Read It Later Reviews #18 – Treehouse, Fluttershy has Tea with Jesus, Open to Interpretation!, Burning Man Brony: Fear and Loathing in Equestria, A Princess by Any Other Name · 10:46pm May 15th, 2015
Yesterday, I read the entirety of Mort and several works of pony fanfiction, and added a thousand words to Mistletrapped.
Today, I read the better half of Pyramids and several works of pony fanfiction, and shall add another thousand words, if not more, to Mistletrapped.
Seems I’ve had a couple of pretty good days here, doubly so as I enjoyed several of today’s stories.
Today’s stories:
Treehouse by Present Perfect
Fluttershy has Tea with Jesus by Retsamoreh
Open to Interpretation! by Souldin
Burning Man Brony: Fear and Loathing in Equestria by Bad Horse
A Princess by Any Other Name by Skywriter
Treehouse
by PresentPerfect
Romance, Sad
1,988 wordsShe stumbles into the Whitetail Woods one last time, to finish what she'd started so many years before...
Why I added it: Bradel wrote a blog post about it a long time ago that I happened to stumble across.
Review
Apple Bloom goes out to put the finishing touches on a house she has been building out in a copse of trees ever since the day she got her cutie mark. It means a great deal to her for some reason, but she doesn’t seem to want her friends to know about it…
This is a very introspective story, moving between Apple Bloom’s actions in the present and her reminiscing about the past, and in so doing revealing the significance of the house to her. The story does a good job of interweaving a bunch of hints about the true significance of her task and just why it is that she is keeping knowledge of the place secret from her friends, one of whom she is in love with.
If you like quiet, introspective sadfics, this might be up your alley, but similar to Beneath Your Feet, What Treasures, this is a story about a seemingly mundane task with a great amount of significance to the person who is performing it. If that story was up your alley, you might like this one, but if you didn’t like it, it would be best to steer clear.
The discovery of her special talent had fueled her decision to return to these woods and continue the project. She'd cut a usable but invisible trail through thick trees and pristine undergrowth. She'd moved wood plank by plank across the small lake in the forest's heart until she'd grown strong enough to fell trees on her own, and then made a rope bridge for return trips. And that didn't even include all the days and nights of relentless planning. Despite the myriad injuries and delays, despite the seemingly insurmountable enormity of this undertaking, she knew straight to the marrow of her bones she could finish it.
Even finding the right spot to build had presented a formidable challenge. She'd almost missed the tree -- an oak that, as a sapling, had witnessed Nightmare Moon's banishment -- nearly passing by an otherwise perfect spot. From the slope, she could just make out its sprawling, writhing limbs through a tangle of trees whose trunks barely matched those branches' girth. Scootaloo would have jokingly referred to this forest as a "wingbreaker". Those conversations had always ended in awkward silence.
Her friends ultimately had presented the most insurmountable of obstacles. It had become easier not to spend every moment with them as they grew and pursued their talents individually. The necessity of making excuses faded, though the guilt over her obfuscations never lessened, not when both Sweetie and Scootaloo so enjoyed describing da capo arias and death-defying stunts. She just couldn't let on in the slightest what she did on those days she vanished from everypony's radar, not until after she'd finished, no matter how long it took.
And of course, Sweetie could never know.
Recommendation: Worth Reading
Flutershy has Tea with Jesus
by Retsamoreh
Comedy, Random, Slice of Life, Human, Whimsy
2,556 wordsFluttershy has tea with Jesus and absolutely nothing objectionable happens.
Why I added it: Horse Voice pointed it out to me after I expressed disappointment at another “Fluttershy meets Jesus” story.
Review
This is a weird story.
Written in a very whimsical style, this documents the meeting of Jesus with Fluttershy, as the two take tea. Fluttershy has been very busy with her animals lately, but rather than hiding and waiting for Jesus to go away, she ended up sitting down and having tea with him and talking to him for a bit, wherein he gives her an important life lesson.
I’m not really sure why it had to be Jesus, here; probably to increase the level of absurdity. The whole story is written in a way to make clear that the world is absurd, and Jesus being Fluttershy’s guest only furthers that notion. Unfortunately, the whimsy didn’t really touch me; while it was mildly amusing at some points, at other points it felt like it wandered off-track just for the sake of being funny, and it didn’t always end up paying off all that well.
It isn’t a bad story by any means, but it felt fairly insubstantial, and the life lesson that Fluttershy learned felt very, well, random – it made sense, I suppose, but the nature of the story otherwise really made it feel a bit odd that Fluttershy actually learned a lesson here.
