It Is Recommendsday, My Dudes #131 · 8:10pm Sep 20th, 2023
Well, last week I said I wanted to be a bit more upbeat. I can hardly prove myself a liar, now can I? So let's go into the bag, so to speak, and pull out some fun ones. And because any theme's as good as any other, let's put that focus on Midnight Sparkle. And sleep walking. Think of it as my apology for bombing out of the SciSet contest that just ended.
To start, I'm going to immediately jump to Merge Request by the ever-excellent FanOfMostEverything.
Midnight Sparkle isn't quite gone. But there's a bit of an issue: she and Twilight share the same body. When Twilight's awake, Midnight's suppressed. When Twilight's asleep, Midnight can control their body. So how do they communicate and try to resolve their problems?
By leaving each other snarky comment lines in Twilight's code on GitHub BitHub, of course. That's a totally rational way to talk to the demon that controls you while you sleep, isn't it?
So yeah. The comedy inherent in the concept should be pretty obvious. It'd be a tough thing to pull off normally - I mean, it's almost literally just talking heads having a conversation with nothing other than the raw dialogue - but this if FoME we're talking about. He knows what he's doing, and it works. It's snappy, stays just about the right amount of time, and the lack of non-dialogue never feels like it's missing.
Content-wise, you'll notice the Romance tag. No, it isn't a TwiMidnight ship. But Midnight spending her days down in the brain with Twi's subconscious means she knows some things and gets to play a bit of matchmaker along the path. It's a nice parallel with the 'Midnight learns friends are a thing' side, and keeps it from being too one note. The raw storyline isn't particularly comedic, but the presentation picks up the slack nicely there.
Plus there's some damn prizes of lines that just hit perfectly. Sunset saying 'I'm your gift horse, Twi. No dental exams, please.' is comedy gold. It's a delight to read.
So from that we're gonna go to one of the site's rising stars: evelili is an old account that only relatively recently got into major writing and has really blown up with things like The Twilight Effect and Heartstrings. (And totally check out their art and animations!) But today I'm going with their most recent, Something About Midnights.
Sunset Shimmer and Twilight Sparkle are roommates. Sunset only moved in a little while ago, but Twilight's already demonstrated that she's weird: she never sleeps, Sunset never sees her leave her room, and the one time she did when moving in? Twilight had this absolutely haunted look upon seeing Sunset. And things take a weirder turn when Sunset gets up in the middle of the night to find Twilight out of her room. Sitting in the middle of the living room floor. Disassembling an alarm clock.
Now this is another story I can't fully go into because there's an end-of-story twist that just makes this story sing. But I'll do my best to stumble around it because goddamn do I not want to ruin things.
It's a damn good mystery which is why I don't want to spoil. All the information you need is laid out right from the start to solve it but some of it doesn't make sense or seems important until the final reveal. Which, in my opinion, is absolutely the way a mystery should work. (My wife's a mystery fan and I'm driven up the wall every time a story relies on a critical piece of information that they conceal from the reader.) I'll leave it at saying that my initial gut when I started reading was that there was a missing tag. There is not and that will make sense as you read.
I gotta mention the character work as well. Evelili does a great job in making all the characters feel real ("Twilight Sparkle came pre-packaged with bedhead and blurry vision and boxer shorts" is so wonderfully charged) and a similarly wonderful job in making both Twilight and Midnight distinct people. Sunset's frantic search questions near the end are another great highlight of just a handful of words giving a lot of strength to the character's personality and mindset.
Plus the ending. A month and a half ago I called out Feathers as having an incredibly powerful last line, and this story rocks much the same. Absolutely love it when the last sentence or so of a story just throws the whole thing for a loop. Gives it a strong start and a strong finish.
New or catching up? Try Recommendsday: The Index for your story needs!
They're both dang good stories, with an oddly similar yet quite distinct take on Twilight/Midnight duality.
Ooh, fine company with whom to share a Recommendsday. Very glad you enjoyed Merge Request, and I echo the plug for Something About Midnights. There's a lot of fun to be had with the Sparkle system.
whoa, thanks so much for the recommendation! im honoured to appear in the same post as FOME; their interpretation of midnight in merge request actually is what inspired something about midnights haha. im glad u enjoyed the story, and thanks for checking it out!
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Wow! This is an interesting example of how fanfic works, or CAN work, with inspiration getting shared and passed on and sloshing around and building like this.