Hap Reviews: Contest Entries 5 · 2:02pm Nov 19th, 2019
Back again folks with two more short entries to the Imposing Sovereign II contest that I picked at random this time. Since there are a few of these up already, I'm going to also at the beginning here link to the first 4 of these blogs. They're easy enough to find, but if you've just hopped on for this latest blog, this will hopefully make it a bit easier to jump around to the others.
Contest Entries 1
Twilight's Secret Shouting, What it Means to Rule
Contest Entries 2
A Trolley Problem Named Desire, Waning Crescent
Contest Entries 3
Fit for a King, Seneschal
Contest Entries 4
Fang and Flame
All have been interesting stories, but they've varied pretty wildly in terms of what, specifically, piqued my interest. Check the blogs out if you'd like a look, or just check the stories out directly! For today, though, I'm going to go over two stories I picked out. These two I selected after going through a few that I didn't think would look terribly interesting (mostly for looking either too dull or for containing content relating to parts of the show beyond that which I've gotten to yet).
From Discord comes Harmony, by AkumaKami64
This story is a short, snapshot style story clocking in at just under 3K words. For its length it's not bad; I wasn't bored reading it at the very least, which is a great start.
The story is about Discord peering through time and space just after the ponies light the Friendship Fire and banish the windigoes and begin uniting the tribes. Discord's main deal here is he's figuring out what to set up so that in the end everything works out okay. He sees all and is pretty much omniscient and omnipotent, and the whole internal debate he has is what to do to allow for the best outcome where he has to do the least possible with his chaotic powers. Eventually the spirit of Harmony turns up and is like 'yo, what if I did some stuff to? Could I like, exist?'.
I quibble with the logic in this story. Harmony appears to have a choice as to how to exist, or when, and seemingly needs Discord's permission, yet by some of Discord's own internal admission, Harmony can kinda just exist anyway... so I'm not sure how that works. I also quibble with this interpretation of Discord's power. Whilst I get that the whole 'impossibly powerful god of Chaos' is an attractive concept, it doesn't seem to hold up against what Discord can evidently do... which whilst impressive, has been limited by changeling disguises, a big chair, being a rock, getting surprised by pretty much anyone, some plant, being blue, and having his power om-nommed by Tirek. The story asks me to buy that Discord knew everything that was going to happen and that this is all some big 300+ IQ strat and he was just pretending a lot of this time and, frankly, I don't buy it.
I mean, yeah, he might have, but it's like the whole Darth Jar-Jar theory... if you're that smart and that powerful, you wouldn't pretend to be as dumb as Jar-Jar.
The story has some merit though! I like the discussion between Harmony and Discord, and whilst I am a bit nonplussed at the interpretation of Discord here, I do genuinely like how Discord is trying to be a villain in order to set things up to be optimal, and his musings on the future events of the MLP universe are pretty fun. There are also times when his voice is pretty spot-on, which is great! I'm a sucker for show-accurate dialogue.
There's no arc or conflict here, but this is a snapshot style story told in 2.5K words, so I certainly didn't feel like there was more I needed to see. It contained itself in its length well, and at no point did it feel tiring to read or too rushed or hurried. Good stuff there.
Who would enjoy this? Well, if you like Discord and short stories, this'll be a good one to pick up. It's neat, efficient, and whilst it may leave you scratching your head at the concept of Discord being already aware of everything that's going to happen, if that's a leap in logic you can accept then I don't really think there'll be anything in this story to turn you off, so go for it!
Princess Trixie of Transylmaneia, by AlexTFish
This story is a cute little 6 chapter 12K word story about Trixie attempting to become Princess of the batpony kingdom, but also explain why she definitely did not have anything to do with a big old cloud poofing over the entire world.
The whole deal is that most of the story is an interrogation, led by Twilight, with a truth/lie detector as the main set-piece. Trixie has to tell the truth and, in the end, hopefully fix the nasty old cloud bugger over the kingdom of Equestria and maybe get to rule a nation as a fun little side-dish. Accompanying her are this batpony noble lassie who was princess of the batpony kingdom first and who doesn't take kindly to Trixie mucking everything up. I probably wouldn't either!
Who can bend the truth to their will has the distinct advantage over the other, and luckily for Trixie, I'm not sure she really knows what the concept of truth is all about, so the old lie detector goes green for pretty much all of her statements unless she's forced into a corner.
The concept is fun and entertaining, and whilst it's certainly predictable how each of the players in the interrogation use careful word selection to circumvent the lie detector, it's still rather entertaining to see how they do it.
