xjuggernaughtx's Top Down Review #6 - Derplicity · 10:42pm Aug 8th, 2015
Another test, it seems. Looks like I’m going to be getting a lot of those if I’m going to continue this review thing. Today the hurdle to clear is bias. You see, Skywriter is one of my favorite pony writers, so I’m inclined to see things he’s written favorable. Add to this that he’s just an all-around pretty great guy, and it’s hard not to be in his corner.
I’m going to try to keep this objective. I am putting on my Special Objectivity Hat. It’s a sombrero because I need a wide-brimmed hat to hold all this objectivity.
Spoiler Free Summary
Derplicity features good characterization and an interesting story. However, there are a few bits of strained logic, and, for me at least, it didn’t really earn its comedy tag. See more on that in the Technical Things section.
I’ve been both anticipating and dreading reading a new Skywriter story for these reviews. Like I said above, I like Skywriter, so I’d hate to write him a bad review. I’d also hate feeling like I gave him an unfairly high rating because he’s a generally pleasant person. As it turns out, Derplicity may have been the perfect story for the moment. I thought it was good, but not quite great.
]Plot and Characterization
We begin in the Queen Chrysalis’ changeling hive. I feel like I’ve spent a lot of time there recently, and with changelings named Pupa. This time around, we are introduced to an operative named Malpiphi, who has been breed to be a superior changeling. Chrysalis sends Malpiphi on an assignment to infiltrate the Crystal Empire and find out as much information about Princess Cadence as possible in preparation for the events of A Canterlot Wedding.
Unfortunately for Malpiphi, she runs into an, um, inferior changeling. You see, in order to give all the best genes to Malpiphi, all the worst genes had to go elsewhere. That ends up being Pupa the wall-eyed changeling.
A one-sided argument between them occurs because they have opposing personalities, and a minor scuffle ends with Malpiphi being accidentally squished by a giant statue. When Chrysalis checks in a moment later, Pupa transforms into the pony form that Malpiphi had taken as her temporary identity so that the queen doesn’t suspect that anything is amiss. Taking over the identity means taking over the mission, and away we go.
Now, let’s take a moment here to talk about characterization:
Queen Chrysalis seems fine. She’s egotistical and haughty. We don’t have a ton to go on with Chrysalis, so that works well for me.
Malpiphi was okay, and that’s probably all she needs to be for her scene. I’ll have one or two things to say about her in the Technical Things section below. If we are focusing solely on characterization, she’s a little one note, but she’s only in it very briefly, so that’s fine, but Chrysalis only has slightly more screen time, and she feels much more rounded.
One thing that I’m not wild about in this opening section is the scene in the kitchen. The changelings have prepared a bunch of pony food so that Malpiphi can get used to eating. Pupa loves it all, of course. I wouldn’t really have much of an issue with it except that no explanation is given. Changelings seems to feed on emotion, so why would they need tongues with taste buds? Why would Pupa be able to taste it? Presumably it’s because she’s in pony form but we aren’t told. Add to this that the changelings apparently know how make all of this food and have the ingredients. Why? Well, I’d guess because they are a culture that is based on covert operations, but we aren’t told that’s why it is. Both of these things are quite minor. They wouldn’t knock down a story’s rating by themselves, but I’m not really a huge fan of making up reasons why something happened in a story unless that is the point of the story. If it’s a mystery or the like, that’s fine. Otherwise, I like to know concretely.
Anyway, back to the plot. Pupa has a mission: Infiltrate Canterlot, observe the pink princess, and report back in two years. In true Derpy fashion, she ends up mistaking Ponyville for Canterlot, which naturally leads to mistaking Pinkie Pie for Princess Cadence. Cadence ought to be honored by that.
Then the story surprised me because we moved into a time-skip. Derpy has been in town for a year and a half, and has fully integrated herself into Ponyville life. She’s continue to learn all about the ponies and taking copious notes on ‘the princess’, as well.
This is where I start to have some problems with the plot. Pupa was fast enough on her hooves to fool Queen Chrysalis into thinking that she was Malpiphi, but she’s in Ponyville for almost two years and has never figured at that it’s not Canterlot? I’m finding that hard to believe. We do get a bit of a rationale for it at the end of the story, but it feels a little weak in my opinion. At least we got one, though, so I applaud Skywriter for that, even if I think it needs to be beefed up to be believable.
