Fic recs, April 16th: RNG Edition! · 11:56am Apr 16th, 2016
First, in today's issue of Reasons Never to Unfollow Someone When They Disappear, FIDDLEBOTTOMS IS BACK. :D
Okay, so, after seeing Loganberry do it, I could not pass up the opportunity to review a bunch of truly-randomly-selected fics. Of course, I had to weed out "story does not exist", "incomplete", "password locked", "sequel", "actually unpublished", "permanently cancelled", and "in a universe I don't know", leaving me with 11 stories out of 100 randomly generated numbers. For the record, it took me six tries to find the first fic, and 80 to find ten. D: Surprisingly, there weren't any whose word counts lay way outside what I wanted to read.
Going by this random sample, most stories on Fimfiction are either unpublished or deleted. The lowest number generated (11 was my lower bound, because I know I've read stories 9 and 10) was 7840 (see below). The highest was 324160 (Darkness of the Eclipse by Silverstream233, incomplete). Along the way, I discovered some really bad ideas (Bronies vs. Decepticons 2?), added a couple things to my RIL, and encountered an old enemy...
But above all? I got a sense of just how many goddamn fics there are on this site. Even the published ones, even just the complete ones. It's a lot, and I will never read them all. :C Damn.
H: 0 R: 0 C: 2 V: 1 N: 8
Taking Wing by DrakoGlyph
Genre: Shipping
On a trip into the Everfree Forest for healing berries, Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy talk about the past.
And we're off to a bad start. Not terrible (the terrible stuff comes later D:), but this story starts with LUS, the narrative is flat and telly, and the dialogue is barely differentiable from it. The writing rambles on and on about various aspects of Fluttershy and Rainbow's past, and their feelings for each other, with little regard to things like structure, logical story flow, or what's happening at the time. The paired endings are pretty standard, not to mention rushed, and the "good" one ends the story with some very poor shipping. Still, when the dialogue is less explainy, they have good rapport, and this story is sort of based around the reason why I like FlutterDash. Also, kinda pretty decent on the Zecora rhymes. But between the flat writing and the overdramatic plot — seriously, it never stops ramping up — I don't think this is going to have much appeal.
Vaguely Recommended
Love's a Drag-On by The Lord Thunder
Genre: Shipping
When Spike meets a girl dragon, he's forced to make a hard choice.
I wasn't expecting too much out of this — on the surface, it seems to be "OC x Mane Cast" shipping — but I ended up liking it more than not. The writing, for better or worse, is akin to G. M. Berrow's: telly in places, hyperbolic to a fault, but simple and erring on the side of cute. There's an unabashed, infectious joy in the piece as it world-builds with abandon, and the fast pacing made for the quickest 20k I've read in a while. The shipping meanwhile is very surface-level, but again I couldn't help but be caught up in Spike's sudden infatuation with Sapphire. (It certainly went better than the one time he met a girl dragon in the comics.) There's also some good humorous scenes with Pinkie, and the mane cast in general felt well-written. I was a little miffed at Rarity's sudden jealousy, fearing the looming specter of Sparity, but her feelings get lampshaded near the end of the story, alleviating my fears entirely. My only real complaint would be about the plot: after meeting Sapphire and skipping his chores to hang out with her, Spike tries and fails to keep her a secret. But once the secret's out, the story becomes conflict-less, and what follows is a couple dull chapters of Sapphire being shown around Ponyville, followed by a couple over-dramatic chapters building up toward an admittedly decent moral. So overall, not the best story ever, but certainly one I didn't mind reading in the least.
Recommended for Spike Fans
Promises by Alexandrite Ward
Genre: Romance
She said she would never leave him, and she meant it.
Augh, gad, it's Fluttercord. D: But for all that I detest this ship and feel like this story could have used any pairing, dear lord do I love the way it's written. The short sentences and present tense make it immediate and emotional. Fluttershy has so much power. It's the kind of story that grabs the reader's attention and refuses to let go until it's had its say. Definitely worth the read if you can stand the ship.
Recommended for Shippers
Darkness by twilight517828
Genre: Gravity Falls Crossover
This story is really badly written. It might be legitimate badfic, I can't tell. Much as I'm always up for some GF, don't bother with this.
Not Recommended: DNF 1/7
Just a Little Nudge by Light Mask
Mature: Sex
Genre: Anthro Clop
Derpy helps Dr. Hooves test out his newest invention: a microchip that will keep ponies fit.
