Read It Later Reviews #30 – A Diamond and a Tether, Night Rose, Happy Hour, Quiet Contemplation, Fixing the Stud · 6:54pm Sep 13th, 2015
A Diamond and a Tether has been on my to-read list for a long time now, and I finally got around to reading it and wondered why I hadn’t done so before.
So many things are so easy to do in retrospect, and yet, we let months elapse before we do them.
In totally unrelated news, I’ve been working on editing Mistletrapped, sprucing up the last couple chapters before I ship them off to my editors.
Today’s stories:
A Diamond and a Tether by Patchwork Poltergeist
Night Rose by Grand_Moff_Pony
Happy Hour by Vivid Syntax
Quiet Contemplation by Arcelia
Fixing the Stud by M E Lovecolt
A Diamond and a Tether
by Patchwork Poltergeist
Sad, Slice of Life, Human
13,294 wordsHeiress Lucy Burdock knows life has a way of surprising you.
For example, she wasn't expecting a little pink pony for her birthday. She certainly didn't expect it to start talking, either. It was cute at first, but it kinda feels more like taking care of a little kid than a pony. Lucy's never really been great with kids... but she can make it work!
Can't she?
Why I added it: It won second place in Equestria Daily’s More Most Dangerous Game contest and made the Royal Canterlot Library. When it came up in the Royal Guard queue, I knew I had to check it out.
Review
Spoiled heiress Lucy Burdock gets two gifts from her boyfriend.
One is a set of diamond earrings which were so two years ago. I mean, god.
The other is an adorable pink little pony in a box. A pretty little princess, just for her. She’s just a foal, but she’s adorable. The perfect little pet.
Too bad she isn’t actually a pet… not that either of them realize that.
Not yet.
I’m sure you’ve all heard of My Little Dashie, the single most popular MLP fanfic out there, with nearly 500,000 views. It is perhaps one of the most controversial stories in the fandom – widely derided as brony wish fulfillment, it is also well-regarded by a fairly large fraction of the community as delivering on “the feels”.
One of the challenges of the More Most Dangerous Game was to write a story based on the same premise as My Little Dashie – that someone comes to possess a baby pony in another dimension, and then raises them for a while before their world comes calling them back.
This story is a major improvement over the original in several ways. I think the largest, however, is that the human – Lucy Burdock – is a spoiled brat who doesn’t really appreciate what she’s been given. She tries to be a good person sometimes, but she can’t do it very consistently, and if it weren’t for her maid Maria, she’d be a pretty terrible person. She’s a pretty bad mother as well – she doesn’t want other people to find out about Diamond Tiara being a person, and so pretty much confines her to her house, and only over time does she come to realize that she has been doing wrong by her little Diamond, spoiling her terribly and giving her STUFF instead of providing her with people and social interaction.
It is only at the end, when she is faced with potential loss, that she truly realizes what she has done.
Diamond is very sympathetic here, and we come to see how she goes from a spoiled-but-sort-of-nice filly to being the brat that we all know and love hate. And while anyone who has read the original My Little Dashie sees the ending coming a mile away, it still works quite nicely – and indeed, even better than in the original version, because unlike in My Little Dashie, the show itself tells us how it all worked out in the end for Diamond Tiara.
As JediMasterEd said in the comments:
Not like a lot of stories that wring sadness out of melodrama and catastrophe, but simply, naturally, inevitably...sad.
And the saddest thing is that no one's a villain. No one is deliberately, intentionally cruel or sadistic or abusive. Just selfish and shallow.
No one's evil. Yet evil gets in, anyway.
There's a moral in that. Aesop would be pleased.
Recommendation: Highly Recommended.
Night Rose
by Grand Moff Pony
Romance, Slice of Life
5,052 wordsThe sun has set, the moon has risen, and crowds fill the ancient streets of Marecelona to celebrate the night away. Among them walks a solitary mare in a long red coat. Few notice her, but those who do know exactly why she is there.
She is there to dance.
Why I added it: The Royal Guard queue.
Review
Roseluck goes to the city of Marecelona, wearing her dancing shoes, hoping to visit the Tablao Rosa, an establishment famous for the flamenco. There, she meets the most handsome stallion, and together, they dance and spend the evening together.
This whole thing was well written from the standpoint of the prose, but I never got swept up in the emotion of this piece; the story is a pretty standard “protagonist meets a handsome/beautiful stranger who shares their interest, spends time engaging in that interest together, and then spends the night with them” kind of thing, and it doesn’t really add anything more than trappings to it. It isn’t bad, but it isn’t anything you haven’t seen many times before, and I didn’t really feel like I got a whole lot out of it.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
Happy Hour
by Vivid Syntax
Comedy
6,348 wordsFour stallions. Poker. Tequila.
