A couple of days late this week, owing to lack of time and – if I'm truly honest – lack of good mood. I don't generally like reading ponyfic when I'm in a rotten mood, although there are some kinds that can cheer me up. I tend to drift towards general undemanding reading (Asterix, for example) to fulfil that role, though. Hmm, I wonder whether anyone's written an Asterix/MLP crossover? I should probably have a look sometime. Anyway, here are today's three fics:
Errors by The Cloptimist
For want of a book by Hoopy McGee
Wrong Side of the Glass by Rosencranz
★: 0 | ★★: 0 | ★★★: 2 | ★★★★: 1 | ★★★★★: 0
Note: I use a skewed rating system. A fic I find average scores two stars.
Errors by The Cloptimist
Trixie, Diamond Tiara, Derpy, Starlight Glimmer and Filthy Rich
Adventure/Comedy; 20k words; Apr 2019; Everyone
Three unlikely heroines are accidentally sent halfway across the world. How will they get home?A strange collection of character tags, huh? That's because this was written for the Season 9 bingo contest Shrink Laureate ran, and the prompts The Cloptimist received were Derpy, DT, Pony Politics, Maretonia and Tartarus. From this rather unpromising setup he produces a fun tale. A magical accident leaves Derpy, DT and Trixie alone in the middle of nowhere. They spark off each other nicely, and the difficult balancing act of writing Derpy without her being either stupid or out of character is pulled off with aplomb. It's not a hysterical comedy, but more a gentle chuckler with added world-building for luck. There are two significant problems. One, that a foreign language is represented for quite some while by a sort-of human one (Google-translated Arabic rendered into Latin script) and this goes on for long enough to get quite annoying. Personal preference, but I dislike Earthly languages being used this way in ponyfic and I criticised one of The Descendant's fics for a similar reason (PR 249). Two, that the ending feels rather rushed – given the word count is 19,996 I wonder whether the contest had a strict 20k limit. (I can't remember.) Don't let that put you off, though. This is still entertaining and very readable. A very high three that could easily have been a four without that rushed ending. ★★★
For want of a book by Hoopy McGee
Twilight, Celestia and Other
Random/Crossover; 6k words; Mar 2015; Everyone
Princess Celestia sends her student, Twilight Sparkle, to the Royal Library to retrieve a mysterious book. What Twilight finds is an adventure she never could have expected.This fic is set before S1, when Twilight is still Celestia's protégée in Canterlot. The description above tells you about all it's possible to do without any spoilers, so all I can really do is to say that this is a crossover that I think will still work if you don't know the other fandom – but I know will work if you do. I'm not that fond of Celestia as depicted here, who I think is a bit of a pain in the way she treats Twilight (though her approach is similar to that she mentions in the Celie/Spike IDW comic). But anyway, Twi has told the Princess that she doesn't see the value in fiction. Tia sends her off an an irritatingly vague mission as a result. One that could only happen in a library. I'm shading this one into the fours for being such a perfect tribute to... well, that crossover. That may be a little too high a rating for readers who don't get the references, but you're not writing this review. :P ★★★★
Wrong Side of the Glass by Rosencranz
Other and Rainbow Dash
Sad; 7k words; Oct 2012; Everyone
I found myself in the Ponyville hospital this morning. A heart condition, they said...Remember the pony in "Read It and Weep" who accuses Rainbow of stealing his slippers? This is his story, and it's rather moving. Turns out he's a musician, and one with two major regrets in life, one personal and one professional – though, for a musician, are those really separate at all? His conversation with Dash about grabbing life by the horns makes him re-evaluate things. It's a touching story, with an ending that hits hard if you don't see it coming, though I think it pushes a "don't settle for second-best evarrr" message just a bit too hard at times. ★★★
Next time on Ponyfic Roundup: stories reviewed should include Impossible Numbers' Beyond the Herd.
Thanks so much for the review - I'll never get tired of seeing my own stories appearing here, and especially for one of my very few longer pieces (nopony ever reads those!)
ReplyDeleteGosh, Errors. Well! With the ending, yeah, you guessed right, the word limit was a hard 20k and I just simply ran out of space - there was probably an entire chapter missing!
Fair play on the Arabic thing; I wanted to do a scene where the three heroines were confronted by unintelligible foreigners shouting at them, and then to replay the entire scene but from the perspective of the Maretonians to show what they were actually saying to each other. I didn't really consider how it could get annoying.
(I was going to just use Generic Gibberish, but thought, well, Maretonia is already a pun, I might as well use the real-life language as a bilingual bonus... although apparently according to Arabic speakers who've commented, it's still mangled Carolinho comedy-speak!)
All the same, it still has some of my favourite bits I've written - the Tartarus scene, Twilight's initial investigation, anything with Trixie and Diamond annoying each other - and I'm really glad to see someone read it and enjoy it!
I actually want to read a few more longer stories. I haven't done a Spotlight edition of PR for months and months, for one thing. It's just a question of time, and what with so many things so uncertain at the moment I tend to take the easy way out and review short one-shots.
DeleteI speak absolutely no Arabic, so that aspect didn't make any difference. It was more distracting in some fic long, long ago that used Welsh similarly. I don't really speak Welsh either, but I have just enough knowledge of it to find it distracting in a ponyfic. (I don't think the story in question is still up.)
I realise now I didn't even mention the Tartarus bits in my review. I found the world-building in there really interesting, though one or two bits (the cockatrice...) were a little unexpectedly harsh for a comedy-tagged fic. That's not a complaint, by the way -- I thought the contrast worked.
For want of a book is among my favorites, and I'm sure that's in part because of the deft crossover. Honestly... I'm going to go and reread it now...
ReplyDeletePlus I now need to go and read a couple of books by... well, you know who. So I may be a while!
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