Read It Later Reviews #24 – Vermillion, More Than Muscle, The Best Day of the Year, Injuring Eternity, The Tutelage of Star Swirl · 12:03am Aug 6th, 2015

This set of reviews is 100% courtesy of the Royal Guard queue.

Today’s stories:

Vermillion by JLB
More Than Muscle by Level Dasher
The Best Day of the Year by Ekserata
Injuring Eternity by Monochrome
The Tutelage of Star Swirl by Moose Mage

Vermillion
by JLB
Sad, Dark, Creepypasta
6,125 words
A camera case for a Crystal-tech personal recorder was found near a PHPD office in the city slums. Under the remains of what seems to once have been a poorly fabricated copy of an actual, Crystal Empire-made, novelty video recorder, a number of functional crystal records were buried.
The following footage is not advised for low rank officers and PHPD detectives not given the Comissioner's viewing permission. In case of continued accidents, access will be restricted to Enforcer and/or Princess-approved personnel.
Any hallucinations of shadow figures and inexplicable noises following the viewing of these recordings should be reported to the psychologist and the Paracriminal Division or Exorcist Corps.

Why I added it: The Royal Guard queue.

Review
Masky – an actor of some description – is going crazy, with only his ~~video camera~~ recording crystal serving as his witness. He thinks he’s seeing weird things – shapes out of the corner of his eyes – and his girlfriend has gone missing. Any time he tries to tell anyone about it, he loses time, and apparently starts rambling about random things that he can’t remember rambling about. He tries to leave a warning, and then in the end accepts his fate, whatever that is, putting on some sort of mask and (possibly?) going off to be killed by/help the Slender Pony or some other thing.

This is basically a creepypasta story, but it suffers from a couple of fundamental issues. The largest one, however, is that it is simply not creepy. When I watch a creepy video or read about some creepy event at night, I get that nice little creepy feeling down the back of my neck and back. It is an unpleasant feeling, but it is an emotional response, and it is the sort of emotional response that this sort of thing is going for – the thrill of the creepy.

And I just never got it that creepy thrill. Without that, the whole story falls flat, as that is its primary purpose.

The story presents several mysteries – what he is seeing, what happened to his girlfriend, whether his girlfriend was ever real in the first place, whether the protagonist truly was an actor – but the story provides few answers to this, and shows no real intentions of doing so.

A lot of the supposed creepiness is in the form of video glitches. For instance:

A high-pitched noise and a stutter indicates the start of the recording. The buzz is almost completely drowned out.
“Come on, you piece of crystal crap. Work.”
A number of static pictures flashes by as the camera catches up with itself.
“Ugh… why does it have to be so complicated? Where’s your “on” button?..”
Momentarily, a shot from the previous segment blinks in the feed. Shortly afterwards, the earth pony’s face is on again. He is aiming the oculus at himself, his foreleg shaking slightly under the weight of the mechanism.
“Is that it? It’s blinking. Fragile, yet devious. Right.”
Some minor distortion appears as the camera is rotated around the room, abruptly stuttering a number of times. It is a small apartment with cheap furniture, with evident signs of minor disrepair visible.

The issue is immediately obvious – explaining these things out loud to the audience is just nowhere near as effective as showing them to us on a video tape. It just isn’t creepy, and it actually feels like it is trying too hard. Creepy videos work by flickering in half-seen images and creepy things on the edge of the screen, but here, it doesn’t have the same impact at all.

This is an example of medium displacement, where something taken from one medium is then inserted into another medium. Frequently, this doesn’t work very well, as Chris noted in the linked blog post; you end up feeling awkward. There is no foreground and background in a story, for instance, so sneaking something into the background of an image doesn’t really work. On the other hand, it is possible to hide things in text that couldn’t be hidden visually.

This story is really a good example of why different mediums use different methods – a lot of the time, in a text medium, we’ll use a journal or letters or something similar, maybe combined with still images. This has very different limitations from what a video has, but it has advantages as well.

Trying to directly translate a creepy video into a text medium just doesn’t work, because you can’t use jump scares, you can’t use stuff moving around in the edge of your vision, you can’t have video glitches (not without an interactive website, anyway – I have seen one person who made use of this, having text move as you read it, so when you read back the story would have changed, to mess with the audience), you can’t communicate a lot of things without drawing too much attention to them, especially not things like “a single intercut frame”, which is anything but sudden when you have to fully describe what is seen there.

Recommendation: Not Recommended

More Than Muscle
by Level Dasher

Slice of Life
1,098 words
We all know his catch phrase, but what else do we really know about Bulk Biceps? What does he have to say for himself? There's always more than meets the eye.

Why I added it: The Royal Guard queue.

Review
Bulk Biceps talks to his therapist about his muscles.

This is one of those “headcanon dump” stories; the talk with the psychiatrist is an excuse for Bulk Biceps to just drop some random backstory about himself, with a bit at the start and the repetition of the start of Hurricane Fluttershy at the end seemingly thrown in to bring it all above the 1,000 word limit.

