xjuggernaughtx's Top Down Review #2 - Sunny Skies All Day Long · 1:25am Jul 25th, 2015
Spoiler Free Summary
Sunny Skies All Day Long is a standard, takes-no-risk, show-style story. The plot could easily be an episode, which is good in a macro sense, but bad in the micro. The characterizations are overall pretty good, but highlight some underlying problems with the overall construction of the story.
Plot and Characterization
The age of this story make it quite interesting. It was published just about three years ago. That put it just after I joined Fimfiction, so it’s a notable time for me. What I really find fascinating about it is that it’s chock full of all kinds of things that everyone is warned never to do, yet it was, and is still, incredibly popular.
Weather report opening: Check.
Telling issues: Check.
Overblown accent for the Apple family: Check.
Main character doggedly runs into the Mane Six individually: Check
I’ll quit before this gets tiring, but you get the point. This is an older story that was written when we were all much more forgiving, I guess, but it brings up questions that I’m still struggling with to this day. Do people really hate those things, or are we just an echo chamber that gives the same advice over and over again when it really has no meaning? Do people really care of AJ says “Ah” instead of “I” if the story is still good, or is it only a big issue is there are other problems. To hear people talk about it, using the Southern “Ah” is akin to punching a kitten, but it doesn’t seem to hamper the popularity of lots of stories. Would they be even more popular without it? Who knows? It’s interesting, though.
Let’s reel this review back in before it gets too off topic, shall we? Sunny Skies All Day Long earns its Slice-of-Life tag, that’s for sure. I do love my SoL stories. We follow Princess Celestia around as she tries to have a day off in Ponyville, incognito-style.
Now, while the overall plot of this is sound, the details of it are questionable. I want to make this clear because I’m going to spend a lot of time picking things apart after this. I enjoyed the overall ideas and presentation of within the story. I like the plot progression, though I find it a little convenient at times. I read this all in one sitting without a break, which is rare for me. Usually something irritates me enough to need a little break so that I can steel my resolve and head back into the breach. What I’m getting at is that I like the big picture, but when I zoom in, there are things within the structure that I don’t care for.
Luna and Celestia come up with a disguise plan after Celestia confides that she’s tired of being royal. Celestia wants to go to Ponyville to “test her disguise,” but spends a little too much energy worrying about being discovered. So which is it? Do you want a relaxing day off, or are you testing a theory, Celestia? I get that she doesn’t want the experiment to fail, but it’s just an awkward setup to me. If you wanted to relax, go someplace else where your prized pupil isn’t going to be.
Whatever. It’s a contrivance to make the story work. I’m guilty of it, as well. Sometimes you just have to shrug and go with things. But as I said, it’s the details of this that often drag it’s overall interesting plot down. For example: Celestia needs to hide her cutie mark. Logical.
Her solution? She puts a big sticker over it.
…
But… she’s covered in fur. It’s not really going to stick. I mean, unless we are talking about some kind of magical sticker, but if that’s the case, then just give me a little detail, you know? It may sound like nitpicking, but when enough of these kinds of things come up, it pulls me out of the story.
Another example: Celestia needs to hide her horn so that ponies don’t see she’s an alicorn. Okay, I’m on board. That’s a good idea. But how does she do it? She makes it invisible. But imagine that you make the index finger on your right hand invisible. It’s going to leave a circle of bone, muscle, and blood vessels visible. Now, if you tell me that you are creating an illusion of smooth skin there, that’s a different story. But as it is presented, I have to wonder why this now invisible horn doesn’t like a big scar. These kinds of details matter to me. Any one of them is nitpicking, but taken together, they indicate that an author isn’t thinking about what kinds of questions these things will bring up.
