AShadowOfCygnus reads "Big Mac Reads Something Purple" · 3:02pm Nov 9th, 2015
Another reading from AShadowOfCygnus !
Big Mac Reads Something Purple
Big Mac tries to tell a story to the CMC, but keeps getting stuck at the same place. Equestria Daily said,
I could find no grammatical errors, and no particular flaws in the writing style.
However, for a fic that purports to be about comedy and romance, there's precious little of either. Comedy stories are supposed to be focused on humor, and the drawn-out joke of "Big Mac talks about his feelings for Twilight in a thinly veiled way" really, really doesn't do anything for any of us.
As a slice of life story, I could see this maybe barely squeaking by, but the pacing is glacial, the story reads as though it is many times longer than it actually is, and in general there's not much conflict to either story arc you attempt to set up, which lends itself to a passionless story that has little payoff for either party. We're not really shown how either Twilight or Big Mac come to have feelings for each other, only told this through exposition in dialogue or narration, which forces us to accept a romance that we may or may not be invested in without any prelude, and if our readers don't already ship this pairing, there's nothing here to convince them to do so. And bluntly, if there's no investment, the ending (which was one bit I did like, with the two heading inside for an "easier book") lacks any sense of payoff or catharsis, since we don't emphasize with either character.
I know these sorts of things are precisely what you hate to hear from us, but to be perfectly blunt, you can write far better than this. I've seen you do so, and your past works have been a pleasure to read for the most part. However, this extreme understatement in the story is a disservice to your skills and would be a disservice to our readers, were we to post it.
Wait, that's the wrong quote, dammit. Ignore that. It's a good story.
AShadowOfCygnus got all three endings in by casting a magic spell on his YouTube video. He skipped a couple of lines somewhere near the start, but I'm probably the only one who'll notice.
Translation: We disliked this so much that a back-handed compliment seemed appropriate. Lovely.
This kind of assessment from readers really chaps me, sometimes, though in some cases it's probably well-deserved.
But in the case of a short slice of life story like this, I found it enough to be flexible and accept some givens - especially for the limited scope of it - so that I could enjoy what you were doing with it. Without the Alternate Endings, this is a brief story of unrequited love, not shared. Despite the tag (which is too all-encompassing), the focus isn't on actual romance - which by default requires two people - but on Big Mac's emotions dealing with his feelings of love, and his sense of low self-esteem and especially self-worth. I thought you did a wonderful job of having the foals hammer into him like kids will do in their ignorance, and Mac's reactions were actually very calm and clever, and they really tore me up.
I can see what the EqD readers were looking for, but not every story needs to give you "Well, first the Earth cooled, and then came the dinosuars" to lay the foundations of the story before things get really good. Big Mac loves Twilight: It's plausible. Accept it, so that you can explore his feelings about that and about himself. To lay down 5K-10K of prologue seems to me like defeating the purpose of a short story like this, which will never have all of the details you want. It should have only the ones you need, and in my opinion this story delivered.
With the Alternate endings... I've probably said enough already. I liked this story, very much, which is why I placed it where I did in my library.
Yet another in the litany of reasons why EqD's 'recommendations' need to be taken with a grain of salt the size of Jupiter.
Have I mentioned, by the way, how much I appreciate that the reading announcement posts you do always include some other angle for discussion of the work? It's very refreshing.
3532630 It was a victim of tags. It isn't really a comedy or a romance, but what else can I call it? I do think, though, that the story both tells and shows why Big Mac is awed by Twilight. Tells, in his story, in which he describes the things about Twilight that impress him. Shows, by the awe he shows towards the library and its books. And the things he singles out as the things he admires about Twilight are, I think we can guess, things that he feels he lacks--education, heroic activity, the confidence to speak to crowds. So I think it does a pretty good job of explaining why Twilight. And, yes, stretching it out to 10K to develop it as a love story would've made it a different story.