GaPJaxie Judges Others · 3:49am Feb 29th, 2016
Stuck in a New York hotel room. Lost my voice -- literally totally unable to speak -- so it's not like I can hit the town. TV is boring. Already read all the ponyfic I can in a day.
Sigh. Fine. I guess I need to do something this evening.
Time to judge others.
Specifically, this week, I'll be judging the fundamental worth and human merit of Cold in Gardez with A Once and Future Darkness, and All The Mortal Remains, of ToixStory with Transistance, and of MythrilMoth with All of Us Together, Forever As One. Ready? Go!
Stories gets a score of Wretched, Poor, Average, Good, or Great, plus a quick summary and a detailed review. Reviews are not spoiler-free, but should not ruin any mystery or suspense.
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Story #1: A Once and Future Darkness
Overall Score: Good
Summary:
A delightful exploration piece that manages to build a surprising amount of intrigue in it's short run time, all building up to a thought provoking and satisfying conclusion. With more time to explore its themes, this excellent example of the genre could have been a classic.
So as I mentioned at the top of the blog post, I've been sick this week. Right now, I'm almost fully healed, nothing left but some sniffles and losing my voice. This past Monday however, I was boiling at over 101F, to the point I was experiencing fever dreams so intense they'd border on hallucinations. I'd dream that something occurred, and even after getting up and walking around, would remain convinced that what I saw was real for up to several minutes.
This became particularly vexing when my dreams would incorporate details from the real world. For instance, two days ago, I cut my leg on the table edge. I then vividly dreamed/hallucinated a team of doctors sawing my leg off and sewing it back on, only to get interrupted and leave before finishing sewing up the last incision. I stumble out of bed to get a bandage, and look! There on my leg, an open wound in just the right place.
It took about five minutes of staring for me to realize that, no, my leg had not just been amputated and re-attached. They were a very unpleasant several minutes. And the dreams only got worse from there. While I don't recommend the experience, it put me in just the right mood to appreciate this story, and the fine dark dreamwork it does so very well.
In terms of literal events, the plot of this story is quite simple -- ponies dreams are bleeding into reality. Twilight Sparkle dreams of swimming out at sea, and wakes up in bed covered in seawater; Rainbow Dash dreams of having her heart ripped out and wakes up with her ribs covered in bruises, etc. Where it distinguishes itself from the cliche however, is how remarkably well it conveys what dreams are actually like. Rather than the perfect, simple, storybook dreams we so often get in cartoons or other media, it accurately portrays the chaotic, whimsical, coherent-but-not-quite nature of real dreams.
And that's where this story really shines: Dream Logic. Dream logic isn't evil after all. It's just your confused mind trying to make sense of random patterns, and so while nightmares are certainly unpleasant, dreams have just as much power to be good and rewarding. From Fluttershy dreaming she's swimming with her animal friends and then developing gills and a tail, to Twilight engaging in dominance-driven aggression only to find she's kind of into that, the dream world is sure to entice characters with half-formed looks at what might be. After all, nopony ever dies in their dreams. They never even really get hurt. It's just a chance to explore what might be, and who they really are deep down.
I won't spoiler the ending, except to say that it went in a quite unexpected direction, but managed to neatly tie the entire story up for me. It was original and clever, and I just wish the story had stuck around a bit longer to explore it more. But for what it is -- compact and effective -- it does its job well. Highly recommended.
Story #2: Transistance
Overall Score: Average
Summary:
A well delivered mashup of MLP and cyberpunk, sadly hampered by a number of lost opportunities to tell a much deeper story.
I love cyberpunk. It's without a doubt my favorite storytelling genre, and if you can name a story written in that frame, I've probably read it. That means, like all great fans being introduced to a fresh attempt at their beloved medium, I am going to nitpick this thing like a thousand starving piranha nitpick a cow. Seriously, ToixStory, if you're reading this, I'm sorry, but it won't be pretty.
So, let me get everything this story does right out of the way: it effectively blends MLP and Cyberpunk while remaining true to both, it's highly evocative of a number of classic works like Bladerunner and fandom tropes like New Lunar Republic without being derivative or cliche, it knows how to make a clever pun or cameo appearance without calling too much attention to it, characters have distinct voices and relateable motivations, and it manages to make everything just a little grander than life without making it over the top. In short, it is a well-executed and charming mashup of two things I love.
I just... wish it had remembered to add something original while it was at it.