Once her disguise is in place, Princess Celestia heads over to Ponyville and persistently runs into the Mane Six for general hijinks. This kind of thing annoys a lot of people, but I’m fine with it. It’s kind of a universal law for this kind of cartoon, and thus it’s fanfiction. You may as well be mad that the dumb teenagers went into the basement to investigate the creepy noise or that the action hero still hasn’t run out of bullets. To me, if she ran into the Mane Six in ways that made no sense or felt overly contrived, I’d have an issue, but just that she does is perfectly fine in my eyes. Operative word is ‘overly’ there because some of it is eyebrow raising in its convenience.
What I do have an issue with is the range of characterization, and that’s a drum you will probably hear me beating a lot. In this story, Twilight feels very authentic. Celestia is fine, though kind of bland. Applejack feels very Applejack-y, despite some groan-worthy bad Southern dialogue. Rainbow has one or two questionable pieces of dialogue, but is mostly well-written. Fluttershy is barely there, but inoffensive.
However, I have a minor issue with Rarity and a major one with Pinkie.
Let’s tackle Rarity first. Her dialogue choices are surprisingly rude, even to the point of her acknowledging it later in the story. Everyone has off days, but if any of the Mane Six are going to be on their P’s and Q’s with a stranger, it seems like it ought to be Rarity. Second, she just up and decides to pay for Celestia’s spa trip and then make her a dress. I mean, it get that she’s generous, but this feels a little much. I think the issue here is that PhantomFox is writing this as he would write any of the other Mane Six. If we swapped out Twilight for Sunny Skies, it would feel quite natural. She does remarkably generous things for her friends all the time. However, this is a stranger that has just wandered into the spa Rarity happens to be in. Am I to believe that Rarity just does this kind of thing on a regular basis? She certainly wasn’t feeling so open-hearted when Zecora came to town...
Let’s hold onto that thought because I suspect I have the answer, but I need to talk about Pinkie first.
Pinkie completely derails this story for me. I have a feeling that PhantomFox doesn’t really know what to do with Pinkie because each time she shows up, she just does something from an episode. I mean that literally. Every time she appears, it’s a recycled scene from the show.
She first appears by popping out of a basket of fruit. Green Isn’t Your Color
She sees Sunny Skies, leaps into the air and gasps, then runs off. Friendship is Magic, Part 1
She’s looking for Sunny Skies because her ears are floppy. Feeling Pinkie Keen
She next pops her head out of the bucket of sponges Green Isn’t Your Color
Finally, she throws Sunny a party, which I can’t blame the author for, but it’s exactly the same party as in any episode.
There is referencing episodes, and then there is wholesale taking from them. This is the latter. I don’t really think it’s malicious or anything, but I think it’s a pervasive problem with this story. PhantomFox is too often going back to the show to get his ideas. Rainbow can’t control her flight and crashes into a tree. Rarity meets Sunny and must give her a makeover and make her a dress, just as she does to Twilight in the first episode. Pinkie just goes through all the Pinkie things that Pinkie has done whenever she appeared. It’s a big turnoff to me when I have to think, “Yeah, I saw that episode, too.” Even the pivotal moment, where Celestia ends up outing herself, it a callback directly to the show. Instead of feeling in the moment, it made me go, “You’re going there again?” Again, if these were isolated cases, it wouldn’t be egregious, but they all happen in the same story. It’s that kind of minor detail that turns into a major problem when viewed together as a whole.
As I said above, and as is the way with a story such as this, Celestia is discovered and it turns out that her friends are supportive. It ends pleasantly and has an overall positive feel. I finished this story feeling just slightly right of neutral toward it. It’s very mildly good.
Technical Stuff
First things first, awkward phrasing. Man, so much of it. We’re all going to have a weird turn of phrase from time to time, but there were just so many in this story. Here are some examples:
Mentally poking inward at herself, she noted that the power of the sun was still there, but dormant.
No pony ever forgot Pinkie Pie after meeting her once.
”T’ain't the cart we’re having problems with, it’s this darn mud we’re having problems with!”
“Yes, I’m fine, if a bit messy. I’m a bit sore, but I don’t hurt.”
Celestia relented and put on a robe and let herself be led into the spa proper by Rarity.
