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.
The fact that I haven't breached 100 yet haunts me. c.c;
ReplyDeleteWell, you know what to do about that... ;)
DeleteLegit don't know what to do, and sometimes I spend time thinking about it.
DeleteLike, should 100 be a big, special to-do of some kind? A magnum opus or just a story I'm really proud of?
Or should it just be another number and I just need to blitz my way there by fixing up some old stuff already?
With my luck, it'll probably just be another story about poop jokes. :B
You say that as if poop jokes wouldn't be a magnum opus.
DeleteI'm considering the same thing. I've got a story idea brewing that I'm excited about, and I might push that off to be #100, so I'd need to expand an old minific in the meantime to publish before it.
I think it's quite possible to be an excellent judge of something without being a practitioner of it. Some things are more accessible than others. For instance, I'd think it's far more common to find a good art critic who can't paint to save his life, versus a fiction reviewer who can't even string together a short story with some basic competence. That's more in the commercial sense, though; I can't imagine too many people within a fandom liking fiction enough to write up reviews of it without dipping their toe in trying to write some. The cost of entry is nil.
ReplyDeleteI don't disagree. These "Thoughts" posts are so titled because they're intended to be personal reflections, not formal essays. It wasn't an accident that, apart from the post heading, I used first person: I'm saying that I feel more comfortable with my own stuff out there for people to comment on, and that all the reviewers I mentioned do that as well. There's no deep moral message intended here!
DeleteOoh, I totally forgot you'd said a week ago that this would be a series, albeit one with no set schedule, just whenever the muse struck you. Which is fair, best way to be, sometimes! I'll look forward to whenever this pops up, in any case.
ReplyDeleteHeh, coming as late to the fandom as I have, I appreciate regular Ponyfic reviewers quite a lot. It's fair to say a hefty chunk of the one-shots I read last year came from roundup posts by yourself or Paul, Logan (and sometimes Present Perfect too, heh).
Those story counts, though (glances fugitively at own story count of 3). Think I'll be happy to just reach double digits, honestly.
Pascoite raises an interesting point, in that whether the critic is/should be a practitioner of the art they're writing about varies and isn't a necessity. With reviewing fiction, of course, the main reason most reviewers write a bit is because the tools are the sake and there's some skill overlap.
Or perhaps it's simply that the pen is mightier then the reviewer, as they say.
Oh yeah, I'm not going to go down the road of "if you can't do X, you shouldn't criticise X". That would leave almost all sports fans unable to criticise their favourite professional teams, for a start! As I mentioned to Pascoite, this is mostly me saying how I feel about it. Although it's unlikely these days, if someone started up a regular ponyfic review blog but hadn't published any themselves, I wouldn't hold that against them.
DeleteAnd just as you write about them being moribund-to-dead, Seattle's Angels officially calls it a day.
ReplyDeleteOh my... I think that's probably worthy of a blog post here in the next few days. End of an era, indeed. Thank you for the heads-up.
Delete