Ghost Mike's Ponyfic Review Monday Musings #128 · 6:00pm Nov 25th, 2024
I had planned to let G5’s end sit for a while before publicly reflecting on it again (the final TYT short, off the series' cancellation, released 39 days ago). And that does still stand. However, a well-informed PonyTuber, Cxcd, posted a video last month breaking down a lot of relatively-unknown facts about G5’s production, its ambitions, and exactly why, behind the scenes, it blew up. One I think even people who don’t care about G5 should see.
As the video is 34 minutes long, and Cxcd (who is also a writer here on Fimfic, though far less active lately) does subscribe to a moderate degree to the typical contemporary slower internet video pace in terms of how many points are doled out in terms of speed, and spacing in humour and self-ribbing throughout (clumsy, but never cringe), it might not work for all folks, even watching at 1.25 speed as I often do for such things. Though he is earnest, sincere and not mugging for our attention, more just making sure we have enough info to go on. But thankfully, the Equestria Daily article sharing the video has a very well-written summary of the main points (and some extra context for things Cxcd didn’t include or clarify), and while you won’t get everything from reading it, you’ll get the majority.
I’ll save from adding too many of my own thoughts on the matter, but suffice to say, changing CEOs and the rejection of the old plan that comes with such, fallout from many at Hasbro not having confidence in an ambitious company purchase on the level of Disney’s prior acquisitions of Marvel and Lucasfilm, and scrambling to dilute that massive debt however they could (to the point of selling eOne, that they bought for $4 billion, for $500 million) all played a part.
It still leaves some questions up in the air – why, if Hasbro was scrambling to save costs once Brian Goldner started to step back, did they retool the G5 show into being CG? – but it does, if nothing else, make me less angry at Atomic Cartoons. We always say we can’t blame the artists, just the execs, but having concrete proof of that being the case here does wonders for me. And considering that level of debt… Hell, any board of directors would need to scramble to do what they could.
Anyway, it’s all very illuminating, especially for the hows and whys of Boulder Media being dropped, the difficulties in making just the film, and some pensive conclusive thoughts. Being a good editor, I shall leave it at that.
It’s another uneventful Monday Musings, I’m afraid: the disinterest in reading ponyfic remains as present as ever, so much like #126 back in September, this is more just the end result of what odd short fic I’ve read here and there. Three of them thousand-word contest entries I picked up on a rather quiet evening off Loganberry’s Ponyfic Roundups on such. But fics are fics, folks, so even with a very low cumulative word count, these five remain no less valid.
This Week’s Spectral Stories:
T-R-I-X-I-E by gloamish
Remember to Smile! by Undome Tinwe
Anyone You Want Me To Be by naturalbornderpy
Princess Celestia Hates Tea by Skywriter
Pinkie Pie in: Princess Celestia Hates Tea by JadeCriminal
Weekly Word Count: 18,415 Words
T-R-I-X-I-E by gloamish
Genre: Comedy
Twilight, Trixie, Starlight
1,000 Words
October 2023
Twilight knows that Trixie isn’t exactly the brightest horn on the forehead around. Yet when attending her latest show (totally not to keep an eye on her, no sir), and seeing her signing a few autographs in the aftermath, she notices something to lower that opinion even more.
Honestly, this is a reasonably fresh take on Trixie lacking common sense, and it’s not all that exaggerated (take out the mean streak about it, and this could happen in the show). The jokes come at a good clip, enough of them are unexpected and pack sufficient comic timing. And while unmistakably a quick vignette, it’s structured around that, so it does end properly rather than just stop at a thousand words (and this wasn’t even written for that contest!).
As these kinds of short comedy fics based around one punchline go, it’s a solid one. Even if Trixie against Twilight fics aren’t your cup of tea. They aren’t mine, yet I liked this fine.
Rating: Decent
Remember to Smile! by Undome Tinwe
Genre: Romance/Dark/Drama
Twilight, Rarity
2,220 Words
September 2024
Now a happy couple, Twilight is right by Rarity’s side as she runs in the election for the governor Everfree District. Yet as exhaustion hangs over her in the run-up to it, she can’t shake the feeling that they’ve been through this before. More than once, actually. Yet why eludes her…
To the attentive user, the twist is hinted at clearly enough early on, but even if you notice it, the details behind it still rather shock later, and it’ll keep one guessing throughout. Perhaps the biggest strength here, though, is the way Rarity’s affection for Twilight makes sense with the eventual nature of the matter at hoof here, lending it a rather tragic air. In the specifics, it even almost plays like a sampling of infamous RariTwi moments in the fandom, which I mean as a compliment.
