It Is Recommendsday, My Dudes #65 · 10:44pm Jun 15th, 2022
Pets are an important part of our lives - as Groucho Marx said, “A book is man’s best friend outside of a dog, and inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” I'm sure nearly all of us could talk for hours on the habits and stories of our favorite pets. And just as long spent wistfully remembering that they've left our lives.
On a totally unrelated note, Spike the Dragon has 15,000 stories on this site while Spike the Dog has only about 230. It's the most extreme ratio between standard and EQG characters. So let's shine a bit of light on those with the prior paragraph in mind.
I'm leading with the more recent of the two: I'll Miss You, Winona by newcomer EileenSaysHi. They're one of the most promising new authors we've had recently, and this is one of their better ones.
The story begins with Twilight waiting at her computer for a video call from a friend - Applejack. Because she got a text and knows that AJ needs to talk to her about something they both can understand: the night before, Winona was fine. And in the morning, she wasn't breathing anymore. As the other dog owner in the group, Twilight and Applejack share that bit of a pet-bond and the two talk about Winona, the Sparkle family's first pet, and how Twilight came to get Spike.
It's not a complex story - just one heavy with emotions most of us are pretty familiar with. Eileen does an excellent job leveraging them, too - there's no overdramatic tearing of hair and wailing in sorrow. The whole thing's a normal conversation, muted by still-fresh grief. It's the spot where the wound's still fresh and raw, but the initial adrenaline's gone.
Ironically, it's still very much about Spike despite his not appearing in the story and only being mentioned a little. Because if you know EQG's setting, it's something on your mind. It's an undercurrent in this story, because the pony-world Spike is a dragon who's life is measured in centuries and the human-world Spike will see two decades on the extreme outside. And that's something that - once you think of it - is hard to shake. And the discussion of Winona puts his situation into shadowed relief.
This one's a great story from a rising new writer - keep an eye on this one, folks. (Their most recent one, too, actually managed to get me to like a second person perspective story! That's super rare.)
Today's second work contrasts as it's from one of the site's long-time veteran stars (AugieDog) and puts Spike into the forefront rather than the background - from the A Most Delightful Ponidox contest, it's Dog Years.
Spike is an old dog now - it's been a number of years since the girls were in high school, and he's slowing down. Still reasonably healthy for a dog of his age, but Spike's no puppy anymore. Twilight's been getting more and more worried with the passing years, but like always? She has a plan. After all, if Spike goes through the portal he'll be a dragon. So all she has to do is move him to Equestria and he'll live for a long time yet! The problem being that Spike doesn't exactly like the idea of moving to a different dimension, leaving his Twilight behind, and then spending the rest of a very long life as a different species.
Twilight takes his disagreement well.
By which I mean she tricks him into the portal and makes it so he can't go back. For his own good.
Turns out, Spike doesn't like that much.
The setup concept to this one's great and it builds well to the situation we all knew was coming but the characters were trying to deny. It lays a great groundwork, particularly using a lot of little cues to really drive home that Spike is old. There really is very little time left, and any pet owner who's been in that vet's waiting room knows the feeling of doing the math in your head about how to get just one more day.
Where this story really takes off is chapter 4, when the two Spikes sit down to have a chat. It casts their differences into a strong light - the mindset between a pony-raised dragon and a dog. Probably my biggest regret with this story is that this chapter wasn't longer - it's prime material and great character work. And it's really the meat of what makes this story awesome: Spike the dog can talk, but he's still a dog. The exposure to magic didn't change what he was or is, it just let him express it more intelligently.
At the same time, Twilight's actions are understandable. And that's the other half of why the story works - they're at odds, but we can get why they do what they do, they're both reasonably right, and they're trying their best to muddle through a difficult topic. It's handled really well here, and as per usual Augie does a bang-up job with it.
New or catching up? Try Recommendsday: The Index for your story needs!
What did you think of the end of Dog Years btw?
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I'm a little mixed on it, I'll be honest.
On one hand, I am a sucker for a happy ending and the way it ends fits the genre. And story-wise it isn't an unreasonable thing to go "Yep, magic is weird, so that happened." The entire series has the point that friendship and love and harmony solves problems, even when they seem insurmountable.
On the other, it does feel like a bit too "And everything worked out, the end!" It's the long-time problem of alicorn Twilight outliving/not outliving her friends writ small. Like AlexTFish said in the story's comments, it's a bit too twee.