Fic recs, December 29th: Project Get! #16 · 2:31pm Dec 29th, 2023
Yes hello welcome back to the show where we grab 10 stories off the bottom of my RIL after it's been sorted by viewcount! And you know what? I've been doing this for a bit now, and I've learned a few things.
First, no one reads stories as soon as they're published. I actually had to call a cutoff of two months rather than the usual one, or these would have all been from November. <_<
Second, the same authors tend to end up on this list over and over, which could mean that they're putting out a lot of things in periods when people aren't reading, but more likely means they're being slept on. So if you read one of these and enjoy it, be sure to check out the author's other fics, would ya?
And lastly, it turns out you can request a range of views when you search this site. >_< In over a decade of using Fimfiction, how did I not know that? It means I didn't actually need to make a second RIL list! Limiting it to under 500 views got me just over a thousand results! Time to merge them back together. x_x
Anyway, this is the final (normal) review blog for the year. I expect I'll have one last vs. post this weekend, and then it's on to 2024! :)
H: 3 R: 3 C: 4 V: 0 N: 0
Trixie and Fluttershy in Cavepony Times by SigmaSonicX
Genre: Comedy
When she, Fluttershy and Maud find themselves transported to a time before pony history, it's up to the Great and Powerful Trixie to save them all!
Well, this one's off to a good start! :) I've never seen Fluttershy paired with Trixie for anything before, but this piece proves she makes a great straightmare for Trixie's shenanigans. Granted, I think you do need a situation where there are a lot of animals around for her to work best, but this provides in spades, and the whole prehistory deal means they aren't even your run-of-the-mill woodland critters! The pacing is a tad quick, but that's okay, because this is really, really funny from start to finish, and the gags just never let up. :D
Recommended
To Stand and Watch the Lake by Krixwell
Genre: Character Piece/Light Horror
I stand and watch over the lake.
In this piece, we're given the life story of an OC, a pony who likes working with plants and was friends with Mrs. Cake and AJ's mom back before Big Mac was born. About halfway through, I got the sense of what was going on, and watching it play out, specifically as how the character relates to what's happening, I was very satisfied to have been right about it. Good OC work here, and a dark, sad story that foreshadows a more familiar one.
Recommended
Gullywasher by TCC56
Genre: Action
Can't let this rain stop me from getting home.
Looks like I get another slate of short fics for those blogs! And this is a good introduction, a brief but intense story about a pony trying to hurry home in the driving rain. Really good atmosphere to this, good description, and the key thing: figuring out who this is. Which I kind of didn't realize I should even be doing until late in the story, but that made the reveal even more satisfying. Good stuff!
Recommended
Three Poems for Discord by Slipshod Extension
Genre: Poetry
Okay, so I don't get to complain about metrics in this review because the description heads me off with good reasoning and I'm kind of mad about that. >:V But that's all right, because this is a lot of fun regardless. "A Nightmare Night Rhyme" is, if anything, a dark piece about how to summon the spirit of chaos through a series of misfortunes and evil acts, and that is just a superb tale, let me tell you what. "Some Old Folks Bicker About the Entertainment" meanwhile is superb in both form and function. The structure here is more closely adhered to — still not perfect, but a distinct step up — and it's not exactly a simple one, at that! Fast-paced and musical, it trips along to deliver a sinister conversation between… Well, I'm not sure honestly, though I suspect one is Discord himself. Go find out for yourself! "A Snake Shaped Like Interstices" is like a villain monologue, a "you'll never defeat me for I am so powerful" blah blah kind of thing, but like… Way more epic than you might expect. Also, it shifts structure, entirely, several times, which makes all the sense. Last, there is of course a fourth poem in this story called Three Poems, "I Am the Very Model of a Solar Princess Alicorn", and you can probably guess what that one's about. :) It's quite fun. So, in all? A very good poetry mini-anthology.
Highly Recommended
Broken Bon-Bonds by Vis-a-Viscera
Genre: Horror
Lyra, it's time you fulfilled your promise.
Damn, this is… This is really, really good. The writing is the sort where I couldn't tell you exactly what was going on, moment to moment, but by the end, I had everything wrapped up pretty neatly in my head. It's pretty cerebral, is my point, and possibly a bit higher reading level than a lot of fic authors are willing to produce. (Also, it probably needs the self-harm tag, so be warned. Also also, there's a lot of blood.) But it's mysterious and gripping, and quite original in turning a beloved pairing on its head. I thought this was exquisite.
