Ponyfic Roundup 500: Elements Edition!

Read it Later story count: 95 (+1)

Words read this week: 47,849

Well, here it is! Half a thousand editions and more than ten years of Ponyfic Roundup and somehow I'm still going. An absolutely massive thank you to three sets of people, some of whom are in more than one group. First, the writers without whom I wouldn't be doing this at all. Second, those who have interacted with me on my reviews over the years. Third, my friends in the fandom, wonderful people all. Huzzah to each and every one of you!

And now, on to the actual fics for this special edition. I thought long and hard about the theme for PR 500, but in the end I decided to honour the very thing that brought me into and kept me in the fandom: Friendship is Magic's central characters. I don't think I need to explain why I've chosen these particular stories! (By the way, I didn't review an appealing-looking Honesty, by TheLegendaryBillCipher, because it's a crossover.)

Generosity by Richie Richter
Honesty by Agalakachikaboum
Kindness by TwilightSnarkle
Laughter by Derpyx0
Loyalty by Arbarano
Magic by Cromegas_Flare

★: 1 | ★★: 3 | ★★★: 2 | ★★★★: 0 | ★★★★★: 0
Note: I use a skewed rating system. A fic I enjoy an average amount scores two stars.

Sounds of 2014, nos. 45 to 41

With my G4 movie rewatch post finally up now, along with some very interesting comments covering a wide range of views, I'm getting properly back on track here at Louder Yay. There'll be the next Friendship is Magic episode rewatch in a few days' time, Ponyfic Roundup 500 will go live at some point tomorrow – and right here, right now, it's time to move on with "Sounds of 2014". A reminder of my criteria for inclusion:

Rule 1: Still available in the same or (1b) similar form direct from the/an original artist.
Rule 2: Available from a third party, with reason to believe the artist is fine with this.
Rule 3: So famous that it would be plain silly to leave it out.
Rule 4: Being unlisted is not, on its own, grounds for exclusion.

A week ago there was a full house of five songs. This week? Another full house of five songs! I love it when a plan comes together. Admittedly, that does require me actually to have a plan in the first place, but let's skate over that, shall we? Onwards!

45: PrinceWhateverer ft. Dreamchan – Constellations
44: Aviators ft. MandoPony – Someone Like Me (acoustic)
43: 4everfreebrony – Under the Sun
42: Eurobeat Brony – Batty
41: Sim Gretina & donglekumquat – Everypony's Gay for Braeburn

Past the jump break, as usual there'll be embedded YouTube videos of this week's tracks, and perhaps less interestingly my ramblings too. :P

The Colour of Vinyl

As you'll have seen from my latest Ponyfic Roundup, I read BillyColt's story This Nearly Was Mine recently. Vinyl Scratch is a major character in this fic, and early in the story she is described as "very pale yellow". Although I didn't note that in the review, it seemed an odd choice to me, and indeed several Fimfiction commenters brought it up, saying she wasn't yellow.

In an idle moment, I poked about a bit online, and on Vinyl's mlp.fandom.com page I found this:

a layout artist on the show noted that the character model's coat color is actually a very pale yellow, specifically the 24-bit hex triplet #FEFDE7.^[3]

The citation given is to a locally archived copy of a discussion from way back in April 2011 from the old Allspark forums (slow-loading PDF) featuring a poster called Nayuki who was a layout artist on Friendship is Magic. Another forum member asks Nayuki, "I've heard [Vinyl] was really supposed to be a kind of very pale yellow or off-white. Is that true?" To which the reply is:

Short answer: Yes
Long answer: Yes, she's off-white
Awesome answer: #FEFDE7

Look up #FEFDE7 on various quickly Googleable sites and you get a variety of text interpretations or none at all. These include yellowish white, cosmic latte (I love that one!) and light grayish yellow. I'm not qualified to say which is right, or how approximate those text names may be, so I'll stick with the actual show staffer's description of "off-white".

Still, it does seem Vinyl's coat colour description could be a little less clear-cut than "not yellow in any way, don't be silly", which is what I would have thought earlier.

My Little Repeats 165: My Little Pony: The Movie

Here we go! It's been well over a month, but here's my rewatch blog on the G4 film. I've allowed it to go to Spotlight length for once, but I've deliberately kept it considerably shorter than my first review (linked below) so inevitably I won't have had room for everything. That's what comments sections are for! ;)

It was a couple of watches before I noticed the left horn was a minotaur's...

