Read It Later Reviews #70 – Lies and Lyres; So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish; Orange Is The New Blue; Time To Talk; Observatory Hill · 9:41pm Mar 11th, 2017
This about sums up how I’ve been feeling these last few days:
Today’s stories:
Lies and Lyres by King of Beggars
So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish by Blueshift
Orange Is The New Blue by Estee
Time to Talk by Jay-The-Brony
Observatory Hill by Skywriter
Lies and Lyres
by King of Beggars
Romance, Slice of Life
15,467 wordsSpike is a dragon with mare troubles, and one of those mares just happens to be his mother. When he meets Lyra, who has troubles of her own, he hatches a plot that they think will be mutually beneficial.
Why I added it: I read it a long time ago and liked it.
Review
Set about five years after the present in the show, Spike, after many years, finally managed to go out with Rarity – but after going out with her for a while, it became clear to both of them that it was not going to work.
This would be bad enough. But then Spike’s siblings ratted him out to his mother, Twilight Velvet, who just had to come make sure he was okay and fuss over him (and encourage him to find another girlfriend).
Deciding to get out of the house to get away from her, Spike ends up sitting on a bench in the park where he is approached by Lyra, who apparently busks there playing her lyre. The two strike up a conversation, and despite Lyra’s abrasive personality, the two start to hang out a bit.
Spike decides to hatch a daring plan to get rid of his mom – pretend to be going out with Lyra. Lyra agrees – but only if Spike does her a favor in return and pretends to be her boyfriend to Bon Bon, her long-time friend who worries about her.
What could go wrong?
This seems like it might be a setup for comedy, but this piece, while it has its humorous moments, is actually mostly serious (though not deathly so). The story is mostly about a blossoming friendship between the pair, as well as the emotional wringer each of them is put through as they realize that the person that they’re deceiving is a real person who loves and cares for the other person and is trying to be friendly towards them. Rather than being a comedic look at faking a relationship, it is actually a slightly sad one, as the characters are left feeling unhappy about their deceptions – a feeling which transfers over to the audience. There’s some touching moments as we see characters opening up to each other, as well as a slightly troubling sense that there’s a hidden subtext to the whole thing which we don’t quite recognize until the reveal at the end.
This is an interesting story. Spike and Lyra are certainly a non-standard pair of characters to write a story about, but this story does some interesting things with the idea, while playing with some fandom ideas about what kind of person Lyra is at the same time. And while the story never really feels like it swings for the fences, always being somewhat subdued, the moments of humanity in the story do connect with the reader and make us care about the characters and their feelings.
Recommendation: Worth Reading.
So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish
by Blueshift
Slice of Life
6,379 wordsWhen Lyra finds her old pet fish in the back of the freezer, she sees an opportunity to recapture the glories of her youth.
Lyra and Flipper are back together after ten years. After all, a bit of ice never got in the way of true friendship.
Why I added it: Blueshift is a good writer.
Review
Lyra inherited her house from her parents when they died. She’s a lazy pony who sleeps all day, is generally pretty listless, and has no friends. She lets things get pretty gross around her, and her roommate, Bon Bon, her only real source of income, has to clean the house. Go through the sofa (which Lyra eats on, ugh!), clean out the fridge, and most importantly, defrost the freezer.
That’s when she finds Flipper.
And Lyra is happy! Finally, she is reunited with her one and only friend. Who definitely isn’t dead. He’s in… cryogenic suspension.
Oh, the fun they’ll have around town!
This is a funny story. Lyra is an amusingly childish and extremely eccentric thing, and her treatment of Flipper the obviously dead fish is quite amusing, as are all the things she does around town.
But this isn’t a comedy story – it’s a tragicomedy.
Lyra is a broken pony who can’t really deal with life, who spends all day sleeping, who never really grew up, whose house is a mess, and when Bon Bon finds Flipper, Lyra clings to the idea of Flipper being alive because her life is empty. She obviously understands the truth of the situation, but she doesn’t want to acknowledge it – and even as she finally gets out of her house with Flipper the frozen fish, if you think about the story from the point of view of the other characters in it, the whole thing is actually pretty sad to watch.
