Read It Now Reviews #14 – Plural Possessive, A Darker Shade of Pink, The Cake of Aponyllado, The Mailmare, Life in the Wasteland · 6:46pm Jan 28th, 2015
Today’s set of reviews are entirely devoted to the More Most Dangerous Game competition; I read five stories, all from folks’ whose other works I have read or which were recommended to me, and I came away with a real winner, as well as some other solid efforts, even if some of them didn’t quite end up being quite good enough in the end.
Today’s reviews:
Plural Possessive by Aquaman
A Darker Shade of Pink by FanOfMostEverything
The Cake of Aponyllado by PresentPerfect
The Mailmare by Bad Horse
Life in the Wasteland by NorsePony
Plural Possessive
by Aquaman
Comedy, Slice of LifeThe plan, he thought, was perfect. Instead of returning to the mortal world as a shade of his former self, King Sombra would transmute his soul into the body of his greatest foe, using her influence and power to destroy Equestria from the inside and take vengeance on the Princesses that stole his beloved empire.
There's just one problem: after her fight with Tirek, Twilight Sparkle changed her address. This turns out to be a much bigger problem than Sombra thought. A Dinky-Doo-sized problem, to be precise.
Why I added it: Aquaman is a good writer.
Review
King Sombra possesses Dinky Do instead of Twilight Sparkle. He finds out that possessing a mortal means that they have as much power over him as he does over them, and their thoughts and deeds start to get mixed together in their combined heads as they struggle for control. And to add insult to injury, not only can Sombra not put Dinky fully under his control, but he can’t even end the spell without her consent.
Why would she not let him leave her mind?
Well, maybe she has a few favors she’d like him to do for her first…
Told from Sombra’s first-person perspective, we hear Sombra narrate every moment of this story in present tense, in a use of the present tense which actually works well in the context of the story. The story is a bit rough at first, as Sombra’s ranting at the start may go on a bit too long, but soon we get into some crosstalk between the pair, and Sombra’s loquaciousness and his general talking down to others as he rants and rages inside Dinky’s head, occasionally spilling out into rambling in the real world.
The story clocks in at 15,000 words, but certainly doesn’t feel so long; indeed, the second half of the story feels short somehow, as if the words are gliding by, though the first chapter felt like it was longer than it really was.
In the end, I’m left with mixed feelings about this story; I rather liked the ending, but I’m not so sure how much I liked a lot of the middle portions of the story. Sombra being sneeringly haughty is fun for a bit, but after a while it wears thin. Sombra’s interaction with the colts and fillies at Dinky’s school are alright, but are pretty brief and overall end up feeling almost too straightforward in many respects. Overall, the story was alright, but I’m not quite sure if it is quite worth the time.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
A Darker Shade of Pink
by FanOfMostEverything
Dark, Comedy, Slice of LifeOnce she got her wings, Twilight found herself with three times the magic to study. She's been spending time with her friends since, the better to understand how each does what she does.
Now it's Pinkie Pie's turn, and she thinks it's best if they discuss her abilities in her heavily soundproofed room. A bit unusual, but it's not like they'll be doing anything actually dangerous, right?
Right?
Set between Seasons 3 and 4.
Why I added it: It was one of the only Cupcakes prompt stories in The More Most Dangerous Game competition not to use the gore tag.
Review
This story is mistagged; it isn’t dark and it isn’t comedy, it is a pure slice of life piece. Or at least, that’s the closest thing there really is to it.
We have the now-common idea that some earth ponies are necromancers, an idea I rather like, but the “dark reveal” that Pinkie made really wasn’t very dark, nor was it worthy of the ending. There wasn’t anything horrifying about it, or even all that exciting in the end; ultimately, it was, I think, supposed to be dark somehow, but it just didn’t work at all, nor did it make sense. Stuff that Man is Not Meant To Know often is disappointing when we, the audience, find out what it is (as, after all, it won’t actually make us go mad) but it really didn’t work here.
The rest of the story was fairly decent; unfortunately, the story was all leading up to the disappointment at the end, and that left me disappointed.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
The Cake of Aponyllado
by PresentPerfect
Dark, Comedy, CrossoverPinkie told Rainbow Dash there was a surprise in the basement. It's a cake, hidden where nopony else will find it. Or her.
Why I added it: Present Perfect is a good writer, and so was Edgar Allen Poe.
Review
This is a pony parody of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado", a story about a man who gets a fellow nobleman drunk, chains him to the wall, and entombs him in an alcove behind a wall of bricks in the basement and leaves him to rot, buried alive.
