Visiden Tries It: No Place Like Home · 1:21pm Nov 27th, 2016
Right, it's audio play time again. Let's do this.
Preliminary Thoughts: I generally dislike LyraBon. To me, the ship is MLP's manifestation of shipping goggles. "Oh, look, they sat next to each other! Totally fucking. Totally." That and I've never forgiven Bonbon for that "Never heard of you" line at Rarity. Die alone, you bitch. Still, I don't mind it if it involves an interesting enough story.
The description's giving me a Tsubasa Chronicles vibe. Maybe we'll find out that Lyra and Bonbon are actually the children of their clones from the future or something.
I should note that with "The Death of Sunset Shimmer" and "Heroic Tales", that makes a total of three audio plays in the works. I've never done an audio play, but I suspect that it's harder than merely typing words on your computer. If Scribbler played in an MMO, I'd diagnose her with a severe case of Altitis. It's difficult to invest in a story when you have a suspicion that the next update is half a year away or might never come at all if things change IRL.
Anyway, on to the story proper. Spoilers ahoy.
The opening sequence is pretty awesome. I've come to expect that level from Reverb's music. It's like watching an anime intro.
We start off with the Chrono Trigger opening of Lyra waking up. I've noticed that Lost Narrator is voicing Bonbon using her normal voice; an odd choice. I suppose it's for the best. There's no way I'm going to be able to take this epic love story seriously if Bonbon sounds like she does in the show.
It turns out Lyra's forgotten their anniversary, as is wont to happen to fictional couples. Given the Lost Narrator's voicing Bonbon, let's hope no one is killed with curses or transformed into a mass murdering lunatic. So she's off to get a Turboman doll. I mean a gift for Bonbon. Doesn't help that Scribbler's published this so close to Christmas. She manages to get her boss involved somehow, and establishes her character as a quirky idiot. This will be a curious development. In my stories, I find Pinkie to be the most difficult to write because she's a quirky idiot and her character does not mesh well with any serious or epic situation. I don't know how well Lyra will cope with the coming troubles.
We shift to a scene with Spike fussing over Twilight. I always like these scenes. Too often, Spike the snarky assistant is forgotten for Spike the buffoon.
Twilight, you've been at this for twenty four hours!
That's an odd rather awkward turn of phrase for Spike. You've been at this for a whole day seems a better fit.
Twilight then goes on a long lecture on ley lines.
At school, the teachers always called it the magic of existence, remember?
Oh God, it's Shakugan no Shana all over again. Is Twilight a flame haze?
At Spike's accidental prompting, Twilight lists down several silly incidents involving him as a hatchling. This is something that I've noticed in the first episode of heroic tales as well. The list goes on too long, the joke asphyxiates in the process and I go from "haha, that's silly" to "get on with it". In heroic tales I chalked it down to Honey Buzz being unfunny and pedantic. This might also be true for Twilight, but I'm starting to harbor suspicions.
As Twilight keeps hyping up ley lines (which I still think should be the province of earth ponies) Spike brings up some good points which she naturally ignores. There's some good characterization here which gives Twilight a volatile mixture of hubris and insecurity. It's a nice bit and, if Lyra died because of it, this would still be a great tragedy story.
That wasn't a princess duty, that was correcting a terrible mistake.
Funny you brought that up, Twilight. You were turned into a princess because you corrected a terrible mistake. You're not the Princess of Friendship, you're the Princess of Un-Fucking Up.
Twilight wants to use a network of ley lines to travel instantly. You should compare notes with the Emperor of Man, Twilight. He tried something similar and it worked very well for him.
We return to Lyra who's been pissing Rarity off. That's a black mark against you, Lyra. Good to see Minuette not being a dentist.
Then the scene switches to Derpy and her daughter. I don't like the sequence. Not so much because it's badly executed, more because I can't stand cutesy-wootsy child voices. So Dinky falls off her idiot mom and Lyra almost saves the day. Very anime-ish there with the brash character whose heart is in the right place. Not too keen on the Rainbow Dash voice, to be honest.
Ditzy doesn't forget Lyra's botched rescue after Dash flies off with Dinky.
I don't have enough thank you's for that, but I have plenty of hugs!
Blech.
