• Member Since 3rd Sep, 2011
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PresentPerfect


Fanfiction masochist. :B She/they https://ko-fi.com/presentperfect

More Blog Posts2550

  • Saturday
    Twilight the 没用

    Yesterday, a fellow named SoothingBell asked if they could translate Twilight the Useless to Chinese, and no way was I gonna say no. :D

    And they turned it around in 24 hours, amazing!

    https://fimtale.com/t/64723

    4 comments · 129 views
  • 1 week
    Idle musing

    so-called because that's what led me to the realization

    What is so compelling about the idea of "warrior woman runs afoul of a wizard and is flung centuries into the future" that I made it happen twice?

    ...And with slightly more musing, I also realize, in a roundabout way, it was with the same wizard. >_> Huh.

    Read More

    7 comments · 163 views
  • 1 week
    Fic recs, March 20th!

    Posting a day earlier than usual because the next reading is a long one!

    H: 1 R: 2 C: 1 V: 1 N: 3

    Read More

    6 comments · 188 views
  • 1 week
    Fic recs, March 14th!

    Lotus Moon has done a reading of Fleety's What's Philomena's Name?!

    Hey, help out Regidar, he's looking for experimental fics! Self-promotion allowed!

    Read More

    5 comments · 234 views
  • 2 weeks
    Fic recs, March 8th: Top Ten of 2023!

    Whaaaaat, two review blogs in a row?

    Well hell yes, because I have done much better with the top ten this year and I am inordinately pleased with myself! :3 here's the explanation of the setup, for all that it has never adequately explained what's going on to like, literally anyone:

    Read More

    19 comments · 271 views
Nov
9th
2015

Fic recs, November 9th! · 2:22pm Nov 9th, 2015

Nothing important has happened since the last one, save that I finished that big audiobook! Or, more to the point, stopped it at not even the one-third mark. Read below to find out why! Only three more readings until the next one! D:

H: 0 R: 2 C: 1 V: 0 N: 3

Trick Question revised her first story, The Element of Surprise, which I reviewed back on January 15th, giving it a conditional rating. It still feels a little telly, but that’s because most of the storytelling is fairly straightforward. What it doesn’t feel is cramped or rushed. I also appreciated how the Sad tag isn’t there because Twilight’s friends die first, but because she realizes at the end that she wasted her life trying to save them instead of enjoying what she had. So this gets upgraded to Recommended!

The Hoodie by Octavia Harmony
Genre: Mystery
A detective is haunted by a serial killer case.
You can kind of tell this was adapted from a piece of original fiction; there’s not much pony about it (and there’s a mention of fingers). I was able to figure out who the killer was after a certain detail is mentioned the second time; after that, it was just a slow slide to the inevitable conclusion. I wanted to like this, and it does do a lot of suggesting things in small ways, but ultimately the writing is a big letdown, being very plain and matter-of-fact. The detective doesn’t get any characterization, and two thousand words just isn’t enough to set up a really satisfying mystery.
Not Recommended

Aletheia by Foehn
Reading by VisualPony
Genre: Lost Cities
After Keskiyönnon, Cold in Gardez sent out a call for more Lost Cities candidates, and this is one of them! The way it sets this up, as a series of vignettes about multiple cities, is extremely clever (I actually didn’t get what was going on at first), but I wish a little more had been done with it. There’s none of the sense of quiet adventure you get from other Lost Cities pieces, and the whole thing feels a bit sparse. Still, I think fans of the original will get a kick out of this.
Recommended If You Like Lost Cities

The End of Starlight by literacy
Patreon reward for Protopony350
Genre: Character Death
Starlight Glimmer starves to death in her cave, alone save for the rocks.
I don’t have much to say about this one. It’s just a scene of Starlight being crazy and alone before she dies. It obviously hasn’t been proofread, which is what stuck in my craw. There are missing words that I can’t even figure out. Didn’t enjoy it.
Not Recommended

