It Is Recommendsday, My Dudes #18 · 1:47am Jul 22nd, 2021
Possibly the smallest writing niche we have on this site - excluding things that are outright banned - is probably not what you'd guess. Nearly any fetish you can think of is represented in decent numbers, almost every perspective and fiction style is used and even the most obscure characters get a decent amount of play.
What we very, very rarely see, however, is poetry.
While it pops up in other stories from time to time, pure poetic works are vanishingly rare on the site. I think it's partially that it requires a pretty different skill set than fiction writing. (The other part, I'd guess, is the 1000 word minimum. That's a lot of haiku.) But while rare, it does exist and there's some that really deserves to be focused on.
First we have Atychiphobia by Ice Star. A powerhouse of an author, Ice gives us a unique piece here: Sunset Shimmer's poetry journal.
Now, a part of why this is really fascinating is that it's not just Sunset's angsty teenage poetry. It actually follows her through different phases under her time with Celestia - separating out different parts of the timeline through formatting tools to let her 'talk' to herself. You get to read not only how Sunset's thoughts and perspectives evolve, but occasionally watch her snip at herself and lament her own past choices and thoughts.
There's a few prose sections interspersed - mostly as scene-setting and world-building for perspective - but the poetry is really what locks you into this one and sets it apart from oh so many Sunset prequel stories.
On the other half of today's coin, we have The Ballad of Maelewano by Rambling Writer.
One of the site's bigger names - the powerhouse writer behind the Tantabus series among other things (and congrats on hitting 1000 follows earlier this week!) - Rambling entered this into Jake the Army Guy's Horseword Extravaganza II in January of 2020. Despite the author's heft and the quality of the piece, it only managed to take an Honorable Mention there and somehow remains Rambling's least viewed (and one of the least liked) stories.
Which is a damn shame because it's a masterpiece.
It tells the story of the founding of Zebrabwe and the conflict between the zebra and the quagga that led to the tribes coming together. And the entire thing is told in rhyming ballad quatrains.
This isn't just a compelling story done in a challenging form, though. The tale is amazingly evocative, capturing the feel of an epic being told over a campfire as the oral tradition and histories of a people are passed down from one generation to the next. As the judge noted, this is the essence of a story where the form matters just as much as the content and the story soars because of it. It's a damn crime that it's garnered so little attention.
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Well, I now have a wonderful glowing review to link in the description! Thank you again for the review! 🖤
definitely a rare niche i would otherwise not have thought to look for, thanks for the highlight!