By the end of it, the story has largely flipped around, with the comedy largely replaced by the more human elements as other ponies reach out towards Lyra even as the ice begins to melt around poor Flipper.
Recommendation: Recommended.
Orange is the New Blue
by Estee
Comedy, Slice of LIfe
26,181 wordsIt might seem like a simple spell. A truly basic working. All it does is change the color of something without altering a single other detail, and somepony just pranked Twilight with it. A minor joke, one with no real consequence. But it's still new magic, and so Twilight and Spike venture out to track the spell and caster across Ponyville.
You'd think a spell which merely changed colors wouldn't create so much trouble.
You'd really like to think that.
Why I added it: Estee is a good writer.
Review
After a long night of experimentation, Twilight is awake. Well, sort of. No wake-up juice. No coffee. Just a regular old breakfast, complete with a nice glass of orange juice.
Except for one thing – the orange juice?
Is blue.
It seems there’s a prankster around Ponyville – a pony who can permanently change the colors of things.
Changing Twilight’s orange juice isn’t so bad.
But changing Rarity, and all of her stock, into horrible colors?
Well, that’s something else entirely.
And as Rarity, Twilight, and Spike go around Ponyville, they find a few other victims as well…
This is a story about tracking down some unicorn vandal who is apparently changing the colors of things in various places around town for some reason, and Twilight, Rarity, and Spike having to try and track them down and figure out who they are.
Unfortunately, this story suffers from two real flaws.
The first is that, while the central plot is the characters figuring out something of a mystery, and the story goes through the motions of the characters solving a mystery, we, the audience, are mostly just treated to a series of pretty samey scenes – someone has had their color/their product’s color changed, the group talks to them for a bit, and they move on to pursue the next bit. This happens once per chapter, and unfortunately not only becomes predictable, but after Rarity, none of them are nearly so interesting, not even when Zecora becomes a mascot for Fruit Stripe Gum, and unfortunately, they’re all fundamentally the same thing. And while a mystery might sound interesting, the story isn’t really a mystery story – there are no real clues we’re given, we’re just shown the deductions of the characters and what they say and do. We don’t have any ability to solve anything above and beyond what the characters do, or put things together first, so it isn’t really a mystery story.
And that’s okay, as it isn’t really trying to be one – but alas, the repetition of the scenes ends up rather wearing.
The second issue is that the villain of the piece, so to speak, is unfortunately pretty much just an entirely wretched individual. In a number of Estee’s stories, the villains are just complete reprobates with no redeeming features whatsoever, and unfortunately, here, we’re treated to much the same. While some people truly are awful, these characters are not terribly interesting to confront – they’re just rather remorseless things and it feels like, when the characters overcome them, it is more meant to be a way to win against bad people in real life than it is to actually do something interesting in a story. And unfortunately, while this may be cathartic for the author, it isn’t particularly interesting to read in a story – one-dimensional awful people are just not that interesting to read about or read about people confronting.
This is a 26,000 word story, and while I was interested in the start – the idea of Twilight tracking down someone who was using some sort of new magic was neat, and of course, who doesn’t love Rarity? – but in the end the repetition and rather disappointing villain made it hard for me to really love the story. While some of the ideas in the story about how a color changing spell might be useful were neat, in the end I was left feeling a bit disappointed that there wasn’t something more interesting in there.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
Time to Talk
by Jay-The-Brony
Slice of Life
1,345 wordsWhen Twilight realised that Spike didn't just have simple comic books hidden in his room, she knew it was only a matter of time before she'd have to have a word with him.
Now, that time has come.
Why I added it: I enjoy seeing various takes on The Talk.
Review
This story is extremely lightweight. Twilight finds a certain magazine in Spike’s room, tells him it is natural to be curious about such things but that he isn’t quite old enough for it, and asks him where he got it. And… that’s it.
