"Sunset Reset" Review · 2:18am Dec 9th, 2017
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/291812/sunset-reset
I've been following this story ever since it began. Now it has ended. I'll spoiler-tag the direct spoilers but otherwise, spoiler free review incoming.
To summarize - when this story is good, it's unique and creative and engaging. And when it's bad, it's painful and boring and annoying.
The basic premise - At the climax of the Friendship Games, Sunset Shimmer decides that Equestrian magic is too dangerous to allow to run wild in the human world, and resolves to take it back to Equestria. While she does so, some sort of temporal magic interferes with the portal and Sunset blacks out. She awakens in Equestria as an alicorn, ten years ago when she was still Princess Celestia's student. What follows is a lot of high school drama, a love triangle, metric tons of angst, a lot of subplots, and ultimately the revelation of what has happened and what Sunset intends to do about it.
Let's start with the good - the love triangle is great. Cadance, Sunset, and Shining Armor's love for one another is developed well and explores how different kinds of love can exist and all be perfectly valid - Cadance is the perfect Princess of Love that ponies dream of marrying, while Sunset is a hot and sexy Princess ponies fantasize about boning, while Cadance and Sunset themselves form a strong friendship that develops into something more. All three parties remain sympathetic and interesting, particularly Shining Armor who is tossed between the two like a toy they each insist on the other playing with, but not actually taking into accout what he wants, and Shining has some understandable confidence issues when two hot royal goddesses start courting him. Cadance and Shiny have good arcs. Celestia gets a lot of depth to her, some good and some bad.
Sunset though... ugh. Sunset recycles the same loop of self-loathing and angst that it gets to the point other characters lampshade the motions she goes through. Sunset convinces herself she is evil and lustful and doesn't deserve love or friendship or prestige, and harshly rejects any suggestion she could be something more. It's as though Friendship Games-era Sunset talked about herself as though she was the same person from the first movie. And then we get to Legend of Everfree and Magical Movie Night and she's still talking that way. It gets tiring and annoying, as a character arc Sunset spends a lot of time spinning her wheels. And I know self-improvement is hard, and yeah Sunset has a lot of issues to work out. But the point of a work of fiction is that those issues are worked out. As is now, in the final chapter Cadance and Celestia's conversation with Sunset hits a lot of the exact same notes they've been hitting almost every chapter for a full half of the story.
This is where the real juice of the story is, the love triangle, Sunset's relationship with Celestia, and the drama they go through. It can get very repetitive but it maintains interest well.
The problem is the story beyond that is mostly just a high school drama. Are you a big fan of Fleur dis Lee, Sassy Saddles, Jet Set and Upper Crust, and Shining's nerd friends? If not, well, prepared to be bored. A lot of time is spent developing subplots concerning the character dynamics of this group and their various personalities and character arcs. But I'll be honest, I didn't care. A lot of it does just boil down to stock high school drama nonsense with ponies. There's a subplot with the pony version of Abacus Cinch that is resolved but contributes little to the overall story, same with a subplot concerning Buck Withers, Shining's bully.
It's particularly bad when juxtaposed with other subplots that are far more interesting and deserve far more attention. The escape of Queen Chrysalis from her volcano prison is a plot point, with Celestia wondering if Sunset's sudden character shift is a changeling impersonation. There's also a subplot where, if I recall correctly, Celestia is facing her looming mortality and has secretly been grooming Sunset to replace her. I'm sure you can understand my frustration with the high school drama stuff when subplots like these are also going on. It's a jarring shift when say, Sunset is at school dealing with cliques and popularity and bullies, then goes home to find herself on trial accused of being a changeling.
Discussion of late-story plot elements in the spoiler tags.
And then it turns out those two subplots go nowhere, for now. Chrysalis never appears, any potentail tie-in/set-up for A Canterlot Wedding is squandered, and Celestia never brings up her grooming of Sunset directly to her. The story's final chapter focuses almost entirely on the dance and the resolution of the love triangle, then finally Sunset's revelation of what has happened to twist time like this and her decision about to go back to the human world or stay in Equestria. Though I have to say I don't fully understand the time travel stuff. While I do appreciate the story took a unique approach to the idea of time travel, it wasn't described very well, even re-reading the explantions. It's also never made clear that I saw what caused the time travel stuff in the first place.
Also, a warning to younger readers - this story definitely earns its "T" rating. Frank discussions of sexuality between ponies crop up in increasing frequency as the love triangle heats up, and the finale explicitly states ponies are having sex even if it doesn't depict it directly.