Lyra proceeds to somehow work in some of her tragic backstory while talking to Noteworthy about teleportation and does her first somber scene. It's pretty solid so far.
We switch to Bonbon and Golden Harvest. Harvest basically goes "Hello, let me remind you of your personality quirks for our invisible audience". I'm not used to hearing Bonbon being so mellow. I keep expecting her to be a bitch. I think it's nice as it steps out of your typical anime belligerent couple and fiery romance to a more mature sense of affection.
Bonbon talks about Lyra running around like a headless chicken. Now, we humans have that phrase because we butcher our chickens for food. I don't think ponies would have a similar enough experience with poultry to develop that expression.
Did you just wink at me?
Weaknesses should be concealed at all times. You can't describe this action as narrative as there is no narrator. The visuals don't show it too. Having this rather awkward phrase doesn't so much as make up for it as it does highlight it.
And we're back with Lyra. After dropping another hint about her tragic backstory, she runs into Applejack, who proceeds to speechify about how it's okay to miss an aniversary or two. From her and Lyra's perspective, it's understandable, but the audience just heard a similar speech from Bonbon in the previous scene and the message is getting a little ham-fisted. I appreciate the restraint, though, for lack of a better word. If this was a Captain Unstoppable fic, Applejack would have worked in the fact that she was fucking Soarin halfway through her speechifying. Given Scribbler's shipping preferences, it's nice not to hear a mention of a certain pegasus. I'm not ruling out the ship, just glad it didn't show up for this conversation.
Finally we get to the aniversary picnic thing. It's all lovey dovey until mad scientist Twilight shows up. Again, Spike says sensible things only for the hubristic Twilight to ignore them. This really is the best sort of Twilight and Spike interaction for me. To my complete and utter shock, Twilight fucks up her spell. And she was so prepared too. I guess, the ley line jumped her. I'm reminded of the Descendant's "Zenith" in a way, though I suspect that Princess Celestia made those ley lines to turn Equestria into a philosopher's stone, which is why nopony besides some obscure researcher who mysteriously stopped and Twilight bothered to learn about ley lines.
The ley magic making tiger-like growls is just silly.
Surprise surprise the wild magic zaps Lyra. The fancy flashback effects are pretty neat at first, but they go on a little too long. Almost hit the fast forward there. Lyra ends up in a world where Mayor Mare is evil. So business as usual then. Aloe and Lotus are there too and they've turned into Bond movie-like Russian twins. They do the evil interrogation scene. I was hoping for the rack, but truth serums work too. As expected, Lyra spouts gibberish and pisses them off. We get acclimated to the whole earth ponies vs unicorns vs pegasi thing. Some fancy titles are thrown around. Episode ends with Shining Armor to the rescue. Good to see he isn't useless so far. The illustrations are hilarious though with the silly ninja outfits. The mustachioed pony cracks me up. His ninja mask apparently comes with special openings for his bushy eyebrows and his killer moustache.
The ending sequence is also pretty awesome. Well, here's to hoping it doesn't take a couple of years for episode two.
I remember thinking that once. Until season five and BEST FRIENDS, that is. Slice of Life could've just been nothing but a twenty-two minute scene of these two tongue-kissing, and it wouldn't have been much more blatant than what we actually got.
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Yeah, that's true. But Slice of Pandering is already a response to shipping goggles.
Finally got around to giving the audio program a listen. The last Scribbler reading I enjoyed was of Biblical Monsters.
The story itself was interesting to say the least. Not exactly my cup of tea, because stories with a focus on time travel/dimension hopping are hard to do right. For example the Forever War is probably one of the few stories I can think of that uses time travel in a way other than to muck up the plot.
But that's just me being picky I suppose. Still gotta hand it to Scribbler's dedication to the audio reading scene. Coordinating all the actors and the editing is probably a big pain in the ass.
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For me, a story should have only one of the following to avoid massive complications: time travel, parallel worlds, and clones. Tsubasa Chronicles had all three. Halfway through the story, I didn't have a clue what was going on and couldn't be bothered to find out.
I 100% approve of this. Though if it was one of mine there would be MacDash somewhere...
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I'm guessing you found this blog post because you were searching your name through the site's search engine.
4375436 Nope. Catching up on blogs. I've been out of the game for a bit.