Fanfiction Reading Update #172 · 10:33pm Oct 12th, 2017
Advisory: contains unmarked spoilers for Slouching Toward Canterlot. Her Soldiers, We, The Never-ending Sacrifice, and Rainbow Dash Discovers Erotic Mind Control.
Despite what my new All Hallows Eve Tweyelight avatar might suggest, I am in fact not dead. It's good to see Fimfiction hasn't changed much since the last reading update. Authors are still having emotional breakdowns and deleting all their stories, Knighty still knows how to botch a UI update (and continue to ensure nothing can visually identify the site with ponies), and I still struggle to write fanfic reviews which ensures the gap between blog posts grows ever longer.
Flurry Heart: Equestria's Great Monster updates and stumbles quite badly as all the mystery and potential plot points involved with AU!Cadance are immediately revealed over the course of several paragraphs. It leaves me wondering what plot the story really has left and whether it may soon get cut entirely. It really surprised me just how quickly a fic can go into a tailspin.
The Lunar Rebellion updates and, surprisingly, stumbles a bit with a character acting out of character with the seeming purpose of then killing him off. Then it updates several more times as the siege arc continues its somewhat glacial pacing. Then it updates several more times with the aforementioned killing off being undone. Then it updates again with a pretty weak payoff to the climatic fight between Shadow and NMM.
As the very, very few of you who read my most recent fic—a 96k long tale of bizarre fetishes, overly long fight scenes, and disappointing endings—can tell, I have a thing (literally) for bat ponies. They remain one of the very few fanon segments canon has barely laid a finger on. It wasn't until the S5 finale female batponies were even confirmed for existing—and even then, it was in an alternate timeline. With the great Griffon Empire, the mysteries of Twilight becoming an alicorn, and Dash becoming a Wonderbolt now all relegated by canon, it's darn near the last vestige fanfics still have all to themselves.
That's why I'm still surprised they haven't expanded into a larger group of fanfics as canon decimates the other genres. Sure, you'll see some clop, a few mango comedy fics, and them playing support roles (usually by joining the Royal Guard as victims of the bad guy), but a bat pony-centric adventure fic is nearly unheard of, let alone mysteries or horror. Perhaps that's due to their fandom status, as the de facto “edgy” OC species (even though a check of Derpibooru puts the vast majority of bat pony OCs in the clop category) or their fanon stereotyping (fangs, vampirism, etc.).
Regardless, a longer bat pony fic will always pique my interest and that's where Her Soldiers, We enters the picture, with its promise of Night Guards and Nightmare Moon and diving into the drama of a bat pony species that doesn't really want what its princess does, despite centuries of culture hyping said princess up.
Usually, it's at this point I give a recap of the fic, but if you've watched the first two episodes of the show, you'll already know the story's plot. “Episode rehashes” are almost always crap. They rarely give anything fresh as they're simply redoing something the reader's already seen, they're usually boring as a direct result, and in the worst of them, they merely exist to serve as a soapbox for the author.
Unfortunately, Her Soldiers, We fails to escape from the first two issues and demonstrates quite well the even bigger danger of strictly looking at canon. There's a lot of really cool plot points the synopsis hints at. The tragedy of the bat ponies, their desire to improve, the challenges Nightmare Moon's return will bring—but it's all left by the wayside due to one glaring issue: the lack of an AU tag.
One quickly realizes as the story goes along that it's merely following along with the plot of the show. There's no question as to whether Captain Nebula is really many times more dense than her name suggests and NMM won't change and instead usher in eternal night. There's no tension or dread as they watch NMM attempt to murder Twilight and her friends. There's no intrigue over what might happen next. There's just a resignation halfway in that you've watched this story before and know how it ends.
I will confess part of my criticism and disappointment lies with my expectations going in. Over the years, I've developed the habit of anticipating a fic's story right from the synopsis. I build up the plot—the hype, if you will—in my head before I've even finished the synopsis. Most of the time what I think the story's going to be like and what it is like match up pretty well and things carry through.
