Read It Now Reviews #99 – Once More, With Feeling; Coco Beware; I Wouldn’t Call It Chores; The Pony Pull; The Drop of Ambrosia · 9:33pm Nov 7th, 2016
Happy Monday, folks! And what a Monday it is. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and the eldritch monstrosities from beyond the stars have been beaten back to the far side of the Moon, with everyone’s memories of their attack erased.
Good times.
Today’s stories:
Once More, With Feeling by Pascoite
Coco Beware by shortskirtsandexplosions
I Wouldn’t Call It Chores by lunarsplash02
The Pony Pull by Admiral Biscuit
The Drop of Ambrosia by FanOfMostEverything
Once More, With Feeling
by Pascoite
Romance, Slice of Life
1,037 wordsSpike is finally going to ask out his crush. He just needs a little preparation time first.
Why I added it: I remembered it from the writeoffs.
Review
This is a very short piece which is heavily reliant on a twist. There isn’t much more to it than the twist, but the twist is cute enough, and the story is pretty cute on the whole. If the idea of Spike awkwardly asking somepony out on a date sounds up your alley, you’ll likely appreciate this. If that idea doesn’t interest you, steer clear, as there isn’t anything else here.
Recommendation: Worth Reading.
Coco Beware
by shortskirtsandexplosions
Sex, Comedy, Romance, Slice of Life
1,872 wordsDo you remember that one time when you and your fashion understudy got drunk and made love? Rarity doesn't.
Why I added it: SS&E is a good writer.
Review
Rarity wakes up with a throbbing headache, only to discover as her senses return that there is a very pretty pony in her bed, and a lot of tossed around clothing and empty bottles of alcohol.
And Coco seems very friendly this morning. Very friendly. And is wearing this splendid collar…
This is one of those “Someone wakes up and finds out they had hot, raunchy sex the previous evening” stories. Rarity, understandably, freaks out, but alas, while this is reasonably amusing for the genre (and Coco and Rarity show some actual genuine concern for each other, as Coco notices Rarity freaking out and Rarity tries to not upset her friend who is apparently now her lover, among other things) it is also fairly by the numbers. If you’ve read stories similar to this one before, you’ve basically read this one, and while it is reasonably well written and kind of cute, it is nevertheless very, very standard.
Recommendation: You already know whether or not this is your sort of thing. If it is, read it; if it isn’t, this won’t change your mind.
I Wouldn’t Call It Chores
by lunarsplash02
Romance, Slice of Life
1,571 wordsWith Rarity owning multiple venues, she has a lot to deal with on a daily basis. She has needed an abundance of help from her friends over the past few years, and every time she needs some assistance, Applejack goes out of her way to help.
Now that Rarity has some vacation time, she feels that it's only right that she helps Applejack in return. However, she's not really one for farm-work. Now it's up to Applejack to show Rarity that work can be fun.
Why I added it: RariJack
Review
Rarity decides to go help Applejack with chores.
Rarity isn’t very good at them and ultimately ends up hurting herself in trying to prove herself.
Hugs. The end.
This story suffers from a lack of real emotional texture; we get Rarity showing up at the start and refusing to not help with the chores, but we’re not really given much of an indication beyond her feeling like she owes Applejack in some way as to why.
The story doesn’t do much to develop the romance angle either; it just sort of is a series of mildly humorous events which are set up one after the next. There isn’t really much variation between them; Rarity tries to do something and struggles with it in some comedic fashion, and then it is on to the next one.
All in all, this feels like a story that is missing a story; it is a series of events, but it doesn’t feel like it has a true plot; there isn’t much of a sense of rising action, and when Rarity finally hurts herself at what is ostensibly the climax, the scene doesn’t feel like it has been particularly built up to.
It isn’t that the activities in the story aren’t potentially funny, but that it never really feels like it goes much beyond a series of mildly amusing scenes which are there because the writer wanted to write them, rather than because they feel like they’re telling a particular story.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
The Pony Pull
by Admiral Biscuit
Slice of Life
6,555 wordsAfter a day of working remodeling a home, Ambrosia and Silver Spanner bond by watching the annual Ponyville Pony Pull.
Why I added it: Because I read its prequel in order to read it.
Review
Ambrosia and Silver Spanner both go to the Ponyville Pony Pull, at which point we discover that the previous story, Silver Spanner, Journeymare, was actually set years in the past – Big Mac is just McIntosh at this point, still a colt, and Jonagold Apple, Applejack and Big Mac’s father, is still alive (and I have to say – I 100% approve of that name).
The story is about them sitting in the stands and watching the pony pull while dumping some information about harnesses and pulling, as well as Ambrosia’s many cousins and Silver Spanner being seen as a weirdo due to her mark and work (and not being able to get a date).
While there was some decent world-building here, I have to say that I don’t really care. World-building requires context, and I just haven’t bought into characters who would make me care about harness types, nor are the characters just so fun to be around that I could listen to them talk about anything and be interested. I felt kind of disconnected, and while there were a few sparks – such as when Silver Spanner tried to be friendly with a stallion and got rejected for being a weirdo – they were few and far between. While the story does a good job of showing Silver Spanner being something of a reject, I couldn’t really bring myself to quite care about her, so her being a social reject doesn’t really affect me emotionally. The ending does a little bit to further humanize the characters, but by then, the story is over and a great deal of it was about other characters doing other things, and ultimately I just never found myself invested in the piece – it seemed to assume that I’d care about Silver Spanner, but I still don’t really find myself doing so.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
The Drop of Ambrosia
by FanOfMostEverything
Comedy, Slice of Life
2,704 wordsTwilight Sparkle. Magical prodigy. Personal student of Princess Celestia. Bearer of the Element of Magic. Princess of Friendship. Hers is easily one of the greatest destinies in Equestria.