All in all, I’m not really sure I can recommend it; the story felt all over the place, and while the whimsical tone of the writing was good, it just didn’t feel directed enough.
To say that it was a beautiful day in Equestria was a lot like saying Fluttershy was good with animals. Birds were chirping in a controlled panic, as if each shrill peep would be its last, while flowers gently rolled in the wind like they strived to be stalks of wheat. Silly amounts of woodland creatures scurried about, much like woodland creatures generally do, and each bore an unsettling smile on its face. At least, it would look unsettling in any other setting, but here in Equestria it was a fairly common occurrence. Much like breathing, if you went around asking ponies.
The Everfree forest groaned, and slowly slunk its millennia old body across the landscape, its very heart beating only once per year. It is commonly thought that the Ursa Major is the largest sentient being in existence, but those in the know happen to be very aware that the assumption was false. The Everfree was a massive turtle of a creature, reaching its flippers around the world in its never ending mission, which only it knew of. Its focus, as it had been for decades, was turning towards a spot upon itself that had been rudely chopping it into bits with tiny tools. It had yet to realize it, but a small town had taken up residence around where its right kidney should’ve been. On the very edge of that town was a cottage, which contained one of the four beings that had figured out that the Everfree was more of a creature than a forest; one lived near its spleen and the other two atop a mountain.
Her name was Fluttershy, and it will take the Everfree more than a century to receive the news that she is currently having tea with a pleasant stranger who had shown up at her door. On any other day, she might’ve denied such a request, and hidden under the couch for an hour, but today she was feeling rather peculiar. Almost, perhaps, brave.
If one were to be granted the knowledge, they would see that this was predetermined. She would be brave, and it did not matter why she had come to that decision, because it was predetermined and the Fates didn’t need a reason. Unfortunately, it had been originally scheduled for next Tuesday, when a tornado was destined to rip through town and she would be tasked with saving several families. The Fates had left their intern in charge while they went off to their book club meeting.
So it came to pass that Fluttershy would be sitting on a soft pillow, made of a fine royal purple, laced with golden strands that some beautiful maiden must sorely miss. Opposite her, on a similar but far more burdened pillow, was a well-built man in a white robe. What skin she could see was tanned and muscular, calloused from years of hard work.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
Open to Interpretation!
by Souldin
Romance, ComedyDuring the Mane 6’s battle against the changelings Rarity witnesses a moment between two of her friends that implies that they are more than just friends, and after the royal Canterlot wedding draws to a close, decides to inform the other members of the Mane 6. Disagreements arise as the four pony’s debate on both the reason for this moment between two of their friends and whether it actually occurred at all and so they begin to discuss their own interpretations of the event Rarity believes she saw.
Why I added it: This is a story about the rest of the cast trying to figure out whether or not Rainbow Dash kissed Fluttershy in A Canterlot Wedding and, if so, what it means.
Review
In light of having four extremely serious stories, I figured it might be nice to throw in a fifth story that reinterpreted canon in a sillier way.
Open to Interpretation! is about Applejack, Rarity, Twilight Sparkle, and Pinkie Pie arguing over whose interpretation of the “kiss” (or the not kiss) that happened in A Canterlot Wedding is correct. Each character interprets the scene in their own way – Rarity, of course, sees it as a terribly romantic thing, while Applejack and Twilight both have more down to earth explanations, and Pinkie Pie’s is… well, very Pinkie Pie.
This story is funny, but is marred by a major problem: the writing sucks. I don’t mean the actual content, but the presentation is quite poor. There are a lot of awkward descriptions, and the story contains a fairly large amount of purple prose and unnecessarily telly descriptions. We have some Lavender Unicorn Syndrome, with Applejack being described as a “southern pony” on at least one occasion, and Applejack’s accent is described in a very telly manner.
I first read this story ages and ages ago, but while it is a very cute idea, the execution is very poor. Still, if you can put up with the prose, and if the idea of ponies speculating about their friends kissing amuses you, this might be up your alley.
With two swift blows the four Rainbow Dash’s surrounding the cowering Fluttershy became but one, the real one, looking down at her friend with a pleased smile. Yet the yellow coated pony did not greet her friend with immediate gratitude, but with a shaky expression of uncertainty. Sure, before Fluttershy was the familiar ravishing rainbow mane of her friend, the familiar well toned body of her friend, and the rarely seen but still familiar sweet smile of her friend, worry continued to linger in her mind. For all she knew it could simply be a trick; a changeling in disguise, with a crafty plan in mind.
