Read It Now Reviews #8 – Dignity, In the Service of the Princess of Friendship, A Spoonful of Sugar, Tortoise Percent Cooler, There is no Luna · 5:54am Jan 17th, 2015
We had a lot of neat-sounding stories come out this week, and I thought I’d try and review a few of them for you folks. I actually have a whopping ten stories I thought were interesting enough to warrant reading and reviewing, so I may end up making another post tomorrow.
Of course, we all know what the most interesting story that came out this week was. That’s right, that awesome erudite writer known only as the Titanium Dragon released another story yesterday!
Apple Shampoo
by Titanium Dragon
Sex, Romance, ComedyRarity’s friends have noticed that she smells an awful lot like apples lately, and want in on it.
Inspired by White Diamonds Ltd.’s piece of artwork a couple days ago, a comment on Derpibooru, and the fact that Hasbro actually manufactured apple-scented body wash and put it in a Rarity-shaped container, this story is meant to be light and silly. Hopefully you folks will enjoy it.
Because folks have been asking me about my rating system, I’ve been debating sticking it in every post. It might look something like this:
Rating System
Not Recommended – These are stories that I don’t recommend. These stories range from the bad to the mediocre - anything which is not actively good will generally fall into this category unless it has some other feature which makes it worth your time. Thus, this category includes both stories that I downvoted, and stories that I didn’t upvote – that is to say, left no vote on at all. If I’m not willing to upvote a story, it is hard for me to say that it is worth someone else's time, as to me, an upvote is an endorsement of a story being worth your time.
Worth Reading – This is a story that I upvoted and think is worth reading. These stories should be satisfying, especially if you enjoy the genre they’re in, but you don’t necessarily need to go out of your way to read them. Still, you won't consider your time wasted if you read these stories.
Recommended –This is a story that I upvoted and favorited. These stories impressed me in some way or otherwise made me feel that more folks should read them, and are worth putting on your reading list. If you were considering reading a story I recommended, you should consider it me urging you to do so.
Highly Recommended – This I a story that I put on my recommended to others list, and represent stories that you should go out of your way to read. I consider these stories the very best the fandom has to offer.
Read It Later – This is reserved for stories which are incomplete, which may or may not be worth reading in the future, but which aren’t worth reading now in their incomplete state. I generally avoid reviewing incomplete stories, but if I do so, I will likely give them this rating if there isn't enough information necessary to make a recommendation.
What do you folks think? Too much? Too long? Should I just include a link to a post explaining my rating system?
Anyway, onto the reviews!
The stories I read today:
Dignity by Baal Bunny
In the Service of the Princess of Friendship by bookplayer
A Spoonful of Sugar by Thornwing
Tortoise Percent Cooler by Majin Syeekoh
There is no Luna by a human
Dignity
by Baal Bunny
Slice of LifeOur heroines gather at Applejack's for some winter afternoon apple pie baking, and Dash can't help but hope a certain apple-based beverage might be included in the festivities as well. And while it's not hard cider, getting a mug of it from AJ might prove harder than Dash expected.
Why I added it: The original form of this story was one of my favorite stories from the “All In” write-off.
Review
Applejack makes Rainbow Dash beg for cider, forcing her to pay her compliments in exchange for the golden ambrosia. Many folks in the writeoff thought this was a AppleDash shipfic, but in reality, it is a Rainbow Dash x Cider story – a 100% canon pairing, judging by Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000.
This story swelled from 736 words to over 2,600 words in the process of being brought to FIMFiction, and it did the story no favors at all. One of the big things about microfiction is that you have to be dense because you don’t have space to mess around, but because it is so short, it can be awesome all the way through if you’re going for a piece like this. The longer you make a story, the harder it is to keep it up to a consistent, extremely high level, and this story ended up taking what was really great about a 750 word story and diluting it out with a couple thousand extra words of prose.
