Read It Now Reviews #66 – Six to Eight Weeks Dungeon, Spark Visions of Twilight, Starlight Glimmer Overreacts to Everything, A Different Kind of Mentor, The Jet Powered Pegasus · 11:30pm Dec 13th, 2015
The season 5 finale train never ends, with three more stories tied closely to The Cutie Re-mark, along with a story that was recently featured and an excellent story which won second place in the November write-off that all of you should read.
Which is which? You’ll have to read the reviews to know.
Today’s stories:
Six to Eight Weeks Dungeon by ocalhoun
Spark Visions of Twilight by Tangerine Blast
Starlight Glimmer Overreacts to Everything by Yukito
A Different Kind of Mentor by Jay-The-Brony
The Jet Powered Pegasus by billymorph
Six to Eight Weeks Dungeon
by ocalhoun
Comedy, Random, Slice of Life
1,848 wordsPonyville's new 'code enforcement professional' has got it into her thick, monotonous head that Fluttershy has too great a density of pet animals, and she's set out to rectify that situation.
Twilight, though, has a problem with this, and she'll have to use her full authority as an alicorn princess to put a stop to it.
Why I added it: It was featured.
Review
Fluttershy is being evicted from her property as a result of a city ordinance against keeping more than six animals per acre (Fluttershy’s cottage containing several hundred, this might be a small problem).
Twilight intervenes to try and stop the bureaucratic mare from evicting Fluttershy.
But it isn’t quite as easy as it seems, even if you’re a princess.
And that’s the whole story.
At 1800 words, I’m not quite sure what I was expecting, but the Random tag was certainly the right one to use on this piece; it really is a random piece, without much real point or purpose, and it just kind of ends without much in the way of an interesting resolution.
The punchline of the story is something I’ve seen before, and used better, in Horizon’s excellent Hearth Swarming Eve (that you all should go read if you haven’t already), which probably greatly diminished its impact on me, and overall, I was just kind of left feeling a bit empty by this story, like it set up a situation and then resolved it without really doing anything with it.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
Spark Visions of Twilight
by Tangerine Blast
Alternate Universe, Slice of Life
2,555 wordsA purple Alicorn shows up one night and then vanishes into thin air. Many wouldn't think anything of it besides how strange it was.
Not Rainbow Dash.
Rainbow Dash has met that Alicorn before.
The implication it brings and the guilt that follows leaves Rainbow Dash with questions weighing on her mind.
Luckily, in the crushing pain of reality, she still has friends.
Why I added it: Featured season 5 finale reaction fic.
Review
Rainbow Dash realizes that she had met that strange purple alicorn time-traveller before as a filly. Twilight had insisted that she and the bullies finish their race, and she didn’t… and now, the future is a mess, and Rainbow Dash thinks it is all her fault.
And maybe, just maybe, it is.
Pinkie Pie thinks it is ridiculous for Rainbow Dash to take it all on herself.
But maybe it isn’t as ridiculous as it seems…
This was a solid idea for a story – Twilight’s appearance accidentally triggering a rebellion in an alternate timeline when those in said timeline realize just what happened. It was good seeing the characters piece together the puzzle of what went wrong and how they might go about fixing things.
That said, this story really ends just as it is getting started, as the ponies in the timeline where Nightmare Moon won begin to plot doing some research and seeing if they can’t change the world, but we don’t really know if they succeed or not; it is more of the beginning of a story than a story in and of itself. What is there is good, but there isn’t much there, and while a journey of a thousand miles may begin with a single step, this feels more like the introduction to a story than a complete story into itself. I’d be interested in reading a complete story about this, but as a short story, it left me wanting more.
Recommendation: Not Recommended because it ends just as it begins.
EDIT: This story has since been considerably expanded. It will be re-reviewed when it is complete.
Starlight Glimmer Overreacts to Everything
by Yukito
Comedy, Drama, Random, Slice of Life
1,370 wordsStarlight Glimmer is TRYING to be a good friend, but she just has this awful tendency to overreact at just about anything.
Like trying to rule over an entire village of brainwashed ponies because a friend moved away.
Why I added it: It triggered me. :V
Review
Starlight Glimmer overreacts to everything.
She claims otherwise.
Twilight cites numerous incidents from this week of Starlight Glimmer freaking out over nothing.
Starlight Glimmer promises to do better.
She doesn’t.
The end.
