Paul's Thursday Reviews CCLXI · 9:29pm Aug 12th, 2021
So. 37 years old today. Long past that point when birthdays feel like “just another day”. Still taking off work tomorrow for the sake of it. Any excuse, amiright?
Now that I’ve officially decided to make BPH 2 a series of stories instead of one ginormous one, I feel a lot less pressure to focus on it alone. Getting the first story out is still my top priority, but now that I know a release is coming in a month or two as opposed to a year or two, I feel a lot more comfortable working on my other projects.
The first one I’d all but given up on, to the point that I started writing a C&C for it. But about three-fourths through it, I realized I still really want to try it. I’ve made a “first chapter” for it three times already and each time I stopped because I just didn’t like how it was coming out. Hopefully the fourth time’s a charm. I don’t want to say what it’s about, mostly because I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up (as it would), but it wouldn’t be a quick, easy project. I’m considering doing for it the same thing I’m doing for BPH 2, but I dunno. We’ll see how long it gets.
More importantly, I’ve decided to get back into my Guppy Love original fictionication. I’m gonna go in and re-read what I have, wake my pre-readers up, and see if I can’t get that done.
Alrighty, then. Who wants some reviews?
Stories for This Week:
The Combinatorics Project by Ringcaat
Games Ponies Shouldn't Play by DagaYemar
Divine Move by Ice Star
Something That Needed to be Done by Rose Quill
Total Word Count: 178,811
Rating System
Why Haven't You Read These Yet?: 1
Pretty Good: 1
Worth It: 2
Needs Work: 0
None: 0
The Combinatorics Project
109,894 Words
By Ringcaat
Six ponies. All the ships.
In this ambitious little anthology, Ringcaat writes multiple AUs in which the Mane Six pair up in different combinations. The results are wacky, to say the least. Pinkie and Twilight as mad scientists, Rarity and Rainbow as the ultimate celebrity couple, Fluttershy and Twilight as homebodies trying to spice up their lives, Rainbow being straight and Twilight willing to do whatever it takes to catch her eye anyway. And all that’s nothing compared to the real Combinatorics Project: Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash going on a multi-dimensional adventure!
This was imaginative, quirky, and immensely entertaining. My personal favorite was the one in which Rarity got sick… which I know sounds like a weird thing to favorite, but it was to me the strongest story in the sense of being a story. Plus it’s what led to Pinkie and Rainbow’s adventure and an invasion by an entire army of Best Fillies (also known as Scootaloos).
That being said, the “appendix” story in which we get to actually see Pinkie’s and Rainbow’s multi-dimensional adventures entirely through the view of Pinkie’s diary travel log travelogue was a treat unto itself. I love how well Ringcaat manages to capture Pinkie Pie’s character, giving us her signature silliness without sacrificing an underlying awareness that what she and Rainbow are doing is not only hard, but extremely demanding on them both.
Simply put, I loved this anthology. Some of the stories were deep, like the one that claims the Mane Six only paired up because of some otherworldly influence and asks if love can survive when that influence goes away. Some were just plain goofy, like Pinkie and Fluttershy turning the latter’s cottage into a massive toy city or Twilight and Pinkie inventing a gas that turns you into a living balloon. Then you get the serious ones, like Applejack trying to keep things together while her marefriend Twilight becomes distracted by some extremely important, life-saving research. There’s something for everyone here, and Ringcaat wove that needle with Rarity-esque precision.
Also, Scootaloo Army. Most endearing swarm ever, in my humbly correct Southern opinion. Except perhaps a Coco Pommel swarm. Which doesn’t happen here, but it’s nice to think about.
Whether you’re into shipping or not, I’d recommend this. Definitely give it a go.
Bookshelf: Why Haven’t You Read These Yet?