Also a small concern here some of the characterization of the Mane Six. I’ve thought this in a few other Skywriter stories, too. Some of the characters feel just slightly off. Nothing major, but enough to jog me out of my rhythm. Let’s look at Twilight and Applejack:
"I'm telling you!" said Twilight Sparkle. "Cinnamon is a natural antimicrobial! Look it up!"
"I think you're just saying that," said Applejack, "so's you won't have to throw away that snickerdoodle that you just dropped."
"Ridiculous," said Twilight. "Let's approach this rationally. The primary reason that the 'three-second rule' is a fallacy is that germs from the floor can easily contaminate the surface of the food within a three-second period. But the antimicrobial property of the cinnamon on top of the snickerdoodle extends the contamination window to three seconds, at least! I'm in the clear! Here, let me draw you a chart—"
"Hey, girls," said Derpy Hooves, the little gray delivery-mare, peeking her head in through the door of Sugarcube Corner. "How, um, how was the royal wedding?"
"Hey, Derpy," said Rainbow Dash, looking up. "Wedding went awesome, if you forget about the whole 'society teetering on the edge of collapse' thing."
"It really is hard to forget that," admitted Fluttershy, glancing at the floor. "But at least, um, everything turned out okay, right?"
"Yep!" said Twilight, proudly. "All thanks to my brother and Princess Cadence! In the end, it was their great love for each other that saved the day."
At first glance, this is very Mane Six-y, but let’s focus in on the details. Twilight is rationalizing why it’s still okay to eat a cookie that she just dropped to Applejack. She’s backing it up with scientific knowledge, just like she ought to. But Applejack is the least likely pony to care. I don’t think she’d waste a perfectly good cookie just because she dropped it. She’s a farm pony. Why would she be given Twilight a hard time about it? Add to this that Twilight tells her to “look it up”, which I don’t really hear Twilight doing in my mind. In the next paragraph, she launches into a lecture about it, which is a much more Twilight thing to do, but I think it would have felt more natural for her to just head into the lecture in the first place. Later, Twilight answers with a “Yep”, which doesn’t feel like her voice to me.
Again, these are very minor things. The characterizations are at least solid for the most part, but it’s the accumulation of minor things that eventually weighs the whole down.
One final issue that cropped up occasionally is minor shoe-horning. I occasionally thought things felt forced. For example, Malpiphi decides to call Pupa “derpy” as an adjective rather than some changeling slang.
"Shut up!" shrieked Malpighi. She burrowed down deep into the mass of pony jargon that had been wedged into her neural ganglia in preparation for her mission and emerged with an appropriate slur. "You are ssso... derrrpy, little Pupa!"
"'Derpy'?" said Pupa, blinking. "What does that mean?"
"It meansss you are an embarrassssssment, a rrrude thing," snarled Malpighi, her pony teeth bared. "And if thisss one were the Queen—as thisss one aimsss to be sssomeday—thisss one would have fed you rrright back into the rrrecyclersss the moment you hatched!"
Why would she do this? She’s a changeling among changelings. She’s just going to have to explain what she’s talking about, which she could have done in the first place. It just feels like Skywriter is trying to get a clever rationale for Derpy’s name in there, rather than feeling like an organic piece of plot. Perhaps with some added detail about how changeling brains evolve to naturally respond as their new shapes would have could have alleviated this, but as it stands, it just feels forced.
In the end, Chrysalis contacts Pupa, who has to make some facts up on the spot when she finds out that she was supposed to be watching an alicorn this whole time. These ‘facts’ end up being Chrysalis’ characterization in A Canterlot Wedding. Pupa realizes she can never go back home now, and more importantly, she doesn’t want to.
By and large, this story is pleasant. As detailed above, I have a few questions about the plot and a few nitpicks about the characterizations, but it’s a fast, enjoyable read throughout. One concern that I have is that while I enjoy Pupa in this story, I don’t love her. That’s a tough thing in any story that I’m reading. I want to be compelled to keep reading about a character. For example, Glokta from Joe Abrecrombie’s The First Law trilogy. I could not get enough of his character. It kept me reading even in places where the story didn’t go in directions that I particularly enjoyed. If this story’s plot had taken a turn for the worse, I’m not sure that Pupa would have been a strong enough character to keep me interested regardless. In the end, I felt like most everything in this story was ‘good’, but didn’t really rise above that.
