Read It Later Reviews #53 – In Her Majesty’s Absence, When There Are No More Stories To Tell, Chocolate Talk, Are You A Bad Pony?, “Thanks, Mom” · 8:28pm Jul 31st, 2016
While clearing out my “Read It Now” bookshelf of stories which were more than a month old, I ended up noticing a number of stories that I had put off reading that had what seemed to be intriguing premises and got sucked into reading them instead of cleaning out my bookshelf.
Oh, well.
This set includes two stories by Harmony Pie, a writer who has been quite prolific this year, having published 14 stories since January and having accumulated nearly 500 followers and a number of stays in the Featured Story Box. I hadn’t ever read anything by them before, so I’m curious to see what I think of their stuff!
Today’s stories:
In Her Majesty’s Absence by PegasusMesa
When There Are No More Stories To Tell by naturalbornderpy
Chocolate Talk by Harmony Pie
Are You A Bad Pony? by Harmony Pie
“Thanks, Mom” by naturalbornderpy
In Her Majesty’s Absence
by PegasusMesa
Slice of Life
10,744 wordsThree days ago, the moon eclipsed the sun at midday before setting soon after. Three days ago, a series of explosions rocked the Castle of the Two Sisters and the surrounding village. Three days ago, Princess Luna disappeared without a trace.
Ever since then, the sun has remained fixed in the sky, and all of Equestria has already begun to wither in the resulting heat wave. Princess Celestia refuses to leave her chambers, and the only one who could reliably bring her forth, her sister, is nowhere to be found.
What will it take to bring Celestia back to reason and stability back to Equestria?
Why I added it: I read it a long time ago and liked it.
Review
The story of the aftermath of Princess Luna’s banishment, this story has two halves – the first is devoted to the worries of the world outside of Princess Celestia’s chambers, as they fret over the Sun that refuses to fall from the sky while the people grow increasingly agitated, and the second is the conversation of a former member of the Lunar Guard with Celestia to try and make things better.
Greenwing, the former Lunar guard, is ultimately the central character of the story – he ties the whole thing together, even though he doesn’t appear in several scenes in the first half. This makes things a little bit awkward, and probably could have been avoided – ultimately, a lot of what happens in the scenes where Greenwing doesn’t appear doesn’t really matter that much or could have been folded into the scenes with him. As a result, the first half of the story is kind of slow.
The second half picks up, though, as Greenwing is thrust in to try and talk to Princess Celestia after all those before him have failed to get through to her.
The story feels a bit jumbled in its first half, but it picks up a fair bit in the second, and I thought it was a nice take on Celestia’s struggle after banishing her sister with an OC thrown in to grind a bit of salt into her wounds.
Recommendation: Worth Reading.
When There Are No More Stories To Tell
by naturalbornderpy
Sad, Slice of Life, Meta
2,413 wordsTwilight Sparkle awakens one morning to find all of Ponyville wholly consumed by a spreading cloud of white.
Hopefully The Stranger inside her castle can help her understand what this all means.
Why I added it: It was featured.
Review
Twilight wakes up to find her world getting consumed by mist, with no one – not even Spike – answering her calls.
A man appears in her castle – The Stranger – who tells her that she and everyone else is part of a story, and that the people who had been writing her stories are done with it and putting it down. There’s only one way for her world to keep going…
I liked the end of this story a lot, but unfortunately, the first half of this story was just kind of… there. The Stranger isn’t particularly interesting, and most of the plot is given away very early on. The quality of the prose is not always that great either; it uses a noticeable amount of saidisms and some of the descriptions are rather awkward (“The Stranger crossed one clothed back leg over the other and presented her with a faint smile. A rather forced and uncomfortable one.”).
The ending of the story was nice, but unfortunately, getting there was kind of a slog, and The Stranger didn’t do anything particularly interesting or even have particularly interesting lines. If you’re going to put an Author into a story, make him an interesting person – yeah, a lot of authors are kind of boring, but characters in stories need to be interesting to read about.