A New Spell by Alexstrazsa
Genre: Historical
Star Swirl prepares Clover the Clever to carry on his legacy.
This is a fairly simple piece built around aging, magic headcanon, and a single twist at the end. Well, and the somewhat surprising decision to make Clover male, though I don’t find that hard to accept. I read this a good while ago, and I feel it still holds up.
Recommended

Fallout Equestria: Starlight by volrathxp
Reading (part 1) by VisualPony
Mature: Sex
Genre: Fallout: Equestria Sidefic
I’d like to begin this review with a quote from my running commentary of FoE:

now I know why everyone wants to write in this world. If you set your story post-Gardens, you can have alicorn OCs! D:

The Big Four of FoE sidefics, if you will, are — to my knowledge — Pink Eyes, Heroes, Murky Number Seven and, of course, Project Horizons. You’ll note Starlight is not among them; I had no idea it existed prior to finding this audiobook. Thus you can imagine my chagrin when I discovered this story was invested in making that prediction a reality. Our main character is Radiant Star, an alicorn with the Followers of the Apocalypse, freed from the Unity of the Goddess’s sway and recently transformed to look like Twilight Sparkle, not to mention having her emotions and memories, much to her dismay. And that’s about where the story starts to go wrong.

The fact is, I never got a good feeling for Star before we were thrust into “time to root for the protagonist now” mode. When we meet her, she has no personality beyond “profoundly lazy” and no goals of her own. Yes, she wants to stop being Twilight, but there’s nothing before the transformation occurs such that said transformation becomes an obstacle to her achieving it. (She does want to become a full-fledged Follower, but it’s during the initiation ritual that she transforms, so she technically got that wish.)

Characters were all-around a major problem in this. I couldn’t tell you a damned thing about Violet Iris, Star’s girlfriend. Who, I should mention, just sort of hooks up with her after a few chapters because why not, I guess? (Rushed relationships were another big problem.) Steeljack, with his on-the-nose name, is just the gruff, stoic guy in power armor. Patch kind of grew on me, between her initial friendless desperation, nonchalance at losing an eye, and hooking up with Steeljack (again, more or less out of the blue), but she was a slow burn and couldn't carry the story on her own.

Mostly, the big problem is that this piece is more or less a sequel to FoE, taking place as it does directly after the events of that story, mired in the changes Littlepip brought to the Wasteland, and even featuring a few major characters like Life Bloom and (ugh) Homage. But everything that Starlight does feels like a by-the-book attempt to fit into FoE’s shoes. The POV is first-person. Our main character is a lesbian. She gets a gun she really likes. She has a little pony in her head. Again and again, plot points, side quests and details matched up readily with stuff from the original. Quite often, it was the stuff that made me roll my eyes. The only thing Starlight does better, at least up to where I stopped reading, was in not making everything be about rape. I mean, serious fucking points right there.

So what did I want from this story? Well, I wanted more alicorn angst, for one. In ten chapters, I got maybe one good scene of this, with Star (who, unlike many of her kind, conveniently can’t remember anything from before she was an alicorn) contemplating the ramifications of having been part of the hive mind, a killing machine in the hooves of a mad Goddess. There was a good bit of Ministry Mare angst, though, which ended up being the one compelling part of the story. As with its predecessor, the main plot was considerably less interesting than what was going on in the memory orbs. Taken as the tale of Twilight’s downfall during the war after the loss of her brother drives her mad, it’s pretty solid, interesting stuff. That’s occasionally, y’know, broken up by these scenes of a random alicorn doing uninteresting Fallout stuff in the Wasteland.