Here, Pinkie Pie plays the role of the protagonist, Rainbow Dash the nobleman, food the alcohol, and cake the chains. The bricks continue to play as themselves, a role they have been excelling in for the last eight millennia or so.
This is a silly story of petty revenge over nothing of consequence, written in the style of Edgar Allen Poe, if Edgar Allen Poe was Pinkie Pie who had just read “The Cask of Amontillado” and had recently received a vocabulary book from Twilight Sparkle.
This is a silly light-hearted story about someone burying their friend alive in the basement for no good reason. I chuckled at it, both for the parody and for Pinkie Pie’s gross ineptitude in her task. Not to mention the fact that I’m pretty sure ponies can go right through brick walls if need be.
Recommendation: Worth Reading
The Mailmare
by Bad Horse
Dark, AdventureDerpy just wants to bring ponies their mail. She doesn't actually believe she can do anything to help stitch an Equestria torn to pieces by war back together.
She's wrong.
Why I added it: Bad Horse is a good writer, and I’ve always liked the idea behind The Postman.
Review
For those of you who are unaware, The Postman is a post-apocalyptic movie set in Oregon. A drifter stumbles across a dead postman, and takes the man’s clothes for warmth in the aftermath of World War III. Grabbing the man’s mail and packages, he brings them to a nearby town because he wants to sell them, but ends up instead coming up with the idea of the Restored United States – he’s a mailman, and if people are together enough to deliver mail, then by God, clearly things are getting better. Because he is clearly a servant of the government, they give him food and shelter, and he starts actually delivering mail for real, accidentally creating a postal service which ends up opposing the local crazed survivalist warlords and re-establishing civilization by re-establishing the IDEA of civilization. Because, you see, ultimately, what destroyed civilization wasn’t the bombs – it was the raiders, the survivalists, who didn’t care about anyone but themselves.
It is also a book, with a rather different plot, but much the same idea that what matters most are the idea of civilization, rather than the actual infrastructure of it – knowing that it exists makes it exist.
This story begins with Derpy delivering mail to a suspicious farmer who tries to shoot her before his son stops him, because who would shoot a mailmare? When they get a letter, they realize that she really IS out delivering the mail, and the farmer relents and decides to start planting flowers in addition to food – not just surviving, but thriving.
The rest of the story expounds on this theme. Derpy is captured by a group of raiders who are intent on raping her, but when she delivers a letter to one of them, he defends her from his compatriots (who, it quickly becomes clear, are pretty new at this – they don’t really seem to know what they’re doing) and the whole group decides to write letters and have her deliver them for her – in exchange for a can of food.
Derpy then goes to Appleoosa, where she nearly gets killed again before they recognize her and let her deliver the mail.
Shaken by her near-death experiences, eventually she goes up to deliver the mail to one of the raiders’ mothers, who is scared for her son and asks how he is. Derpy, however, will have none of it and leaves, refusing to even provide return service.
Returning to Ponyville, she is despairing, and feels like everything she did was a waste – no one cares about delivering the mail, and she contemplates burning it, along with herself, before she notices a letter on the floor…
As with The Postman, this is a story about civilization, and how fear keeps ponies apart – and how civilization, and treating other ponies in a civilized manner, can bring it back together again. All seen through the very personalized lens of one stubborn mailpony.
Recommendation: Recommended.
Life in the Wasteland
by NorsePony
AdventureTwo hundred years after a war that broke the world, a squad of soldiers travels across a blasted and hostile land on a mission for the future of Equestria. But they encounter a new kind of foe in the Wasteland that could endanger that very future.
Why I added it: Obsolescence recommended it to me.
Review
I feel like I’ve read this story before, the story of a group of soldiers going across the wasteland in hopes of making a better world. Though I have not read this particular story before, it has echoes of a hundred other tales I’ve read.
Our protagonist is Shepherd, an earth pony whose job it is to carry one of the magical Seeds that restore life to the magic-deficient wasteland. He is surrounded by a group of earth ponies, pegasi, and even a griffin whose job it is to defend him to the death so that he can accomplish his task – to plant a Seed in just the right spot to return a portion of the wasteland to life, restoring its magic so that the land can be lived on and farmed, and to drive back the monsters of the wastes.
