Going on a week vacation next week. Road trip down to North Carolina for the wedding of a family member. Well, family of my mom anyway. I’m going mostly just to get away from the internet and to keep her company. I’m also going to be taking just a kindle and non-pony reading material. Both fiction and non-fiction. Books I’ve wanted to read but just haven’t got around too with the easy rut of ponyfic to roll around in. Hopefully will be able to clear my head a bit during the trip away from the distractions of the computer and pony.
- Celestia Privatizes the Sun by Fiddlebottoms
- In the Absence of Sunset Shimmer by MyHobby
Celestia Privatizes the Sun by Fiddlebottoms
Bleh. Clever comedy this is not. Once I realized how specific the commentary was my enjoyment went from minimal to nonexistent. Not recommended. Though, I know some people enjoy this sort of thing and I know I enjoy just as narrow/shallow/focused entertainment in other places. Just don’t expect too much I guess?
In the Absence of Sunset Shimmer by MyHobby
I had a mixed reaction to this one. On one hand it was a pretty good story, but on the other hand it has a bunch of stuff I didn’t like. Several of which were formatting issues. Lots of songs, which is good for any pony story, but they were put into the text really awkwardly so that each time the flow of reading hit a brick wall for me. Nothing like how the Lunaverse guy does it where I get a good feel of flow even if I just skim the song. Likewise, the author here handles dialogue poorly. In a technical formatting sense. It’s a problem I’ve run into with several other ponyfics but this was the worst example. New line for each new line of dialogue, regardless of who is speaking. I mean, each new line after body language or what have you. So a line break in dialogue could be the same person speaking or someone else and in places it was hard to tell. What with the majority of characters being ‘she’ or ‘her’ pronoun-wise, plus the alternate universe doubles meaning there were plenty of scenes where several characters had the same name. Which was another problem, but not really the author’s fault. I’ve commented on the difficulty of doing pure text AU doubles before. Something that’s easy as heck with visuals is a lot harder in text form.
Otherwise, this felt like book two or three of a series. I get that the author has their own continuity but at a glance it looked like the majority of their stories were of the pony side of things. Whereas the human side if things was plenty developed. As in ten years have passed and the girls have grown and changed, and some cool ideas for them, but as the reader I really could have used a bit of catch up. I say that little exposition is best, but it is stories like this that show that a reader needs a little just so they don’t feel left out. Not to mention that Sunset’s husband is kept a mystery until the very end for no reason except for a big reveal that has nothing to do with the plot or really anything. Seriously, the scene at the end where she meets her husband has some good character bits in it but is completely unconnected to the rest of the story. I’d love to read the story where they hooked up, that would be interesting. But here it is just a throw-away scene at the end of the story mostly for the (sort of) punchline.
So, not a bad story but I can’t really say that I liked it. It didn’t feel very pony actually. You could take out the magic and AU entirely with only a bit of fuss and you could switch put the nouns and add a bit of back story to make it a decent urban fantasy. So your mileage may vary. I’d recommend this for someone who wanted a EQ story that that was creative and different, but with the caveat that there is a bit if formatting and lack of character context to deal with.
The City of Doors 