The primary reason I haven't read this story is because it is 252k words long.

That's really all I can say, as I haven't, you know, read it?

3303846 We've been over this privately, but I'll reiterate it for posterity I suppose.

Ultimately I am a characterization whore. It's my bread and butter and I will often ignore flaws in other works to absorb it. It's why I enjoy Dean Koontz despite his being pretty much a shit writer. He writes interesting characters and I want to see what they're thinking and what they're gonna do.

It's the same thing here. No, it's not a particular interesting story, and it's slow as fuck. I don't care. I'm getting to see a detailed, in-depth, damn near real-time exploration of Twilight Sparkle and Applejack in a relationship. In fact I'd go so far as to say that the only way you could possibly enjoy this story is if you disregard it as a story entirely.

It is nothing but a character piece. It's like watching someone's home movies with a telepathy function. It's literally only about the journey, and the destination is absolutely irrelevant.

Now, if someone argues that it's good storytelling I'll start laughing right now. But I'll keep reading it as long as it keeps coming out.

Truth to tell, if this was any other kind of story I'd probably hate it. The only reason it works is because there's almost a complete lack of conflict, other than the day-to-day conflicts that inundate life as a whole. If it was trying to convey a narrative about Equestria on a macro level, in any form, it'd fail miserably. But it might be the best micro-level look at these characters I've ever read.

Just don't go into it looking to get sucked into the narrative. You have to give a shit about the minutiae of Twi and AJ's lives.

3303986
Here s my argument with the "real life minutia" aspect.

The other day in a different group I was talking about "Project" style fics (The AppleDash Project that I wrote, or Jake's recent TwiJack Project) that build relationships between the episodes. One thing I pointed out is that they force you to view the relationships within the world of the show, the world in which the characters live, which does not stop for their relationship.

That's not the world A Delicate Balance takes place in.

Now, Equestria is a cartoon world, but let me make what I feel is a more apt comparison: I've read, and loved, all of L.M. Montgomery's Anne books. They follow Anne Shirley (eventually Anne Blythe) from the time she's 11 until her sixth child is 18. As with A Delicate Balance, not much (usually) happens in a book-- most of the books are fairly episodic stories of life in a small town or smallish-city and the silly frustrating or sad or happy things that happen to people living there.

But, at the same time, things happen all the time in the books. In the book that covers most of Anne's love affair with Gilbert (Anne of the Island) she's attending college, she receives several marriage proposals of various degrees of seriousness, she helps friends with their love lives, she has a friend die, she has a story published, she spends a chapter learning about her parents, she hears funny stories about things that happened to characters from previous books... her life doesn't stop for 95,000 words while she decides if she loves Gilbert. She spends plenty of time on that, but it's in relation to what else is happening around her-- it's affected by those things, and those things affect her decisions with regards to him. (ETA: And the whole book is 75k... the length of a normal novel.)

To me, that's how you write a realistic, character focused, long term relationship. Not by retreating into character's heads but by showing how life happens and how they react, and how that changes the things in their heads. I respect what the author was trying to do with the fic, but as a work of fiction I think it ends up being just as "fanfiction-y" (in a bad way-- self-indulgent and meaningless) as a piece of fluff like A Fact for Twilight.

ETA: So what I'm saying is that when there are legitimate ways to achieve an effect, I'm not likely to recommend or enjoy a fic that ignores those to its detriment.

Really, this story needs an ensemble cast. It needs to tell stories about Ponyville through the lens of their relationship. This would allow for a slow progression of the relationship without forcing the characters to freak out to create drama. It does not do this.

One concept that I have a partial outline for that could tell a similar story is to have the two of them placed at the head of the local government. This would allow them to slowly grow together, but the everyday business of the story would be about dealing with Ponyville's problems.

Overall, my personal opinion is that A Delicate Balance is an okay story. It has its ups and downs like any other.

I started reading it for two main reasons, one: I found the TV Tropes page and was intrigued by the concept, two: I was still unsure that TwiJack was a viable ship and wanted to read a well received TwiJack story. At the length the story was when I first started reading, I think this was a pretty decent TwiJack story.

