It Is Recommendsday, My Dudes #7 · 10:49pm May 5th, 2021
Alright - after a lot of drama yesterday that's psychologically drained me and feeling under the weather from my Covid vax, I'm pulling a mulligan today.
And by 'mulligan' I mean that I'm using my reserve blog which flushes four stories out of my backlog rather than one new and one backlog. So... yeah, deal with twice as much story.
So folks who know me know a couple things about my story preferences. One of the big ones is that I'm a huge hater for the Human in Equestria and Displaced story groups. There's a bunch of reasons for it, chief among them that I find the subgenres formulaic and boring. More than half of all HiE stories are the same story, just changing the random human's name and which pony they end up dating. The human is almost always either a character-less blank slate, a blatant self-insert, an obvious power fantasy or a combination of the three. Ponies around them are mostly reduced to wearing the Idiot Hat so the human can be awesome thanks to their knowledge of technology/genre-bucking awareness/having a gun. Displaced is even worse because it's got all the same issues but even less context and pointless "I suddenly have super powers!".
But the genres aren't empty of good stories. They're just rarer.
So a while back my trashing HiE stories got the ask: what Human in Equestria stories do I like? (And in exchange I got a few recommendations back at me, though I don't include those here.) I came up with four.
First is Antiquarian's A 14th Century Friar In Celestia's Court. This one attracted my attention initially because.. well, okay because Antiquarian is quality but this story in particular has a great hook (and a common theme with my picks). The human in question isn't a random college student/person at a convention/soldier - it's a 60-something French priest from the mid-1300s.
That changes the playbook quite a lot. Friar Jacques is coming from an era with more primitive technology than ponies have. He's invigorated by the displacement but he's still an elderly man. And he's got a very distinct and well-built personality.
The story itself is a little standard fare on some of the notes, but it's also got a lot of interesting bits as there's attempts to reconcile pony religion and philosophy with 14th century Catholicism. There's a bevvy of secondary and tertiary characters that help flesh out the world and build unique interactions. And there's a lot of Jacques being a snarky old man, which is just far more amusing than random guileless punks trying to be witty.
Next we've got A Slave's Freedom by Soaring.
Again, the unique hook here is the human protag: a Mississippi slave from the mid-1800s. It also bucks the standard tropes of the HiE genre by being more of a survival adventure with Dyson (the human) working with an injured Rainbow Dash to work their way out of the wilderness. That story is interspersed with flashes from Dyson's life on Earth, giving context to the character and his life prior to pony.
The more isolated setting really helps the story, keeping it focused on the two characters and their interactions. And the story's further helped by that there's a level of... I want to say parity between the human and pony. They're established well as needing each other, there's misunderstandings but the work through it, and Dyson is a believable character who acts in ways you would expect for a person who's entire life (and the lives of generations of ancestors) was as a slave.
Next up: Luna's Return Trajectory by Stainless Steel Fox.
Pitch here is simple: Luna was sent to the moon. Celestia never specified which moon. So when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land on it, well.
Both of them started to reply, then Buzz said, “Uh... if you're talking about the small blue horse that appears to be bounding towards us, yes we see it too. Please advise.”
There's a lot of humor in this one - for obvious reasons - but it's also a nice tale about Luna's loneliness and bridging the species gap. I tell ya, it hurt when Apollo 11 had to return. The story's simple enough, but it's got a lot of heart and uses adorable filly-like Luna so she's extra cute. It's a fun one.
Last is a piece by SweetBanana: Mane Allgood and the Strange Ape Known As Sable.
The start of my attraction here is the ingenious use of Mane Allgood: a little-used character to start from, her obvious mirror (Jane Allgood, of course) makes her uniquely suited to a HiE story. After all, who better to use to investigate a weird primate? The second part of the appeal is that it's approached fairly reasonably on the Equestrian side. It's not until chapter three they even go "Wait, it's sentinent?!" I like that. It's a good hook.
(Now in the interests of disclosure, I did help Sweet with some editing for the first two chapters. But that was mostly because I liked the hook, so I figure the rec is still valid enough.)
It's been on hiatus for a bit and was just getting its feet under it, but the story's had a good start with a very unique approach.
New or catching up? Try Recommendsday: The Index for your story needs!
Friar is some of the best prose on the site, and easily the best use Christianity in a pony fic. I'm less familiar with the others, but I'll clearly need to correct that.
My favorite HiE is Family Tree, by far:
- MLP: FiM
- Romance
- Mystery
- Sad
Getting cryptic notes from dead relatives is never a good thing. This was no exception. What are you supposed to do when someone wants you to solve a mystery when there's something out in the woods? That turns out to be the least of my problems.And if you really hate Displaced fics, might I plug my own gratuitous expression of that?
- MLP: FiM
- Thriller
Twilight builds an elite strike team of Displaced humans for a secret mission: stopping the enigmatic Merchant once and for all.I can't help but feel you are doing good work. :)
soaring is pretty poggers
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Okay, the description of that self-plug absolutely has my attention.
5513794 Can't top it with my 1940 story, that's for sure. And I've never written a Displaced, so...
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no you're poggers
Thank you for the recommendation, TCC56! Glad that you've enjoyed the story thus far.
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I'm just glad you're still going! I remember being very disappointed when the story (and the account) suddenly disappeared during that little whoopsie.
5514002
your mum says poggers from my bedroom