It Is Recommendsday, My Dudes #141 · 7:59pm Nov 29th, 2023
I've mentioned before that sometimes the criteria connecting two stories are weird. Usually it's straight forward like 'stars the same character' or 'shares genres'. Other times you get real oddballs like 'griffon-centric stories that are used as a lens to look at real world cultures' or 'has cover art of two women swing dancing'. Well, now we can add a new one to the weird list: 'Twilight/Luna romances where the primary plot point is the destruction of a priceless artifact.'
We lead with Heavy Metal by SPark.
Twilight Sparkle awakens in Luna's bed after spending the night with her brand new marefriend. Caught up in the heady daze of love, afterglow, and having just woken up, she takes in the room and the fullness of her joy. And then she slips, falling on and crushing Luna's regalia.
She, of course, panics because she just got a marefriend and she can't start their relationship by destroying Luna's priceless artifact jewelry. There's only one solution: hide the evidence, fix everything, and pretend it never happened.
So to start, aside from the 'Twilight and Luna absolutely had sex last night' part, this could very easily be a show plot. Twilight accidentally breaking Luna's regalia and going Twilinanas to try and hide the oops would slot easily into any of the early seasons. (And since she mentions Owlowiscious, it probably does take place then! I don't think it actually ever identifies if this is unicorn or alicorn Twilight.)
I also appreciate the care Twilight puts into things as she goes nuts - remembering the need to anneal the metal so it wouldn't weaken; taking the time to get the enamel right; properly treating different types of metal differently. It suits her thought processes well and it adds some nice depth to the story.
Plus there's just a ton of adorable cuteness here, particularly when Luna finally gets directly involved and (of course) discovers what's going on. This is some 10/10 Tuna shipping and wonderfully in character for them both.
Now in the other direction, we'll make things a bit more complicated by entering a third pony to the mix as we hop to latte89's work, Breakage.
When Luna happens upon a school tour of the Castle (who have quite a lot of questions, including about when she's going to marry Twilight), she meets Smasher. The young colt has a bad habit of breaking things by accident - and he's sitting in the midst of a number of ancient relics. Of course, it's not the artifacts that Luna's concerned with. She cares more about the foal and his thoughts.
This one's a little more roundabout on the romance side of things: while it's very much about the Luna/Twilight relationship, Twilight herself doesn't appear until the very end and the story doesn't make the situation immediately obvious. (That's a good thing! Build up is good!)
It also does a good job of showing Luna off in a more… I want to say motherly aspect but that isn't quite right. Luna often gets stereotyped as the Princess of War. The dour one, with fell countenance and fury, while Celestia gets to serve the aspect of the counselor and kind parent. It's good to see Luna getting into that, particularly because 'cares for foals' really does mesh well with her proper canon role.
Smasher's a fun little guy, too. I'm pretty sure we all knew his sort when we were young, and he's portrayed fairly realistically here: he acts like a child, not just a short adult. That's a tough one for a lot of authors but latte pulls it off.
And it all comes together in a good ending. Just where this story's headed isn't instantly obvious from the conversation between Luna and Smasher, but it makes sense in the longer (well, 3k worth of longer) context. It's a good, solid story that's well assembled like that, and I appreciate a coherent narrative.
New or catching up? Try Recommendsday: The Index for your story needs!
I'd like to know more about that 'proper canon role', to be honest. Have a somewhat hard time of figuring Luna properly, in part because of how she is muddled by fanon interpretations. Always feels like I'm missing something important
Great read suggestions.
5757154
Well, we know her role implicitly is a protective one - the guardian of dreams and such. And actually a surprising amount of her canon interactions are with foals - between her Nightmare Night appearance, connecting with Sweetie Belle, and her scenes in the one where the Princesses switch Marks, she spends a lot of her screen time with them and is usually pretty caring. As opposed to Celestia who basically has zero interaction with non-adults throughout the series, yet is more often portrayed by fanon in a motherly context. (There's a million stories about Celestia acting as Twilight's surrogate mother or as being Sunset Shimmer's literal mother, and yet very few stories with Luna in a similar situation.)
5757159
My impression was that it's a character that can easily be viewed as someone who is still growing up herself, and I feel it's not something that usually conveyed through fanworks. Her relatability in many ways stems from the fact that she has a potency to change, isn't it? Above all things, she was introduced as younger sister, as someone who is certainly closer to regular ponies than Celestia, and it seems to me that all her episodes in the show are directly tackling growth and self-actualization in some ways, but she is not someone who dishes out the lesson in most of them, she is the one who learns. Also her characterization changes through the run of the show, which reflects the theme of maturity too.