The road goes ever on and on, and so does Ponyfic Roundup. This week I'm pleased to say that I'm back up to my usual four stories. I haven't got much else to say here, though, so I'll just add: marmalade. Look, I like marmalade, all right? So does Paddington, after all. And the Queen, so I'm in good company. Anyway, on to the fics:
What Cats Know by Daedalus Aegle
Cheerilee's Worst Day Ever by Sailor_Pluto
Rocket to Insanity by Scherzo
dead butterflies (One of Them Will Destroy the Other) by The Red Parade
★: 1 | ★★: 1 | ★★★: 1 | ★★★★: 1 | ★★★★★: 0
Note: I use a skewed rating system. A fic I find average scores two stars.
Sweetie Belle and Opalescence
Mystery/Sad; 9k words; Dec 2016; Everyone
Sweetie Belle investigates a mystery of cats.
This is a Nightmare Night story. It's narrated by Sweetie Belle – a significantly older Sweetie than we see in the show, with a narrative voice that's changed too, though it's left vague exactly how much older and you have to take the clues from a few circumstantial details. One or two of those are big deals, though DA doesn't always write them too obviously that way. It's clearly deliberate rather than poor writing. Anyway, Sweetie feels sure that cats have magic, given the way they move through the world, so she goes to see Twilight. The latter tells her some things about magic (interesting world-building in that) but it doesn't scratch her itch, not really. She needs to see someone who walks the line between pony and cat. I loved who that turned out to be: it's obvious, but only really in retrospect. Something odd happens near the end that I suspect will seriously divide readers' opinions; I found it magical, but maybe a little bit of a stretch even for Equestria. Worth noting that Paul Asaran loved this, but he adores Weird stories whereas I only somewhat like them. Highly atmospheric without any flash-bang-wallop, this story appealed to me, but it did also leave me slightly frustrated. A top-end three for me, so still clearly above average. ★★★
Cheerilee's Worst Day Ever by Sailor_Pluto
Cheerilee and CMCs
Comedy/Random; 1k words; Sep 2015; Everyone
First, Diamond Tiara insulted Cheerilee. Then everything went downhill from there.
A promising short description there, which seems to point to a comedy of escalating awful events. Poor long-suffering Cheerilee seems set up for being the butt of them. Sadly it's just too straightforward to work, with things never getting to the ridiculous level that the [Comedy/Random] combo suggested they might. And personal preference here certainly, but spending about a quarter of the story on a smelly school toilet and its lack of paper isn't my idea of a fun time anyway. The ending is so blatantly inspired by show events that it doesn't really fit smoothly, either. Sadly, a missed opportunity here. ★
Rocket to Insanity by Scherzo
Rainbow Dash
Dark/Horror/Tragedy; 3k words; Sep 2017*; Mature (Gore)
What if Cupcakes was just a dream? A very vivid, terrifying dream?
(* This fic is much older than 2017; it just took ages to get to Fimfiction.) I'm no great fan of Cupcakes, but the description there caught my attention. The thing is, Rainbow keeps on having vivid, terrifying dreams about various takes on the Cupcakes story, and she's falling apart psychologically as a result. For quite a while I found this approach effective – and so really pretty frightening. You feel helpless as you see what Dash is going through, and so you almost feel it along with her. It's just a shame that towards the end the story goes all-out for splatter-horror and so becomes significantly less interesting than it looked like it might be. Maybe still worth a look, but be aware that [Gore] tag isn't there for nothing. ★★
dead butterflies (One of Them Will Destroy the Other) by The Red Parade
Rainbow Dash and Applejack
Romance/Horror; 5k words; Aug 2021; Teen (Death)
Fluttershy wants us to see the butterfly migration.
See that short description? Cute, isn't it? Well, by the end of this fic it's likely that you'll find that cute phrase terrifying. This is a fascinating and very well written chiller in which the mysteries of what's going on only reluctantly reveal themselves – if they ever do. Rainbow and Applejack are a couple, it seems, but why is Dash so cold and why is AJ speaking in blanks? I was impressed by how those blanks return in another way late on, putting things into new perspective. There's even a great little piece of world-building involving Flurry Heart, Cozy Glow and Cadance, no less. The story is maybe a little on the abstract side for me at times, and I won't claim I'm sure I've understood it all – but I suspect at least some of that ambiguity was deliberate on TRP's part. Recommended, but don't expect an easy ride. ★★★★
Next time, it'll be Ponyfic Roundup 400. And to mark this occasion, for the very first time, I will be looking at a small selection of G5 fics. Here's hoping it works out!
