It Is Recommendsday, My Dudes #19 · 7:08pm Jul 28th, 2021
There's a lot of darkness in today's stories - but I'd call it the good kind of darkness. The sort that gives contrast and helps you tell where the light shines brightest. They're both crushingly sad in their own ways... but I also would call them both hopeful.
The shorter of the two is Onyx by Ravenpuff. While not a lengthy piece - and split into two halves from distinct perspectives - it's got a lot of power to it.
The first takes the internal thoughts of a crystal pony mare - it dodges around the subject at hand, but it isn't too hard to fill in the pieces. A pony like Sombra almost certainly had concubines, after all. (I will note here that the story is E, and while that rating fits it absolutely skirts along the edges with some of the things that it implies rather than says.) The second half is from Cadance's eyes - newly in charge of the Crystal Empire and confronted by a terrified young girl who expects nothing but retribution and fury for herself and for the child she bears.
'Child of Sombra' stories aren't infrequent, but they generally either relegate the child to an antagonist or they play up the protagonist role (and many go rather 2edgy4me). Not many stories approach this angle of it and stick to there, rather than making it a red tag laden footnote before launching into one of the aforementioned types of stories.
But that's why I think this one packs the punch it does - it keeps the focus much more tightly on a single scene that's packed with emotion.
For the longer - but not that much longer - we look back to the Imposing Sovereigns II contest. And what a hell of a contest it was. Like, seriously, it was absurd how many amazing pieces came out of that contest. Among them is this piece - Lest We Forget by I Thought I Was Toast. I was shocked that this one didn't place in the contest, but that's also the nature of judging: you can only recognize so many, and when the docket is that packed? There's hard choices.
Using the prompt of Luna and The Old, it looks to how the Princess of the Moon celebrates the Summer Sun Celebration - the holiday where the sun is at its strongest and which celebrates her defeat. Or, more accurately, how the bat ponies she left behind celebrate it.
Evocative world-building at its finest, Luna plays the role of a strangely familiar outsider being guided through a holiday to celebrate her. The scene that's set gives me shivers as she's shown her legacy by ponies who aren't sure how she'll react to her lowest moment. And - importantly - she is shown the love that her people had for her in that darkest of hours.
This is a story I absolutely love as it gives beautifully painted context to the other side of Equestria's biggest holiday and deep character development to Luna.
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