This felt like the broadest strokes possible for a story like this, but it didn’t ultimately really go much of anywhere. It was just a scene, and while there’s nothing wrong with the scene per se, there’s just not that much substance to it – it never really goes beyond the most superficial level of things.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
Observatory Hill
by Skywriter
Adventure, Comedy, Slice of Life
11,138 wordsWhen Moonage Daydream, the loudest, most dazzling Pony Rock star in all Equestria, pays a visit to Ponyville, almost everyone is excited — except Twilight Sparkle, who just wants a quiet, dark place to do some stargazing. But when Princess Luna shows up and offers to help, will her solution be worse than the problem?
Yes. Yes, it will.
Why I added it: Skywriter is a good writer, and who doesn’t love reading about Twilight and Luna?
Review
Set after Luna Eclipsed in Season 2, this story is about Twilight going out to stargaze one evening, only to find her dark skies ruined by a nearby concert. Hearing Twilight calling out in vain, Princess Luna shows up and offers to grant Twilight a boon in order to make amends for all the terrible things she had done as Nightmare Moon.
While Twilight tries to demur, Luna insists, and leads Twilight out to an ancient observatory deep in the Everfree Forest, a place where the stars shine brighter and clearer than anywhere Twilight has ever seen. But Luna isn’t content with simply walking through the woods with Twilight as her boon…
This is a story about a burgeoning friendship between Luna and Twilight. Luna has no real idea how to relate to ordinary ponies anymore (even if Twilight is anything but ordinary), while Twilight is struggling to get Luna to understand that she doesn’t want some sort of great boon from her friend. The examination of Twilight and Luna’s friendship here is played through the events of the evening, which are rather more hazardous than stargazing is supposed to be, and also plays off of Luna’s extremely larger-than-life personality as seen back in season 2.
This story never really wowed me, but it was consistently decent. While it may have hewed a bit close to Luna Eclipsed at the start, with Fluttershy cowering in front of Luna, it goes off in a new direction and does its own thing, establishing an interesting relationship between Luna and Twilight as they both work to understand each other better, and Twilight puts the Magic of Friendship to good use.
This story accomplishes exactly what it set out to do, which is to show a growing friendship between two different and yet similar ponies. If you are interested in reading about Luna and Twilight, this is likely right up your alley.
Recommendation: Worth Reading
Summary
Lies and Lyres by King of Beggars
Worth Reading
So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish by Blueshift
Recommended
Orange Is The New Blue by Estee
Not Recommended
Time to Talk by Jay-The-Brony
Not Recommended
Observatory Hill by Skywriter
Worth Reading
Three days of productivity in a row? What is this madness?
Now, to get to work on finishing up A Thousand Bouquets so I can get it edited…
Number of stories still listed as Read It Sooner: 174
Number of stories still listed as Read It Later: 603
Number of stories listed as Read It Eventually: 2105
I love blueshift stories so damn much. That is his him at his best and is one of a hoofull of stories I desperately want to read to a small child before bedtime. A bit weird that he stopped so suddenly but at least we know he's still alive!
I don't know what to think of jay-the-brony. I keep clicking on his stories because they sound interesting but then they turn out to be exactly what's on the label, no more no less. He's a good writer, I just wish his short stories were proper short stories.
Inspiration?
In the name of saving TD some time:
There will be a new Rarity one-shot story up sometime during the next three days.
Not Recommended.
There. Now I can write it in peace.
He upvotes two of my stories today and the one he downvotes is the one he reviews.
4451967
Unfortunately, this is my general impression of his stuff as well. I will every once in a while click on something of his, but I've taken to mostly avoiding it because I seem to say the same thing every time I read one of his pieces.
I've only read a tiny number of Blueshift's stories; I've got a bunch more on my Read Later list, but I've liked what I've read of his so far.
It is kind of strange, too; I found one of his works extremely early on, and then marked a lot of his stuff as Read It Later in like, 2013... and I've only just gotten around to reading more stuff by him.
4451971
Spoilers, man! Spoilers!
4451967 I am still alive! And life got in the way D:
4452133
Ah yes, that accursed life stuff! I vote we band together and kill it!
Man, you cannot mention "Observatory Hill" and not link DeftFunk's reading, that is not okay.