A few more thoughts before I close this up. Starlight did a lot of trying to bring season 2 elements into the FoE universe, and not always with good results. Daring Do’s Stable was a cool set piece, for all that it’s a mostly pointless sidequest. Shining Armor, meanwhile, is killed off in the same scene he’s introduced, existing as nothing more than a plot device for Twilight’s story. Discord was also rather poorly handled (and I can’t help but think that, even unreformed, his presence in the Wasteland would have major repercussions for the original story's canon). Anyone who read my review of the original story will recall constant eye rolling over how video gamey it was. (Side note: This is the first FoE-related thing I’ve read since actually getting to see the games played, and that was something of a treat. There’s a lot of inspiration taken from New Vegas, and, it seemed, a lot more of an attempt to integrate details from the games so that it felt truer as a crossover.) And yet I was incredibly incensed when Star gets a minigun with magically infinite ammo within the first few chapters. Violet gets a beam rifle that’s nearly as powerful. I just… You leave the big guns for later! I suppose I just can’t be satisfied. I couldn’t bring myself to read the clop chapter, for what it’s worth, so I can’t comment on that, other than this should have a sex taaaag. What I won’t comment on is the writing; for once, an audiobook led me astray in this regard, the author having done some major editing since it was published, and I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt in regards to what I heard.

In the end, the problem with this story is that I was never excited about it. I stopped because I didn’t really have to give it the time of day, and I’ve got a lot of other things I need to do instead. (Like, say, Project Horizons...) Not once did I say, “Gee, I want to know what happens next.” Even not finding out the end of Twilight’s arc doesn’t bother me that much, for all that it was the only thing holding my interest. Fallout: Equestria took 15 full chapters to really get good, and this, my friends, is no Fallout: Equestria. If you really liked the original, you may like this, but I suspect you also got something out of it that I never did.
Not Recommended: DNF: 10/37

Telltales by Hyperexponential
Reading by SolarPony, et. al.
Genre: Thriller
Twilight Sparkle and Applejack stood in the light of the boutique’s door. There before them stood two Raritys.
Let’s travel back to when “X is a changeling” was relevant, and this story decided to do something with the idea. Now, from the Dark tag, it’s pretty obvious that they’re gonna choose the wrong Rarity; that’s how you make a horror story out of this kind of setup. The fun parts come in the dialogue as they try to sort out who’s who, the reason why they pick the wrong one, and the building fridge horror as the denouement progresses. This is a fun little piece.
Recommended

And now my audiobook list is under 300 videos for the first time since I added VisualPony and Captain Sand. :B

Report PresentPerfect · 715 views · #fic reviews
Comments ( 11 )

Yeah, the FoE: SL story simply bored me.

I'm considering doing a FoE story once I finish my current ongoing one. Any advice for me?

Has anyone read FoE: Heroes? I have a long drive coming up and found a pretty decent quality reading of it. Is it worth the time?

PresentPerfect
Author Interviewer

3531370
Don't do it! Start from the angle of having a plot and/or characters who fit the setting. Tell a story, don't just shove video game references into your fic. And definitely don't do what I'm doing, which is planning a story meant to break a lot of the tropes of the original. Spitefic is a lose-lose situation. :B

3531380 The no video game references thing will be good, I tried that with my first fic here and it was awful. :p

My only concern with my fic compared to the original is that several elements of S2 and S3 would be at play, but I can work around that in the backstory.

Hm, I really enjoyed End if Starlight, but I guess they all can't be winners.

the somewhat surprising decision to make Clover male

Clover's explicitly referred to as male in the Journal of the Two Sisters book, which may well be the reason for that choice.

PresentPerfect
Author Interviewer

3531813
Goddammit, I need to get my hands on that fucking thing. :|

Well... shit? I remember liking Starlight a whole lot more than you, but I'm not sure how much of that was due to the mystery involving Twilight and how much was everything else.

I also vaguely seem to remember things getting better after the point where you stopped reading, but I can't really quantify how or why at the moment. I'll have to segue my mind back to FoE from Undertale for that to happen.

Twilight Sparkle and Applejack stood in the light of the boutique’s door. There before them stood two Raritys.

And for one hopeful moment, I thought there was a sequel to What if I told you there was a changeling in the basement of Carousel Boutique?

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