Her time to deduce such things was over once a grinning Rainbow Dash gently used her powerful forelegs to carry the worried pegasus off the ground. As her closet and oldest friend, the athlete knew when her charmingly timid companion was troubled, and noticed the glimmers of doubt expressed in her shining teal pools. Before lifting her off the ground Rainbow had been smiling, but with a plan; a course of action that would remove all doubt from Fluttershy’s mind, she beamed.
The cyan pegasus held her friend in her hooves, brought the shy mare’s face close to her, and kissed her on the nose. The act worked; as they moved apart the soft peck removed all doubt and gave both airborne ponies a matching smile. Their thoughts began to match as their minds wandered into the territory of their secret romantic relationship. Born from having loved one another since fillyhood, it was a secret to their friends that when the two were alone they would whisper sweet nothings to one another, and gaze longingly into each other’s eye--
"A’hm gonna have ta stop you there Rare.” Applejack interrupted with a hurried pace.
Two ponies sat at one of the many small circular tables that were placed within the expansive and expensive lounge area. Seated next to one another on large, cushiony chairs that felt like paradise for one, but too soft and squishy for the other, they spoke with one another as the good friends they were.
“A’hm pretty sure Rainbow an Fluttershy aren’t secretly datin’.” The orange earth pony, Applejack, said with her thick southern accent.
“Well...I may have added in the part about them being in a relationship but it would explain a lot, the rest of what I saw did occur.” The white unicorn, Rarity, replied with a flick of her purple mane and a slight giggle at the very thing she had witnessed.
Recommendation: Worth Reading if you can deal with the prose.
Burning Man Brony: Fear and Loathing in Equestria
by Bad Horse
Tragedy, Human
9,568 wordsSometimes, you really can go out into the desert and find yourself with the help of a bag of mushrooms and some ponies. Sometimes, you're better off not knowing.
Why I added it: It was one of the last two Bad Horse stories I have not yet read.
Objectionable content warning: Drug use and cursing.
Review
An exploration and criticism of a certain sort of self-defeating cynical mindset, this story really feels pretty literary, like a short story I would read in a magazine rather than a piece of pony fanfiction. This isn’t a bad thing, but you should know going in that you’re reading something which is very tonally disparate from most stories on the site.
Told from the first-person perspective, the narrator’s name is never given anywhere in the story. A lonely man who does software database engineering, he goes off to Burning Man in order to discover the magic of friendship and comraderie amongst the so-called burners. For those of you who are unaware of what Burning Man is, this story tells you what you need to know; a hippie retreat off in the desert, an escape from consumerism, and (apparently) an excuse to take a bunch of drugs with strangers.
The protagonist holds most drugs in low regard, and seems to hold his fellow burners in low esteem, but chooses to take psilocybin, stating that it “shows you things”, the narrator describing it as seeing things unfiltered and uncorrected, and seeing things from the inside of your mind. He then wanders around Burning Man for a while before wandering out into the desert accidentally, not realizing that he has done so as he begins to hallucinate the presence of ponies.
Or does he? As the hallucination proceeds, it becomes less and less clear to the audience, if not to the narrator, that he is, in fact, hallucinating, and not actually contacting the ponies in some strange way. What is interesting to see is the contrast between the first chapter and the succeeding ones.
In the first chapter, we see that the narrator is a cynical man, but we also see him being observant. We notice him recognizing the idiocy around him, the dangers of Burning Man, and see that he is aware of things. We learn that he is smart.
But in the second chapter, we also see that he is not. The man is very cynical and thinks he understands what is wrong with him, and why he is alone. And while he is half-right in his understanding of his loneliness, he fails to recognize his own personal failings, and even when the mane six, in his various hallucinations, try to help him recognize what is wrong and rotten inside himself, the things that he can’t let himself see because he doesn’t want to recognize that the world is more complicated than the cynical, twisted version he has built up in his mind that he doesn’t fit into, he rejects them in an increasingly flailing manner.
The story seems to be, on the whole, a rejection of a certain brand of cynicism that seems to be all too common at times – the rejection of the world being corrupt, as well as the rejection of self-defeating cynicism and the idea that merely knowing something doesn’t mean that it isn’t a problem. Just because you see further than some people and can recognize some things as stupid does not mean you understand the depths of your own failings. In the end, the narrator is his own greatest enemy, and is both protagonist and antagonist in his own tale.
