Fancy Pants is euphoric. After a long decade in Canterlot, he has finally achieved the support of the masses and has risen to become a Minister of the Democratic Empire of Equestria. He figures that, with his new-found power, he can change the nation for the better.
Unfortunately, there's one obstacle before him. It is known as the Civil Service.
He's going to have a tough time.
Crossover with Yes Minister and its novelisation, by Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay.
Featured on Twilight's Library 25/3 - 9/4
Chapters (1)
For all of you who enjoyed this story, there's a spiritual successor in the works. You know, the usual Yes Minister style.
Yes Minister crossover? I approve.
Sir Apple is lucky this is Equestria and Fancy Pants he was dealing with rather than Westeros and Tyrion, he would have been a corpse rather than simply defeated.
Also reminds me of William Lederer and Eugene Burdick's the ugly american while it got some things wrong in the portrayal of US foreign policy in the 1950s other parts were spot on and show just how messed up the system was.
It's amazing who holds the power in situations like these. Some many are afraid of change they build up an tangled system to make sure that the smallest details will be scrutinized and only through self sacrifice can anything hope to grow. We want things to happen but nothing can unless we decide to take the time and effort to make an improvement.
Very nicely written.
Have this:
i.imgur.com/6MrWqNZ.png
And this:
i.imgur.com/LLVMeeZ.gif
And a feature recommendation.
In short, good show.
4118296
Oh, um... wow. Thank you!
4121692
You're very welcome
This is brilliant. How the hell doesn't it have more upvotes?
4157323
Thanks for the vote of confidence!
Refer this to GhostOfHeraclitus, he will approve and advertise this.
4167297
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have more publicity, but how exactly would I go about referring this? A PM, perhaps?
Not to mention it seems a little narcissistic to be recommending my own story to be advertised. Also a little shameless. But that could possibly be just me.
4172287
My dear fellow, this is Yes, Minister we are talking about here. The whole point is narcissism and shamelessness.
But no, this story deserves more attention, and I am certain that Ghost will love it. He's written an entire arc about the equestrian civil service after all. Just message him and see, he's one of the nicest people on the website.
4172311
Fair enough. I will send him a PM. In due course. In the fullness of time. When the moment is ripe.
Just kidding, I've already sent it.
EDIT: I can't believe I haven't said this already, but thanks for the advice. And the upvote, presumably.
I have added this story to my new recommendation group here.
4232980
Huh. Thank you!
*Grins* Very lovely. I can't wait to see more :)
4281416
Why thank you! Though this story is complete, there's a spiritual successor up here, if you are interested.
4281473 I am following it with glee I promise you.
Hey there, I’m alexmagnet from WRITE, and I’m gonna give you a review on this here horsefic. Now, normally I would tell you about how I break my review into sections and blah blah blah, but this time I’m going to do things a little differently. You seem to more or less know what you’re doing, so breaking it into sections hardly seems necessary. Instead, I’ll go through the fic and just point out issues and stuff in chronological order. From my first reading, it doesn’t appear that I’ll have that many technical issues, so that’s good.
Anyway, let’s get started.
>I’d set it to the tune of my favourite song, Beethooven’s Fifth Symphony
Okaaaaaaaay. Already I’m questioning the “pony-ness” of this fic. I get that you changed Beethoven’s name (slightly) to make him vaguely pony-ish, but I have a real problem with people using real world things like this in ponyfics. It feels out of place, and, frankly, somewhat lazy.
>“Good morning, Fancy!” She said cheerfully.
All right, let’s go ahead and get this out of the way early. You seem to have a pretty decent grasp of grammar, and yet, bafflingly, you consistently mess up dialogue tagging. There’s also one other thing that’s a little frustrating, but we’ll get to that later. First, lemme explain how dialogue tags work.
>”Good morning, Fancy!” she said cheerfully.
This is how your dialogue should look. The tag (said, yelled, whispered, etc.) is always lowercase since you’re attributing dialogue to a character. If you make it a new sentence, you’ve severed the attribution. Here are some more examples (of my own), where red means incorrect and green correct.
>”What are you talking about?” Asked Trixie.
>”What are you talking about what am I talking about?” responded Twilight.