But sometimes they don't. And almost always that leads to some disappointment. Celestial Code wasn't a Tyrantlestia mystery fic. Feedback was all about the time travel paradoxes rather than the death of Twilight. Immortal Game wrapped up it's evil!Twilight arc a third of the way in. And Her Soldiers, We isn't so much the Night Guard struggling with Luna's return from banishment, as it is retelling the pilot.
I had gone in expecting a fic about the Night Guard dealing with Luna—maybe even an AU where the Elements fail and they struggle to show Luna ponies really do care about her. Instead, it's all about two bat po—er, vesperquines—bumbling through the pilot with NMM. And that leads into the second, albeit more minor criticism: the tonal shifts.
As an example, NMM creates an intricate spell—cast into the Everfree trees—that will cause the M6 to descend into madness as their very minds are slowly consumed in a hellish nightmare they will only be able to plead for eternity to escape from. It rattles the bat ponies to the core as they doubt whether NMM can truly be turned to good, given what she's about to do. Here's how Twilight and company confront this terrifying ordeal:
This, and most of NMM's other attempts at killing/maiming the M6, gives the story an unintentional comedy feel. Some horrifying plan that would fit snuggly in a grimdark fic, and it's defeated by some silly and non-serious solution. It's almost like NMM thought she was in some grimdark “NMM wins” AU story just as I had, but then found herself trapped in canon.
And it's not limited to just conflict with canon. Backstory reveals Celestia was horribly wounded by using the Elements to banish Luna—her skin constantly bled for decades, staining her fur. She babbled incoherently like she was Charles II, forcing a sort of regency for a century. Sounds pretty serious... until you realize what the stained fur and silly phrases are referencing.
It makes for a story that seems to struggle with itself. Is it a lighthearted perspective shift? Or following its synopsis and a tale of bat ponies struggling to reform their insane and power hungry princess? Canon forcing the interesting premise down a very restricting path certainly doesn't help the tone or plot of the story, either.
Ultimately, like can happen so often with fanfic, the premise of bat ponies trying to free their princess from her madness is let down by the execution and strict adherence to canon. Canon is a fantastic thing for fanfics. It gives writers the base template to use when developing a plot and characters. It provides readers with a safe backstory/foundation they can use to extrapolate things when reading fanfics (and measure how well the fanfic writers are doing). But if you only use canon, it can severely limit and cripple your plot, leading to a reader wishing for a fic all about the bat ponies real struggles to break through to their insane princess.
Her Soldiers, We receives...
...moustaches out of five and, as a result, is neither upvoted nor downvoted.
Clop isn't a genre that I read that often. That's partly due to the PWP problem—most clop has a cardboard thin plot that's only there to fill space in between sex scenes and partly due to description issues—no clopfic writers have had sex with unicorns, pegasi, or hopefully regular ponies nor have a great many likely had sex period, so provided proper, and arousing, narration of sex scenes can be quite challenging without it sounding wooden and uninspired.
But perhaps the biggest problem is my fetish, which has already been alluded to in the second sentence of that first paragraph. It's one that's so niche, it doesn't have a group or even a subfolder in the main fetish group. It's one that I spent a year writing that 98,000 word fic I mentioned in the previous review. It's flattening and over the years, I've become so used to the fetish that it has made arousal quite challenging for other content. Thus, regular clop—whether plain, or with bondage, or vore, or whatever—just doesn't give me much in the way of south of the border.
So there's very, very few clopfics I've read. Most of which one could easily argue aren't actually clopfics since there's no sex going on in them. Still, while flattening may be the big one for me, that doesn't mean there aren't some “tertiary” fetishes that occasionally go along with it. These are almost always used in service of the main fetish—to provide context, a scenario to build off of, etc. But they still count as fetishes and can still prove to be stimulating to a degree.
As a result, and thanks to a desire to develop some Twidash “scenarios” to build, I dove into the realm of hypnosis fics. As with any fetish, there's always going to be various subcategories. For hypnosis, this usually involves the “level” of mindfuckery that's employed. The more aggressively domination-oriented will have a total mind wipe, where the character's turned into a vegetable for another to do with as they please.
The idea of fucking a botanical fruit that's culinarily used in savory dishes doesn't sound that appealing to me, so I tried to avoid those fics. I discovered that the type of hypnosis I was looking for—where the character is influenced on a subconscious level to perform actions they'd otherwise be resistant to and tries to rationalize it—was very hard to locate.
