Random reviews 2 · 8:46pm Aug 13th, 2017
More! I adjusted my script to return completed fics that are between 2000-3000 words, which I feel should provide deeper material while still being short enough to read in a reasonable time. I also reduced the number down to 5 because 10 stories is a bit too much I think. Are you ready for round 2?
Princess Celestia and the Laser Pointer by SirNinji
Half Baked - Ideas And Curing The Blues by apple short
Where I Am by Shortstop
Reign of the Goddash by fishii10
Baby Steps, Spike... by Lioncub1234
Since someone asked, these are the ratings that I'm currently using:
• Awful: The fic has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and is not even worth reading.
• Poor: The fic is simply bad. I didn't really enjoy it and wouldn't recommend it.
• Tolerable: The fic isn't good, and I wouldn't recommend it, but I didn't dislike it.
• Okay: The fic is fine; I enjoyed reading it.
• Good: The fic is well-written and enjoyable, I liked it and would probably enjoy reading it again.
• Excellent: The fic made me squee. I'd put it in my favorites and recommend it to anyone.
Ready for reviews? Here are reviews.
The first selection turns out to actually be quite a well-known and highly-rated fic, so I might have lucked out here. I haven't read it myself, though, so let's dig in!
In this fic, Princess Celestia chases a laser pointer around, as a cat might. The story's short description says that's all that happens, but never trust a description. That's like... trusting a movie preview, or a tabloid newspaper. Descriptions are lies.
Actually it's more like Celestia's guards watch while their Princess does something weird, which I always love seeing. I like the idea that Celestia feels free to let her guard down when there's only guards around; after all, guards aren't there to judge her or ask questions, they're just there to guard. And as of "A Royal Problem", we've seen that this is actually more or less canon.
Anyway, Celestia has noticed a little glowing red dot, which she doesn't know what it is, but, like a cat, she knows she wants to get it. This results in a chase through the castle and the amount of mayhem that you might expect from an alicorn with no inhibition.
Fun fact: all fics with chase scenes are awesome. The story creates the impression that this kind of thing happens all the time in Canterlot Castle, which I can well believe.
Eventually the story comes to a head when Celestia apparently "kills" the laser dot, and Celestia never finds out what it was or where it came from. We the audience do get the reveal, however; it's Luna pranking her sister, of course. I wasn't going to spoil it at first, but then I figured it's a pretty obvious reveal.
This fic is cute, silly, and enjoyable, and a fun jaunt back to the innocent, carefree days of 2013, when Luna was just getting back into the swing of modern princessing. Recommended if you want a silly, fun one-shot.
Notable moments
• "Celestia swam to the bottom of the fountain, feeling the freezing cold water brush against her body as her mane glowed in the dark waters." - that is an awesome image!
Demerits
• One of the guards makes a menstruation joke. For shame. At least his fellow guard calls him out on it.
VERDICT: Good
[Adult story embed hidden]
This fic is a) mature, and b) has the red lightsaber of downvote doom. That's not going to stop me, though!
In this fic, a pony named Half Baked is attending the Apple Family Reunion, although you'd have to read the description to establish that, as the story doesn't bother with trivialities like establishing location. Half Baked is... well, I'm just going to guess that he's high, like the author must have been, because this fic isn't even trying to make sense. I mean, this is the second paragraph:
“fucking this is upsetting me violently at least a little bit.” He said with pissitidy to rival a griffon being teased with the promise of equalitude and then not getting a place to live on the map of Aquestria but forced back to its own land with a cruel and laughing aha from a maniacal and twisted leader of death. (Like Discord)
Yeah, the whole story is like that. This is a trollfic. But hey, to be fair, the story does have a plot, and Half Baked is technically the main character, when he's not sleeping parts of the story out.
Anyway, the premise, near as I can gather, is that Half Baked is extremely horny and needs to have sex. This is where the fic ties into the events of "Apple Family Reunion", since as you'll recall, Applejack was insistent on making it the best reunion ever. Therefore, she insists on having sex with Half Baked. That said, there's a certain grayness to Applejack's motives; it's implied that there may be a racial component to her liking for Half Baked, so it's difficult to ascertain whether she's being selfish or not.
Okay, enough of that. This fic is deliberately terrible and a waste of everyone's time. Next!
