Read it Later story count: 95 (nc)
Words read this week: 34,262
This is apropos of not a lot, and not remotely related to ponyfic, but I have been listening to and greatly enjoying songs by The Seekers, especially those from their 1960s heyday. In my view, Judith Durham had one of the finest voices ever to grace the charts. My own pick would be "The Carnival is Over", a huge hit internationally (except in the USA) that was so popular in the UK that it kept The Who's "My Generation" off the top of the charts in 1965. That band never did have a British number one. All right, now it's time for ponyfic!
Labors at Sunrise by NaiadSagaIotaOar
A Tryst at Midnight by Cosmonaut
How the Foundation Ruined Nightmare Night by Drefsab
flith2 by Fluttergail
White Out by the dobermans
★: 0 | ★★: 1 | ★★★: 2 | ★★★★: 2 | ★★★★★: 0
Note: I use a skewed rating system. A fic I enjoy an average amount scores two stars.
Labors at Sunrise by NaiadSagaIotaOar
Cherry Berry and Rainbow Dash
G4; Romance/Slice of Life; 1k words; Dec 2021; Everyone
Rainbow Dash and Cherry Berry exchange gifts in the morning of Hearth's Warming.
A small but beautifully formed piece about one of the more unusual, yet here entirely believable, romances you see in MLP fanfiction. It's narrated by Cherry, and the prose is utterly lovely. How she sees Rainbow is wonderfully expressed, and when Dash herself comes into the story she acts in a very Rainbow-like manner that's nevertheless something we wouldn't get in the show. An ending that feels fitting and brings a smile, too. This rates a very easy four and it's so short (I wish there had been more!) that I can't see any reason not to read this unless you truly hate the pairing. ★★★★
A Tryst at Midnight by Cosmonaut
Bat Pony and OC
G4; Romance; 8k words; Jan 2013; Mature (Sex)
Midnight Blossom, the vivacious female member of Luna's royal guard, and Cloud Skipper, one of the sub-captains under Shining Armor, share a frenzied romp together high above in a secluded watchtower.
Reading that shortdesc, you might be forgiven for dismissing this as just another clopfic. Well, it is worthy of its Mature rating, in that there is explicit sex and a fair amount of it – but there's a proper story here too, and the sex doesn't even happen until around halfway. After a diverting opening from Midnight's POV which turns out to be rather more mundane than it seems, "Skippy" (a nickname he hates) is told by his hidebound and prejudiced old superior to get the bat pony mare out of the ranks. Guess who? An interesting clash of characters here, and one which could have made a nice story in itself. Instead there's the expected turn into cloppery, which is well enough written but to my tastes a bit less interesting. The story (edited by darf, oldfic fans!) has an irritating number of minor technical errors on the missing apostrophe level. Still, the characters are interesting enough for a three. ★★★
How the Foundation Ruined Nightmare Night by Drefsab
OCs and Luna
G4 AU; Comedy/Slice of Life; 20k words; Oct 2014; Everyone
Nightmare Night has become a comfortable routine for Princess Luna. It is, after all, just one night. What could go wrong? When two researchers from the Foundation get involved, the answer is "everything".
Featured by Seattle's Angels (remember them?) and greatly enjoyed by PaulAsaran, this is an amusing AU story in which the Foundation for Spellcraft and Alchemy manages to simultaneously fulfil the requirement for Nightmare Night spookiness and to muck up pretty much the whole deal. That includes Princess Luna, who as a result spends a large part of this story in... well, spoilers, so let's say an unaccustomed position. She still remains very much the Luna we know, though. The two OC researchers are great fun, bouncing and scraping against each other throughout, and the one that's clearly intended to be "British" has actually British-sounding dialogue for once.¹ As Paul noted, it's hard to say much about this without too many spoilers, but it's both absurd and genuinely funny. Its view count of 848 at time of writing is far too low. ★★★★
¹ One small exception: nobody in this country uses the expression "give it the old college try".
flith2 by Fluttergail
Fluttershy, Rainbow Dash and Twilight
G4; Sad; 1k words; Sep 2022; Teen
Fluttershy has a conversation with Rainbow Dash. Twilight experiments.