The thing is, there isn’t really a story here, so it is just basically someone trying to dump some headcanon about Bulk Biceps. Without anything else to really bite into, there isn’t much substance here, and a good chunk of the story seems to just be filler to meet the word limit.

Recommendation: Not Recommended.

The Best Day of the Year
by Eskerata

Sad
1,845 words
When Princess Luna attends Chocolate Cream's tenth birthday party, she knows this colt is very special.
She'll understand just how special Chocolate is when he shows her how happiness doesn't just come from parties.

Why I added it: The Royal Guard queue.

Review
Luna comes to the 10th birthday party of a colt named Chocolate Cream, but something is wrong…

At first I thought this story was going to be a “Luna is going to the birthday party of a dying young pony, or creating a dream for him.” Then I thought it was going to be about something bad happening to Pinkie Pie.

Turns out, I was almost but not quite perfectly right.

This is a feelsy little piece which is trying to tug on the heartstrings, but it was a bit too obvious in what it was. While it wasn’t exactly what it seemed to be at first, it ended up close to it, and that made it really hard for me to like it as it felt too blatant in its attempted emotional manipulation, and the ending felt like it was trying too hard to summarize the story, rather than let the reader pull it together for themselves. I just didn’t get the feels that the author was shooting for.

Quibble: 70 years of age is not “really old”. I would personally put “old” at 80 and “really old” somewhere beyond that, though I suppose that may be a fairly modern point of view. Still, feels a bit weird to call 70 years “really old”.

Recommendation: Not Recommended.

Injuring Eternity
by Monochromatic

Romance, Sad
42,298 words
For Twilight Sparkle, the increased lifespan that came with princesshood had forced her to outlive most of her beloved friends.
Centuries later, even after trying quite hard to move on, the alicorn will succumb to her innermost desire to time-travel and see her friends one last time, particularly the silver unicorn who had stolen her heart.
Twilight had only hoped to take a quick trip just to see them from afar-- no talking to anypony or meddling with time. Of course, things never always went quite as Twilight wanted, and what she thought would be a harmless short trip would turn out to be much, much more than that.
She would learn, thanks to Rarity, that centuries could be lived in but a single day.

Why I added it: The Royal Guard queue.

Review
It has been centuries since Rarity and Twilight’s other friends died, leaving Twilight with only the princesses and Spike, and Twilight can’t deal with it. Twilight barely has any friends – not one worth mentioning by name – and has not been able to love anyone since she lost Rarity. Twilight has never moved on, and thus, has devised a spell to let her go back in time for a while and see her friends – and her lover – one last time.

She wants to do it in secret, avoiding putting the space-time continuum in danger, but when Rarity finds her, she just can’t resist spending one last weekend together in Manehattan.

A shipfic/immortal angst story, this story depicts a Twilight Sparkle who was never able to get over the deaths of her friends and lover.

Twilight and Rarity’s characters both came through strongly, and they worked fine as a couple in the context of the piece. There were a few bits here and there that stood out, and the reveal in the very final chapter of the story about hat the note in Twilight’s notebook said – the note that Twilight sent to herself that told her whether or not to go – was a nice touch.

All that being said, I’m not sure that I really bought into the central premise of the story, in the end, and that made it hard to really enjoy the way I would have liked.

I had a hard time accepting the Twilight Sparkle of this story as a five-hundred year old version of herself. She didn’t seem much older, and hardly any mention is made of any specifics past Rarity’s lifetime. Twilight doesn’t really seem to really be the type to be fixated on Rarity for five-hundred plus years in the story, either – despite her professions of love, it just never really felt authentic, and the reason was that there wasn’t anything else build around that. I didn’t really feel like future Twilight’s personality (which was more or less present Twilight’s personality) meshed well with the presentation of her being fixated on Rarity (and her other past friends, though that felt kind of quickly forgotten as the story went on). It just didn’t feel plausible without anything else being added on as well.

A second issue I took with the story was that the central issue – what a great deal of the story had lead up to – was not really resolved in a very satisfying manner. Twilight needs to get over Rarity and move on with her life – actually try – but the scene in which this finally comes up and is dealt with in the end just didn’t feel very weighty or convincing.

The last problem with this story was that it was well over 40,000 words long – a novel-length piece – and yet I don’t feel like I consumed a novel’s worth of content. The story just felt like it was long for what it was, like it was wasteful with its length. I wasn’t ever bored, but I was at times frustrated that the story seemed to take up so much space, as I knew how it was going to end, and the journey didn’t always feel like it justified its existence.

The story also had some mechanical issues which, while not prevalent enough to be a game-ender, were prevalent enough to be a distraction.

Despite my misgivings, this story was not bad, and it was on the edge between worth reading and not recommended for me. In the end, though, the issues outlined above, combined with its length, makes it hard for me to recommend, though I'm sure that won't stop some folks.

