The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Reviews #01: The Thousand Year Change · 10:35pm Aug 11th, 2016
Hello my good Sirs and Madams, I hope all is shiny, cool and otherwise awesome.
As I'm sure most of you are aware, I am inclined to write the odd review. Mostly, I post these on Rage Reviews, and I generally review in the style of that group. While the Rage style of reviewing is awesome, there is a key problem: it does not lend itself well to longer pieces.
Of course, long fics can be and have been reviewed by the group, but such reviews, like the fics themselves, are very long. Reviewing fics longer than about twenty thousand words is a big time commitment, time I just don't have at present. What I need, therefore, is a style that allows me to review such works concisely, without compromising on quality.
Hence my new review series, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Reviews.
The basis of this is straightforward:
Fics of clear quality, or which show a promising author will be named among The Good.
Fics of low quality, or which are clearly the work of a lazy author, a hack or just plain riddled with clichés will be named among The Bad.
Fics of a darker sort, which rely on blatant character derailment, casual character assassination, or that exist as a vehicle to attack people or groups will be named among The Ugly.
That said, let's look at our first fic:
Tags: Adventure, AU, Comedy, Dark, Romance.
Description:
It all started with a simple question: What if? What if Luna had ponies who noticed the beautiful nights she created. Would she have turned into Nightmare Moon? Would she and Celestia rule together for a thousand years? Would Twilight meet the rest of the bearers of the elements and become friends with them? Now, with the help of a new magic spell that she created, Twilight is going to find out!
Welcome to the Lunar Republic!
Featured 4/9/15
First Impressions:
The first thing I must comment on is what first drew me to this fic, the cover picture. It's awesome. A cool image of Luna in snazzy armour, it draws the eye, and has undoubtedly attracted many readers to the fic. Props to the author here.
The description is also pretty cool: there are no errors that I can detect, the hook is good, and will further draw in those attracted by the cool cover pic. The author describes an interesting potential AU, based on a clear 'what if' style question. However, there is one big red flag here:
Welcome to the Lunar Republic!
An ominous sign. The tags are also more than a bit schizophrenic.
Story and Characterisation:
Before we begin, let us talk about the Royal Sisters. In canon, both Celestia and Luna are positive characters. Each is regal, commanding and benevolent. Both are depicted as good rulers who seek the best for their subjects, and are clearly well loved for their efforts.
Fanon is another story. Here, there is a clear divide; Luna is far more popular than her sister.
Poor Celestia is depicted in fics as every sort of antagonistic monarch going: tyrannical, abusive, homophobic, incompetent, petty. You name it, and some author somewhere will have assigned it to Celestia.
Happily, this not universal, and the trend for demonising Celestia is not what it once was.
Luna, by contrast, is much loved. Or, more accurately, people's ideal of Luna is well loved. Don't get me wrong: there are plenty of people who love Luna for what's on screen. However, as with Spike, there are people who love Luna less for what she is and more for what they think she is. Or should be.
In other words, they project onto her like crazy.
The ultimate expression of this is The New Luna Republic.
The New Luna Republic is based on the following assumptions: 1. Celestia is evil or hopelessly incompetent. Therefore: 2. Luna will rise up and over throw her sister. Following this, paradoxically: 3. Luna will rule over a new Republic.
These assumptions are well in place in this fic. Celestia is hopelessly incompetent and Everything Is Her Fault. Why? The author doesn't like her. He admits as much in an author's note:
Season 2 began my dislike of her. In Luna Eclipsed we saw Nightmare Night which started out cool. But when I heard the legend around it I put my foot down. How could Celestia think that allowing this holiday was a good idea. I have heard others say it was to keep her sisters memory alive, but there had to be another way! What did she think would happen when Luna came back? She was teaching them, as children, to fear her younger sister thus making it harder for her to be accepted when she returned. Another bomb was at the wedding. Cadence is your niece yet you didn't see anything out of place? You never thought to give your student the benefit of the doubt? And Chrysalis knocking you on you plot should have been another wake up call to you. You need to start handling some situations on your own!