Over the course of the story, we meet several of his squadmates, and we see them confront a somewhat alien menace – a group of changelings, monsters which they don’t recognize but believe to be beasts of the wasteland rather than naturally occurring creatures which had survived the end of the world. I was somewhat disappointed that the story never made a point of this fact – the fact that we, the audience, know that the changelings existed prior to the end of the world, and then the fact that it is never expanded upon, is a bit disappointing. They struggle, one of their number dies, but in the end the group manages to plant a Seed and restore life to the wastes.
The formatting on this story bothered me; the inconsistent white-space between paragraphs (or the lack thereof) bothered me more than if it had been consistently one way or the other. I think it looks better with white space, personally, but in any case, the inconsistency made for somewhat weird reading.
However, I think my single largest gripe with this story was that it was more or less exactly what I expected out of a story like this, and I never really got to know any of the characters beyond the most obvious of archetypes – I didn’t really know them as people, not even the protagonist, and that was a bit disappointing. Instead, I felt like it was a fairly generic group of soldiers making their way through the waste to use the GECK.
It isn’t a bad story; it is reasonably well-written apart from the formatting issues and the flow of the story, and the plot that holds the story together, all work well enough. It just felt generic to me, like I’d already read it before and it didn’t do anything to stand out from the other stories of that sort that I’ve read. I didn’t really regret my time with it, but it is hard for me to say that someone else should read a 15,000 word story that I felt ultimately didn’t do anything new, or execute it so well that it gripped me.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
Summary
Plural Possessive by Aquaman
Not Recommended
A Darker Shade of Pink by FanOfMostEverything
Not Recommended
The Cake of Aponyllado by PresentPerfect
Worth Reading
The Mailmare by Bad Horse
Recommended
Life in the Wasteland by NorsePony
Not Recommended
I think that there will be some real competition for the top spot in the More Most Dangerous Game; The Mailmare and Arcadia are both strong contenders, and there are several other contenders for the other high spots.
Plus, if you haven't read Ruin Value yet, you totally should. Horizon even wrote one of his little Never the Final Word minific add-ons to it down in the comments.
Number of stories still listed as "Read It Later - Recommended": 185
Number of stories listed as “Read It Later”: 1546
>tfw beating Aqua, FOME and Norse
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You're completely right about how chapter 1 sets up the story's theme, but the funny thing is I didn't plan that at all. I'd been staring at a blank Google doc for 2 days, unable to write, and had less than a week left, and I decided to just start typing something with Derpy delivering mail, as a warm-up, to get me into what is now chapter 2, which I'd thought of as the story's opening. I planned to throw it away. I chose the name "Flower" because I wanted to play a game--I'd come up with a bunch of different pony first names that all matched some last name, but never mention the last name. And I liked the idea of ponies who used to grow flowers now needing to grow beans. It wasn't until I'd written the entire scene, and was looking for some way to show that the letter had an effect on them, that I thought of planting flowers.
2753916
It worked very well. I think you've got a pretty good shot at winning the whole thing, though I've only read something like 15 stories.
Of course, I'm not a judge, so...
2753877
Well, yeah. Yours was actually good.
2754163
I'm now starting to doubt the overall quality of the contest entries. Of which I have so far only read one.
2754627
I've listed a bunch of the ones I've read here.
I haven't seen a My Little Dashie or Past Sins story yet which I'd recommend, and I suspect that Arcadia is the only good Anthropology story (though it is probably a top contender). Looking through the Cupcakes stories I haven't read (it has been surprisingly fertile ground, though it has also produced several stories which just didn't do it for me) there are a couple names I recognize (Grand Moff Pony, Pascoite) which could be alright. Some folks have spoken well of Comet Burst's Past Sins entry, but I'm skeptical.
Unfortunately, I'm mostly going by author reputation and recommendation, because most of these stories sound awful from their short descriptions - Arcadia, Please, Count to Five, The Mailmare, The Cake of Aponyllado, and Plural Possessive are the only ones where I read their descriptions and was like, "This could be interesting." And frankly, I probably wouldn't have read Plural Possessive if it wasn't by Aquaman. The Marching Madness was far better than I would have expected it to be from its short description, as was Panacea.
2754727
Unfortunately, you'll have to wait a while to get my opinions on them. :B
2754727
I haven't read any of them yet, and to be honest probably don't plan to, except for one or two whose author I'm following. I don't really have the time these days to commit to much reading aside from stuff that's recommended to me.
2756169
Yeah, makes sense. The judges will be going through all the entries anyway; I'm just being a bit silly looking at them.
I only have five more that I plan to look at, though, at this point (though I've several days worth of review posts which I haven't posted at this point).