With an overwhelming majority of nine votes (the same as Schemering Sintel's winning tally, incidentally), the second story to be read and discussed by the Golden Oaks Book Club will be:

Today is Princess Twilight Sparkle’s 500th birthday! And her most faithful student, an earth pony with a familiar name, can’t wait to celebrate!

At 13k words, readers have seven days to finish the story before we open up discussion in the Skype group, which you can join by shooting ToixStory a PM. If you do not have a Skype account, or do not wish to join, this thread will also be opened after seven days from today for discussion.

We also encourage commenting on the actual story. Draw the author's attention that this is happening: I'm sure they will appreciate it.

Happy reading, everyone!

Edit: Thread is live! Discuss away.

3686854 I enjoyed this one when I read it way back when, and was happy to revisit it. We get a look at an older Twilight and her new role as a teacher and a lot of cuteness in the form of Smarty Pants. I loved that Smarty was tied in as Pinkie's descendant, as I was thinking along those lines when she was introduced. I started on the sequel, so I have a bit of an idea as to why Cadance's personality seems to have changed, but I won't spoil that just in case anyone else wants to read it.

The statement that Celestia and Luna are playing"hide and seek" made me wonder why they would leave, but it adds nicely to the background history and change in both Twilight and Cadance. All in all, I greatly enjoyed it.

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I really like how it feels quite true to the show - it's one of the strongest points of the story. The fact that she said "playing hide and seek" instead of anything else is a testament to that. It's got a lot of awareness of what makes the show so nice to watch.

I think my main issue with the story as a whole is that some of the gags fell flat for me, and ended up making the story feel a little bit clunky where there are entire passages dedicated to a single joke which doesn't hit home. I can't really point out a specific instance of this, it just kinda felt that way.

I love love love the characters, though. It's all very cute, and funny, and generally heartwarming, with some nice development of the world in general - the kind of story I really like.

3686854

I have to say that this story is one of the best portrayals of an immortal Twilight I've seen. She's not a ball of misery, or overly sad. She has her sad moments, but she has mourned and moved on, made new friends, but never really tried to escape the legacy they left behind.

Instead, she's embraced it and followed their descendents. I loved how this portrayed her as a teacher, and how Smarty Pants feels like Twilight herself must have felt at a younger age. I find it interesting that she was never mentioned to have had a mate or a pairing at any time, or any descendants of her own. Perhaps it's a bit of distance that she must keep in order to retain her sanity. Loving too closely and losing...

Anywho, it remains a wonderful story that had me hooked from the first chapter to the last and let me forget, for a moment, that I was reading a story at all.

3720199

I really like how it feels quite true to the show - it's one of the strongest points of the story. The fact that she said "playing hide and seek" instead of anything else is a testament to that. It's got a lot of awareness of what makes the show so nice to watch.

Agreed. The playing hide and seek bit... it's hard to tell if she's talking down to Smarty Pants and protecting her from a hard reality, or if even she does not know. It's a bit of mystery that I liked, and hope to see answered in the sequel (currently passing through it somewhat slowly.)

The part I liked most was the show-quality feel to the writing. As though this were something that could have plausibly happened in the show itself - were it to dabble in alternate timelines and possible futures. I'm kinda hoping the comics do a little more exploration of what lies beyond Star Swirl's Mirror of Multitudinous Multiverses *

*my name for it.

3720259

Agreed. Another thing that annoyed me about some of the comedy is that some of the gags didn't really feel like show-style humour.

3720265

In particular, Cadance felt rather off from her show personality. Twilight still felt spot-on, but Cadance appears to have changed quite a lot more. Most of her jokes and gags felt a bit rougher, more Family Guy-ish, I guess. If that makes any sense. Not full frontal Peter, but definitely aiming in that general direction. They weren't completely off show style, though. Just...

I dunno. They felt weaker compared to Twilight and Smarty Pants' joint gags and interactions. Maybe it's because we didn't get to spend as much time with her, and it seems that Cadance has almost become her position as a goddess of love, rather than still somewhat tied to her past.

That may be because of the age of the story, too. If I recall, this one is post-season 3 and pre-season 4, before we got to spend more time with Cadance in a slice of life adventure with Discord.

3720259 I second the point on a happy alicorn Twilight. While it's not to say that she didn't mourn and doesn't miss her friends, too often do I see fics who pretend that she couldn't possibly go on. Will it be the same for her? No. But I believe that she would continue making friends throughout the years given the lessons she's learbed.

Besides, even if she went into super sad Twily mode, we all know that Pinkie would make it a part of her will that Twilight make new friends and be happy. It would be one last Pinkie Promise.

