If the title doesn’t give you enough clue as to what you’re gonna get, you’d better brush up on your skills of implication.

It’s Tricksy is the bowl of peanuts, the ham sandwich, the cheesy fries to chase down that vodka-and-soda and that small, funny yellow drink with an umbrella (which is which is up to your interpretation), and is easily the easiest to appreciate in this round’s recommendations. You may know Ezn as the guy who wrote Long Distance, which tackles the rarely-explored issue of dragonfire; the writing chops which carried that particular story through serve well when it comes to Trixie and zebras flinging rap at each other. Well, not rap per se, but rhymes with a tone suspiciously fitting of rap. Totally unrelated fact: I dislike most rap. You’d think it odd, but it’s pretty hard to fill in the gaps between rounds without the use of uninspired run-of-the-mill beats an audible drumline. And yet Ezn does it, just enough to keep it all together.

No, this isn’t Epic Rap Battles in prose. It’s better. Not hard, since most rap sucks, but...

See, what this story has going for it is a perfect length. Admittedly, it’s not the first thing that comes to mind when you think “praise”, but knowing when and where to end is pretty consarn vital for flash fiction such as this. The pulse of the story is often the novelty of the idea, and you’ve got to lay it down soon as it stops beating.

Oh, also, Trixie isn’t a whining sob-story who demands attention and acts bipolar with every scene break. Did I mention that? Because I particularly liked that, and it’d be nice if there were less “oh poor Trixie, come and cry in my comment section” stories.

All in all, give it a whirl. It’s not ruby, but it’s at least pearl.

Girl, I got words for days, I'm a certified dictionary and thesaurus
I'll be bringing fresh rhymes long after you start to bore us

As the legendary Reverend Run once said, “It's tricky to rock a rhyme to rock a rhyme that's right on time; it's tricky!”, and it is indeed... tricky. But, despite the obvious challenges associated with dropping mad beats, Ezn has shown us that he not only has the ability to thrown down with the best of them, but he can also make an entertaining story out of it to boot. It's Tricksy stars none other than, you guessed it, Trixie (best pony) and a lowly Zebra with a penchant for rhymes (who is not Zecora). If the idea of a rap battle featuring the Great and Powerful Trixie, and a crowd of zebras providing the, 'Oh, snap!'s and the, 'No she didn't!'s, done in a style eerily reminiscent of In Living Color's The Dirty Dozens, with Trixie sitting like Ed O'Niell atop her throne of verbal smackdown doesn’t appeal to you, then you are a person that I never want to meet, so you can go ahead and stop reading this review right now.

For those of you still left (which better be all of you, so help me Krishna), lemme give you a quick rundown of why this fic is so funny, awesome, and kickass that it makes me want to shout to the lyrical gods, screaming my love to the heavens like that guy on 34th street, you know the one, because apparently I haven't filled my quota for references yet, which frankly is bull because, c'mon, who else is gonna make references to Ed O'Niell's work outside of his Married with Children fame?

Anyway, what makes It's Tricksy so appealing, and entertaining, is how accessible it is. According to Ezn's note, Trixie being a dope ass rhymer is apparently part of a larger story, but no knowledge of that is necessary to enjoy this fic. It's quite short, only about twelve hundred words, and that's the perfect length. This is a fic that knows exactly how long it has before it wears out its welcome, and it never starts to drag or be anything other than wonderfully entertaining. The story is a simple one, but that also works in its favor. Ezn doesn't have try and force some kind of hackneyed story to get us to believe that Trixie would have a rap throwdown with a zebra. It simply happens and we, as the audience, accept it for what it is... awesome.

