It Is Recommendsday, My Dudes #23 · 6:51pm Aug 25th, 2021
As I come up on my second horse-iversary on the site, it occurs to me that this is a great chance to steer this blog towards firsts.
It was a little tough to pin down just what the first story I added to my favorites was - when I established this account, I piled a ton of stuff into a single shelf pretty rapidly (before spinning it all out into a variety of other, better categorized shelves not long after.) But after going back a bit, as best I'm able to tell the first story I favorited was Mica's Becoming "Dad".
A lot of the other stories I favorited around it are bigger and bolder - The Enchanted Library, One Last Regret, Time, and so on - but that doesn't mean this one is somehow worse. It's a comfortable fic: a string of vignettes between Quibble Pants and Wind Sprint as the two feel each other out and slowly find how to relate to each other. It's got some little stabs to the heart - like Sprint measuring the house - but it's just.. comfy. The varying POVs help it along as well, with Mica doing a great job at capturing the difference in voice between an early teens child and an adult.
The story won't win awards, but it still makes me smile when I go back and read it. And that ability to capture emotion is maybe the most important thing.
On the counter side, the first author I followed is easy to pin down. It 100% was Dave Bryant. Dave is one of FIMFiction's big underappreciated authors: he's been around for twice as long as I have, yet has only gained a fraction of the attention. And it's a real shame given his talent.
Now technically the story I'm going to recommend here is Lectern's New and Used Books: Summer Break, but in reality it's the entirety of Dave's Twin Canterlots setting.
The first story starts out slow, with the Rainbooms meeting over the summer at a local book store for hanging out. The real turning point, though, is a few chapters in when they meet Cookie Pusher, aka Cook - a low level functionary dispatched by the US Department of State. And that's where things get interesting. See, the Twin Canterlot stories aren't about the girls hanging out drinking coffee. They're a well-researched and reasonably realistic tale about what happens when the US finds out that there's an interdimensional portal to an alien horse world in the middle of their territory. Most stories that use that premise immediately devolve into either war or conspiracy-heavy black ops sorts of things. In Twin Canterlots... the US makes diplomatic contact and start opening up trade and intelligence negotiations.
Cook's story goes for a while and en route he's joined by side stories with Rose Brass, a disabled Army veteran turned social worker who's assigned the de-powered Dazzlings as clients.
I could honestly rave for a while about things - Dave is a top favorite writer of mine and I absolutely adore the setting he's created - but what it boils down to is that this is an excellent and underappreciated set of stories that are particularly fascinating because of the legwork that's gone into giving an air of legitimacy and realism.
New or catching up? Try Recommendsday: The Index for your story needs!
"Becoming Dad" is a good one indeed.
Dave Bryant is definitely an obscure treasure on the site.
I blush!
And I definitely will read today’s other recommendation sometime soon.