My Little Repeats 103: "Amending Fences"

Proper horse food, too. A rare sight by this point in the series!

S5E12: "Amending Fences"

4 Jul 2015

My original rating: ★★★★★
IMDb score: 9.3

The one with "Twilight Twinkle"

Thoughts: Here we are, then, The episode often picked as the best FiM ep of all time. Is it? Well, it's not quite my utter personal favourite (that's "Hurricane Fluttershy", as if you didn't know) but M. A. Larson does provide us with an absolutely tremendous 22 minutes of animated Pony. I loved it when it came out and I still love it now. I adore almost everything about it: the way it links in with the start of S1E01, Moondancer showing where Twilight could have ended up, Minuette's wonderful (and criminally unused hereafter) bubbly character, Pinkie and Spike playing fine supporting roles... oh, you get the idea. Although it's not a big deal now, there's even a tiny Starlight Glimmer cameo. Okay, the "trail of books" lure isn't the most original idea in the universe, but somehow it still works perfectly here. The reminiscences of Lemon Hearts and the others (that flask!) are lovely, and on the other hoof Moondancer not instantly forgiving Twilight the second she sees the party is very nicely handled. Twi wouldn't say, "I failed friendship" until the movie two years later, but the phrase would have been apt for her here too. I love "Amending Fences" for all of this, but perhaps most of all for the way it takes pre-FiM Twilight and S5 Twilight and contrasts them to such great effect. Would the old Twi have been so persevering and resourceful when trying to make it up to Moondancer? No, and indeed the fact that she wasn't is a big reason why Moondancer ended up a recluse – but it's also the reason Celestia sent Twilight to Ponyville in the first place, without which this episode would have been impossible in another way. Look, it's just so good, all right?

Choice quote: Twilight: "All my old friends! ...I can't remember any of their names right now."

New rating: ★★★★★

Next up is "Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep" which not everyone thinks is great but which I very much enjoyed in 2015. Will I still?

Ponyfic Roundup 377

Read it Later story count: 96 (+1) 

I must admit, when I said I was going to nudge my weekly story total up from three to four, I rather suspected that something would go wrong almost at once to stop me establishing that new level as the norm. Amazingly, it hasn't, and I have another four fics to look at this week. Here they are:

Telling Tales by James Washburn
The Enemy Within by Jake the Army Guy
Unplanned by Alicorn
The Most Basic of Jokes by CartsBeforeHorses

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

Happy 10th birthday, "Loyalty"!

AcoustiMandoBrony – Loyalty

Feeling old yet? It's ten years today since the best known part of the "Elements" collection was first uploaded to YouTube. This has never actually been finished, and although in the last year or so we've had a couple of updates from Re:Make (as Acoustic Brony are now known) we still await any actual new music to complete the set with "Honesty"¹ and "Magic". Back in 2012 they were collaborating with MandoPony, but that perhaps unsurprisingly won't carry over to the new versions of the songs. Anyway, as you'd expect from a song with this title, "Loyalty" is a song about Rainbow Dash. As befits her character, it's very much a rock number, a paean to the pony for whom backing up her friends means everything. (Well, usually.) It contains what is probably Acoustic Brony's most famous solo, too, a great guitar-then-drums section that kicks in around 3:25 and lasts for just over a minute. I was privileged to see AB play "Loyalty" live at BUCK 2014's Summer Sun Celebration: the solo was changed a bit, but it was still a fantastic experience. They also played it at UK PonyCon 2019, but I had to dash off after the first verse to do the famous UKPC pub quiz! No regrets, but "Loyalty" is and will forever be a great fandom classic.
¹An early version of "Honesty" was played at UK PonyCon 2019, but no public studio version exists

Thoughts of a Ponyfic Reviewer 2: If You're Gonna Dish It Out...

I've always felt that if I'm going to engage in the – let's face it – rather strange game of reviewing and rating other people's stories, I should allow them to do the same to mine in return, should they so wish. Actually, I think that in general it's better if ponyfic reviewers take this approach. The easiest way to do this is, of course, to have your own stories out there for people to comment on. This is in fact the usual practice.

Consider: the main individuals still in the "regularly reviews ponyfic" game are probably Present Perfect, PaulAsaran and me. Including these three and a non-exhaustive bunch of high-profile reviewers who've now moved on, the published story counts are, with active reviewers bolded:

Present Perfect: 96
PaulAsaran: 69
Foals Errand: 48
Titanium Dragon: 43
Loganberry/Louder Yay: 30
Chris/One Man's Pony Ramblings: 21
Soge: 8
Singularity Dream/City of Doors: 3

Of course, this isn't everyone, as lots of people have written at least the occasional ponyfic review in a Fimfiction blog or wherever. There are also the more substantial contributions from the members of the Royal Canterlot Library, Seattle's Angels and – now we're going back a bit! – The Royal Guard. All now moribund-to-dead in 2022-world: indeed, in the case of TRG, their Fimfiction group has long since been entirely removed.