Technical Things
I’m going to list this here because I’m not sure where else to put it. One of the main issues I have with this story is that it’s labeled as a comedy and only as a comedy. However, I didn’t find it funny. It’s cute. It’s pleasant. It’s a fun read, but at no time did I laugh or smile at it.
Now, let’s go into this a little bit because it makes rating this story difficult. I rarely find things funny, which is odd because I’m primarily known as a comedy writer. Here’s the truth of things, though. I don’t usually find the things that I write to be funny. I often feel like it will probably make people laugh, so I go with it. A lot of the time, I’m right, but I’m not personally laughing. Well, I often laugh when I write Cheerilee’s Thousand but that’s pretty much the only xjuggernaughtx story that I find funny. The rest are just intuitive guesses as to what will make the audience laugh.
So it’s with this same mind that I read other comedies, and I usually don’t find them funny, either. This can be mitigated some by having another tag, but this story is only labeled as a comedy. So, for me, it’s kind of failed it’s intended objective. It doesn’t fail at all as a story, but it’s a comedy that didn’t amuse me. I feel like that’s significant. I kept waiting for the funny, but it never arrived. And for the record, Skywriter wrote my all-time favorite pony comedy, Shipping Sickness, so I know he can strike my funny bone. It just didn’t happen here.
Other technical issues are very minor. There were a few instances of tiny grammar mistakes. Missing commas and the like. One of the characters accidentally says “the gig is up” rather than “jig.” Every so often, there was an awkward sentence that I think could be neatened up, and at least once, Malpiphi switch from calling herself “this one” (very Unsullied of her) to saying “I.”
Unfortunately, I accidentally closed my notes before saving them, so I don’t have the examples to put here, but if anyone is particularly curious, I could re-read and put some examples in the notes. Again, it’s all pretty minor. This is a skillfully written story.
One thing that might bug some people is that I felt that this had slightly more adverb use than some of the stories I’ve read recently. I’m not an adverb hater, so I’m fine with it, but I know some readers think they are the Anti-Christ. Used sparingly, I think they are a useful tool, and I’m sticking with that. We have them for a reason, folks.
Are You The Intended Audience?
It’s a good bet that you are. I’m pretty hard on stories, and none more so than comedies. While I didn’t laugh, this story still managed to entertain me. I wasn’t blown out of the water by it, but it was fun and tied together separate bits of canon in a coherent way. Nice to see a backstory to some of the goings-on in Ponyville. Given the enduring popularity of this story, it certainly doesn’t need my help, but I would think that most readers would find this to be at least a good story, with many more ranking it even higher.
I give it:
Three Singularity Dreams
While I think a lot of people would see this as at least a four star story, I don’t feel that it quite reaches that level. It’s on the high side of a three, that’s for sure. It’s a good read with decent characters, but I wasn’t as attached to them as I was to the CMC in Yes, Apple Bloom, there *is* a Santa Hooves. This story has a better plot than that one did, but it’s held back in my mind by being a comedy that didn’t make me laugh. I don’t think the majority of readers will have the same issue but I rate these stories on how I respond to them, not how I think others will.
Man, what happens if any of us change our avatars? :B
3305509 Titanium Dragon already did!
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WHAT WILL YOU DO?
THE FATE OF THE WORLD IS IN YOUR HANDS
3305613 I'm just going to assign you avatars. There will be no changing! Obedience, or it's back to the gulag!
Would comprehensively explaining why taste falls under "you must pretend to share the ponies' physical processes in order for them to not grow suspicious of you" actually improve the story? How about spelling out the details of how her infiltrators went about procuring the ingredients and recipes? I suppose it might be possible, but that's only because contemptuous lecturing fits well with Chrysalis's characterization here.
I'm not opposed in principle to having things spelled out, but generally speaking, I don't think obvious stuff like this ought to be. Even ignoring the possibility of annoying the readers by insulting their intelligence, explaining obvious/trivial things normally just swells the wordcount without providing the readers anything useful. It can potentially be worth doing if the exact details of the explanation will end up relevant to the story, but even then there's a good chance the impact those details have on the plot will suffice to clarify what's going on.