The core of this story is the begging, but the extended version draws it out much more, with a much longer introduction before we get to the good stuff, and the good stuff being diluted out by cross-chatter between the rest of the mane 6. I think it was a much stronger piece without the rest of their friends there, and with the whole thing focused down on the teasing conversation which was the heart and soul of the piece.
By including more characters, it also felt like it diluted the character of Rainbow Dash and Applejack; in the original version, it was a very intimate little story, and because there wasn’t anything but the interaction between Applejack and Rainbow Dash, those two characters shone through a lot brighter.
Recommendation: Not Recommended, but I do recommend the original piece.
In the Service of the Princess of Friendship
by bookplayer
Slice of LifeTwilight Sparkle was thrilled to find her place as Princess of Friendship. But what is a Princess of Friendship without her friends? When Applejack comes to her to have an important conversation, Twilight is reminded that some of her friends have places of their own.
Why I added it: The original version of this story was one of the better stories from the “All In” write-off, and it covers a topic of particular interest to me, personally, given my own views on Applejack.
Review
Applejack, with the new magic friendship castle, has come to realize that she faces a very real choice. Before, she was an apple farmer who slapped on a magical artifact to save Equestria, but she has now come to realize that she’s at the point where she may end up becoming someone who is helping Twilight rule, and happens to live on a farm and buck apples in her free time. She has to make a choice – does she keep running the farm as she has been, and cut back on doing her work for Twilight, or make accommodations so that she can help Twilight rule, at the cost of not being able to really do what it is her cutie mark seems to indicate she should be doing?
I like this idea, and I like the idea of Applejack making this decision, and I liked her decision and her rationale for it. The story is pretty short, clocking in south of 2,000 words, and is to the point, letting the tension build as Applejack explains the situation to Twilight, but not belaboring the point. It works and is well-paced, and is a good look at the decision Applejack has to make – and perhaps soon, her other friends as well.
Recommendation: Recommended, especially if the idea of Applejack making this decision is interesting to you.
A Spoonful of Sugar
by Thornwing
Sad, Slice of LifeLife can be tough when you're part of the in-crowd, so it helps to have a few friends you can turn to. For one filly, realizing who those friends are might mean losing the only friend she's ever known. If only she had the courage to face her biggest fear, things might be different.
Maybe this year...
Why I added it: The original version of this story was one of the better stories from the “All In” write-off, and I helped look over this story as it was revised for FIMFiction.
Review
Silver Spoon has a sad little tea party with the Cutie Mark Crusaders, who question her friendship with Diamond Tiara.
This is a nice little character piece, and at only a thousand words, it packs a lot of characterization into a small space. If you like the idea of examining the relationship between Silver Spoon and Diamond Tiara through Silver Spoon’s eyes, this is worth reading.
Recommendation: Worth Reading.
Tortoise Percent Cooler
by Majin Syeekoh
RandomWitness the best day an awesome tortoise like Tank could ever have.
Why I added it: Cerulean Voice recommended it to me.
Review
Luna brings Tank into the same starry space of ascension that Twilight went to, in order to bestow him a gift for rescuing Rainbow Dash and for being awesome.
Tank’s voice in the piece is silly, Luna is not in character… the story is, in effect, “random comedy”, but it doesn’t really end up feeling purposeful, and it didn’t end up making me chuckle. Really, it was just “Hey, God thinks you’re pretty cool, here’s some powers,” to some generic cool dude, with a little bit of anticlimax at the end to drive the point home.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
There is no Luna
by a human
Dark, Alternate UniverseFinally, after years of begging, Celestia gives Twilight permission to access the Forbidden Wing of the Royal Library, a wing so secret even the other princesses can't access it. Twilight rushes to Canterlot, excited for the research potential.
Then, she finds those books…
Why I added it: The premise intrigued me, and I made a note to read it; it was subsequently featured.
Review
Twilight Sparkle gets to go into the most restricted part of the Royal Library, a place where only she and Celestia are allowed to tread, and read various censored works. There she finds some ancient history books, written even prior to Luna’s banishment, which seemed to suggest that Luna never existed at all. When she confronts Celestia about it, wanting to know why Celestia had those books produced, Celestia reveals the truth:
Luna doesn’t exist.