Although I can't cover everyone, I do want to mention one more person, who is in a kind of class by himself. That is Pascoite, who remains very active. Although he keeps the amusing "occasional author" line in his Fimfiction bio, in fact he beats all the others mentioned here with 98 published stories – the last uploaded only a week ago. He doesn't review ponyfic much now,¹ but scroll through enough anime review posts and there's still the occasional Underappreciated Author Spotlight, so I'm going to bold his name here.
¹ I don't count pre-reader feedback for Equestria Daily, since as a rule that is not public

I do allow and indeed encourage mini-review feedback (within certain limits) for the monthly Flashfic 150 contests I run, but there is no requirement to have published ponyfic to give those. I do very occasionally submit a non-competitive flashfic myself, though. There's also the whole other area of YouTube and the like. I tend to find video reviews frustratingly slow to get to the point, so I very much prefer text-based thoughts, which is a major reason I'm not considering video reviewers in this blog post.

It's interesting that all the reviewers I've mentioned have at least a few published ponyfics, and most have a total well into double figures. I can't speak for any of the others, but I think I would feel rather uncomfortable if I was pronouncing on other people's Pony stories but not giving any kind of "comeback" – sure, they're able and very welcome to comment, but I rather like that people can look at my writing and see that I'm neither completely illiterate nor a Nobel Prize candidate.

Ponyfic isn't everything, of course. I don't think there's any way to get a total word count for Louder Yay, but I'd be willing to bet it greatly exceeds the amount I've written for all my fics combined. I always leave comments open on here, so that's also a way of allowing people to have their say on what I've written. The question of "why review anyway?" is a different one (and one I may return to) but for me, at least, if I'm going to dish out verdicts then I feel I should be able to take them as well.

A belated happy 10th birthday to that remix of "Discord"!

The Living Tombstone – Discord (remix)

Annoyingly, I missed this anniversary yesterday! Indeed, I was only reminded of it by a friend today. Although it's not Eurobeat Brony's original, say "Discord" to most people and they'll think of The Living Tombstone's stupendously popular remix. With well over 54 million views on YouTube since its initial upload on 21st January 2012, it is I think the most-viewed MLP fan song of all time. In March 2012 we saw this music video, made by Umby and filmed somewhere in England (Newcastle?) while much more recently "Discord" has become a hit on TikTok, with at least some of its users entirely unaware of its Pony origins. While quite a few people do prefer the original, and even more feel at least mildly irritated that TLT sometimes gets the credit for the whole song, there's no doubt that his "Discord" is a song that almost everybody with the slightest interest in brony music knows the second they hear those opening notes. Not many MLP fan songs can say that, and its place in fandom history is more than secure.

My Little Repeats 102: "Party Pooped"

I'm still amused that "George" has a jelly babies cutie mark

S5E11: "Party Pooped"

27 Jun 2015

My original rating: ★★★
IMDb score: 7.5

The one with sheep on the line

Thoughts: For the second week running, a new writer, but this one was destined to have a rather more successful MLP career than Neal Dusedau: "Party Pooped" was Nick Confalone's Pony debut. And it's better than the previous episode, too, although still no classic. Part of this is that I find the first act pretty tiresome, with the "YAKS HATE IF NOT PERFECT" stuff really going on too long. Later, Pinkie's journey to Yakyakistan is quite fun, if all a bit thrown-together, and her Party Bunker is an amusing little touch even if I don't think we ever see it again. I'm still not sure why Yakyakistan wasn't called simply Yakistan, which is (to my mind, at least) a much better pun. Mind you, I still don't see any obvious inspiration for Rutherford's name, either. Meanwhile, Twilight is having the kind of freak-out more reminiscent of her earlier days. Again, it's fairly amusing to start with but does go on a bit too long. All these things considered, I'm going to nudge my rating down from a low three to a high two. While this is clearly more fun than "Princess Spike" was, it's still not that great an episode. Happily Confalone would go on to write several very good eps, but he didn't quite hit the ground running and "Party Pooped" was a bit of a mish-mash.

Choice quote: Rainbow Dash: "It's sort of panic themed."

New rating: ★★

Next up is "Amending Fences", and frankly I think we all know already how that one is going to go down. :D

Ponyfic Roundup 376

Read it Later story count: 95 (-1) 

Not a lot to say today, and for once I'm not going to ramble on pointlessly for a couple of hundred words just to fill up the space. I'll do that in the reviews instead... I should probably give the list of this week's fics and move on.

What Meets the Eye by Butterscotch Cream
Hyperportentia by MyHobby
Bon-Bon's Average Day by articunos bitch
Select Difficulty by naturalbornderpy

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