My Little Repeats 88: "Inspiration Manifestation"

I've got plans! And capes. As you will see, this post is going up a mere five days after the last one. That's deliberate; I'm hoping to get the rest of S4 done faster than I've been going up until now.

"Writing reviews is easy, I tell you. I can do anything!"

S4E23: "Inspiration Manifestation"
Written by Corey Powell & Meghan McCarthy
26 Apr 2014

My original rating: 7.5/10 (=★★★)
IMDb score: 8.2

The one with judgemental Owlowiscious

Thoughts: Honestly, my views on this episode haven't changed a lot over the years. I still find it a little bit of a plod, even though watching Rarity become ever more unhinged should be comedy gold. The puppeteer character is quite interesting (though his voice is really strange) but he just fades out of the story. The dark magic spellbook is quite a nice touch, though as with many of these things it's all a bit convenient. On the good side, this is another brilliant performance from Tabitha St. Germain, not quite matching "Simple Ways" but not far off. I also thought the moral was a decent one and – as alluded to in "The one with" – this episode used Owlowiscious quite effectively as a kind of external conscience for Spike. Funny ending too, with Spike's perhaps excessive honesty towards Twilight! On the whole, though, this is just decent for me. Still a three, but I'm nudging it down just a little bit from the very high three it got in 2014.

Choice quote: Rarity: "What does a bird know about architectural design?"

New rating: ★★★

Next up is "Equestria Games", an episode where I honestly have no clue how I'll react, since I've barely watched it for the last seven years.

Ponyfic Roundup 353

Read it Later story count: 125 (nc) 

Right, thanks to a friend for giving me a heads-up that I'd forgotten to update this intro section! So, here's a new one. Short but shiny! But mostly short. Three fics for you this week:

Head in the Clouds by Timaeus
Girl Talk by Starswirls Beard
An argument by Xenont

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

My Little Reviews 87: "Trade Ya!"

Sorry about the delay in getting here, folks! Last time, I was very much at the top end of the pack in my outright adoration of "TT123" – which I absolutely do not recant, by the way! This time, an episode I expect to like rather than love, despite its considerable quantity of Fluttershy. Let's see...

Me when I realise I've set this post's publish time completely wrong

S4E22: "Trade Ya!"
Written by Scott Sonneborn
19 Apr 2014

My original rating: 8/10 (=★★★★)
IMDb score: 7.5

The one with the Discord table lamp

Thoughts: Here we have another episode with a big dollop of "going along in a predictable fashion", ie the trading. However, the ep as a whole, while I like it a good deal, doesn't work as well for me as "TT123" did. I love the Applejack/Rarity stuff (though for me it's not shipping!) and I enjoy a fair bit of the Rainbow/Fluttershy subplot as well. The ending is nice, there's a fun mythological creature in the Orthros, the Traders Exchange looks great and Sylvain LeVasseur Portelance (the voice of Stellar Eclipse, who appeared via the Make-a-Wish Foundation) acts surprisingly well for a non-professional. Nice to see full-on Crystal Ponies in the background, too; those were apparently toned down in later seasons owing to the level of work required. On the downside, there's way too much acceptance (not least from Twilight!) of Fluttershy coming close to months of indentured servitude. That just doesn't seem very Equestrian. I also don't think this was one of Pinkie's greatest S4 moments, eg her terrorising of the foal with the broken quill. This is much better than Sonneborn's debut ("Somepony to Watch Over Me") but it has enough rough patches that I can't quite justify its four any more. As such, a top-end three it gets now. Still entertaining, no question. Just not a great.

Choice quote: Rarity: "How dare you let me get what I want? What kind of friend do you think I am?"

New rating: ★★★

Next up is "Inspiration Manifestation", which as I've mentioned before I can rarely remember anything much about. I therefore have no clue how I'll react now.

Ponyfic Roundup 352

 Read it Later story count: 125 (-7) 

A little later than usual, but at least on the right day, here is a somewhat minimal edition of Ponyfic Roundup for you all. It's still too hot to do much beyond the essentials, but at least there's cooler weather on the horizon. When, this being England, it will rain. (Yes, I know much of England isn't actually all that wet. But I have to keep up appearances for an international audience.) Just the two fics to ponder today:

Moving On by Bad Horse
The First Winter Wrap Up by ChoppersTopHat

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

Still here, just hot

By English standards it's stupidly hot here at the moment (nudging 30 °C, which remember we're not used to) and more to the point the nights aren't cooling down as much as usual, either; so things are going to be slow here until it calms down on that score – probably near the end of this week. I'll see what I can do, though. :)