I know that sounds harsh, but if I could name one thing that keeps this story pinned at merely average it would be "Wasted Potential." Take, for instance, this story's Luna. Self-exiled exiled for decades, she wanders Manehatten in disguise, pretending to be one of the common folk and shunning her royal title and identity. The story does an excellent job of portraying it as no mere extended pout, but as a deep ideological difference between her and Celestia as to what Equestria should be. Little things, from Luna's cybernetic implants to the way she sold the moon to a private corporation show that she and Celestia see things very differently. And eventually, that difference became so extreme that Luna either had to fight her sister, or give up. And this time around, she gave up. It's an interesting take on Luna, one that evokes enough fanon conceptions of her to be familiar while still being different and clever.
I just wish it had like... mattered to the story. At all. Luna is the protagonist, sure, so we get a lot of her inner monologue and thoughts, but other than some legal shenanigans her status as a Princess allows her to pull, her backstory is basically irrelevant to what occurs. It's just a camera with a Princess-noir-tinted filter observing these events unfold. Another good example can be found in the AIs. Two AIs fall in love and are suing for their recognition as sapient creatures! Good story, classic, and it's well executed here. But for "AI" to be anything other than a Find/Replace on "SLAVE", the fact that they're artificial creatures needs to drive the story in some way. Are people concerned that they'll reproduce out of control since they can easily copy themselves? Are corporations worried about their factory machines deciding to unionize? There's a rich field of potential story here, all of which is either briefly summarized or passed on unobserved.
Finally, there's Celestia. While she serves as the antagonist for much of the story, it's clear she isn't really evil. She and Luna just have very different conceptions of rulership and the pressures therein. When they talk, it's not really about the subject at hand, but about old wounds, old slights, emotional hurt, and arguments they never settled. There was a potential here for this story to have an amazing Celestia as well as a good Luna, but we never get to see enough of her for it to really matter. A similar argument can be made for Twilight, who likewise isn't much of a presence in a story that she has so much potential interest in.
Ultimately, while I know I'm hard on it, Transistance isn't a bad story. It's an effective mashup of two very different genres, and that's not nothing. But with so much unexplored, the mashup alone isn't enough to really wow me. It kept me engaged and waiting for more to develop, but if you've seen Blade Runner and MLP, none of the plot twists will really surprise you.
Story #3: All The Mortal Remains
Overall Score: Great
Summary:
One of the best soft-spoken character pieces I've ever read, this story gives profound and sometimes tragic insight into Twilight's character without ever having to say a thing. If you're a writer who has been told "Show, don't tell" read this fic as a great example.
As Twilight is cleaning out the library, she finds an urn containing the ashes of Page Turner, the previous librarian. Nopony is really sure how it got there. Nopony is sure what to do with it. Nopony really cares. He didn't have any family, all his friends are gone, there's nopony waiting for this urn or who will be touched if they receive it.
So why does Twilight care so much? Why, after everypony tells her to inter him in a public plot and leave it, does she carry on trying to find out where he "should" be? She has reasons, and very good reasons, but they don't have much to do with Page Turner at all.
It feels weird to say, but the literal events of this story are almost totally irrelevant to what makes it great. Twilight finds a jar. She goes around asking ponies if they know anything about the jar. They don't. Eventually she just picks a place to put it and leaves it there. The end. What makes it fantastic is that, the most Twilight talks -- the more her behavior seems just a little bit odd and out of character for her -- the more we see that for her, this isn't about Page Turner at all. She's ducked death a lot of times. In fact, as of the start of the story, her library is still smoldering from the battle with Tirek. And Twilight has always dealt with it well. She's a brave pony.
But being brave doesn't mean you can't be just a little bit afraid of death. Or curious what will happen to you after you're gone. Or your friends. Or the town you live in. After all, nothing lasts forever. Except possibly Alicorn Princesses.
None of this is ever made explicit, and the story does a marvelous job of implying that even Twilight isn't fully cognizant of how stress is subtly influencing her thoughts. But almost without the word ever coming up, this is a story about Twilight learning to deal with death, and at that, it is an absolutely masterful example of subtle slice of life. Go read it.
Story #4: All Of Us Together, Forever As One
Overall Score: Poor
Summary:
An absolutely fascinating concept keeps you reading to the end of this fic, but sadly, the story simply doesn't have the substance to back up its premise. A lack of length and development leaves a story that should be hitting like a ton of bricks hitting like a featherweight.
As Rainbow Dash lies dying, Twilight is desperate to save her. Terrified by the thought of outliving all her friends, and determined to keep them with her no matter what, Twilight hits upon an ingenious last minute solution. She'll eat Rainbow Dash's soul.