I am not part of the "drug culture". I don't go in for anything more addictive than codeine. I don't touch LSD since this time at my house I was in the process of undressing a beautiful and horny young woman who was visiting from California and had used a lot of it there back in the day, and something triggered a flashback and she started panicking and ended up sleeping on my couch. Weed and alcohol are mildly amusing, that's all, and they both eventually make you stupid. Or maybe the potheads I knew had started that way? I wasn't going to run that experiment.
To name psilocybin in the same breath as those things is a sin. Shrooms show you things. The inside of your head is like a metropolitan airport, with planes flying in from all directions or lining up to take off, and there's a little man in there who's saying, "You line up over there, you two start your approach now on parallel runways, you hold and follow that other plane five minutes behind."
Psilocybin puts that little man to sleep. You start seeing, hearing, feeling, and thinking things unfiltered, uncorrelated. One moment, you're intensely aware of the pull of gravity. The next, the scent of baked stone from the gravel underfoot. The next, the whisper of a couple walking by on the other side of the streets pours into your ear, painfully loud. You see the patterns your well-meaning air traffic controller thinks you're better off not seeing.If you focus on something, you'll see it just as you normally would. You have to deliberately unfocus, let yourself drift, until things start creeping in around the edges. You have to work at it, with a Zen kind of un-work.
Shrooms don't lie, but they don't tell the truth. They just show you what's already inside you. I wouldn't call them dangerous, chemically. But I wouldn't call them safe.
Burning Man is the worst possible place on the surface of the Earth to experiment with drugs, short of the slopes of Everest. Nobody wants to sit with you for hours and supervise your trip, unless they're already so stoned that somebody should be keeping them away from you. Just finding a shady place to sit can be a challenge. If you take off your hat, or forget to drink water, or fall asleep—all easy even for a sober person to do—it's heatstroke and a severe sunburn. If you need to vomit, good luck reaching the porta-potty a quarter of a mile away and cleaning up afterwards with no water. If you wander off into the desert, you may die.
On the other hand, you can walk down the street wearing dark goggles to hide the bugged-out look in your eye, and no one will think it's strange. Or at least that's what I was hoping. I sat on a sofa in the shade at the Lost Penguin, God bless them. I would have loved a drink, but I'd run out of gift trinkets. I knew the bartender would give me a drink for free if I asked. He had to. It was Burning Man. He might ask me to do some kind of sexual pantomime, or he might give me a dirty look. Or he might just smile. But I couldn't bring myself to ask. I couldn't get my head into the universal friendship bullshit that was supposed to make everything work by gifting. Like that was some kind of social experiment. Like the people in Reno and Dallas and Kansas City would look at us and suddenly say, "Hey, we don't need money! We can give everything away for free!" and dance in the streets around bonfires of burning dollar bills hugging and kissing each other. Maybe in San Francisco and Austin. I was starting to appreciate how Hoover had felt about communists.
Recommendation: Recommended.
A Princess by Any Other Name
by Skywriter
Comedy
6,144 wordsPrincess Cadence tries to legally change her name to "Princess Cadance." Footnotes ensue. Part of the "Cadance of Cloudsdale" cycle, and a crossover with Ghost of Heraclitus's Civil Service stories. Familiarity with neither is required.
Why I added it: I’ve enjoyed the Cadance of Cloudsdale stories thus far, and a crossover with the Civil Service stories that I so enjoy is a welcome thing to read.
Review
Princess Cadence wants to change her name from Princess Cadence to Princess Cadance, legally, and poor Dotted Line, as a much younger bureaucrat than we see in Ghost of Heraclitus’s stories, has to deal with her and her dubiously enchanted “birth certificate” – or, the closest thing that passes for one for a princess who was a child for nine hundred years. The only thing standing between Princess Cadance and her new name is a five hundred page long piece of paperwork which was apparently due two days ago.
A footnotes comedy in the vein of Ghost of Heraclitus’s work, the influence of Pratchett’s particular narrative style – and Ghost’s particular narrative style – both show up very clearly here, and the wonderful (and very British) whimsical style of the text is very fun indeed. There is fun wordplay, the contrast of the ridiculous with the even more ridiculous (and sometimes, if it can manage, the very mundane), and a great deal of clever dialogue which manages to do the job of making the reader laugh quite admirably. The story got better the longer it went on, and by the time we got to the end of the document I was pretty thoroughly amused.
