Howdy, folks.

So I’m sure a few of y’all have noticed the Cream of the Crop folder, with its modest collection of stories, and perhaps are wondering about how they ended up in there.

Well, it’s quite simple. The Cream of the Crop folder for Free Twilight Sparkle! is a collection of stories selected by the admins and contributors as their personal picks for the best of the best. This of course means it’s rather subjective, as personal opinions are rather personal. The only hardline rule we're following is that stories must be complete before they qualify.

So, as this is a personal spotlight of some of our absolute favorites featuring the Princess of Bookforts, this thread will let us admins and contributors highlight our picks if we so choose. I myself picked a single story for inclusion at the start.

bats’ pick for the Cream of the Crop:

The Homesteading by bookplayer

For their first home together, Twilight and Applejack wanted a house close to Applejack's farm and big enough for Twilight's books, with a little something special besides. They settled on the perfect place, one of the oldest barns on Sweet Apple Acres, and had it converted into a comfortable house for their little family. But when strange things start happening just after they move in, Twilight finds that she has a mystery to solve before she can really call her dream house "home."

My thoughts:

The Homesteading is my favorite story on this site. That honor has been mercurial for a while here and there, with things switching places based on my mood, but The Homesteading smashed through and is unquestionably my favorite. I have gushed about this story a few times before, but it truly hits everything I’m looking for in a story that I like. It’s a supernatural mystery of sorts that keeps you on the edge of your seat through the whole thing, with suspense, love, heartache, and catharsis along the way.

3024917

Oh fine. I'll toss a few into the ring.

Why? Not much to say...

Aside from it's TwiDash done incredibly different.

Hey, just trust me on this, yeah? I know what I'm doing. Most times.

~Skeeter The Lurker

Yay, I get to write a book report!

by kits
Twilight Sparkle prides herself on following and sticking to her plans, but she isn't as organized as everypony thinks. Her master list, the plan for her life, has an item that she has never been able to check off; and the time has come to fix that. How hard can it be? All she needs to do is go on a date and get a kiss.

While I haven't been poking around this site quite as long as some of the greybeards, I still managed to come across several bits of excellent stuff and I'm a rather voracious reader. I had a hard time limiting myself to a single excellent story that was really exemplary of Twilight Sparkle. I'm pretty comfortable with this choice though, Twilight's List.

The story started out as a simple contest entry, and was expected to only be about 15k words, tops. Fleshing it out fully ended up making it several months late, and over three times the estimated length. Yet, totally worth it.

We're given a straight forward premise: Twilight Sparkle loves checklists. She organizes her checklists with checklists. While some people might keep diaries of their lives, Twilight plans hers with a checklist. I should stop saying checklist so many times in a single paragraph.

What starts with a premise that seems simple and has been done in more than one story I've read, turns into an excellent exploration of not only Twilight's character, but how she views her friends. It takes the fairly naive young Twilight, fresh from Canterlot and still unsure about friendship, and gives us a look at the more romantic part of growing up that the show omits by necessity of rating and target audience.

Unsurprisingly, Twilight's romantic adventure being motivated by completing a simple checklist doesn't go over so well. Paraphrasing Kits' own words, this was written to be like a trainwreck where you keep wanting the characters to gain your insight and come out of the mishap better. It isn't a simple fluff piece designed to simply have magic ponies make kissy faces at each other. The participants act and react in a very believable way, rather than everything and everyone conveniently working out perfectly.

Not only is this an excellent story about Twilight, it is an excellent example of a romance story done right. It's an example of a story done right.

Hey look, I didn't even mention tacos once.

...

fuck.

Since everyone else so far has picked shipping stories (although a couple that are still to have blurbs written are not), I figured I should branch out a bit.

My pick for one of the best Twilight stories on the site goes to Eakin and Hard Reset.

I'll preface this round of gushing by saying that one of my favorite movies is Groundhog Day, so take that as you will.

Although this is a slightly darker take on the time loop premise (and on the MLP Universe in general), the story manages to use that premise to great effect and present believable consequences of living through the same day over and over again. The story certainly earns its Dark tag, but manages enough nuggets of humor to stay palatable even for someone like me who does not like dark stories as a general rule.

There are some references that might strike people as gratuitous (like Twilight going Lollipop Chainsaw with her bat, Home Run; as depicted in the cover art), and though your mileage may vary, they tickle me just right. My personal acid test for dialog and character is to imagine the voice actors speaking aloud in my head. Not only dialog, but thoughts and (in first person) narration. Hard Reset passes all three with flying colors.

If you want to join Twilight on a dark adventure to save Canterlot against overwhelming odds (and possibly take a few loops off now and then for sanity's sake), read Hard Reset. Also, there are a bunch of excellent sequels.

