Ponyfic Roundup 445: Spotlight on The Party Hasn't Ended

Read it Later story count: 94 (+2)

Words read this week: 56,037

As I've touched on before, I'm off on holiday in a few days' time, and that will mean a week without a Ponyfic Roundup. Here's a Spotlight for you before I leave. It's a pretty old story, and one which I don't think I've even heard anyone mention for many years now. It got 15,000 views in total, though, and made the Pony Fiction Vault, so I can't be the only person who's read the thing! Let's see how it goes...

The Party Hasn't Ended by butterscotchsundae
Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, Lyra, Bon-Bon, Big Mac and Caramel
G4; Romance/Dark/Adventure/Comedy/Sad; 56k words; Jan 2012*; Teen

Pinkie's unrequited love for Dash precipitates an adventure across time, space and dreams.

Five genre tags? You can't do that any more! You could in 2012, though – and in fact this story wasn't new then, *first appearing on EqD in April 2011! In essence, though, this is a PinkieDash shipfic, which ends predictably. With a lot, and I mean a lot of other shipping. Good thing: bar rather too much POV-jumping, it's pretty easy reading. The prose doesn't stand out especially, but nor does it do so for bad reasons. It slides past smoothly most of the time. Bad thing: it feels very clichéd. That's a bit unfair: the story is so old that it more or less pioneered some ponyfic clichés. Even worse thing: a blatant reference to another fanfic that has no business here at all. Another bad thing: a terrible last few pages which for me ruin the otherwise generally okay tone of the story. So no, I haven't dug up some long-buried gem. It's far from the worst shipfic I've read, but unless you're really into both PinkieDash and oldfics, there's probably not much for you here. Two, and not that high in the band either. ★★

There will be big spoilers beyond this point, so proceed at your own risk.

This is an old story. An ooooold story. (So old it consistently does "a unicorn pony" and "a Pegasus pony".) One thing I don't know is whether it was edited at all in the months between its original Equestria Daily upload and its appearance on Fimfiction. There certainly are fics that have been revised since their first publication – Fallout: Equestria, for one – but since I don't know the answer on this occasion, I will be reviewing the fic on its own merits. And yes, it has some.

Let's start with some positives. First, the prose is generally quite easy to read. It's not going to win any awards for style, and from time to time it gets into a tangle – not least in terms of sudden head-hopping. Still, there's a bit less Lavender Unicorn Syndrome than in many other very old stories. Considering this is essentially a Season One fic, the characterisation is generally okay as well. Fluttershy is even rather like her "Hurricane Fluttershy" self – not bad for a fic that pre-dates that episode!

I'm also going to give The Party Hasn't Ended a point for its explanation of Nightmare. Inevitably this is very, and I do mean very, different from what canon gave us (and even more different from the IDW comics) but in its own way the use of Loneliness is rather satisfying. Every so often in these sections, you do get a glimpse of what this fic could have been had it been edited and ship-trimmed a lot.

On the downside, the shipping is absolutely obsessive. PinkieDash is the central pairing, but boy are there a lot of ships sailing here. There's RariJack. There's LyraBon. There's Rainbow (yes, again) and somepony from Flight Camp called Star Catcher. There's CaraMac, of all things (was that one common back then?) There's even what to me in 2023 seems a really out-there pairing-up of Fluttershy and Cloudkicker. Not to mention the fact that the PinkieDash itself, combined with the inevitable sonic rainboom, saves the world. Yes, really it does.

As I said up there, this is an ancient story and so some of the stuff that now seems horribly clichéd probably wasn't (so much?) back in S1 days. Probably even the blatant memery and direct show references (Spike: "Can you do that? Can you die twice"?) were less obviously intrusive then. That said, I could really, really, really have done without not one but two bloody Cupcakes references here. Or anywhere, really.

Oh, and I mentioned above how much I disliked the final few pages? More or less out of nowhere, Rainbow confesses to Pinkie that she is a virgin. I suppose I should be grateful that there isn't an actual clop scene (the sex happens during a scene break) but when Dash saying sex is "SO. TOTALLY. AWESOME!!!", written just like that, is followed by lyrics from Röyksopp – in a fic which has plenty of original lyrics – it seriously grates. I hated this part of the story.

I'd sometimes write a little more in a Spotlight review, but to be frank there's not much more to write here. Let's face it, you probably already know whether you want to read a story where Pinkie is stuck in a (kind of) other dimension until Rainbow remembers her old life and tells Pinkie she loves her. The meme references are not huge in number but they are intrusive ("Confound these ponies..." even!) So yeah, an interesting delve into the past, but once was enough.

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No PR next week, as explained above. When I get back, I'll be looking at fics entered for the "Arboreal Yearnings" contest. As they're mostly very short, I think I can fit all the 17 entries (not including mine, of course!) into two weeks' Roundups. The first batch will consist of:

Trees Don't Think by Starcoder
Séance by Muramasa
A Tree in the Park by Lingo
Immortal Tree by Bad Dragon
Forest Dryad by Twilight_Shimmer
His Tree by EndlessPossibilities58
If You Go Down In The Woods Today by SilverNotes
A Fir-ly Difficult Choice by Mokoma
Branch Shaking by Moproblems Moharmoney