Previous stories reviewed for this author:
The Pony Who Lived Upstairs — Pretty Good
Games Ponies Shouldn't Play
31,454 Words
By DagaYemar
Cheerilee discovers an old board game among her stash of stuff: Diplomacy. She’s had it for ages but never played, so she decides to invite her friends Trixie, Raindrops, Lyra, Ditzy, and Carrot Top to try it out. They have the game at the library, and Twilight agrees to act as an impartial judge and rulekeeper. This is going to be so much fun it might kill their friendship forever!
I had never even heard of Diplomacy before reading this story, but now that I have I really want to try it. It reminds me of the old days playing Magic: The Gathering with my cousins and sister, which got all kinds of intense.
Anyway, this story basically follows along as the girls from something called the Lunaverse – which is a thing, and that’s all I know about it – play Diplomacy on a fan-made Equestrian map. It starts off turn-by-turn but begins summarizing a bit once the rules and positions are explained and understood. The problem here is that if you’ve never played Diplomacy then you’ll be totally lost and confused on a lot of points. Even if you have played the game it could be hard to follow along by virtue of A) six players, B) constantly shifting alliances, C) a ton of moves described that can get overwhelming very quickly, and D) a non-official map that may confuse even veteran players of the game due to its ‘newness’.
So… yeah. I spent a lot of time confused by the details. I sure as heck couldn’t understand any of the overarching strategy going on. In their defence, DagaYemar tries to help us by providing images of the map using color-coded pins and “flags” (read: sticky notes) to mark the progression of the events. But as a newbie with zero experience or even awareness of the game, much of what I was seeing was lost on me. I also think DagaYemar made a mistake in making the colors of the pins match the characters rather than the nations, because it added one more, if minor, layer of complexity to the whole thing. I tried to keep up by paying close attention to the map between turns, but after three chapters I was so lost I gave up and decided to stick to enjoying the character interactions and the ‘big picture’ as they described it in-story.
That worked well enough. I definitely understood things a lot better from that perspective, and some of the events had me grinning. I loved the final result even if I was disappointed that my preferred character (the Brilliant Recluse, as DagaYemar names her) didn’t win. I enjoy reading about politics, and watching these characters form alliances, lie to one another, perform sneaky tricks, and at one point even try to sway the rulekeeper was immensely entertaining for me.
I also appreciated when DagaYemar shifted to an “in world” perspective, i.e. depicting the characters within the world they’d created within Diplomacy. This includes such fascinating things as Trixie the Griffon, Princess Ditzy appealing to six-legged elk leader Carrot Top, and Grand Vizier Cheer Ali dealing with assassins. It’s precisely the kind of imagery I conjure in my games of, say, Civilization or Risk. I’m not sure if they add any true value to the story as a whole, but they were still a lot of fun, even coming with some awesome worldbuilding elements.
I come away from this feeling largely positive. I’ve been introduced to a game that looks like a ton of fun. The author managed to keep things interesting despite my complete ignorance of said game. I admit I was lost when it came to the overarching strategies, and that will be a big issue for anyone who doesn’t have at least a passing familiarity with Diplomacy. But I still enjoyed watching the events unfold and I have every intention of reading the Mane 6 version.
Bookshelf: Pretty Good
Previous stories reviewed for this author:
New Author!
Divine Move
36,408 Words
By Ice Star
Sequel to The Company We Keep
Sombra. Not “King” Sombra, he isn’t one and doesn’t care for ponies who try to make him out be. In fact, he doesn’t care for ponies in general, save except the Pink One. There’s a lot of things Sombra doesn’t care for, and he has surprisingly few goals. The only one that really matters, at least for now, is as simple as it is challenging: do not die.
And so we continue with Ice Star’s long series of Cadance- and Sombra-centric tales. This one, told entirely from Sombra’s perspective, has the ever-sassy and crude creature nopony understands and almost everypony hates… uh… doing things. That’s really the best way to describe it, he’s ‘doing things’. He wants immortality, and ostensibly all his efforts are geared towards that goal, but the individual events don’t seem to have anything to do with it. He’s meeting his maybe-kinda-sorta long-lost relative. He’s searching for the Alicorn Amulet. He’s helping foals do foal things. He’s insulting Celestia to her face.