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First off, I'd like to begin this by saying that I saw this hit the feature box back when it was first published, although I ignored it at the time because any story that even hints at Twilight having an extended/indefinite lifespan doesn't tend to mesh with me. It has been said that Twilight "will not outlive her friends" by FiM show staff, and I am one of those rare kinds of people who take what someone says at their word.

While I was busy reading other Adventures like Sunset of Time, The Age of Wings and Steel, and the Time Loop Trilogy, Princess Twilight Sparkle's 500th Birthday was ripping up a storm in mid-2013, collecting large amounts of upvotes in a very short space of time. It died off and left the feature box soon enough... but then I started noticing it in popular stories again back in March 2014, when the second sequel came out. Its ratings almost doubled, racing from 511 to 926 in the space of eight days.

Still I paid it no mind. I had no interest in another "Immortal Twilight" story. I had better things to read (and write, by that time).

Finally came the time when I could ignore it no longer: a day only weeks ago when it was voted to be the next story read and discussed by the Golden Oaks Book Club. Well, having no choice, I decided to dig in and brace for the inevitable "woe is me my friends are all dead" story.

I regret ever having put it off for so long. This story, right from the get-go, turned my expectations on their heads and shook them harder than Elvis' pelvis. Somehow the narration already had me laughing from the first few paragraphs; it's written very erratically and repetitively in a similar vein that you might expect Pinkie Pie to tell a story. Chapter one basically kept me in a constant (if gentle) laughing fit as poor Princess Twilight Sparkle was blasted awake by the enthusiastic yell of an overly energetic filly, which leads into some quite ridiculous shenanigans.

The first thing that surprised me was a result of the synopsis. It led me to believe, with these words:

her most faithful student, an earth pony with a familiar name, can’t wait to celebrate!

that the filly described might be a "reincarnation" of sorts of one of Twilight's friends (most likely Pinkie Pie I thought, given the birthday party theme of the story). Nope. Instead, we get a boisterous little girl named Smarty Pants, although her attitude reeked (in a good way) of Pinkie Pie regardless of the unexpected name.

As I read, I found it much easier to enjoy what was happening before me. A sad, mopey, I-miss-my-best-friends Twilight could not possibly be any further from how she was depicted. After finally getting past the events of Twilight waking up in chapter one (in which Twilight challenges Smarty Pants to a drinking competition with hilarious results), I got to see a vastly different Twilight than I expected in chapter two. As she laughed and mucked around with her hyperactive student, it was clear that she had the mental fortitude to look past her friends' 430-year-prior departure from the world. I saw a true Princess of Friendship—one who had accepted her friends' deaths a very long time ago and strove to make new ones with the passage of time, though she had never truly forgotten them. This was incredibly refreshing to me on a personal level.

Smarty is an interesting character in her own right: a descendant with Pinkie, Applejack, and Fluttershy's lineage in her blood, she reads in leaps and bounds like she wants to jump off my computer screen and spring right into my face with a hasty apology before tearing up my bedroom. She's got as much energy as the sun, she refuses to back down from a challenge, yet when she slips up and breaks something valuable (or takes a bubble-bath and uses up an entire bottle of shampoo, containing an active ingredient found only in a flower that blooms but once per century) she is meek and overly apologetic, despite Princess Twilight reminding her that she has the power to fix things with magic.

An innumerable amount of d'awwws later, I find Twilight explaining to Smarty Pants why exactly she chose her—an Earth pony—for a student. Here is where the fic shines and the bonding between Princess and Pupil thrives. Smarty is full of questions and can hardly sit still the entire time, yet Twilight is perfectly patient with her as she has been throughout the fic's duration. Smarty Pants (and I) learning about her heritage and what exactly makes her so special brings about a heartwarming moment that I rarely experience on such levels.

Of course, the story is not without its glitches. Scattered here and there are misuses of apostrophes, misspelled words, and awkward sentences too awkward for even the Pinkie-esque narration to cover up. The beginning felt weak, like it was trying too hard to justify the non-existent comedy tag. The joke of Twilight waking abruptly and hitting her head as she sits up just takes too long. There's a fair bit of unexplained stuff too, like where Celestia and Luna went (the explanation given was "playing a long long game of hide and seek), why Twilight and Cadance (who didn't really need to be involved in this story—more on that in a bit) are the only rulers left, and how in the hay is Rarity still alive? While these are all sorta small things that may or not be important in the grand scheme of things, there was something that really rubbed me the wrong way.

