Read it Later story count: 94 (+2)
Words read this week: 26,042
The Forgiveness Festival by DegeTheMighty
Shouldering a Holiday Burden by Ghost Mike
Limestone Reluctantly Preserves the Pie Family Hearthswarming by Harmlesskitten13
Silent Night by Serina
The Family That Chooses You by SmokeTester
★: 1 | ★★: 2 | ★★★: 2 | ★★★★: 0 | ★★★★★: 0
Note: I use a skewed rating system. A fic I enjoy an average amount scores two stars.
The Forgiveness Festival by DegeTheMighty
Scootaloo and Rumble
G4; Romance/Slice of Life; 1k words; Oct 2013; Everyone
In a small Ponyville festival, Scootaloo hopes she gets the apology she deserved.
The eponymous festival is celebrated in some parts of Equestria a week before Hearth's Warming. Scootaloo is not happy and wants Rumble to say sorry. Not for nearly getting her grounded over some classroom notes, either. It's more a case of him fancying the wrong pony, which is to say, not her. There's potential for an interesting fic here in the "what if the pony I like isn't the pony who likes me?" line, but sadly this isn't it. There's just no depth to it, and the ending is quite ridiculously abrupt. I don't like giving one-star ratings, albeit a high one in this case, but sadly this story has almost no substance to it. ★
Shouldering a Holiday Burden by Ghost Mike
Silverstream, Gallus, Spike, Twilight and Rarity
G4; Slice of Life; 8k words; Dec 2020; Everyone
With Hearth's Warming fast approaching, Silverstream finds something she'd hoped she never would: a friendship problem that can't be solved.
...Or can it? This is Mike's oldest story on Fimfiction. He feels he's advanced noticeably since then and I will read his later stories at some point, but I always like to see how people began in ponyfic – and besides, this story has been on my RiL list for a long time. So, now I've finally read it, was it worth it? Happily, yes! As many of you (including Mike) know, I enjoy stories where we just spend some time with well-characterised, er, characters. This is one of those, and it has the requisite warmth to boot. Silverstream and Gallus are both believable, and Silverstream in particular is very satisfyingly characterised. The problem she faces feels like something suitable for the setting. (I appreciate that it's not a particularly simple one.) Unsurprisingly for Mike, Spike also gets a solid supporting role with Twilight, and Rarity has a smaller but useful role too. The story is rather on the wordy side and could have done with some paragraphs being cut down,¹ but though it slightly dilutes the impact it's not a dealbreaker. First published MLP fic as it may be, it's warm and friendly and I think worth a very solid three. ★★★
¹ I understand a fair bit was trimmed before publication, but it's still a bit that way.
Limestone Reluctantly Preserves the Pie Family Hearthswarming by Harmlesskitten13
Limestone Pie, Maud Pie, Marble Pie, Cloudy Quartz and Igneous Rock
G4; Comedy/Sad; 10k words; Jan 2020; Everyone
Limestone is going to preserve a festive atmosphere for her family, whether she likes it or not.
Why does it need preserving? Because Pinkie Pie isn't there! She's having to stay in Ponyville for her baking internship. Limestone, of course, is grumpy, because she's Limestone – but Marble is moping and apparently Maud is doing Marble's work as well as her own. I like the interplay between the various Pies, and there's a good sense of them as a family. The mystery of why a particular cavern was sealed off by the older Pies years ago is a bit on the slight side, and Cloudy's Early Modern English isn't accurate ("We were hoping yond supper wouldst help...") but the characterisation of Limestone in particular is one of the better and more interesting I've found. The end A/N reveals a serious reason for Harmlesskitten13 writing this fic, but I'm judging it on its own merits. And I think it's interesting enough to slip into the threes. ★★★
Silent Night by Serina
Misty and Opaline
G5; Sad/Slice of Life; 2k words; Dec 2023; Everyone
Misty decides to visit an old friend on Winter Wishday.
