BronyCon, Day 3 · 9:34pm Aug 16th, 2019
Day 3:
Hi there! This is part of my blog series on the adventure that was the last BronyCon! If you're just joining us, you should probably start here:
Day 0
Part 1 of Day 1
Part 2 of Day 1
Part 1 of Day 2
Part 2 of Day 2
Part 1 of Day 3
Part 2 of Day 3
Day 4
Epilogue
Saturday.
Saturday is kinda The Big Day for most cons. But then, most cons are in the three-day format, and Saturday is the only day that's really the full day as opposed to an opening or a closer. So you'd be forgiven for thinking that the action might be a little diluted, with Friday also being a full day in this four-day format BronyCon went with.
You'd be wrong.
Saturday was less tough physically than Friday, but it was no less packed with con goodness!
Much of it this day, however, came in the form of panels.
Before I went to any of them, though, first things first. After I woke up and got ready for the day at the hotel, I walked over to the convention center and immediately visited the vending machine that sold me the lime-flavored seltzer. I picked up another one of those to get my morning started off with some hydration. I'm told that a good day should start with a good breakfast, as well, but I'll be honest, I usually don't because I don't seem to get any benefit out of it vs. just sleeping through the time it would have taken to find and eat breakfast. But hydration is important! So do that.
Seltzer water in hand, I dropped into Quills and Sofas for a little bit of a morning hangout with the writers, then it was off to my first panel of the day.
And wow, was it a doozy.
It was "Ponyfic: There Can be Only One" at 11:15am.
This was one of the best panels of the weekend, IMO, but also assuredly with the potential to be one of the most contentious - if it had been played too seriously. Fortunately, it wasn't, and it all stayed in good fun.
How do you choose the "best fanfic of all time," exactly? Well, the good people at the Royal Canterlot Library had an answer to that. First, you make a bunch of, by their own admission, blatantly unfair cuts and omissions for time to chop the field down to sixteen candidates. Then, you put those candidates in brackets and face them off against each other, as measured first by audience applause, then by the RCL judges' calls in case of an audience tie, then by Horizon's tie-breaker call in case the other RCL judges tie.
What were the sixteen stories in consideration? I think I have the list around here somewhere, lemme check my phone...
Here we go:
The Silver Standard
The Writing on the Wall
Hard Reset
Background Pony
The Enchanted Library
The Railway Ponies: Highball
Nine Days Down
Yours Truly
Around the World in 81 Days
The Keepers of Discord
The Best Night Ever
Evil is Easy, Governing is Harder
Mendacity
Lost Time
Princess Celestia Hates Tea
Whom the Princesses Would Destroy
Okay, so you've got your homework assignment! I expect you to have these read and be ready to discuss them by our next meeting, and--
Oh. You just want to know which one won. Um, alright. I guess.
Ready for it?
Drumroll, please.
Well, I think the outcome made Monochromatic very happy, because it was... The Enchanted Library.
This happens to be a story I'd never read (sorry Mono), but after seeing it win at a panel like this, you can bet I started on it - before I even left Baltimore, in fact. I'm up to chapter 14 so far. It's good! I recommend.
Though I have the suspicion I'll end up saying that about everything on the list of sixteen, if/when I eventually get through them. There's a lot of good ponyfic out there, and this is just a small sampling of the best peaks of the good. And there's also a lot of not-so-good to bad, of course, as will comprise much of any given corpus of fanfiction created by any given fandom, but this fandom is fortunate to have particularly good filter mechanisms that can be employed for identifying the flecks of gold in the gravel. So let's just focus on what matters.
Anyway, getting kind of off-track.
Actually. One thing more that I have to say, before we move on. I would like to mention that I'm extremely pleased to see one of The Descendant's stories ("The Railway Ponies: Highball") on here. The Descendant is an old friend I've known across a couple different fandoms, spanning somewhere around a couple of decades at this point. We were both writers in the same places for a long time; you could kinda say that we come from the same playground where we took a lot of our first baby-steps before arriving at Ponies and stepping up to something bigger (yes, I admit it, I wrote for another fandom long before MLP, and no, don't ask about it please; it's all terrible and honestly should all be burned on sight).
The Descendant hasn't been here since 2016.
And I miss him pretty bad.
So Descendant, if you ever see this, let me know how you're doing. I know that around the last times we talked, there were some rough things going on for you, and I get the sense that you were growing disillusioned with pony fic, writing as a whole, maybe just life in general. But you still do have a lot of fans here. People still comment a lot on your profile page, even to this day, that your kindness and your humility, just you being you, changed their lives for the better.