Yes. Definitely. All predetermined. It certainly had nothing to do with any incidents she had early in her personal lessons from Celestia, nor any potent magic the Princess of the Sun kept hidden in plain sight. That would be ridiculous.
Why I added it: FOME is a good writer.
Review
Twilight falls into the Fountain of Youth, a fountain which can turn ponies with the proper potential into alicorns.
Fortunately, Celestia has many, many years to plan for Twilight’s ascension. Which definitely is not a desperate gamble at all intended to fake her student’s ascending for reasons other than falling into a small body of water.
The story is kind of amusing, but it is never really laugh-out-loud funny, and ultimately, it feels kind of overly convoluted – it has to spend a lot of time on setup and the ending punchline doesn’t ultimately flow from the rest of the story. Indeed, I’m not sure that I really liked the ending that much in general; it felt kind of like an abrupt right turn from the rest of the piece, and didn’t really make much sense contextually. A lot of the amusement of the story ultimately comes from the premise, and I think a bit more flailing on Celestia’s part would have made it funnier, or maybe a different punchline, such as Rainbow Dash chugging from the fountain after a performance, thus sending Celestia scrambling for another convoluted excuse. As it is, though, it just didn’t make me smile enough.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
Summary
Once More, With Feeling by Pascoite
Worth Reading
Coco Beware by shortskirtsandexplosions
Worth Reading
I Wouldn’t Call It Chores by lunarsplash02
Not Recommended
The Pony Pull by Admiral Biscuit
Not Recommended
The Drop of Ambrosia by FanOfMostEverything
Not Recommended
And there we go!
My reviewed by the Titanium Dragon shelf is up to 864 stories, but if you count short stories individually, I’m all the way up to 957 reviews (though only 955 individual stories – two stories have been re-reviewed).
I’ll be up to a thousand soon. I’m not quite sure what I’ll do then.
Ah, well. That’s future TD’s problem.
Number of stories still listed as Read It Sooner: 158
Number of stories still listed as Read It Later: 553
Number of stories listed as Read It Eventually: 2045
I don't know why, but these reviews always brighten my day. Managing to make me laugh, even.
I may have a problem.
Yeah, Drop of Ambrosia definitely could've used some more beta reading to catch the unfortunate implications and logical leaps I didn't realize were in there. This is why you should have someone else look over your stories, folks. Some of the stuff you think is there might only be in your own minds.
The URL links in The Pony Pull review are messed up. Looks like each got doubled up inside of itself.
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Fixed. The cause was autoformatting - basically, Word likes adding a space before the URLs I copy-paste into the document. I usually delete them, but I missed them here. When the site sees those spaces, it reacts... strangely.
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Editing is magic.
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Aw, thanks. I'm happy to hear that they brighten someone's day!
4289275 All part of why I hate autoformating. Luckily gDocs, which I write in most of the time, doesn't have too much of that (though the replace functionality works in an annoying way).
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I understand why some people feel otherwise, but I actually love autoformatting; it does a lot of good things for me. The benefits ultimately outweigh the annoyances for my personal use.
]4289315 It is the nature of things, I think, like auto-correct. Most of the time, they're great. But then there are the times when you don't want them to do what they're doing, either because it is messing up for some reason or because it includes a particular bit of functionality you do not want, and they just won't stop doing it. And then they're very frustrating. And those are the things that stand out in your memory.
What I really wish is that the norm was to make it easy to enable/disable. That ability to pic,k what types of formatting you want, to disable and enable it as you see fit, is pretty standard for software development programs, the good ones, anyway. Sadly, word processing programs lag behind in this area, and phones don't seem to have a nice big on/off button for the auto-correct.
Anyway, on the stories themselves, only read the first two, the "worth readings".
For Coco Beware, I pretty much agree with what you said. It feels sort of like it was just a quick little something SS&E wrote, without investing too much time in it. Nothing wrong with that, but the end result is that it doesn't really stand out from others in the genre, despite being well written.
And for Once More, With Feeling - I wouldn't really consider it a story with a twist. It is evident pretty early on (though with a 1k word story, pretty much the entire thing is early on) what is happening. Location, homework, voice crack... even on a first reading, these stand out like a Bat-Signal on a cloudy night. And probably double so if you looked at the tagged characters before reading. But that still leaves it as a nice, cute story that does what it set out to do in an efficient way.
You can review my next story!
Naw, I'm just kidding. I won't have it released by then.
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You'd better.
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You can turn off auto-formatting in Word, or turn off specific bits of it, though I'm not sure if you can fix the particular problem I have.
I mean, there's definitely some huge clues there (and, alas, the character tags give it away - a problem with some stories), so I can understand feeling that way. Still, I'm pretty sure it was meant to be a twist, and I didn't want to spoil it for people.
Thank you very much for reviewing my story! Even though you don't recommend it, it means a lot.
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You're welcome!