Read It Later Reviews #86 – Bitter/Sweet, The Virgin Princess, Rusty Scissors, The Book of Might Have Beens, We’re Eggspecting! · 10:45pm May 21st, 2019
Howdy folks! It’s been a few weeks since I last did one of these. My last set of Read It Later reviews was published on May 8th, so it’s been almost two weeks since then!
Yes, 13 days. Only 13 days. It’s crazy though, because it feels like it’s been more than a year!
But obviously that’s just crazy talk. I mean, where the heck would a year have gone in that time?
Today’s stories:
Bitter/Sweet by Estee
The Virgin Princess by GAPJaxie
Rusty Scissors by PJABrony
The Book of Might Have Beens by Cold in Gardez
We’re Eggspecting! by Jay Bear v2
Bitter/Sweet
by Estee
Slice of Life
9,742 wordsIt's the oldest chocolate shop in Equestria, the very first -- and on this night, it's also out of business. The final treats have been sold, the vultures have already begun to circle the equipment, and the proprietor polishes the remains out of pure habit while wondering what to do with her life. But that question will have to wait, as she has one more customer to take care of.
The very first.
Why I added it: Estee is a good writer.
Review
Estee’s slice of life stories often are more about filling in the world than they are about telling a story where things happen. This is one of the great things about Estee’s stories – but also one of their weaknesses, because while much is said, often little is done. Thus, their stories often leave me in a somewhat… uncertain state. I do love worldbuilding, after all, but I also feel that worldbuilding must have some purpose, some context – merely creating a world isn’t enough, I want to have a reason to care.
This is, perhaps, a slightly unfair characterization. Rather, I think a lot of Estee’s stories use the world to lend weight to seemingly minor events. A chocolate store shutting down is, after all, a minor thing – but the very last of a 1,200 year long line of chocolatiers, the first of which was the very first chocolatier of all time, being visited by Princess Luna, who sought to be not only their first customer, but also their very last… well, there can be something more there.
Knowing what it is, what the stakes are, can connect us to a story, but it doesn’t always work out. All too many stories are overwrought, ending up on the far side of “I don’t actually care about all this backstory.” This is seen frequently in video games, where people come up with a great elaborate backstory for their world, but fail to make us care.
But I liked this story. While the story had a fair bit of pathos, it was a pathos that ended up working out – we get to see a chocolatier who has never escaped her name interact with a princess who has never escaped her own personal nightmare. We get to see her at first afraid of the princess, then eventually get comfortable enough to talk about things, and so we see everything gradually unfurl.
While I do feel like the pacing on this was a bit on the slow side, and the story perhaps meandered a bit more than it needed to, I think that the core of it actually worked pretty well.
Recommendation: Worth Reading.
The Virgin Princess
by GAPJaxie
Dark, Drama, Slice of Life
10,597 wordsTwilight was sixteen when she became an alicorn. She hasn't aged a day since. Some ponies ask her what it's like, not being able to grow up.
Twilight can't really say. She's never known anything else.
Why I added it: GAPJaxie is a good writer.
Review
Princess Twilight Sparkle is 38. But she’s really 16.
She’ll always be 16, because that was when she became an alicorn.
This has consequences.
This story is labelled as dark for a reason, but it’s not bleak; rather, the darkness lies in the way that Twilight Sparkle lives her life as a result of her fixed age, and the implications thereof, as well as some of the negative events that are going on in the world around her. The fact that she has to put a post it note on her coffee maker to remind herself that she actually likes coffee is a dark presaging of just how hard it is for her to truly remember how much many things have changed without prompting.
But as the saying goes, the night is always darkest before the dawn, and this is not just a bleak piece about Twilight Sparkle’s memory problems, but also a story of what the eternally teenaged Twilight Sparkle brings to the world around her, and the choice she makes on a regular basis to continue to do so.
I don’t want to give too much away, but while the premise was interesting, this story’s ending really stuck the landing, and was a very lovely message that perhaps also was a little bit meta in how it applies not just to the story, but to the show itself.
Recommendation: Worth Reading.
