Fic recs, April 12th! · 10:38pm Apr 12th, 2022
This, sadly, is another one of those short review blogs thrown together at a moment's notice because someone around the site needed help. :/ Hopefully, you can give some assistance to one or more of these folks.
PhycoKrusk needs help for his dog. (The story is in an earlier blog.)
Estee's also signal boosting an artist who needs help after being hit by tornadoes.
And Pennington Inkwell needs some assistance recovering from a personal tragedy. :/
H: 2 R: 1 C: 2 V: 0 N: 0
Still Undead, Still Don't Care by Banjo64
Sequel to Undead and Unconcerned
Genre: Random Comedy
The zombie apocalypse is somewhat less apocalyptic than ponies might have expected.
I have zero recollection of reading the prequel to this, but that's okay. Even if I felt like I was missing part of the joke, the rest of it absolves itself quite well as a stand-alone. This is a series of scenes exploring the concept of this zombie plague that turns ponies into zombies that aren't very zombie-like, and manages to extract a lot of humor from the concept. There's gonna be at least something in here you'll enjoy.
Recommended
Solar Wind by FanOfMostEverything
Reading by VisualPony
Genre: Random Comedy
Luna asks her sister why she tends to be nervous around the Night Guard.
I went into this 100% expecting it would be about Celestia's hair. In hindsight, I wonder why. I was thinking about the wrong end, as it turns out. Much funnier that way. :)
Recommended If You Like Fart Jokes
Normal Love by Regidar
Genre: Dark/Sad/Romance
If they're going to be stuck here, it's better that they have each other.
Wow, this is heart-wrenching. It's just a short snippet about Bright Mac and Pear Butter being trapped essentially in purgatory, able to watch their family grow and live and unable to do anything about it. They have each other though, and that's sweet even if it adds a whole new layer to the more depressing aspect of their situation. I've seen few stories balance bleakness with solace this carefully.
Highly Recommended
Zecora and Yoda Have a Conversation by Dewdrops on the Grass
Genre: Star Wars Crossover/Comedy
Zecora has tea with her teacher.
This was entirely done as a writing exercise starring two characters with very idiosyncratic speech patterns. Amusing. And I'll give the author credit, working Star Wars into Zecora's backstory worked out surprisingly well. That said, this leaves something to be desired in her speech, most notably the metrics (or lack thereof). I'm also not certain of Yoda's grammar being completely correct, but I'm not here to evaluate that. This is cute, just a little flawed on the technical side.
Recommended for Star Wars Fans
In Birdsong by themoontonite
Reading by Sparrow9642
Reading by Lotus Moon
Genre: Horror
Fluttershy knew quiet. This was not a normal quiet.
This was really unexpected. The horror surprisingly comes not from Fluttershy finding a dead animal, but what happens afterward. It's so short, so tight, and the prose is excellent. That's really all I can say other than be sure you read this!
Highly Recommended
I will happily take a C for a fic with implicit bat ponies.
5650338
not even implicitly >:V
5650339
5650338
Solar Wind is approaching, if not the, definitive book for our age and perhaps many ages to come, and I will not hear any disagreements.
Oh, um, thank you for the review I was not expecting. And you're completely right about the lack of metrics. I am not well versed in rhyme or meter. But it was fun to try, nevertheless.
5650359
well, I'm glad you tried it :) not everyone's gonna get it right the first time
Normal Love was one of my favorite stories to write. It’s right up there with Twilight Under The Bodhi Tree, and they deal with similar feelings—albeit in completely different circumstances. Ever since The Perfect Pear I’ve been obsessed with the apple parents, perhaps unhealthily so. I love how the show really made their love for one another shine through so perfectly, and the way that AJ and Big Mac spoke of them in that episode painted a hole of loss I didn’t think possible for the show. I tried to recapture that, first in Wandering, and then finally in Normal Love. Right after Normal Love (and before Bodhi Tree had hit its final draft) in April of 2020 I was very suddenly forced to grapple with the reality of death i had yet to truly face, and it seemed strangely juxtaposed in my life as it was then.
I still don’t know if the way I approach death and processing death in my stories absolved me of having this weird fetishization of it as a point of art—maybe I can’t process it in any other way. I’m glad you liked it so much though
it always means a lot to get highly recommendeds from you. I still remember being a goofy teenager working out how to tell stories and how many conditionals I’d get from you, so finally breaking out into consistently putting out fics people can think highly of is a really neat personal benchmark.
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you're a good kid :)