Eventually after sifted through some bizarre ones where Twilight turns into a giant lamia, I found Rainbow Dash Discovers Erotic Mind Control. It seemed to fit what I needed, so I dove in. A little concerning was its length—77,000 words. This meant: there was more plot than clop, there were quite a few variations on hypnosis, or there would be the same clop repeatedly. Sadly, it's the later one that came to dominate the story.
Things started out really good, though. There was good interplay between Twilight and Dash, both the clop and non-clop portions were fine, and there was this “slow burn” kind of feeling as the hypnosis started out small, but as the chapters ticked one, grew increasingly bigger in intensity. But, much to my surprise, the thing that grabbed my attention wasn't Dash or the clop: it was Twilight.
I've always been a sucker for evil!Twilight ever since I read The Severing--the first fanfic ever posted to EQD. It's always a great mirrorverse kind of premise and for a while there early on, it and “Twilight becomes an alicorn” were my go to genres. Those Twidash “scenarios” I mentioned also had to have her be far more aggressive toward Dash than she'd normally be, so a slide down the classic evil!Twilight dark magic slippery slope was a delightful addition.
As the hypnosis ramps up and the chapters go by—with Dash egging Twilight on the whole way—I started to ponder the lack of a dark tag or any kind of content warning involving it. Funnily enough, out of all the evil!Twilight fics I've read over the years, a hypnosis clopfic is the one that nails the slippery slope slide the best. It's such a gradual thing at first, just like Twilight, you don't question it. By the time the boulder's racing down the hill, she's too deep to pull out.
Except she's not. And it's here, at what I'd argue is the real climax of the story, that things actually start to go downhill. For when Twilight reaches the bottom of the slope and fully mind controls Dash with the intention of making her her “bodyguard” for the foreseeable, if not permanent, future, she hits a trampoline and goes right back to the top of the slope.
She realizes the error of her ways, fixes Dash's head, and Dash forgives her incredibly quickly for someone nearly made an athletic, obedient sex slavebodyguard. It took the “redemption” arc of the evil!Twilight story and compressed it into half a chapter. And from there things only deteriorate further.
I said I'd argue this is the real climax of the story—it's where things get their fetishiest, where the most conflict and suspense occur, and where the characters are most tested—but it happens seven chapters into the story. The story's seventeen chapters long. The entire rest of the story can be summarized as “Twilight and Dash engage in BDSM shenanigans.” There's latex outfits, ball gags, going to a weird slightly creepy sex convention.
But there's very little mind control and evil!Twilight is no where to be found. The hypnosis/mind control used feels far more like standard roleplaying two people who do domination/submission would do than it does actually hypnotizing or mind controlling a person. And that's what it really feels like for those ten chapters: BDSM roleplaying.
I suppose that might be the issue with hypnosis. It's either a full vegetable, or it's such a minor thing you wonder whether it's really hypnosis at all. It's unfortunate my search for the kind of hypnosis I'm after ended in a failure, but them's the breaks. Niche fetishes aren't known for their wide selection. I, especially, should know given what my main fetish is.
It's somewhat difficult to judge and rate Rainbow Dash Discovers Erotic Mind Control. Its whole purpose is to arouse those with the fetishes it caters to. Yet the type of hypnosis it employed did very little for me. Ultimately, those “scenarios” I mentioned were developed all on their own. Only Twilight turning Dash into her bodyguard was lifted from the story. The plot itself starts really strong with the evil!Twilight stuff, but it's ultimately swapped out for fairly generic and, for me, somewhat boring BDSM things.
Still, it feels a little unfair to be negative about it. Clopfics are perhaps some of the most subjective fanfics out there. Only those with the exact fetishes, and exact subcategories of those fetishes that the story is tailored for are really going to enjoy it. As experience has taught me, a fetish story is a very difficult beast to tangle with and seldom will the plot be able to overcome the awkward, highly detailed fetish scenes the story's based around. Few who lack those fetishes will come away praising a fetish clopfic. It's just the nature of the beast.