Alrighty, so I added several fics to the Cream of the Crop folder before I knew we were doing this whole justification thing. So now I look like a whore. So here we go. I've got FOUR :P

First up,

"Yours Truly", by Thanqol.

A whole mess of more eloquent people than I am have said plenty about this story. It's old, older than most TwiJack fics. It's even a pioneer (as far as I know) in the Letter-fic field.

I don't know that you can properly call this a seminal TwiJack work, because I haven't seen too many fics emulating it, but it's an important one. Before most people considered the ship viable, and certainly before it could ever be called anything close to popular, Thanqol showed us how it could be done.

"Best background pony" indeed. This is here because it matters.

NEXT!

"Que Sera, Sera" by Ponydora Prancypants

Ah those heady days between Season 3 and Season 4. Twilight was an Alicorn but we didn't really know what to do with that, and "Princess Twilight Sparkle" wasn't around to give us two-minute explanations of all the important shit. In the wake of "Magical Mystery Cure" came "Que Sera, Sera" which roughly translates (from Spanish) to "Whatever will be, will be."

Don't let the "Sad" tag scare you off. While this story has sad moments, and is overall melancholy, I'd hesitate to call it the kind of over-dramatic sadfic that Fimfic is all too famous for. What it really is, is an emotional look at how the world we know and love could have come to be. It is at its core a story of love and courage in the face of what you know can never be averted, only faced with dignity.

If they'd decided to end the show like this I'd have been okay with it, I think.

"In Memory Of" by Obselescence

Yeah, okay, this one really is sad. But read it anyway. Seriously, it's excellent.

This is a look into the future, at the notion that the march of time spares no one, no matter how great. Immortal god-beings and long-lived creatures notwithstanding, of course.

Honestly there's not much more I can say about this without spoiling it. It's one of the best fics I've read on this site. Just go read it, it's not super long.

"Spellbound Fireflies" by bats

Yeah, okay, this one might be me being a little bit of a whore. I'll make no secrets of the fact that I consider bats my favorite writer on the site, nor shall I apologize for it. That said, this is still probably the finest example of TwiDash I've read on the site, and it isn't even the 100% focus of the story. It is, instead, given equal screen time with a heartfelt exploration of the relationship between Scootaloo and Rainbow Dash.

bats gushes about Homesteading. Jake can't hold in his enthusiasm for Little Wonders. This here is my favorite story on Fimfiction. It's a more mature and established TwiDash, it's Scootadopt done right, it's clear that bats did his damned research on various educational techniques.

I loved this story enough to learn to make eBooks explicitly for the purpose of having one of it. It's awesome.

Now that Jet's posted all his at once and looks overzealous, I had two that I added, so here's the second one:

Friendship is Empathy by Trinary

Twilight Sparkle realizes that Rainbow Dash has been keeping a secret from her ever since the Mare Do Well incident. When she goes to confront her about it, she finds out more than she bargained for. And then Twilight reveals that she's been keeping something from her friends ever since the Royal Wedding. Now everything is out there; harsh words have been spoken and a once strong friendship hangs in the balance.

Sometimes, based on the way the show is written and the audience the show aims at, some of the more delicate parts of interactions between adults get sort of glossed over. It's not a downfall of the show, and it certainly doesn't make it a bad show, but everyone has that episode that they look at and say "This resolution makes me angry." I will not hide the fact that Mysterious Mare Do Well is the episode that pushes those buttons the worst for me, though at this point all the main characters get their time to 'shine' in the spotlight of kid-glove-mishandled moralizing.

Friendship is Empathy covers two of those, offering a mature and emotionally resonant take on characters hitting an emotional breaking point after hiding their hurt feelings for a little too long. I've heard this story can be polarizing to people, as both sources of hurt feelings can be reasonably interpreted in different ways, but if you go in willing to look at it from the perspective the story presents, you'll find a riveting story about two characters that love their friends dealing with the fact that their friends can hurt them without even meaning to, and where to go from there.

3033880 I wasn't a fan, but I suppose to each their own submission-wise. Could we do cancelled stories as submissions? Because I have one I would like to submit that will never be finished, but is good regardless.