I can see how this nabbed an Honourable Mention in the latest Iron Author competition at Everfree Northwest (hey, look at where some of this story is set!). Read outside of that speedwritten context, it’s not as strong, but close enough to the next rating up that RariTwi fans, or those keen on this particular brand of time loop stories, can bump it up a rating.
Rating: Decent
Anyone You Want Me To Be by naturalbornderpy
Genre: Sad/Slice of Life
Changelings, OC
4,884 Words
December 2015Reread
In a back alley in Ponyville, there exists a one-room shop underneath an office building. This business is not formally advertised, but word-of-mouth among those who need it keeps it circulating: a changeling here will turn into whoever you present pictures of, and silently take whatever it is you need to say. The unrequited crush, your terrible boss, your worst enemy, the dead relative, anyone. But it is only a fantasy escape, not true therapy. And not just for his clients either.
This is a deliciously fascinating concept, even grading against the myriad of ideas of a lone changeling undercover among ponies not for the hive but just for his own survival, a very fertile genre that understandably if sadly saw far less practice post-October 2016. And it has the chops to deliver too. Told in first-person, there’s some very effective scene-and-context setting here, first of the unnamed ‘ling’s habit of constantly observing and swapping disguises for when he needs to go out (in a rather different register than is typical: he struggles mightily with impersonating voices, for one), and then some snapshots of clients coming to him at nighttime, the issues they try to work out via his transforming them.
The perspective voice has a snappy pace while remaining dense with incident and the details and observations he makes. Cameos of a few show characters are done tastefully and work in-context for showing the kinds this guy deals with. And the voice at the back of his head that what he’s doing isn’t really helping, rearing when some ponies are clearly making things worse for themselves, gives it effective pathos too, beyond the pitch of this being an escape from himself. It’s a very effective 3.1K fic.
Of course, there’s another 1,800 words after that, and it’s decidedly less effective. The inevitable dilution of moving from the concept of what this normal is like to an actual change in his life is a part of that, and it certainly doesn’t help that it makes it feel like the opener to a longer fic, though I don’t think that’s a huge problem. Nor that the details of how the changeling ended up in this position are left intentionally vague and barely-explored. But what we do get, while tying into the fic, leaves the fic in rather an unsatisfying heap to leave on, and rather exposes writing weaknesses the main material had managed to obviate.
The main material is unique enough, executed strongly enough, that still I feel comfy recommending it, unless clumsy endings really grind one’s goat.
Rating: Pretty Good
Princess Celestia Hates Tea by Skywriter
Genre: Comedy
Celestia, Twilight
8,536 Words
May 2012
Princess Celestia’s love of tea goes back centuries. It’s one of those things everypony knows about her, to the point that only is it the pride and joy of the staff who make it for her that she praises their work, but it is the default gift from foreign ambassadors to her. All of which makes it harder that, despite drinking the stuff for millennia on a near-daily basis, she hates the stuff with every fibre of her being. Which makes it difficult when she lets the secret slip…
As one-shots go, it’s hard to get more fandom classic than this. Both for the view count (third-highest among all stories I’ve covered), and also for the genre of concept, an early subversion of one of the few traits glimpsed on a character with comparatively little show screentime but who is nonetheless one of the core pillars of ponyfic. Such things often don’t age well, both for their technical writing and plotting in an author’s early career, and for that subversion leaving them feeling rather dated.
This is an exception. Oh, both of the above issues are present somewhat, but they are modulated very well. First, it’s not at all the “lol random” fic you might expect from the world going crazy when Celestia lets the truth be known. As long as you can accept that everypony’s lives are defined and driven by Celestia’s public adoration of tea, everything in this story makes total sense in reference to itself, in its plotting and narrative escalation, and even in the characterisation and voicing of such. This is the major achievement here: it makes the silly parts funnier because you always see the root logic, it makes the absurd reactions funnier for being true (stock prices of tea industries plummet, for one). Thus, the old nugget about comedy arising from introducing one piece of absurdity into a serious situation gets a huge workout throughout, both in the larger comic turns and the little jokes along the way.
Celestia’s first-person voicing is interesting too: there’s some flowery language without going overboard, and her greater perception gets a good comedic workout throughout. Moreso, though, it wrings some solid insight into the proceedings, rendering Celestia as more than a punching bag, down to a funny-yet-surprisingly-poignant conclusion for her. And the wider observations about societal effect don’t get in the way of the fun either.
