Read it Later story count: 97 (+3)
Words read these three weeks: 105,861
Taking three weeks to get this review out, partly thanks to this platform not liking me for a while, has unsurprisingly led to my RiL list swelling a little bit. I really don't want it to get back into three figures, so for a few weeks I'll be prioritising stories from there and having at least four of the weekly five taken from that source, rather than grabbing two or three of them from other parts of Fimfiction as I usually do. Back to the Spotlight!
The Cadenza Prophecies by iisaw
Twilight, Tempest Shadow, OCs and Mane Six
G4 AU; Adventure; 106k words; Mar–Aug 2024; Teen (Violence)
The Storm King's invasion of Canterlot goes differently when a more callous and world-weary Twilight is present.
AU is definitely the term here: while the story opens with the attack on Canterlot we see in the 2017 film, here it doesn't succeed and once he finds that out, the Storm King is not happy. That has... implications. Tempest, meanwhile, becomes a POW on Twilight's airship – indeed, her story arc is particularly interesting. You absolutely need to have read previous instalments for this one to make any sense, as otherwise you're going to spend the whole time asking, "But why? ...who? ...where?" and so on. About Twilight's character, but not just about her. There's plenty of swashbuckling adventure (and a good thing too!) and not too much TwiLuna (see previous comment, YMMV of course). One new culture is especially intriguing, and it ain't Klugetown either, though we do go there. I'm not absolutely on board with the pacing of what happens regarding Twi's main target, and overall I do slightly prefer The Twilight Enigma, but if you've enjoyed this series thus far, I think you'll enjoy this one plenty too. A lowish four, but I'm comfortable giving it that four. More on that below the line. ★★★★
Spotlight as this is, abandon unspoileriness all ye who enter here.
As I said, you really can't jump into The Cadenza Prophecies cold; it just won't work. You need already to appreciate why Rarity is royalty and why Fluttershy is the greatest airship navigator in the sky, what Twilight Town is and why, among many other things. I'd suggest the previous (chronologically) book, The Twilight Enigma, is the main one to refresh yourself with if you don't have the time or inclination to re-read the whole series. Although this one does mildly foreshadow a few things from The Skyla Pseudonym, concerning orichalcum for example, you can ride those out a bit better. It will also help to know the movie characters – though again you can probably skate by with outline knowledge of those, Tempest and the Storm King excepted.
If you know this series, you may well want to know what the balance is like between sky piracy, ahem, privateering, diplomacy and TwiLuna-ing. It's definitely biased more to the adventure side, though not quite as much as The Twilight Enigma was. The TwiLuna-ing is there and important, but it's nothing like as big a part of the screen time as it was in The Luna Cypher. Diplomacy is somewhere in the middle, and I particularly liked the intricate manoeuvrings between Twilight and the jackals in the city she'd nearly obliterated but now needed to get on side. I am of course simplifying wildly,¹ but I can't give everything away even down here!
¹ I feel like Twilight, writing like that.
Let's consider this story's Tempest. There's a tricky tightrope to be walked here between making her too immediately sympathetic and making her entirely coldly unappealing. This was something the film did well, even with her very different character arc, and happily I think The Cadenza Prophecies succeeds with her as well. I like that the start and the end of her tale are fairly predictable, but the journey to get from one to the other has quite a few twists and turns that I didn't see coming. It helps that Grubber becomes less of the irritating sidekick he was in the movie, although he has one rather strange moment fairly late on that seems a bit odd. (When he dashes off the ship.)
Some of the major characters from the film are more prominent than others. Celaeno appears, but is nowhere near as important as Tempest. Meanwhile, Capper isn't present. Of the Manes, Rainbow Dash is very much a big deal, though as befits her character it's often very showy. (Seriously, she's literally cut in two at one point, though her magical protection means this isn't nearly as big a deal as a completely different wound.) Rarity is a subtler presence, amusingly often playing off the extremely unsubtle Pinkie Pie. Fluttershy is vital but just gets on with what she needs to do. Applejack isn't front and centre that much, apart from an interval where she acts as the Nebula's captain. They both have more to do than in the film, at least!