Unfortunately, the TwiJack aspect itself devolved into (for me) abjectly boring slice-of-life minutiae around the time that Twilight pulled on her relationship with Applejack, the exact same thing that Twilight in Romance Reports did with Cheerilee. Although Twilight has shown some character growth in the story since that point, that particular crisis showed that Twilight really hadn't had any sort of growth after over 150K words into the story.

In preparing my thoughts on this post, I took a long moment to think about exactly why I am still reading this story, and if I am completely honest, it is not for the TwiJack. You could swap literally any other relationship into the spotlight here and (with allowances made for different characters and situations) produce this same story. Nothing in it is really dependent on the TwiJack aspect itself.

What does keep me coming back chapter after chapter is the stuff happening around the edges. The explanations and applications of earth pony magic (as envisioned by Japanese Teeth), the CMC trying to get their cutie marks and get good grades in school, the relationship between Dash and Scoots, and probably above all Lyra and Bon Bon's marriage and partnership.

Would I recommend A Delicate Balance to a new reader? As a slice-of-life story covering day to day life of a diverse group of characters in Ponyville, yes. As an illustration of TwiJack as a ship, no.

Them's the breaks.

Hey guys!

NOTE: To all the inevitable TL;DR people, just skip to the summary at the end.

Okay, let me start off with one main thing: all of the criticisms of how the pacing is glacial, how nothing happens, how there's a ton of filler, etc... it's a completely valid criticism. The pacing is insanely slow and wordy, and I take a freaking long time to get anywhere. And yes, I am fully aware that lots of people have every reason to be incredibly bored by the lack of things happening. I'm not going to go and try to defend every aspect of the story, because I know full well that there are plenty of things that I could've done better. And I really really don't want to come across as making this one big "I meant to do that!" moment, though I know that it's going to sound like it. The closest thing I can offer as a "defense" for the story is this:

I never envisioned or expected this story to become any sort of definitive Twijack story. Heck, most of the reason I chose to use that pairing was simply on the basis that there weren't many Twijack fics and thus it would stick out more. It still absolutely baffles me that this is somehow still one of the most popular Twijack fics on the site for that exact reason. When I started it, I knew it was going to move forward at the pace of a narcoleptic tortoise, and I just assumed that most people would ignore it on the basis of how slow it moved.

In short, I specifically wrote it to fit in a niche, and the fact that it's so popular outside of that niche surprised even me. What's the niche? Well... I'll let 3303986 say it:

Ultimately I am a characterization whore. It's my bread and butter and I will often ignore flaws in other works to absorb it. It's why I enjoy Dean Koontz despite his being pretty much a shit writer. He writes interesting characters and I want to see what they're thinking and what they're gonna do.

It's the same thing here. No, it's not a particular interesting story, and it's slow as fuck. I don't care. I'm getting to see a detailed, in-depth, damn near real-time exploration of Twilight Sparkle and Applejack in a relationship. In fact I'd go so far as to say that the only way you could possibly enjoy this story is if you disregard it as a story entirely.

It is nothing but a character piece. It's like watching someone's home movies with a telepathy function. It's literally only about the journey, and the destination is absolutely irrelevant.

Like Jetstream, I am a characterization whore. As far as I'm concerned, character interactions are the life and breath of any story, and if the cast of a work has a fun dynamic, I will watch/read it even if nearly every other aspect of it is terrible. When I wrote A Delicate Balance I knew that the only people who would find it as enjoyable to read as I did to write were people who felt similarly about the characters.

If you've ever watched Seinfeld, there's an episode called "The Chinese Restaurant". The entire episode is nothing but the cast waiting for a table in a Chinese restaurant, in real time. That's it. There's isn't much of an ongoing conflict, and what there is is minor and/or happens mostly offscreen. For the most part, nothing of importance happens. Same thing with one of my favorite manga, Yotsuba&! It's literally a day by day account of the shenanigans that the title character (a hyperactive five year old girl) gets up to. No real story arcs, not a whole lot of development, just sitting back and watching stuff happen. I love that kind of thing, and if I could get away with it (and if I had the ability) I could write an equally long story in which even less happens, fully knowing that maybe a dozen people will enjoy it and everyone else will shrug.