I’m not quite sure what else I could have possibly expected out of this at 1.3k words, and frankly, it wasn’t not what I expected. That said, it just didn’t light my fires; it was mildly amusing, but nothing more, and it all felt a little too… obvious, I suppose, like the joke was already in the concept, and there wasn’t much else beyond that?
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
A Different Kind of Mentor
by Jay-The-Brony
Alternate Universe, Slice of Life
1,327 wordsOne of the many alternate futures Twilight found herself in during her long quest to thwart Starlight Glimmer was a realm ruled by Nightmare Moon. Having come across the dark alicorn herself, Twilight now journeys with her, under threat, travelling deep into the Everfree Forest to show her the means to travel through time.
During that journey, the fallen princess has more than a few words of wisdom to bestow upon the young mare beside her.
Why I added it: It was featured.
Review
Nightmare Moon talks to Twilight about the value of naked power.
And then the story ends.
This is really more of a scene than a story, and while it is a decent enough scene, it doesn’t really go anywhere or mean much of anything in and of itself; it is the start of a story, rather than a story in and of itself. There’s nothing wrong with ideas like this, but if it doesn’t really go anywhere, it is really just a vignette, and there isn’t a whole lot delivered here that justifies its existence.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
The Jet Powered Pegasus
by billymorph
Adventure, Drama, Thriller, Racing
8,206 wordsAnything can fly with enough force behind it, even Scootaloo. An adult and still flightless, Scootaloo poured everything into a jet powered suit to get her into the air. But, with her debts mounting and the Hearth's Warming Derby organisers frantically updating the rules to stop her ever racing again, she has to fly faster than ever before if she wants to keep her wings.
Why I added it: I liked it in the writeoff.
Review
Scootaloo will never fly, not under her own power. She doesn’t have the magic or the wings to pull it off.
But anything will fly if you put enough power behind it.
Twenty years old and part of the racing circuit, Scootaloo is flying not only through cloud-rings, but also through rules loopholes. No one ever expected somepony to build a pony-powered jet flightsuit, but that’s exactly what Scootaloo has done. Her magitech suit threw her deep into debt to build it, but if she gets at least third place in this race, she’ll be able to pay off her debts and keep flying. If not… well, she’s going to be grounded again, this time for good.
Rainbow Dash wants to help, but Scootaloo is tired of being carried. And Spitfire… Spitfire doesn’t think Scootaloo belongs to be there at all. Ponies bust their wings trying to be the best, and Scootaloo got in with her magical contraption. Spitfire doesn’t think it should be allowed, and has convinced the judges that this farce will end after this race.
But Scootaloo is going to beat her. She has to. And with her flight suit, she can.
This is a really well-written racing story, and it presents pegasus racing in a very interesting light – talking about using the magic left behind by other ponies as well as their slipstream, as well as going into Scootaloo’s suit just enough to give us some idea of how it works, and how she might have a shot at it, despite being innately flightless. The race is presented excellently, and we get all of the standard twists and turns and thrills that you’d hope for in a story about a race. It gives some pretty strong visuals, and gets your brain pumping and cheering for Scootaloo as she flies her ridiculous contraption on through in the hope for third and the money she needs to keep flying.
Recommendation: Highly Recommended and criminally under-read.
Summary
Six to Eight Weeks Dungeon by ocalhoun
Not Recommended
Spark Visions of Twilight by Tangerine Blast
Not Recommended
Starlight Glimmer Overreacts to Everything by Yukito
Not Recommended
A Different Kind of Mentor by Jay-The-Brony
Not Recommended
The Jet Powered Pegasus by billymorph
Highly Recommended
That’s right, a highly recommended. Billymorph is a really great writer, and The Jet Powered Pegasus is criminally underrated and underviewed. It is a really strong story, and while I understand a lot of folks might question it at its description, it is pretty much the best depiction of a race I’ve read about in prose fiction ever. Maybe I’m just a nerd for magitech, but the story works very well, and I got some fun mental images of Scootaloo in her flight suit, racing along with the other ponies during the race.
Number of stories still listed as Read It Sooner: 97
Number of stories still listed as Read It Later: 389
Number of stories listed as Read It Eventually: 1742
Wait, what? HSwE isn't a comedy!
*reads OCalhoun's story*
... I hate to say this, but I have to echo your NR, and it's exactly because the ending (and the reference you cite) flat-out doesn't work. It's not that the idea of it can't be funny, but it has absolutely nothing to do with anything else in the story, so it boils down to a feghoot: derailing the entire setup in order to do the worldbuilding equivalent of a bad pun.
