Wacky Box Reviews #6 Making up for lost crime · 6:19pm May 5th, 2016
hey guys I know I already did a wacky box this week, but I skipped a couple so here's a double dip
let's do featured box reviews aw yeah
"blatant nepotism" pick:
Make it Stop! by Captain Unstoppable
together that name and title make a special kind of irony
What happened to Big Mac after he ran off after Starlight Glimmer had made the stallion known for silence unable to stop? Cursed to say everything he had always held inside, how will Mac survive a day as every thought he has he says out loud. What will Mac do when he runs into ponies that he had always wanted to say something to, but held his tongue? Will Ponyville survive a uncensored Big Mac?
So full disclosure I hang out in a chat with Captain Unstoppable so I know him and when you know me it's life in the box seats.
please bribe me for my attention is the message here
So this fic looks to be like an expansion of a bit from the latest my little trixie episode where Starlight glimmer did magic to Big Mac and now he can't stop talking, which is great because normally he doesn't say more than like two words. Okay sure sounds like good times. I'll bite.
“My word, the sun is bright today! Doesn’t Princess Celestia know that high temperatures could inhibit the growth of apples?” Mac’s mouth just kept on running, commenting on anything and everything. “And, honestly, what was Applejack thinking bringing that Glimmer character to the farm? A pony who had controlled others with her magic? I thought Applejack had enough common sense to know that would be a bad idea.” Mac’s heart gave a start as he realized what had just come out of his mouth.
here's the fic
All of it
the whole fic
It's just this.
I mean I'm exaggerating the fic isn't just like one paragraph but if you were going into this thing looking for jokes, this is kind of the extent of it. It's like 4k words of big macintosh running around town rambling stuff that's on his mind and then being embarrassed that he said it out loud.
I was going to post that one simpsons gif of Mcbain going that's the joke but it's weirdly hard to find one on google that isn't grainier than a wheat field in harvesting season. So just imagine that gif and you'll get the idea. You're going to find this fic exactly as funny as you find the idea of its premise funny. Comedically it doesn't do a lot more for itself than that.
I'm being kind of hard on this fic but really it's not that bad. Honestly if anything I'd say it's just misguided. It's masquerading as a random comedy (or a comedic randomy) because those are the tags on it, but at core the fic really feels like it wants to be a character moment. I mean there are definitely more character moments than jokes.
“You need to stand up for yourself!” Mac could only stare down at Caramel, who looked up at him with equally wide eyes. His body wasn’t moving but his stare was locked on Mac. Or perhaps was going through him.
“Wh… what?”
“You’re too soft! You let ponies walk all over you!” Thoughts Mac had once had about his friend started to spill out of his mouth, and it didn’t have the decency to ask for permission to speak. “You’re a great friend, Caramel! One of the best I’ve ever had! But can you stand up for yourself. Just. Once!? It always seems that you want to be a doormat to let others clean their hooves on! Celestia bless it, you need to be a stallion once in a while! Go get a date, tell the waiter they brought you the wrong order, just go do it!” Mac wanted to bash his skull in, find a deep hole and bury himself in for the rest of his life.
“When you tilt your head like that it makes my heart skip a beat! Even though you could run, fly and talk rings around me, I can’t help that the first word that comes to mind for you is ‘cute’!” Mac continued, praying to every celestial being he had ever heard of to strike him dead right there and then as his cursed mouth rambled on. “From the first time I met you, I thought you were the cutest, sexiest, and all around most incredible mare I had ever met! I have been wanting to ask you on a date for so long now, but I’m afraid I would not measure up to you and would have my heart broken!” Rainbow just kept on staring at Mac. Her wings had stopped working the moment the word ‘cute’ glanced off her ears, and she was just watching him, listening to what he had to say.
This would actually be a really good idea for a fic based around Big Mac's character even. He doesn't say anything, Starlight's spell makes him say everything he really thinks, THERE YOU GO THAT'S THE PLOT. It'd be just like that one jim carrey movie where he says yes to everything only it could actually be good.
I mean I GUESS you're allowed to have liked Yes man.
As it stands the fic doesn't really go down that route. It does it more than it wants to be a comedy, but the way it's written it feels more like it's just throwing out headcanons for big mac's thoughts on the local ponies than it does really trying to explore anything about what he's forced to blurt out. I'm going to kind of cheat here and invoke Captain Unstoppable's other fics by noting he writes a lot about Mac/Rainbow Dash ships. Dude likes his macindash what can I say
so there you go.
Prosewise I'd peg this fic at about a 3ish. It's solid enough to be mostly invisible, which works for it I guess. imo going for invisibility over cracking jokes is probably where the writing missed its opportunity to elevate itself into a real comedy, but taken by itself it's not so bad.
