Present Perfect vs. The Freeport Venture · 5:33pm Sep 11th, 2016
The Freeport Venture by Chengar Qordath is a first for these reviews: a versus post for the sequel to a story that was itself given only a regular review. But while A Moment in the Sun may have started things off in regards to this particular AU, Freeport Venture is the story whose name appears in all the subsequent titles. That's my reasoning.
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I hate to say it, but I think A Moment in the Sun — which I consider one of the best tragedies on this site and one of my all-time favorite fics — may just be a fluke. I was irritated by its companion followup, Rise of the Phoenix Empress, and I was downright disappointed by The Freeport Venture. Figuring out where AMitS went right and the others went wrong requires more than just berating the writing; I had to figure out why I like AMitS so much in the first place. I'm not sure I've come to a suitable conclusion, but we'll see.
Freeport Venture starts us off more or less where AMitS left off. Sunset Shimmer is living a life on the run in the frozen north, being hunted by agents sent by both her parents and Celestia, who just want her to come home. She moves from the north to Freeport, a city-state archipelago that's your average wretched hive of scum and villainy. Along the way, she meets a colorful cast of characters and gets into a lot of trouble, all while being headstrong, naive, and ridiculously good at magic.
The "headstrong, naive" part is the first thing that gets to me. We're in Sunset's head the whole time, so at first, it's easy to suspect she's got everything figured out. But as she makes her way to Freeport, meeting up with soon-to-be-revealed Equestrian spy Strum McAwesomeposture Strumming Heartstrings, she begins to hear a mantra: "You don't know how to live on your own. You don't know what Freeport is like. You don't know everything. Stop being an ignorant teenager." This grows quickly annoying.
Part of it is because, well, I'm in Sunset's head, and therefore I care about the things she cares about. In A Moment in the Sun, it's obvious that her delusions about becoming an alicorn are the tragic flaw that leads to her downfall. This is great. It's not so great when she's still hanging on to those delusions, not to mention general arrogance, and people keep pointing this out to her. I think that might be what separates this story from AMitS, but I'm not sure.
Unfortunately, Sunset not changing is one of my big problems with this piece. By the end of the story, sure, she's gained some hard-earned experience — though a lot of it is things other characters just straight-up tell her — and she's learned to take advice from others, if grudgingly, but she still feels like the same character, fundamentally, with the same flaws. It's not tragic, it's just stupid, and being reminded again and again that she hasn't got things figured out as well as she thinks she does just makes her mistakes harder to experience as a reader. I mean, a big character turn for her is recognizing that Strumming isn't as stupid as Sunset thinks she is. That shouldn't qualify as "major character growth", yet it does, and it's about the most growth she has over the course of the story. It's possible that a lot is held back for the sequels, but that's not exactly satisfying.
Another major problem I had is that Sunset has zero agency. She's bad at planning when not under pressure and mostly spends the entire story being bounced around as the plaything of other characters. While that's kind of the point, it's again not enjoyable to read about, because you know every single thing she tries to do is going to be countered by someone with more experience and a better ability to read others who's already planned three steps ahead of her. It's exasperating watching her be countered again and again, sometimes before she's even done anything. Only at the very end, when she's been cornered and pushed to desperate measures, does she have anything like control over her life, and that's only because everyone else backs off, arms raised, because they know they're about to get bit.
And I don't know, maybe a small payoff would have been enough to spur me to read other stories in the series if not for my third big problem: the writing. AMitS doesn't have these problems, and I'll note again, I reread it for my Phoenix Empress review, during chapter two of the audiobook, so it's fresh in my mind. Point is, the writing never shows when it can tell, and never tells when it can explain. Pages and pages of world-building and changeling headcanon are dumped out through the characters' mouths. There's hardly a sentence in the narrative — and quite a few in the dialogue — that couldn't have another sentence taken out and lose nothing for it. This story is slow and pedantic, and nothing about listening to it was enjoyable in the least. Characters spend scene after scene belaboring points, analyzing, overanalyzing, justifying their motivations, explaining and just flat out not doing anything. Action scenes often slow to a crawl because of this. Rise of the Phoenix Empress does have this issue, if not quite as bad, and this is what leads me to call AMitS a fluke. I'm not looking forward to reading more stories by this author, if this is how he approaches writing now.
