Read It Now Reviews #45 – Just As Planned, Family Resemblance, The Knight and the Knave, In From the Cold, Figments · 9:40pm Aug 12th, 2015
This came from a pretty eclectic variety of sources; two writeoff stories, a story from a writeoff writer which is unrelated to the writeoff, a featured story, and a random story that got recommended to me by Sharp Spark. Quite the variety pack of stories - but how will they hold up?
Spoiler alert: reasonably well.
Today’s stories:
Just As Planned by billymorph
Family Resemblance by HapHazred
The Knight and the Knave by Trick Question
In From the Cold by Baal Bunny
Figments by Half Awake
Just As Planned
by billymorph
Tragedy, Dark, Slice of Life
1,234 wordsAfter an aging Rainbow Dash’s Wonderbolts show ends in tragedy, Twilight has to close her affairs.
Why I added it: It was a solid entry in the last writeoff.
Review
Twilight officiates over Rainbow Dash’s funeral, then goes to Rainbow Dash’s house to close out her friend’s affairs. But after she finds a letter in a drawer, she has to know more about the accident…
This is a short, dark little piece. The text is rough in several places, but the overall idea is solid, and it doesn’t linger past where it needs to.
Recommendation: Worth Reading.
Family Resemblance
by HapHazred
Comedy, Slice of Life
2,869 wordsSome ponies are shy creatures, and try to get through life without getting noticed too much. Other ponies are massive, hulking brutes that make as much noise as possible.
The two are seldom related.
Why I added it: It was featured.
Review
Fluttershy’s dad is an enormous pony, even bigger than Bulk Biceps by the sounds of things, and comes to meet all of Fluttershy’s friends, but mostly Rainbow Dash.
This story is one of those things that has a totally ridiculous premise – that Fluttershy’s dad is almost geography – and just kind of carries it forward through the piece, and plays it pretty much straight. In fact, almost uncomfortably so; a lot of the humor seemed to be dependent on the fact that he was, well, huge, but it seemed to just think that the situation was intrinsically funny enough that a lot of the story, it was just kind of… there. The hoofwrestling match with Rainbow Dash was probably the highlight of the story, but all of the humor just kind of felt obvious to me, and it didn’t really do much to tickle my funnybone.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
The Knight and the Knave
by Trick Question
Sad, Slice of Life
2,269 wordsPrincesses Celestia and Luna take tea under less than ideal circumstances: house arrest for psychiatric care following Luna's revelation about the her use of the Tantabus to torture herself.
Ever the thoughtful sister, Celestia tries to help Luna open up about her addiction to guilt and suffering in order to understand why Luna isn't happy now that the pain has finally left her. But Luna has a very different topic she wants to discuss.
Why I added it: Trick Question is a good writer.
Review
Two princesses sit down in a room and share tea. One of them has been confined to her room for further psychological examination and debriefing. The other comes to visit. Together, the two talk about the Tantabus, and about the days of old when they played Knight and Knave (Good Cop, Bad Cop) with ambassadors and dignitaries. Celestia was always the knight, and Luna the knave, but now Celestia is always the knight, even when they’re not playing, and Luna misses the Celestia she used to know.
Set in the aftermath of the Tantabus incident, I wasn’t terribly excited by this story until its ending, which is basically "the good part of the story", along with a few little bits of dialogue here and there. I don’t really buy Celestia’s characterization here, which hurts because the story hinges on it.
As far as the writing goes, it suffers from some tellyness in places. It is pretty short, which is good because if you do read it, you might end up reading it twice after you’ve finished to pick up on all the little clues you missed about what it was really talking about.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
In From the Cold
by Baal Bunny
Adventure
2,672 wordsA lot can happen to a pony between the moment she rappels out the town hall window and the moment she bursts in the front door with news of the bugbear's defeat.
Why I added it: It was in the last writeoff.
Review
Bon Bon flees from Lyra and the bugbear as she thinks back on the ruin that the monster made of her life. She has to get out of there, she has to get away… but if she does, she’ll be abandoning everything she’s built up for the last few years.
The “monster hunter Bon Bon” stories that have been floating around since Slice of Life have never really interested me all that much, and this story didn’t really break that pattern. A certain sort of gritty “secret agents defending people” adventure-type stuff in modern-day Equestria often sits wrong with me because of the nature of the show, but also because it just has never interested me all that much in general, I suppose. The central hook of such things just doesn’t have much of a hold over me, and consequently when I see such stories, they fail to really engage me unless there is some other axis of engagement.