The rest of the story is devoted to explaining what that means, and who “Luna” really is.
On the whole, the work was alright; it worked reasonably well, and I’ve seen a similar idea about how the Elements of Harmony worked before. This story put a different spin on it, however, and in the end it seemed reasonable enough (if clearly set in an AU), though I would have liked to get a better handle on how Celestia really felt about Luna in the piece; she felt a bit detached to me, and while I liked the idea presented, I would have liked to have seen a bit more emotional tension there, given "Luna's" true nature.
A more minor quibble: a lot of the works in the Forbidden Wing seemed rather lame, and it might have been nice if there had been some allusion to them having not been banned or censored, but merely stuck into the library in order to draw attention away from the Luna-less history books. That would have been a very neat bit of diversion, and I think would have explained why they were so boring – by making the books seem on the whole boring and unremarkable, it discourages someone who got curious from really looking through many of them, and the history books would have been much easier to explain in such a context.
In the end, this is overall a decent piece; you don’t need to go out of your way to read it, but if the idea seems interesting to you, it will probably satisfy you well enough, even if it won’t knock your socks off.
Recommendation: Worth Reading
Summary
Dignity by Baal Bunny
Not Recommended (but the original version is recommended)
In the Service of the Princess of Friendship by bookplayer
Recommended
A Spoonful of Sugar by Thornwing
Worth Reading
Tortoise Percent Cooler by Majin Syeekoh
Not Recommended
There is no Luna by a human
Worth Reading
I hope I pointed you towards some interesting things to read; all of these works are very short, with the longest, There is no Luna, clocking in at a mere 3,000 words. I hope you find some of these interesting, and for those of you who haven’t checked out Apple Shampoo yet, I hope that you enjoy that as well.
Number of stories still listed as "Read It Later - Recommended": 186
Number of stories listed as “Read It Later”: 1540
I suppose that's a fair assertion of my fic.
Thanks for the review.
2728340
You're welcome!
It wasn't really my sort of thing, but Cerulean Voice recommended it so I thought I might give it a shot.
You had some link problemos for the last two stories. Anyways, I thought that Tortoise Percent Cooler was still a relatively funny story, and I didn't even laugh. I usually don't, but that's neither here nor there. It was one of those stories that I personally like that I suppose you don't, where it's ridiculous for the sake thereof and nothing more. There's something to be admired in senseless comedy.
. . .
Sometimes.
EDIT: I had a feeling you'd fix those link problems before I even posted about them.
2728353
Sometimes really ridiculous out-of-left-field humor works for me, but that particular style of humor doesn't tend to work very well for me most of the time.
2728351 No, I understand completely. I respect that it wasn't your cup of tea, but I thank you for at least giving it a shot.
2728358
Personally, Step Brothers and other movies like American Pie and . . . that just about sums up all the movies that are terrible ever. Anyway, those movies and their comedy are really what I consider to be too ridiculous and outrageous. I watched Step Brothers and could feel my brain cells bursting.
Dude, I distinctly remember recommending Rocks Are (Not) Dumb, not Tortoise Percent Cooler.
You wally! Now you make me look bad
2728408
I was referring to this post you made yesterday. You know, where you gave us a link to the story and encouraged us to "Grab your daily dose of silly from the master."
2728412
Well, that said, I did say silly. Heck, it only went into my tier two faves.
You and I seem to have very different uses of the voting system. I'll give an up vote to almost anything that isn't inherently terrible, whereas you seem to reserve it for only the most stellar of stories. Likewise, a story has to be a complete and utter failure on all levels for me to downvote it, whereas you'll toss it out on anything that has a few elements that you think break the entire thing.
Hehe.
You should just link to the rating system -- it's enough of a wall that no one's going to actually read it every time, especially since the names are pretty self-explanatory.