I left with mixed feelings. Is Sombra growing as a character, or is his entirely different mood at the end a simple result of him actually getting something he genuinely wanted for once in his life? It’s hard to say. I’d like to state that the moment he got a new sword he evolved somewhat – that seems to be what Ice Star was going for – but it’s not clear how or why. The most frustrating bit is that we can’t trust anything Sombra says; as much as he insists that he only ever speaks the truth, he is clearly an unreliable narrator whose views and outlooks are dictated by his laundry list of issues, not least of which is his blatant… uh... whatever the pony version of misanthropy is. Equinthropy? On top of that, it’s hard to see how most of the events relate to one another or his overarching goal. On top of that, when he finally achieves his goal it’s not even through any act of his own but due to a mistake made by somepony else that has nothing to do with any of his actions in this story.
...something to do with “fate”, perhaps.
And yet there are a great many things I enjoyed about this story. Sombra’s snark is the stuff of legends. There’s some worldbuilding, albeit on a minor level, to go along with his journey. I loved that ending scene with Cadance that may have, for the first time ever, directly demonstrated that yes, Sombra does like at least one pony (especially if she comes bearing pizza). If nothing else, Sombra is a fascinating creature to watch.
I can also see some improvements in Ice Star’s methods. In this series of stories, this may be the most direct the author has ever been in terms of making it clear that X event is happening. They still go for subtlety when possible, but things are no longer so thickly veiled in fog that you can’t see your hand in front of your face.
The one area that is still a big problem is the lack of transparency in the background of events. In one instance Ice Star completely skips a discussion that would have probably been valuable for my understanding of what was going on. If some commenter hadn’t mentioned it, I never would have known that the entirety of that background info probably exists in a side story (inasmuch as this author will allow it to exist at all). Why wasn’t this story labelled as a sequel to some prior story in the series so that I could have known it existed and read it in the proper order? No, mentioning it in some random author’s note two or three stories ago doesn’t tell me that there is going to be very important information I’ll need to be aware of in a much later story. If it’s not important enough to warrant being directly connected to the chain of stories, then why should I assume it’s important enough to be required reading for that chain of stories?
In Ice Star’s defense, they’ve informed me that they are very aware of the issues raised by this past practice and is one of the things they plan to correct for in the promised coming rewrites. The more I hear about such things, the more I look forward to them. It would be nice to re-read these stories later and see how much they improve when the storytelling isn’t woven in as convoluted and unclear a manner as humanly possible.
Despite all my complaints, the truth is that I really enjoyed this one, more so than any of the others I’ve read by this author so far. That has everything to do with A) Sombra being such an interesting character and B) significant improvements to the writing and storytelling. Watching Sombra stomp around Equestria (and I do mean “stomp”) being a misunderstood jerk while searching for a path to immortality was surprisingly fun. I look forward to the next story in the series in which he finally confronts the one princess who has yet to make a splash in this series so far. I’m very curious to know exactly why he’s so interested in meeting her.
Bookshelf: Worth It
Previous stories reviewed for this author:
Autophobia — Pretty Good
Tear the Sky Asunder — Pretty Good
Tomb of Magic — Worth It
All That Lingers — Worth It
Bathophobia — Worth It
Something That Needed to be Done
1,055 Words
By Rose Quill
Sequel to Homecoming
Sunset visits her old stomping grounds in search of some familiar faces. Adagio is there, and she looks like shit. Time to give her a wake up call.
This one is only a “sequel” in that it is set in the same universe as and occurs chronologically after the previous story. There’s no connection whatsoever to Homecoming save for a single throwaway line, so people should have no trouble jumping into this one should they feel inclined.