The stakes are pretty high; the big boy cloud, and the gargoyles (there are gargoyles) inside it are scaring the shit out of pretty much everypony (though one wonders why the pegasi don't just poof it out of existence, but I suppose magic or something, right?) and if nobody understands how it happened, then nobody can fix the problem.
There's a lot going on, more than I've described here, which is pretty impressive considering the story is only about 12K words long, which feels short for what's presented in the story. What's a bit less impressive to me is how it's told. The story goes about presenting the perspectives of each of the characters through dialogue, and whilst I agree with this in theory, in practice there are bits (particularly dialogue) where this format stops working as well. Pacing is also weird at times; a lot of stuff goes by pretty quick, so I'd sometimes have to slow down to make sure I didn't miss anything, especially considering a lot of effort went into specific word choice. I wouldn't have minded a bit more time taken to slow down and describe more of the nobility and what was going on to give some context to what the characters were doing; especially in what was basically a mystery story it felt like I was being given a whistle-stop tour of the most important points. This made deducing the twists a breeze, though perhaps someone less used to seeing through plot twists might find more mileage here.
I also question the use of coloured text. I had no issue with the red text for the batpony princess, but the mid-pale blue for Trixie was a struggle at times. This was using the light settings for FimFic, no tweaks to display.
Character voice is on point; I think Twilight comes out best here, though I'm satisfied with Trixie as well. I'm particularly happy with the original characters, though! They feel like they could easily fit inside the show as supporting cast without any tweaking, which I'm always impressed by.
All in all, a pretty fun story I enjoyed that I wouldn't have minded seeing given perhaps 1K or 2K words more to smooth out some of the bits like the party, add to descriptions of the interrogation, and so on, just to flesh out the environment and add some additional context onto the story.
I do also question the ending... but that would be getting into spoilers.
Who would enjoy this? Do you like Trixie? Do you like plots? Deception? Investigations? Mysteries? For 12K words, it feels more like 6-8K, and it'll sort you out, regardless of the issues I had with it, I reckon. You'll be done in half an hour and probably crack a smile or two as you do so. It gets better as you read it too, in my opinion, so don't be deceived by a fair amount of set-up in the early chapters; it has some twisteroos down the line.
That's all for today. I'm running out of the old reading steam so I may struggle to keep this up as I run out of energy and PhD stuff intensifies. I should have at least some grit in me to finish a couple more though... There's one where Twilight apparently gets worshipped as a god that, in particular, reminds me of my own story Part-Time Goddess, so I'd like to give that one a proper look!
Hopefully I'll see you soon, and as usual, check out these stories if you think they look like your cup of tea.
Cheerio lads.
Yay! Thanks for the review! Given your self-confessed tendency to mild grumpiness I think I have to be pretty happy with that review of my fic
Pacing was always going to be an issue for the fic: I was aiming for 8-10k and when it started looking like it'd go over that I had to start squeezing bits out. I'd originally planned to use the UnreliableNarrator schtick to get a bit of Rashomon-style conflicting viewpoints (by Trixie and Ethereal Requiem and/or maybe somepony else) of the "same" events, but there was no time or space for that. There were another couple of plot points I'd been considering too but got trimmed for time and space, since I was running very close to the contest deadline and needed to actually write an ending and stuff. It ended up being published on the very final day, 5 hours before the contest closed!
And I guess a comment I keep getting on all my fics is that my writing style is fast-moving. I guess I prefer to err on that side rather than linger and overstay my welcome. I did want to elaborate the interrogation room a bit but it felt like those sentences would be victims of "if it can be cut, it should be", you know?
The colour thing was an experiment, and I'm not sure it worked. Originally it was a darker blue but then I found it was almost unreadable on FimFic's dark mode; I tried for colours that was readable on either light or dark backgrounds, but I perhaps shouldn't have bothered, and just trusted in the narrative voices to make it clear which pony was speaking.
But that said, it seems like the overall effect I was going for of "plots and twists and fast-moving mystery" came across pretty well. And I'm very glad you liked Twilight's and Trixie's voices: that's certainly going to be pretty key to anyone appreciating the story! So thanks for the review, and I'm happy you enjoyed it
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Golly, that's pretty tight! I applied for mine about three weeks before the deadline and was worried that I'd be short on time, and to be frank my own could probably have used a lot more time to sit and be edited ad nauseam myself...
I think all things considered you should be pretty proud of the story. It looks like an interesting experiment that took risks, which is in my opinion worth a lot. My early stories and even a lot of later ones are filled with experiments that probably worked a lot less well than yours...
Good luck in the judging phase! : )
Thank you, and good luck to you too! I'm similarly working my way through reading the other entries, and I look forward to reading yours soon