Rescheduling PR again, but don't worry

Nothing is wrong this time, I'm just snowed under with other stuff. I'd rather take a day or two longer to write it than rush it out and make even more mistakes than usual. So, as is usually my way when this happens, Ponyfic Roundup will appear on Friday this week. Don't worry, I've been reading! :)

My Little Repeats 72: "Bats!"

"Why Rarity, you're gonna save us a fortune on buckets!"

S4E07: "Bats!"
Written by Merriwether Williams
28 Dec 2013

My original rating: 8/10 (=★★★★)
IMDb score: 8.2

The one with Rarity's hazmat suit

Thoughts: Merriwether Williams' final episode is arguably her most enjoyable, fighting it out with "Wonderbolts Academy" for that honour. It certainly boasts a good song, an excellent duet between Applejack and Fluttershy that – at least at the time – was unlike anything we'd heard before on FiM. Vaguely Tim Burton-y and with fine visuals to complement the music. The actual story is quite fun, too, though it sticks in my craw slightly to have to admit that AJ generally has the right in the argument over Flutters. Doesn't help either that all of a sudden 'Shy is, well, a Stare master. Plus the "mystery" over who's swooping in to eat the apples really isn't much of a mystery at all. Flutterbat became famous of course, but even so. As I said in my 2013 review, I do (mostly) appreciate how Pinkie is written here; S4 is uneven on this score, but "Bats!" generally gets her right. The moral about sometimes having to tell your closest friends no is a great lesson, but it's not really one from the episode we've seen. Oh, and Fluttershy's fang at the end was rather intriguing at the time; now we know it meant absolutely nothing it's mildly irritating. All this means that I'm going to nudge this down slightly, from a bottom-end four to a top-end three. I still like it, but song aside I don't really think it's a classic.

Choice quote: Rainbow Dash: "Won't somepony please think of the cider?"

New rating: ★★★

Next up is "Rarity Takes Manehattan". I remember this as being one of my favourite Dave Polsky episodes, but not as being exceptionally good.

Ponyfic Roundup 336

Read it Later story count: 145 (-3) 

It's time to play the music, it's time to light the lights. Neither of which are much use on a text blog, so instead let me move on to the actual meat of the matter. I haven't had a lot of spare time recently, but I have at least got some ponyfic read. (And even a little written, believe it or not.) There are, as usual, three stories under the wobbly microscope today, and they are:

Motherly by Trick Question
As the smoke fades by RarityEQM
Linked by Wheels by JourneyCatMLP

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

GalaCon postponed to 2022

GalaCon 2021 will not happen. The plan is to hold the event in June 2022 instead. As is common, people are being given the option to hold on to their tickets or to get a refund. I can't say this is likely to be a surprise to anyone. While things are not as bad now as they were last year, the threshold needed to be confident of hosting a large, organised convention is pretty high. I would dearly like to be proved wrong on this, but I'm personally not convinced there will be any full-scale cons in Europe this year.

My Little Repeats 71: "Power Ponies"

Green Lan—er, Rarity's little moments in this are always worth watching

S4E06: "Power Ponies"
Written by Meghan McCarthy, Charlotte Fullerton and Betsy McGowen
21 Dec 2013

My original rating: 6.5/10 (=★★★)
IMDb score: 7.5

The one with the Hairspray Ray of Doom

Thoughts: The only ep with Betsy McGowen as a writer, albeit sharing the spotlight with two regulars. I wasn't a huge fan of this first time around, and I still fret that it's not especially Pony. At this point, before "Rarity Takes Manehattan", Maretropolis was the first really modern city setting we'd ever seen the ponies in, and it felt odd. After all, Equestria didn't have cities like that (or so we thought) so a comic with them in was more science fiction than superhero fantasy. Still, I quite enjoy the characters and their superpowers. Everyone talks about Flutterhulk Saddle Rager, but I actually find her "You hurt a firefly, therefore I will destroy you" bit rather irritating, given she didn't get angry when her close friends were being threatened with death ("You shall live just long enough..."). On which note, I do have a soft spot for the amusingly over-the-top Mane-iac, actually. I don't much care for the more recent dark'n'brooding superheroes (or indeed supervillains) and this 1960s-style stuff is much more to my personal taste. Poor Spike/Humdrum, though: he just can't catch a break in this show sometimes – until, of course, he's inspired by Twilight pointing out how much the Mane Six trust him to come through and he ends up saving the day. So, quite an entertaining episode, yes – but it doesn't always feel much like a My Little Pony episode. And that, in the end, means it can't do better than the moderate three-star rating I gave it the first time around.

Choice quote: Rarity: "We're breaking for tea and biscuits!" Oh, excellent. Custard creams, I hope!

New rating: ★★★

Next up is "Bats!" Apparently this is not an episode that the whole fandom regards terribly fondly, but I have a soft spot for it. At least, I had. Whether I still do, we shall find out.