I’m not sure if the fact that the whole story is a foregone conclusion for me kept me from engaging with the events here, or if I just can’t really invest in it because of my feelings about such things in the Equestria verse in general, but this just didn’t work for me. I never really engaged with Bon Bon in this story, and while I said in the writeoff that I felt like I needed to see more of her to bond with her, I saw more here and I still didn’t. I just couldn’t invest in her as an imaginary horse person or her struggle with the bugbear.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
Figments
by Half Awake
Adventure
6,345 wordsFor Princess Luna, guarding the dreaming minds of Equestria against intruders is no easy task, even on the best of nights. When the Cutie Mark Crusaders get involved, it is definitely not the best of nights.
Why I added it: It was recommended to me by Sharp Spark.
Review
Luna is hunting a monster through the dreams of her subjects, and Luna discovers that the Cutie Mark Crusaders are continuing to share their dreams after Luna’s prior intervention. But with a monster on the loose, figuring out how the CMC got together again will have to wait.
I like the idea of Cutie Mark Crusaders Dreamwalkers. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling like I’ve read this before. While this story is pretty different from Moonlight, I couldn’t help but draw comparisons to it in my mind for some reason, which is pretty unfair to this piece, as it doesn’t have much in common beyond the basic idea of the CMC dreamwalking and interacting with Luna.
The story is brief but it tells the story it wants to tell – Luna finds out the CMC have figured out the trick of dreamwalking from Luna’s own example, Luna doesn’t have time to deal with them and has to run off after a monster, and the CMC follow her because they’re the CMC and there’s really no stopping them.
The first chapter felt like it was going to go into how the CMC figured out how to dreamwalk, and how that worked, and then the story never really went into it at all. Likewise, in the final chapter, the idea of doors being left open behind dreamwalkers was really neat, but wasn’t really expanded on. I really liked the idea of the CMC being to blame for the events of the story, but it felt like it could have been brought up elsewhere in the story as well. I just felt like I wanted more, and while that is a good feeling to be left with, I felt like I was missing something that I really wanted to be there in the story somewhere, something that tied the whole thing together more neatly.
Indeed, the story was full of neat ideas that never quite crossed the line as much as I would have liked. I liked the idea of the Dreamsnatcher, and why it was taking things from ponies dreams, even if it was never spelled out on page. The final battle in the dream was an interesting idea as well. The characters were voiced reasonably well, though there wasn’t any stand-out dialogue. And indeed, I think that was the real problem with it above all else – it was never bad, but it never really stood out to me either, with a lot of good ideas but never quite getting there in terms of fully executing on them.
This was a nice effort from a first-time author, though; I look forward to what they do in the future.
Recommendation: Worth Reading if you want to see some neat ideas about dreams, but you may be left feeling like you wanted more.
Summary
Just As Planned by billymorph
Worth Reading
Family Resemblance by HapHazred
Not Recommended
The Knight and the Knave by Trick Question
Not Recommended
In From the Cold by Baal Bunny
Not Recommended
Figments by Half Awake
Worth Reading
Work on other stuff continues apace; I wrote a comedic piece of original fiction over the weekend, got Chapter 5 of Mistletrapped mostly hashed out, though one scene is still giving me a bit of trouble and I’m probably going to go a slightly different direction with it than originally planned (though it won’t have any major ramifications on the rest of the story), and I’ve got another piece of original fiction – this one sci-fi – that I’m going to see if I can’t get finished tonight, after I finish chewing on Mistletrapped.
Number of stories still listed as Read It Later – Important: 79
Number of stories still listed as Read It Later – High Priority: 318
Number of stories listed as Read It Later: 1637
Wow that's a A lot of right off entries. Unfortunately I could not participate because I was working
3315377
It happens. There were actually 109 writeoff entries in total this round (I wrote six of them).
My own entries will be going up eventually, but a lot of them don't really bear expansion, so they're probably going to go into my short stories collection (or maybe I'll finally reorganize my short stories collection and have one devoted to my RariJack stuff and one devoted to my other stuff. Not sure).
I still can't grasp how you can do this so efficiently.
3315433
Well, if I'm just reading, I can read somewhere in the realm of 20-30,000 words per hour, depending on the density of the text. Reviews can be quick or slow to type up, depending on the nature of the text and my own reaction.
I read and reviewed The Tutelage of Star Swirl in about 2.5 hours, for instance.
Thanks for the review!
I replied with some thoughts over there.
I gave The Knight and the Knave a read based on this recommendation, and for once I'm inclined to judge it a bit more harshly than you. I did the usual reread given the twist ending, and while there were a number of hints about the actual ending, there are a number of other details that just seem inconsistent with it.
3323150
Frankly, the story exists for the sole purpose of the twist, and it isn't that great outside of it, I'm afraid. This is actually a problem which is pretty common in twist stories, and is the reason I very nearly NRed it. But I thought it was interesting enough that people might like it.
I'm sorry it wasn't.
3323238 Ehh, just two thousand words and change, not like it was a huge time investment.