But I'm not about to end it without a rating. The story just didn't fulfill things for me. The hypnosis built up to Twilight's big evil act, only to then deflate into seemingly standard BDSM shenanigans, never again to really reach that climax it had so neared near the beginning. The romance angle felt just as any plot element does in a clopfic—a nice addition, but something that's dragged down as the clop scenes and plot scenes eternally fight each other for control over the story. While I'm sure the story aided quite a few in their “scenarios,” it just didn't for me.
Rainbow Dash Discovers Erotic Mind Control receives...
...moustaches out of five and, as a result, is neither upvoted nor upvoted.
If there's one genre I love more than any other it would be Alternate Universe. The show's setting is great, but it can be awfully limiting—especially after seven seasons and a movie right around the corner ready to blow the lid off the rest of the world. AUs are where authors can really spread their wings and mold an entire setting all their own, usually with a great plot to go along with it.
But Slouching Towards Canterlot isn't technically an AU. It falls into the far flung future genre that fics like Transistance have made their home—full of sci fi, FTL, and robots. Sure it isn't technically an AU, but for all intents and purposes, it is. Detailed worldbuilding still has to happen, OCs need to be developed or canon characters explained, and the plot still has to be enticing.
The plot's one you might have heard before. A police officer trained to detect almost perfectly imitating synthetic life through determining the empathy of the suspect must stop one of these lifeforms from wrecking havoc in a major city controlled by a mega corporation. It's disappointing that it feels more like a Blade Runner fic than an MLP one, but that's not the big issue it has.
Slouching drew me in with its synopsis and promise of crime drama and sci fi but there was one glaring problem I noticed right away—the story's word count. Worldbuilding almost has to be a slow thing, like a dripping faucet. The author can't dump everything onto the reader at once—that's dull, uncreative, and most of all, a waste. The world must gradually be pieced together as the story progresses, the plot is fulfilled, and the characters interact with others and their environment.
Fics that do worldbuilding are always large as a result. A SoL oneshot in a total AU setting is going to eat 5k at minimum. A story about a police officer tracking down a replicantspiro who's “evil” plan is to ascend and become Celestia? That could top 50k no problem. Blade Runner clocked in at just shy of two hours. Now imagine it being told in 22 minutes.
That's the fatal flaw that Slouching has. At 6,000 words, it takes you on a Formula One race through the plot and setting. There's very little description, so the futuristic Las Pegasus is a white void with a few buildings. There's only enough words to flesh out the protag, and that's only done thanks to building on the “gruff noir cop” persona, leaving the three other main characters a virtual mystery.
But worst of all. I have no fucking idea what happened at the end. Remember the “becoming Celestia” plan? I have no idea why that's a bad thing. I have no idea why a synthetic lifeform wants to become Celestia in the first place. I have no idea why said lifeform was kidnapping foals to begin with. I didn't even know Celestia was dead and there was eternal night because the story never mentioned the time of day or even described it as being dark outside.
It felt like an 80,000 word story had been condensed into a oneshot, with all the deep worldbuilding, all the intrigue over what happened to Celestia and Luna, all the moral debate stripped out for the bare plot and little else. Blade Runner meets futuristic MLP with a dash of NMM wins sounds like a really interesting and potentially grand plot. Just not for a oneshot-length story.
Slouching Towards Canterlot receives...
…moustaches out of five and is neither upvoted nor downvoted.
I've read many fanfics in my day but few novels. That's partly because fanfics are free and usually quite interesting, but it's also because of convenience—my library's fifteen miles away and requires a twenty minute drive to get to. Why do that when you can just fire up Firefox and have millions of words at your fingertips?
It's small size also severely limits the books available. Sure, I could do that library lending thing, but that only adds even more work to the twenty minute drive. As a result, in the last decade, the only books I've read have been text books and Fade In, a book by Micheal Pillar detailing the writing of Star Trek Insurrection's script (it's a really interesting book I'd recommend, and it's free).
But, with a camping trip looming, I decided to make the trek and grab some books to keep me occupied once my laptop's battery eventually dies. As expected, it didn't have the ones I wanted (On Basilisk Station and A Stitch in Time), but it did have a different Star Trek novel, The Never-Ending Sacrifice.