Ponyfic Roundup 335

Read it Later story count: 148 (-7) 

Yes, the RiL list has finally made it below 150! I can't run to a fanfare, I'm afraid, but you're welcome to make one at home from old washing up liquid bottles. Not that much further now before I reach 100, at which point I'll stop trying to reduce it and start trying to keep it stable. We'll see how well that goes... I have three stories to look at today, at any rate. They are:

The Order by Bad_Seed_72
Derpy Gets Fired by GarlandGala
Demise Reprise by Chris

★: 0 | ★★: 0 | ★★★: 2 | ★★★★: 1 | ★★★★★: 0
Note: I use a skewed rating system. A fic I find average scores two stars.

Nick Confalone's never-realised plans for the EqG S2 finale

Click this pic to see the text at full size

(Via EqD.) Some fascinating but frustrating news from Nick Confalone, one of the main writers on Equestria Girls. He recently posted some quite detailed notes about his plans for the S2 finale that would have set things up for S3. Except, of course, that EqG was cancelled, and so we never got either S3 or the S2 finale. Which, on the evidence of the above, is rather a shame.

Now, I know EqG's specials haven't always lived up to their promise. The most obvious example of that is Spring Breakdown, where we all got really excited about the prospect of the girls heading into Equestria... and then spent what felt like about four hours watching them having a cruise. Okay, okay, followed by a few minutes of a few characters in Equestria. But still.

Even so, I really wish this special had been made. "What happened to human Sunset?" is a question that's only ever been answered by fanfic writers, and it would have been really interesting to get a canon answer. What Confalone writes also puts pretty much the entire sub-franchise, from the very first film onwards, into new context. It could have done an awful lot.

What we don't know from Confalone's notes is what actually did happen to human Sunset. Indeed, it's not clear whether back in October 2017 even he had a definite answer to that question. It does look as though this will remain in the realms of Fimfiction – but even this limited reveal does prompt some fascinating questions about what might have been.

My Little Repeats 70: "Flight to the Finish"

Big Princess is watching you

S4E05: "Flight to the Finish"
Written by Ed Valentine
14 Dec 2013

My original rating: 7.5/10 (=★★★)
IMDb score: 8.5

The one with Granny Smith high-hoofing Scootaloo

Thoughts: Like Corey Powell, Ed Valentine never did better than a Scootaloo-tastic debut episode. This one really is great. The framing device is fun, though at this point much of the fandom thought the Equestria Games arc was going to be S4's big deal. Whoops. Anyway, the CMC and particularly Scoot are superb in this, and I especially like the little character touches in their interactions (eg Sweetie is less stubborn than AB in the station confrontation scene). Rainbow Dash makes an amusing "professional" coach and even Ms Harshwhinny is less irritating than I once thought her. But this is Scootaloo's episode, albeit partly due to Diamond Tiara at her very worst. We don't quite get an answer to "Will Scoot fly?" though Dash's look away when she says, "Maybe you'll fly some day" does suggest she doesn't think it likely. But this was as close as the series ever got to directly addressing her possible disability, and I think it did it in a satisfying way. On top of that, we get a very good song, probably high in the second rank. Point of interest: my old review notes that this was where Claire Corlett started singing for Sweetie Belle (Michelle Creber had done so early on). Anyway, I need to right a wrong from 2013. Last MLR I bumped an episode down a star. This time I'm going the other way. This is a really good episode and a very clear four.

Choice quote: Scootaloo: "Of course I need you! Without you two, who's gonna hold up the hoop?" [Ouch.]

New rating: ★★★★

Next up is "Power Ponies". I was not a big fan of that one first time round, but I've wondered for a while whether I might be willing to reassess. Only one way to find out!

Ponyfic Roundup 334

Read it Later story count: 155 (nc) 

I've now exceeded a third of a thousand Ponyfic Roundup posts. That kind of blows my mind, especially given all the more useful things I could have done with that time. :D Anyway, not the greatest week I've ever had in terms of ratings, but it could certainly have been worse. At least all three of these fics have something positive to say about them, even if I didn't love any of them overall. They are:

Windfall by Warren Hutch
A Rare Rain by Michael Hudson
You Can't Extinguish the Sun! by Twilight Glimmer

★: 0 | ★★: 2 | ★★★: 1 | ★★★★: 0 | ★★★★★: 0
Note: I use a skewed rating system. A fic I find average scores two stars.

Which FiM episode do you consider underrated, and why?

Thanks to Mike Cartoon Karma for bringing up this subject in another forum. I like the idea and so will use it here! I'm going to tweak the criteria just a little for my purposes, so here we go:

Which episode of Friendship is Magic do you think is underrated?