Highly Recommended
Uplift by TheLegendaryBillCipher
Genre: EQG Shipping
It's not like Pinkie to skip out on a party. What plans might she have?
Well, that was cute! A totally unique pairing in Pinkie and Wallflower Blush, plus a couple scenes of them doing a date, and a background thread of unspoken pain. Not bad at all!
Recommended for Shippers
Igneous Rock Slide by 2SuriYourself
Genre: Drama
One day on his farm, Igneous Rock Pie finds a hole.
It's funny: the description of this story says it's based off "Man in Cave", a Youtube video about the death of Floyd Collins (a man who got trapped in a cave and died). But between its posting and this review, that video was taken down for plagiarism, and I literally never would have known about it if not for that 4-hour Youtube video about plagiarism. <_< All of which is to say, I have to assume this is entirely original; to its credit, it doesn't even copy the full real-life story. Instead, we get a rather matter-of-fact tale about Pinkie Pie's dad falling down a hole in a cave and getting stuck, and the life-or-death efforts his wife undergoes to rescue him. Surprisingly, it's not exactly a pulse-pounding thriller, but that's not a bad thing; I guess this becomes more documentary by itself. I will make a note of the writing: it starts off with this kind of fairy tale storytelling quality which doesn't really fit, if you ask me, but that gradually improves. What doesn't improve is tense shifting, which I found annoying. But if nothing else, this is a really interesting tale that incorporates what life on a rock farm is actually like, day-to-day, as well as what Pinkie's parents were like well before she was born.
Recommended
Practice Makes Perfect by Crono411
Mature: Gore
Genre: Dark
How do you get to the operating room? Practice…
Given the tags, I really was not surprised when our unnamed protagonist went into his basement through a trapdoor. You know, all the sorts of things you expect from a story where a doctor vaguely says that 'practice' is how he's gotten so good at surgery. But "doctor is keeping a pony alive in his private dungeon for experimentation" actually isn't the horror punchline here, and that's quite good, since I saw it coming a mile away. I won't spoil it for you.
Recommended If You Like Dark Fics
Making Gifts by Tangerine Blast
Genre: Friendshipping
With Starlight and Sunburst off to see their parents, Trixie ropes Maud into finding the best Hearth's Warming gifts ever for them.
I want the concept of Friends Warming to enter into the fandom lexicon, right now. >_> Like if that is not the cutest shit you've ever seen, even sans context, just gtfo rn fr. This whole thing is cute as fuck, with some really good friendshipping between Trixie and Maud as Trixie runs off on a harebrained scheme and ultimately comes face-to-face with her own self-worth. Which I super-duper get, I was able to fob off Christmas gifts this year and it has been such a load off my mind, let me tell you what. This could have used a bit more editing, granted, but overall is a really strong slice of life piece, especially if you're more interested in the newer characters like Starlight than you are the Mane Six.
Recommended for Trixie and Maud Fans
"This Is Spur-Tack!" (300 + 1) by Mockingbirb
Genre: 300 Parody
Friendship can defeat anything.
Do you remember 300? I fucking loved it. It's such an over-the-top, definition-of-hypermasculine display of ridiculousness. It becomes a parody of itself by the end. I couldn't not love it. And here, Mockingbirb, through tortured pony puns, friendship and a devious use of AU, produces a somehow even more ridiculous parody of the parody. Frankly, this makes more sense than the movie or, likely, the original comic book. This was brilliant, and so, so funny. It's everything I want from a random comedic takeoff of a cultural touchstone. (It had to be a cultural touchstone, right? "This is Sparta!" was such a huge meme, after all.) From the moment you see that title, you know what you're getting into, and it only gets better from there.
Highly Recommended
Oh, this should be interesting. I've got some pretty good bits in there. Some are, uh, less so.
Yeah, there's actually tons of filtering options documented under "Help". Who'd've thunk it? It's worth browsing that to see what other things can be adapted for personal use. It was how I filtered fics by year in my "Reviewed" bookshelf, for a start, to see what years I was looking at most.