I only wanted A Stitch in Time because it was written by Andrew Robinson, the actor who played Garak. An in-character autobiography written by the guy who actually played the character? That's probably going to be good. A random EU novel? Not so much.
I've always shied away from sci-fi expanded universes because they're always crazy and bizarre. DS9's EU, for example, has an evil, mirror wormhole and Weyoun becoming the Emissary. Those who know DS9 will understand the absurdity of both. For those who don't... you honestly might want to skip to the next review, because it's going to be pretty hard understanding what happens without knowing about DS9.
The rest of the Star Trek EU has similar bizarre things happening and it's not just Star Trek. Star Wars' EU is littered with Death Stars and lost doomsday weapons hidden in nebulae—not to mention the Palpatine clones (no wonder Disney decided to chuck it all in the trash). It all creates a sense that they're, well, fanfiction. Absurd, crazy plots that would never happen in the source material they're based on. Most of the time, the suspension of disbelief just can't cope with it.
So I went in expecting some absurdity, but was quite pleasantly surprised by what I found. The novel tells the story of Rugal. Even those familiar with DS9 will probably not know who he is, partly because it was a season 2 episode he was in and partly because the episode in question—Cardassians—was all about Garak and Bashir. Rugal's role lasted about ten minutes.
As a refresher, in the episode, Rugal is a cardassian orphan left behind by Cardassia when they left Bajor. His arrival on Deep Space Nine—and biting Garak—causes an interplanetary curfluffal, especially once it's revealed he's the son of Kotan, a prominent politician. It's eventually revealed to all be a gambit by Dukat, DS9's primary antagonist, to take down the politician, for family is everything on Cardassia. After that, neither Kotan nor Rugal are mentioned or seen again on the show.
The novel picks up where the episode left off. Rugal is in a strange, foreign world. A world populated by the very people who brought misery and Holocaust allegories to his adopted home. His grandmother hates him, his father is awkward and struggles to connect to his lost son, and he has a tough time in the propoganda-laced academy he's in.
The world of Cardassia is one very much unseen in the show, save a single matte painting and viewscreen shown again and again. As Rugal slowly discovers over the first third of the book, life there is a world of contradictions. Family's most important, unless it gets in the way of political or military standing. The Cardassian Empire's strong and never wrong, but it's a fragile house of cards propped up by the military and thank god they pulled out of that clusterfuck called Bajor.
All the while, the Obsidian Order makes doublespeak and paranoia the norm. And in the midst of the fear and imperialism, Rugal's father, still a high ranking politician, meets with and discusses dissidents like Legate Ghemor and Natima Lang—characters who had their own oneshot episodes of DS9—in the countryside. It all gives a sense of cohesion and continuity to things. It's all happening in the very same universe as the show is.
The world of Cardassia and its politics is excellently built up throughout the first half of the novel, to the point where I was far more interested in Kotan's escapades and issues than I really was with Rugal's. That's not to say Rugal's story was boring or bad, just that I was more absorbed in what was happening in the background.
In the foreground, Rugal becomes more and more bitter. His dream of returning to Bajor and living with his adopted family dies a slow, agonizing death. First when his adopted parents die, then when his father is suspected of treason by the Order and placed under close supervision. Even Rugal meeting a friendly and hotheaded Cardassian girl named Penelya who he eventually falls in love with doesn't help lift his spirits.
He eventually falls into a group of radical college students helping the poor and downtrodden, right as the Obisidan Order gets wiped out by the Dominion and Kotan and the dissident movement are finally able to take control and fulfill their dream of moving Cardassia into democracy and peace. But their dream for a better and freer Cardassia are going to die just as bad a death as Rugal's did.
The Klingon invasion metaphorically destroys Cardassia and, desperate for a reprieve, the dissident government reverts to old totalitarian ways in a way to save things. Rugal barely escapes the ensuing riots and his father eventually resigns from the government in protest. In the midst of it all, Rugal's grandmother, who put the “bitch” in “a massive fucking bitch,” dies and Penelya leaves Rugal to attend to her family's (who's most important, remember) business on a far-off colony world.