My Little Pony: The Movie

6 Oct 2017

My original rating: ★★★★
IMDb score: 6.1

The one with pirate pudding breaks

Thoughts: One should never take IMDb scores too seriously – but 6.1? Come on, guys, that's not fair. This is an enjoyable movie. It's not a great work, no Inside Out or a Toy Story, but it's a cut above plenty of films made to sell plastic merch. This was the first (though not the last!) time we saw the Toon Boom style, and while feelings were mixed initially I think it's aged fairly gracefully. One or two slightly rickety CGI moments, but in general it looks very nice. The film also sounds nice – in fact, this may be the best of all MLP media for audiophiles, thanks to very solid songs (I adore "Open Up Your Eyes") and a fine score, beyond that which many kids' films provide.¹
¹ Though.. grumble grumble "Ponies Got the Beat" grumble grumble "Equestria" grumble. :P

Fluttershy isn't in the story enough. There you are, I said it! Neither is Applejack. Maybe if we'd got a sequel things might have been different, but even I (four cinema visits and a convention viewing) couldn't make this a blockbuster on my own! Twilight, Pinkie, Rainbow and Rarity have a fair amount to do, though even allowing for this being started in the S4 era (hence Starlight's absence¹) they seem a little too helpless occasionally. Witness their near-instant persuasion by the clearly less than trustworthy Capper.
¹ Bar that non-speaking cameo at the start.

Yeah, talking of Capper... while his character works reasonably well, I still don't really like anthro cats or the Klugetown creatures in Equestria. (I'm actually okay with Grubber as comic relief.) Plus if you didn't know the background of the film, from earlier plans or the prequel comic, you wouldn't have the slightest clue who Verko was meant to be. As for the seapony-hippogriff things... despite the lack of "shoo be doo" they weren't bad, though I probably like them more now I know we got Silverstream and Terramar in the show as a kind of spin-off result. The pirates? Slightly underused, but fun.

Tempest Shadow is for me easily the star of the film. Emily Blunt pitches her just right, giving her a genuine menace beyond that of the theoretically more powerful Storm King who – despite being actually (well, maybe) Killed Off For Real by the end, is more in the bumbling, self-absorbed comedic supervillain line. Tempest's redemption is arguably a little too quick, and her filly backstory a little too neat (again, there's more detail in that comic) but when you only have an hour and a half to work with there have to be some limits.

The film is a little bit lacking in the memorable dialogue stakes, with few really memorable lines. Well, okay, the "Hungry! Hungry! Hippos?" one is stupid in an amusing way, but of course the "bad spell service" pun doesn't work for a British audience.¹ "Brian! Noooo!" is up there, I suppose. There are some outright clunky lines, too: as I noted in 2017, "the three most royal princesses of Equestria" is just bad. Sia I can excuse as she only had dialogue at all because she was The Big Guest Star rather than in the story organically.
¹ The basic "ringtone" is one thing that has really dated.

You've been waiting for this, I'm sure, so: yes, that scene on the beach does still hit me hard. It doesn't last very long, true, but it's got quite a punch. (And to this day, I maintain that Twilight is not unreasonably out of character when she attempts to steal the pearl. Not in these desperate straits.) For a U-rated film this movie gets fairly dark in places, and that helps it no end. Looked at straightforwardly, this is probably only a three-star film. It has such good memories and associations for me, though, that it's keeping that four. Yes, purely because I can.

Choice quote: Twilight: "Friendship didn't fail me. I failed friendship."

New rating: ★★★★

Next time, I'll be returning to Season Seven of Friendship is Magic itself, with an episode I had a good time with back in 2017: "Once Upon a Zeppelin". I hope to see you there!

Ponyfic Roundup 499: Nearly There Edition

Read it Later story count: 94 (-2)

Words read this week: 31,379

Well, it's been a long journey, but it's nearly at an end reached its next milestone. Next week, I will be hitting my 500th edition of Ponyfic Roundup, and you can bet I have something lined up for that. That's for a little later, though. First, it's time to look at today's five, all of which have (at least in their titles) some sense of almost, nearly, not quite and so on. Here they are:

Almost Famous by sporksalasagna
This Nearly Was Mine by BillyColt
Not Quite a Mare by Sky Melody
On the Edge by Roxxi
Filthy Rich Gets Divorced! (Almost) by deadpansnarker

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

Sounds of 2014: nos. 50 to 46

I rewatched the FiM movie yesterday, so expect that rewatch blog (at last) later this week. But for this series, we're now into the top half of the Equestrian Trot 100 chart from 2014. From here on in, we're really getting to the songs that were seriously popular in our fandom that year. Of course, I will still only feature them here if they hit at least one of my usual criteria:

Rule 1: Still available in the same or (1b) similar form direct from the/an original artist.
Rule 2: Available from a third party, with reason to believe the artist is fine with this.
Rule 3: So famous that it would be plain silly to leave it out.
Rule 4: Being unlisted is not, on its own, grounds for exclusion.