It's that time of year again: time for the annual colts-only weekend at Lucky Buck's, and Braeburn, Soarin', Caramel, and Big Mac are in for one heck of a night.
Why I added it: The Royal Guard queue.
Review
Braeburn watched the elderly white mare in the seat next to him tap her hearing aid. He wasn't surprised – the train was very loud, and Pearl Prism did appear to be getting on in years. Maybe she'd misheard him.
Pearl cleared her throat. "You said... four stallions in one hotel room?" She gulped. "Drinking and 'fooling around'?"
"Yep!" Braeburn gave the wizened mare a smile. He was happy she was taking an interest in his colts-only weekend. It gave him something to talk about on the long train ride out to Neighagra Falls. "A lot of ponies say it ain't decent. Heck, a bunch of 'em would make it illegal if they could." Braeburn tried not to judge other ponies' ideas of what was right and proper. Gambling is a sin, after all, but what's a colts-only weekend without the traditional poker game?
Pearl narrowed her eyes at the impossibly gorgeous stallion. "I see..."
"But sometimes you just need some private time to bond with the colts. Friday night, everypony's itching to go. We all get so pent up after a while." Braeburn loved Appleloosa as much as the next pony, but it was still nice to get away and break the routine sometimes.
Pearl stuttered, "...b-because you miss fooling around with each other?"
"Uh-huh!" Braeburn frowned for just a moment. He didn't want to presume she knew about a colts' weekend – she was a mare, after all – so he decided to explain the poker game from the beginning. "We start off in a circle, and I usually take the lead." Somepony has to be the first dealer.
"...the lead?"
"Of course! How can I explain? Let's see... There's kind of a dance to it: there's the turn and the flop and–"
"No! N-no need to go into detail, deary. I-I think I... know what you're talking about."
"Oh, so I don't need to explain about the blinds, then?"
Pearl slowly, nervously shook her head.
Braeburn gave her a sideways glance and a little chuckle. "Aw, that's great!" He considered that maybe she did know more than he'd given her credit for. "Got some experience yourself, have you?"
Pearl clutched her purse tightly and bit her lower lip. "Not... with four stallions at once." She paused and looked down at the floor with wide eyes.
Braeburn shook his head. "Well, you can do it with any number, really. We usually go forty rounds or so."
"FORTY!?" Pearl's head whipped back towards Braeburn. "That's... q-quite a feat, isn't it?"
"Well, by the end of the night, I always want more, but our bottoms just start to get so sore, you know?" The seats at Lucky Buck's weren't particularly comfortable, but it was tradition to always sit at the same table.
Here you can see both the strength of the story – Braeburn’s big thing through the story is his total inability to recognize innuendo – but also its weakness, as the story has a tendency to explain the jokes at times, which diminishes the humor rather immediately. It doesn’t have the confidence to let the jokes stand on their own, which is a pity, as a number are quite good, and would be even better without explanation, and several are outright ruined by the story tripping over itself in its eagerness to make sure that you get the joke.
Braeburn and Caramel are the strongest part of this story; Braeburn’s constant innocent innuendo is pretty consistently funny, and Caramel’s generally frantic nature sets up one of the more interesting rounds of the card game.
And while I saw the ending coming a mile away, I still laughed at it.
The real question you need to ask yourself before reading this story is how much the little explanations in the quoted section bothered you; if they bothered you enough that you found it unfunny, then you probably should avoid this, but if they didn’t bother you that much, then you’ll probably find it enjoyable on the whole.
Recommendation: Worth reading if the author’s periodic violation of “don’t explain the joke” doesn’t bother you.
Quiet Contemplation
by Arcelia
Slice of Life
1,451 wordsIn the few short months that Rarity has been living in Manehatten, it has become routine to sit in one of the empty booths in Chester's Diner and watch the city wake up. Yet one morning, her usual morning ritual is disrupted by the presence of a stallion.
A short one-shot about the moment you meet the one, the very first conversation you have with them and how you'll remember it forever.
Why I added it: The Royal Guard queue.
Review
Rarity comes to the coffee shop in search of some peace and quiet, but it seems she’s acquired a secret admirer. A secret admirer who has finally worked up the courage to talk to her…
Frankly, this story ended up feeling like wish fulfillment rather than how two people would actually interact. Having someone admire you through a window – and apparently investigate who you were, after having done this for quite some time – is actually a little bit creepy, and the whole conversation feels kind of awkward and forced. I never really ended up buying into the emotionality of the scene, either; the start of it was building up a head of steam, but the end doesn’t really play off of the same emotion very well and as such the thread is lost.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
Fixing the Stud
by M E Lovecolt
Romance, Comedy, Slice of Life, Feghoot
3,783 wordsAfter Pinkie's new cake test run goes awry, the Cakes are left with a hole in the wall. Mister Cake goes to the hardware store to pick up supplies to fix it, with the help of his kids.
