Ponyfic Roundup 526

Read it Later story count: 92 (+3)

Words read this week: 32,686

It's been a hard week for me, but after the music post the other day, I'm feeling that I'm ready to get back into the routine of bloggishness. You'll be getting a "My Little Repeats" about the next S8 episode ("The Parent Map") before too much longer, but first it's Ponyfic Roundup time. Five stories as usual when there's no Spotlight fic to hog all the limelight for itself, and here they are:

Can't Choose Your Family by CyborgSamurai
The Heart Thief by Sharaloth
Button Squash (Or, Maud Doesn't Write About Rocks) by Rinnaul
Moonbug by Sledge115
Supper of Scootaloo Stew by Lucky Dreams

★: 0 | ★★: 1 | ★★★: 3 | ★★★★: 1 | ★★★★★: 0
Note: I use a skewed rating system. A fic I enjoy an average amount scores two stars.

Can't Choose Your Family by CyborgSamurai
Celestia, Luna and Other
G4 Crossover; Slice of Life; 4k words; Jan 2013; Teen

Celestia is visited by her estranged grandmother before the Summit of the Gods to discuss a family matter.

An RCL-inducted story, and certainly a concept I haven't seen before: it turns out that said grandmother is none other than Loki. Yes, that Loki, trickster god(dess) and all. You probably do need at least a basic knowledge of Norse mythology for this fic to work properly, but it doesn't need to be especially an deep one. Celestia is nicely characterised, and I can accept her interactions with Loki in a way that some may be familiar with from their own families. The way all this ties into Discord and his then-recent release from stone works very well, too. I do rather agree with Chris, though, that the author may have tried to squash too much story into four thousand words. With either some of that trimmed down, or more space to work with, I think I'd have found it wonderful. As it is, still very solid but with that reservation bringing it down to a still-good top-end three.★★★

The Heart Thief by Sharaloth
OC, Scootaloo and Fluttershy
G4 AU; Dark/Tragedy; 16k words; Feb 2013; Teen

In the City of Gardens and Cages, a thief must brave the wrath of the Tyrant to win a chance at love. A Fallen World story.

This tale is set in the "Fallen World" established by The Archer and the Smith (PR 165) and Diamond in the Darkness (PR 369), although it's not a direct sequel to either. This part of the post-fall Equestria is led by the Tyrant, for whom nothing is more important than the city's animals – the penalties for harming them are terrifying. Steady Hoof, a thief from elsewhere in the world, falls in with a gang of other thieves led by Scootaloo. He's smitten, but she's not interested, finally allowing him an apparently impossible quest to win her heart. I have somewhat mixed feelings about this fic: the thriller aspects¹ are great, the story is genuinely frightening, and the world-building is consistently interesting. On the other hand there's no real mystery about the Tyrant's identity, while Steady's instant crush and then refusal to accept that Scootaloo isn't interested becomes grating. ★★★
¹ The story pre-dates the introduction of the [Thriller] genre tag.

Button Squash (Or, Maud Doesn't Write About Rocks) by Rinnaul
Maud Pie and Pinkie Pie
G4; Random; 1k words; Nov 2014; Everyone

Maud writes about something other than rocks to expand her literary horizons. Pinkie advises her on what's popular lately. Maud may have misunderstood.

After Maud's debut in her eponymous episode, there was a brief meme-like craze for riffing on her poetry about rocks. This is a late entry to that fray. My favourite aspect here is the interaction between the Pie sisters, which is spot on for this era of FiM and makes good reading. The fic's a fun little thing, but the problem comes at the end: there seems to be some sort of meta reference to Button Mash fics, but it's so long ago that I can't actually remember exactly what it's referencing. Given a title mentioned there, I'm really not inclined to look it up too assiduously – and so this story kind of feels incomplete. It also feels like a "you had to be there" fic, and I don't think I was for that second part, so I can only rate it a two. ★★

Moonbug by Sledge115
Luna and Pharynx
G4; Romance/Slice of Life; 10k words; May 2020; Everyone

Pharynx doesn't really like potted plants, but Princess Luna does. So what better way of getting him to stop ruining her lavender pots, if not with a good lesson or two?

Written for an Original Pairing Contest, so there's little point in trying to play coy about where this is going. Fortunately, Sledge115 is too good a writer to play that game, though a little twist late on is still nice. This is a story set in S7, and as such I'm very pleased to see Luna believably written for that era, not for her "Luna Eclipsed" days. Her interest in gardening is very well depicted, and the author draws out several parallels with Pharynx that I confess I hadn't really thought of. Actually, the fic is full of little details, ideal for a story without (in the foreground, anyway) any Equestria-shaking events going on. Moonbug reads like part of an organic world, not just an isolated vignette, and it's all the better for it. I may not share with Sledge115 having Luna as my favourite pony, but she's so well characterised here that it doesn't matter. Recommended. ★★★★

Supper of Scootaloo Stew by Lucky Dreams
Scootaloo, Rainbow Dash and OC
G4; Dark/Comedy/Slice of Life; 2k words; Nov 2015; Everyone

Rainbow Dash spends an evening winding up her adopted sister.

Remember Seattle's Angels? This story got featured there, but I read it simply because much Lucky Dreams wrote has clicked with me. Here, Scootaloo tells the tale as she's packed off to her grouchy, tedious aunt's house for vacation. Rainbow Dash, who's with her, insists to Scoots that Aunt Cloud eats foals she's fed up with. What follows is a mixture of prose and slightly Roald Dahl-reminiscent poetry as Dash tells story after story of various misbehaving foals' gruesome ends. This is something that gives me pause, since Dash is maybe overdoing the "big sister's prank" thing given that by 2015 we knew how scared Scootaloo could get sometimes. As Present Perfect said, both dark and whimsical. For me, though, perhaps a notch down from LD's best stories in that it doesn't quite have the sheer magic of those. ★★★

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I intend to return to the usual Wednesday for Ponyfic Roundup next week. Since that means I'll have two days fewer than usual to get things sorted, it's going to be a low word count week. As we all know, though, quantity and quality are two different things. Here's what's coming in round 527:

Immortal Beginnings by Snake Staff
So Her Legacy Will Endure by PresentPerfect
Pink Geode by Faeforches
A meeting by IsaSpSp
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Midnight by Jade Ring