Now, as to Bookplayer's post 3304108

I feel kinda obligated to respond to this, if only because she's generally considered the shipping author around here. First off, pretty much everything she says in her post is accurate. Compared to pretty much any other romance ever, it's slow, and very little happens. No, it's not very engaging; 90% of people who read it will probably find it slow and sluggish. But there's one thing I feel the need to nitpick:

To me, that's how you write a realistic, character focused, long term relationship. Not by retreating into character's heads but by showing how life happens and how they react, and how that changes the things in their heads.

While this is true, I feel compelled to point out that writing a "realistic, character focused, long term relationship" wasn't exactly what I was trying to do. When I first started writing, it was probably a larger proportion of my goal (hence why the earlier chapters tend to be better received), but it was never the goal of the story per se. That element is in the story, but it isn't the whole thing, and it never was. What it comes down to is this:

There are two tags on the story.

The story is tagged Romance, yes, but it's also tagged Slice of Life, and there's a reason I put that tag there. A Delicate Balance isn't a straight Fomance story; it's a Slice of Life story that has romance as a theme that ties the minutiae of day-to-day life together. I wouldn't consider it a good introduction to, or defense of Twijack as a pairing. It wasn't meant to be that. It was merely meant to be a sort of "What would happen if they happened to be together?" I stuck them together and then sat back and watched how life in Ponyville changed as a result. There's no real "arc", no ongoing plotline, and no real rising action, climax, or denouement. Is that way of looking at the relationship going to bore some people? Obviously, yeah. Do I regret choosing to write the story that way? Not really.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to go and tell everybody "YOU'RE READING IT WRONG!!!!11" or whatever. If you don't enjoy the story, you don't enjoy the story, and that's fine. It's definitely a niche story that found a much wider audience than I thought it would. The short version (after this stupid-long post) is this: I'm fine with the fact that the story doesn't appeal to a lot of people, I just wanted to clarify exactly what the goal of the story was (or at least, what it is now). It's just as much character study as it is romance.

Granted, even as a Slice Of Life piece, it's still lacking in a lot of areas. If I would write it again, there are tons of things I would change, and there are tons of things that I'm frustrated that I couldn't do better. It's not a perfect story by a long shot. But I greatly enjoyed writing it, and as the first thing anything remotely like this that I've written, I think I did pretty well, especially given that I was flying utterly blind (I barely ever read shipping/romance works fic or original).

So yeah, if you're still reading for some reason, thanks for listening. Hopefully I didn't make everybody more confused (though I probably did).

TL;DR Version:
This post 3304451 covers it pretty well here:

Would I recommend A Delicate Balance to a new reader? As a slice-of-life story covering day to day life of a diverse group of characters in Ponyville, yes. As an illustration of TwiJack as a ship, no.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I was going for.

3413252 Given that I wouldn't even consider the fic "best Twijack ever", I'm as confused as anybody. I think part of the weirdness might be from the fact that unlike most shipping fics, I never really had any intent to "sell" the pairing to anyone. My reasons for picking Twijack as the basis for the fic were honestly pretty utilitarian at first (though now it's my favorite ship), so I didn't have any intent to either become a definitive take on the ship, or to provide any sort of defense as to why it's so awesome. If people want something to point to as an example of why Twijack is best couple, this isn't a good example.

Anyway, the only bit of your initial post that I can really take exception to is this:

I hate to break it to you, but if you feel the need to go all Tolstoy with a plot like that, you probably need to go back to your outline and start over. I'm sorry people, but there's simply no reason to devote that much time and story to such a mundane concept.

I know that long word counts turn off a lot of people, and in this particular case a lot of it is unnecessary, but as I said in my earlier post, it's as much about just watching the characters as actually developing the relationship. Yeah, if you're there solely for the romance, there's a heck of a lot of padding, but in a way, the story is kind of about those little in-between things. Now, if somebody finds them (and by extension, the story) boring, there's really nothing I can do to change that. I wrote it specifically to appeal to people who (like myself) enjoy that sort of thing.

Up there, Bookplayer identified as "self-indulgent and meaningless". Self indulgent... yeah, I make no excuses about that. I wrote the type of story that I would personally enjoy reading. Meaningles... depends on the person. Obviously, a lot of people find it pointless. But as the story somehow got popular, apparently some people don't. No accounting for taste, I guess.