What Cats Know certainly has my interest piqued, and on the scale of comfortably weird stories, I generally am more for them then you, if not quite as much as Paul. dead butterflies has also been on my radar since Paul reviewed it a few weeks back - evidently I need to read far more of The Red Parade's stories then I have.
ReplyDeleteI haven't read Rocket to Insanity, but I did listen (note: not watch) to Scribbler's 4-hour comic dub of the comic of it (not sure if it came before the fanfic or after, but it's evidently longer, at a little over 100 pages). Made for good background noise one work afternoon back in 2019. I remember being invested and intrigued, though I'm convinced that was mostly because of production reading strengths, so I see no need to read this. And as for that Cheerilee fic… yeah, pass.
Oh, so a G5-themed week was your plan for the 400th roundup? That's a good idea! The G5 tag just crossed the 600-story milestone on Fimfiction the other day. Sizeable, but that's still a compressed enough amount that leaves a small enough number of "worthwhile" fics, so I'm curious to see what you've picked. Whether they're all be new to me, or be ones I've read already, or a mixture. Count me intrigued!
The Red Parade has (had?) a weird habit of lower-casing titles, which I confess put me off slightly and I think did the same to some others. That was a mistake on my part, I think. I'll be reading more TRP stories.
DeleteI know Rocket to Insanity had a TheLostNarrator reading, but I wasn't previously aware of the Scribber production of the comic. I'll probably pass on it, but she's so good at that kind of stuff that it may well come across better there than the actual fic did to me.
And yes, G5 stories will happen. I won't give away much about exactly which ones, but one small clue is that one of them is by an author I have a good deal of time for.
Rocket to Insanity is one of those classic fandom grimdarks that's complete pants, as you all might say. <.< You're 100% on the money with it.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure it's bad enough to qualify as complete pants. Though the last few pages did really, really lose me. Mind you, classic fandom grimdarks don't really do it for me. Probably Rainbow Factory was my least unfavourite of those, and IIRC that still only got two stars.
DeleteI've read the first one, and I had pretty much the same reaction as you, though for somewhat different reasons, relative to how much Paul liked it. Not to rehash the comment I left on his review too much, but I found it good world-building and good in tone, but it's set up as being something Sweetie Belle has written, yet it doesn't stick to that format choice well enough, doing several things repeatedly that wouldn't fit that choice. Where I do agree with you is that it felt frustrating in that it seems like it's going to reveal some Big Truths only to nip around the edges of it without ever saying anything definitive. I don't have any special affinity or distaste for Weird Stories, so I don't have any leanings for the genre. But when the few people she asks who should know this Big Truth are all evasive about it, they never indicate why this could be dangerous knowledge. Yes, I'm part of the "need to know" crowd, but I could have been satisfied not knowing what the Big Truth here is (indeed, I have to be, as it isn't said) as long as I knew why it's a Big Truth. And if it's something they can't trust Sweetie Belle with, then why are they okay with her writing this up for the general public to see? Surely some of them will reason out whatever it is, but none of those consultants object, or at least Sweetie Belle doesn't say they do. It even comes across as she has figured it out for herself, but she must disagree with them on divulging as much as she does to the public, yet she doesn't say how or why she differs from them. And then the climactic moment doesn't seem to be connected to all this buildup.
ReplyDeleteSo, yeah, on the frustrating side, but it carries its atmosphere very well. It's one of those things that succeeds on the surface but tends to show its seams when you start digging into the construction of it.
I'm a simple soul who generally prefers stories which do reveal what's going on, at least in general terms. Very occasionally a fic that is all mysterious does do it for me -- horizon's The Last Dreams of Pony Island comes to mind -- but it's fairly rare. That story really earned its right to do that to me, though. This one, though I did quite like it, maybe didn't quite get there.
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