Obs thoughts If I had to sum this fic up in a couple words it'd probably be wasted potential. It's a perfectly workable fic as it stands but there were a lot of opportunities to commit to being a comedy or being a character thing and it doesn't really grab at the chance to be either of them. The premise is actually pretty solid and it kind of opened my eyes to the potential behind this random throwaway moment of the episode, so props for that. It just doesn't really USE that potential to the extent it could have. So, y'know.
I give this fic that one talking apple from the apple jacks commercials.
"EQ UEST RIA girls we're undeniable" pick:
Cheer Princess by MythrilMoth
She didn't think. She just jumped through the portal.
Then it closed behind her.
Stuck in the body of a human teenager, Princess Celestia finds herself trapped in the same world as her bitter student. Even as she and Sunset Shimmer both work to adapt to their new environment and bodies, Celestia is faced with an additional challenge: Sunset Shimmer is attempting to become the queen of Canterlot High, and the only way Celestia can fight back is...
...by becoming more popular.
Woah Celestia that's not the school cheerleading uniform
Cover yoself up gurl
So this fic looks like it's an alternate universe of equestria girls where Celestia ran into the portal after Sunset Shimmer when she ran away from Equestria the first time. Except it
turned Celestia into a teenage girl for some reason.
I mean I guess I can roll with it but it raises weird questions about how the portal works. It just turns everyone who goes through it into a teenage girl? Why would you make a portal that does that? And does that mean the human world version of Twilight and co. were all just coincidentally also teenage girls of roughly that age when Twilight went through the portal herself? Would it turn a baby into a teenage girl if they went through the portal? Would it turn ME into a teenage girl?
THESE ARE THE BIG QUESTIONS.
I mean there's probably an explanation for it somewhere in the fic. It's just unintuitive and doesn't feel like the natural conclusion to jump to. You would PROBABLY think the portal would just turn Celestia into the alternate human version of herself. Not the teenage girl version of the alternate human version of herself.
I guess the fic itself might offer some answers.
Anyways the fic itself opens with Celestia jumping through the portal and finding herself in humanland. Sunset Shimmer's like HAHAHA and Celestia's like NO WHAT IS THIS and I'm like wait is today garbage day.
Celestia's eyes widened. She turned and ran to the statue, pressing her hands against its smooth marble surface. "No," she whispered. "No..."
Sunset laughed. "Looks like I won't be going back to Equestria after all!" she exclaimed. "And neither will you, Princess! Not for another thirty moons!"
Celestia slid slowly down the statue, her forehead pressed against the cold stone. "No," she repeated.
"I think I'll just leave you here to cry and whine while I see what this world has to offer," Sunset sneered.
I kind of feel like I'm supposed to be reading this as emotional, but we're barely like two hundred words into the first chapter and I'm not really sure I care yet. I respect the go for sort of an in media res opening but it isn't really a good fit for like a scene driven by feelings and stuff. People need, y'know, time to figure out if they care about whatever drama's going on. You start something off in media res when it's like a bank heist in progress or there's like a war going on or something
you generally don't start off with DON PIERRE NEVER REALLY LOVED YOU ROSALINA
Man Rosalina's taking the news really hard.
So Sunset Shimmer runs off then like Vice Principal Luna finds teenage girl but actually really a pony Celestia and she's like "you seem homeless and you look like my sister if she was a teenage girl why don't you hop on into my carriage"
and Celestia's like "Well I see nothing wrong with getting into carriages with strangers"
The chapter ends with teenage Celestia meeting regular Celestia and everyone's really shocked.
I really don't know what else I can say about it. Every thought everyone has is just kind of exactly what you'd expect in the given situation. "Oh I can't reveal I'm actually a horse princess or she'll think I'm insane." or like "Haha you said something that's totally weird, teenage girl who looks exactly like my sister, I'll just go ahead and assume you meant this kind of normal thing instead."
I mean there's nothing WRONG with it, it's just kind of
boring I'unno. I keep saying there's nothing really wrong with stuff and it's true. Objectively it's fine. Just subjectively I'm not wowed by it. Your mileage may vary and all that.
Prosewise I'd give the fic about a 3ish too. It's kind of the same problem as Make it Stop, nothing's strictly bad, but it mostly just sticks to describing exactly what's happening at the given moment and that's not really what the fic needs here. A lot of these seemingly intended to be emotional moments could probably have come across a lot better if the writing was working a little harder to back them up. Maybe that's just me.
The next chapter is Sunset Shimmer getting hit by a car.
Literally that's how it starts
Sunset smirked as she glanced over her shoulder to see her mentor brought up short by a strange metal carriage. Laughing, she sprinted off into the night; adrenaline and the thrill of having put one over on her mentor heightened her senses and awareness of her new body, making her able to adjust to the strange bipedal movement and the massive shift in her center of gravity far more easily than she rationally knew she should have.
She also wasn't paying anywhere near as close attention to where she was going as she should have. A loud screech and a blaring horn were her only warning before something struck her painfully and she found herself sprawled on the hard, unforgiving pavement.