Really, whether or not this story is worth reading is the question of whether slogging through a lot of mediocrity is worth the payoff at the end.
Recommendation: Not Recommended, but there is some quality in the ending.
Chocolate Talk
by Harmony Pie
Slice of Life, Fluff
2,080 wordsIn an effort to get to know her reserved little student better, Celestia invites the young Twilight Sparkle over for a cup of hot chocolate. Who knew lavender unicorns were so cute?
Why I added it: It was featured.
Review
Celestia has hot chocolate with Twilight.
This is a pure fluff piece, as Celestia invites Twilight over to have hot chocolate with her. Unfortunately, while this story dedicates itself to cuteness, it doesn’t really feel like it has a point; Celestia invites Twilight over to share hot chocolate, but the story really doesn’t do much to develop either character as a person, and nothing really happens.
Fluff is one of those things which is simultaneously very easy and very difficult to write; writing something which is just puffy and fluffy is not that hard, and there’s a crowd of people who will eat that sort of thing up. But writing something puffy and fluffy which simultaneously feels like it has some weight or significance to it is much harder. Unfortunately, this story ends up feeling incomplete due to its lack of significance; it just sort of ends without much of anything really having happened.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
Are You A Bad Pony?
by Harmony Pie
Slice of Life
2,558 wordsOne warm summer night on the castle balcony, Twilight Sparkle must ask Princess Celestia a very important question; the pony she trusts with all her heart. Surely the thick book from the past can't be true.
Why I added it: It was featured.
Review
Twilight, while reading an old book, finds out that Princess Celestia used to execute criminals on occasion, and is deeply upset – both at the idea that Celestia would kill anyone (does that mean Celestia is a bad pony?), and at the idea that, if Twilight herself is a bad pony, that she, too, might meet the same fate at Celestia’s hooves.
This is actually a fairly decent idea for a story; the idea of Twilight finding out about Celestia’s past – and the weight that can cometimes come from leadership – is a solid topic for a story. That being said, this story felt a bit off for a couple reasons:
1) In the series proper, Twilight often expresses fear of Princess Celestia’s wrath. This would have been a perfect vehicle for justifying said fear, and possibly even setting up for the whole fear-of-being-banished-or-sent-to-the-dungeon thing.
Instead, Celestia defuses Twilight’s concerns, and it sort of threw me a bit – I had expected some character development, some setup for some of Twilight’s concerns, but instead I got a thing about the burden of leadership. That’s not a bad thing, but it didn’t quite feel like it slotted into Twilight’s backstory/mentality. I feel like tying it into Twilight’s fears about Celestia’s wrath in the show proper would have strengthened this piece, as it would have made it feel more relevant to Twilight’s personality and lent it additional impact.
2) Twilight doesn’t feel very Twilight-y. We’ve seen filly Twilight somewhat, and we know what Twilight was like at the start of the series. Twilight here doesn’t end up really feeling like herself; the only real character trait she seems to share with her canonical self is her love of books/learning.
In the end, I wanted to like this story more than I ended up actually liking it. It had an interesting core concept, but it didn’t quite feel like it delivered on it, and felt like it verged on melodrama at times, focusing a great deal on how upset Twilight was to the point where it almost felt excessive.
If we’re intended to feel for a character, knowing why they’re upset – at least in part – is often important to getting us into their mindset. Here, a lot of Twilight’s upset happens before we know the source of her discomfort, so we feel a bit disconnected from it, and it feels like it takes too long for Celestia – and thus, we the audience – to understand what has upset Twilight, and thus to connect with her plight.
Interestingly, this sort of underlines why showing vs telling is often ambiguous – while tears are ostensibly “showing” us that someone is sad, tears are merely an outward manifestation of sadness or grief. Understanding that grief or sadness is often critical to get us to empathize with a character, especially in text, where we cannot see their face.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
“Thanks, Mom”
by naturalbornderpy
Comedy, Random, Slice of Life
5,212 words"Thanks, Mom." Two simple words said by a simple guard.