Spike is important here, especially given his ability to send dragonfire messages. There's the occasional nod to his growing up, not least a fun scene in which he (off-screen) meets up with a young female dragon he fancies the scales off, but for the most part he's Twilight's little brother. Luna is of course Twi's lover, but we see her mostly either in the dream realm or in her letters, in both cases helping Twilight to come to terms with her situation. Celestia is a quiet (but crucial) background presence mostly, but the eponymous prophecies from Cadance are often very much on Twilight's mind. Like most prophecies, though, they're not always that clear or helpful...
Twilight, aka Queen Twilight, aka the dread Captain Blackmane, is of course central, so you really do have to enjoy and appreciate how she's portrayed here, all the more so since she narrates the whole thing. I suspect anyone who's made it this far in the Alicorn Adventures will at least be able to cope with the fact that this Twilight will, where absolutely necessary, kill. For most of the story her goals and motivations are pretty clear – this isn't a tale with 200 intricately entangled subplots, and given this near-Aubray-Mareturin homage's classic adventure style that's a good thing. I very rarely found myself wondering why she'd done something, not least because she usually said so on the page itself!
The secondary characters are a good bunch. Not merely the likes of Ao and Ket, who might justifiably fret a bit at being called "secondary" after so long in the series and having more time on screen than some of the Mane Six themselves. Still, they know what they're about and can doubtless cope with my relative neglect of them! Dr. Woundwort¹ is appealingly irascible, but a character I found particularly enjoyable was Ralf, the diamond dog engineer. Even before the encounter with the Anubians brought him a specific relevance, I found his approach to Nebula rather satisfying: he fitted in well with the others without merely being a rehash. I'd be happy to read about him again.
¹ A general practitioner, clearly...
One new character I was really unsure of to begin with was Lucky Charm. Given that this kind of adventure story already majors on the heroic swashbuckling bringing victory against the odds, and given that Twilight is already astoundingly powerful,¹ I was concerned that Lucky would just make things too easy. Fortunately (so to speak) this wasn't the case and iisaw managed to make her luck inconvenience the Nebulas at times. I'm not sure I'd particularly like another full novel with Lucky as a major secondary character, but I am sure she'd be fun in The Adventures of Lucky Charm, which if this was a feature film would act as the pre-feature cartoon.
¹ I'm still not a massive fan of the Wheel of the World stuff, but it's only rarely directly used in this story.
Something you'll be used to by now in the Alicorn Adventures series is the wealth of footnotes. These are very much present and correct here, and for the most part they're reasonably unobtrusive and helpful. The series' usual inline approach is followed, and I think it's about the best option when you don't have a printed page to work for. I say "for the most part" as just occasionally I wonder about the balance: we get one for "scuttlebutt" but not for "pareidolia"? Perhaps slightly too many footnotes about naval terms, too, given the existence of an impressively extensive glossary (which includes fine illustrations, too). I guess I'll just have to put the "pareidolia" one down to Twilight imagining everyone knows what it means...
The pacing of The Cadenza Prophecies feels just slightly uneven at times, though I won't say it bothered me unduly for the most part. The opening is immediately thrilling, as we wait to see where and how the fic will branch off canon. Then there's some (still enjoyable) meandering to an extent until we encounter the Anubians. After that, events tend to move at a cracking pace with some excellent battle scenes – but given we end up with the Storm King (whose wisecracking is oddly missing) dead, much later on and mostly in a relatively small space, there's an encounter with Grogar instead. That felt a little disorientating, and I'd have liked a tad more setup on the Grogar stuff.
Now, that four-star rating. I'll be honest and say that this wasn't an absolute slam-dunk four, for the various reasons I've set out above. As I've also said, The Twilight Enigma which went full-on for sky pirate swashbuckling shenanigans, was a little more to my taste in that regard and I'd rate that a bit more highly. But, although this is possibly confirmation bias, I enjoyed spending more time with the Nebulas so much that I certainly want to rate it higher than the three stars I gave to The Luna Cypher. Ralf is an extremely good addition and he's one of the reasons I ended up putting this definitely above the dividing line. Not the only, but certainly one. But overall? I had fun. I give quite heavy weight to that.
Back to the usual five shorter stories next time. This is the slate I'll be considering:
The Cat-astrophe by Samey90
Heart of Gold by TCC56
She Kills Monsters by chiko
Coronavirus by Thought Prism
The Two Doctors by Silver Needle
Yay! I squeaked out a four-star!
ReplyDeleteThank you for the wonderful review.