Simple, right? Then Rainbow's essence, her character, and everything that makes her special can live on with Twilight in her immortal body. Problem solved. If only Twilight's other friends weren't staring at her in horror like she... uh... well. Grabbed her dying friend, craned open her jaw like a magical serpent, and sucked her soul out through her nose.
It's a beautiful premise, right? I thought so. A good writer could tell an entire, rich story about what happens in the ten minutes after that as Twilight's other friends are frozen in shock, torn between loyalty to Twilight and wondering if she needs a wooden stake through the chest. Unfortunately, All Of Us Together, Forever As One summarizes what happens next with little more than, "they were so upset it took them a several years to start to get over it," and fast-forwards on wards, starting the trend that would ultimately lose me on this story.
Now, let me be clear -- and fair to the writer. If All Of Us Together, Forever As One was simply bad I wouldn't have reviewed it. There's ten million fics on FiMFic that are merely not good. This story actively taunted me with the prospect of goodness, only to cruelly yank it away time and time again. Every page was like being offered a slice of the most delicious looking and smelling cake you've ever seen, only to stab the fork down into it and discover it's a plastic display cake covered in artificial scent.
For instance, when Twilight eats Rainbow Dash's soul, a streak appears in her mane reflecting Rainbow's colors. The same when she eventually takes her other dying friends. Most curious this! So is Dash inside her head, babbling away? Or have they merged to become one creature? Or is Twilight just more "Dash-like" now, with some of her mannerisms and traits? These are all excellent questions the story doesn't feel an overwhelming need to answer. It's aware of them! It posits them to keep you interested. But actually answering them is left as an exercise to the reader.
The final scene of the story isn't bad, and is a bit of a heartwarming look at an immortal Twilight watching the last of her friends pass, but without substance to back it up, it's really just a cotton candy fluff bit. On the pure merits of what actually happens, this story should have been unremarkable, but the premise was so engaging that I felt actively let down by what manifested.
Could you judge one of my stories?
If your still bored?
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Leave me a link and I'll see about next time!
I found Luna to be jarringly out of character in A Once and Future Darkness, but imagining it as an AU I could still appreciate it as a good story.
I agree that All the Mortal Remains is great.
It seems I am something of a CiG fanpony.
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http://www.fimfiction.net/story/313629/a-stitch-in-time
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As am I! And yes, in that segment, Luna reminds me much more of NMM than show-Luna. Then again, the distinction between those two characters was never fully clear.
Oh, sorry about your voice; I hope it recovers soon.
Oh, dear, and sorry about the fever and whatnot; I'm glad that you're already over it.
"It's without a doubt my favorite storytelling genre, and if you can name a story written in that frame, I've probably read it."
Have you read the Rifters trilogy?? Not sure how much it counts as cyberpunk, or if you'd like it, but, as the author's posted it free online, I thought I'd mention it.
Hm.
Well, I'm sorry to hear you felt cheated by that particular story. I never intended for it to be a long, dramatic piece. Just a brief take on a way Twilight might keep her friends with her forever. It was really supposed to be one of those "something to think about" stories, where the reader is supposed to fill in all the missing pieces and take away their own conclusions from it.
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And at that you succeeded! Just the fact that I had so much to say about it makes it clear you at least inspired a lot of thought. And as I said, I'm glad you wrote it. All reviews are intended to be friendly.
You just taunt me so.
That's incredible. I know what I'm doing next weekend.
The history of this is a bit involved, but I actually have similarly destabilizing dreams whenever I try to mess with my sleep. For context, my brain seems to fight my attempts to lucid dream by making my dreams more coherent, so a dream where I sit down at a pizza restaurant with accurate lighting and a standard layout, read a full menu with coherent text and reasonable options, and order something alongside coworkers is pretty par for the course, though only when I'm trying to lucid dream. The most notable one was incredibly intricate, and the only hiccups were a few time skips. A useful summary would be a bit long, so I'll spare you. It ended with me waking up with really conflicting feelings over what I had done and unsure if this world was real, and it led to a small existential crisis. I still have a note-to-self I wrote on my blackboard soon afterwards that I'll probably never erase.
Second on the list would be me spending a full year believing my brother had gotten a speeding ticket before realizing that the scenario in which I heard that could not possibly have happened.
Still going through the Siren Song material.