>”You just said you were my father,” said Trixie.
>”Yeah, and?” said Twilight.
>Trixie shook her head, saying. “That doesn’t seem physically possible.”
See the pattern here? When you’re punctuating dialogue, if you plan on using a tag, then you need a comma between the tag and the dialogue. If you’re using other punctuation, like an exclamation mark or a question mark, then you leave the comma out, but the tag remains lowercase, since it’s still part of the same sentence. Something like this:
>Twilight chuckled. “Oh, Trixie, physics has nothing to do with it.”
Is acceptable since, in this case, “chuckled” is not a tag. It’s just an action that, when followed by dialogue, functions the same way as a tag, letting the reader know who’s saying what. Moving on...
>“There’s a letter from you from the government.”
Unless FP sent himself a letter from the government, I believe you mean “for”.
>“So… then… I really won the election of the Democratic Empire of Equestria?” I ventured.
Given that he was only elected Minister of Administrative Affairs, it hardly seems like he “won the election of the Democratic Empire of Equestria”, ignoring, for a moment, that you can’t both be an Empire and Democratic. Also, I realize that we don’t need to know that FP was running for office to understand the story, but you literally just dumped us in with absolutely no explanation whatsoever of anything. Canonically, FP seems to be a wealthy business man, at most, so this feels a little out of left field.
>I leapt out of bed. “What ministry am I getting?”
...Excuse me? In what democratic society do you run for office, but not know what you’re running for? How the hell would this even work? You run a campaign and give speeches about… I guess everything and just hope “they” assign you to the ministry you wanted?
>I reached out with my telekinesis and retrieved it.
The mental image this conjures is disturbing, to say the least. I’d recommend not drawing attention to unicorn magic unless necessary.
>Please be at the palace at 8am today for further details.
Good christ, they send him a letter the same day he’s supposed to be at work for the first time? Either the people working there are assholes, or mail gets delivered really damn early.
>After all, first appearances in Canterlot tend to be particularly important. Especially when it’s the first appearance one makes as a Minister.
Needs a comma before “Especially”, as this is a dependent clause subordinate to the clause about appearances.
>Two-faced little-
Ah, here’s the other issue I was talking about earlier. See, when you cut off dialogue, narration, or thoughts like this, you use a dash, not a hyphen. Hyphens have very specific uses, and none of them include breaking a sentence like this. Now, you have two options for dashes. You can use either an en dash or an em dash, it pretty much doesn’t matter. However, if you use en dashes, then they need to be spaced, whereas em dashes are not. For example:
>Two-faced little— (em dash)
>Two-faced little – (en dash)
These characters can be generated by pressed Alt + 0151 and Alt + 0150 respectively.
>There were only a few who enjoyed such extensive publicity - the royal family
Same thing goes here. When you use a dash like a comma, to separate parenthetical elements, you don’t use a hyphen.
>From what I remember, they were my competitors in the recent election. I smiled at them.
How many ponies ran for this (or I guess any) office?
>She hoofed a copy of today’s news to me
Oi… don’t do this. Don’t needlessly ponify words. You can use “handed” just fine, and if you really don’t want to, then try another word, like “passed”, just anything but “hoofed”. It’s such an ugly, unwieldy word.
>I read the headlines: New Minister’s Fancy.
Really? He gets elected to some low-level bureaucratic managerial position and makes the headlines?
>“So, how do you feel about getting a new Minister?” [...] “... Yes, Sir Apple.”
I don’t know how I feel about this whole section. It feels rather out of place considering throughout the entire rest of the fic, we only see things from FP’s perspective. I think you do a pretty decent job with characterization, so you don’t need this to show that Apple Bee is a dick and Woolly (which is a terrible pony name, by the way) is a tool.
>“...”
Yeah, don’t do this either. If you want to show someone being silent, say they were silent. Just having an ellipses in quotations is lazy.
>He was unusually flowery with his language.
I mean… he’s not really that flowery. He’s a bit wordy, sure, but flowery implies something different.
>“... Yes…”
I’ve noticed that you use a lot of ellipses, perhaps more than are necessary. In this case specifically, you should only use one set. Anymore is just overkill.