“Most of my collection is mostly research.”
This is the tip of the iceberg. Once again, just one or two of these wouldn’t be any issue at all, but when half the paragraphs on a page have a phrase that makes my brow furrow, it makes it hard to keep in the story groove.
And speaking of paragraphs, this story breaks for each piece of dialogue regardless of whether the paragraph before was describing action from that same character. Like so:
Celestia’s face froze and her wings flared at the reference, hitting the attendant behind her in the snout.
“Oh, I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to-”
The mareseuse gently folded Celestia’s wings and started working on her shoulders.
“It’s fine, miss Skies. Please relax.”
Not a huge deal, but it leads to a million paragraph breaks and just feels weird.
A bigger issue for me is the repeated use of “Pony did X in Y” type phrases:
She briefly considered flinging it against the wall in frustration.
Celestia sighed in bliss.
Twilight grunted in frustration.
I’m not a hardass about this kind of thing when used in moderation. Sometimes that kind of description is the better option when the alternative muddles up the scenes with overly-long descriptions. However, this story goes to that easy well just a little too often for my liking. Have faith in your readers, folks. We will get that she’s frustrated when she’s contemplating flinging her crown against the wall. We don’t really need to be told. The context is usually enough.
A make or break in this story for some people is going to be AJ’s speech, but I’m fine with it. I roll my eyes when people froth at the mouth about the “Ah” speech, but I get it. Just in the way that loose details bother me, weird, phonetic speech derails other readers. I don’t find it hard to read myself unless it’s something like, “Granny, kin yoo rustle me up that them thar bowl o’ ’tater-biscuits ’fore Ah waste right ’way?” That’s just irritating. This story does start to tiptoe toward that from time to time, but I feel like it’s under control. However, it does sometimes flip back and forth between “Ah” and “I”, and that I don’t care for. Pick one and stick with it.
Are you the intended audience?
This one is going to work best for people that are fairly laid back about the nuts and bolts of the storytelling. If you’re the kind of media consumer that just watches the movie or reads the story without picking it apart, this is a perfectly good little story. I don’t happen to be that person, so my time with it was a little rockier, but it’s certainly not awful. I think most people would enjoy this, and that’s evident by how many people have upvoted it. If you are a fairly forgiving reader who just wants to spend some time with reasonably well-characterized members of the main cast, then this will likely work for you.
For me, not so much. I don’t hate it, but I have no desire to read it again. It was death by a thousand cuts. Death is too strong a word. It was irritation by a thousand pokes.
I give it:
Two Titanium Dragons. I kinda want to give it two and a half Titanium Dragons, but can we have half a Titanium Dragon? That feels odd… I think this story is better than a two, but not a three. Let’s discuss in the comments and I can amend if people feel strongly about it.
First thing I want to note, not because it's the most important, but because it might affect how you think of this story: it was written well before it was published on FiMFiction, because IIRC this story is older than FiMFiction. At the very least, I know it was written during season 1, so probably March or April of 2011. Whether that temporal placement makes a difference to you--whether it affects your understanding of the characters knowing that they were written before S1 was in the books--is one of those "up to the reader things."
I think calling this "the quintessential slice of life fic" is about right: it tries to be the Celestia Episode of the show that, 4.5 seasons in, we still haven't gotten, and I think most people would agree that it succeeds in feeling like it could be exactly that. Whether it feels more like an MA Larson episode or a Merriwether Williams episode is another matter, of course...
3267044 That's interesting. It hadn't occurred to me that it would be older than it's release on Fimfiction, but I was mildly surprised to find out that it was released after my story. I'd always thought of it as older, I now I know why. It is older.
I'm not really sure if it's age lets it off the hook a bit. It's not really the characterizations that are an issue. It's the way those characters are presented. Too much "Well, this is what they did in the show, so I'll just do that" going on.
I'd say this was a Dave Polsky episode. Not great. Not bad. Kind of sloppy but with some good moments.
