Read It Later Reviews #32 – The Birds and the Bees; All of It, For Her; Ave Sonata; We Who With Songs Beguile; The Regular · 8:15pm Oct 6th, 2015
Thought I’d get some work done for the Royal Guard and read a few pieces I’d been putting off reading for a long time.
Today’s stories:
The Birds and the Bees by Scantrel
All of It, For Her by Pav Feira
Ave Sonata by Majin Syeekoh
We Who With Songs Beguile by Loganberry
The Regular by Ruirik
The Birds and the Bees
by Scantrel
Comedy
9,195 wordsThe Cutie Mark Crusaders' plans for an afternoon of crusading are interrupted by a school assignment to write a report on nature. They've heard other ponies talk about "the birds and the bees" and decide to ask their sisters and the rest of the Mane Six for their help on the subject.
Needless to say, the answers they get should make for a very interesting report!
Why I added it: I had read it previously but couldn’t really remember it.
Review
The Cutie Mark Crusaders decide to write a report about the birds and the bees because they overheard Applejack saying she’d have to have a discussion with them about it sometime.
Naturally, they then go around to every one of the mane six asking them about the birds and the bees, with predictable results.
Unfortunately, this is the precise problem with the story – it is, alas, eminently predictable. Two of the chapters – Twilight and Rainbow Dash – rely heavily on the idea of the ponies having active sex lives (especially Rainbow Dash) for their comedy, and Rarity’s chapter relies on the idea that she keeps a bunch of dirty romance novels around as its source of comedy. Fluttershy’s flustered chapter is exactly what you’d expect after the CMC tell Fluttershy that everyone knows she’s an expert on them… and Applejack, being the final pony, gets to hear about it and put it all together. Even Pinkie Pie’s chapter is semi-predictable, though it is probably the least predictable of the lot of them.
The problem with the story is that it just feels kind of obvious – humor often relies on the unexpected, but the story pretty much followed the general, generic lines of all such stories without putting any particularly fresh twists on it. You can probably imagine the CMC wandering around asking the mane six about the birds and the bees, and the particular tropes used here for comedy just didn’t really do it for me – the idea of transgressive humor using ponies is potentially funny, but in the end if you don’t really go anywhere beyond the obvious, it is hard for it to really draw a laugh. Here, the presentation felt very unadorned, very bare-bones, and tremendously telegraphed, and in the end, it just didn’t really do it for me.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
All of It, For Her
by Pav Feira
Romance, Sad
4,386 wordsThirty five years. Been roaming Equestria from town to cloying town, looking for her. Not for lack of trying, mind you. Equestria's just that big of a place. There's only so many places left to look, though, and it'd be foolish to throw in the towel already. I'm getting close. So I'll do the same thing I did yesterday: search.
Why I added it: It was featured by the RCL.
Review
Cranky has been wandering Equestria for 35 years, searching for Matilda. He pawns off various trinkets to make rent and pay for things, even as he visits every place he can think of in the hopes of finding someone – anyone – who knows Matilda and can point him in the right direction.
And no one can.
Ever.
Sometimes they take pity on him and give him a little trinket for good luck. Another memory to add to the wagon – or possibly to pawn off, later on down the line.
But today, his local landlady decided to follow him around. He thinks he’s been hiding what he’s been up to, but she knows. And she thinks it is high time he examined some other options…
A story that does an excellent job of capturing Cranky’s pathos, Cranky is well-voiced throughout the piece, and his limited, blinkered point of view makes it impossible for him to see the world for the place it is in oh so many ways.
This story is sad on two fronts – it is sad because Cranky can’t find his lost love, but it is also sad because Cranky’s quest is so obviously futile on the face of it. It has been thirty-five years – why should he expect that he can even find Matilda? Is the expectation that she waited for him even reasonable?
But he won’t even contemplate the idea that he might want to just live his life, instead of spending the whole thing chasing after a dream – he outright can’t contemplate it, because the idea is just too sad. But every day he chases that dream, he’s letting all the other ones he could be having die away.
Recommendation: Recommended.
Ave Sonata
by Majin Syeekoh
Dark, Slice of Life, Human
1,050 wordsSonata Dusk plays in the park under the watchful eyes of Aria and Adagio.