Y'know, I expected to really hate this, but I never got enough of a head of steam to. This story is just kind of… there. Derpy gets this injection, takes a shower, masturbates, wakes up the next day, does a whole bunch of stuff in the nude, and masturbates some more. That's about it. The second sex scene has some fantasy stuff going on, but it's really brief, and for being a fetish fic, this is overall incredibly subtle about the whole mind-control thing. That's not even how it's supposed to work. So in the end, I can't say I liked it, but I also don't know who would.
Not Recommended
Obligatory Self Insert Fic by usually_writes_crap_fics
Genre: What's on the Label
Think about this for a second: the RNG took me to the sole story written by an author with one follower. What a needle-in-the-haystack this is. Anyway, between the title and the author's name, I wasn't expecting too much from this, and that's precisely what I got. It's hellbent on being wacky and just comes off as dumb. The writing isn't particularly good, nor the main character particularly interesting. I think it's trying for self-parody, but 'trying' is the operative word. If you like cringe humor, it might be worth a chuckle, but we can move on.
Not Recommended
Sombra's Curse of Plenty by Anonymous and Firesoul10
Mature
Genre: Weight Gain
Either I'm losing my touch, or I just ran across the most weaksauce fetish fics on the site. I was hoping this would get my dander up the way Just a Little Nudge couldn't, but no, I just laughed. Only read if You're Into That.
Not Recommended
A New Kind of Flutterape by BlackSnowyOwl
Genre: Trollfic
Fluttershy's boring hospital visit is interrupted in the strangest of ways.
Y'know, there were two stories before this one that I would have liked to read, but they were incomplete. Instead, I get this, which… Well, for starters, it doesn't sound much like Fluttershy. I don't think she's in the habit of using the word "sucks" regularly. Second, it's one of those awful stories about someone being bored, so it's mostly boring. And third… it's about Ponky? As in, the author? Like, he even commented on it and the fact that he is, and I quote, a "shapeshifting tendril creature". shortskirts approved? I distinctly feel trolled, as I have no idea what the point of this was, beyond possible circle-jerking.
Not Recommended
My Little Pony Crisis Core by TimeRarity64
Genre: Final Fantasy 7 Crossover
I don't know what FF7 "Crisis Core" is, but this claims to be a ponification of the ending of it. I would love it if someone more familiar with the… game? would read this and tell me how plagiarized it is. As it stands, it's poorly written, melodramatic, the characters aren't in character, and it doesn't make any sense. It's not even bad enough to be funny. Skip it. EDIT: Thanks to Rinnaul, we know! It's super-extra-completely plagiarized, and thus super-extra-completely-not-recommended. :D
Not Recommended
Blank Score by TheExhaustedBrony
Genre: Dark
This was the other story I had high hopes for; unfortunately, it comes off as melodramatically dark. I mean, I kinda like that it's about Octavia killing Vinyl Scratch, but that's a very small, very petty appreciation, and not enough to really justify this piece. I wouldn't actually recommend it to readers.
Not Recommended
WIE (Wrestlers in Equestria) by Scootalootrue
Genre: What's on the Label
Gotta hand it to myself, I recognized four of the six wrestlers introduced in the first chapter. I was also amused that they weren't in their prime, but taken from around the time the story was written. (So Macho Man was still alive, RIP.) But yeah, I've never been very into wrestling, especially since it stopped being about super-muscular guys with superhero names. This is definitely trying too hard to be funny, and I can't say if actual WWE fans will appreciate it at all. It is distinctly cracky, at least, but mostly just dumb.
Not Recommended: DNF 2/10
So yeah, mostly N's. <.< Yet nothing really infuriating or that made me want to never do this again. Well, except for the one story I skipped...
Sturgeon's Law confirmed. Also that most of the fics on the site are unpublished or deleted. I suspected as much, but it's nice to confirm that suspicion.
If you'd review more patented Cold in Gardez fics, you wouldn't have that problem!
3873802
shut it up, you :V
Crisis Core was a Final Fantasy 7 prequel for the PlayStation Portable, where you play Zack, the guy whose identity Cloud stole in the main game. It's basically about how there were two other SOLDIER genetic experiments besides Sephiroth: Genesis and Angeal. Long story short: SOLDIER experiments have a tendency to go emo and crazy, Genesis was a pretentious prick, and you quit caring about most of the backstory long before you finish the game because the more Squenix writes about the FF7 universe, the less sense it makes.
