Horizon Reviews: 80 Days Crossovers, Part 2 · 9:09am Sep 16th, 2016
(80 Days Challenge: Original Post * Reviews Part 1 * Reviews Part 2)
Given that back in June I challenged authors to write crossovers based on a video game about an 80-day round-the-world journey, I find it supremely fitting that I'm drawing the challenge to a close exactly 80 days later —
— OH, HUSH, YOU. It was 80 days of travel time, okay? Maybe it looks like 94 on the calendar, but that's just because I went up to the North Pole during my expedition and accidentally crossed the International Date Line fourteen times the wrong way! 
Ahem. Anyway, I promised every author a review, and this blog post is to round up the stories that were not yet published (or finished) when I wrote Part 1, along with a little bit of retrospective.
If you'd like a quick index to the 80 Days stories, I've created an 80 Days group and put all of the reviewed stories into a folder there. (This post will officially draw the challenge to a close, but there are other folders for hypothetical future works.)
First, a quick look back at a story from the first batch that has continued to update:
Around The World in 81 Days, And Other Problems Caused by Leap Years, by GaPJaxie
At last review, Leap Years was at 17,000 words. This ongoing story has now more than doubled in size, and while the tension has dwindled from a boil to a simmer after Twilight Sparkle narrowly survives the pony equivalent of the assassination attempt which sparked World War I, both the geopolitical and emotional fallout of that event continue to loom. The story is starting to dig into a lot of the nuances that that event overshadowed, including Spike's attempt to define himself from within Twilight's shadow. It's a different sort of gripping now, the calm before the storm, but I know enough of GaPJaxie's skill to be confident that the other horseshoe is going to drop before the end of the story, and I'm looking forward to the experience.
Still Recommended For: Everyone.
And on to the three stories published since my last post!
80 Days 'Til The World's Farthest Shore, by Cynewulf
If you had asked me to guess which of this challenge's eight fics would become a runaway Featurebox hit, the last one I would have picked was the [Human]-tagged one set on a fantasy world with only the most tenuous surface connection to My Little Pony. "Have we been wrong about FimFiction readers this whole time?" one might ask. "Do they really crave original fiction, and we fools have been giving them ponies?" Or is it that, upon seeing such a strange story receive so many upvotes, readers are drawn to find out what attracted the crowd to it?
This story rewards that curiosity on a lot of levels. We meet a mysterious traveller in a fantasy-world tavern, and her story reveals what's going on here — a sort of high-fantasy extension/reinterpretation of Equestria Girls, in which she meets transdimensional visitor Twilight Sparkle, who has gone through a portal and gotten stuck as a human in a distant land. Twilight asks for the traveller's help, needing a local guide to make the long journey to a portal home before it can close. Along the way, among their adventures, they step into the center of a local revolution that throws the characters of the visiting princess and the world into very sharp contrast. And then, just when we think we know how this ends, we find out what happened when they got to their destination.
In short, this escorts you through some gut punches, and then an ending that borders on the sublime (in the spiritual meaning of the word), wrapping up in a way that makes this not just a strong MLP story but also very thematically pony. It's all the more haunting for how distant yet familiar everything feels (and this author's note is a good chaser to the story, if you agree). If this is what original fiction in the Featurebox means, sign me up for more.
Recommended For: Everyone, original fiction tolerance or not.
Two Mares And A Carpet Bag, by Icenrose
The other two reviews today are weird sideways takes on 80 Days, and this one plays it much more straight: two characters, a wager, an attempted circumnavigation, etc. Reading a bunch of crossovers in a row, those can start to blend together — and this does stick closely enough to the game's formula that some sections had me feeling restless — but this story still finds ways to distinguish itself.
First of all, while nominally Trixie is the leader (the Fogg analogue) and Starlight is the helper (the Passepartout analogue), this feels much more like a pair of friends than 80 Days ever could — which is to its credit. The game's Fogg is a distant, removed presence, almost a force of nature that drives the trip while the adventures are all Passepartout's story. Translating 80 Days to prose fiction and a new setting, there's no reason to leave Fogg so abstract, and happily Trixie is far more engaged in the trip than Fogg ever was. In fact, some of my favorite chapters (6 and 7) are driven almost entirely by her, and it's a pleasure throughout seeing her interplay with the nominal protagonist.
What this keeps is the short, punchy nature of the original: most chapters are under 1000 words, some well under. It's rather faithful to the economical nature of the original storytelling, and we get a surprising amount of characterization from those little snippets (see again: Chapters 6 and 7). The story's still continuing, updating every few days, but it feels like it started hitting its stride a few thousand words in and is now really digging into the intriguing worldbuilding and the emotional engagement with the characters that the early going somewhat glossed over.
Recommended For: Trixie's scenes on the steamship, and the building quality over the course of this longer piece.
Solitaire, by Pascoite
This story, as I noted in its comments, pulls off a remarkably audacious derail, and I'm grateful it's the last one I'm reviewing — like its protagonist's journey, this is (by design) almost impossible to top. Also like its protagonist's journey, I'm not sure this accomplishes the goals it started out with, but it sure does something remarkable along the way.
This starts with an unnamed earth pony noble hearing about the successful completion of the 80-day circumnavigation, and deciding to one-up it as flamboyantly as possible. The wager is private, for reasons quickly revealed: the chosen method of travel is not only borderline cheating but also awkward and unethical, and while the noble is completing the trip for the personal satisfaction of having pulled it off, making a public spectacle out of it would most likely ruin them. And then that chicken comes home to roost like the hammer to the face of a mixed metaphor, and the rest of the story is simply about dealing with the fallout.
