[REVIEW] "Big Stompy" would have been a better name · 9:06pm Oct 14th, 2014

This will be the first in a series of reviews of "classic" fanfics that were HUGE in their time and made a big splash when they came out, but didn't necessarily keep the new audiences as newer fics came out to grab the feature box.

And I'm starting with the one fanfic written during Season 1 that held on to semi-canon status all the way until Equestria Girls game out.

In The Ballad of Salty and Sweet, Alton Brown explains that the sweetness of sugar is usually disguised by our tongues, making chocolate (for example) less chocolaty and even sugar less sugary than it could be. To remedy this, you simply add (oddly enough) a touch of salt to the mix. The salt pulls out for your tastebuds the rich combinations and textures to the flavors in the confection allowing you to truly enjoy them.

Similarly, while I do love me some FiMFiction, sometimes it's just...too sweet. There's nothing to balance the sugary, hyper-sweet flavors of the raw, canon-only universe of MLP. Sure enough, when we take a look at some of the best episodes of the series, usually the ones that start and end it, there's a bit of "salt" in them in the form of a big bad, major conflict, etc. A good example of a too sweet episode where some "salt" would have DEFINETLY made it into one of the best was Over a Barrel, wherein a staple of American entertainment for 50 plus years, a major historical marker in Western Civilization, a great big historical lesson in dickery on the part of a government and a bunch of racists in power, the Great Plains Wars, was turned into...a pie fight.

Oh, of course I get it, this is a KIDS show. Still, the entire thing lost any possible punch it could have had once they made the ponies weapons into a big stack of baked goods...and the berserker buffalo took the pies seriously as a "threat."

Too much sweet, not enough salt.

So when we, as a fandom, need to apply a little bit of culinary blowtorch to the confection that is our favorite show and sprinkle a little dash of salt, we can either twist what we already have into something that (at best) is only superficially like what's presented in canon (I'm looking at YOU, all you "Tyrantlestia" writers!) or we can add something that's pure "salt."

Hello, Battletech! How are you? Come on in, we need some flavor in this fanon!

The premise for combining a RPG setting that has claimed more PCs than all the WWII shooter games released for major consoles combined with the bright and fluffy world of MLP is fairly predictable. It can really only be one of two things; magical accident or sci-fi accident, and in The Thessalonica Legacy the author goes with "sci-fi accident."

One thing that is fortunate is due to the nature of Battletech (a tabletop RPG), there's no "main characters" that the audience may already know and be able to nitpick over. The author can simply create whatever characters they want and nobody can say they're written wrong or out of character. This leaves the author free to focus their attention on the Mane 6 (and related) and get those right.

As far as the story being written well, it's pretty darn good. The only drawback is that the scope of the fic is such that not nearly enough attention can be focussed on any one character for too long. This basically means that while you might REALLY want to see, say, Pinkie Pie piloting a mech, in order for the author to tell their story it just isn't going to happen.

On to the story itself, then...

This is a really, really good crossover story. It may even be able to stand on it's own, and here's why: Most fanfics are written for the fans. They're written BY the fans, after all. So it's no real surprise that when the author mentions a particular character, they can simply toss out the name and the reader automatically knows who the author is talking about, a good chunk of their backstory, etc. Example: Twilight Sparkle. I didn't even need to elaborate beyond the name and you understood everything I was trying to convey about the character in question. This doesn't really work for (say) wanting to show off a good story to your non-fan friends, though, because to understand the story they then have to know everything YOU know about the characters, and when a show reaches it's 10th episode, a trilogy reaches it's second book, or a movie franchise hits sequel number three, that's far too much work for the average person to do just to get the joke in the fourth paragraph in the second chapter that has you in stitches.

The Thessalonica Legacy is written in such a way as to be able to be picked up by pretty much anyone and be able to get a feel for the characters, the setting, heck even the science and magic in the story without needing a week-long bootcamp, and yet the narrative is smooth enough that you don't hit that stumbling block that bothers so many other works where the recap for the new people bores the veteran fans. (*cough*TheLostFleet*cough*)

So what's the story about? Well, it's like it says on the tin; Twilight Sparkle uncovers a mystery hidden in plain sight regarding a mysterious incident a few centuries ago that seems to be connected with oddities in pony civilization, like the design of hammers and the handles on teacups. Meanwhile in another universe, a group of soldiers on an emergency mission are ambushed and their jumpship is sabotaged, leaving them stranded in a system that has no signs of human technology whatsoever, but is inhabited by non-human intelligence.

To tell you more than that would spoil things, and this is really one of those stories where you don't really want things spoiled. It's also a story where the relationships between the characters, both Mane 6 and human, is more important than mech technology or space travel or magic or yadda. This means when the story moves forward the characters are developing, which is the whole reason to read a story to begin with.

As far as my earlier statement on this fic being semi-canon up until EqG, I'll give you a minor spoiler; Twilight Sparkle uses her knowledge gained from the humans to help develop Equestria's first internal combustion engine, which is then used in locomotives. If you recall, in "Over a Barrel," the train was pulled by a herd of muscular stallions. Suddenly at the beginning of Season 2, we see the Friendship Express with a complete internal combustion engine and no pulling team. This means that the technology to allow for IC engines came along very suddenly between seasons one and two. Further, there wouldn't BE any mention of the humans making contact with Equestria because with was made a state secret. Up until Twilight encounters humans (as well as becoming one) in Equestria Girls and exclaims about how she doesn't know what they are, there's nothing in the canon universe to contradict this fic, and this fic was so well written that it could easily have been made into a miniseries that slots in the hiatus between seasons 1 & 2.

One last thing...if you want to really get yourself into the mood to read this, MrMaxaminus put together a videogame start screen style video in honor of this fic, and I'll be honest when I say it was that video that got me interested enough in the story to read it.