Like how after you beat the game, it implies Genesis becomes Kadaj from the Advent Children movie. Which means that despite half the plot of the game being set up by the processes used to create Sephiroth and Genesis being different, in the end, Genesis winds up being Sephiroth again.
...These games were kind of stupid, weren't they?
Anyway, the plagiarism is at 100%. They basically wrote out the final scenes with pony names Search-And-Replaced over Squenix character names.
3873885
Thank you.
Here's the mathematical evidence for it.
It really is astounding to think about just HOW much fanfic there is. It's already more than someone can read in their lifetime. And that's just one fanfic site for one fandom in one language. It's mind boggling stuff.
If you'd just stuck to published fics, there's something like a .01% chance that you'd randomly pick a Biscuit Fic.
obligatory
3874006
IT'S GONNA GET WORSE :V
3873941
This might not seem like a big deal since this is a mostly English-language fandom -- I follow at least three and a half authors, just off the top of my head, who speak English as a second language yet write in it -- but lately on /r/mylittlepony there've been several art submissions where the description reveals that they're coverart for fanfics only available in Russian, so there's at least one other nontrivial language community for MLP fanfic. I had better get interested in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky so that when I take Russian classes I can claim it's to read something other than horsewords :B
And there's another bottleneck: the story approval process. With the exception of some recent auto-approved fics, the vast majority of which presumably get read by the author's followers anyway, all those fics have actually been looked at, if not read in their entirety.
3873799
Horizon has multiple unpublished fics for testing things like the unintuitive wordcounter or esoteric BBCode features. Knighty has an unpublished fic for general testing purposes. Even I have an unpublished fic with no content, mostly just to see the whole process. And I strongly suspect that any abortive attempt to upload a fic still locks up the story ID as though it were deleted. So this does make a lot of sense, but I'd be very interested to see the breakdown of what proportion of story IDs are published, unpublished but public, unpublished and password-protected, or deleted.
At this writing, the latest story in the new stories column on the front page has ID 325219, and the "Browse" page claims to find 96,935 published stories, which suggests a ratio of about three fics in ten actually being published (to be precise: 96935/325219 = 0.29806069141101843, according to my install of Python 3), but I suspect that there are more than 96,935 published stories and the search is not exhaustive.
3875214
AUGH WHY DO YOU ALWAYS WRITE SUCH LONG COMMENTS SHUT UP ALREADY
3873799
I have a ton of unpublished stories which will someday become published stories.
Really.
Also, PP: I tried doing this once and didn't find a single WR, which is why it never got posted as a blog. Unless I'm forgetting something.
3875767
I didn't go into this expecting stories that were worth reading. That I found two out of eleven is quite a feat. :V
Look, PP, you didn't have to read Pinkamena Diane Pie Cupcakes with Scootaloo. I did -- and my stupid self-imposed "I never DNF a fic I'm reviewing" rule meant I had to read every word of it. So let's have no complaints from you. :P
3873953 I got a Georg fic (Daring Do and the Dance) randomly when I did this. It was indeed the best fic in the set, although not quite the only one worth reading.
3877120
Hey, this could have gone a whole lot worse for me. :V
3877137 You've made up for it a bit with today's vs story, though.
If you'd review more patented
Cold in Gardezxjuggernaughtx fics, you wouldn't have that problem!3875214
Just for the record, I have six unpublished fics. Three of which are going to someday get published and are placeholders for when I get the text edited, and three of which are for bonus content/contest entries/testing, respectively.
So I guess I'm bringing the average up! :V
3877592
I've actually got two unpublished fics (since we're sharing); one's been ready to go for close to a year now, but I'm waiting to finish the other one, which is longer and more serious and Idon'twannadoit ._. Because it would be funnier if they were published back to back.
3875767
I've only got three, at least that have made it as far as having a story number reserved for them.
If we count partially-complete gDocs, outlines, and notes scribbled on napkins, though. . . .
Huh. Out of these, one has already been reviewed by someone else. Another one is from an author that is already on the big master review list. The rest completely new additions.
3901937
Random go!
3902204
I'm just surprised that a small selection of completely random stories managed to hit one that someone else already reviewed.