Thoughts of a Ponyfic Reviewer 2: If You're Gonna Dish It Out...

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.

A belated happy 10th birthday to that remix of "Discord"!

The Living Tombstone – Discord (remix)

Annoyingly, I missed this anniversary yesterday! Indeed, I was only reminded of it by a friend today. Although it's not Eurobeat Brony's original, say "Discord" to most people and they'll think of The Living Tombstone's stupendously popular remix. With well over 54 million views on YouTube since its initial upload on 21st January 2012, it is I think the most-viewed MLP fan song of all time. In March 2012 we saw this music video, made by Umby and filmed somewhere in England (Newcastle?) while much more recently "Discord" has become a hit on TikTok, with at least some of its users entirely unaware of its Pony origins. While quite a few people do prefer the original, and even more feel at least mildly irritated that TLT sometimes gets the credit for the whole song, there's no doubt that his "Discord" is a song that almost everybody with the slightest interest in brony music knows the second they hear those opening notes. Not many MLP fan songs can say that, and its place in fandom history is more than secure.

My Little Repeats 102: "Party Pooped"

I'm still amused that "George" has a jelly babies cutie mark

S5E11: "Party Pooped"

27 Jun 2015

My original rating: ★★★
IMDb score: 7.5

The one with sheep on the line

Thoughts: For the second week running, a new writer, but this one was destined to have a rather more successful MLP career than Neal Dusedau: "Party Pooped" was Nick Confalone's Pony debut. And it's better than the previous episode, too, although still no classic. Part of this is that I find the first act pretty tiresome, with the "YAKS HATE IF NOT PERFECT" stuff really going on too long. Later, Pinkie's journey to Yakyakistan is quite fun, if all a bit thrown-together, and her Party Bunker is an amusing little touch even if I don't think we ever see it again. I'm still not sure why Yakyakistan wasn't called simply Yakistan, which is (to my mind, at least) a much better pun. Mind you, I still don't see any obvious inspiration for Rutherford's name, either. Meanwhile, Twilight is having the kind of freak-out more reminiscent of her earlier days. Again, it's fairly amusing to start with but does go on a bit too long. All these things considered, I'm going to nudge my rating down from a low three to a high two. While this is clearly more fun than "Princess Spike" was, it's still not that great an episode. Happily Confalone would go on to write several very good eps, but he didn't quite hit the ground running and "Party Pooped" was a bit of a mish-mash.

Choice quote: Rainbow Dash: "It's sort of panic themed."

New rating: ★★

Next up is "Amending Fences", and frankly I think we all know already how that one is going to go down. :D

Ponyfic Roundup 376

Read it Later story count: 95 (-1) 

Not a lot to say today, and for once I'm not going to ramble on pointlessly for a couple of hundred words just to fill up the space. I'll do that in the reviews instead... I should probably give the list of this week's fics and move on.

What Meets the Eye by Butterscotch Cream
Hyperportentia by MyHobby
Bon-Bon's Average Day by articunos bitch
Select Difficulty by naturalbornderpy

★: 0 | ★★: 1 | ★★★: 1 | ★★★★: 2 | ★★★★★: 0
Note: I use a skewed rating system. A fic I find average scores two stars.

UK PonyCon 2022 theme announced

This actually happened a couple of days ago, but it's taken me until now to get round to posting about it! Good job I don't try to be a news site. ;) Anyway, the theme has been announced as Gothic. I do rather suspect (though I don't know) that the cancelled 2020 in-person UKPC, which was going to be "SpookyCon" (and still was, online) has a bearing. Although this isn't the same as that, there's clearly a fair amount of overlap. Anyway, it all sounds like a fun theme, so I'm happy enough.

My Little Repeats 101: "Princess Spike"

Featuring Andy Price and Katie Cook's OCs, both wearing glasses

S5E10: "Princess Spike"

20 Jun 2015

My original rating: ★★
IMDb score: 5.6

The one with Minnesota mare

Thoughts: Neal Dusedau's writing debut was not well received. In fact, it is the first FiM episode to score in the fives with IMDb, the previous low being the 6.0 for "Somepony to Watch Over Me" last season. Is it that bad? Well... yes and no. It's not actively disastrous, but it's just... there. I already feel it fading from my mind, and in any case after four and a half seasons "Spike is stupid" was getting really old. It was well past time he developed as a character a bit more – that was coming, but at this point we didn't know that. I actually like the world-building here, with the summit and the regional ponies (even if I don't recognise all the accents and stereotypes) and Twilight hugging books as she drops off can never not be adorable. I thought this was one of Cadance's better eps, too, as she was clearly unconvinced by Spike's explanations. However, I did not like the dragon-sneeze trees. They could perhaps have worked with even a hoof-wavy explanation of why they were in Canterlot, but no. Without that they were just stupid plot devices. The non-magical chainsaw was ridiculous, Fancy Pants wasn't very pleasant and all in all this was... mediocre. Not a total disaster, but it wasn't and still isn't an episode you'd want to show off to people as an example of what FiM can do. Two stars still, and not especially high in that band either.

Choice quote: Fancy Pants: "There's an angry mob here that demands satisfaction!"

New rating: ★★

Next up is "Party Pooped", which I found a bit of a mixed bag, a definite upgrade on "Princess Spike" but still a long way short of being a classic.

Thoughts of a Ponyfic Reviewer 1: Background Details

Thanks to Mike Cartoon Pony for indirectly inspiring this post.

Yes, this is a series now. Woo. It's not going to be especially structured or appear at regular intervals, but then this is me we're talking about here; what do you expect? :D

Something that's always pleased me in ponyfic is when an author takes the trouble to get background details right, or simply to add a fun little Easter egg. Sometimes these are little bonuses that the reader probably wouldn't even notice if they weren't familiar with the subject, but which give those readers an extra smile or two. For example, a story I read a while back¹ had a glancing reference to the Theresa May/field of wheat story, which I doubt anyone much in the US has ever heard of. It amused me so much that I had to stop reading for a moment because I was laughing so hard.
¹ The Cloptimist's very good Red/Yellow, PR 249.

It's also very satisfying as an author when you've done this and someone compliments you on it. It happened to me recently, in the "background research" sense rather than the "Easter egg" one with The Unbearable Lightness of Bucking, for which I did a reasonably significant amount of preparatory reading on existentialist philosophy. (If you haven't read the fic, trust me, it is relevant.) Although it's perfectly possible to enjoy the story without that knowledge, I was delighted when someone who clearly did know the subject complimented me on my use of it. It was a lovely feeling.