>And if the rumours of the lack of cooperation between the Civil Service and Ministers were true…
And that’s another thing. If you must use non-standard punctuation in narration, please don’t use ellipses. There’s really no reason for it.
>It was painfully obvious. Literally.
>How thoughtful of them. “They shouldn’t have.” I replied.
You sort of switch back and forth between italicizing FP’s thoughts, and not doing that. Pick one and stick with it, but don’t flip-flop back and forth.
>“A noble cause, Min…” He paused.
Nope, you don’t use ellipses to cut off dialogue. Use a dash instead.
>After all, Rome wasn't built in a day."
Oh, come on… Now you’re not even trying. At least with “Beethooven” you made a vague attempt at making it more “pony”, but this is just lazy.
>This has been an immensely fulfilling day.
Wrong tense, boyo. Should be “This had been an immensely fulfilling day.
>I'm not going to be later than Sir Apple today.
Again, wrong tense. “I wasn’t going to [...]
>How did these Civil Servants always manage to be so early?
I feel pretty sure that you don’t need to capitalize “civil servants”, though, I suppose you could if you really want to. This is more an aesthetic choice.
>There were several more muttered echoes of “yes, congratulations”.
“yes” should be capitalized.
>“So, Night Light, what Ministry are you heading?”
I assume this is the same Night Light as the fanon name for Twilight’s dad, in which case… what? Twilight’s dad is a Minister? I mean, I guess you could do that, but it seems like an odd choice. Easier to just make it another OC.
>“Caesar, here,” [...] “is in charge of Economy.”
If this is a joke, then good on you, because it’s a pretty good one. If not… welp.
>The level of complexity of his speech certainly mirrored my Permanent Secretary’s.
Again, it doesn’t really feel all that complex. He’s speaking more coherently than most politicians.
>He paused inexplicably.
I’m not really sure what’s inexplicable about his pausing.
>much of this paperwork are copies of documents and minutes of relevant meetings
Should be “is copies”
>“Morton’s Fork.” He said.
*Sigh*... if you want to know my issue with this, refer to the comment about “Rome wasn’t built in a day”
>He persisted doggedly.
This is something I’ve started to notice a lot in this fic. You have loads and loads of sentences that follow the exact same structure of: [noun] [verb] [adverb]. It comes up far more than is necessary, especially since adverbs are literally the Devil. You should use them as sparingly as possible since there are much better ways to give the same feeling that an adverb does that is less lazy.
All right, so I’ve finished reading for a second time and given all the basic comments I feel like giving, so now let’s move on to more general comments about the story as a whole. Contrary to what you may be thinking given all my comments (which, trust me, are far less numerous than usual), I actually quite liked this story. It’s short, but fun, and it’s got a nice beginning, middle, and end, with clear conflict and resolution. I would say that the ending came a bit quickly and easily for my tastes, but it’s a minor complaint. I suppose the larger issue is that the middle started to really sag after a while.
Anyway, let’s talk about characterization for a sec. I thought Apple Bee and Woolly were really well done, and I liked them quite a bit, even though I’m about 90% sure they’re just ponified characters from Yes, Minister (which I have only an incredibly basic knowledge of). Blue Blood, on the other hand, felt wildly out of character, which you tried to explain, but really it wasn’t enough to make me believe BB would do a 180 in terms of character. People, and by extension ponies, don’t do that. FP, likewise, didn’t really feel like FP, though that’s somewhat excusable given his lack of real characterization in the show. For what it’s worth, FP felt like he could’ve been literally anyone random OC and it wouldn’t have mattered.
Similarly to the FP thing, there’s nothing particularly “pony” about this story. Again, I have not seen, nor read, Yes, Minister, so I don’t know if this is true or not, but it certainly feels like you just took the same story and made all the characters ponies. There’s nothing to really suggest that this story couldn’t have taken place in Britain, for instance. All the pony stuff felt rather inconsequential and so it hurt my enjoyment of the fic in the long run. Like I said, I liked the fic, but I think that might be more due to the source material you’re referencing and less to whatever originality you added to it. However, if my assumptions are incorrect, and this is only vaguely related to the source material, then I apologize and say good work, because this is fairly decent.