Another nice one I discovered was the Highly Rated options, which sets it to a Wilson score of >80, though the user can adjust this. Wilson scores being an amalgamation of likes, dislikes, views and other stats that calculate the odds of getting likes to dislikes. They're ordered identical to rating rank, though it's not an apples-to-apples of split. Right now, if your story's rating rank is about 44,000 or lower, it'll be within the Highly Rated default cutoff.
Only one of these I've read is Igneous Rock Slide, for judging the Ancestral Tribute contest. I rather liked it, all the way to a Pretty God, though according to my review at the time I didn't notice tense shifts or the lurch from a fairy tale mood to the documentary feel much of it is in (I do remember the latter style, mind). Not a bad one at all.
Three Highly Recommended out of ten stories is quite solid! I suppose, being stories you liked the look of enough to add to your list to begin with, the quality would be higher than the average of a typical audio reading based blog, mind.
5761313
yeah, I saw your review and that led me to remark on the time frame vis-a-vis the hbomberguy video
also, quite a few of these are just from authors I follow, whose works I add to my RIL regardless :) so I must have good taste or something!
Thank you for recommending mine. Glad you liked it.
These "Project Get" delves are always interesting (at least to me
).
I previously read some on this list, and I would like to comment on two to add to the words of praise you already related for them:
"This Is Spur-Tack!" (300 + 1) by Mockingbirb is vastly underrated (e.g. less than 10 votes) as a soulful send-up of "selfish" griffons and the overwhelming POWER OF FRIENDSHIP.
Igneous Rock Slide by 2SuriYourself is another story that has not yet reached ten votes, but it really deserves more attention as a character-driven drama based on a real incident. The detached prose shines through despite some technical tense issues. It combines a cathartic mix of grimness and glory.
Thank you for the review! To my knowledge, this is actually the first time one of my stories has gotten one, if you don't count comments directly on the story.
I'm so glad you enjoyed To Stand and Watch the Lake. Though it didn't get much attention when it was posted (in part because I made the mistake of writing and posting a serious story on the night to April 1st, in part because all the interesting things about it are spoilers making it a nightmare to market, and in part because I'm just not a big name writer yet), I always felt it was some of my better work. Even if the style might be a bit of an acquired taste.
5761978
well you are absolutely right to be proud of it! :D
What a delightful surprise to log in and find a very generous, and quite recent, review of my work!
It means a great deal to have my stuff read and talked about at all, let alone so kindly! Thank you!
Genuine question--obviously, I'm not particularly skilled as a poet. It seems to me that "A Nightmare Night Rhyme" is the most tightly structured of the three Discord poems--with the exception of the first line (at 11 syllables), I read it at a consistent 12/9/12/9 syllable structure for each stanza. Am I missing something there?
5763627
It's not just syllables, but also the stress patterns.
The first line, for instance (and it's been forever since I last studied poetry in depth, I can't remember most of the names for these anymore) is a solid -`- -`- -`- pattern, as is the second line, albeit with a leading syllable, which is fine. Third line, same thing. But line 4 reads
-`- --`- -`
If I were to read it with the same cadence, no matter how I pronounce "chimera", I'd be putting stress on "fell", at which point it sounds like I'm purposefully trying to butcher the poem, but... The pattern of the first three lines just does not fit. And there are a few other lines, like the one starting "And thou" (two leading syllables, which is a bit much), that don't quite match the pattern set in lines 1-3. So I have to assume that's what I was talking about, I write these reviews so I don't have to remember things for long. :B
5763657
Interesting; thanks for the thoughtful reply!
I think I feel the stress pattern differently, in what Google tells me is called anapest. If I understand correctly, that's two unstressed followed by one stressed syllable--not unlike "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (lol) or, more generously, "The Destruction of Sennacherib." This feels more consistent to me throughout (with the first syllable skipped for the first line):
I dare thee, oh brave one, when night creepeth dark,
If no monster can stand 'gainst thy sword,
Gather cockatrice tears and shaved timberwolf bark
And conjure the chimeras' fell lord.
(etc.)
But since the poem fails to convey that, I've missed the mark somewhere...or maybe this reading doesn't fix the issue anyway? In any case, thank you again for your kind words and constructive feedback!
5763663
I would never have thought to put the stress on the second syllable of "conjure" >_> That's clearly the disconnect between our scans!