Georg posted a comment with an alternate ending, and to me that works far better, because it bases the twist on the actual build-up of the story. Even ending on the titular "six to eight weeks" would have done that, closing on some karmic justice (although much more roughly delivered with a lot more left implied), which is why the last two lines are so disappointing: they rob the piece of the punchline it should have had, which could have actually worked.
(Hi, ocalhoun. Sorry I didn't like it. Hope that helps. The rest of the story is a perfectly good setup, but in a story this short it all comes down to how you capitalize on the setup and the final impression it leaves.)
Bucking called it. Not that there was much doubt, just based on previous patterns.
3616496
You mean the pattern of TD hating everything? :V
i.ytimg.com/vi/3OET5OP-PTA/hqdefault.jpg
3616499 More like specifically the pattern of TD reviewing every single story ocalhoun puts out and invariably rating them NR, almost all for reasons that can be summed up as "it just didn't do it for me".
Note that I'm not criticizing anyone, just noting the facts.
3616512
To be fair, it isn't quite invariable; I've liked a number of his stories. If I hadn't, I would have given up on reading them a long time ago.
It probably just seems inevitable because I've been doing a bunch of these lately and haven't cared very much for the latest batch.
That being said, the reason behind my dissatisfaction with this one ended up lying primarily in the ending; the story sets up a situation, then ends on a joke about the friendship dungeon which didn't really feel like it flowed naturally from the rest of the story. The story didn't ultimately end up going much of anywhere as a result of its ending feeling bit disconnected from the rest of the piece.
Three of the stories in this review set had ending issues; in addition to ocalhoun's story, both Tangerine Blast and Jay-The-Brony wrote stories that felt incomplete. Jay's didn't really have an ending at all, while Tangerine's felt like it was chapter 1 of a larger story - it had an "ending" but not really a "conclusion", so to speak.
Spark Visions of Twilight - Definitely have to say that it needs to be continued. Like it's been noted, that story is a first chapter in feel, pacing and setting. I just hope Tangerine jumps into it. He can do a tight story with it without going too long if he wants to.
A Different Kind of Mentor - I feel like I've mentioned my issues with his stories before.
The Jet Powered Pegasus - Added to reading list.
3616652
Yeah, I might have to take his stuff off my reading list in the future.
Or just steal all his ideas, seeing as he doesn't seem to want to use them :V
Though I actually have plans of my own for the Nightmare Moon verse.
Yeah, I agree. I'd definitely read it.
Starlight Glimmer Overreacts to Everything is one of those stories where the entire joke is in the cover art, so looking at the cover art saves one the trouble of reading the story.
This type of story is rather common, and can often be identified by the cover and title.
It's nice when art inspires people, but rehashing a piece of art by padding it into 1000 words always strikes me as a poor use of one's time.
"The Jet Powered Pegasus", in spite of its awfully blunt title, sounds fucking awesome. If you've read "RUN", which I loved and which has a vaguely similar premise, I'd be kind of interested in how they compare -- although it may not be feasible to do that in depth without spoiling "Pegasus". Still, I was worried that you'd strike out again on this batch, so it's nice to see you wrap up with such enthusiasm.
3617072
I have to admit, based on my limited experience with this trope, that I agree. (I feel compelled to note the amusing relevance of "a picture is worth 1000 words".) I reckon it's a particular instance of having an idea to start a story with but not really seeing it through from "idea implementation in prose" to "actual story", which seems to be a particular bugaboo of TD's -- see also the discussion of ocalhoun above. I feel like I have read stories that pulled it off, probably by being inspired in a more tonal/aesthetic direction rather than literally recreating a scenario, but I can't bring any to mind.
These stories crop up a lot in the box because the "hook" -- whether a pic, a neat premise, whatever -- drives a lot of interest, and if your story is approximately grammatical and somewhat coherent, gathering enough eyeballs is pretty much all you need for popularity. (Plus, they tend to be rather short, so people finish them and vote and comment rather than losing that initial interest.) I've speculated before that a boring-looking story in the box is actually more likely to be good, since it's possible to write a very good story that doesn't lend itself to such hooks.
