Fic recs, May 28th! · 7:18pm May 28th, 2015
Also, Illya Leonov has done a reading of Riverdream at Sunset! Couldn’t ask for a better combination. :D
Today, I have somehow dredged up three fics meant to be bad, along with two that aren’t. Those two are the longfics I’ve been reading and listening to for a while now, so blogs will get back to regularity for a bit. (At least, until I add the next Youtube channel into my reading list.) I am, however, going to start working on more longfics, so expect a couple of vs. blogs in the nearish future. (Because, y'know, they're long. :B) I’m also currently focused on the OC slamjam, but that at least has gaps in between reading segments. (I won’t be releasing the whole review until the contest is done, if I haven’t said it already.) Enjoy!
H: 1 R: 1 C: 2 V: 1 N: 0
Alarm Clock by Meta Four
Genre: Metaphysical Comedic Adventure
Derpy has always been able to see things other ponies can’t. But she never thought her special talents would mean that she would have to save Ponyville from an eldritch horror all by herself!
I can’t praise this story enough. It’s very similar in idea to The Big Butterfly Brouhaha, because Derpy sees fairies, but has a much different tone. It’s clever and funny and charming all at once, not to mention a thrilling adventure. You’ve got nth-dimensional weirdness rubbing elbows with fairies and Lovecraftian horror in ways that fit together perfectly and are never obtuse. You’ve got some phenomenal callouts to the show, especially The Last Roundup, fitting Derpy’s wacky “you’d never see it on TV” hijinks comfortably into canon. (Remember when the whole season was one big Where’s Waldo with Derpy? Yeah.) Even more fantastic are the callouts to fanon, only a few of which I didn’t completely love (the oblique “it’s bigger on the inside”, for instance, which is balanced out by “I emptied your fridge” being a major plot point). In fact, the only thing I can really criticize on the whole is that the first few chapters feel unconnected, but given that the author started off meaning for this story to be a series of vignettes rather than a grand adventure, that makes sense. And it all makes sense, by the end. This is marvelous and you’ll not see another story like it, even if there’s another story kind of like it.
Highly Recommended
Celestia Kills a Teacup With Luna by KitsuneRisu
Genre: Crackfic
Celestia is about to meet with the latest gryphon dignitary. Things are not likely to go well for him.
Y’know, this might just be a parody of Cloud Hop's I’ll Kill You With My Tea Cup, but, y’know, I can’t entirely be sure. :V Anyway, even without that story grounding this one, this is marvelous. Celestia is hilariously out of character (and a total idiot), everything is exaggerated and overblown to ridiculous degrees, and the comedic timing is spot-on. If you enjoy cracking wise at the show characters, or at the fandom, don’t pass this up.
Recommended
A Story That Ignores Every Writing Tip I Have Ever Received by Protopony350
Genre: Trollfic
Big Mac has a plan: It is time to the stop the king!
For being “an attempt at the worst fic ever”, this has a suspiciously low number of downvotes. This is very much a trollfic of Protopony’s style, which is to say Argembargerish but with his own twists. It really does defy all standards of writing (an especial standout is a scene where the events leading up to that scene are dumped at the end). There’s something of an anime crossover in the middle, which was a pleasant surprise, and I love how a major plot point is just dropped halfway through without explanation. Overall, this is tons of fun, if you don’t mind things like “making no sense” and “being written extremely poorly”. :D
Troll Recommended
Rainbow Dash Explains to All of Her Friends What Updog Is by Aquaman
500th review of 2015!
Genre: Comedy
Pranking her friends proves to be quite a lot more difficult than Rainbow Dash expected.
So this was written as featurebox bait, but it didn’t work (though it’s got no downvotes, what a shocker!) The basic idea is amusing, but honestly? It’s a little dull. I mean, the funniest part of this is the author’s note. There are one or two good jokes by the end, but I’m not sure how many people are going to want to go through a couple iterations of the same scene to get there.
Vaguely Recommended
Awakening by solocitizen
Reading (part 1) by ChaoticSeven
Reading (part 1) by VisualPony
Genre: Science Fiction
Ten thousand years after the age of magic and harmony, a single pony crash-lands on an icy planet, where she’ll find out the fairy tales about Equestria that she loved reading as a child weren’t so mythical after all…
Of all the literary genres out there, none is so underrepresented in our fandom as sci-fi. And I’ve always been a huge sci-fi fan, so any time there’s a new story about ponies on spaceships, you better believe I’ll be jumping on it. This story was a fun romp through space with ponies, no doubt about that, and it gave me some stuff to think about, but overall? It was just okay, which is not something you really want to be saying about a piece you spent a lot of time reading and someone else spent more time writing.