EDIT: Also, as everyone has no doubt notices, I tend to write a lot. The core is that when I have an idea, I have a tendency to try to include everything on the off chance that someone would enjoy reading it. Not the best tendency, I know.

I think one reason it seems too long is that some sections are very episodic and formulaic. One of them will begin to worry, they will talk with some of their friends, they will continue to work themselves up, and then they will talk to the other and everything's fixed. It undermines any character development because they don't actually stop creating these problems.

Also, I find the whole chocolate shop plot to be weird. She already has a job which she just oddly passes off to Spike. Then her studies are implied to be a job, which would usually come with a stipend. Even if she were to get another job, she has some pretty impressive qualifications, so she should be able to do better. It seems like you were trying to shoehorn Bon Bon and Lyra in.

3413751 Yeah, that's one of those things I'd probably handle differently if I rewrote the story. Initially I wanted to include them as an example of an existing couple who'd been through the stuff that Twilight was going through and could give her more perspective, but that plot thread got kinda sidelined.

3303846

I would like to post a counter argument. It is true that some readers out there are turned off by large word counts, but that is not always the case. In fact, when I start searching for a new work to read, I often will sort by highest word count, and work my way progressively down a list to a point.

At two hundred thousand words, I will definitely click on a story if the summary doesn't include the phrase "I suck at summaries." One hundred thousand words will take me a day to read, two at most if I'm busy. Twenty to forty thousand words is a fun diversion of nearly half answered(in my opinion) what if scenarios. Anything less than that and I am often left sorely disappointed in a story. What happens after this event? What happened before this event? What about the other characters?

Whether or not a story is good is entirely dependent on if people will read it and if they enjoy it, much like a painting is worth what people will pay for it rather than the materials used to make it. I will concede that the stories you suggested are all good stories. I've read and enjoyed each of them. But why discourage people from reading A Delicate Balance in favor of those stories?

A Delicate Balance is the fic that sold me on TwiJack as perhaps the most solid and believable mane six pairing, and if you read the comments on the story's comment section, you will see that I am not alone in that sentiment. I think that makes it a very strong card to have in our hand.

Rather than offer our fellow readers fics based solely on our own personal preference, we should stack the deck in our favor. We need to find out what type of story they like to read and slip it in their reading list like sweet, sweet caffeine.

They want to read a new shipping fic? Excellent, ask them what they like in a fic. High word count? Low word count? Amusing one shot of how the main characters get together? Amusing one shot of their problems after they get together? A tear-jerker that takes place at the end of one of their lives? Let me tell you what, buddy, you're in luck. Because we have got the fic for you.

I personally can't stand shipping fics that move super-suddenly for no apparent reason or seem to contrive drama for the sake of drama. The reason I love ADB as much as I do is, because some people might see it as boring, I see it as an entertaining look at how a relationship affects everyone around the couple as well as the couple. I see it as a realistic take on a mature and healthy long-term relationship that, while not the most exciting, still has compelling moments of simple conflict framed in believable, bite-sized pieces.

A Delicate Balance isn't my favorite TwiJack fic ever, I'l admit. It's not my favorite romance story ever. (That honor goes to this awesome story...) And I'm well aware of the fact that I tend to prefer stories that have a wider scope than just the couple involved. Show me how it affects the friends. Show me how it affects the family. I love that stuff more than sappy, kissy fluff. So that is part of why I adore ADB for the story it is. But I don't think it's boring, per se. A slower paced story isn't necessarily a boring one, just like how a fast-paced story isn't always exciting.

What's nice about A Delicate Balance is how the pacing never seems forced, is how the small moments can be made exciting by the way they're portrayed, is how the story itself proves that not every relationship needs to be a roller-coaster to be worthy of being read about. What's nice about ADB is that it's a wonderful introduction into shipfics because the romance is almost secondary by nature, and it's so much more complex than a formulaic story about a pony deciding to kiss their friend because [insert trope], like the kind that give MLP shipping a bad name for some skeptical readers. What's nice about ADB is that it shows so many sides of so many ponies, on top of showing so many different kinds of love in a realistic and well-intentioned way. A Delicate balance is much more than a romance story, and that's why I love it. That's why I believe it deserves its current standing; it's incredibly three-dimensional and insightful in ways I have yet to find in another story on this site.