Notable words
• "awesomenicity": a portmanteau of "awesomeness" and "ethnicity", used to describe Applejack's penchant for blue-coated ponies.
Notable lines
• APPLEJACK: "And dude yall know that being my relative means we cant be making love much. It would be insects!" - this was the point where I realised this had to be a trollfic.
VERDICT: Awful
Aaaaaaaaaahhhhh. Back to sincere pony fiction. Feels good! And it's a Soarin fic! I don't think I've read many, if any, of those.
This fic opens with Soarin waking up from a strange dream in the early hours of the morning. Unable to get back to sleep, he starts reminiscing about his loving relationship with Rainbow Dash, now his wife. D'awwwww. I've got nothing against a bit of SoarinDash, especially when it's this cute.
The story's told entirely through just Soarin's recollections, with almost no dialogue... but it's done so well that I hardly even noticed that. It charts the progress of Soarin's relationship with Dash through their meetings in the show, and beyond, and the usual trials and tribulations of romance. Nothing particularly groundbreaking, but cute, and I enjoy the way that the story queues up its reveals and drops them in regularly enough that the story never loses momentum. The sleepy night-time setting provides a nice atmosphere for the reminiscing, too.
If you like SoarinDash, you'll like this, and if you just want an inoffensive one-shot romance, you might like it too.
Oddities
• Soarin's memory of Cadance and Shining Armor's wedding doesn't seem to include, y'know, the entire changeling invasion...
VERDICT: Okay
The author opens with "I'd just like to warn you that this is in no way at all a serious fic." Well, unluckily for them, I take everything very seriously. :serious_face_emoji:
According to the description, Rainbow Dash becomes a goddess in this fic. In the interests of fairness, I will attempt not to make any comparisons to the definitive "Rainbow Dash becomes a goddess" fic, (other than to say that you should definitely read that one because it's brilliant).
So in this fic, the main character (apparently an OC) invents a machine to turn Rainbow Dash into whatever she wants. Naturally, she of the whale-sized ego chooses a goddess. Unfortunately, it's not the reluctant, confused goddess of HapHazred's masterpiece (dammit, I said I wouldn't make any comparisons), but rather an angry, god-demands-worship-now kind of goddess. Whoops. Thus begins a race through Ponyville to collect up the Elements of Harmony, hoping that the Elements are (a) still where they think they are, and (b) actually usable if Rainbow Dash is temporarily indisposed. Fortunately, the answer is yes, and yes, because Trixie shows up at the last minute to help save the day.
This story has way more downvotes than upvotes, but honestly? It's not bad. The story is set up and resolved properly, and the plot is consistent throughout; even though random things are happening, I got the feeling that they are happening because this is a chaotic situation, rather than the author just piling nonsense into the story. Even when the author does just shove things without good reason (like Trixie's appearance, which the author admits is purely to score points with Equestria Daily), they don't feel like a complete ass-pull. The author knows how to turn a good phrase, so the writing is never boring either. It's a decently-written bit of nonsense. If I have any complaints, it's that I found the OC main character a bit confusing; sometimes he seems to be a pony, sometimes a human, and various references are made to things I'm not familiar with, even though this story doesn't appear to be a sequel or anything.
VERDICT: Okay
[Unpublished stories cannot be embedded]
Unlike everything else I've reviewed, this story has three chapters. All less than 1000 words. That's usually a bad sign, but let's dig in...
And it's written in present tense, too. Another bad sign. Anyway, the fic's a bit of slice of life that happens to explore Spike's crush on Rarity a bit, with Applejack and Rainbow Dash attempting to "help", although their efforts are somewhat counterproductive.
It's an amateur effort for sure; the grammar's poor, the tense is all wrong, the jokes don't really fly, the pacing's too fast, all the characters are rather too immature, there's no real exploration of the actual issue... but it feels sincere, at least, and there's even a moral in there (even if that moral is "don't go to Rainbow Dash for romantic advice because she's an idiot").
VERDICT: Tolerable
I wholeheartedly approve of this method of story selection.
And here I thought my joke would only work once.
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I said "usually"!
Yay, you made a second one of these
Truly, wisdom for the ages right there.
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I'll probably make more! I kind of like these random forays into ponyfic past.