Thanks for this quite interesting review! "Sunny Skies..." is, if you'll excuse me, a relative juggernaut of popularity, but I've never actually read it! To hear you describe it, it really does sound like a S1-style fic. I'm very curious as to how much of the broad-strokes characterization was simply a factor of not having as much canon to play with yet? I dunno.
IMO, no story is improved by the "Ah/I" substitution for A.J. It's not a hanging offense for a story (a few of my favorites do it quite flagrantly, and it doesn't make me want to take them off my favelist) but in all cases the story would be better without that particular dialect affectation. I guess I could see it working in a straight-up farce or parody fic.
3267075
That's right, Skywriter touched on the other thing I forgot to say! And by "touched on," I of course mean "said it verbatim, only first and better"
Ah/I is mildly annoying, but it's not anywhere near a fatal flaw--I just today recommended a story to the RCL that uses Ah in AJ's voice exclusively. It's just a needless affectation, one that doesn't do anything to help with AJ's voicing--and if you need those "Ah"s to tell that she's speaking, you've got bigger problems.
I say this as someone who has used AJ Ahs in more than a couple of my older fics. As I say, not as I do, etc.
My thing with "Ah" in AJ's dialogue is that I tend to read a lot of stories where she's the main character, and it gets uncomfortable. That, and it seems to be a kind of slippery slope, people use "Ah," then start in with "yer," then before you know it they're writing "ahdea" and "summ'in'" and "the thang o' it is" and A) it makes me really crazy, and B) it doesn't even read like the right accent.
Y'know, given your six-part system, you actually have the interesting option of halving a score up or down. So, you could give something 2.5 TDs, or 2.5 (whoever 3-stars is, I forget), to show which end you're leaning toward. Just a thought.
3267075
3267087 For me, one of the big issues with this story is what I call The Snowspeeder Solution. In any Star Wars video game, if an AT-AT appears, you will need to tangle its legs with a snowspeeder. It like a religious devotion to the scene in The Empire Strikes Back. It's like they don't believe there is any other possible scenarios that players might want to explore. It's always snowspeeders.
This fic feels a bit like that to me. The characters kind of slavishly stick with what they've done already onscreen. I'm not sure that being a season one story can excuse that. I mean, if I was writing an Avengers fanfic right after the first Avengers movie, I don't think it would be permissible to have Loki trick Thor into a glass prison the same way it was done in the film. It's just kind of tacky to me.
However, if we are saying that this was early on in the fandom, and therefore PhantomFox wasn't a very skilled writer because the show inspired him, then we are getting somewhere. I don't know if that's the case, but it does feel like an inexperienced thing to do, and I'm certainly okay with people growing out in public.
As for the "Ah" speak, I guess it just reads naturally to me. My brain doesn't do that speed bump thing when I see it that it seems to do for other people. I do agree that there are much better ways of getting the flavor of your character, though, than by the use of brute force accents. I think they have their place for brevity, though. I wouldn't mind throwing on an outrageous french accent for a snooty waiter that was only going to have three lines of dialogue if it helped keep a scene tight by cutting down on description.
I definitely feel the slippery slope argument. I've seen plenty of way over the top "Southern" speech coming out of AJ in stories. That's why I removed it from my own work. I know it grates on people because when it's taken too far, it brings people out of the story. When they've been bumped out one too many times, even the sight of that "Ah" is enough to trigger irritation, even if the rest of the dialogue is fine.
To me, it's flavor, and I like the flavor of it as long as it's mild. MILD is the key, and people aren't so good at that.
3267127 Huh. That is kind of interesting. Maybe I could make something like sharps and flats. You know, two TD's and a JohnPerry is leaning up to a 3, whereas two Singularity Dreams and a Soge is leaning down to a two.
Man, so many ways to make the rating ridiculously complicated and fun!
3267148
I love complicated ratings systems. :B That's why mine's not numerical.
3267148 Since I'm such a fan of utterly bad stories, Can a "Super Trampoline" be a negative rating for the truly irredemably awful?