You'll need to have seen Chapter 6 of Make Your Mark to properly understand this story, since it hinges on what happened to Opaline. Part of the author's sizeable Hearth's Warming Eve collection, this fic sees Misty going to visit Opaline. Well, in a manner of speaking – she's actually gone to talk to a tree. This is where the spoiler warning comes in, since you need to know the tree's significance with regard to Opaline in G5 for this story to work. It's a nice idea and it's executed fairly cutely with appealing empathy from Misty, though the writing does suffer from too much exposition of fairly basic things that anyone who's seen the relevant episodes will already know. A decent two as it stands, but I think there's a three-star fic in there with a bit of tightening. ★★
The Family That Chooses You by SmokeTester
Sunset, Fluttershy and OC
G4 EqG; Slice of Life; 5k words; Dec 2015; Everyone
Having nowhere else to go, Sunset Shimmer visits Fluttershy's family for Christmas
This story ignores the existence of the canon "Anon-y-Miss" comic, which given that comic's unpopularity will probably be welcome news to many! We also didn't know how (FiM) Fluttershy's family worked, since it was before "Flutter Brutter". Those things together gave SmokeTester a fair bit of freedom. It's a warm hug of a tale, as you might expect, in which Sunset finds out just how much her new friends (it's not long since her reformation) care about her. A little too much Lavender Unicorn Syndrome ("the prismatic youth finally relented") and there isn't a massive amount of substance to this. If you're looking for a few minutes of cosy fluff, though, this might be your thing. A top-end two for me, so not bad even with those slight reservations. ★★
The next two Wednesdays are Christmas Day and New Year's Day, but fear not, you won't have to wait three weeks for the next Ponyfic Roundup! My plan is to post it on Friday 3rd January. It will be a Spotlight edition, and nobody who knows me and my ponyfic preferences will be remotely surprised by the story I've chosen to feature. So, for now, Merry Christmas, Happy Hearth's Warming and/or Wonderful Wishday! Next time...
Oof, that's a sore rating average, yikes. I had a feeling we wouldn't see much high – most seasonal stories often err on the side of being heartwarming fluff pieces with minimal substance too much to produce exceptional work – but two 2-stars and a 1-star? Yikes. Good thing the two longest fics provided 3-stars, so at least in word-count, 2/3's of this week was solid.
ReplyDeleteI've read Silent Night. It was actually one of the first times I chose to not review a fic after reading it. Not because it's bad, I would have given it a Passable. But as tantalising as the concept is, is basically doesn't do anything that most folks wouldn't imagine as the starting point for Misty going to Opaline to try and move beyond what happened (Misty, that is), and reading it provides much the same experience as what anyone would picture. Not much point reviewing to say that. It ether needs more substance/content, or, as you note, to cut out some chaff. But as the author wrote each of these fics a day after each other, it could have been much more rickety.
Also, says a lot about how most folks didn't even make it to the end of MYM that being cagey with spoilers is still necessary for you here! With good reason, though.
As for the big boi, that's about what I expected. Though worth noting I'd written fanfic long before for several, so this was only a debut in the sense of catching up to ponyfic standards. Most of the ways in which I feel it's wobbly don't tend to be those most readers will notice or care. Conversely, the most acclaimed-point, Silverstream's characterisation, just kind of came out, I didn't focus on it.
The problem she faces feels like something suitable for the setting. (I appreciate that it's not a particularly simple one.)
Yeah, this problem very much came from the "expand on the show's canon to a deeper step they couldn't do" school of thought common to many folks' first fic. Very satisfying, if one engages with later-show canon unironically. Which I don't, but hey, shows I can write about that I don't personally care for!
Unsurprisingly for Mike, Spike also gets a solid supporting role with Twilight, and Rarity has a smaller but useful role too.
Ha! Think that's a bit of a placebo effect off my affection for the li'l dragon. When writing some later fics, I was analysing my writing of prior ones, including dialogue. Spike only has 85 words across 7 lines, while Rarity has 323 across 15 (she is given to longer statements off her eloquence). Twilight being ahead of both, of course. And honestly, he's included mostly for the end twist: I even made him the butt of two jokes, which I'm sure many wouldn't believe, knowing my defence of the guy. But they're good-natured ones.
I understand a fair bit was trimmed before publication, but it's still a bit that way.
Possibly to get under Jinglemas' 8.5K hard limit (it's not an enforced one, mind), but I can't recall. I did later lose close to 200 words off implementing EqD feedback, getting it featured the following December. We're only talking little prose cuts you'd never notice otherwise. But, yeah it's still fair to say I hadn't reigned in my occasionally-verbose ways, the way I emphatically had by The Endeavor Within (which was also overlong, though for actual content, to the tune of losing 1.5K after publishing).
nobody who knows me and my ponyfic preferences will be remotely surprised by the story I've chosen to feature.
Dunno what it says about me that I figured the fic out from this line alone! That said, I'm glad to see it: I'm sure a part of iisaw would prefer this didn't happen until his intended revision of the penultimate chapter (4th last if counting epilogue and glossary), but it'll be good to get another appraisal of this one beyond my own positive-with-reservations feelings on it. And also see where your tastes on this series/genre type may have shifted, if at all, in the nearly seven years since you looked at The Skyla Pseudonym.
"You idiot! We're all prismatic youths!"
ReplyDelete