You were one of the greatest standard-bearers of the central message, that friendship really is magic. I think you helped more people than you or anyone else ever realized.
Send me a message or something if you get the chance. It's been a long time and it'd be nice to know if you're okay these days.
Okay, moving on with the convention. For real this time.
After finding out what the One True Best Fanfic of All Time was, I had to hurry to get in line for the next event (welcome to Linecon!) because it was one that I absolutely knew would be absolutely packed: the 1pm Voice Actor Script Reading!
I seriously wanted to get into this one because I went to the one at Everfree Northwest, with a fan script written by Aquaman, and it was absolutely awesome. The script for this one at BronyCon was written by Horizon, so I expected pretty great things here as well.
So it was back to standing in line, but fortunately not for more than forty minutes or so, at most. Also, I was standing in line with BlazzingInferno and Epic Yarn, so I had some friends to talk to. I hadn't eaten anything yet that day (again, me being a bad example, do as I say and not as I do, etc. and so forth) so Epic Yarn generously dug out a granola bar and offered it to me. And thus, I ended up eating lunch on Saturday after all. It would not be the only time I ate with BlazzingInferno and Epic Yarn, as we'll see in a later post.
I was admittedly kind of sick of linecon by this point, but this time I don't mind at all, because the script reading was worth it! Great job by all involved, on the whole. That said, I think it suffered a little bit, unfortunately, for a couple of reasons. First, as it turned out (and Horizon was not expecting this), it was actually a cold-reading of the script by the VAs. Consequently, the execution at BronyCon had a few rough edges where the EFNW reading was very polished. Second, the EFNW script had been written with some constraints in consideration for which VAs would be there to read their parts; such was not the case with this one. The result was that some of the parts had to be voiced by the other VAs acting as stand-ins for the ones who weren't at the con this year, and I felt like that hurt the quality of delivery a bit.
To be clear, it was not a bad performance. It was a more of a rough draft vs. a final draft. Rough drafts can be good, and this one was! It just wasn't as cleaned-up as would be expected from a final version. It was a different experience from the EFNW script reading, and it's interesting to see how the two contrasted each other.
Unfortunately, since neither of these readings could be recorded for legal reasons, you had to be there for them in person. No YouTube videos of these will probably ever show up (EDIT: legal or not, apparently someone did record the BronyCon script reading - without expressing either approval or disapproval or linking any links, I'll just say that as of the time I'm writing, you can definitely find it on YouTube with a pretty basic search, which I leave as an exercise to the interested reader). I'm really sorry, I feel kinda bad talking about these kinds of events in front of an audience of readers that includes people who missed them with no way to go back and recapture them for everyone. I wish everyone could see these wonderful performances. 
But you know what you can do?
You can do what I did next, because it's something special (at least to me), but also something you don't even have to go to a convention for.
And you can find out what it was in the next blog post!
See you then. 
I recorded the There Can Only Be One panel, and I'm so glad.
I doubt I was the only one to do so, but that was the fic I nominated in the, er, nominations thread. I think it's one of the best stories on this site; it's almost criminal that it still has under 3,000 views. I never knew TD outside Fimfiction, and even here not really beyond the odd exchange of comments, but I think pretty much all of us who've been around a few years still miss him. I'd love to know that he's okay, at least. When we get to December I'll be doing the Santa hat thing TD started, so he lives on here in that way too.
Don't feel bad about it. Every convention has its memorable moments that aren't recorded by anyone. Okay, that's usually just because they happened not to be recorded rather than because they couldn't be recorded, but the net result is the same. I'd be lying if I said it never stung just a tiny bit to realise my chance of ever seeing one of these panels is zero -- but it's not exactly something that keeps me awake at night. (He said, posting this at two in the morning UK time...)
I miss The Descendant. I only chatted with him a couple times, but he’s left his mark on the fanfic community (and on this site’s user pages). My favorite work of his is probably still Dear Idiot
It was hardly the first script reading to bring in some substitutions. They had to do some quick and dirty recasting last year as well, as that one was written by one of the guests. (Tabitha St. Germain, if you're wondering.)
Still, I'm honored that you thought the Highlander panel was one of the best of the con.
I've read exactly half of those stories, including "The Enchanted Library". I should get off my rump and read the rest.
The fan script reading at EFNW was one of my top three favorite events at the con. It was many different levels of awesome, so much wish it could have been recorded.