I read and appreciated this neglected author's¹ Filth, when it was almost brand new back in 2015 for PR 81. Seven years and an author username change later comes this deliberately oddly-spelt follow-up. While the first story was clearly the perspective of a pony with crippling social anxiety, I'm less sure what's going on here. The impression is almost that Fluttershy is at least semi-aware of being a fictional character being manipulated (eg she uses the word "skybox") and that this has affected her to the extent that her words and thoughts are no longer stable. It's an interesting experimental piece and at (exactly) a thousand words worth a look, but I wasn't hit as hard by this as by the first fic. Top-end two. ★★
¹ Six followers.
White Out by the dobermans
Celestia, Featherweight and OC
G4; Sad/Slice of Life; 4k words; Jul 2015; Everyone
Princess Celestia makes a trip to collect her newest prized pupil, Featherweight.
An EqD-featured fic with almost as many downvotes as upvotes? Odd, but both Present Perfect and Pascoite appreciated this, the latter as its EqD pre-reader, so... Celestia visits a small house where Leadweight (Featherweight's mother, an intriguingly drawn character) and the foal wait to be collected.¹ Yet when Featherweight becomes agitated in the extreme about going, Celestia apparently tips into abusive behaviour to make him travel. We also see disturbing snippets of his life at home. I was quite confused by this, and judging by the Fimfiction comments I wasn't the only one. On the face of it Tia is highly OOC, yet there's no [AU] tag. No [Dark] tag either, which puts one obvious interpretation in doubt. "Education is the state's power" was the EqD tagline for this, and that along with the fic's title suggests a couple of other ideas – though the dobermans is clearly not an author who likes to explain,² so I remain uncertain. Definitely interesting, and well written too – but rather frustrating with it, hence my star rating. ★★★
¹ Celestia and Featherweight have interacted before, in the show at that, as noted in the story.
² Well, not much. There is this little comment.
There'll be reviews of five more stories to come next week, surprisingly enough. That Ponyfic Roundup will see me write about:
Ambulance Inspection Rejection by SockPuppet
Little Muffin Stand of Horrors by sister_mike
Above All Else by 8686
Sight by Slywolf930
Pieces of Me by DwarvishPony
Ooh, "White Out." That's one of those stories that I can't say was a pleasant experience to read, but I'm glad I did, and it shows good authorial skill. I'd definitely recommend it.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad I read it, and I wouldn't disagree with your recommendation. I just still feel I'm missing something.
DeleteI'm always amused when I hear that a band was super popular on one side of the Atlantic but not the other. How often a one-hit wonder here in the US dominated the British charts during the 80s, etc. etc.
ReplyDeleteWhen I see "How the Foundation X", I immediately assume SCP Foundation, and I'm kind of sad it's not. :C
"Fun" fact: I went back and read my review of White Out to see what I said about it, and at the top of that journal, I was gleefully advertising the Dresden Files card game Kickstarter. Talk about regret! Fucking hated that game, probably the worst thing I ever helped crowdfund, and I helped fund Mighty No. 9!
Shakin' Stevens is someone I always think of in that department. He had one Top 100 single in the US (and even that peaked at no. 67), whereas over here he was the biggest-selling singles artist of the 1980s. Four number ones and another 29 Top 40 records.
Delete(Though a few of those hits ran into the very early 1990s.)
Deletewow, yeah, I've never heard of him! :O
DeleteAnd like, a recent One-Hit Wonderland from Todd in the Shadows about Frankie Goes to Hollywood revealed they were huge in the UK, when they basically just had "Relax" over here. That's what was on my mind when I wrote that. :)
Mind you, the Seekers were Australian anyway... :P
DeleteAll this has me in mind of (and this will really date me) when we lived over your way for a year and use to watch "Top of the Pops." It was interesting to see what smash hits were on there that were relatively unknown once we returned here, and vice versa. One British group who had a couple of great sings that year was The Flying Pickets. And I can't remember the name of one of the songs either, just that I vaguely remember the video was of them jumping on a giant bed/trampoline in the garden. I've googled bits of that over the years and never gotten any hits. But their cover of "Only You" was great. Not to mention the original by Yazoo was also quite good. Alison Moyet had a heck of a voice.
DeleteOh yeah, this is a blog about MLP fanfiction...
YES! Truth is spoken in this post. :D
Delete