Drake's Thursday Reviews #4

Let's get some actual new reading done today!

The Art of the Duel by Undome Tinwe

This is an interesting piece of fantasy, Rarity infiltrates a masquerade ball to sneak into the castle library and steal a valuable book, and is caught and dueled by Twilight. They banter as they duel, over morality, nobility, fighting styles, philosophy, and come to appreciate the other's wit and skill with a blade even as they remain enemies. That is something I have to note, if you can't buy into prolonged conversations taking place over several minutes of swordplay, you'll have trouble swallowing this fic. However, I can, and I quite enjoyed this. It's marked as complete when the ending leaves it open for a longer story someday, but on its own its pretty good. There's also some great humerous bits with Twilight's outrage over Rarity stealing a book.

"I know better than most that a pony's worth comes not from birth, but from deed. And you, Platinum, have committed the most ignoble of acts."

"Theft?"

"Book theft."

Recommendation: An enjoyable bit of deadly flirting with RariTwi.

Just Two Clones, Having Dinner by Summer Dancer

This delivers exactly what it promises - Twilight's evil clone from The Mean Six meets an escaped Pinkie Clone from Too Many Pinkie Pies, and they talk. Characterization is strong, establishing the clone Twilight and Pinkie as their own characters while also still definitely influenced by their originals. They discuss the obvious topics, like where they could go and what they could do, how they survived their respective episodes, and if they can or even should trust each other. Pinkie's clone also names the two of them, because they've never needed their own names before and so never chose one for themselves until now.

The only snag in the story comes when Twilight (the clone), at the end, talks about "justice for clones" as if she's going to become a moral crusader of some sort, which doesn't gel with both her episode depiction and her behavior here. Aside from that this is a good story that explores its premise well.

Recommendation: It holds interest enough to be worthwhile.

Trust and Responsibility by AliceLiz

This story follows Sunset finding Twilight home crying because she got drunk and had sex with Trixie, and she feels awful about it. Sunset consoles her, offers the idea of a polyamorous relationship, and Twilight talks to Trixie about it.

That's it.

This story is surprisingly light on substance and heavy on dialogue. At just over 3.4k words, it doesn't give its concept time to breathe and expand. Topics of conversation are brought up, discussed, resolved, and set aside with no time for any real emotional impact or character to be developed. The resolution is particularly poorly executed, with Sunset out of the blue bringing up the idea of polyarmory from Equestria's practice of herds, and Twilight talks Trixie into trying it. This is despite the fact Twilight's crush on Trixie in high school and how she feels sorry for her being lonely is brought up and discussed in less than two pages. It's not even fully clear if Twilight has any romantic interest in Trixie or just a sexual attraction, and if Sunset feels either. Twilight and Trixie had a drunken one-night flung, it's not like Twilight was seeing Trixie behind Sunset's back.

Recommendation: Far too short for its own good, it needs more room to explore its ideas better.

Things Left Unsaid by Rose Quill

This is enjoyable enough. Sunset has been living in Equestria for several years and has hooked up with Applejack, the mirror portal is closed because too much Equestrian magic was seeping through the portal and it became a danger. But Sunset is pondering the state of her friends back home, so on the day the portal opens like normal, she goes to visit them with her marefriend.

Sunset's conflict over the two worlds and her place in them is well done, and the story does a good job exploring how she misses her friends but not really the human world she struggled to survive in. A critique would be that the shipping of the story is secondary to this plot. Applejack is fine here, I buy the two are in love and she's good as Sunset's rock to support her, but the narrative is focused on exploring Sunset's feelings about the two worlds and not on exploring their relationship. The central conflict isn't even about their relationship and their being together is never challenged at all. AJ is mostly just here to give Sunset someone to talk to about her feelings, and she works well in that role, but its still not much.

Recommendation: Not too good for SunJack shipping, but good for exploring Sunset's "child of two worlds" conflict