Ponyfic Roundup 351

Read it Later story count: 132 (+1) 

Here I am again with another edition of Ponyfic Roundup. What, you thought it was an episode of Rate My Custard? Sorry to disappoint you. As you can see, my RiL list has slightly lengthened this week. As I keep saying, if only people would stop writing fics that appeal to me I would find this job a great deal easier! Right; here we go:

Theory by shortskirtsandexplosions
Taken for Grammar by Robotech_Master
Sunset Shimmer is Dating WHO!? by Ninjadeadbeard

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

My Little Reviews 86: "Testing Testing 1, 2, 3"

There are no words

S4E21: "Testing Testing 1, 2, 3"
Written by Amy Keating Rogers
5 Apr 2014

My original rating: 9/10 (=★★★★★)
IMDb score: 8.5

The one with the BuyOurToys Copter

Thoughts: I loved this episode the first time around, and I still love it now. Amy Keating Rogers comes up with another of her specials here, and it's wonderful. It looks fantastic, the dialogue is in another league from "Leap of Faith", it's funny, it's emotional, there's a very solid moral for both principal characters and we even get some backstory. Oh, and Fluttershy is an alicorn. Ish. If you want to quibble a bit, the early exposition about the Wonderbolts Reserves is slightly wordy, but aside from that there's almost nothing to take away from the sheer enjoyment I had while rewatching it. As with "The Cutie Mark Chronicles" way back in S1, this ep fills 22 minutes to the absolute brim without it feeling hurried – all the Mane Six, the CMC and the pets get something to do here. There's time for some side set pieces (the Rainbow/Twi argument and Fluttershy's intervention) and of course there's Pinkie's rap. I can't remember whether that was controversial at the time, but I adore it now at any rate. (The nod to an ancient anti-piracy ad was amusing, too.) On top of all that? This is an episode which could only really be set in S4, because it needs Twilight to be an alicorn but for her not to be a perfect flyer. I'll stop gushing about this episode now. But yeah, it's keeping its five stars.

Choice quote: Rainbow Dash: "Aah! Pinkie, you're real!"

New rating: ★★★★★

Next up is "Trade Ya!", which I remember liking rather a lot, perhaps slightly more than the fandom as a whole does. I hope it stays that way.

Ponyfic Roundup 350: Spotlight on A White Mare

Read it Later story count: 131 (nc)

Here it is: 350 up! To mark the occasion, I wanted to get one of my longer reads dealt with, and A White Mare is the story that I picked. Unlike some of the others on my RiL list, I'd barely even heard of this until someone mentioned it, but that and the story's description just intrigued me all the more. Let's see how it fared...

A White Mare by RandomBlank
Celestia [and OCs]
Romance/Adventure/Human; 39k words; Apr–Jul 2015; Teen

Celestia lands on Earth as a common Arabian mare. Without magic, speech, not knowing the language, she seeks her way home. First though, she needs to make some friends and restore her freedom.

There are nowhere near as many (non-stupid) "pony on Earth" fics as there are "human in Equestria" ones. Now, what I was expecting here was that we'd have Celestia as the main protagonist and that we'd be inside her head as she struggled with translating her brilliant intellect into a form humans could understand. While the second part is broadly true, in fact the POV character is a Polish human who is (by the author's own admission) something of a self-insert. He happens across Celestia stuck at a run-down riding school controlled by a very dodgy character. Though it's not a comedy, there are some entertaining bits here, especially early on where the narrator pokes fun at himself; and in a pleasant epilogue. Also worth noting that bronies are not a thing on this Earth, which makes a change. My biggest problem with this was that it's one of those fics where the author is apparently desperate to show how nerdy he is – sure, the character is as well, but there's way too much detail in here about BitCoins and stock market goings-on and the like. It's tedious, frankly. The main villain is a bit of a cardboard cut-out baddie and Celestia also becomes absurdly overpowered later on, albeit in a different way from usual. Oh, and that [Romance] tag isn't really relevant except in a couple of places where it becomes creepy. The location-reversal idea has potential, but this story doesn't really realise it. ★★

If you want some spoilery expansion on all that, then click past the page break.

Ponyfic Roundup will be on Friday this week

Yes, it's another one of those weeks! Nothing terrible going on, just a lack of time and a little bit of general under-the-weatherness (hay fever mostly). I could do a rush job and probably still get PR up on Wednesday, but I'd rather take the extra couple of days and do it better. (Or not. Me being me, doubtless I'll still make a silly mistake somewhere!)

