Ponyfic Roundup 438: Spotlight on Synchronicity

Read it Later story count: 96 (-2)

Words read this week: 82,654

Here's a longer fic that I've known about for something like a decade, and even read the first few pages of from time to time – but until now I'd never read it right through. As far as I can tell, no significant reviewer has covered Synchronicity before. It's not one of the star stories on Fimfiction, being currently rated just outside the top 5,000 with 7.6k views, and it's the only one of Sev's three fics that is neither M-rated nor incomplete. Let's see where it takes us...

Synchronicity by Sev
Mane Six, OC, Celestia, Luna and Fancy Pants
G4; Adventure/Comedy; 83k words; Dec 2011–Aug 2013; Teen (Sex)

Old grudges lead to shaky alliances when the lands outside Equestria unite against a common foe

This is a sea pony story, of a sort – in that a major OC is a kelpie, who after a strange introduction is a rather appealing character. Her people have kidnapped Celestia and want serious action from Equestria or... well. Meanwhile, a threat to both peoples is growing fast, and Twilight and the Mane Six need to work out what to do. She finds a magical resonance with Rarity lets them share certain thoughts, and this gives them both more of an insight. Though the fic shares the [Adventure] and [Comedy] tags, the comedy is concentrated in the early chapters – which are sometimes rather shakily written – and later on the adventure mostly takes over. There's some sweeping world-building here, enabled by the story's earlyish date. The innuendo mentioned in the longdesc (we're talking stuff like what Twilight really keeps hidden under her bed) likewise calms down a lot after the first third. I think this improves the fic. For the first few chapters this was a two-star story, but a substantial improvement in the writing and a genuinely exciting (if rather long) climactic chapter bring it up to a three. ★★★

After this point, you should only continue reading if you're okay with major spoilers.

First, the kelpies. Windswept is interesting if not stunning; she starts out as an apparent enemy, and indeed it wouldn't have needed that much to go wrong for her to be one. She puts up with quite a lot for a while once Pinkie's ship heads for the kelpie's land (Kelantis, though "land" is not the right word!) but in the end Windswept is both on the side of right and likely to be supported by the reader. She's not that active in the final battle but she's never entirely forgotten.

Talking of which: I greatly enjoyed that scene. It takes up most of an 11k-word chapter, but I don't think it really overstays its welcome. (Perhaps it could have been split in two, however.) This is helped by the variety: although everyone is fighting the Star, the way they go about it varies. Fluttershy's heroics – and one in particular had me cheering – are not the same as the massed ranks of griffins (so spelt) or the way Kelantis is used by the kelpies.

Though terrifyingly powerful, the Stars make for rather odd enemies, though given their extraterrestrial nature I suppose not fully understanding their motivations is fair enough. Sev says in the end A/N that a number of things were deliberately left open at the end of the story, so we get no more than hints and nudges about what may have happened in the far past history of Celestia, Luna and (kelpie ruler) Princess Aurora. We do get a bit about Discord's first rule, which was bad.

I mentioned that the writing was a bit shaky early on. It's never terrible, but you can definitely tell the difference between the early chapters and those written in 2013. There's a good deal of LUS of the workaday "...said the pink pony" kind, though it's not that distracting. The near-total dropping of the innuendo about "thrumming" (magical resonance) later on, even during a scene set in the palace harem, helps a lot in terms of keeping the focus on the adventure and the climactic battle.

Princess Rarity was a thing in G3, and so she is again here, since Celestia has stepped down and Luna has never actually been made a Princess by the shadowy Council of Harmony who really run Equestria. This political aspect is not the most convincing part of the fic, partly since it isn't really fleshed out. Fancy Pants is on the Council, but so is Big Mac! Why him? We're never told. Still, Rarity does well in her brief time as a royal, so there's that.

And then there's Pinkie, aka Admiral Magenta McGorgamaforg. She's fun as far as it goes, but the problem is that the joke goes and goes and goes. There are only so many times I can read about her bouncing her pipe off a sailor's head before I start to sigh quietly to myself and hope we get back to Windswept or Rarity soon. She does have the occasional moment of pure Pinkie brilliance, however, which stops her scenes from being tedious.

I can't in all honesty call Synchronicity a disgracefully overlooked gem. It's not always beautifully written, its tone wanders a bit between the early nudge-wink humour and the later adventure (even if I do prefer the latter) and Windswept isn't quite compelling enough as the central OC. This kind of sweeping world-building is trickier to believe in nowadays than it was a decade ago, and at over 80,000 words it demands considerable reader time. Still, the final battle is gripping and if you get that far you'll probably enjoy it.

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Next week, it'll be back to a substantially lower overall word count as I return to reviewing five shorter fics. They will be:

Sixty-Eight Reasons to Switch Placebos This Summer by TheMessenger
A Day for Mommy by Hivemind
Good Enough by cloudedguardian
Garland Graveyard Shift by Ninjadeadbeard
Forty-Two Troublesome Trixies by Darth Link 22