If I had two I would like to submit, they would be Eternal and Equestria's Twilight

Eternal is a story that. It contains probably the best psychological sequences on the site, with the exception of Composure's dream sequence. Surreal symbolism tells you everything you need to know about a thousand year-plus lifetime, and it comes with one of my favourite Twilight portrayals ever. There is careful foreshadowing and subtle character development at every turn, with both positive and negative character growth coming about from Twilight and Celestia's attempts to explore their nebulous relationship. Celestia slowly grows more and more unhinged by her feelings of weakness and frailty in the face of her image of perfection and emotionlessness, as well as more and more open, kind and genuine. Twilight, meanwhile, deals with how loyal she is to her friends, and what their love means to her. She must suffer at every turn in an attempt to get back her first and greatest friend, and must battle her own feelings of inadequacy, obsession and impotence as she does so. Luna even gets in on the action, with her inequality with Celestia and sympathy for her sister's subtle pains developing slowly across the story. Rich character studies like this are why I keep coming to this site and checking the featured box each day.

Equestria's Twilight is essentially the opposite story. Instead of Twilight and Celestia working to unravel their psychological insecurities around each other and building a more healthy, stable mutual bond, Equestria's Twilight starts out with Twilight murdering Celestia and Luna's killer in revenge, and attempting to salvage the broken nation created by their deaths. Equestria's Twilight is a story of slow decline of the nation, with no theatrics or plot twists involved. It gleefully deconstructs Twilight's need for authority figures in her life, obsession with personal responsibility and idealistic outlook in the face of a new, bleak Equestria. Best of all, it doesn't exaggerate her flaws to be out of character simply to obtain its tragic results or attempt to shove ham-fisted morals down our throats, unlike tragedies like Boast Busted or Biblical Monsters. Unfortunately, something mysterious happened to the author at some point and we have not heard back from him in over a year, so it is assumed the story will never finish. That does not mean it is not very, very good. Equestria's Twilight is the reason I stopped bothering to read grimdark. None of the other grimdark stories I have come across worked nearly as hard in any regard as this one.

On a happier note, we're getting some great stuff here! In Memory Of, Yours Truly, Que Sera, Sera. Lots of great authors on the list right now.

Alright, I suppose I should throw something in. A number of my favorites have already been added by other people, but I feel it would be a shame to overlook this one.

Wild, Sweet & Cool by Kwakerjak

After reading a book by Spitfire's personal trainer, Rainbow Dash decides that the best way to get closer to her ultimate goal of joining the Wonderbolts is to add strength training to her practices by having one of her friends ride her. However, when she decides that Twilight Sparkle is just the mare for the job, the pegasus gets a bit more than she bargained for.

This was something I read very early on when I joined the site, and I remember it as being hilarious, well-written, and a good friendship story. And, of course, the premise of Twilight riding Rainbow Dash for part of her training is highly amusing. Keep in mind when reading it that it's pre-season three, of course...

--arcum42

I don't understand, does this mean only certain people in the group can decide if a story goes here and if so who?

7504872

Hi! Yes. Welcome to necroposting 101, where we educate you in reading the dates on posts as well as reading the contents of said posts.

As I'm sure you haven't noticed, the last time this thread was posted in was the magical space year of Twenty Fourteen, roughly TEN MILLION seconds ago. Now, this may not seem like a long time in the grand scheme of things, being many, many orders of magnitude younger than the age of the universe (however you count it, I'm not here to judge), but to those of us who are mere mortals, spinning round and round on this silly rock in space, it is quite enough time to render a simple thing as a forum post dead, dead, dead.

Waking the dead is so rude. Leads to horrible consequences. Ghosts, zombies, skeletons. You might even wake the sheeple. (Don't wake the sheeple.)

Anyway, now that the dead have shambled to life, allow me to quote a passage from the very first post of this thread:

Well, it’s quite simple. The Cream of the Crop folder for Free Twilight Sparkle! is a collection of stories selected by the admins and contributors as their personal picks for the best of the best.

Hoo boy, that's a lot of words. TEN MILL- I mean, a whole thirty five. I can see how it's difficult to decipher the meaning.

Anyway, I'm off to go find a shovel to fill in this thread's grave once again. TTFN: Ta Ta For Now.

7504884
So I missed the date part, OK? I just think the whole 'admins and contributors' wasn't that clear at first and now that I look at it I see that how I was wrong. You don't have to be rude about it.

7504890

I didn't have to, but snark is kinda my thing, so I did choose to, yes.

7504893
Well I think you went to far with it this time. Please think about it a bit more in the future.

7504899
Only if you promise to read the dates and contents of threads before replying to them~

You just won't let that go will you. OK sure, I'll keep an eye out for it.

7504908
I think you went too far not reading the first post in the thread that explained exactly what you were confused about.

I also think that if this was such a difficult thing to understand, then you're judgement on how far others have gone isn't particularly valuable.

But yes, by all means. Claim others are rude for being snarky with you when you've been rude and necroposted a seven year old thread. Clearly that doesn't deserve a little mockery. Too far indeed, princess.