Pony Stories 222

And back to pony. Three stories below the break. One of which had the horrible luck of being a story I didn’t like much, which I wrote up a review at the same time the author posted a blog about how overly abrasive critiques are a bad thing. Augh! Timing.

Gears in the Void by Lab

I’d call this a fairly standard human in Equestria story. Decent writing, but not great. It reminded me a lot of Project Sunflower. I liked that one better. It had a more interesting concept, but Gears was a bit better on the writing side. Not that it’s a great work of literature. The start kind of drags. The first 20% or so I was checking how far I had gotten semi-regularly, but I got from 20% to 50% without realizing it, and the story from the halfway point to the finale pretty much flew by. So it can carry you along if you let it. You just have to meet it 2/3rds of the way is all. Villain was a bit generic. If you didn’t like King Sombra, you probably won’t like this guy either. Was not really a person, but didn’t quite pull off force of nature either.

One of the things I run into with modern person in fictional setting stories is the decision as to whether or not the fictional series exists in the world the modern person is in. It’s always tricky because if it does exist, you run into what you could call meta-recursion. The story becomes about the fictional world and not, well, the world in the fiction you are reading. However if it doesn’t exist, things just feel a bit flat because the reader knows about it. This story falls into the former camp, where the main character knows a lot about the pony world because of the show. It’s handled decently well, but I think it would have been stronger without it. Pinkie Pie was way over in the plot-device wackiness side of her spectrum, but not quite bad enough to ruin things. If you are sensitive to that sort of thing, avoid this story.

It occurs to me that the human in Equestria stories are all modern or near-future people. Has there been any of them that involve other times? Like far future or ancient history? Like someone from the Roman Empire showing up in Equestria. Or I had this idea of one of the librarians from the Library of Alexandria blacking out during the fire and then waking up in Equestria.

So, anyway, decent HiE fanfic. If you don’t like them, avoid it. If you do like them, check it out.

Those Awful Rumors ‘Round Town by PresentPerfect

Hmm.. This is another well-written fanfic that just didn’t click in my head. Interesting concept I guess, but not really enough there to get any hooks in my brain. Partially recommended. In that I recommend it, but not sure you should expect much out of it. Might just be one of those stories where the reader needs to bring most of the emotional impact with them to the story.

Spoilers (assuming this works) highlight to reveal if you’ve read the story. from here – Part of it is that if the ending is literal, how does nopony know about it? If there are dozens of copies of her parents around, and they go out in town since some of them came into the house, then shouldn’t it have gotten noticed? Twilight Sparkle, at least, would want to study the phenomenon. Maybe it’s something only she can see? Or they only exist around her in some way? A bit more story to explain things would have made me like this a bit better. When a story is that open-ended, I can basically just think up my own story ideas instead. It takes the author’s note at the end and the spoiler in the author’s blogpost about it to give enough hook to get any interest from me. – to here

Melt by horizon

Good, but not really my thing. If you like story as verse/poetry/etc, you should definitely check this out.