It carries on in this vein for a while. In the author's view Celestia is bad and wrong and stupid, and thus is she written. We also have telling info about how the author interprets the relationship between the sisters:
During Season 1 I noticed a few things that irked me. Like when a party was held at Sugar Cube Corner for her but she didn't bring Luna. I mean, wouldn't that have been a good thing to do as a big sister. It would have been a small gathering that would help her met other ponies after being gone for so long. Same with the Gala, only it would have been something a bit more familiar.
Note the lack of agency the author assigns to Luna. Luna didn't go to Sugercube corner? Celestia's fault for not taking her. Luna wasn't at the gala? Celestia didn't bother to invite her.
There are two key themes here. First, the infantilisation of Luna, whose every action, or lack of, is placed at Celestia's door. Luna, poor baby, could not have made decisions for herself. No. They must have been inflicted upon her by Celestia. Second, the negative spin placed upon everything Celestia did or did not do. In this fic, everything is always Celestia's fault.
The fic begins with a framing device: Twilight, newly an alicorn, creates a spelll that allows her to observe the effects of changing history in some manner. She uses this spell to see what would have happened if Luna did not become Nightmare Moon. This acts as a framing device, and is not referenced again.
As for the answer, here the author draws some very odd conclusions. First, Luna does not rule Equestria alongside her sister. In this AU, Luna had followers and admirers. Good thing right? Not necessarily. Luna's followers are mercilessly harassed and discriminated against.
Naturally, Celestia is too incompetent and complacent to do anything about this.
This being the sort of fic it is, Luna's followers happened to be all of the best and brightest. Luna, increasing tired of Celestia's poor rule (note the further infantilisation and blame shifting; Celestia is always responsible for all Luna's problems), eventually has a huge falling out with her sister and effectively banishes herself, and her followers to the moon.
Where they set up a super high tech space colony with all the sci fi trimmings.
Yes.
Canon characters are devided between the Moon based Marysuetopia and Equestria, which is depicted as being far more xenophobic and vicious than anything in canon. Particularly, the batponies have been persecuted to near extinction (This, clearly, is Celestia's fault) and the moon ponies are held to be evil demons.
Said moon ponies are an odd bunch. Despite their paradoxical high tech (how they kept themselves alive while developing the tech to keep themselves alive is a touch unclear) they have a legal system that would embarrass a tinpot general. Rules are draconian, with death and worse delt out as a matter of course.
In one horrible scene, the Mane Six (sans Lunar citizen Twilight) are found guilty of crimes against the state. Luna sadistically tells them that they are to be put to death:
“Very well,” she said. “The vote is unanimous. The five of you shall be put to death which will be set at a later date. The method of death shall depend on whether or not Twilight Sparkle lives. Should she pull through, you shall be granted a quick death via vacuum of space once Twilight is awake so that she may witness it herself. However, should she die, the five of you shall be placed in prison pods and then ejected towards the sun. It will be a long, painful, and maddening death as the prison pod keep you alive for years as you fly towards the sun.”
She does this despite knowing full well that they are innocent.
As with Celestia, Luna is horribly characterised: aside from the infantilisation, she is very aggressive, prone to violence, prone to poor decisions and generally never thinks things through. Much of the fics conflict can be put at her door.
Celestia's fault, naturally.
The meat of this fic, beyond this, is the conflict between the Equestrians and the Lunar ponies. Which is to say, the conflict between Celestia and Luna. I shan't go into further detail, but I'm sure you can imagine how it goes.
Conclusion:
As with its fellow LR fics, this fic is guilty of multiple well documented sins. However this fic in particular is characterised by its remorseless assassination of the character of Princess Celestia. As such, I name it among The Ugly:
...
Now, my good ladies and gentlemen, I want your opinion: was this a successful experiment, and should I write more reviews in this format?
I'd say that went well. I look forward to future reviews in this style.
Call me goog again and I'll gut ya.
I enjoyed your review. It was a goog one.
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I liked it!
Your review that is. The story... well I think for once I'll borrow Thumper's father's advice. "If you can't say anything nice. Don't say anything at all."
And yes you should definitely do more.
Cool stuff. And yeah, my expectations dropped when the NLR stuff was mentioned, too.
Actually, I don't think either Luna or Celestia is supposed to be in the right in that fic. I'm pretty sure they're both supposed to be flawed, in very different ways.
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They are. The author portrayed both flawed. I don't think we were intended to side with Luna when she condemned the Mane Six. I should have made that clearer. That said, it was still rather out of character.