Why I added it: The Royal Guard queue.
Review
Sonata plays in the park and talks to a little kid, but the kid’s parent shoos them away from her. Sonata is a bad person, after all. But Sonata doesn’t really understand.
Aria and Adagio do, though. Sonata has always been off, but she’s getting worse every day…
Unfortunately, I felt like this was more of a scene than a story; it doesn’t really go anywhere. We find out what is wrong with Sonata, but there aren’t really any greater implications; the still-sane sirens want vengeance, but the story doesn’t actually lead to any sort of resolution of… any kind, really. It is more of a setup than a story. I was thinking that maybe it would imply that the others were worried about it happening to them as well, or maybe something more sinister at work, but…
It just kind of left me feeling like I got a bundle of plot threads in my hand, but they didn’t get stuck together.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
We Who With Songs Beguile
by Loganberry
Comedy, Slice of Life
3,289 wordsFluttershy's songbird choir is renowned throughout Equestria, in demand by ponies everywhere. Looked at from the other side of the perch, though, it's not always the life it's cracked up to be. If you want to hear the real story, straight from the bird's beak, Mazarine is your jay. Though you may have to set aside most of an afternoon...
Why I added it: The Royal Guard queue.
Review
Mazarine the blue jay complains about ponies and their strange ways.
A story told from the point of view of one of Fluttershy’s songbirds, this story is chock full of the bird’s perceptions of ponies, from their odd society to the casual manner in which birds are mistreated by ponies, to how they identify ponies by coat color and mane color (which is a bit strange, given that the birds themselves apparently have names – why don’t they name the ponies? [1]), and the birds’ skewed perspective (and lack of understanding) of the world around them.
Unfortunately, this story didn’t actually end up doing a whole lot for me; I didn’t really find it to be very funny, and the whole thing felt very meandering, without much of a point. The arc of the story was tremendously muddled by asides, and by the end of it, I didn’t feel like a whole lot was achieved – I didn’t really ever empathize with the blue jay, and most of the story was spent focusing on the odd vocabulary of the bird rather than focusing on the contents of the story itself. The whole thing never really touched me, nor did it make me laugh, nor did it make me empathize with the long-suffering blue jay, and by the end, I just was left without any really strong impression of anything in the piece.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
The Regular
by Ruirik
Slice of Life
3,436 wordsIn all his years of running his own shop, Doughnut Joe has seen thousands of ponies. Some he knew, most he didn't, and many he would never see again. But he never minded that, for he always had his regulars.
Why I added it: It was featured by the Royal Canterlot Library.
Review
A very slice-of-lifey slice of life piece, this is about Donut Joe puttering around his shop and eventually remembering an old regular customer of his – who, naturally, gave his name as Regular. It documents a few of their interactions, gives a few hints as to who the Regular is, and then finally explains why he no longer comes there, and how he got a new regular – a cute little violet-coated filly who likes tea.
This is a melancholic story, but it isn’t really sad per se; describing it as slice of life is accurate, because over the course of the piece, nothing really happens in it. Unfortunately, the story’s understated nature ended up making me fail to engage with it at all; I never really cared about the Regular, or even about Donut Joe, as I just didn’t get enough of them as people for it to really hit me in the feels. Consequently, the events of the story just slide on by, and I never really got a great grip on the passage of time in the piece – indeed, it seems to contradict itself periodically, noting that the Regular’s last visit was two weeks ago, and then later noting that a month had passed since he found out by the Regular didn’t visit anymore. The introduction of the story – setting the scene for the rest of the piece as Donut Joe comes in and does his weekly ritual – doesn’t really feel like it was continued on in the ending, and the whole thing feels a bit disjointed at times in ways that bothered me, as I tried to follow the various events and times and just couldn’t.
Overall, I wasn’t terribly enamored with this piece; I’m not generally a huge fan of pure slice of life pieces, and without emotional investment and my sense of “What Happened to the Mouse?”, it just didn’t end up coming together for me.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
Summary
The Birds and the Bees by Scantrel
Not Recommended
All For Her by Pav Feira
Recommended
Ave Sonata by Majin Syeekoh
Not Recommended
We Who With Songs Beguile by Loganberry
Not Recommended
The Regular by Ruirik
Not Recommended
And there we go! Five more stories read, and my bookshelves actually getting shorter.