What I got thinking about was the basic setup: You’ve got Lumina, who’s a unicorn living in a far-flung future without magic, but she has a book about the mythical land of Equestria (she even has the Elements of Harmony reference guide!) and she’s always believed it existed, along with magic, cutie marks, flying pegasi, the whole nine yards. Because she’s the only pony who’s held out hope against naysayers, the lack of actual magic in her life, and some rather extreme psychiatry, she’s of course the Chosen One who’s going to bring magic back into the world. And I got to thinking about how this kind of thing can be taken the wrong way: “ignore those who doubt your beliefs, and eventually you’ll be proven right”. Think about all the awful people on the internet, and in real life, who approach arguments with that mindset. (This is often written into BiE stories, too.) Of course, that’s an overreaction on my part (“Someone might take it the wrong way” is never a good argument), but it also got me thinking about how to do this sort of thing right. Enter Harry Potter. He’s the Chosen One, yeah, but his destiny has been completely hidden to him. He finds out about it despite all efforts to the contrary and then he gets really excited about all this magic shit because holy shit magic (and also holy shit, it’s way better than living under the stairs in his awful uncle’s house). And he ends up suffering a lot for his status, but it has nothing to do with whether or not he believes, just that he’s willing to do what must be done.
Anyway, back to this story. It’s presented in two halves: the present-day plot, where Lumina and her A.I. buddy Animus crash-land their ship on an icy planet and scramble for some way to repair it, and a series of scenes from Lumina’s past, walking us through her family issues, her planet being taken over by pegasi, and the reasons why she became a starship pilot for a courier company. Sadly, I found the latter plot far more interesting, even though I can’t say I got super-invested in Lumina as a character. By the end of the past plot, I was really entranced by her getting back to her planet and meeting her old boyfriend, and I felt her character arc was set up quite well.
As for the present plot, well, it’s got all the spaceships and alien planets and killer robot centipedes you could want, but that’s about it. Maybe it was some of the author’s choices that kept me from really getting immersed in the story. For instance, the crash landing damages Animus, reducing him to a basic ship’s computer, and Lumina ends up fixing him by getting him a new body (though I missed the logical leap to how that became the solution). So of course it’s a dragon. This is paired with Lumina trying to fight off her childhood, in the form of Twilight Sparkle talking to her. Yes, that Twilight Sparkle. No, she’s not crazy. The “awakening” suggested by the title is not the reemergence of Equestria from obscurity (I was surprised to learn that the icy planet was not Equestria, as I had anticipated), but of Lumina learning how to bring magic back into the world, as I think I’ve already said. How she goes about doing this is actually one of the story’s more interesting bits, but again, it kind of feels like, “Well, of course she’s doing this.”
The writing is decent, and the specifics of how the three tribes work together, or don’t, in this future is fun to piece together. There are a few quirks, like Lumina’s habit of bottling up emotions “next to her heart” (which I think is actually a plot point) and using the word ‘diagnosis’ instead of ‘diagnostic’, but overall, the worst thing I can say is that this story was never exciting. Not once did I find myself really wanting to know what happened next. I have no interest in reading the sequel, which isn’t finished yet, and that’s about the most damning thing I can say. If you like ponies in starships, this will scratch your itch, but I really can’t recommend it too strongly.
Recommended for Science Fiction Fans
I can't recommend Alarm Clock enough. It does everything for Derpy Hooves that I've been trying to do since I joined this site, and it didn't even need card games to do it.
i'm 0kay with that genre label
I regret nothing and apologize for less than that.
3105802 A pony fic without card games? 0/10. Don't bring that filth into my house.
I knew it.
I knew you liked tea.
You dirty whore.
I think that Awakening was the first fic I actually disliked, as in "feeling strong negative feelings about it." I really wanted to like it since, like you said, sci-fi is criminally underrepresented in the fandom (outside Doctor Who crossovers), but the whole thing is terribly anachronistic. The worst offender by far was the whole "electroshock therapy in space" angle, but there were plenty of other situations that just left me angry at the story, rather than at the characters who were taking the actions.