However, he does blatantly favor Luna and openly admits to hating Celestia. Which is fine (nobody is expected to like every character), but it very clearly colours his writing; he pretty much puts the blame for everything bad that ever happens in canon (and a whole bunch of other bad stuff he invented from whole cloth) at Celestia's door.
Ultimately, my main criticism of the piece is not that it's terribly written (it isn't), but that it constantly attacks one character. Hence way I classed it as ugly and not as bad.
So nice to see I'm not alone in my feelings on that fic
Yeah this is a pretty good format for a review. As for the fic itself, I'm ashamed to say that it's one of my guilty pleasures. There's some element of fascinated horror that keeps me reading it. I spend the whole time thinking 'Now how are we going to curb stomp Equestria next?' and 'How long before Twilight is pregnant with Gary "Shadow Blade" Stu's child?'. The one character who's actually in character is Cadance.
I don't think I've ever seen such a Mary-Suetastic depiction of the New Lunar Republic. They have miraculous technology that would make sci-fi characters call bullshit. Did you read up to the recent part where six Lunar guards single-handedly kill something like five hundred Equestrian Royal Guards, while only losing two or three of their own? Or the most recent chapter where there's a war between Equestria and the moon, where there are no casualties on the Lunar side (even after Soarin' throws himself into a spaceship engine to try and bring the craft down; it just gets back up and starts walking around murdering ponies) and they make Equestria surrender after slaughtering some ridiculous number like fifty thousand of them.
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I didn't get that far, though I'm not at all surprised to hear this. I gave up when the royal guard ignored Celestia's orders to stand down in order to listen to Blueblood. That was one 'look how rubbish Celestia is' moment too many.
4155863 Blueblood gets worse and Celestia winds up in prison on the moon.
Yeah.
That was a really good review. Straightforward, informative and has its own point of view. Please, make more.
Is it too late for me to add my thoughts?
Because this review is very good, echoes some of my own thoughts perfectly, but it's over a year old...
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Feel free, I'm generally happy for comments
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Between that post and this one here, I actually had a very brief exchange with the author. Brief, but still interesting!
So yeah, first off, it does balance out the more it moves along. Never fully, but somewhat. Like Luna doing something incredibly stupid and destructive that's not implied to be Celestia's fault and leads to hundreds of deaths, all on her.
That being said, yeah, it never fully balances out. There are many, many moments where togetherness and unity is touted, but that stands in contrast to how outclassed Equestria is written in general. Both Equestrians and NLR ponies have to work together to stop the Lunar superweapon from utterly destroying Equestria, and the ponies on the planet are even more helpless than usual because the Republic's other superweapon suppresses all magic in the world.
Anyway, I did ask the author about this. The apparent favour of the NLR, with the changes later on in the story. If that was planned ahead or a product of readers telling them they were playing favourites. They told me they believed showing darker sides to the Republic early on would have been detrimental to the flow of the story; something I deeply disagree with, by the way, as I nearly stopped reading several times over it, almost missing the last few chapters which are where the story truly shines. When the batpony racism is somewhere in the background, when the Equestrians actually have something to offer, when Celestia stops being an idiot and Luna aknowledges her own flaws. If not for all that hammering you for dozens of chapters, it would've been truly marvellous.
Personally, I did get the sense the author sort of chickened out at several instances. The draconian punishment you mention? They explain in comments and notes how it's not that bad. But if it's not that bad, it takes away an instance where the Republic's incredibly harsh legal system would've created a real flaw for them. That's a thing going through the story time and again.
The instance embodying it best for me was Twilight explaining the history of the Republic to Scootaloo. She notes how Luna gave control over war over to the Senate, knowing her own short temper. And... yeah. Luna has a short temper. She's impulsive. That's supposed to be her flaw, her contrast to calculating Celestia.
And yet, she took immediate steps to fix the problem while Celestia, the supposedly logical one, sat on her ass doing nothing and generally proves she can't think her way out of a paper bag.
The power imbalance between the Lunars and the Equestrians does not exactly help. One side has all the tech, social progress, and even better-trained soldiers in their hyper-equipped military despite not having any active enemies on the moon. Equestria has... water.
