Hap Reviews: Contest Entries 3 · 12:08pm Nov 14th, 2019
Howdy hoo. Today I'm going to wrap up the entries for the 'Peace' category with Fit for a King, and then move onto a story which struck me as a promising competitor story, The Seneschal. Both I thought were pretty good, and both for different reasons!
After these two I may take a bit of a break from the whole 'daily review thing' to try and read through the only other Ember centric story in the contest, written by Horizon. It's longer than the others, clocking in at 14K words, so may take me a bit longer to get through considering my slow reading speed. Anyway, onwards to the recs.
The Seneschal, by Kris Overstreet
The Seneschal is a fun little story for more reasons than one. One of the more amusing bits to me was that it read almost like a 'Celestia Sadfic Best Hits Compilation', and featured a pretty fun little potpourri of tropes to play around with. You got your 'Celestia is depressed after Luna goes lunar', you've got your 'Celestia becomes a hermit', you've got your 'Celestia struggles to rule Equestria', your 'Celestia struggles with outliving ponies', 'Celestia starts planning for Luna's return and this gives her strength', and so on. The story should hold no surprises to those who have read a couple of like-minded tales, as I have. The concept of Celestia being depressed after Luna became Nightmare Moon is as old as season one, and on a personal level I've had something like six years to familiarise myself with the concept.
So on an originality level, I'm not terribly invested, but tell you what, the story's pretty good at playing these tropes straight and mixing them up very well. It uses canon background, such as Princess Platinum and Smart Cookie, to very nice effect. I sometimes see the Equestria of one-thousand years prior being a bit alien compared to the Equestria of today, and whilst that's fun sometimes too, it's helps the believability of this story to drop these names convincingly and provide a nice backdrop for this whole internal drama. I think that's pretty great frankly, and partly because the tropes told here were so well established, it was very easy to go along with everything that happened in the story.
I would have appreciated a surprise or two, but as far as 'delivering what I expected' goes, this delivery is very difficult to find fault with.
Who would enjoy this? You like Celestia fics? How about an ultra-streamlined one that takes the concepts you're used to, gets rid of most of the faff, and tells it straight and clean. You've got a full complete arc, starting with depression and ending with 'ey, Celestia is back, baby', you've got all the beats you'd otherwise get from like a dozen other Celestia post NMN story all alloyed into one. So that's pretty good.
Fit For a King, by ZeroMonkey
I'll tell you what I like about this one; it's probably the fic I've given most thought about out of all the ones I've read. Probably a weird one, since on the surface it kinda just looks like a darkfic where Sombra acts all evil, which is often a turn-off for me. I often find the concept of the baddies 'negociating' with the good guys always a bit funny, since I always imagine the good guys just rolling their eyes and buying time whilst they prep the Friendship Cannon. Stories in the past have tried to sell me on the concept that the bad guys are super powerful, but, well, I frankly don't buy it...
However, this story circumvents that whole 'convince Hap' problem very neatly by only ever implying the stuff that Sombra does through the world around him. How the characters react to him, and what they let him get away with, is probably the best worldbuilding tool the story could have used, since it lets me use my own imagination and spend a lot of the time wondering what, exactly, Sombra has going for him.
This can get a bit cheesy now and then, with Sombra just casually shrugging off deadly poison, but it's still a method I wouldn't mind seeing more stories use. I'm a bit prone to explicitly showing and telling stuff, so I do enjoy seeing folks do things differently to my own, blunt, go-to methods.
The story is a snapshot-style story that implies a lot and doesn't outlive its welcome as well, which is great. It's probably underrated, I think, for what it is, but I guess the darkfic and at times uncomfortable grimness of what happens can be a turn-off, and certainly did make me a little uncomfortable from time to time (which in all fairness is what I believe the story is going for).
Who would like this? From a more technical perspective, if you like the idea of inferring information from an environment, then go take a look at this story. It's short and for what it is it does this trick pretty well in my opinion. From a content perspective, if you like seeing evil villains win, or at least, pretend very convincingly that they have the upper hand (though if he's winning, one does wonder why he's agreeing to a ceasefire...?), then you could do a lot worse than this story, though perhaps a longer jaunt might be more up your alley in that case.
That's all from me today. It may take me longer to finish the next story I want to get through, so it could be a day or two before I get back to everything. Good luck, and see you folks around. Don't forget to check out the stories if they sounded fun!