EDIT: Minor follow-up to:
I tried turning up the heat to ~90 F and setting an alarm every 30m from midnight to 11am to cover whenever I'd fall asleep and whenever I'd wake up. The goal was to deprive myself of sleep enough to be half-dreaming while awake or half-awake while dreaming. I expected to get progressively more sleep deprived until falling straight into REM was inevitable. I woke up ~20 times the first night and ~12 times the second night. I was in the middle of a dream about half those times each night (~10 wakeups while remembering a dream the first night, ~6 the second night). The dreams were evenly spaced throughout the night. I was fully dreaming while dreaming (no lucidity), and I was fully awake while awake (no incoherence). I don't feel sleep deprived at all right now, and I didn't yesterday either. None of that went as expected.
Nothing to do with your
judgementsreviews, but that Rainflop Dash GIF gets me every time.What got me about that last story is that Twilight 'dies' by the end, too. At the end of the story, what I got from it at least, the pony known as Twilight Sparkle is no more; instead, there's this new being in her body, with five stripes in her mane, with a completely new personality made up of a conglomerate of six ponies. I think that's actually why I really liked it; in saving her friends, Twilight isn't just sucking out their souls, but giving up her own soul as well.
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Nnooooo, I really think I need to emphasize how un-fun this was. I spent several minutes deeply concerned that they might have put it back on wrong and I was about to develop gangrene. Luckily I was too dopey to think of calling 911 or I probably would have.
That's crazy.
The closest I've ever come to that is, sometimes, I'll dream about having conversations with friends I've been meaning to have for a long time. Like, I'll dream about finally telling Bob that he's kind of racist and it's not okay. And in the dream, the entire conversation plays out in a perfectly mundane and reasonable fashion. Then, for a few days, I'll be uncertain if the conversation actually happened or not.
But man, that sounds messed up, dude. My existential crisis only lasted a few minutes.
There's a lot of it!
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I know! It's so cute. I think I'm going to make it a standard feature of these things.
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Yes! I noticed that too, and it's a really really interesting idea I wish we'd got to see more of. Like I said in the review, the story isn't bad, it's just taunting. It introduces a bunch of really neat ideas and then -- shoop! It's gone.
Skywriter is really the only person I think CiG has to compete with for best writer on the site.
Word.
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See, to me that's a thing of wonder. I spend a third of my life hallucinating, sometimes directing hallucinations, and honestly believing nutso things that I know are crazy. That's a lot that I'm missing out on.
Can you imagine how differently you might live your life if you could treat your time dreaming as just another part of your life, with memories, volition, and intentionality in tact? I don't know about you, but that would completely change the way I interact with the world. I'd build a second life in my dreams, and maybe sometimes a third and fourth. What in the waking world might be a bad week or month would become no different from a stretch of bad dreams. While a month of bad dreams would no doubt suck, it would be so much worse if it felt like there were nothing else. There's a level of freedom and dependability to be had that can't exist in this world.
There's this thing that's dangling in front of me, and it's tantalizing.
Getting gangrene would suck, as would having my leg sown on badly. But it's worth playing with.
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Okay, first? You seriously need to read A Once and Future Darkness. You're going to love that story.
I can relate, in a way. This is very much how I feel about a number of transhumanist technologies, and virtual reality most particularly. The real world often sucks, or at least, it can't indulge my particular whims because those whims have stupid consequences. The ability to let people go off and create the own worlds is exciting, and it will be fascinating to see what people start creating in a few years. The tech is going to get there soon.
But, I don't feel that way about dreams. I always felt that dreams were like a malfunction in my brain. Even when I'm fully asleep, I have a persistent sense of wrongness about them. They're relaying sensor data I know to be erroneous,
These are great reviews, and I hope you consider them as a boredom alleviator more often!
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Over in Writeoff-land, I'm giving him a run for his money, but he's easily lapped me here on FIMFic (and in the now-vanished combined Writeoff scoreboard, he just pulled ahead). Like Skywriter, CiG's one of those authors who is good enough to be dominant wherever he goes.
3785922 I need to introduce you to my IRL Brony friend who will literally wax poetic about the virtues of virtual reality for hours if you let him. https://m.facebook.com/ishaffer?fref=nf&ref=m_notif¬if_t=feed_comment_reply
3786685 For what it's worth you're definitely in my nebulous top ten.
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Done done done! That was a ride! I think Luna is wrong though. Her idea of "growing up" is learning to embrace and accept desires a pony might have. I think that's important, but she does it by throwing away all sense of intentionality. She wants ponies to act without reflecting on what they're doing to get what they want. Without that reflection, they end up chasing after just the sense of reward. And they get it, and that's good! But it never comes with any sense of accomplishment. The whole notion of a cutie mark, the driving sense of purpose in a pony's life, is based on that feeling of accomplishment. Strip a pony of that, and what's left?
