Ponyfic Roundup 230: No Matter Where I Go, I'll Never Find a Better Prize

I think I may have found a new record-holder for the number of character tags on a single story. (There wasn't an upper limit in the old days.) That's The Corporate Watering Hole, an unfinished fic written by Rainbowflash way back in December 2011. This story has fifteen character tags. Since it's unfinished, it won't get reviewed here, which saves me the problem of trying to format its headers!

Read it Later story count: 292 (-3)

Another pathetic two-story week, but this time I actually have a proper excuse, which is that I've been preparing Christmas presents. Okay, that's not much of a proper excuse, but grasping at straws is pretty much my thing. Here's today's duo, both starring a certain pink Earth pony:

The Wait by xjuggernaughtx
Pinkie Pie's Incredible Interplanetary Super Prank by Cupcakes

★: 0 | ★★: 1 | ★★★: 1 | ★★★★: 0 | ★★★★★: 0
Note: I use a skewed rating system. A fic I find average scores two stars.

The Wait by xjuggernaughtx
Pinkie Pie
Slice of Life; 2k words; Jan 2016; Everyone

Pinkie Pie battles a fiendish foe: her mailbox.

Another much-missed author, though at least this one's fics are still around. This is about as slice-of-lifey as SoL gets – the end A/N explains that it was written for a never-completed collaboration which required that. I'm usually satisfied with how xjuggernaughtx writes Pinkie, and so it is here: I particularly appreciated some stuff about how being such a fine party pony brought its own pressures. There is the odd joke, but generally this is 1,500 words of Pinkie Pie being Pinkie Pie. If that's something that appeals to you, give it a shot; a highish three as I like it. ★★★

Pinkie Pie's Incredible Interplanetary Super Prank by Cupcakes
Pinkie Pie, Twilight and Rainbow Dash
Comedy/Slice of Life; 1k words; May 2012; Everyone

Pinkie Pie's search for a super prank turns out to have far-reaching ramifications!

This sounds like a wacky, laugh-a-minute comedy, but that's not really its style. Instead, it's another SoL-with-jokes fic, though the joke count is higher than in The Wait. I quite like Pinkie's characterisation (she's read all the joke books. All of them) though Twilight's shows its age a little more. There's some Lavender Unicorn Syndrome too, though it's not unbearable. The snag for me was that the one thing the story turns out to be building up to simply didn't have the effect I imagine the author desired. Hence the lowish rating, but it's short enough that you might as well see if it does the trick for you. ★★

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Next time on Ponyfic Roundup: No edition next Wednesday as it's Boxing Day. PR 231 is planned for 2nd January, and I hope to have more than two stories for you then! One should be nightwalker's Gilda fic, My Father Used to Say.