Ponyfic Roundup 350: Spotlight on A White Mare

Read it Later story count: 131 (nc)

Here it is: 350 up! To mark the occasion, I wanted to get one of my longer reads dealt with, and A White Mare is the story that I picked. Unlike some of the others on my RiL list, I'd barely even heard of this until someone mentioned it, but that and the story's description just intrigued me all the more. Let's see how it fared...

A White Mare by RandomBlank
Celestia [and OCs]
Romance/Adventure/Human; 39k words; Apr–Jul 2015; Teen

Celestia lands on Earth as a common Arabian mare. Without magic, speech, not knowing the language, she seeks her way home. First though, she needs to make some friends and restore her freedom.

There are nowhere near as many (non-stupid) "pony on Earth" fics as there are "human in Equestria" ones. Now, what I was expecting here was that we'd have Celestia as the main protagonist and that we'd be inside her head as she struggled with translating her brilliant intellect into a form humans could understand. While the second part is broadly true, in fact the POV character is a Polish human who is (by the author's own admission) something of a self-insert. He happens across Celestia stuck at a run-down riding school controlled by a very dodgy character. Though it's not a comedy, there are some entertaining bits here, especially early on where the narrator pokes fun at himself; and in a pleasant epilogue. Also worth noting that bronies are not a thing on this Earth, which makes a change. My biggest problem with this was that it's one of those fics where the author is apparently desperate to show how nerdy he is – sure, the character is as well, but there's way too much detail in here about BitCoins and stock market goings-on and the like. It's tedious, frankly. The main villain is a bit of a cardboard cut-out baddie and Celestia also becomes absurdly overpowered later on, albeit in a different way from usual. Oh, and that [Romance] tag isn't really relevant except in a couple of places where it becomes creepy. The location-reversal idea has potential, but this story doesn't really realise it. ★★

If you want some spoilery expansion on all that, then click past the page break.

Let's get my [Romance] problem (so to speak!) out of the way to start with. It's barely a factor most of the time, but the human does end up going with Celestia to Equestria. Those who like things that way round should note that this is confined to a short epilogue. That's not a huge problem, though. No, what did squick me a bit was that, just a couple of times, there are suggestions of attraction beyond the chaste. Nothing actually happens, and yes this is a sapient magic horse and not an Earth animal – but there is one scene fairly early on in which the guy is washing and cleaning Celestia where we get frequent allusions to exactly where he's looking and why. I hated this and was very relieved it wasn't continued.

I mentioned the overpowered nature of Celestia. I quite liked the way in which, once she'd learned a bit of English from books, Narrator set up Tia with one of those joystick-controlled communications devices. I also enjoyed the mandala-based system of magic Celestia eventually used; being OP in magic is fine as that's canon. What did make me roll my eyes was that her abilities eventually escalated to the point where she basically brought about world peace (example: "Just yesterday she solved the territorial conflict between India and Pakistan"), advanced the bounds of Earthly scientific knowledge and realised how to play the stock market perfectly every time.

So that was pretty tedious – as, I have to say, was all the stuff from the narrator about how his system ran Knoppix and how Tia was careful to avoid "the 51% attack suspicion". This, I'm afraid, quite often came over as "Look how much I know about this stuff!" I'd have enjoyed it a lot more if it had been written in more normal human terms with the techy stuff sketched in rather than drawn in thick felt tip. Happily, this geekery does calm down a bit later, though it gets somewhat replaced by the narrator's (and I suspect the author's) depiction of a rotten-to-the-core Polish system.

Talking of drawing, this is an illustrated story – sort of, anyway. Most of the drawings are in the early part of the fic, and they consist of things like building plans and representations of the Equestrian alphabet, as shown on Narrator's ancient tablet ("a cheap piece of crap with a resistive screen"). It's not impossible to follow the story without the pictures by any means, but they to add a little something different and they do their job decently enough. Every so often there are also links, but those didn't work – to be fair, Narrator finds them dead as well!

One of my favourite parts of A White Mare comes quite a way into the story, when Celestia is explaining to human scientists about interdimensional bridges. Well, not fully explaining, because apparently this leads to disaster – but also, I suspect, because Tia likes to be playful sometimes (she likes cake!) and leave a bit of mystery in the air. I was very struck by the notion that such a disaster led in the far past to the destruction of Equestria's Sun and Moon. In this story, that is why Celestia and Luna have to do what they do: because the newer bodies are in fact artificial replacements!

Tresher, the wildly corrupt supervillain who seems to control just about everyone in a way SMERSH would be proud of, is a rather dull character. He doesn't even carry a lot of menace most of the time, which is odd considering the power he has over Poland's society and establishment, including massive-scale illegal drug running and even assassination. He's not really much more than a name, and the super-lawyers whose support Narrator enlists using some of the proceeds from Celestia's multi-billion-euro Share Master turn (no, really) are mostly able to hold him off quite effectively with the eventual help of the Russian military (no, also really).

It's nice to see Twilight and Luna in small roles late on, though the very temporary addition of the rest of the Mane Six seems like pure wish-fulfilment fantasising on the part of the author. In all honesty, a large part of the whole story does. I suspect I would have enjoyed it a good deal more had it been half the length with a lot of the geek jargon and militaristic stuff removed and with Celestia's powers (by the end so huge that Earth asks to be united with Equestria!) toned down to something more akin to "ordinary supergenius" level. Oh, and definitely without that washing scene. There's still enjoyment here, but I can't shake the feeling that the fic's essentially self-insert nature hampers it quite significantly.

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Next time on Ponyfic Roundup, it'll be back to the usual collection of shorter fics – which I hope will include shortskirtsandexplosions' Twilight sadfic Theory.