Then she like wakes up in a hospital bed with her human mom beside her. Not like IN the hospital bed with her because that'd be some really weird incest but you know what I mean. Apparently real human Sunset Shimmer was a runaway a couple years and secretly a pony Sunset Shimmer got mistaken for her when she was taken to the hospital. I actually kind of dig this idea because it's a neat way to explain how Sunset got herself slotted into the human world.
I mean if I have a problem with all this it's really that I still don't feel a really big need to care about what's happening. Like yeah this is a fanfic and we already sort of know the characters, but the fic itself is playing out an entirely new conflict. You don't need to explain who the characters are but you still kind of have to invest some time into explaining why we care about your fanon take on their problems. A major character getting hit by a car would be kind of a big deal in any other context but here it's like
"Wow okay I got hit by a car. Wait are these parents do they think I'm their kid JACKPOT here's my chance to steal some human parents."
There's another chapter and there's more, y'know, stuff in it. That's about the extent of things. I'm not really trying to be mean here I just don't think it brings anything new to the table that manages to invest me in what's going on. Maybe it'll pick up in the future I'unno.
Obs Thoughts: Okay so first up I'm kind of looking back at everything I wrote and I'm like "Wow I made this fic sound awful" and to be honest it's really not. I'm not rushing to recommend it but there's nothing really that bad about it. It's kind of more like a saltine cracker than like terrible food or anything. It's still totally edible, it's just not really that exciting to eat.
The fic's main issue is in the execution. I guess the word to use here would be formulaic. It's like a Michael Bay movie or insert generic movie here. The STRUCTURE of a conflict people would care about is there, but it's there to move the plot. Everyone's just going through the stock standard motions for the situation and you're just kind of struggling to care. Realizing the portal has closed behind her makes Celestia feel sad. Being asked where Celestia comes from makes Celestia feel defensive. Being mocked by strangers makes Celestia angry. Most lines of thought are sustained for roughly 1-2 sentences on average before a new thought pops up.
I mean yeah, on the surface they're all acceptably human reactions to the situation, but when you don't spend much time emphasizing how the characters are real thinking human beings under their surface actions, they just wind up feeling like robots. It's just inputs and outputs.
Michael Bay helps make up for those issues with like EXPLOSIONS and EXPLOSIONS and HEY BRO THE ONLY EXPLOSION THIS MOVIE WON'T HAVE IS A BOMB AT THE BOX OFFICE but in a written fic you can't fit a lot of explosions on the page so it's a lot harder to mask that sort of stuff.
boy I wrote a lot of words about this fic.
Anyways I give this fic a saltine cracker
Saltine, Obs... that was a pretty saltine review.
Fanfics need more explosions.
Is that what you're saying.
3922185
I mean yeah it wouldn't hurt
3922188 I'll remember that.
Obs please, don't tease me. My heart can't take it.
Obs your feelings and opinions are soft. Stop hedging your gutfeels!
I guess.
3922220
SURE
OKAY
FINE
I GUESS
I agree with your take on the saltine cracker fic. I was actually disappointed. Moth's writing has never really impressed me, but he sometimes has an interesting idea or two, and this actually did seem like a neat concept. It's taking Celestia about as far from her comfort zone as possible, and putting her in a situation that I would have never normally imagined her in. I like that idea, and I wish it had been able to keep my attention.
I am an insane MacDash shipper Obs. Wish I had done more to impress you, but at least you didn't light it on fire.
I will keep striving to get better
The most gloriously bearded teenage girl, yes.
Also I'll bribe you with shrugdollars, where I don't really do anything but you still give me some of that attention.
I loved Yes Man, it was hilarious.
Oh good, I was also thinking of Yes Man while reading that fic, but didn't want to say anything because I've never actually seen the movie. :B
Also >tfw Obs wants to be a teenage girl
3922185
I'll get on that.
How do people feel about Twilight Sparkle gets Killed by an Exploding Peach?
Is Eric Freeman standing out in the street holding a gun?
3922185 Everything, fanfics included can be made better with explosions.
3922398 Biscuit, no.
3922499 Are you going to be writing clop with explosions now?
3922503 Maybe.
If you want another take on "Big Mac can't stop talking", I'd quite recommend ManlyDerp's If you Ain't Got Anything Nice to Say... Big Mac gets poison joked and starts unloading all his pent-up thoughts at everyone he meets. It's not a bad read, although it's still incomplete, and takes quite a turn for the dark, if I remember correctly.
Yes Man? I was thinking more Liar Liar. Which is an odd thing for the fic to do because Starlight in the episode made him more articulate, not necessarily forced him to be honest, unless Big Mac is naturally unable to lie which is why he avoids talking.
I've noticed that Captain Unstoppable's MacDash fics tend to have Rainbow viciously slugging Big Mac. some years ago, I would have found it cute, like in a Naru punches Keitaro kind of way, but now I just find it a bit unsettling.
3922503
What if it's a clopfic?
3923641 ...fine.
3922188 what about short skirts?
Hey, I like saltine crackers.