Ponyfic Roundup 285

Read it Later story count: 222 (nc)

It's been a long week, and at one point three major roads into my town were closed at the same time, owing to a combination of flooding and police activity. (I don't know what, but the road in question is now open again.) At one point also, I wasn't sure I'd get a PR post up this week either. I've just about managed it in the end, albeit a pretty minimal one with just the two stories to look at. Here they are:

Conference by Dave Bryant
Hope Blooms by Bookish Delight

★: 0 | ★★: 0 | ★★★: 2 | ★★★★: 0 | ★★★★★: 0

Conference by Dave Bryant
Celestia and Spitfire
Slice of Life; 3k words; Oct 2016; Everyone

HRH Princess Celestia and Lieutenant Colonel Spitfire discuss the strengths and shortcomings of a certain rainbow-maned filly aspiring to become a Wonderbolt.

An interestingly different take on Rainbow Dash's Wonderbolts career, which at the time of writing had not got as far as her acceptance. Actually I get the impression this fic may originally have been written some time before its Fimfiction date, though I can't find evidence to back that up. (Edit: because I didn't look in the right place! It dates from 2012. Thanks to Whisper Key in the comments.) Anyway, what marks this one out is that it's very clearly a conversation between a military officer and her commander-in-chief, something we see little of in the show. I'm always mildly iffy about "That's not how the military works!" objections to canon, since Equestria isn't Earth, but Dave Bryant clearly knows his stuff on that score. At the start, he does spend a tad too much time making sure his readers know he knows his stuff too, but once that's out of the way it's a good read with excellent dialogue and some interesting world-building that deals with stuff like the potentially clashing responsibilities of a mare who's both Wonderbolt and Bearer. ★★★

Hope Blooms by Bookish Delight
Babs Seed and Apple Bloom
Slice of Life, 4k words; Jun 2013; Everyone

The night before Babs Seed returns to Manehattan, Apple Bloom asks to talk. *Really* talk. About everything.

Another "talking heads" story, and again it's pretty well done. The two fillies are both the right mixture of likeable and cute, and I enjoyed the way they both ended up teasing out admissions from the other. There's even a rather satisfying reveal about Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon, though those two don't actually appear. Applejack is a background presence (the story takes place at Sweet Apple Acres) and is responsible for the ending, which is not especially memorable but does seem nicely in-character. Like the previous story, a good one to read if you're a big fan of SoL – and of course of these characters. ★★★

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Next time on Ponyfic Roundup: stories reviewed should include Aquaman's Plural Possessive.