I don't really know what else to say about this fic. It's short, funny, and not a goddamn sadfic (which is apparently what 95% of all Trixie fics are). It's kinda like The Other Guys of comedy fics, enjoyable enough to be remembered, but not quite funny enough to be a 'classic', which is not necessarily a bad thing. For what it's worth, Ezn manages quite a lot in a little over a thousand words, and as he proved with Long Distance he has a talent for writing, especially dialogue (at least in the case of It's Tricksy). Even if you hate Trixie, and you hate zebras, and you hate rap, and you hate battles, then you should still read this if only to see how to do a comedy fic without the use of silly slapstick humor. So go put on your laughing pants and have a quick read of Ezn's It's Tricksy.

A rhyme is a rhyme is a rhyme,
But you've got to keep it in time.
The meter, the stress, the words coalesce
To something unique and sublime.
When speaking the words of your heart,
Remember this musical art.
For form is to matter what cake is to batter;
Don't put the horse after the cart.

It's Tricksy is simple and funny,
As sweet as a comb full of honey.
Wait—that's imprecise, so I'll try it twice—
As sassy as Angel the bunny.
Its strength, as you've no doubt been told,
Is ending before it gets old.
It opens up quick, it's done in a tick,
And just like that, Trixie's been trolled.

There's not much to say beyond that,
Though often the meter falls flat.
Attention to meter would make this fic sweeter...
Do kids today still call things ‘phat’?
Now when you go write your own fic, see,
Remember the errors of Tricksy.
Don't write rhyme, write song, as bold and as strong
As The Great and Powerful Trixie!

And now, a reply.

Most of the comments on the story itself are part of a debate about whether Trixie (as portrayed in "Boast Busters") is sympathetic or not. It's a funny feeling getting a comment that fills up your screen and then immediately realising it's not even about the story. Still, those guys faved, and I'm pretty chilled about derails (some of my favourite stories are trainwrecks). In light of that, it was great to get some lengthy reviews!

I should have known my hokey "sounds rightish if you say it in a certain way" rhymes would not impress a real poet like Nietszche. Rereading the story, I totally, totally get his criticism, and I'm afraid it probably applies to most of the zebra dialogue I've written. I make it rhyme, then I read it aloud and see if it sounds right, but sometimes I warp the speeds of different words in favour of it sounding right. I'm no poet.

alexmagnet, my other story about Trixie being a rapper is actually shorter than this one. Don't read it though -- it's catastrophically silly.

Getting stories the right length is important to me. I love a good bit of flashfiction, a genre that's a little maligned in this pony world, if for the completely understandable reason that many stories hovering around 1k words are there because they were published as soon as the author wrote their first ever one thousand words of fiction (and that's good for the author, absolutely, but not really a fun thing to read). It doesn't help that EqD has the (again, understandable) policy of only accepting one-shots longer than 2.5k words. Longer often is better, but if you've got one joke you need to tell it and run the hell away. Some ideas just can't support that many words, and in my mind a punchline fic that runs too long before the punchline is the cruelest thing you can do to your readers (a punchline fic that runs too long after the punchline will ensure you don't have any more readers).

Back in 2011, I was going to write a more serious story about Trixie visiting Zebrica, performing there, and ultimately discovering the different way zebra culture treated her act. I wrote a page and a half of her walking through town, setting up, starting her performance... and then I realised I didn't have anything for her to do, and so the fic sat.

About a year later, I was reading Homestuck and I heard some dude rapping somewhere in my building. Somehow, that thought collided with my abandoned Trixie fic. Thankfully, it also collided with Kurt Vonnegut's fifth rule ("Start as close to the end as possible") so instead of piling more words on my year-old trainwreck, I said #YOLO and got right into the action. Setup is all good and well if you make it interesting, but my number one rule of writing is "no-one wants to read stuff that is boring", and my number something-else rule is "setup should be proportional to pay-off (unless that it's not is the joke, and then get out the flame-retardant shield)". One of the tools we fanfiction authors have is the ability to presuppose a lot of knowledge in our audience. It's a tool that can be used incorrectly, of course (you can kill a man with a hammer), but that the audience already knows about Trixie and Zecora played a vital role in keeping my drive-by of a fic away from the fuzz.