My Little Repeats 85: "Leap of Faith"

You have to hand it to Lyra, she catches on quickly!

S4E20: "Leap of Faith"
Written by Josh Haber
29 Mar 2014

My original rating: 7/10 (=★★★)
IMDb score: 7.3

The one with Big Mac's Jaws impression

Thoughts: Applejack's key episode has never been one of my favourites, but perhaps I was just judging it against S4's really quite consistent run of good episodes. This really isn't too bad, though I still don't think it matches "Rarity Takes Manehattan" or "Pinkie Pride". As I said back in 2014, it's a bit short on snappy dialogue and while Granny's past swimming ability was fun it wasn't exactly something we'd seen before. This is a Josh Haber episode, so I suppose "Let's shove in something out of nowhere for the hay of it" isn't terribly surprising. Still, this isn't the worst of the FlimFlams' later appearances and the song, though not great, is reasonably solid. Big Mac has some nice comic moments – there's a fun animation touch when he slides down the bank and crashes into a briefly unamused Applejack. Silver Shill is a bit of an uninteresting... well, he's not even an antagonist really, just a random pony the FlimFlams had corrupted. The moral was okay, I guess, even if again not terribly memorable. All in all, a reasonably good but not amazing ep. Probably not much different now to how I saw it in 2014, which means it does enough to keep its moderate three-star rating.

Choice quote: Granny and AB: "Hoo-ha, hee-hee, ha-hoo-ha!"

New rating: ★★★

Next up is "Testing Testing 1, 2, 3" which I have always been very fond of. I don't expect that to change.

UK PonyCon tickets now on sale! Prices and thoughts (updated)

It's been almost two years since an in-person MLP convention was held in the UK, but we might be about to end that drought. An official UK PonyCon blog yesterday announced that tickets for this year's convention in Nottingham on 9th and 10th October are now on sale, this having gone live at 2pm BST. Exciting stuff! Some of my trademark rambly thoughts in a moment, but first the price list:

Weekend Adult/Child/Family: £46 / £24 / £92

Saturday Adult/Child/Family: £30 / £13 / £60

Sunday Adult/Child/Family: £24 / £13 / £48

VIP Upgrade (in addition to a ticket from above) : £72

Anyone who's familiar with UKPC will note that these are substantial jumps from 2019, an increase of around 20% on the whole. The UKPC blog is commendably open about the reasons for this, which are pretty much what you'd expect: that given the changed environment since 2019, running a convention is now costlier and riskier than it used to be. Given that, I think the con has done quite well to (for example) keep the Adult Weekend ticket below £50.

There doesn't seem to be a mid-level tier this time around. There is a "Supporter" option, which is what that used to be called, but this year that term is a rough equivalent of the "Spirit Badge" some other cons have. In other words, a way of supporting UKPC's running costs that doesn't actually gain you access to the event. (It will, however, give you a special role on Discord and a place on the list of contributors.) This costs £5, but you can buy more than one I believe.

Some fairly rambly thoughts (as ever!) past the jump break.

G5 film logo, release date... and cast!

The P loses its heart for some reason

Well, here it is! I won't be reproducing the cast poster here in consideration of those who are avoiding spoilers – but I think it's probably unreasonable to avoid even mentioning the name now. I'll have to use it in post tags, after all. A New Generation it is. Not the most thrilling or original of titles, but it will serve. I'm not going to consider the new logo a spoiler either, especially as it's pretty close to the old one. (No rainbow, though!)

Lots of details on EqD if you want the nitty-gritty, including that cast poster. But what I will say here is that those (not many) I do know of the cast seem reasonable choices, and I'm interested to see some characters revealed beyond the five we already knew about. There are a total of ten of them shown on the cast poster (which is on EqD). There's also one very familiar name involved with the screenplay.

Oh, and we have a release date! A New Generation will be making its debut on Netflix on 24th September. That's a Friday, by the way, so if you want to see it on release day don't accidentally go into FiM mode and leave it until the Saturday! I suspect I'll always be a bit sad that I can't watch this in the cinema with my friends as I did in 2017. But hey ho, that's the world we live in right now.

I'm going to have to think a bit now about how to organise Louder Yay when writing about the G5 film between now and September, and what level of spoiler-care to use. For example, if we get a trailer then that will be on here. It would be absurd not to post it. However, if I can find a version with a thumbnail that isn't spoilery (as I could for the 2017 film and EqG movies) then I will use that.

For now, though, I'm just excited that we've finally got some more information that isn't just "new toy set appears on website"!