Oh, and there’s one more thing before I wrap this review up. Throughout the fic, I encountered lots of talking heads, which is basically when two or more characters have lots of dialogue but little to no action. There were many instances where FP and Apple, for example, would talk at length with almost no action to break it up. Now, you can do this occasionally, and in small doses, but it ended up feeling like more than half the fic was talking heads. So that’s another issue you could work on.
Anyway, that about wraps up this review. Closing thoughts are that this fic is not bad, but there is much that could be improved upon, not the least of which is making it more relevant to MLP in general.
-alexmagnet, WRITE’s resident Trixie fanboy
I was delighted to come across a crossover like this, but also a little bit worried as to how well it would be done. I think you made a very good go of it. Fancy Pants is the obvious choice for the Jim Hacker role, and I felt that you grew into the writing as the story went along; I certainly found the second half better than the first.
The language, which is of course crucial for a Yes, Minister-based fic, was very nicely done. There were a few small lapses (mostly Americanisms such as "gotten" and "paycheck") but they were sufficiently rare not to cause any real annoyance. The incorrect speech tags were a much bigger distraction; it's a shame to see that in an otherwise accomplished story, since it did detract from the fic's quality a little.
I thought you did excellently with the Sir Humphrey and Bernard roles. "Sir Apple Bee" was clever! I particularly enjoyed the final part of the story, with
HackerFancy Pants managing to get one over on his Permanent Secretary. That really did feel like an episode of Yes, Minister with ponies. (It reminded me a little of the end of "The Skeleton in the Cupboard", one of my favourite episodes.)I'd say that it was a courageous decision to write this crossover, but that could be misinterpreted! What I wills say is that I enjoyed it, and that I've put "Yes, Princess" on my Read Later list to, er, read later.
4300390 I know I'm replying to an old comment, but:
This is accurate for British politics. You get elected as an MP, and if your party wins the election only then does the Prime Minister decide whether you get a job, and if so which one. You really don't know until then; The Usurper is spot on here.
There are a few other things you criticise which are, in fact, simply parodying the original Yes, Minister's style, but I won't bore you by listing them all. Suffice it to say that the show really is very talky, and that that's part of its charm; a quickfire, snappy fic would not fit this particular crossover at all.
4772468
Why thank you. I do realise that errors exist within the script, but nowadays with important exams coming up and lots of other things to attend to I never seem to be able to find the time to correct them. I'll get around to it at some point, in due course, in the fullness of time, when the moment is ripe.
As for Americanisms, well, not being British (or living anywhere near Britain for that matter; just in a Commonwealth country) I must confess to not being as familiar to the proper British way of speech as I should be.
All in all, I do feel that I've improved since I wrote this story, even if only a little. Unfortunately I haven't put up any new chapters for any of my stories recently, Yes Princess included, but I plan to do so as soon as this storm of exams pass. It's only a matter of time. Onward!
"Almost all government policy is wrong... but frightfully well carried out." - Sir Humphrey
4773827 Exams? More important than ponies? What madness is this, sir?! Ahem... as far as Britishness goes, I think you did a better job than I would writing, say, a West Wing story. If I weren't English myself, I might easily have missed the tell-tale signs. I suppose it's a bit like Fancy Pants in "Sweet and Elite": his VA was remarkably good at doing an upper-class English accent, and I can only remember two or three words in the whole episode that weren't quite right for an Englishman, er Englishstallion.
So, better I guess, still doesn't explain how ponies got in touch with ancient real world Greeks and their form of governance but maybe it's explained instory.
Will read.
Wow, this is swell (even after reading alex's thoughful review). I'm horrible at comprehending with politics! How did you even come up with this sort of idea?
6262343
Haha, blame it on reading Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister too much. That, and being way too cynical for my own good.
6272995 Are those stories similar to yours?
6273249
Heh, it would be more accurate to say that mine is similar to theirs. They are written in a pseudo-journal format, as is one of my stories that follows in the same vein (and is sort of a sequel to this story, in a way). The biggest difference between my stories and those books is the quality of writing, which in the novels is probably thrice as good as mine.
6277249 True true, novels are classics.
A 'Yes, Minister' crossover? I have got to read this. I know all about the suffering ministers go through, believe me.