Rusty Scissors
by PJABrony
Slice of Life
1,655 wordsBabs Seed, long ensconced in her job as a stylist, goes in for a day of work. But her last customer will make her question her decisions.
Why I added it: It won Iron Author at Everfree Northwest 2019.
Review
Okay, so this is kind of cheating, as this story literally just came out – in fact, it was written this last weekend, at Everfree Northwest.
But whatever! Screw the rules! TD hasn’t put out a review set in far too long, and he wants to talk about this story. And speak in the third person, apparently.
Rusty Scissors is the story of a feeling of alienation in a big city. Babs Seed has lived there most of her life, while Coco Pommel only moved to Manehattan to pursue her dreams. But both of these characters have one thing in common – they feel as if they have no real future. This is not to say that they feel an imminent sense of doom – indeed, quite the opposite, they’re both doing reasonably for themselves.
And yet, they’re both letting themselves get drawn along by the currents of society, not really trying to do anything outside of their “roles”. They simply are, they exist, they do things, but they don’t really seem to go above and beyond, to really try anymore.
This is a slightly gloomy Slice of Life piece, but it is not melodramatic – instead, it is just a quiet sort of melancholy, a melancholy that the characters allowed to creep into their lives, and that they could, perhaps, escape, simply by making different choices.
I liked this piece, and at only 1,600 words, it is quite brief, but effective in what it is trying to do.
Recommendation: Worth Reading.
The Book of Might Have Beens
by Cold in Gardez
Slice of Life
8,359 wordsLeave it to Twilight Sparkle to create the greatest spell of the past century – and then want to destroy it.
It's too dangerous to use, she says. It's too tempting. It can't help you the way you think it can.
Well, Starlight Glimmer knows a thing or three about temptation. She'll prove to Twilight that this spell – this magnificent book – is too important to destroy. That it can help ponies.
She just has to survive using it, first.
Why I added it: I liked it in the writeoff and Cold in Gardez is a great writer.
Review
Twilight Sparkle makes a new spell. Or, more accurately, makes a powerful magical artifact, a book that can show a counterfactual reality, a different world where you made different choices.
She is thinking about destroying it.
Starlight Glimmer, however, is skeptical of this idea. This is such a wondrous thing… sure, it is limited to your own life, and can’t go back centuries, but clearly, there’s many things you could learn from using something like that, right?
And it’s not like it can physically hurt you…
I like this story a lot. The first sentence grabbed me, the core premise is very strong and made me want to see how things turn out, and the way that Starlight uses it – and the way that it hurts Starlight, to see the worlds she could have lived in, and the pony she could have been, if only she’d chosen otherwise – works very well. Starlight has just the right mixture of regret and ruthlessness to really twist the knife into herself with these counterfactual realities, and so she’s really the perfect pony for it. The alternate realities, too, all have a solid bit of emotional impact, and while I feel like the most impactful of the three was the first one rather than the last one, it does flow nicely into the little emotional moment between Twilight and Starlight at the end.
There’s not many stories that manage to make me feel so strongly compelled to read them, but this one sold me on itself and fueled my interest from beginning to end.
Recommendation: Recommended.
We’re Eggspecting!!
by Jay Bear v2
Romance, Slice of Life
4,874 wordsSilverstream and her husband Gallus are going to be parents! Everyone is so excited about their egg.
Well… almost everyone.
Why I added it: I don’t actually remember, but going through the stories I’d marked for myself to read, the cover art made me want to pick this one.
Review
Silverstream and Gallus are married, and Silverstream laid her very first egg last night. She’s exuberant and excited, and it seems like everyone she knows and loves is coming to see her. Okay, it was only like, six people today, but it will be more soon! And her egg! Oh, how she loves her egg! She loves it more than anything else in the world, except for maybe her husband! So what’s there to worry about, except for maybe a few paparazzi?
While Silverstream is the point of view character, this is ultimately not a story about her, but about Gallus. But this distance is vitally important to the story – it not only allows it to hide what Gallus is feeling from the audience, but also reinforces the sense of distance that Gallus is feeling from some of the events we see in the story, as he is often off to the side and watching.
