Present Perfect vs. Boast Busted · 1:08pm May 19th, 2018
I've looked into a lot of fanfic and art 'verses over the years, but a very well-known 'verse has long evaded me. I speak, of course, of RainbowDoubleDash's vaunted Lunaverse. Which means, yes indeedy, it's time to crack that nut by checking out the very first story, Boast Busted! Let's see what this AU has to offer, shall we?
So, here's the breakdown as I understand it: A thousand years ago, "Corona" was defeated by Princess Luna and banished to the sun. More recently, Luna took one Trixie Lulamoon as her student, ultimately sending her to Ponyville to learn to control her ego (which was making it hard for her to make friends). There, she met five familiar ponies, found the Elements of Harmony, and defeated Corona, though apparently she's still on the loose? I dunno, that last bit comes out in the final chapter, which was obviously added on after the story had been written, and the rest will no doubt be gone over in detail once I get to Longest Night, Longest Day. (Which will happen sooner than you might think, Goombasa is working on a reading of it! :D)
Anyway, our new mane cast are Trixie as the Element of Magic, Derpy (Ditzy Doo) as Kindness, Raindrops (of all ponies) as Honesty, Lyra as Loyalty, Cheerilee as Laughter and I guess that makes Carrot Top Generosity? But yes, the Lunaverse is a big "what if" AU where characters are switched around in the setting of Equestria. And Boast Busted is a pretty darn good introduction to it.
What makes this 'verse work, I'd say, is that the characters' personalities start, at the very least, from the same place they do in the show. (Where they have them.) Trixie is still an egotistical showoff, but she's got the support of friends and a Princess who make her want to better herself. Twilight is in classic "Rainboom never happened" Moondancer mode, but she's not a complete shut-in; she's just more driven to learn everything about magic that she can. And though by the end, it becomes your standard more-serious take on Equestria, the first chapter at least is perfectly show-like. I can see why people enjoy this AU.
Let's talk about the other characters quickly, since pretty much no one but Trixie, Twilight and Luna have canon personalities. Derpy feels like a fairly standard Derpy, kind and well-meaning, crosseyed but otherwise lacking in early-fandom mental illness tropes. There is, I believe, some lip-service given to her destructive habits, a la Last Roundup, and she has Dinky, which is great. Carrot Top is likewise Carrot Top, with bonus antagonism with the Apples. Lyra doesn't have much of a presence, but I was amused by the noodle incident mentioned between her and Trixie. Cheerilee doesn't show up at all.
And then there's Raindrops. She goes beyond "background pony", never having really been a fandom favorite, and honestly, I'm not sure who else could have been used. (Wait, what am I saying, they could have used Bon-Bon, where is she D:) It just goes to show how few characters a writer looking to do something like this had to choose from back in season 1. Out of all the main characters, Raindrops is the one I liked least. She doesn't have a terribly strong personality, or rather she vacillates between reasonable, if kind of lazy, and extremely belligerent. I wasn't sold on "she is part of this circle of friends" the way I could believe some of the others. I'll probably have to read more stories to get a better picture of her.
Then there are the canon characters. One thing that might put new readers off of this 'verse is that it seems to have inverted the background/main character dynamic so that our Elements of Harmony are the antagonists here. Applejack, for instance, seems to have done something reproachable in the past, and the Apple family is shown to have an economic stranglehold on Ponyville's produce production. Rainbow Dash is mentioned early on, as Raindrops gripes about how she's the weather manager even though she's lazy. And of course, Twilight Sparkle is our main antagonist in this outing.
However, the way Twilight is handled is, I think, a highlight of this piece. As I've mentioned, her personality feels spot-on for Twilight-with-a-different-upbringing. She's still graduated top of her class from Luna's School, but though she travels Equestria with a wagon full of books, she hasn't been completely swapped with Trixie, is what I'm getting at. And even better, though she ends up being the one who brings the Ursa to Ponyville, the story makes a strong point that she isn't the only one at fault; Trixie shares the blame for riling her up. Not to mention Trixie and friends only distract the Ursa while Twilight powers up a teleport spell to get rid of it, fixing the crisis she herself started. And a scene where Trixie ends up in Twilight's wagon alone is, I think, the most important, as it shows Trixie having sympathy for Twilight. This story is not content to turn Twilight into an evil pony, and that was a very, very good decision.
(On that note, I can only hope the same is done for others. Being upset at Rainbow Dash is one thing, but Applejack is out and out vilified. I can see Rarity rubbing some ponies the wrong way, though. I can also see Fluttershy just never appearing in any of these stories, which would be hilarious. But what about Pinkie? She's gotta be there, the Rainboom happened in RDD's interpretation of events. [Which I applaud them for, that is wholly original for an AU.] But I mean, I've read stories where she and Bon-Bon clash because of their professions. Obviously, an opportunity has been missed.)
