Welcome, one and all, to the third edition of In Retrospect, in which a washed up fanfic author reviews his ten year old stories!

Join me as I relive the past, review my past work, give commentary, and desperately try to remember what I possibly could've been thinking at the time when I wrote this stuff! I barely remember any of this, and neither do you, probably! Get ready for today's issue, as we cover Feeling the Beat and Equestrian Hearts!

Let's dive right in.

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They probably dragged on a lot longer than they needed to. There was too much dialogue, and a lot of it was corny. I could have handled prospective romance way better and fleshed out each of the characters. There were plot elements I introduced that had no real payoff. If I really wanted to, I would redo it all.

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Hello, hey, hi, what's up, how's it going! It's me, Alexstrazsa, aka that guy who was deeply involved with the fandom but is now washed up, irrelevant, out of touch, and probably no one remembers him. That guy!

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Greetings, champion! Bet you didn't think I'd actually continue this, did you? Bet you thought I'd go and disappear for two years again? Honestly, wouldn't blame you, there's a bit of a precedent for it. But last time was fun, I wanna keep doing it! So, what's on the docket today?

Ah. I see.

Well, before I get into the meat of things, let's have a little page break, shall we? Wouldn't want to clog up your feed with paragraphs upon paragraphs of self reflection.

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Just got back home from Bronycon. Sorry to say that I didn't get many pics beyond some neat cosplays. I did, however, take copious notes, the better to offer as comprehensive a retrospective as I can.

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I'd say my Bronycon retrospective blog is long overdue, wouldn't you? Let's get to it.

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When I started writing this story, I envisioned it to be the first part of seven stories. Each focusing on one of the main 6 and their own struggles to try and find a way home, the seventh would have been a final showdown using what they had learned and brought back with them against Discord.

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Thinking about watching the whole series and reviewing it. "Now that we know everything that's going to happen in the series, how does this individual episode hold up?"

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I'm thrilled to announce that “Each Small Step” has been chosen for a Royal Canterlot Library feature! In addition to talking about the story, they also did an interview (my first ever ). It’ll be posted on Fimfiction on Friday, but you can read it right now on their website

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S1E5 Griffon the Brush Off

Completely unrelated to the episode, I hate that griffon is also spelled griffin and gryphon. I always have to check which the show used when writing a story with griffons.

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S2E15 The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000

Let me start by saying how much I hate long lines like what's shown in this episode (the Black Friday model). If 100 ponies spent 10 hours waiting in line, that is 1000 wasted hours. There's a clear alternative to this, and it's a lottery system. Everypony at the gates of Sweet Apple Acres at 9:00 draws a number, and lines up in that order to get cider. The same number of ponies get served, but no one has to wait a long time.

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Been looking at old links to places and things.

I remember a story from back when and I was digging into my libraries for it. I remember there was an offsite sister site to the series when it was written; the series was a too shippy for my tastes, but the other stuff in it was quite good. Turns out that the site went defunct, so I'm just going to put an archive.org link in here. It's not a full crawl, but it feeds the archivist I wish I had the internet to be.

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10 years ago to this day, I started publishing Friendship is Optimal to FIMFiction. What a decade it’s been for both the story and for AI progress.

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These 'another world' series' might frustrate me, but call me a fatass all you like, because this series is :

Sauce.

Right, let's get this down before I forget anything good.

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S1E9 Bridle Gossip

It's the first appearance of Zecora, who I expect was intended to be a recurring character. She provides a skill set the main characters don't have, and an outsider's perspective, so she serves an important role in the series. But a zebra with stereotypical attire (Mohawk and gold rings around the neck) seems like a rather, well, problematic design in 2010. (But not as much as an episode later this season.)

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S2E7 May the Best Pet Win!

"You know, each of the main cast has a pet, except for Rainbow Dash."
"What kind of pet would Rainbow Dash have?"

Curious if that's how this episode came about. It doesn't seem like something that was planned from the beginning.

Featured in this episode: Dun dun dun!

I have no idea why Rainbow Dash finds sleeping in trees to be comfortable. If I could sleep on clouds, I would sleep on clouds every single time.

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S2E1-2 The Return of Harmony pt. 1 and 2

Here's another episode that ended up being the first appearance of an important recurring character. It's interesting that, according to the Wiki, this episode was planned in Season 1. And in an alternate universe where the series ended after 65 episodes, Discord would just have been some villain that the heroes defeated and later reformed.

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S1E21 Over a Barrel

When I was young, you could still find old black-and-white shows like The Lone Ranger and westerns on TV. Plus, all the classic Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry cartoons still played. So I saw "cowboys and Indians" plots all the time growing up.

But it's a rather risky idea for writers in 2010 to recycle the trope.

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S2E5 Sisterhooves Social

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