Add in a solid modulation from scene-to-scene in the pacing and flow that makes this one zip by, and while there are still plenty of choices in the story and writing that are a little clunky and mark the fic out (even Skywriter’s ponyfic writing wasn’t born fully-fleshed, though he had been writing for over a decade before this fic), for the most part, I was delightfully entertained. Not an essential read (you still need a little tolerance for ponies going bananas over the simplest things), but a delightful one.
Rating: Really Good
Pinkie Pie in: Princess Celestia Hates Tea by JadeCriminal
[No Cover Image]
Genre: Comedy
Pinkie, Celestia
1,775 Words
May 2012Unofficial sequel to Princess Celestia Hates Tea – Reviewed above
Not all took well to Celestia’s smoothing over of her hatred of tea. Pinkie, in particular, ever the connoisseur of baked goods and beverages, spotted what’s actually going on. And thus, she wastes no time in whipping up something that will truly sort the lingering ends out.
So, how did I end up reading this fanfic of a fanfic? Well, Skywriter’s original had a fan comic adaptation made over on Deviantart (first page has even more views than the fic, at 72.5K), and I read it after that fic out of curiosity. One of those “made with edited show vectors” ones, you know. It’s very faithful, and undeniably loses a lot from the loss of the authorial voice (though some is retained via thought bubbles, and the artist creatively reinterprets some of Celestia’s thought-asides into spoken gags), but it was a pleasant diversion, and went by quick enough. Then, at the end, I noticed the same artist had done a sequel comic. Thinking this was their own continuation, I read it, and only at the end of the short five-page affair noticed it too was an adaptation of a fic. Just one not written by the author. And as it was not even 1.8K, I figured, what the hay, already sort of read it, I’ll look at the fic too.
Well, it made me very appreciative of the adaptation process the artist did. This fic’s story (published one day after Skywriter’s original) is already limiting it a bit, being an extra ending added to a perfectly-finished original. And there are attempts to go for the same kind of absurdity, first with a mad scientist bit from Pinkie and then with her breaking and entering. But the writing heavily cripples it. Not just perspective but tone swaps wildly between the short scenes, and I honestly don’t know that I’d have been able to parse the direction or the point of it all without having read the comic first. On top of lots of technical errors and slips, it feels like nothing so much as the author trying to imitate the snappy visual pacing of onscreen episodes but without any translation process to make it work in a written form.
The comic of this snugs up the unnecessary beginning, uses visual panels to properly transition between beats and scenes, cuts some of the roughest gags and frames the visual ones for funnier impact, and at five panels it’s diverting enough for anyone who adored the original. The fic, though, is a messy, clunky affair with only the revelation at the end to applaud it by, and not even in how it’s communicated.
Rating: Weak
Spooky Summary of Scores:
Excellent: 0
Really Good: 1
Pretty Good: 1
Decent: 2
Passable: 0
Weak: 1
Bad: 0
thank you for pointing to that Celestia Hates Tea comic, it's well done and I'd passed it up somehow!
...ten years ago when it was made c_c;;;
I think I've finally hit the point where examining the flaws of G5 is beating a dead horse [winks at camera], though perhaps I've been made very actively disinterested by the latest comic making the G4 connection downright tragic.
This doubtless won't be my final word on the subject, but probably my ultimate thought is one of painfully missed opportunity. G4 ended up with a very likeable mane cast because they were simple characters who were easy to understand, yet far deeper and more interactive than their trope exteriors. I think this was something G5 nailed at its outset. The characters were likeable and simple, but with hints of depth waiting to be explored. Izzy was so desperately lonely she wandered to the home of an enemy species based on a childhood drawing. Zipp was the cool jock who was also a history nerd and desperate to fly. They could have been so much more than what we got.
It's like if G4 consisted of the first six episodes and all the rest was Pony Life.
Anyway, oh Princess Celestia Hates Teas, hiiiiiiii!
A fandom classic, and like many such it is perhaps a bit diluted by many stories of similar vein that followed. Yet I think it holds up not just for the trailblazing nostalgia. While most imitators simply end the story when their ridiculous premise of choice is played out, Skywriter committed to writing fully the ramifications, comedic escalation, and eventual resolution which painted Celestia in a surprisingly heartfelt light. I'm not surprised someone was moved to immediately write their own happier ending for the poor girl.
5818112
This is the chief reason why I didn't intend to talk about it further. Beating a dead horse and all that. The above video/its EqD summary were just too important to leave hanging.
Pretty much, yep. It's a hilarious comedy that still has something profound about it through the absurdity through it all, without ever forcing that to be the main point in a way that would dilute the humour, as most comedies often do when they get serious.