Fic recs, January 7th! · 4:07pm Jan 7th, 2019
Happy New Year! After finishing Without a Hive, I wanted to break into some longer stories for my daily audiobooks, and I wanted to get them all done at once, which is why this took a while! :B And why there's tons of news! Here's hoping it's still relevant...
The Bronycon bookstore is moving forward! If you're serious about helping out, go read that blog and do the survey!
Alexstrazsa is selling his Cadance plushie! :O And some other stuff, too!
Illya Leonov's newest reading is Blueshift's A Voice in the Dark! Scribbler has done a reading of Archonix's To Be a Mule, with Dusk Spark and Glacier36!
If you're a fan of Mega Man and/or my writing, I posted my Mega Man movie outline on Tumblr finally. :B
This month's Flash Fiction Online is food-themed and contains a horror story about eating and wine after a funeral.
H: 1 R: 1 C: 2 V: 0 N: 1
Winning, and the pitfalls therein. by RandomNPC
Read by Fimfiction
Genre: Fixfic
There's more than one way to defeat a villain.
I gave this one a shot, I really did, but the description's assurance that this story would be rational set my teeth on edge. Now, to be fair, the first chapter, about Twilight leaving Nightmare Moon in gormless surprise as she welcomes her return, then 'defeats' her by helping her actually rule Equestria, is funny. Not a laugh a minute, but the overall situation is amusing and there are some good jokes. Moving past that, however, this really got my goat. Twilight as written here is a smug, emotionless asshole, and the breaking point for me was her lecturing Celestia on her mistakes. Not even the lingering suggestion of Dislestia could repair the story in my eyes. I just had to wonder how this thing that called itself Twilight Sparkle had any friends at all, to say nothing of how they got the Elements to work. It doesn't matter that the chapters aren't precisely in continuity with each other. This is a perfect example of why making everyone act 'rational' (read: unrealistically) ruins stories: it's dull.
DNF: 2/6
Celestia and Luna's Completely Average Day by Nyronus
Read by Fimfiction
Genre: Much Ado About Nothing
The Lord of Undeath has escaped Tartarus, and nopony but Luna seems to care.
So this is one of those stories where Luna doesn't know something that everyone else does, and no one feels like explaining it to her. By the time I figured out the joke, there was still a distressing amount of story left. Thankfully, that moment was followed by a hilarious scene that used long, awkward pauses to good advantage. My point is, it's easy to figure out what's going on well before Luna does, and then the story just keeps on going. It's not bad, not by half, well written and with some good comedy like what I mentioned before. I'm just not a huge fan of watching a character slowly slide into making a huge mistake the way Luna does here. At least the ending has a good message about the place of immortals in a world of plucky mortals. That by itself was worth it.
Recommended for Laughs
Terms of Forgiveness by Fylifa
Read by Fimfiction
Genre: EQG Drama/Comedy
Now that they've made up, Celestia wants to see what Sunset's life is like in the human world.
This has an awful lot going for it. There's some solid comedy, Celestia dressing up in a magical disguise to go through the portal to the human world, Celestia pretending to be Sunset's mom and embarrassing the hell out of her… It's kind of all the things I've ever wanted in an EQG fic? The writing is good, with a few missing words here and there and the odd quirk of never using the term 'cutie mark'. Put up against the canon Sunset/Celestia reunion, a fanfic has a lot to live up to, but this makes a damned noble attempt.
Recommended
Time Turner's Discordian Detective Agency: The Missing Kitten of Inspiration by Rodinga
Read by Fimfiction
Genre: Mystery/Comedy
Lost kitten in Canterlot? It's nothing Equestria's foremost time-turning detective can't handle!
Boy, it's been a while since I heard the word "fillyfooler", to say nothing of reading a story where Vinyl Scratch works at a club with that name. This is squarely a season two fic, in other words, and it's got some weird old ideas. Foremost among these is the major bar to entry: cutie marks are superpowers, and Time Turner has the ability to rewind time by 42 seconds at a go, retaining memories that let him avoid major mistakes. If you can accept that, you'll probably have an easy time also accepting that he can follow "patterns in disharmony" to solve his cases; it basically means he has low-level plot awareness. That said, I never quite understood how his superpowers worked. For instance, in three adjoining scenes, he uses it twice: once to avoid detection on a stakeout, and once to undo injuries he suffers from slamming into a lamppost. But, if he had used it after he was detected during the aforementioned stakeout, he would have avoided the "high-speed chase" that led him to slamming into that pole in the first place. It just bothered me that I couldn't tell if he'd forgotten to do it, or was beholden to some kind of limit between uses. And since I'm on negatives, the comedy in this story tends to be very "mares are from Mars, stallions are from Venus", with everything from "of course any stallion would watch two mares going at it" to "maybe it's your time of the year", which is funny in a world-building sense if one only ignores the crass sexism. (That's only slightly worse than the creation of an entire character and subplot so there can be Doctor Who references.) Which is not to say I didn't like this; it's a fun romp, with some jokes that do work, and it's quite enjoyable to watch a simple case about a missing kitten snowball into the craziness this ends up in by the end. I just find myself often agreeing with Vinyl Scratch; Time Turner's kind of a dick.
Recommended If You Like Detective Stories
The Mare That Time Forgot by The Auspicious Author
Read by Fimfiction
Genre: Sci-Fi/Dark/Drama
Trapped in a world where nothing moves but her, Twilight must find a way to fix her situation before she loses her mind.
On the surface, this begins as a long-form sci-fi horror piece about Twilight in a world without time, slowly going insane as she tries and fails again and again to find a way back to normal so she can see her friends again. It's gripping and fascinating. And then, near the end of that first chapter, which could have stood on its own just fine, Twilight — and I don't mind giving this away — kills herself. One can hardly blame her; the situation was hopeless, she spent years alone with no sounds but her own voice. I've read a lot of stories in the past that are meant to end on a character's death, usually by suicide, and where they all fail, this succeeds, for one reason: it keeps going. This then becomes — again, just on the surface — an exploration of tragedy, as the ripples caused by Twilight's sudden death reverberate out across Equestria. Her friends, her family, acquaintances, Celestia, and the world at large have to deal with a true heroine dying for seemingly no reason at all. And if the story doesn't come to a conclusion about that, it's likely because one is never guaranteed to find closure in another's death in real life. In other words, Twilight's death is pointless, and that's the point. But the other reason? There's something going on here. I know it; you know it. No one can figure it out. This is like Broken Bindings, except Broken Bindings actually wanted to be solved. So I'm calling every last one of you: somebody around here's gonna be smarty-pants enough to crack this thing open. When you do, let me know. (And just take my word when I say: don't try to listen to this with TTS. c.c)
Highly Recommended
If anybody at all tells you the secret behind The Mare That Time Forgot by all means PM it to me. I tried the same thing and got no bites.
Well, thank ya' kindly, good sir for your kind words. Much appreciated.
Happy to see one of mine on this list with a Recommend! And the nice words you had for it. I'll take a shot at that Mare That Time Forgot because it sounds like an enthralling mystery.
I also promise to dedicate a CMC fic to you someday to make up for the lack of 'marks'
4992979
What a story mark!