Last time around, I had to skip two of the five tracks. Today there's no such difficulty, as all the songs are still around on their original artists' YouTube channels and so every one satisfies Rule 1. Not only that, but you can find the lot of 'em on Bandcamp in HQ, too. Isn't that fabulous?

50: Foozogz – HEARTS♥RMX
49: SlyphStorm – Sinking Ships (cover)
48: Black Gryph0n & Baasic – Sight Unseen
47: Foozogz – Behold
46: Black Gryph0n & Baasic – Faster Than You Know

Come with me beyond the jump break, where I'll put the usual YouTube embeds of this edition's songs, plus the also usual short paragraph with details and thoughts.

Ponyfic Roundup 498: FanOfMostEverything Edition

Read it Later story count: 96 (+1)

Words read this week: 24,736

Today the focus falls on someone who has been a big part of Fimfiction almost since the start, having joined in September 2011: FanOfMostEverything. If you've been around ponyfic more than ten minutes and haven't encountered FoME,¹ you're probably not looking very hard. He's a huge asset to Fimf, reading and commenting on ridiculous amounts of stories, but also – today's key point – writing a lot of them as well, with no fewer than 159 listed as I type this.
¹ The original post used "FOME" throughout, but since the writer uses "FoME" consistently about himself, I've gone back and changed each instance.

Other than stories I've already read, the main type of fics I didn't review here were the many based on Oversaturation (PR 395). Since I enjoyed that, I may well read other stories in the universe at some point, but today I wanted to focus on fics that didn't need particular background knowledge. Passing homages and references, fine (FoME would be a hard author to review without those!) but not out-and-out Magic: The Gathering crossovers, since unlike my subject I'm not much into that.

All right then. Let's get to it!

Go South, Young Mare by FanOfMostEverything
Shoeshine and the Khaki Maniac by FanOfMostEverything
The Glaring Gaffes of Gabby Gums by FanOfMostEverything
Time Enough for Friendship by FanOfMostEverything
A Mad Glimmer by FanOfMostEverything

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

Sounds of 2014, nos. 55 to 51

Off we go again! Today we finish with the bottom half of 2014's Equestrian Trot 100 chart. As a reminder, these are songs that were in the charts in 2014, not necessarily tracks that were released that year. As we've seen, some songs have considerable staying power! Here's your reminder of the criteria; a track needs to hit at least one of these to be featured here.

Rule 1: Still available in the same or (1b) similar form direct from the/an original artist.
Rule 2: Available from a third party, with reason to believe the artist is fine with this.
Rule 3: So famous that it would be plain silly to leave it out.
Rule 4: Being unlisted is not, on its own, grounds for exclusion.

On the skipping front, sadly this time our recent run of good fortune has come to an end. We have not one but two songs which don't meet any of the above requirements and so sadly have to be skipped. Let's hope for better luck next time! The three remaining tracks are:

55: skipped
54: PhonyBrony + Feather – I'll Show You My Loyalty
53: Aviators – Set Me Free
52: Scraton ft. Nowacking – Vinylicious
51: skipped

Come with me beyond the jump break, where I'll put the usual YouTube embeds of this edition's songs, plus the also usual short paragraph with details and thoughts.

Well, that's annoying

Barring a last-minute miracle, I'm not going to be entering this year's Thousand Words Contest, which closes at 23:59 UTC tomorrow. I had intended to, but a couple of awkwardly timed hospital appointments meant that I really needed any ideas to work out first time – and the one I'd settled on just didn't. I might have another go outside the time constraints of the contest, or I might just stick a snippet in Little Bits and chat briefly about what I was hoping for.

Still, it does look like the contest will be a success, with the story count running into three figures once again. I do intend to continue my past practice and review the winners here at some point not too distant from the results announcement. For me, though, thank Celestia I did get a Dialogue Only Contest in, otherwise I probably would have gone a full year without a published ponyfic.

