Fimfadvent: Day 1 · 12:16am Dec 2nd, 2020
It's December! This year I wanted to try to do some kind of advent thingy, and I thought I'd combine it with an initiative to try to give some attention to fics that might otherwise fly under the radar. So, for as long as I can keep it up in December, this is my plan: every day, I'll look through all of yesterday's fics, select one that didn't get many comments or views, and give it a review.
I don't have any rigorous criteria for selection, but I'm trying to lean toward fics by newer authors, or authors who don't have many followers, or fics that I wouldn't normally be interested in.
So, without further ado, here goes day 1! (Well technically it's the 2nd December where I am since it's past midnight. Let's pretend that isn't true).
Our first fic is from new author HKS, the cleverly-titled Sonar Eclipse. I chose this one because it has no comments, yet I'm surprised by the amount of work that seems to have gone into it - it has a nice cover art and, rather delightfully, a soundtrack. No, really! How many fics have their own soundtrack?
You can listen to the Sonar Eclipse EP on Bandcamp, and it's pretty good - not exactly musical, but very atmospheric, providing a sufficiently watery backdrop to this submarine adventure.
The fic starts on Earth, following a flood of Noachian proportions which has submerged almost the entire planet. It isn't clear how that happened exactly, but it seems like some people were able to survive in submarines and everything's become a bit of a Waterworld-like place full of desperate scavengers and land-seekers. The story follows just such a submarine as its crew tries to find whatever they can to survive their now-desolate world.
Then they find a magic talking bathtub.
I don't know why there's a magic talking bathtub or why nobody is surprised that such a thing exists, but their entire world was destroyed so I'll cut them some slack. They learn that you can drop pieces of paper into the bathtub and it will tell a story about the character described on the paper. It's AI Dungeon, but in bath form!
Naturally, they do what any traumatized submarine crew would do in this situation, and use the bathtub for entertainment, because why not? They try it first with a description of a clownfish, and it tells them a lawyer-friendly version of Finding Nemo.
Everything goes swimmingly (pun absolutely intended) until one day they try to see what happens if you don't supply any descriptive details at all, so they just put "pony". Now I tried this in AI Dungeon, and it started threatening to do bad things to me if I ran away, so this doesn't bode well.
The magic tub describes an orphaned alicorn who self-destructed to destroy an invading army, but is destined to return in five thousand years. I'm honestly getting a bit of a Revelation vibe from this fic. It's so beautifully nonsensical. The author admits that English isn't their first language so I'm guessing some things might be lost in translation, but I'm quite enjoying this mushroom trip for now.
The submariners eventually get the idea to describe themselves to the tub, which I'm surprised they didn't think of sooner. Unfortunately, as is always the case with prophecies that involve oneself, it's not good news. They're gonna die. Pretty soon, it turns out, as the sub starts failing all over the place and they begin to drown. But - cliffhanger ending - an alicorn shows up! I'm assuming it's the alicorn from the story, but we don't find out because it ends there. I'm not even sure if the humans die or not.
This story was... really bizarre. The writing quality is extremely loose - there are comma splices everywhere, giving this a very dreamy feel, which actually doesn't work too badly for such a weird fic. There are six human characters, but they get almost no characterization and are fairly interchangeable. And it's barely an MLP fic. The action is almost entirely human-centric, and the mystery alicorn shows up at the last minute and gets no dialogue, or even a name.
I found out afterward that this fic is intended as a prequel to another fic that hasn't been released yet, but honestly, this feels like it should be the prologue chapter to that story, rather than a fic in itself. Still, the presentation surrounding this fic is pretty nifty and I have to give the author props for going the extra mile in putting this together.
Thank you so much for this! glad you enjoyed it
"I'm not even sure if the humans die or not." = they do die, is said at the end that Deddo is the first one to die while the others die soon after
"I'm assuming it's the alicorn from the story" = yes it is, and he will have a major role on this next part of the fic currently working on
again thank you so much for this review, hopefully i can improve my writing on the next one