Interesting to see how many of your upvoted stories are favorited, and how many of those are recommended (453/199/102 at this writing, for those too lazy to click the links -- so about a 9:4:2 ratio [cut your recommendation ratio in half and they follow the first three squares, like the monolith in 2001!]). Then your top-tier recommendations are an order of magnitude rarer, though that's probably because you have a fixed size for that list. Do you have an "everything I've ever read" shelf? How big is it?
2728449
I keep track of everything that I've read, but because bookshelves were only implemented in November of 2014 they are highly incomplete. As a result, it underestimates the number of stories I've read by a fairly wide margin; as I notice stories I've read and voted on, I add them to the proper categories, but as such they're incomplete.
I have hidden No Vote and Downvote bookshelves, where I add all the stories I've not voted on and given downvotes to; right now they're at 374 and 286 respectively.
The catch to all that, though, is that the way that I initially populated these shelves was by going through all the people who I follow and adding stories from there, as well as from my favorite stories list; as such, the list is very, very heavily biased towards stories I've upvoted (as obviously I don't follow people when I don't think much of their writing). Since I've started doing reviews, about half of my reviews have been "Not Recommended", which would mean that I don't recommend almost exactly half of the stories I read, which would indicate that I upvote stories as often as a don't vote or downvote stories.
I can't really tell you how many stories I've read; I do know that the number is greater than a thousand, but I'm not sure if it is 2,000. The problem is that early on in the fandom, I read a ton of stories from random writers because they were fairly highly rated in, say, a shipfic group, or were on someone's recommendation list or whatever. These folks I mostly did not follow, and as a result I'd have to go through manually and add ratings for them.
I've gotten better at self-filtering stories as well over time; early on, I hit chaff vastly more often than I do now, because I have a better ability both to discriminate against stories I know I won't like beforehand (thus preserving those stories from eating a downvote from me, because I don't vote on stories I don't read) and because I have a better reading list now which has been assembled over the course of two years, and because I follow a lot of the best writers on the site and I can always go fishing through various folks' back catalogs (I didn't get around to reading Ghost's stories until fairly recently, for instance). If I worked my way through all of the recommended stories on my RIL-Recommended shelf, I'd probably have a much harder time and end up downvoting a lot more stories.
I think that a lot of my reputation for downvoting stories comes from the fact that I downvote stories from good writers, rather than the absolute number of downvotes that I give out, though according to Razed Rainbow, who used to be a prereader and thus could see my voting history, at the time (sometime in the summer of 2013) my voting history was extremely negative at the time.
I feel like it's bad form to write this much in response to a review, but I am curious what you think of my thoughts.
I think your review of my story's pretty fair. I can see what you're talking about.
The books are kind of dumb, and that's my fault. I think I cut too much there. I originally had a passage where Twilight noticed an empty shelf on books about homosexuality, implying Celestia used the Forbidden Wing to store books that were too controversial now, but might be released to the public later when they became acceptable. I cut it because I felt it was overly political and raised more questions than it answered, but it might have made the purpose of the Forbidden Wing a bit clearer. It's supposed to be filled with vile things, horrifying things, but things that Celestia feels, for whatever reason, it would be a crime to forget. And usually, she's the only one that sees them.
Celestia being detached was mostly intentional. I felt she would need to become a bit detached in order to pull off her plan, and that after thousands of years of putting on airs, she would still be uncomfortable showing any sign of weakness in front of Twilight. That's why I tried to develop her feelings about what she did briefly, in the ending, after Twilight left. Not to mention, I like subtle ambiguity in stories, particularly in endings. Did I amp that up too much? Is that logic flawed? Or did Celestia just feel flat?
2728551
Her being detached makes perfect sense in-character; she isn't actually Luna's sister, Luna is a deliberate creation of her own design, and Luna has a bunch of memories of a life with Celestia that Celestia lacks. And Celestia has always had good emotional control.