The Dominion takeover of Cardassia shortly thereafter causes things to swerve and, sadly, not for the better. The Cardassian worldbuilding, politics, and intrigue that made the first half of the novel so absorbing is abandoned in favor of a standard war setting on an ice planet. The standard motions are gone through—war's crap, everyone's cynical, etc. and it all feels like a big loss.
Most of the characters we've gotten to know throughout the novel are gone—and will never reappear. Cardassia itself isn't seen again until the very last chapter. And Rugal feels ever so slightly out of character. Gone is the bitter teen who hates his people and homeland. He's just another loyal Cardassian soldier fighting the Romulans. Sure, the Dominion War had to happen since this is tightly following DS9's story, but it still feels like it could have been better.
The novel lifts out of its sagging second third as the Dominion impodes and the Female Changeling gives the order to kill all Cardassians. It's a single, nearly forgettable line of dialogue in DS9's series finale but it's shown in chilling detail in the novel as Rugal has to desperately fight his way out of the Dominion base. He's the only one that makes it off the planet.
Things then take a shift for the comfy as he eventually makes his way to the planet Penelya moved to. She's not at the farm she settled at. There's signs of a fight but no sign of a Cardassian. At this point, an unsettling feeling fell on me. Vaporization was a thing in Star Trek. What if he was breathing her in? Worse, he'd never find the body as there was no body.
He lives there for several months as other Cardassian survivors trickle in. Turns out, the Dominion wasn't the only one to commit a genocide. Federation colonists, returning to the planet or escaping from their concentration camps, did a solid job cleaning up what the Jem'Hadar left, as a the burned down warehouse full of corpses on the edge of town can attest to. Friction with the colonists soon increases as Rugal takes in a human orphan girl—one who he eventually adopts as his daughter.
As things come to their conclusion, he leaves the planet and gains Federation citizenship. Eventually, he returns to the husk of Cardassia Prime. Kotan's house is nothing but a crater and he's assumed dead. In the midst of it all, though, a certain Cardassian girl is waiting for him in the rubble of the place where they first met.
The Never-Ending Sacrifice was a delightful experience to read. It absorbed me to the point I read the whole thing in a single day. The worldbuilding of Cardassia in the first half is what really made it. The Dominion portion of the novel feels like it could have been done better, perhaps by leaving things on Cardassia and showing the slow descent that happens under Dominion rule, as opposed to a fairly bland and distant war setting.
Things do improve in the final chapters as Rugal searches for Penelya and there's a real sense as things go on that he'll never find her and get the resolution he seeks. The fact things hadn't gone well for him up to that point certainly adds to the tension and apprehension that develops as you close in on the final few paragraphs.
Overall, The Never-Ending Sacrifice far exceeded my expectations. Instead of unrealistic characters or plots, there was a tight focus on worldbuilding and sticking with DS9's story. Instead of my disbelief killing the suspense for me, it drew me in and absorbed me into the story. Unlike what I had feared, there was no absurdity. No crazy plots. No super protagonists. Just a single character who has to live through the events of DS9, in all their twists and turns, and try to make something of it.
The Never-Ending Sacrific receives...
…moustaches out of five and would be upvoted and favorited, but it's a novel and not a fanfiction.
Oh my, just look at the Possible Trackings!
To Save Twilight Sparkle is cut after three chapters due to what is probably the most common issue fanfics have—heavy pacing problems. Instead of slowly building up Twilight's unusual behavior for several chapters to let things percolate, instead of the issues building up and dread and concern growing, instead of spending ten or twenty thousand words doing this—it's all sped through in just three and a half thousand.
Thanks to this review, More About Time is cut without a single chapter being read. If I wanted a “fuck up the timeline, then try to fix it” plot, but not have the bad ending, I'd rewatch Stein's;Gate
Survive the Everfree is cut after two chapters due to a combination of some wooden and awkward dialogue, and primarily due to a severe lack of narrative descriptions—resulting in the dreaded white void syndrome—to enhance the atmosphere of a scared filly in the Everfree Forest.
Ha! I was only pretending to be oneshots.
The Longevity Theory opts for a diary entry style story to tell it's dark necromancy tale. The characterization's a little puzzling—I don't know about you, but when my aunt—who was like the grandmother I never had—died, I didn't want to become immortal and raise an undead army in the process. It accelerates a bit too quickly and has a pretty standard “foreboding” ending that most of the dark oneshots that don't opt for the gutpunch shoot for, but it's still good.