(And on that note, my mind was blown when I realized Spike just does not exist. I suppose it's possible he's hanging out in Canterlot with Luna or something, but Twilight doesn't have him, and neither does Trixie. She just sends not-friendship-reports to Luna via plain ol' magic.)
As for the plot, it follows the main beats of Boast Busters — magic show, Ursa, two unicorns clash, one gets her comeuppance — while still being its own thing. We get a scene from Twilight's POV, for one, showing where she came up with the crazy idea to find the Ursa in the first place. Her motivation, by the way, is that she looks up to the Element of Magic, then is super-disappointed to find out she's a stage magician, because what is magic if not spell casting? I thought it was a cool touch.
I suppose I can get into the writing here. Overall, it was good, but if there's any downside to this (besides perhaps Raindrops), the writing would be it. This story feels old, though I've definitely seen worse. Mostly, I was just put off by lots of LUS, describing characters we already know, and defining the characters by their Element. (Granted, in this case, it's very important to correlate Element to pony, but it still put me off.) There was one typo, so that's pretty good, but I was also surprised at how much Derpy's eyes are made an issue. Talk about showing your age; that Twilight doesn't immediately freak out at seeing them is the one positive thing Trixie notes during their first encounter. Like, how much of a jerk are other ponies to Derpy? >.>
Beyond LUS and being old, this story felt a good bit slower than it needed to be. There are a couple scenes — convincing Dinky she doesn't need to listen in on the 'adult conversation', trying to psych Twilight up to get rid of the Ursa — that drag on and on as every possible objection the characters can come up with is laid out. That's the kind of detailed writing whose absence can trigger the pedantic reader ("BUT WHY DIDN'T SHE X"), yet only serves to lengthen a story needlessly. (Also, I did not get the significance of "Don Rocinante", which I assume is ponified Don Quixote.)
I suppose I should add that the final chapter is very obviously tacked on after the story was originally written, possibly after Shining Armor was revealed in canon. It's not that what it goes over isn't important, but it feels enough like another story that I would have preferred to see the fallout of Boast Busted's events at the start of a sequel, for instance.
In the end, there's a lot more to like about this story than not, and I can see why the 'verse became as popular as it did. It's the kind of AU setup that attracts the average fan, but it's handled in a considerably more well-thought-out manner than such things tend to be. I look forward to checking out the other stories now. :)
Also, props to the reworked theme song.
4/5
A good introduction to a classic AU.
Oh ho, but you didn't think I was done, did you? >:V
In the middle of chapter 3, completely out of the blue, there's a link to another story, suggesting its events happen while Twilight is in the Everfree Forest. Were it not linked directly in the middle of a chapter, I'd treat it as a sequel, but not so! Time for Boast Busted: The Lost Tales by Emeral Bookwise!
...Pretend there's another page break here. :B
This story definitely suffers from being analyzed in this context. It's obviously written by a different author and hasn't been proofread, it doesn't have the staying power of the story which frames it, nothing particularly important happens in it or is related to it. In other words, it's a perfectly adequate fanfic that has the misfortune of being canonically inserted into a fandom classic.
So taken on its own merits, what do we have? Twilight runs afoul of a trio of would-be sirens in the Everfree Forest while tracking down her Ursa, and gives them a good lecturing about the difference between various types of aquatic equine life and pretty much anything else they can argue about. It's a light comedy where the comedy is separated by long, dry headcanon dumps. That said, it's also kind of interesting, structure-wise.
I'm not talking about the plot, really. It's just the fact that this is Lunaverse Twilight without Trixie as a counterpart. Having only read her in Boast Busted so far, I found that odd; she's almost regular Twilight, but not quite, and as someone in the comments points out, she's currently in the middle of causing major trouble, so who's the protagonist here? (Well, there's a protagonist, there's just not a 'good guy', per se.)
(And no, Emerald Bookwise is not the most prescient writer on the site, he added the Rainbow Rocks canon later on. It was nice to see, though.)
This piece is hardly a fandom classic, but in all, it's a decent enough read if you can forgive some scattered but major typos. Like a plus sign at the start of a word. How do people end up with things like that? c.c
2.5/5
Fun, but no classic.
Now I'm done. :B Tune in tomorrow for NickNack's Heart of Gold, Feathers of Steel! How I avoided reviewing it when I've already done all of its sequels, I will never know
Skill. 100% skill.
I put at minimum, 90% of the blame on Twilight for the Ursa Minor.