Ponyfic Roundup 497: Super Soaraway Spike Special!

Read it Later story count: 95 (nc)

Words read this week: 24,498

This time around, it's one of the themed editions I'd promised in the run-up to Ponyfic Roundup 500. Today, I'm concentrating on everyone's favourite Number One Assistant, Spike! As several people have mentioned, he's tagged in a whole lot of fics, but often as a background character or even a bit of an afterthought. Not so here: Spike is central or at the very least important to the story in each and every one.

How to Hug a Five-Hundred-Foot Tall Dragon by somatic
An Old Coot by Bachiavellian
Super Amazing Rocket Sled of Awesome by The Descendant
Sparkles and Scales by Winter Quill
Words on a Page by Tranquil Serenity

★: 0 | ★★: 1 | ★★★: 4 | ★★★★: 0 | ★★★★★: 0
Note: I use a skewed rating system. A fic I enjoy an average amount scores two stars.

Sounds of 2014, nos. 60 to 56

Well, lookee here, as I might say if I were Applejack, though if I were that would raise a lot of questions so it's probably just as well that I'm not. Anyway, I'm back again with another look at what was making the brony charts a decade ago. As always, I'll be taking my cue for what to include from the Equestrian Trot 100. Also as always, a track will need to be compliant with at least one of the following criteria to merit inclusion in this post:

Rule 1: Still available in the same or (1b) similar form direct from the/an original artist.
Rule 2: Available from a third party, with reason to believe the artist is fine with this.
Rule 3: So famous that it would be plain silly to leave it out.
Rule 4: Being unlisted is not, on its own, grounds for exclusion.

Any skips this week? Not a single one! Isn't that fantastic? That means the following list will contain five songs, and a fascinating collection they are:

60: 4everfreebrony & DragonwolfRooke – Starswirl's Frankenstein
59: Feather – Wave Hello
58: Sim Gretina ft. Nowacking – When the Bass Drops
57: Feather – City Slicker
56: ponyphonic – Harmony Ascendant

Past the jump break, you'll find the usual YouTube embeds of this edition's five tracks, as well as a short paragraph giving a few details and thoughts.

Ponyfic Roundup 496: Spotlight on Equestria from Dust

Read it Later story count: 95 (nc)

Words read this week: 69,579

Apologies to those who saw the unfinished version of this go up early by mistake! The big news this week, though, for us reviewers at least, is Ghost Mike's decision – not taken lightly – to step back from regular weekly reviewing. Happily he's not abandoning reviews altogether, but it's been fine to see them for two years and it'll be a wrench when they're not always there any more. I'll let Mike himself explain in detail. As for me, here's what today's post is supposed to look like!

Equestria from Dust by Soundslikeponies
Celestia and Luna
G4 AU; Adventure; 70k words; Oct 2012–Jul 2013; Teen

On a desolate plane on a barren world, Celestia awakes for the first time.

This story won RCL recognition,¹ so I was hoping for great things. On the other hoof, it's an old fic and so I was mildly wary. In the end, I think the good considerably outweighs the bad, but not overwhelmingly so. The highlight is very much the world-building, something taken literally here: the story opens with Celestia and nothing else. Equestria is created bit by bit, as are Luna and others. Tia gradually starts seeing strange apparitions in her dreams – who or what they are is a slow-burn mystery that runs through the story. Late on there's a significant appearance from a major canon character, one that's handled quite well. After a very slow – frankly, borderline tedious – opening, this story gets into gear and eventually becomes an exciting, intriguing mystery adventure. That brings it a top-end three, though I can't help feeling it could have been a four with pacing more to my liking. ★★★
¹ Not linked as the RCL site seems to be down.

This is a Spotlight edition, and so, there be spoilers past this warning, mateys!

Well, could be worse!

I don't usually bother reporting on Equestria Daily polls here, but I did want to note that the recent "What is the best type of Pony fan content?" one's results are out, and they came out rather better for us ponyficcers than I'd been expecting. Here are the four categories that made it to a double-figure percentage:

Animations: 27.6%

Drawings: 19.5%

Fanfics: 14.8%

Music: 13.9%

Considering everything, I think that's a pretty decent result for the Fanfic Party. I don't think I'd have predicted coming ahead of music, not when this fandom has produced so many great tunes. Mind you, things do change: I was very struck by PMVs scoring just 2.0%, a figure I'm certain would have been higher ten years ago.