Ponyfic Roundup 305

Read it Later story count: 195 (-3)

Summer has made an appearance here in darkest central England. As is often the case with our summers, this means one really nice, warm, sunny day (yesterday) followed by one unpleasantly hot, humid day (today) followed by a return to cool, cloudy, showery conditions (tomorrow). Our climate can be a pain sometimes, though at least it's not usually lethal. Anyway, today's three fics:

Sunset Shimmer is not an Alicorn by jqnexx
An Unspoken Agreement by Jarvy Jared
Roots by LittleSallyDigby

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

Sunset Shimmer is not an Alicorn by jqnexx
Sunset Shimmer and OC
Equestria Girls/Adventure/Comedy; 8k words; Jul 2019; Teen

Just because she isn't an alicorn doesn't mean Sunset Shimmer won't open an alicorn-sized can of beatings on Equestria's latest threat.

When Sunset was going to the bad, before her trip to CHS-world, she made a lot of enemies. One, who was framed for plagiarism by Sunset, has found her and wants revenge. Oh, and she's got what seems to be the Alicorn Amulet. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a confrontation is on the cards. This is enjoyably and quite tensely portrayed, and it doesn't always go the way that I (or Sunset!) had expected. A few points at which I felt I was missing some reference or other (why is aluminium supposed to be ultra-rare in Equestria?) and an ending twist that fitted but still felt slightly tacked on. Not a bad look at pre-reformation Sunset's actions coming back to haunt her, though. ★★★

An Unspoken Agreement by Jarvy Jared
Twilight and Rarity
Sad/Slice of Life; 2k words; Jun 2019; Everyone

They meet at a cafe, and talk about everything but the thing that matters.

As that short description may suggest, this is very much the "atmospheric scene" type of fic. The two principals sit and chat in a rather brittle way, clearly with something else in the background, perhaps like a tender tooth in the way the two mares are so obviously not prodding it. Reading between the lines isn't all that difficult, which is honestly a good thing – some writers seem to think opacity is a virtue in itself, and I'm not in that camp at all. Not one for action junkies, but rather a story for those who like quiet, restrained character pieces. ★★★

Roots by LittleSallyDigby
Big Mac, OCs, Granny Smith and Celestia
Adventure/Slice of Life; 11k words; Sep 2012; Everyone

The secret history of the Apple Family.

Here we have Big Mac finding out just what his forebears have actually done for Equestria. The story alternates entries from his journal (over several years) and the tales of a large number of his ancestors – always told by intermediate generations, but going right back to G1 Applejack. We get a vast amount of historical world-building, even managing to offer a possible explanation for the largely tech-free (early-series) Equestria still giving Twilight a computer in her tree basement in "Feeling Pinkie Keen". Impressive, sweeping world-building, but it didn't grip me. The journal entries are often too expository even for me, and they don't always sound much like Big Mac. I think the real problem, though, is that there's just too much here. It's ancestor after ancestor after ancestor, and I think I might have found it a tighter tale with those cut down to perhaps five or six at most. Frankly, it got tedious eventually, and so I can't rate this as highly as its imagination might have deserved. A high two. (Worth noting, in passing, that one commenter compared this to Dune. I find that a bit tedious too.) ★★

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Next time on Ponyfic Roundup: stories reviewed should include shortskirtsandexplosions' Friendship is Wet.