Read It Later Reviews #7 – Yes, Apple Bloom, there *is* a Santa Hooves, Long Live the Chief, Kiss By Wire, Feedback, A Day at the Beach · 8:54pm Dec 29th, 2014
Work on Mistletrapped continues; I should have the next chapter ready to be edited this evening.
In the interim, I thought I would review a few short stories to keep you all satiated:
Yes, Apple Bloom, there *is* a Santa Hooves by Lucky Dreams
Long Live the Chief by Obsolescence
Kiss by Wire by Bachiavellian
Feedback by Curly Q
A Day at the Beach by PropMaster
Yes, Apple Bloom, there *is* a Santa Hooves
by Lucky Dreams
Slice of Life"Dear Santa Hooves. My name is Apple Bloom, and I don't want presents for Hearth's Warming this year. I just want my cutie mark..."
Why I added it: It is one of the most highly-rated holiday stories, and Bradel called it an “awesome art project”.
Review
“Awesome art project” is probably a good description of this story; it is, at its heart, a children’s Christmas story about some heartless helpers at the North Pole sending somewhat trite rejection letters out in response to requests for gifts. Apple Bloom wants her cutie mark, but that’s not something that Santa Hooves can deliver in his sleigh, and thus begins a letter writing campaign from Apple Bloom’s friends and family up to the North Pole.
The story itself is very much Christmas children’s fare, but the style of the story – presented in the form of scanned latters, each with their own unique style of handwriting – is quite nice to see. I was a bit disappointed that Twilight Sparkle’s penmanship was not significantly better – I was hoping for calligraphy – but the others worked quite well for what they were.
If something with letters like this in it interests you:
Then you might enjoy perusing this “story”. If these don’t pique your interest, skip it.
Recommendation: Worth Reading for the concept.
Long Live the Chief
by Obsolescence
SadAnd so the sun sets over Apple Springs Buffalo Reservation…
Why I added it: This is, technically speaking, cheating; I read this story a long time ago, and didn’t vote on it. Yet, when I think about pony stories, this sticks out as something that I remember. So I decided to re-read it and figure out why.
Review
Chief Thunderhooves brings an apple pie to Ex-Sheriff Silver Star, and the two of them reminisce about the past. The chief remarks on the fact that he is the last of the buffalo – not because the buffalo are all going to die, but because “the buffalo”, the people that he belonged to, with their cultures and traditions, are soon going to be no more. They live on a reservation now, and their way of life has irrevocably changed – and even if they could go back to the old ways, it would be wrong to do so. And Silver Star himself is a relic of a bygone era – the lands have been settled, there’s no need for tough settler ponies like himself anymore.
The story is wistful, and it does exactly what it is trying to do. The use of Silver Star as a parallel for Chief Thunderhooves, pointing out that it is not only “the buffalo” who are dying, but everyone of their generation, is a nice take on things and helps drive home the mood of the story. It does what it is trying to do in a little over 1,500 words, then gets out of the way.
Recommendation: Worth Reading.
Kiss By Wire
by Bachiavellian
Romance, Comedy, Slice of LifeIt's Ditzy Doo's birthday today, but there's something terribly, horribly wrong. Why won't the phone stop ringing?
Why I added it: This was an entry in the October 2014 Writeoff competition Just Over The Horizon, the same competition which produced my own Virgin Green Fields.
Review
Derpy gets a phone call from her secret admirer who is totally not Time Turner. Things go downhill from there for her secret admirer (but uphill from there for our audience).
This cute little story is only barely a thousand words long, and thus is hard to really write much of a review for, but it made me smile. It is short, sweet, and to the point, and does what it is trying to do without lingering or belaboring it.
Recommendation: Worth Reading.
Feedback
by Curly Q
ComedyAfter Rainbow Dash's magnum opus fan-fiction, Daring Do and the Ring of Destiny, fails to attract the response from her editor, Rarity, that she expected, she copes with her feelings of rejection in a manner befitting of her established reputation: by parking her cloud mansion above the boutique and drenching it in a watery apocalypse.
Why I added it: Seattle’s Angels featured this story.
Review
The story description describes pretty much the whole story, and all there is left for it is the execution.
The rejection letter at the start of the story was cute; I liked the extremely eloquent writing style and her blunt evaluation of the story, and her statement that Rainbow Dash can do better (a sentiment I myself have been on the end of). Rainbow Dash took it much worse than I did, though.
I did not like the rest of the story, where Rainbow Dash floods Rarity’s boutique; it was a cute enough idea, but it doesn’t really go anywhere and the description of the story already tells you everything that happens – as the story simply ends there, with no further resolution.
On the whole, this was very much a Daring Don’t reaction fic, and while I’m amused by the author’s sentiments that Daring Don’t was a fanfic written by Rainbow Dash, I didn’t feel like the payoff for the letter was worthwhile.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
A Day at the Beach
by PropMaster
SadApplejack and her family go to the beach on a rainy day in June.
Written on June 6th.
Why I added it: Seattle’s Angels featured this story.
Review
This is a graves fic – a story where someone is talking about going to meet someone and ends up in front of their grave. It is also a memorial day type fic, about remembering dead soldiers.
If you know what happened on June 6th, 1944, on a beach in Normandy, you can guess what this story is about.
That being said, if you’ve ever read a graves fic before, you’d know what it was about.
Oddly for a story like this, it doesn’t actually end with them in front of the grave, though they do end up on the beach when it is raining. And at the end, Scootaloo, who is drug along by Rainbow Dash to “meet her mom”, still doesn’t know what is going on, and, bizzarely, the older ponies don’t explain it to her – which is, quite frankly, a lousy thing to do, and actually kind of annoyed me at the end of it.