Too bad he forgot just how much a cart full of building supplies weighs.
Why I added it: The Royal Guard queue.
Review
Expermental cake #398 blew a hole in the ceiling because Pinkie Pie used too many jumping beans. But #399 is going to be okay, right?
Right?
A story set more than a decade after the present in the show, Pound and Pumpkin Cake are both young teenagers, grossed out by their parents wanting alone time and having the hots for attractive mares and stallions around town and wanting to show off for them. But Mister Cake just wants to prove he’s still young, hale, and hardy, and when he can’t pull his cart full of building supplies on his own and has to get help from Big Mac, it’s depressing.
And no one seems to appreciate his jokes, either.
This is a story about the insecurities of middle age, and despite its label as a comedy, most of the story is actually a pretty slice-of-lifish piece about the insecurity of middle age. There is some humor in it, but I wouldn’t really call it a comedy per se…
Well, mostly. I definitely groaned at the end of it when I realized it was a feghoot.
In the end, I was left feeling ambivalent about this piece. I didn’t regret reading it – some of the jokes were pretty funny, the characters were portrayed pretty well, Mister Cake’s securities were shown to the audience in a reasonable enough fashion – but in the end I had trouble really feeling enthusiastic about it. It was decent, but it didn’t thrill me.
Recommendation: Worth Reading if you want to read about Mister Cake being worried about getting old and like slice of life type pieces.
Summary
A Diamond and a Tether by Patchwork Poltergeist
Highly Recommended
Night Rose by Grand_Moff_Pony
Not Recommended
Happy Hour by Vivid Syntax
Worth Reading
Quiet Contemplation by Arcelia
Not Recommended
Fixing the Stud by M E Lovecolt
Worth Reading
In case you didn’t notice, I also posted a set of read it now reviews late Friday night, which also included one recommendation; if you missed that, it is worth checking out, at least if you like literary stuff.
Somehow, I keep managing to put off reading very good pieces for no good reason.
Will I learn from my mistake and finally read all the stories on my Will I learn from my mistake and finally read all the stories on my “You’re Next” bookshelf next, where A Diamond and a Tether has been residing for ages?
Probably not.
Number of stories still listed as Read It Sooner: 82
Number of stories still listed as Read It Later: 335
Number of stories listed as Read It Eventually: 1665
Incidentally, for those of you who caught the title before I edited it: yes, Wanderer D's The Three Sisters is in an upcoming review post. Though given that a bunch of folks I follow are releasing stories today, I suspect that my next review set will be a set of Read It Now reviews.
You didn't review Three Sisters.
Oh wow, thank you for the review. I'm also glad you found it worth reading.
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3390275 see
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My Little Dashie was the only story I ever actually cried to. I wonder if I'll do it again.
Definitely interested in that last one. :D
And by "that last one", I mean "the fifth story out of five reviewed in this journal". Just to be clear. :B
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I had a good bit of luck in the Royal Guard queue this weekend; all five of these stories in this set were in the queue.
Needless to say, A Diamond and a Tether passed.
Thanks for the review, TD!
Tether is the only time I've written something that got apparent universal acclaim and it still baffles me a little. Maybe I just work better with a short leash and a need to fix and fiddle with stuff. Man, Dashie is so gosh darn interesting as a premise. I wish its spinoff and copycat fics did more than kissygoogoo feelz, but then, I feel that way about most fics about parenthood in this fandom, so...
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I think it is hard for a lot of people to write stories like that in part because I don't feel like there's much of a realistic presentation of such in the media. There are a lot of parents, but I see a relative dearth of really complex parent/child interactions in a lot of stories (though I suppose that's probably true of everything - romance is often the same way).
The original certainly hit a powerful button, and I think yours exploited it much more powerfully in general, though I suspect that the targeting of Dashie directly towards bronies helped it with its core target audience, as it wasn't trying to make a complicated point.
If you're going to give out an HR, you picked a fine story to do it with.
**checks the temperature for Hell, MI**
... Huh, 45 degrees. Not frozen over, but darn close.
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I've been really happy with the last few days of stories.
There are two new stories that are getting high marks from me, and right now I'm at 4/5 on my next Read It Now of good stories.
I blame the writeoffs.
But, you know, in a good way.
Was the repeating part of this intentional?