The epilogue. Yes, we were shown Twilight plotting to get Cadance back sometime for sending Smarty Pants with a birthday cake to wake her up at 2am, but really, that was sort of funny by itself. Yet in the epilogue, Cadance finally appears as a character—and has undergone many radical changes, like taking up smoking, being a prankster, and being generally bored with the way things are. There's a little bit of narration to build up an OC adviser, but why bother when we're not going to see her again? She's completely forgettable (I legitimately cannot remember her name now). And when Twilight and Smarty Pants crash her epic speech prepared for Hearts and Hooves Day in front of tens of thousands of ponies, Cadance yells something about getting drunk. In my honest opinion, this story would have been perfectly fine (if not better) without the epilogue at all. While Twilight had grown and changed and experienced much, she was still unmistakably herself through the whole story. Cadance might as well have been impersonated by Chrysalis (or whoever rules the hive ~480 years after the events of ACW) again for all I recognised her—it just wasn't her. Perhaps a separate, in-universe story dedicated to her transformation over time would be prudent.

For being one of the cutest stories I've ever read (because adowabu Smarty Pants), and depicting Immortal Twilight in a far greater, more positive light, I award this story a grade of 8/10. It deserves its rating and its place on my faves shelf... but I can't help feeling that I was cut a little short of something. I don't know.
Perhaps I'll have to try the sequel sometime—it may very well hold the answers to some of my remaining questions.

3722869 I will admit that I was a bit leery of the 'immortal Twilight' bit as well, for the same reasons as you stated as well as those addressed above. Immortals in fanfiction often have a dismal mindset about their longevity or get Mary Sue'd to a ridiculous degree. I'm rather pleased this one took neither route.

3722869 I liked the Slice of Life nature to this world's Twilight and how she takes on a maturity that is very in character, but is also welcomed. It was, as you said Cerulean, a refreshing change from Sad and Mopey Twilight.

But at the same time I wished the story could have gone far deeper into the world. Why did Celestia and Luna disappear for example? Where is Spike? I liked the story as a nice Slice of Life set in the future, but I also found it terribly limited...

Of course that changed when I read the sequel which basically answered all of my qualms, but I digress. I do agree with your review Cerulean and I like the characters of Princess Twilight and Smartypants. Its just I like the sequel to this story better than the original because the original is rather limited in worldbuilding.

Hi folks,

First of all, thank you so much for reading my story and sharing this discussion with me. It means a lot that my first story is still generating discussion over a year later.

This story was the first I have ever written. This all started when I was bored at work one day (at the time I was a technical writer at AT&T), opened up a notepad file, and just started writing.

I feel like I've learned a lot since then, and I hope to keep on improving, until I can eventually retire as a well loved author / professional Denny's patron.

I didn't really have a plan, at first. I just started writing the first chapter and published it as A completed one off, to see what folks thought. The first person to comment on it was a bit rough on it. But he offered to edit more of my writing in the future. Blood Lord and I have worked together as peer-writers ever sense.

I tried very hard to stay true to the show for Princess Twilight Sparkle's 500th Birthday. Well, as true as one can while exploring a far flung future. I love that it is portrayed as a world of stark contrasts. A world with its thrilling dangers and mundane goings on. A place where a pony could get a burger with friends a few weeks before fighting a demon hell-bent on world domination.

I agree with you on the jokes being long and drawn out. I was learning as I went. Turns out, visual gags are hard to pull off in a book, and the payoff usually isn't worth it.

This was written between seasons 3 and 4. Cadance wasn't very developed at the time. And I admit to using her as the butt of many a joke in my stories. I have nothing against her, she's just my go-to-gal when I need to tape a Kick Me sign to somepony's back.

I am working on the third story in this series. Which I beleive will be the third of five. And the Celestia/Luna disappearance will be fully explained in the fourth story. At least, that's what I have planned. My new job at Amazon is much more demanding than the old one at AT&T. Time will tell.

Again, thank you for your comments, your discussion, and for reading my story. It feels great knowing that you, for the most part, enjoyed it.

Peace like a river,

-Dan

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I admit to using her as the butt of many a joke in my stories. I have nothing against her, she's just my go-to-gal when I need to tape a Kick Me sign to somepony's back.

You would get a real kick out of Aragon's A Hell of a Time then. The girl cops it from him so hard

We did like it overall. I daresay a good number of us will be reading the sequels

I totally failed to participate in any of the discussion on this, but I thought both it and 505th were excellent. Great suggestion/recommendation.

3725187 Incidentally, this is why I have been reading and commenting up a storm on the first two stories.