Ponyfic Roundup 478: Silly Edition

Read it Later story count: 96 (-2)

Words read this week: 30,382

Welcome to the Silly Edition! In spite of its name, this does not in fact mean that all today's fics are silly, although some of them do qualify. I simply chose five stories that have the word "silly" in the title. I'd never heard of any of the fics before, and indeed I didn't know several of their authors, so it was a bit of a leap in the dark. Let's see how it turned out, shall we?

Silly Little Filly by EnderBlaze
Silly Assumptions by Owlor
On the Very Silly Origins of Alicorns by GroaningGreyAgony
Silly Little Things by ForgottenExistance
Silly Filly by ValenceBond

★: 1 | ★★: 3 | ★★★: 1 | ★★★★: 0 | ★★★★★: 0
Note: I use a skewed rating system. A fic I enjoy an average amount scores two stars.

Silly Little Filly by EnderBlaze
Twilight, Celestia, OC and Other
G4 AU; Adventure/Random/Sad; 10k words; Oct 2013–Jul 2014; Everyone

Celestia finds Twilight as a foal! The Princess is oblivious to her past, and the truth may have scarred Twilight for life... Does Twilight find the true love of a family? If not, danger awaits. Princesses can't look after fillies forever, after [sic]

This is a strange one. It starts out with the Princess finding an abandoned filly in – guess what? – a cardboard box and taking her home. There then follow several chapters of filly Twi cuteness, including some early signs of magical ability. A few too many technical errors, but nothing terrible and it is warmly fluffy. However, the fic then takes a lurching turn into really dark territory, removing Celestia from the narrative and instead including some backstory domestic violence that is sudden, quite vicious and certainly utterly unsuitable for an E rating. The final A/N sort-of explains this, but not in a satisfactory way.¹ The fic was heading for a lower-middle two-star rating before that, but this unheralded nastiness put me off so badly that I've bumped it down to a high one. ★
¹ "My apologies for the rushed ending, as well as the confusing events which lead to it. However, if you want me to be perfectly frank, I lost interest in this story a long time ago." (Then why should I keep it?)

Silly Assumptions by Owlor
Vinyl Scratch
G4; Dark/Slice of Life; 1k words; Oct 2012; Teen

Vinyl Scratch has a completely ordinary morning.

This one really isn't a silly bit of fluff. That [Dark] genre tag isn't lying, though there's nothing really extreme here. We follow Vinyl through an apparently rather uneventful few hours – but "apparently" is the point, since there's something going on below the surface. Unfortunately this fic relies on a textual gimmick that's been used so much over the years that it's lost much of any cleverness factor it had in 2012. Notably disturbing cover art, though. ★★

On the Very Silly Origins of Alicorns by GroaningGreyAgony
Celestia, Luna, Twilight and Mane Six
G4; Comedy/Random; 9k words; Sep 2015–Aug 2017; Teen

Where did the first Alicorns come from? The answer is dumber than you think.

Now this fic really is a silly story. That would probably be very much to my taste – but this is a silly fart story, and those are generally very much not to my taste. "The answer is dumber than you think" is fair comment, since the first alicorns came about because of a lot of farting. GroaningGreyAgony being a fine writer, this story is actually very readable and in places even I laughed. A fart story that can make me like it is impressive. Still only gets a three, but for this setup to get a three (and a highish one at that) from me says a lot. If you do like dumb stories about farts, don't even consider passing on this. ★★★

Silly Little Things by ForgottenExistance
Applejack and Rainbow Dash
G4; Romance/Slice of Life; 3k words; Mar 2015; Teen

Rainbow Dash arrives at Sweet Apple Acres with a dire need for preening. Applejack is more than willing to help her marefriend.

A cute bit of romantic fluff written for a contest run by the Preening Group. I quite liked the idea of Applejack having stepped outside her earth pony comfort zone to learn how to care for Rainbow's wings. This could almost be an E-rated story, were it not for one or two slightly out-of-nowhere wingboners and sexual hints. The fic ends with a moral that's quite fluffy itself. A two, but a top-end two, and probably a three if you really like preening fics. ★★

Silly Filly by ValenceBond
OC and Discord
G4; Comedy/Random/Human; 8k words; Aug 2016; Everyone

Discord comes to Earth looking for fun. Unfortunately for one unlucky human, this means turning them into a pony and letting them loose into a convention.

The shortdesc of this story perhaps gives away a little too much. Still, it's quite easy to believe that even post-reformation Discord would find it fun to play with a being like that; come to that, remember the way he treated poor Comet Tail in the S4 opener? Discord's voice isn't perfect, but it's not bad. A persistent problem with tense mismatches, notably of the "told me it's" type, but the main issue is that the fic just stops with no real resolution. Another top-end two, one which could have been a three with a proper ending. ★★

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So, not a dreadful week but not (with one exception) the slices of wildly bonkers silliness I'd been expecting. Next time around, it'll be an ordinary, unthemed edition of Ponyfic Roundup. I'll be looking at the following stories:

Arbitrary by RunicTreetops
A Moonlit Storm by SilverNotes
Pinkie Pegasus by Lets Do This
Dying to Get There by Titanium Dragon
Winona by Obsequiosity