It's very difficult to say more without getting into deep spoilers, but I've unpacked my thoughts a little in story comments, including some discussion of what makes this so unique. Give it a shot.
Recommended For: Its protagonist effortlessly outdoing all of the travelogues you've been reading; and for tackling a question about travel that I've never seen anywhere else.
In Conclusion
I posted my challenge on the grounds that the game offered some interesting narrative lessons that could improve your writing. How did that work out?
Well, I learned something fairly quickly, amid a fair amount of pushback noting that the game suffered from an interesting meta-problem that echoed the protagonists' problems: it's extremely difficult to balance speed with depth. Apparently, I instinctually played the game rather differently from many of my readers, in a way that landed me in the designers' sweet spot and teased out a lot of hidden content others found it difficult to engage with. I never quite hit the constraint walls that others found hemming them in, and that's part of what made the experience so much more magical for me. I'm honestly not sure how this applies to prose, which is linear by design, but it might be a useful cautionary note when designing something like a Choose Your Own Adventure or a House of Leaves-style metanarrative that rewards reader exploration.
Much more relevantly: FrontSevens — whose story was the most direct takedown of the game experience — wrote a detailed blog post about their experiences writing their story. There are some concrete writing lessons in that post — including the necessity of keeping a sense of tension by allowing a failure state as a genuine possibility; and moving on to more traditional lessons about character and such which the game did do well — and so, if that post is typical, I stand by my assertion that this game serves as a tutor for some good writing tools. I'm really grateful to FrontSevens for helping me feel like this whole endeavour was justified on its own terms.
But whether or not lessons were learned, this produced some fine writing that I'm glad I got to see. That is not a lesson that I needed to learn — I already know how awesome all of you are — but it's always wonderful to be reminded of how talented the community is here and what sort of magic we can work if we all pull together.
On that (very pony) note, I think it's time to give all of our authors a round of applause and move on to our next journey. Hazeyhooves, FrontSevens, Grand_Moff_Pony, GaPJaxie, Sharp Spark, Icenrose, Cynewulf, and Pascoite: Thank you all for taking me up on this crazy little wager!
...
... 
Alternately, you could've experienced relativistic time dilation. Which, by my calculations, would've required you to move at around...
185 million meters per second, or 61.7% the speed of light. On average.
Yeah, that seems reasonable for a steampunk setting.
In any case, I may just need to play the game, if only to see where it takes me.
And thank YOU for putting this challenge out there, Horizon! It was a fun time!
And a tip of the hat to everyone who gave it a go. Lots of great and interesting stories came about as a result!
-GMP
Solitaire was damn impressive, and not at all what I expected, even with your forewarnings-slash-cryptic hints. Brilliant stuff!
Now, to read 2MaaCB...
i'm glad you spurred on the creation of some really cool stories!
4212523 When is 80 Days Around the Living Room coming out??? Also, apropos of nothing, your avatar still amuses me greatly.
Yay I'm in a blog! This was nice to wake up to, for sure. Read it while I waited for a patient this morning at work.
I think one thing I learned, definitely, was what happens when you try to fit lots of stuff in a small space--namely, difficulty. I had a story that was supposed to be like 5K that I realized 3K into was going to be WAY longer, and I had to make a choice--do I delay, and write it all out, or do I summarize and highlight? For the first time, I chose the latter. Generally, I've tended to be a lot slower in pace. I think I drove people crazy with how long it took Twilight to reach the West in Night, but there was a lot of ground and a lot of conversations I wanted to happen! So it was interesting to more or less go against all of my usual inclinations.
I also, by the by, had an abridged illustrated version of this book on my shelf as a child and loved it. So that was a nice familiar road to travel.
I had originally planned to play it far more "straight"--that Twilight and Sophie would travel west until they reached the ends of the earth, but then I realized that I would just be retracing a story I had already written. While I wanted to continue exploring the idea of parallels as I've been doing for a long time with the Songverse stories and the ones connected and mentioned in Night, I realized that what made the idea interesting was not the sameness but the twists. Alicorn or not, princess or Archmage, this pony with this one or another or not at all, variations upon themes. So I altered it at the last minute to be a northward journey instead, keeping elements but changing the character of the journey.
It also made me think, again, about how to make "reveals" effective. I'm fond of saying that every big event or change is a gambit. You roll the dice--every time a character dies, changes drastically, does something to change others or the world drastically, every time is another roll. You being a fellow player of games will know what I'm getting at here. We've had nights that the gods welcomed us with open arms, the heavens sang the song of the world's foundation, and natural 20s were ours in abundance. But then. But then there's the dreaded spectre of the nat 1, the critical failure, the Absolute Fumble. Sophie being a not-quite-but-basically Twilight analog is definitely a roll of the dice. In one fell swoop, it changes character, setting, and to an extent, how we view character dynamics. I had actually considered having her be the next Lady Villier, actually, and thus really be her world's Celestia. Wonder how that might have been? Lady Villier being immortal through very different means, mainly in being reborn and then having the shared gestalt memory transferred at death to the succeeding and mostly identical new "her". Is the roll unavoidable? Probably. I've always wondered if it was better to avoid tempting fate, or if it was better to scattershoot--knowing that at any point you can lose someone irrevocably but counting on the emotional impact or the fascination of the New to carry you through, like riding the shockwaves or something.
Thanks for the challenge! It was fun.
4212686 would it matter if it was when the levee breaks in around 80 days?
4212791 fund it.
finally finished reading all 8 of these, wow. all the while, getting this proud feeling like i went on the same journey with 7 others. and we can wink at each other knowingly, as if we're the only ones who witnessed and shared the experience of writing this crossover.... even though all our stories turned out very different!
still jealous that they were all better than me.