And indeed, it felt like it lingered oddly at the end – the main point of graves fics is seeing that headstone there at the end, and having some final words, but here, we had a flyover by some griffins, and nothing really deep or meaningful, just characters telling us that it is all deep and meaningful – which is quite bothersome, because that is precisely the trite sort of thing which bothers me on Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day.
I don’t particularly like Memorial Day or Veteran’s Day to begin with, but I despise when people talk about how deep and meaningful it all is without actually showing why it is deep and meaningful. Having the characters talk about how deep and meaningful it is doesn’t really tell me why what happened there was important, and why it was worthwhile (or, alternatively, futile). It feels empty, like a lot of things I see people pontificate about on TV on Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day.
Here, we don’t even get to see what they fought for – what was the war with the griffins over? Where were the people that they liberated? D-day, ultimately, lead to freedom for Western Europe, the fall of Nazi Germany, and the end of the Holocaust, as well as freedom from further bombing in the UK. Nothing comparable is really shown here.
And this, I think, goes back to them hiding what is going on from Scootaloo, and why it bothers me so much. They’re teaching her that going through the motions is more important than actually understanding what happened. And that is unacceptable to me.
Recommendation: Not recommended.
Summary
Yes, Apple Bloom, there *is* a Santa Hooves by Lucky Dreams
Worth Reading.
Long Live the Chief by Obsolescence
Worth Reading.
Kiss by Wire by Bachiavellian
Worth Reading
Feedback by Curly Q
Not Recommended
A Day at the Beach by PropMaster
Not Recommended
I’ve been contemplating starting to leave out the “Recommendation: Not Recommended” lines for stories that I don’t recommend, but I feel like it is something of a cop-out; do you think that this would be a good idea, or do you think that it would be confusing? It would still be a non-recommendation, but it might take some of the sting out of it when the author sees it. On the other hand, I ultimately see these as being a service to the reader.
Let me know in the comments what you think.
Number of stories still listed as "Read It Later - Recommended": 164.
Number of stories listed as “Read It Later”: 1528.
I'm glad someone agrees with me about "Feedback." I do have to disagree with your thoughts on "Kiss by Wire," but I've added the Santa Hooves one to my Read Later.
2686373
You didn't like Kiss By Wire very much, then, I take it?
That's too bad, sorry to hear that.
Sorry you didn't enjoy my story. It's not for everyone, though, and you seem to be somebody that wasn't going to enjoy the themes due to your dislike of Veteran's Day or Memorial Day. I wanted to avoid the cliche of the "Graves Fic" as you call it. We all knew what was coming next, it didn't need to be done again, it would feel too trite. I wanted to explore the apple family. It's not about the war or the pomp and circumstance surrounding the celebration of peace, it's about the characters.
Obviously we're going to disagree on what is and isn't good about my story, but I DO appreciate you taking the time to do a review, even if it ended up being something you didn't enjoy.
Surprisngly, I don't have the Obs story that you reviewed in my RiS box. Since it's so short I'll probably just blaze through it today.
2686459
Yeah, it happens. Sadly I've not read a whole lot else of your work; I've read part of one of your incomplete stories, but it is, as of yet, still incomplete; I do plan on finishing reading it once it is done, though. A lot of your stuff is not really "my kind of thing"; I really only ended up reading A Day at the Beach because it was recommended to me. As I noted, I'm not overfond of said stories, and the fact that I recognize graves fics so readily probably indicates I'm overexposed to those as well, so it really wasn't a great fit for me as a reader to begin with. But I try things; sometimes, I even like them.
Didn't happen this time. I do stand by why I disliked it, though; you did avoid the generic graves fic ending, but it didn't really end up feeling satisfying to me. I do get that you were aiming at the characters rather than the event, but I didn't really feel the impact on them as strongly as I would have liked.
Ah well.
Hope you have a good afternoon! Or evening, depending on where you are.
2686490
It is one of his older, more obscure stories; it doesn't even have a thousand views.
Ahh good, thanks to your compelling argument, I'm dropping A Day at the Beach. :)
Leaving out the Not Recommended lines would work best if you did do little badges or ribbons for the higher ranks. Maybe change "Worth Reading" to "TD Approved" and the others to "TD Recommended" and "TD Top Tier" or something. Then you're just providing thoughts on the story without a summary line at all, and some stories earn ribbons.
The final summary section would then just be a list of the ribbon winners for that post.
I say keep the "Not Recommended" rating; it's not like it becomes a nice hugboxy review without it, and I do think its removal would be confusing/ambiguous. 2686781's idea is a good counterpoint, though, since the confusion stems from the lack of parity if you have "Recommended" but no "Not Recommended", which wouldn't be implied by a ribbon (and your recommendations are rare enough to be ribbon-worthy).
Sorry that I'm commenting on this a little late -- I've had very limited access to the internet this week.
But thank you for the review! And I certainly agree with you about Twilight's writing. At the time, my thinking was that she's much too practically minded to worry all that much about the state of her handwriting -- just so long as she gets her notes and observations down, and they're legible, I think that would be the most important thing for her. Looking back though, I really wish I'd made more of an effort. Just because I don't think she'd fret about how neat her letter was, that doesn't mean that it wouldn't be incredibly neat anyway.
I've never read Long Live the Chief before, but it's sounds pretty cool. I'm going to get right on that.
2699844
Thanks for the feedback on the review, and I'm glad that I reviewed another story that caught your interest as a result.