Recommendation: Not Recommended, though fans of immortal angst type stories might enjoy it.

The Tutelage of Star Swirl
by Moose Mage

Tragedy, Dark, Adventure, Alternate Universe
62,193 words
Long before Twilight Sparkle was taken under the wing of Princess Celestia, another pony was given a chance to prove himself. Your history books will tell you that he was a bitter, lonely, powerful old Unicorn who never really understood the magic of Friendship. But history, as we all know, only ever remembers one side of the story.
This is the life and the tutelage of Star Swirl, one of the greatest pony minds to ever walk Equestria.

Why I added it: The Royal Guard queue, but it had also been recommended to me by Cerulean Voice, and Moose Mage is a good writer.

Review
Starswirl the Bearded is a young unicorn with an incredible amount of talent. A scholar of magic theory even as a teenager, he has spent ten years under the tutelage of Princess Luna. The time has come at last for him to become Princess Celestia’s student as well…

And the moment he does, she sends him off to the quiet, sleepy town of Whither’s Hollow to learn the magic of Friendship.

And to defend the town against the Jackals of Tartarus. But you know, that’s a minor detail, not even worth mentioning to Star Swirl – or even her own sister, until Luna presses her.

The story has a dual focus – the story of how Star Swirl the Bearded came to be the pony he was, including how he got his cloak and bells, as well as the story of how Luna and Celestia fell out with one another. You know that the story is going to end in some ways – Star Swirl won’t become an alicorn, and Celestia and Luna’s relationship is going to get worse – but the story still entertains as it gets from point A to point B.

The story is labelled a tragedy, but interestingly, in the end, it isn’t Star Swirl’s tragedy, but rather, Luna and Celestia’s. Celestia cannot trust others, not even her sister. Luna can’t protect everyone throughout the night, and is unable to protect Star Swirl from hurts she cannot heal. Star Swirl’s story is not, by and large, a happy one either, but it is not tragic.

The story does a reasonable job with its characters – Star Swirl has some depth to him, as well as some secrets that he holds for most of the story, and Emory, the de-facto mayor of Whither’s Hollow, has some depth to him. Lily and Pan, two other OCs in the story, are decent enough, and have hints of larger lives, but didn’t really end up popping out nearly as much to me.

If this story had a weakness, it lies in the fact that the story doesn’t really have a proper climax. The Jackals – a terrible threat and the cause of much grief in the story – ultimately are dispatched in a rather brusque manner, and without much lead-in – it simply gets done when Star Swirl decides he wants to go take them out, which is very strange given his previous difficulty in combatting them. While it is meant to show the newfound steel in Star Swirl’s heart, it still felt a bit “unearned”.

The subsequent confrontation between Star Swirl, Luna, and Celestia, while probably the proper climax of the story (as it brought the other major plot thread to a close), didn’t really feel entirely satisfying to me as a climax. While stuff happens, in the end, the climax doesn’t really resolve the central conflict of the story – and while necessary given that things don’t end so well for the characters involved, it still felt a bit off.

The story also had an odd tendency to inappropriately capitalize some words; while in some cases it made sense, as the words were referring to something in specific, in other cases it did not.

I also wasn’t overly fond of a (perhaps unintentional) message in the story, which was that knowing where you belonged and staying there would make you happy, but that could possibly be overlooked.

On the whole, the story was interesting enough for me to read the whole thing without getting bored, and I don't feel like it wasted my time. That being said, it is over 60,000 words long. While there were some things I really liked – the explanation of why Star Swirl collected those bells of his was a particular highlight – at the same time, I have a hard time being enthusiastic about it.

Recommendation: Worth Reading if you like melancholic pieces of historical drama and don't mind the "adventure" aspect of the piece coming to a rather abrupt end.

Summary
Vermillion by JLB
Not Recommended

More Than Muscle by Level Dasher
Not Recommended

The Best Day of the Year by Ekserata
Not Recommended

Injuring Eternity by Monochrome
Not Recommended

The Tutelage of Star Swirl by Moose Mage
Worth Reading

The Royal Guard certainly exposes me to a lot of stories I would never read otherwise. And I’ve read two pony novels – and a Discworld novel – in the last two days.

Apparently I really wanted to get some reading done in my free time this week.

But I really want to get some writing done with the rest of it…

Number of stories still listed as Read It Later – Important: 73

Number of stories still listed as Read It Later – High Priority: 306

Number of stories listed as Read It Later: 1636

Report Titanium Dragon · 956 views · #read it later #reviews #story reviews #Vermillion #JLB #More than Muscle #Level Dasher #The Best Day of the Year #Ekserata #Injuring Eternity #Monochrome #The Tutelage of Star Swirl #Moose Mage

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Karibela

Karibela #1 · Aug 6th, 2015 · · ·

I like how much time you spend on these reviews! I'll have to check out 'Tutelge of Starswirl' sometime, and I'll certainly put it on the read later list for myself.

Titanium Dragon