If you enjoyed Ghost of Heraclitus’s Civil Service stories – and if you haven’t yet done so, you should – you will definitely enjoy this. But reading those stories is not required; this works just fine as a stand-alone work, and will likely see you smiling by the end.
"Apparently, my actual birth records were annihilated in the same metaphysical calamity which wiped my rightful empire from the face of Equestria," said the Princess, with an offhoofed gesture. "This is as good as you're going to get. It's an unbroken nine-hundred year chronicle of my foalhood under the care of the Sisterhood of Song in the ancient fortress-city of Reduit. It contains height, weight, dietary information, medical data, and far too many picture plates and anecdotal accounts for my, or anypony's, taste."
Dotted flipped several pages into the meat of the book. "'And Lo, on the Thirteenth Hour of the Thirty-Fifth Day of the Year of Sheep, the Princess-Goddess did request the Camelopard Song be sung to her so that Her Radiant Self could Settle Down for Nap-Nap Time. And then She did request it Again. And Again. And Lo, once more, Again. Then did Sister Euphonium declare that she was Quite Fed Up with the bloody Camelopard Song already, and, in speaking thusly, did set down the Dictum: It is Meet that Good Little Deities shall request no more than Two Successive Repetitions of the Camelopard Song before their Nap-Nap. And then she did make further Proclamations regarding Evening Cups of Water, to wit...'" Dotty turned over a few more pages. "Oh, and here's a very nice etching of you sitting on a little stool."
"That's, um, not a stool."
He blinked. No more diapers! proclaimed the enthusiastically-embellished lettering beneath the etching. The sheer volume of joyful illumination attached to the script suggested very strongly that the scribe responsible had, in her off hours, been intimately connected to the Princess-Goddess's changing-rituals and was quite frankly glad to see the end of them. Dotted harrumphed and quickly shut the codex. "Yes, well," he said.
"It's not ideal," said the Princess. "Especially since some ponies tell me that its status as a sacred relic and centuries-old object of worship have given it a limited degree of sapience and an unpredictable aura of wild magic, but I have to say I haven't noticed anything unusual."
...fRrReEeEeEeE uSsSsss..., said a voice, as a gout of brackish seawater fell from the ceiling and shattered into droplets against the waxed surface of the interview table.
"Wow," said the Princess, chuckling and glancing upward. "That's some plumbing you got there."
Recommendation: Highly Recommended
Summary
Treehouse by Present Perfect
Worth Reading
Fluttershy has Tea with Jesus by Retsamoreh
Not Recommended
Open to Interpretation! by Souldin
Worth Reading
Burning Man Brony: Fear and Loathing in Equestria by Bad Horse
Recommended
A Princess by Any Other Name by Skywriter
Highly Recommended
Admittedly, I actually read Treehouse, Fluttershy has Tea with Jesus, and Open to Interpretation! A while ago, and only just got around filling out the review set with the last two stories, but I am very glad that I did – the last two were both good reads, and stories I had put off reading for far too long.
Number of stories still listed as Read It Later – Important: 65
Number of stories still listed as Read It Later – High Priority: 251
Number of stories listed as Read It Later: 1565
Well, this seems like a good excuse to reread A Princess by Any Other Name. Inasmuch as I need one.
Whoo, WR! That's a World Record! andalsoyourquotebrokeattheend
3071799
Thanks, good catch.
3071805
No, but I'm glad you read that, as I consider it to be one of my best stories. :)
Loved Princess by Any Other Name and have had it faved for some time, as well as a copy of The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents sitting on my bedroom sidetable for most of two years now. It's about worn out.
I remember reading Burning Man Brony and thinking it was a great story, but I hated the protagonist enough for it to be a deeply unpleasant read.
Glad you liked Burning Man Brony, but, wow, looking at that quoted section now, I'm not happy with its style. I'm sure it was snappier when I wrote it.
3072406
That's understandable. I think the story can be an uncomfortable read for some folks because they either recognize small bits of themselves in the narrator, or have encountered people like him; he has a certain sense of verisimilitude to him. Consequently, we can actually dislike him as a person for his behavior and the fact that he didn't learn anything, despite being given the opportunity, though hopefully the audience gains something out of reading his tale.
Have you read or reviewed the story "Wear Flowers in Your Mane"? It's fucking great.
4131346
Nope. It is on my list though. Gave it a bump up to a higher priority list.
4131650
It's pretty good and was finished recently. I'd put it in my top 10, but I can't wait to see your opinion on it.