While I had expected this story to be silly based on the cover art, it is in fact a rather introspective piece, and about a concern that I rarely see expressed in a story, despite it being surprisingly common in real life, and expressed in a very real way. Even though we aren’t seeing the story through Gallus’s eyes, we come to understand how he is feeling at the end, and why he might be the way that he is.
And you know? That was nice. The story has enough of Silverstream being Silverstream to divert us from what is really going on, but we see little hints throughout the piece about how Gallus is feeling, and so while the story works to charm us with Silverstream, it is a spoonful of sugar to make Gallus’s pathos go down.
Recommendation: Worth Reading
Summary
Bitter/Sweet by Estee
Worth Reading
The Virgin Princess by GAPJaxie
Worth Reading
Rusty Scissors by PJABrony
Worth Reading
The Book of Might Have Beens by Cold in Gardez
Recommended
We’re Eggspecting! by Jay Bear v2
Worth Reading
It felt good to do these reviews again, but I’m feeling a little rusty in writing them like this. It’s been a while since I’ve done these short-form reviews, but I’m sure I’ll get back into the swing of things.
And I enjoyed them. It’s been too long since I’ve just sat down and read new pony stories outside of the context of judging a competition. I’ve actually got a few partly-complete review sets sitting around from various abortive attempts at writing full sets, but I decided to just start fresh and write an entirely new set.
And I actually worked on editing a couple stories as well. Will the insanity ever end?
Perhaps tomorrow, I’ll be a writer.
But until then, I hope you all have a good evening.
Number of stories still listed as Read It Sooner: 234
Number of stories still listed as Read It Later: 681
Number of stories listed as Read It Eventually: 2279
Good to see you back in the saddle.
5062386
It's good to be back!
well hey :D I'd hoped your recent blog meant you'd be posting more reviews!
5062388
I was glad to see you were still posting reviews! I've basically not been here for... months, really, so I was happy to see your own reviews up this afternoon.
Actually, that reminds me of something. A lot of the show people were talking/joking at the con about stories that they could read now that the show was over. I was thinking about poking reviewers and seeing if we could get together a list to potentially send/give out to those people of stories that they might be interested in from the fandom.
Hooray, you're back!
I hope you keep it up, because I did and do enjoy these reviews. The Book of Might Have Been's was seriously underrated when it first launched, so it's good to see it getting some love. We're Eggspecting is a story I gave a pass when it was in the feature box, but if you think it's worth reading, I think I'll give it a shot after all.
It surprised me that you (and many other people) read this story cold. It's the fourth story in a five-story series: The Third Wheel, Courtesans, A Foreign Education, the Virgin Princess, and The Last Changeling. It heavily references the events of the previous stories, such as Twilight having a little sister (who has a changeling lover), or Equestria being a war with the griffons. When I saw people were reading it cold, I was worried they'd get confused or feel lost.
Nice to see that didn't happen!
Twilight is eternally a child. She's a cartoon character! But that's fine, because it's not about her. It's about all the kids who enjoy having her around, one generation after the next.
Yikes. I thought my reading queue was long at ~600.
5062402
I considered reading the series from the start, but The Virgin Princess's title and premise grabbed me a lot more than the first story's did. I'll likely read the others later.
It is very poignant, and I definitely approved of the metatextual level as well, but it still hurts.
5062387
Yes you are Wise!
By that measure I've had very productive two weeks as far as writing goes
.
Welcome back!
>book of might have beens
How... Coincidental.
Welcome back!
Thanks for the review, TD. I actually think Book might be one of my best stories, and it managed to ask readers a fairly interesting question. I wish I could do that every time.
Glad to hear you're getting back into the writing spirit, too.
Thank you for the review! Writing from Silverstream’s perspective always felt like the right choice for Eggspecting!, even when I was questioning whether she should be his partner, so I’m glad that it works.
And my wife is going to be so excited that her cover art is still drawing in people months later.
5062601
It's hard! But the question was definitely interesting, and you did something interesting with the telling of it. There was a lot of emotion in there, as well as some solid self-loathing from Starlight, while it still left the question open.
You did a great job with it, it's a strong story.