Not so simple when those words are accidentally addressed to Princess Celestia.
Why I added it: It was featured.
Review
All of Celestia’s guards start acting like Celestia is their mom.
This is not weird at all.
(Yes it is).
Unfortunately, this story was just… too weird for me, and it centered entirely around the absurdity of the situation. But the absurdity ended up feeling too lampshaded, resulting in the story seeming to try to call attention to its own humor… which sort of killed the joke, and ended up making the whole piece end up coming off as having an aura of trying too hard.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
Summary
In Her Majesty’s Absence by PegasusMesa
Worth Reading
When There Are No More Stories To Tell by naturalbornderpy
Not Recommended
Chocolate Talk by Harmony Pie
Not Recommended
Are You A Bad Pony? by Harmony Pie
Not Recommended
“Thanks, Mom” by naturalbornderpy
Not Recommended
And there we go.
I fear that the real reason I’m doing so many reviews right now is procrastination on finishing my stories. But I really want to get them done.
Time to buckle down.
After I go eat lunch. 
Also, go check out Skywriter and Winston's insightful posts about pony vegetarianism (or more accurately, the lack thereof). They're interesting and well thought-out posts which are worth a read.
Number of stories still listed as Read It Sooner: 141
Number of stories still listed as Read It Later: 521
Number of stories listed as Read It Eventually: 1940
Thank you so much for reviewing my stories. I never thought it would happen.
Although I already had a feeling it wouldn't be recommended, I'm very grateful you decided to read it
You know that feeling when you go back and look at a fic you wrote two years ago and you realize that you were really bad back then and if you wrote it now you'd do so much better and how it's just so embarrassing to think that other people might be reading it?
Yeah...
Thanks for the review! I always appreciate the attention!
TD is serious pony.
"Thanks, Mom" is very un-serious story.
Georg is very un-serious pony.
Georg liked story a lot, particularly the Guard stories.
I wonder if any of those fine libraries have works of mine in them. Now I'm nervous to see how they do if they even caught your attention.
4124851
I AM GLAD TO CAST LIGHT ON YOUR OLD SHAME.
Er, I mean, you're welcome.
4124840
You're welcome! You've been in the featured story box quite a bit so I thought it was high time I actually read something of yours. Accumulating 500 followers in half a year is no mean feat!
4124860
I have the feeling that naturalbornderpy's stuff is aimed at a target audience that I am very much not a part of.
4124909
i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/03133/the-eye-of-sauron_3133429b.jpg
I do have one of your stories on my read later list, namely Sleep. I think someone recommended it, as it is on my middle-priority list.
See, I remember having a similar issue when I read "Thanks, Mom". Especially since I see myself in natualbornderpy's target audience (Even if he did can something I was very excited for him to make). I don't completely recall what I commented but I felt wholly blank about it. Like, it didn't even have me crack a smile which made me feel weird. Like it wasn't bad to me, just there.
4124909
Lol see, I'd have wonders about that but right now I've got just the one story I did for a contest. So I know it aint in his trajectory.
A little bit more on topic: "Thanks, Mom" was totally weird and I also had reservations about the weirdness of it.
I also have a story called Thanks, Mom. Reading the blog header got my hopes up for nothing.
4125399
If it makes you feel any better, it is on my list of things to read.
4125487 *Looks at reviews of Harmony Pie's stories*
You know if you are looking for a story by Harmony Pie that is worth recommending try checking out The Most Annoying House Guest. That story was entered in Ocalhoun's 250k word competition and if i recall won the most awards there.
In fact I made a review on it
Check it out for yourself.
-MixMassBasher
4145570
I'll add it to my list!
4146359 Sure why not? You can check out my review if you want for my thoughts on it. Who knows maybe you might disagree with what I said.
4145570
Aw, no! That's going to have the same issues, and I'm not very proud of it