The story is short and direct: Sunset visits Adagio, Adagio is mad at Sunset, Sunset tries to slap some sense into her, Sunset leaves. Which is fine, I guess. The catch is that, like so many of Rose Quill’s stories, there’s no resolution. The story ends with the problems merely acknowledged, not resolved. Rose Quill doesn’t even bother to give us Adagio’s reaction to Sunset’s counter; they ignored the most important part of catching the reader’s attention in favor of ending the story early.
At this point I’m accustomed to Rose Quill having a quirky storytelling style that, generally speaking, avoids doing everything the reader wants. My biggest hope now is that the sequel will continue the ‘story’. It’ll probably do so in a way such that there shouldn’t be a sequel at all, but we’ll just have to wait and see. This also assumes the sequel will have anything to do at all with this story but, having read the incompleted Walk in Darkness series of stories, I know this author isn’t that quirky.
To be clear, I don’t like how Rose Quill approached this, but I also can’t say with confidence that there’s anything objectively wrong with that approach. On the middle shelf it goes. If nothing else, the teasing with sequels will keep me coming back for more because I want to know if Rose Quill will eventually resolve the issue.
Bookshelf: Worth It
Previous stories reviewed for this author:
Tactics — Worth It
Walk in the Darkness — Worth It
Got a Minute? — Worth It
Succor — Worth It
Homecoming — Needs Work
Stories for Next Week:
Her Frontier by FromTheMoon
She Knows How To Treat A Lady by MysteriousStranger
Red Apples by billymorph
Freeport Venture: Auction Night by Chengar Qordath
Lows And Highs by Soufriere
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Well for what it's worth Happy Birthday dude.
Happy Birthday! Here's to many more.
First off, Happy Birthday! Second, you should consider looking into the Lunaverse stories. They're basically a "What If?" universe in which Celestia was the one to go bad and get brandished, with Trixie being Luna's student and the leader of a different set of Element barers. It started off with one author, but eventually sprung into an entire group! Believe me, I think you'll find it's worth the time.
Fun fact, one story from that branch helped inspire my story "You Call That A Costume?".
I'm glad you had as much fun with Combinatorics as I did way back in the day. :D The scenes aren't all made equal, but it's just so ambitious and really lives up to its own ambition in sometimes surprising ways.
You poor young thing.
Happy Birthday! Will it coincide with your house closing? Or did that already take place?
Happy Birthday, Paul
Happy birthday.
I've rewatched this video about Diplomacy some several times since it came about. The maker is an incredible author and may be my favorite DnD DM on the planet.
It opens with a great 2 minute Diplomacy tale and from there its fairy engaging, you might enjoy it.
Happy birthday!
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Many thanks!
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Hmm, I dunno. Under the current circumstances I need to be picky regarding what I read, and "Here's a different group of Element Bearers." isn't exactly a new idea. Still, I might be interested in checking it out, assuming the first stories aren't too long. I'm very curious to know how someone "brandishes" Celestia, after all.
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All true, it was an excellent fic. I love how it starts off feeling like a bunch of unrelated stories and whammo, inter-story crossovers! Very creative and fun.
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Very interesting video. Makes me want to play all the more. And now I know where I can go to play it online.
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I meant 'banished'! Either I misspelled or my autocorrect did it to me again!
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I pulled out of that one. Inspection revealed way too many problems. So I'm back to searching.
Had one that looked good I was supposed to look at today, but alas, the seller went with someone else before I even got a look at it.
Happy birthday!
As soon as I saw "The Interdimensional Council of Scootaloos" was a chapter I had to add that to a bookshelf.
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Well that's a bummer. The market is so screwed up at the moment. Kind of wish the bubble would pop.
Anyway, best of luck with the search then!
Happy (belated) birthday! Hope you enjoyed the day off.
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Oh, I did. Thanks a bunch!
Congrats. My birthday is also in August, but I haven't celebrated it since my late teens, I kinda just let is pass by.