A couple notes on the technical side. The author needs a pre-reader. This is not an illegible story, but there are enough typoes and formatting errors that you do notice them and they can distract. Myself and other readers used to point out these errors in the comments, but checking the old chapters where we did so, the author never bothered to correct them. I'm not sure why but it annoys and shows both a disrespect for reader feedback and a disregard for technical errors. The author also makes the questionable choice to treat "plot" as normal talk for the rump the same way we would use words like butt or ass. Given the term is a joke in the fandom it is very distracting to see it casually tossed around. I specifically recall commenting at one point that usage of it occasionally for humor could be effective, but the author obviously ignored that advice, too.
Then there's the meta love-triangle going on - the author has a passionate love affair with the terms "amber alicorn" and "pink princess" so hot and steamy it rivals anything the royal love triangle could give us. I ran a Ctrl-F on the finale - the term "amber alicorn" is used 51 times, and "pink princess" is used 38 times. From my recollections of other chapters, this is not an isolated incident.
Overall, this one is a bit rocky and slopping in places, but it did hold my interest through two years of updates. The core cast is likeable and their conflicts and growth entertain, and that kept me reading skimming through the high school drama stuff to get to those bits. This story is apparently one of a trilogy now, so I hope for the next story the author gets a pre-reader to help with their technical shortcomings and polishes up their creative ideas. If they do, we can get a story that shines like a rainbow.
It's nice to know the story is finished but I'm not sure if I'll ever bring myself to finish it. I enjoyed it starting out but as you said I started to get bored with a lot of the stuff that was happening, with Sunset herself being pretty frustrating despite the fact that this is supposed to be friendship games Sunset. I admit the love triangle stuff was fun though.
Then the chapters started to hit the 15k-30k range pretty regularly and at that point if the story isn't able to keep your interest it's unlikely you'll devote time to reading chapters that long.
I haven't finished the last few chapters yet, but I have definitely been a fan of this story. The high school drama and other interpersonal interactions I took as character development, and enjoyed them as they were. I personally don't mind extra sub-plots filling out word counts, but then I enjoy reading James Michener too.
Sad to see it end and happy at the same time. And to hear that there could be more makes me nothing but happy.
Good review!
A badly written and executed story with some good ideas, and some bad ones. At times, chapter after chapter take place with no development. Sunset is angsty. Sunset is planning to go, boo hoo. Sunset wants Shiny to be with Cadance who wants him to be with Sunset.
Subplots go from dramatic to extremely vapid as you mention (ranging from changeling attacks to tedious high school drama), and come out of nowhere to be dropped in an instant. Celestia acts like a maniac at times, murdering a changeling for no reason, and ambushing her daughter with charges and declaring her guilty until proven innocent (providing she does this in 5 minutes). Of course, the author didn't even address this, because that would be respectful of viewer feedback.
When the author actually bothers to have the characters develop instead of going around in circles for chapter after chapter, the interactions between Cadance / Shiny / Sunset are actually pretty good. And Sunset's an interesting character when she's not written as the emo teen who almost sounds like she wants to cut herself.
This story could be cut down to a fraction of its size if stuff actually happened. There is the potential for a good story in here, but it needs a far more competent author.
Also for reference, "amber alicorn" appears 736 times in the story. "pink princess" appears 518 times.
Oh boy, sounds like 400k words I don't ever have to read! :D
I think I agree on most complains but rate this to be in fact a bit above average, even if maybe for the story beeing a change of pace from the ussual grimdark I read.
But the small subplots like Cinch and Buck actually make sence for me. Cinch was put there solely to show character progression of Cadance - it was the first time we see her leaving her passive zone I think. And instead of trying to get a generic teacher the author took Cinch scince it wouldn't take as much efford to introduce her and waste time for an episodic subplot of something that eather way would rather quickly fade away, he gone for someone we already knew and didn't need to be constructed to be intresting.
And that's why there is so much high school friends introduced in the subplots. Characters from the show are simplistic enough to be easy to write alongside a place for deepness and no need for greater introductions scince the audience already has a picture to work of.
As for Buck, I think he was one of my fave characters to be honest because I liked to guess what his next move was. As a force of nature he was an unpredictable character that could come up with anything. And seeing like his father is now approached with an offer from NMM, I belive he could end as a fairly intresting puppet in her hooves...
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Except no. That's a cop out. This fic is set 10 years ago in the past, the characters are not the same as the adults we know. It's lazy on the author's part to treat them as such.
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It's still better than throwing someone entirely alien to be a background token without any meaning whatsoever. But he used them as the audience has a framework of personality, has fun seeing characters in their merry way to become themselves [or are they? - I like this speculation guessing game] and you constantly look at the story baking conspiracy theories abaut how does the timeline change for them as well as using them as timeline deviation indicators.