It will! Between the rapidly increasing computational power, the improving VR, the COTS smart clothing, and the continued improvement and application of generative neural nets, I can see a lot of crazy things happening in the next few years. I think it'll be a while before untrained people can go off building their own worlds, but we'll get there eventually. Getting the right people together in a world might be a problem in itself, but that can probably be solved.
It's questionable though how much freedom we'll have in those worlds. The internet is pretty darn good at giving people a huge variety of communication options. That doesn't mean people are free to communicate arbitrarily with it. Software gets hacked. Encryption gets backdoored. Anonymizing networks get monitored. These things aren't hypotheticals. They absolutely get used, and they make people think that maybe they're not that free from consequences online. I'm not so sure that VR worlds will be much different in this regard.
I guess CelestAI is the only great option.
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By all means.
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That's not actually the vibe I got from it! See: Fluttershy and growing a tail and gills. That didn't throw away her sense of intentionality, and it corresponded quite well with her cutie mark and conscious desires. I don't see Luna as being against reflection so much as against repression. Come to terms with what you truly desire and take it for your own. That's part of why, in my review, I said I wished the story was longer. I would have loved to see an expansion of the "1000 year night" and a clarification of these two points we're brought up, since I admit right now it's ambiguous.
I'm always a bit of a pessimist on the timescale, but within a decade, absolutely we're looking at a major consumer implementation of all those technologies. Which sounds like a long time, but then I realize I just said we're within 10 years of the Matrix BETA 1.0 and I realize we're living in the future and it's amazing.
I'm actually more optimistic on this. A long time before the average person has /full/ customizeability, but I expect a lot of world generation tools that cover a majority of use cases.
This is actually a major concern of mine. Someone spending all their time in VR is, more or less definitonally, spending all their time surrounded by a massive network of sensors that monitor their every communication, sensation, and movement, and likely a lot of their biometrics as well. A security failure in the VR equivalent of Facebook (or a government mandated back door) could easily lead to a surveillance state that would make Orwell blush.
Long run, we knew it had to go that way. That, or the entire solar system would be reduced to paperclips.
But, hey! She'll satisfy your values. With friendship. And ponies.
3787676 well, i gave you a link to his facebook. Send a request and I'll let him know.
3784837 Hey!
horizon's pretty good too.
3787809 i agree. that's why he's in my nebulous top ten. nebulous because i don't really intend to rank authors.
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I see how you got that vibe, but I'm still sticking with mine, lest CiG reveal his true intentions. The most reliable perspective in this fic is Twilight's. With every other pony, we skip from before-dream to after-dream with a black box in the middle. With Twilight, we get the see inside the black box, and it's not pretty. We know that given a moment's reflection, she would not have done the same thing, and her regret is clear from her own instinctual reaction to her dreams.
I, for one, welcome our paperclip overlords. I think they would do well in holding things together.
But think about the criminals, pedophiles, and terrorists!
https://youtu.be/g1GgnbN9oNw?t=1h12m44s
I'm not sure if you're following the Apple-FBI shenanigans. The news seems to give a really simple story in favor of Apple (privacy stance) and against the FBI (enforcement stance), but it's tough. If the FBI wins, there will effectively be a giant target painted on any law enforcement agency with backdoor access, and security against malicious actors will be upper-bounded by the security of this group that is impossible to keep secure. If Apple wins, society will eventually move on to a world with no enforcement authority. Every middle ground is a quagmire of problems.
It's not a small number of people that know how to start trying to break systems. A lot of them would love to try things out on real systems, and they're inhibited mostly by the threat of legal retaliation. It's not a question of "good guys vs bad guys". It's human instinct for someone to want to play with things that seem like magic once they get their footing.
When it comes to computer systems, privacy and forensics-based enforcement are fundamentally at odds. At the same time, privacy and system security are fundamentally on the same side. If enforcement is necessary for security, then security is not a meaningful concept, and so the purpose of a forensics-based enforcement agency cannot be to maintain the security of computer systems. If government agencies aren't absolved of their duty to solve computer-based crimes, we're in for some fun times.
If you're curious and haven't seen it yet...
https://youtu.be/g1GgnbN9oNw?t=3h35m46s
https://youtu.be/g1GgnbN9oNw?t=3h58m56s