I loved writing Ralf, so I’m glad you had fun reading about him. In fact, you really hit the nail on the head with your last paragraph. What it’s all about is fun. I write what is fun for me to write, hence all the Aubry-Maturinesque aeronautical jargon, foreign cultures, and airship battles and such. That my idea of fun doesn’t line up perfectly with all readers and sometimes diverges radically from a few, is perfectly understandable.
So it's great that yours is a review that I think really gives a good idea what someone will experience while reading the book, given the range of tastes among your readers. That's the very best kind of review!
Thanks again!
You are very welcome, and I'm glad you liked the review! At some point I need (and want) to go back and read the whole series, right from The Celestia Code... though "at some point" is probably going to remain the ambition for quite a while.
DeleteI enjoyed writing the review, too. The footnotes were something I do a little anyway, but I really had to include a few here! Admittedly the one about Dr. Woundwort was purely so I could include the joke, but surely that's a good enough reason for a footnote!
That is the best reason for a footnote!
DeleteBeen looking forward to this, seeing what another reviewer might make of it.
ReplyDeleteWell, my prediction that folks would likely have this neck-and-neck with Enigma came true here. Myself, I put this slightly ahead for the curious but valid reason that we're so far into this AU now that I found it easier to accept the questionable aspects of/relating to Twilight, compared to Enigma. But given you found such things there only mild niggles compared to the moderate niggles for myself, it makes sense that one would inch ahead for you due to the greater quantity of onscreen action (plus less onscreen TwiLuna).
Still, I praise iisaw highly: the two novels are consistent, no easy feat given the 8-year writing distance plus the content and modulation differences. One could go from Engima to Prophecies with no sense of the near-decade between their writing. And I highly praise him for not giving a damn about Continuity Lockout after such a long gap either. Story integrity is king.
You touched on many of my favourite aspects: I think Tempest's arc suffered a bit from Twilight's too-tight interiority and closemindness in her narration not letting us really see and feel her arc's transitions (another reason why 3rd-person might have been better for the pile), but it was still a strong point. I adored Ralf (and like you, found Lucky Charm interesting if not as delightful), loved the Celestia Code-esque section in the jackal city, really vibed with Spike's portrayal (can never say no to the warmth of his and Twi's interactions!), and though for somewhat different reasons than yourself, was onboard with a simpler, more linear tale than Enigma. I'll add to that how deftly handled the usage of what movie canon/elements would suit this story was done, virtually never for fanservice and always reworked to suit this universe. Twas silky smooth, that.
Your review also made me realise I gave short shrift to some elements: as you note, the Mane 5 all have at least one crucial role or plot point along the way (Applejack being made captain late on was the only one that felt done just to give her something to do, the rest were natural enough). Also, I was too hard on the pacing from after Twilight decides to go after the Storm King to her first encounter with some of his ships at nearly the halfway mark. The story still does, unintentionally perhaps, promise a much more streamlined and focused story with its opening then makes its first act go on for ten-odd chapters, and would unquestionably benefit from shaving off a decent chunk of its window dressing there. But it still works reasonably.
Honestly, after reflection on it for nearly three months now, I only really have two big issues with what the story is trying to do: Twilight's character arc, whether flat or transformative (it felt like the former, but that's no problem if so, they work for confident pulp adventure protagonists) vanishes into this air after disposing of the Storm King with nothing replacing it. Plus much of everything to do with Grogar and the titular prophecy (I'm all for barely-relevant macguffins getting title billing, but stone me how this was modulated). I still can't tell what the point or goal or intention was with those two, so they come across as hollow and unfulfilling. Everything else, I could see what the intent was, even if I didn't agree, and accepted them largely without question.
So yeah, I have been feeling that perhaps I was slightly harsher on a couple elements and didn't adequately praise a few others. Even though my review, like yours, gives the right info for the reader to gauge whether they'll like it, that doesn't weigh well on it. But oh well, reviewing novel-length ponyfics ain't a science. And at the end of the day, I had fun too. Sometimes diluted fun, but except for the two above problems, it was, by and large, always present above and beyond the niggles along the way. So, the story is a success.
Sounds reasonable! I thought I'd probably end up liking the story overall slightly more than you did, and so it transpired. The series is just aimed squarely at what I like, I suppose. Ralf's introduction was probably the point at which I thought, "Yeah, this can get a four if we get more stuff like this."
Delete