That really dates the story right there; when, if you wanted to Luna to be "the good guy," Celestia had to be the bad guy. Not having Celestia as the bad guy weakens the platform for Luna being the good guy, so we can't have Celestia escape from being the bad guy...
I don't at all miss the days when that was common thinking.
Raindrops is hands down my favorite character from the Lunaverse. Her struggles with depression are fantastic.
Trixie is a close second, and Lyra a closer third.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocinante
Rocinante is Quixote's horse, as five seconds on Google would have said.
Neat! Review! I appreciate reviews.
Yup. Idea that I decided on a lark, which has bitten me in the ass ever since. Though it is actually alluded to in earlier chapters, though not stated outright (since it isn't relevant to this story).
Lyra's marefriend. As to why I didn't use her, I wanted the same setup that the show uses - so all mares, and two mares from each tribe of pony. I already had my two earth ponies mixed, and so needed two pegasi. Ditzy was a shoe-in, but at the time when I was writing "Boast Busted" there were almost no named pegasi background ponies that the fandom had really latched on to other than Ditzy, so I basically had to pick one of the few named ones and invent her personality from the ground up. If "Hurricane Fluttershy" had already come out when I started this story, I may have chosen Flitter or Cloudchaser instead due to the sisterly dynamic.
That being said, Raindrops is perhaps my favorite of the Lunaverse-Six, so I'm glad that she was included. She emerges fully as her own character in the story "Tales of Ponyville".
Her personaly of having anger issues comes entirely from a single fan-edit of a Rainbow Dash pic of Raindrops lying down looking annoyed:
Here it is
This is a problem with the early Lunaverse, but not an intentional one. I'd always intended Applejack to be a basically decent pony, but early stories showed her as more antagonistic because, well, it made the most sense for the stories in question. My writing speed just didn't keep up with reader perceptions, unfortunately.
If I can ever get around to resuming "For a Few Bits More", Applejack in that is one of the main heroes.
Actually, it might not have. We've never addressed it directly in the Lunaverse, but personally I think it didn't.
The story itself isn't significant, but the overall scene is mostly what I think is obligatory in any AU, which is a moment where the AU-character has a moment wondering what it would be like if things were diffeent, i.e., in the main universe.
It's a partial reference to one of the better alternate universe short stories out there, called "If Lee Had NOT Won the Battle of Gettysburg", by Winston Churchill (yes, THE Churchill). It's an essay written from the perspective of a Confederate historian theorizing what a world where the Confederacy lost the Civil War would be like.
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In fairness, I have nothing and never had anything against Celestia; I never bought into that "tyrant" idea. But the entire premise I was going for was a reversal of roles, so that meant Luna banished Celestia for Celestia turning evil - although, for the record, a different way and with different goals than Nightmare Moon.
Wait, what... where? I know I'm not the greatest at catching typos, but I'm pretty sure even I would notice a bungle like that, and ctrl-F can't seem to find it either.
Also, minor correction I must make to you, my name is Emeral, not Emerald. There's no D and that's entirely intentional.
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Now, I admit that my understanding is incomplete because I've stayed away from the Lunaverse for a couple of reasons, but my strongest objections to using Celestia as a foil for Luna's "goodness" is that generally people who did this refused to give Celestia the same consideration as Luna herself - namely that Luna was allowed to be redeemed. Either Celestia escaped the Mane Six's efforts to blast her, or she was powerful enough to resist their effects, or she was simply too far gone for them to work, or, or, or... So I heard that Evil Celestia was still at large in the Lunaverse in spite of the New Mane Six successfully going through an alternate season 1 opener, and for me the premise joined a large pile of "meh" fics.
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My apologies, I will fix that. D:
The Lunaverse is something I've been kind of meaning to try out for a while but never got around to.
Everyone is better when they have bonus antagonism with the Apples! :V
(Exception: Filthy Rich.)
Waaaiiit... that's not an inversion! :P
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"If Lee Had Not Won" is of course well written, and is more plausible in some respects than some other Confederate victory things I've read or heard of, but there seem to be some really glaring gaps in logic at key points. Basically the only explanation I can think of for the occurrences at (at least) two junctures, Lee's emancipation of the slaves against the entire point of the Confederacy's bid for independence and the out-of-nowhere peace and harmony between the Union, Confederacy, and Empire in 1905 is magical thinking.
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Fair enough. At the time I hadn't read any other AU fics centered on the idea of Celestia going evil, so I can't say I was inspired by that. It was, like I said, just done on a lark, not out of active refusal to give Celestia the same consideration - I just thought it seemed like a neat idea. That being said, we've used the opportunity to seriously develop Corona as a character in her own right, especially in Season 2.
I’ve enjoyed reading these, PP.
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I'm glad! A lot of time (if not necessarily effort) goes into these reviews! :B