Pony Life to premiere on 13th June

First up: paperhearts is back! He's posted a brief blog post on Fimfiction. He's clearly had a very hard time, but he's now able to see his family again. This is the best fandom news I've had in ages.

Now, to more straightforward MLP news: Pony Life is finally on its way! According to EqD, the first episode will premiere on Discovery Family on Saturday 13th June – so in less than a fortnight! We've also seen the synopses for the first two episodes, from Zap2it I believe. As they may be considered a little spoilery, they'll go after a page break:

FufCon PonyFest 3.0 is go!

Oops, forgot to post this. Here's the schedule page, which includes a link to the Twitch stream. Coming up as I post: Anneli Heed's panel. :)

My Little Reviews 42: "Read It and Weep"

"I go through all this just to get retconned? Sheesh"

S2E16: "Read It and Weep"
Written by Cindy Morrow
4 Feb 2012

My original rating: N/A
IMDB score: 8.8

The one with Pony Battleship.

Thoughts: The first Daring Do episode, and still quite possibly the best. Regardless of how you feel about the "A. K. Yearling" stuff that comes in later in the series, the Daring sections of this episode make a wonderful adventure in their own right. Here (as Daring's design demonstrates) it's clearly Rainbow Dash putting herself in the adventurer's horseshoes. I've never liked Ahuizotl's S9 retcon, but here he appears as I feel he should appear, a love-to-hate villain; mind you, it's strange now to see him without Caballeron! By S2 standards these sections are visually sumptuous, too, and we even get fantastic little touches like imperfections in the "film" and bleed at the edges of the "cinema screen". And the score is very good indeed. The adventure bits are interspersed with plenty of excellent character moments (hey, this is a Cindy Morrow episode) and provide us with the most likeable Rainbow Dash performance in a long time. It's all set up with Dash breaking her wing – at the time a clichéd fanfic setup, but used nicely here, and a reminder that Equestrian magic doesn't do easy healing. The hospital scenes aren't all quite so good, and the night-time slipper raid stuff is really a bit absurd. I'm also not entirely comfortable with Screw Loose and have always been surprised her appearance didn't create much controversy – we're only two episodes on from Derpygate, after all. These quibbles aside, though, "Read It and Weep" is a great episode and one I hugely enjoyed rewatching. Plenty of humour, too – we even find out next season that Rainbow really does snore like that! A four-star rating here, and a pretty high four at that. Indiana Pones indeed.

Choice quote: Pinkie Pie: "I'd say it was more of a fracas than a ruckus."

New rating: ★★★★

Next up is "Hearts and Hooves Day", an episode I wasn't at all a big fan of at first, but one which has gradually grown on me over the years.

Does anyone have news of paperhearts?

Edit 30 May: He's back! See Impossible Numbers' comment.

Some while ago now, paperhearts posted in his Fimfiction blog to the effect that he was going into hospital for treatment for Covid-19. That was on 25th April, so it's been more than a month. I was thinking about this yesterday, and then I saw Impossible Numbers' Fimfiction blog post on the same topic. He knows the bloke considerably better than I do, I think, but nevertheless I've had enough dealings with paperhearts to like him.

I'm aware that this bloody virus can often take a long time to recover from, so I'm hoping that the lack of news is simply that paperhearts is putting his energy into more important things than posting on a fanfiction website. I'd settle for any good news, though. If anyone knows anything (that they can reasonably say to me) then I would be very glad to hear about it. I am worried about paperhearts, and I know I'm not the only one.

Ponyfic Roundup 297

Read it Later story count: 209 (nc)

Here I am again with another Ponyfic Roundup. What – you were expecting me to review pencil sharpeners or something? I'm so, so sorry. (Edit: though see the comment by The Cloptimist!) Instead, you'll get me rabbiting on about the following three fics:

Together Forever by Snake Staff
Great and Powerful? by Manaphy
Hay is for Horses by Holy

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

Yes, I'll be reviewing the clip shows

It just isn't likely to be especially soon. I haven't yet seen all of them, for a start! Given the small amount of original content in each episode, my plan is to write up a single post to cover all six. Still, we do have a Friendship is Forever tag here now, so that's something! And something's my favourite.

PoniesOnline is today!

Here's the schedule. Note that times are given in Eastern Standard Time (not Daylight), so the opening ceremony will begin at 3 pm BST. A pretty nice variety of events, by the looks of it. Interesting that some streams are on Twitch and some on YouTube; scroll down to below the timetable itself to find the links for each one. Sadly "Pony Trivia Night" is at three in the morning UK time, so I'm unlikely to be able to stick around for that one. On the plus side, StormBlaze's art panel works out at 10 am UK time, which is fine.