after I've read it, then done up my review, I sometimes browse the comments/known reviews, get a bead for what its reception has been like. Ditto for the author's notes. Occasionally I incorporate parts from that into it, but either way, it illuminates what aspects some folks have taken objection over, and then I see where I fall on it. Because I always try and consider the whole, we get a reaction like like me "the rest is great, this aspect is iffy and I don't like it much, but it's still a Pretty Good overall".
But yes, I would say it's a fic to still be proud of. Good on you, bud!
Honestly, the weirdest thing for me about the fic is the misleading cover art. Not a whiff of Filly Twilight, much less being cuddled by Celestia as she snoozes. 0/10, I want my money back.
My numbers are a couple of weeks out of date as I tend only to update my records monthly or so, but that won't make a consequential difference, so:
The 2010 fic is Pinkie Pie and Applejack's Cooking Hour, which formed part of an edition where I reviewed a fic from every year of G4 to that point (2017). That story was published to Fimfiction in January 2012, so feel free to mentally add it to the 2012 column if you like -- but it first appeared on FanFiction.Net in December 2010 and I read the version from that site for my review. (They're identical but for one piece of punctuation anyway.)
As it seems for a number of us in the reviewing game, 2014 is the peak year. That's partly because 2014 was pretty much at the peak of the fandom as far as ponyfic is concerned, but in my case it's also somewhat down to personal preference. I happen to like alicorn Twilight and the Golden Oaks Library, and S4 which mostly aired in 2014 was the only time the two things combined in canon. 2014 was also the year of Rainbow Rocks, certainly my favourite of the Equestria Girls films. It was also the year I began Ponyfic Roundup.
My numbers for recent years fall off quite significantly as I'd expected, and in fact the difference would be starker still were it not for contest editions. For example, last year's inaugural Thousand Words Contest accounts for no fewer than 28 of the 69 fics I've reviewed that were published in 2022. My 2023 number will shortly see an even bigger boost as I cover a number of fics from both this year's Thousand Words Contest and the New Blood Contest. It's also worth noting that in the "Covid years" of 2020 and 2021, I generally reviewed at the slowest rate in my entire reviewing career, often covering only two or three fics each week instead of the five I do now.
Okay, 2014 is peak for me, Paul and Loganberry, and it's also your second-highest number :O That just blows my mind
…Evidently, the lesson from all this is, talking about reviewer stats isn't a niche in its appeal as I'd thought (having all but one of the still-active crowd being regulars here will do that, eh?
), and perhaps next time it should be its own blog, because leading with that meant the fics here barely registered. 
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Myself, I always knew 2014 would be the year to beat. It doesn't hurt that Loganberry and Titanium Dragon started that year, Paul started the year after when fics from that were still fresh, and while it wasn't your thickest year in terms of how many reviews you did (according to your archive spreadsheet, 2015 and '16 edged it out by 129 and 8 fics respectively), it was close enough to the top that it also being a peak year of site output would correlate to push it over the edge.
The main reason I knew, was that it being the last year of peak output (20.1K fics compared to the 21.6K/21.7K of 2012/13, and it was basically level until Autumn that year) meant that people had been more settled, and a lot of them had moved beyond the writing technique greens that, in retrospect, characterise a lot of 2011-13 works and can make them not as appealing to read these days. Ditto for a lot of early fandom tropes/pairings/story types that are the victim of their own success. As Logan also notes, that timeframe of the show is in a weird spot of feeling classical despite not being early, making the approach to building/deviating from the show then feel different to the Season Five-on era, yet not so foreign as some of the early works.
Myself, the difference is only a few fics, but I think my slight leaning for 2014 comes from the average higher writing quality, mostly. And, as Logan notes, Princess Twilight feels oddly approachable and still herself when paired with the Golden Oak Library (and this does apply in part to 2014 fics after "Twilight's Kingdom" too, given fic authors had no reason to deviate from the tone, or approach to her characterisation).
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See my response to PP above, but also:
41%, wowzers. Granted, hardly that in words (
), but still. Then again, half of the 2022 fics I reviewed in 2022, 48, came from contests.
Then again, if I end up covering contest finalists before the year is out, that'll be an even higher chunk of 2023 for me.
Considering 17 of your current 24 come from covering the Arboreal Yearnings Contest already, you may end the year with 2023 being "Contests, and a few stragglers".
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Very possible! Though one thing these stats have done is to make me feel I'd like to review a few more 2020-onwards stories. I hope the New Blood fics in particular might point me to a few newish authors whose archives I'd enjoy mining. Realistically that's an ambition for 2024, however.
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Useful statistics are always welcome!