Happy b-day
Sorry for the late reply, I've been prepping for heading back to university in days. Unfortunately, time doesn't care about health issues and absolutely can and will gobble itself up even when I'm not spending it on writing. I've had this in mind since it came out though since your reviews on my stories (especially my longer ones) have been helpful to have for when I'll get to revising them. I've gotten through most of the shorter ones, so there is that. But I'm struggling with trying to do a million different writing-related things alone and that makes things... supremely difficult when there is only one of me to do all the work.
When writing this story, I always knew that it was going to end up a little looser than the previous installments no matter what route I took with it. Crystalline and Tomb of Magic are an obvious succession, and The Company We Keep happens alongside Tomb. Those three all have that much more obvious interconnectedness, while Divine Move is more or less the last stop before the fifth story and where the drift into shifting the focus from the narrow range of "Mane Six and Princess related things" to "Princesses and others" becomes really, really obvious. I also didn't feel it was entirely appropriate to have Sombra with the same linear conventions of less world-wise characters being heroes, like Twilight and Cadance. That's partly because we're in the middle of his story (this is the fourth book) and his life, so reducing him to that would be really forced, as well as out of character for how I have him. This smug horse does what he wants when he wants.
Oh, but that's entirely intentional. You're meant to wonder about how much of this is development on Sombra's part or simply if he has been like this the whole time (and for how long) and whether you're just noticing because most of his perspective has been withheld from you for so long. Even the one (possibly two?) bits he got to narrate in previous stories were just brief teases. They didn't tell you nearly as much about Sombra as Divine Move did.
So, I'm gonna drop a potential (but mild) spoiler: of all the narrators to appear in the present-day, Sombra is the one who you should trust the most. He's only an unreliable narrator in the sense that he is very opinionated, but his narration also acknowledges this. I'm not sure what you mean by other issues that impact his narration, but that is only because you didn't specify what they are. I could venture a guess for what a few of them are.
TLDR trust the demon, he doesn't bite that much.
And now my avatar probably makes a lot more sense. Y'know, the important things.
This was always something I wondered about. In all your previous reviews, I noticed that you focused more on what needed work and examining logistics/flaws in the story. The parts that you liked, or that I inferred most likely weren't an issue, were either briefly touched upon or left alone. Sombra, as a character, didn't get a lot of commentary in those reviews even as it became more obvious (I would hope) that these stories are about him. I really wanted to see whether you liked this glorious ego horse for him, and I knew that this was the story that I'd just have to hear it on.
This is actually really fucking good to hear. I'm not sure if it is a product of the narrator changing to a character that is more direct than getting hit by an oncoming train, or more of a result of my writing improving. There is a lot that could also be attributed to the overarching narrative being revealed more. Hopefully I'll be able to see what it is upon rereading and improving it.
It's a stand-alone side story, not a proper part of the sequence of five stories.
I didn't have the skill as an author at the time in order to figure out how to reference the events organically. It's entirely on me there. My audience was also incredibly small at the time so I was used to the same five to ten people just kinda going to whatever I wrote because there were so few readers.
I'm currently slogging through the most recent (and currently incomplete) story in the main arcs. In a way, it needs the least amount of work, but there are also over 200,000 words to currently go through. The fact that this summer was bad in terms of writing and my third year of university starts in a matter of days... it's going to take a while with the amount of work being dumped on me.
I'm only one guy, but I do want to deliver the best re-writes possible. That you're looking forward to them was honestly something I needed to hear too.
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It's written by me and it has the romance tag. That could be a clue.
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All good to know. Of all these comments, there's only one thing I feel obligated to react to:
No excuse. There needs to be some clear, readily-identifiable way to know that there's more information available that will be critical to what we're reading now (and it's definitely critical). If you don't want to do the most obvious method of automated sequel-linking, you could perhaps put a link to the timeline directly in the story description, along with a note that some previous stories in the timeline may be required for a full grasp of certain ongoing events. At that point the readers have only themselves to blame for their confusion.
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This is a huge part of why I've tried putting a lot of effort into improving how I write continuity without creating these dilemmas. I'm much better at bridging those gaps as an author now where before it was a major blind spot of mine.