Though I hope you'll find none of those in the highest rated stories of all time.
Tautology!
Anyway. SSADL is one of those stories I have been very upfront about disliking. I take it very much as an example of everything I hate about slice of life done wrong. I just find it to be dull, repetitive, and extra-derivative throughout. I'm glad you made that AT-AT comment, though, as I have long referred to this kind of thing as a 'Star-Wars-ism', although I usually use 'all big monsters must be a rancor' as my go-to example. It's a big part of what often gives fanfiction a bad name – one that I think it totally deserves.
3267544 Well, get to reviewing a whole bunch of bad fics so that you're a known reviewer! I can swap you out for Rage Reviews as the bottom scale. Or I could use Star Destroyers... This fic gets a single Star Destroyer should be an irredeemable mark of shame.
3267795 This story is too inoffensive for me to hate, but it's just kind of disappointing. It could be a really good story, but has too many half-baked ideas in it. I mean, a sticker? Really? And there's no issue with it when she's soaking at the spa or getting a massage? That's... just. Well, I'd hope that an author would see that it's the kind of thing that needs further explanation to work.
Of course, that's not true at all. It does work for thousand and thousands of people, apparently. I'm not one of them, though I didn't downvote this.
I feel with a good re-write, this could definitely be a decent story, but as it stands it's just okay. Celestia's interactions with several of the ponies is done pleasantly enough. Celestia/Rainbow Dash is for the most part okay. Rainbow is mostly in character. Fluttershy is barely there, so it's hard to really be out of character. Twilight and Applejack are fine. It's just Rarity and Pinkie that bug me.
I do think there is a "what is the point of all of this" feeling going on in this story, but I have a high tolerance for stories that don't really go anywhere. As long as I have authentic characters to read about, I often don't care that they aren't doing all that much. I mean, Cheerilee's Thousand is a long series of mini-stories about not very much.
This was one of the first stories I read when I came into the fandom (very late S2). At the time, I really liked it and favourited it. When I read it again for review purposes last year, I was rather less impressed. I was surprised how badly proofread it was, and like you I had problems with some of the characterisation. That said, I still think it's a pleasant read for the undemanding consumer (which, some of the time at least, is what I am). Like quite a few of the "classics", though, I don't think it really stands up as an exemplar of how great ponyfic can be.
As for "Ah-speak", I'm with what appears to be the consensus around here: it's mildly annoying, and I can't think of a time when simpy "I" wouldn't be better, but it wouldn't hit a fic's rating unless it was absolutely borderline for other reasons.
It was not a problem back then because the whole issue is that it's overused. Something can't be overused when it's still new. Same with HiE, I really enjoyed them when I first came to the site, but then after a few more they became incredibly dull because they all use almost the exact same character, because for some reason, 95% of authors think, individually, that this one character archetype is perfect for an HiE.
I've never heard of people being annoyed by using Ah instead of I before now though. I've seen it a few times with ridiculously over the top sentences which are almost like an encrypted code with how hard it is to understand, but not with just 'Ah'.
3267075 Regarding Ah/I... I agree with Skywriter here, but mostly because "ah" is a word in it's own right. It's a verbal stutter, like "uh" or "umm" so when I see it in an accent, my brain hears AJ as unsure about what she's saying next, not talking about herself until I'm halfway through the sentence, then my brain has to reparse the thing and it throws me out of immersion.
Now, that said, I'm sure I've used it myself. I think some amount of accent is required for AJ and the other Apples, as that's a big part of the character's voice. It has to remaining easily readable though, so my go-tos are the dropped "g" (runnin', goin', fixin', etc.), the ubiqitous "ya'll", and a few broken contractions like "gonna" and "ain't". I'm also a fan of "yer" for "your" and "ya" for "you."
I think the following is perfectly readable, yet clearly conveys the accent.
"Yer granny's fixin' dinner tonight. Ya'll gonna be back by then?"
Also, glad to see you more cheerful and involved on the site again Juggernaught!