Pranks-a-Lot at least partially participates in the episode deconstruction I knew was coming after MMDW 2the zombie episode. It's ruined somewhat by the way it beats it's fix fic point over your head at the end like a mobster with a tire iron and the fact it is blatantly mistagged for clickbaity purposes.
Page Two scratches the dark oneshot itch rather nicely while not having too much of a gutpunch ending. It is hurt a little by canon directly contradicting said gutpunch, but it's still good.
Celestia vs Garble is a pretty standard comedy oneshot, and though it's premise is a tad old, it still delivers like most comedy oneshots do.
The USS Twiluna has been the flagship of my fleet for years, but I must admit the ship's gotten a little old and outdated as time has gone by and a new one threatens its hegemony. A Little Bit of Nothing is a pretty typical fluffy romance oneshot fic—nested right in the Once Bitten, Twice Shy style that I enjoy—and it provides a fitting tribute to the USS Flutterdash.
“Who Wants to Live Forever?” may be the go-to for Twilicorn dark oneshots, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy the classics and Best Friends Forever, while being a little old, still manages to blend the tropes well—even mixing things up a little with the Magic Duel reference/plot point.
Solar Tyrant tells the origin of the current Tyrantlestia interpretation that holds dominance—an AU where she kills Luna—only, it feels somewhat basic and lacking. It lacks the characteristic grimdark gutpunch so often associated with dark oneshots and gives a rather plain, straightforward accounting of Celestia's reaction to killing her sister, rather than, say, Celestia recounting it during some political execution years later, perhaps with the gutpunch being the one getting executing is Twilight.
Despite the reassurances of the Slice of Life tag, Morsel of Truth created a truly dreadful (and well written) atmosphere as it built toward it's conclusion. It's testament to the spoopy nature of the story and the fine line oneshots can walk that the addition of a single sentence near the end, “Then Pinkie ate the candy.” would require the addition of a dark and/or horror tag. It's also testament to the fact that atmosphere reigns supreme. This was much more horrifying—with none of those tags needed--than any one of the dozens of grimdark endings some dark oneshots opt for. It's also favorited for it's trouble.
Blink adapts the “make a copy and destroy the original” theory of teleportation, only throws in some more grimdark stuff like enough corpses to make the Imperium of Man blush and crushing insanity to make it... more grimdark and a little more confusing. Where did the giant fishbowl come from? How is there not an infinite loop of giant fishbowls full of corpses from the constant teleporting? Since the whole idea of destroying the original is based on the premise that the information is copied and deleted, doesn't the original surviving just undermine everything? The basic concept's a cool idea, but it feels ruined by the unnecessary grimdark additions that just feel like they're there to make the story more grimdark rather than to actually enhance it.
Something something Deadfics
Just as quickly (okay, maybe that's an exaggeration) as it was added, Through a Glass, Darkly is shifted back into Tracking when the author realized him jumping off the ride was just a dream and he's actually still trapped on it like the rest of us.
Loyal's apparent suicide means that Archmage: Square One is placed in the deadfic category. RIP, and sadly that's meant quite literally.
And that's all I read for the day quarter year.
# of story updates remaining: 615.
# of “Read Later” stories remaining: 1,195.
I do miss seeing these blogs from you, they're so incredibly helpful. :)
Ayyyy, you're still around!
Your avatar was always frightening, what with the big eye and all, but man. Now it's on a whole 'nother level.
Nice.
Page Two is not intended to contradict canon, much less directly. It's a historical look at the first confrontation with Tirek and the lengths Celestia was willing to (temporarily) go to in order to safeguard her magic.
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The contradiction is from the fact that characters' cutie marks aren't on the skin, only the fur (see: Ponyville Confidential). Since that's the big reveal at the end of the story and canon shows that can't happen, it loses some of the "gutpunch" impact.
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This is true, but it isn't clear that shaving the fur would necessarily remove the magic of the mark. Snips and Snails didn't appear to lose any mojo when they lost the fur on their haunches.