This is very true for me too. Several times I have only included a comedy tag on readers' insistence.
3306246 That's why I said that the detail was a minor issue. It's just something that makes me raise my eyebrow for a moment, but the more times I do that, the more annoyed I get. By itself, the lack of the detail is nothing, but it's the accumulations that gets to me. I've always said that no story is perfect. Mine certainly aren't, and as an author there are things that you just have to go with or you'd be writing forever. It's up to each one of us to figure out what that is.
On the other hand, I don't think the explanation of such things is all that difficult. All it takes is one or two sentences from Chrysalis. Even if she just mentions in passing that the cooks have been researching methods for a year in preparation, it's better in my eyes. I'm not looking for a chapter on changeling physiology. I just want a small explanation. There is a sentence in there somewhere about how Pupa is drawn to the kitchen by these amazing smells. Would it have been that hard to just say that her new pony nose was picking up delicious scents that she'd never experienced before? That way the reader gets the hint that the new pony nose is an important component. That all I really want.
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I agree that expanding on any individual instance wouldn't be too bad, but the thing is, you'd have to do so for all (or at least most) of them if you want to actually deal with the stated problem. How does the communicator work? How did Pupa get to Ponyville? How did she manage to make a living there? And so on, and so on, and so on... trying to answer every possible question would weaken the story. So bringing up specific instances as problems seems disingenuous - pushing the proposed fix to its logical conclusion would cause more damage than simply leaving things alone.
Perhaps there's a way to distinguish between the examples you brought up and the ones I did? I'll admit I don't see any difference, but that's hardly sufficient to declare one doesn't exist. I'd be interested to see what your criteria are.
3307129 The issue is that the kitchen scene directly ties into Pupa's characterization whereas the communicate is a plot simplification device. If the kitchen scene added nothing but flavor to the story, I wouldn't have mentioned it, but it is what introduces us to muffins as a Derpy context and is important for goings-on later in the story. Without a proper rationale as to why it's occurring, it makes it feel like its just smashed in there so that we can get Pupa loving muffins. That kind of thing bothers me when it leaves me with questions. Things like "How did she get to Ponyville" don't hold as much weight for me. Yes, it's important that she get to Ponyville because of the plot, but it's not a big piece of her character like the muffin thing is. It's just the next step in the story. To me, it feels like Skywriter is saying, "Hmmm. Got to work muffins in here somewhere before I send her off. Oh, I know! I'll have her eat one in the kitchens!" But the concept of cooking doesn't make sense for changelings, so I need a little more to go along with it. Derpy has already been shown to be a screw-up, so I don't need an more detail on how she could have screwed up one town for the other. I do need more detail as to how she didn't pick up on it two years later...
We are all going to have different tolerances for this, and it's important to remember for any review that the reviewer it talking about their personal preferences. In my opinion, The New Crop is the best thing I've ever written, but Chris gave it an "It's okay, I guess" as a review because I didn't explain the Alternate Universe fully enough for him. While I would prefer a higher score out of him, it just comes down to what works for him versus what works for me. This review is the same way, and that's why I tried to put in there a few times that other people aren't going to be as bothered by this as I am.
Thanks so much for the in-depth review! It's always gratifying when someone puts this kind of thought into something you did.
And yes, in my versions of Equestria at least, it is very flattering to be compared to Saint Pinkie.
3308291 You're very welcome. I hope there was something useful in there for you. It made me really regret that I don't have some kind of half-rank or something like that. I think it's better than a three, but just not quite at a four. I had to really sit and think about it for a while.
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I suppose that makes sense, though to me it suggests that the review focused on the wrong thing: I'd say the part that could bear more explaining is why she instantly likes baked goods, not why she gets the chance to try them in the first place. Still, I agree the rest could probably be chalked up to personal preference - I like piecing things together, and I don't really see characterization as much different than any other story element in that respect. Obviously it's qualitatively different in a lot of ways that affect other aspects of the story, but somehow it didn't even occur to me that people might see those as relevant to this particular topic; if nothing else, we can use this as yet another reminder that it's important to talk with people who don't share your tastes.