Which brings me back to "RUN" and "Jet Powered Pegasus". While "RUN" has a good premise and, more notably, a great presentation, its most obvious quality is the distinctive prose style, with recurring formatting tricks and phrases and so on (the aforementioned presentation is really just an extension of that to the description page). "RUN" with uninspired prose but an identical plot might feel perfunctory in the exact same way as that box-bait. OTOH, it sounds like what TD likes about "Pegasus" has more to do with actually following through on its premise; his only mention of the voice is saying that the racing itself is depicted in an exciting way, and we know from airport thrillers and highbrow English class literature that (respectively) workmanlike prose can be exciting and innovative or beautiful phrasing nevertheless unengaging. (No offense, billymorph -- having not read it, I'm sure that "Pegasus" is as sparkling as it is well-thought-out. I'm just saying TD's review seems to respond more to the latter.)
3617185 I agree that the main problem with translating pictures to story is that they often follow the picture too closely. Rather than taking the picture as a base to build off of, or as a "tonal/aesthetic inspiration", they just try to translate the picture into prose. Visual art has so many fundamental differences with prose, however, that the end result inevitably relies on padding. Since pictures convey information more quickly, trying to convert a picture into a story is inevitably doomed to create a fic that is mediocre and redundant with the original picture.
I have written stories based on pictures before. They weren't simply translations of the picture, though. Rather, they took the feelings about the picture, the hypothetical scenarios the picture created in my mind, and then used those as the basis for a story.
I wrote a blog recently about how music can be a steroid for the imagination; it is vague enough not to restrict ideas, yet evocative to impart emotion. Pictures are similar but different. They can certainly evoke emotions, but they don't leave as much room to speculate as music can. Translating a piece of visual art into a story requires the author to stray farther from it, to avoid being redundant with the inspiration.
Alas, the constant presence of these things in the featured box leads me to believe most authors don't think through such stories very carefully. The fact that the rehash the picture is the entire point, and most authors are content to rehash clickbait with less efficient clickbait.
3617185
I've read RUN; I'd say The Jet Powered Pegasus is a better story, though it is a completely different sort of story from RUN (though, full disclose, RUN isn't exactly my favorite story in the world, though it has been a while since I read it). RUN isn't nearly as focused on the action as The Jet Powered Pegasus is, and it focuses on a different aspect of what is going on. The Jet Powered Pegasus is a single climactic race, plus some events before and after it; RUN is about a number of events illustrating the relationship between characters and what it meant to be a runner. That's not to say that The Jet Powered Pegasus doesn't focus on the emotional connections between characters; it spends a lot of focus on how Scootaloo relates to Rainbow Dash and Spitfire. But it isn't the same sort of intense emotional connection as you saw in RUN.
All, but oneeee.
¡Execute "Order # 66"!
This is blog "Read It Now Reviews # 66".
Unfortunately, Abrams, who does not care about continuity, so he will ruin Star Wars, by leleasing a movie called Star Wars, which is called Star Wars and has characters with the same names as the 6 real movies of Star Wars, but having nothing to do with Star Wars, in less than 1 week.
Abrams ruined Star Trek and now ruins Star Wars. Since he cannot follow continuity, he should make his own movies, rather than ruining the franchises of others. I wonder which franchise Abrams will ruin next.
3616483
The funny thing is that I read the story, saw the alternate ending, and immediately thought of your collection of story continuations. I agree completely about the ending, too, which is a pity, since I was enjoying the story before that. It might have been decent for the first part of a story, of course...
--arcum42
Spark Visions of Twilight
Seeing as how the original chapter was supposed to be a very short snapshot of what might happen after RD's encounter with alicorn Twilight, Tangerine Blast pulled it off quite well. Not recommending due to the abruptness isn't very fair. There are actually numerous examples of great short stories that end just as loads of interesting shit was about to begin--in Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, Amazing Tales, even Anne McCaffrey's "Dragonriders of Pern" originally was just a very short story called "Weyr Search" which was never meant to be continued.
In the best of such stories, we never saw their beginning, we never see their end, but what we do get to see is an attention grabbing moment in their middle. Those stories were originally meant to be left for the reader's imagination of where they might go after that last period.
In some cases, those stories were continued by their authors. Fortunately for many of us, Anne followed through with hers. And I'll have to see about Tangerine's tomorrow.
But as Rod Serling, himself, might say, "Sometimes--the greatest impact these stories have on us--is right where they end--in the Twilight Zone."
4494622
Given that the story has since been (considerably) expanded, I'm going to re-review it when it is done.