So was everything bad? No, of course not. Freeport is a living, thriving city; I compared it mentally to the similar location from that one Psych crossover I read a while back. The headcanon, especially for changelings, is actually really neat, infodumps aside. I love that the ends Sunset is driven to weigh heavily on her mind throughout the rest of the story — seriously, what she does to the pirate is surprising and dramatic — and yet she doesn't spend a lot of time whining about it. I like the use of 'feather' for 'fuck' (as an expletive only), even if this piece uses 'buck' the same way. The characters Sunset meets are also pretty darn good. Kukri is fucking adorable (I of course have a weak spot for adorable foals). Puzzle Piece is shady enough that I never stopped questioning his motives. Celestia shows up once or twice and is the same lovable monarch from AMitS. Metal Mome, a pirate Sunset is tasked with capturing, has a great backstory and is well built in the legend sense before he shows up. I mean, even though he appears for a whole two fight scenes in the middle of the story, he lived up to that legend and was interestingly designed to boot.
Then there's Strumming Heartstrings.
Strumming caught my attention immediately. She shares a cabin with Sunset on board the titular Venture, en route to Freeport, and one of the first things she says to her is "And if you get any ideas, I'm terrible in bed and hog the covers." I loved her immediately, and things only got better when it was revealed she was a bumbling spy who loved to eat and constantly produced a litany of snacks from who-knows-where whenever she got snacky.
And then, in chapter 8, she becomes the villain, in about the most dickish, underhanded way possible. I hated this, and if I had not planned on vs. posting this story, I would have quit right there.
Strumming, as it turns out, fooled all of us. Being in Sunset's head, we, the reader, are never given any clues we can piece together to see through Strumming's "bad spy" act. I felt thoroughly duped, right alongside Sunset, and the fact that she went from, "crazy, quirky foil" to "conniving, actually-good-at-her-job spy" was made all the worse by the fact that I underestimated this story's tone. See, in the show, I could understand an intelligence agency keeping around someone like chapter 2 Strumming, who blows her cover almost immediately upon coming into contact with her mark. But obviously, a real intelligence agency would never allow someone like that in the field; that was the one clue I was missing, and I wasn't even looking for it because I thought I was reading a different story. Like I said, would have quit right there.
There are some other things that bothered me, like Sunset's ability to pull dark magic out of her ass at the drop of a hat despite never having actually been trained in it, or the use of 'plot' (a carryover from AMitS) or, even worse, Strumming calling Sunset "Baconmane". (She is a hot dog!) There's a very intriguing bit analyzing the symbolism of Sunset's cutie mark that comes in the middle of what should otherwise be a tense action scene. Most of all, the conspiracy Strumming brings up while she's making her transition from wacky sidekick to villain is fucking ridiculous, never thoroughly reckoned with, and implodes under the story's own logic.
It took me a good fourteen pages to explain why I didn't like The Immortal Game; then again, I had no preconceived notions about it. The Freeport Venture is easy to sum up because I came into it hoping for an extension of the great tragedy of A Moment in the Sun. Instead, I got a dull, pedantic adventure about a stupid pony who only learns that she can use illegal, immoral magic to escape from bad situations and get anything she wants.
2/5
'Disappointing' doesn't begin to cover it.
For the record, my next goal is to finish Through the Well of Pirene, which I have sadly been neglecting. :( Once that's done (and VisualPony stops killing me with two-part chapters), I will head into book four of Project Horizons. Though The Moonstone Cup is a lot closer than I'd like it to be...
I completely disagree with almost all of this. I don't think there's a real "bad guy" in any of the story, except maybe the council or Metal Mome. I don't think Strumming turns into a villain. She's an antagonist, sure, but that doesn't make her a villain. She's just doing her job. Possibly. I love her ambiguity, and I, like you, love her tic of just constantly eating snacks that she pulls from nowhere. Puzzle is a great character, too. I dunno, I just can't agree with your assessment.
so hype so hype so hype
4205096 Have to agree completely with you. I liked A Moment in the Sun as a character drama, but the Freeport Venture is fun, action-packed and builds a great setting, I feel it's the stronger piece.
There is a fair amount of exposition, which is pretty darn necessary when a brand new setting with a different tone is being built, if the story was set in Canterlot or Ponyville we wouldn't need to learn nearly as much as we do about Freeport.
And I particularly love the twist with Strumming, a fair amount of readers actually suspected it, partly for the reasons you mentioned, and partly because it fits more with the larger world Chengar has built.
Do you have a review of that? That was one of my favorite stories and one of the first ones I read and I wonder if it would hold up as well three years later.
4211813
Ayup.
Happily, I enjoyed it. :)
4206161
Why was it "necessary" to spend collective pages upon pages of exposition explaining lore for a setting that is only present throughout half of the narrative?
4718502 Because at this point the setting has been used for like 6-8 more stories? It's an investment.