I'm not going to define "underrated" too specifically, but I do generally mean by the fandom as a whole, not just by me or those who comment here. You can answer this pretty much how you like, but I'll add a few pointers:

* Try to pick only one episode. I know it's tough. That's part of the fun!

* I mean full-length show episodes, not films or shorts. "Best Gift Ever" counts.

* Double-length premieres/finales count as one, so they're eligible.

* Please stick to underrated here. Yes, I will ask the same about overrated eps at some point – but not today.

As for me? I'll stick to the answer I gave Mike when he asked elsewhere: "Flutter Brutter". When we asked people to rank S6 episodes on UK of Equestria shortly after that season finished, "Flutter Brutter" ended up way down, averaging something like 20th place. I thought then, and still think, that that was harsh.

It's not an outright classic, sure, but I think it's a decent episode with solid Fluttershy characterisation. I suspect many people rank "Flutter Brutter" poorly because they don't like Zephyr – but then you're not supposed to like Zephyr. That is not a writing failure. S6 isn't chock-full of brilliance, so I think this episode deserved better than 20th spot.

So there's my answer. What's yours?

My Little Repeats 69: "Daring Don't"

NB: I call My Little Repeats' main section "Thoughts" and keep it down to one longish paragraph quite deliberately. MLR is not intended to feature full reviews, nor to cover every last significant point. Right; off we go.

One day, I may actually watch Turnabout Storm all through...

S4E04: "Daring Don't"
Written by Dave Polsky
7 Dec 2013

My original rating: 7.5/10 (=★★★)

IMDb score: 7.9

The one with National Random Holiday Party Day

Thoughts: Last time we had the debut of one controversial writer; this time we see an episode from one of the early series' more divisive. This ep certainly was, what with its blatant retconning of the Daring Do story. If you can't get past that, you won't like this episode at all. I can to an extent, though the change still niggles a bit all these years on. Definitely some highlights here: there's some snappy dialogue, often a Polsky strong point. Rainbow Dash and Twilight's intense exchange about little details in Yearling's books is brilliant. Caballeron makes quite a solid villain. Pinkie literally painting the red line is great. A particularly nice, fittingly Indiana Jones-reminiscent score from William Anderson, too. On the other hoof, what exactly is Ahuizotl's motivation for unleashing 800 years of sweltering heat? Plus for our heroes, repeatedly pestering an author who so clearly just wants to be left alone isn't laudable behaviour and shouldn't have been rewarded – which it was, by putting Rainbow on the front of AKY's upcoming book. Dash's meme faces annoy me a bit more than they used to, too. Back in 2013, I said that, while entertaining, this episode "seemed to make fun such a high priority that one or two quite substantial underlying problems were glossed over". I still think that, but those flaws show up more clearly to me now than they did when this ep was new. I wavered between a bottom-end three and a top-end two, but in the end I have to bump it down a notch. Two it is.

Choice quote: Fluttershy: "Uh... should we go in and help her, maybe?"

New rating: ★★

Next up is "Flight to the Finish", and if I don't greatly enjoy that one then I think I may start to wonder whether there's something wrong with me!

Ponyfic Roundup 333

Note: for the moment, at least, I will not be considering G5 stories. Nor will I be reading stories which place already-revealed G5 characters in a G4 setting. Maybe down the line, but for now I think that would be unfair on those trying to avoid spoilers.

Read it Later story count: 155 (-2) 

Gosh, is it really March now? I remember last March, it was—actually, let's not go further down that road. Let's do this instead. G5 may be on the horizon, but there's still plenty of G4 ponyfic to be getting on with. Several hundred new fics a week still appear on Fimfiction even if you strip out the M-rated stuff. (I don't object to M-rated stuff as such, but I read so little of it that it's usually irrelevant to me.) After last week's break, here we go with another three stories:

Take the Dragons Bowling by Alaborn
Crowns and Mimosas by CoffeeMinion
The One Left Behind by dormagio

★: 0 | ★★: 1 | ★★★: 2 | ★★★★: 0 | ★★★★★: 0
Note: I use a skewed rating system. A fic I find average scores two stars.

Minor change to tags

I'm not sure whether anyone other than me actually uses the tags I put on each post, but you may have noticed that they were slightly different on my "Castle Mane-ia" review post. Two changes there: one, there's now a "G4" tag, since I suspect I'll be writing a lot about G5. Two, instead of just "show" I've introduced a dedicated "Friendship is Magic" tag. After all, we already have one extra show (Pony Life) and there'll be a G5 show eventually too.

I'm afraid I'm not going to go back and update all the tags I've used for the past eight and a bit years; there are limits. Nor am I going to worry about the fact that "Friendship is Magic" is a name not only used on the show itself. If you want everything perfectly neat and organised, this is not the blog for you! But unless I forget (which I'm bound to at times) I'll be using the new tags from now on.