I guess my real problem was that Celestia presented the situation but I never really got a good handle on Celestia's own emotional take on things, and I guess I wanted to know how this affected her as a person. Obviously she doesn't exactly wear her emotions on her sleeves (or hoofshoes, for that matter), but it would have been nice to have been given a bit more of a picture of it, as the potential emotional tension that creates is interesting. As such, it presented the what and the why, but it didn't really deal with how Celestia felt about it, which I felt was one of the most interesting questions.
I'm not really sure if it is correctable with the piece as-is, as it isn't really set up very well to capture Celestia's feelings on the matter; it was more of a "what could have been" rather than a "this can be fixed in the piece".
Forbidden books are all well and good, but the books you described simply didn't sound worthy of being forbidden, which was why there was such a disconnect there. I guess it was just the creative spark in me suggesting different things to make more sense of it, but making them seem more worthy of being forbidden might work as well.
And it isn't bad form to respond to my reviews; I'm fine with people responding and asking questions or what have you. I've had people make inquiries previously about more specific thoughts on pieces, and had folks discuss my reviews and their stories. Don't sweat it.
I find it interesting that you don't upvote stories. Granted, I use that as a signal to myself that I've read something (and until I've located and reviewed all the stories I've read on this site, it will be my best indicator to myself of such), but I've always downvoted anything I find middling. No sense in promoting mediocrity, after all. :B
Ratings explanation might be a bit lengthy to put at the start of every journal. Maybe just whenever someone asks, you put it on the next one? Also, if I learn anything from those descriptions, it's that a rating of "Recommended" or higher from you is a better thing than a "Not Recommended" is bad.
2728726
I've considered doing that. I'm sure the 300-odd stories on my neutral vote list would all appreciate that bit of advice.
And then the admins would be like "TD, what are you doing? You're downvoting all the stories," and I'd be like "I'm doing what I should have done a long time ago."
And then clench a cigar between my teeth. It wouldn't be lit, though. Smoking is bad for you.
EDIT: Actually, there's another reason for that category, namely incomplete stories that I haven't made up my mind on, which were interesting enough to follow but not so interesting that I'd upvote them.
Personally, I wouldn't be able to recommend There Is No Luna. There's too many holes in the story's logic. I'm willing to ignore the plotholes it could have due to history -- especially when Discord is involved, since he would have flat out told Luna the truth when he escaped -- since it's labeled AU. Fine, it can have a different history.
The problem is, the books are hidden in a place Luna would have full access to, and the information is also hidden in Celestia's brain, which Luna has full access to when she's sleeping. And now it's in Twilight's mind, which Luna can access. Like, it's being hidden in places that are practically right out in the open as far as she's concerned. She could discover it at any second. A better route would have been that she already knew but was choosing to be 'Luna'.
2729186
It isn't perfect. I ended up liking it well enough, though, that the plot holes didn't bother me.
I was amused by Fervidor's idea that Luna already knew and didn't care, though, and that might have made for a better story which better showed Celestia's emotional reaction to the whole thing.
2729273
Yeah, Fervidor's idea would have been a great direction for the story to go in. Perhaps even with the addition that Celestia knew Luna would figure it out eventually and hoped she'd react well in her new, saner state of mind.
2728620
I actually feel like I had a good handle on how Celestia felt. Between her justifying to Twilight that Luna was happy and had a family now and the closing line.
I do think more could have been done with the emotional tension and the morality, but I'm not sure if it could have been done in a 3000 word one-shot. Unless you wanted to have a lot of dialog of Celestia explaining how she felt, it seems like you would need a fair bit more story showing her interactions with Luna.
Why did you decide to review your own story? (not that I mind or am complaining)
2729609
I didn't. I was advertising it.
I did review my own stories once, in a big post a while back, as a sort of retrospective thing.
u w0t m8?
2729881
And no one pointed that out until you did.
THANKS EVERYONE.
2729919 Clearly you can't trust your friends. I recommend holding a party with rocks and flour and other inanimate objects.
2729927
Bah, Madame LeFlour is a terrible proofreader, and Rocky only reads trollfics.