Number of stories still listed as Read It Sooner: 88
Number of stories still listed as Read It Later: 347
Number of stories listed as Read It Eventually: 1693
[1] As noted in the comments by Loganberry, the author's intent in naming the ponies using simple color pairs was to show disdain for the ponies - all the birds have complex color names, so the ponies being given simple ones was apparently intended as a sign of disrespect. While clever, I didn't pick this up at all during the story, and it was further confused by the fact that Lavender-Purple was their name for Twilight, and Lavender is a fairly "expensive" color name.
Who is this "Pav Fiera" you speak of? Have I heard of them before?
Thanks very much for the review! I love getting detailed reviews like these -- and yes, that goes even when someone doesn't like the fic. There's very little I can quibble with in your assessment, since a lot of its effect depends on how you feel about Mazarine's (deliberately) rambling style. Since you didn't like that, it was always going to be a major stretch for you to like the story as a whole.
Those are their names. That's why all the birds themselves have names that are colour-based. The names they give the ponies are more basic simply because they rather despise them.
3447721
3447741
Aha, I see. So they get simple color names because they're not cool enough to warrant real names, eh?
Naming your kid Blue is probably like naming them John Smith. Very unoriginal.
3447758
Or you're a huge fan of Pokémon?
cdn.bulbagarden.net/upload/thumb/3/36/Super_Effective_Strip_02.png/250px-Super_Effective_Strip_02.png
Hmm, what are you gonna do once your list is done?
3447816
If I did nothing but read stories on FIMFiction, it would take me about half a year to read everything on my lists.
Assuming I didn't sleep at all.
Or spend time eating.
Or working.
Or doing anything else.
And didn't add anything new to them.
It isn't likely to happen anytime soon.
But, what would I do?
Hopefully focus more on writing.
I'm sad you didn't like Beguile so much. :(
3448207
I am too~
Well, not really sad. Because I don't really get sad over not liking stories.
But I was hoping I would like it.
Then again, I hope I'll like every story I read.
LOOK WHAT I'M SAYING IS PEOPLE TOLD ME I SHOULD READ IT AND I WAS HOPING I WOULD LIKE IT MORE THAN I DID OKAY?
3448233
Maybe you should try liking things more sometime :V
3447758 Pretty much. You make a fair point about Twilight's name in your footnote. That was a little bit of a compromise on my part, because of Twilight's annoying insistence on being two shades of the same colour. "Purple-Purple" would sound silly, and "Light Purple-Dark Purple" even more so. Perhaps "Lavender" is a more ordinary colour name for ponyfic readers (admittedly partly because of LUS) than for the population at large. Still, I would have used a simpler word if there'd been one available, so your point stands.
Thanks for the recommend! I'm glad you liked it.
In a way it's sort of weird to see this fic get so many positive reviews. I sort of see AoIfH as a very personal story, considering that I channeled a lot of the emotions from my own "one that got away" story when writing that. But in hindsight, I guess that's why it resonated with a lot of people.
3447721
Don't follow that guy he's not cooler than me seriously i can be cool too i won't narc i just wanna hang out :(
3448461
Yeah, curse that pony's colors for ruining everything!
Incidentally, if you're wondering, the basic color terms in English are:
Blue
Green
Red
Yellow
Orange
Purple
White
Gray
Black
Pink
Brown
Lavender is a pretty widely recognized term, so it isn't like it is super obscure or anything (unlike mazarine, which I'm pretty sure 90%+ of the reading public can't identify as a color word at all), but it tends to stick out a lot more.
3448595
So which of your stories should I read next?
3448692
Well, assuming that you're only looking at Completed fics, that limits your options to a sweet little children's story, or a sentimental/silly Rarijack RomCom. Though, if I can ever push the blasted thing out of revision hell, I have a Twilestia RomCom in the works that might tickle your fancy...
3450385
RariJack you say?
3450472
Aye Rarijack, luv.