Me, I would have liked for the Equestrians to have something to give them an edge in a fight. Indeed I would have chosen magic. To me, a tradition-bound society ruled by stuffy nobles overly proud of their sorcerous heritage sounds like it could, it should produce spellcasters of some skill. Only, it doesn't. All powerful Unicorns are, of course, Lunars. Again, this would have been a great opportunity to show Equestria is worth something. It even has some roots in the actual show: NLR Twilight is amazed at the idea that they might soon have a working time machine. Well, inside the Canterlot Archives lie time spells. At least they do in FiM.
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From what you are saying, the fic does improve from some point after I abandoned it. It leaves several questions unanswered, however. A key question: the fic proposes that the Lunars developed highly advanced technology to survive on the moon. It never mentioned how they survived whilst that tech was developed.
Further, as you point out, why develop a massively advanced military force whilst on the moon in the complete absence of any enemies? This would be a foolish waste in a terrestrial setting with plentiful resources. On a self sufficient lunar colony it is utter madness.
Why, indeed, waste precious resources developing weapons at all? The anti-magic weapon is justified as a last ditch counter to Discord, but why all the rest of it?
Also how did the Lunars become so advanced, compared to the Equestrians (and, indeed, everyone else)? A sizable difference, based on different cultures, might have been reasonable (the difference between the Aztecs and the Spanish, for example), but the actual difference is ludicrous. It is only heightened by the Lunars lack of resources; again, how did they survive before they got all this supertech they need to survive? This sort of thing doesn't develop itself, it takes time, energy and resources, and the Lunars should have none of those things.
The different development might be more forgivable if the Equestrians were shown to have developed highly advanced magic, and the Lunars highly advanced technology. This would have put them on a more even footing and made the Lunars seem less starkly like an author's pet. Instead, the Lunars also seem to have more advanced magic than anyone else (see: capturing Celestia mid teleport).
As you point out, they also have the best unicorns.
Again, how did they develop all this, with a fraction of the numbers and resources the Equestrians have? It's not as if canon Equestria shows no evidence of learning or academia. Hell, even Ponyville has a library!
It's just very shoddy writing.
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Indeed it does. I found it's best if one pretends a lot of the stuff from before didn't happen. Not a good sign overall, but eh.
The main reason for the stark difference (in addition to blatant creator favouritism) as it's explained is that Equestria suffered serious brain drain when Luna went to the moon and took her own with her. All the smart ponies liked looking at the moon and staying up at night, you see, so they all went with Luna. Luna magically created a hub for those few ponies to survive and work, and all those smart ponies all in one place pushed each other to the max potential.
There's a few problems with this, of course.
One, lack of resources. The moon could have lots of precious metals and gas and what have you, but it's not really capable of sustaining life. So all those efforts would need to go into making it habitable at all. The Lunars do say they have hardly enough water to get by, but at the same time, they have enough free time to develop power armor and grenades and laser beams and hover tech. That's not logical. That's not how science works.
What is also not logical is how long Equestria stays primitive. Yes, an instance of brain drain can give the Lunars and edge, but that was a thousand years ago. Equestria has had no smart ponies since then? Really?
That carries some rather ugly connotations, if all the smart families with smart babies are all on the moon and the rest of ponykind are the stupid lot with stupid kids who all inherit their inability to evolve meaningfully. Pretty sure that's not what the writer was going for, but...
We also agree on the level of magic. As I mentioned, it even makes sense if we take all the societal development into account, going beyond just a sense of unfairness. There's also another possible working point, one that the author accidentally lay the groundwork for.
They argue Equestria is a feudal society where the noble class would squash anything 'new' to keep their hold on power. Let's run with that and ignore how they would be very interested in anything increasing their power. What is the role of feudal nobility, apart from managing their holdings?
They're supposed to be warriors. So why not capitalise on that?
Have the Equestrians, after the Lunars left, become a more warlike society. They're surrounded by enemies, they even have those expatriates literally hanging over their heads. They have all the reasons to become militarised. Let them be fearsome fighters willing to go the distance because, long ago, they were abandoned by their weak cousins who fled to the moon under their lunatic princess.
Not only would that lead to a more balanced whole, it would also give the Lunars a reason for their weapons programmes: To protect themselves should those "barbarians" ever decide to invade. And yeah, they do get called barbarians at some point in the fic already.