), I do love fussing over stats where anything of interest is concerned, Fimfic included. Happily, I’m not alone (because duh 
): Recommendsday blogger, fic writer and all-around awesome chap TCC56 does too, and in his latestGhost Mike's Ponyfic Review Monday Musings #66 · 5:01pm Jun 12th, 2023
I think it’s telling that only on launch day last Tuesday did I really register that eight more episodes (okay, a two-parter and six regular episodes) of Make Your Mark were dropping. Mirrors the level of enthusiasm I’m seeing in most circles. This, despite having noticed the promos for Chapter 4, up to and including a palette swap of Pipp with frazzled hair voiced by another Disney Channel “star”.
A promo stunt that I’m sure, by the way, will help the declining audience as much as Bliss did for the Powerpuff Girls reboot (that much-promoted special fell shy of even pulling in 1 million viewers). Honestly, I seriously considered not even mentioning G5 at all, new content be darned. But, well, parched for blurb content and enough folks probably expect me to, so…
In any case, yep: we’ve reached that point of the generation, where everyone internally knows the writing is on the wall and are already refocused on the future. Most people externally too. The lack of announcement of further content for G5 beyond the initial episode orders, plus more and more discounted merch and toys in bargain bins (just last week Amazon heavily marked down the movie-line G5 toys) only further intensifies this. When you consider the half-year-and-change since the indifferently sleepy Winter Wishday “special”, with Tell Your Tale retreating to a fortnightly upload schedule that makes it so much of an afterthought I forget about each new short until I see it in spaces I visit… yeah, I’m feeling much the same.
And I think this applies not just to the overwhelming majority of Fimfiction users, but to most of the pony fandom online (if not to the same level as here, I grant). Even in more positive, affirming spaces, the overall reaction and response has shifted pretty soundly to “yeah, I guess I’ll watch it, I suppose”. The largely abysmal conception, execution and total wheel-spinning of what we’ve had thus far being a key culprit. And it continues: I’m one episode shy of finishing the new batch Chapter 4 currently, and not a darn thing has changed about its quality on any of the numerous aspects I’ve dissected before, except for visual improvements at the margins that don’t really make a notable difference to the overall look, the most hyper-annoying traits of Pipp and Sparky getting downplayed in favour of them being props, and the glacial progress on overarching plots and amount of wheel-spinning being non-zero percent less glacial. Which doesn’t amount to a molehill of beans, does it? Most of everyone will feel it’s a marginal improvement but still pretty much the exact same quality as before, I think.
Honestly, folks, at this point, I’m burned out enough on public G5 talk that I doubt I’ll even mention it in the forward next week. Yep, we’ve reached that point, and even toy leak evidence that plot stuff is actually happening hasn’t changed that. It just doesn’t stick in my mind when I’mnot actually watching it, and as, movie excepted, none of it is even close to rewatch territory, that amounts to being largely absent.
Well! Bit of a downer, that. How’s about some quality MLP fanfic?
This Week’s Spectral Stories:
Magical Mystery Marks by bdoubleowo
Trixie Comes Out by King of Madness
A Figment of Her Imagination by PaulAsaran
It's a Dirty Job by Somerset Cider
A Bridge to Somewhere by Skywriter
Weekly Word Count: 37,556 Words
Magical Mystery Marks by bdoubleowo
Genre: Random/Slice of Life
Twilight, Mane 6
7,000 Words
February 2020
What started as a wonderful morning for Twilight quickly turned confusing when she saw Rarity handling the weather, complete with Rainbow Dash’s cutie mark. And it soon turns out she’s not the only one. Only difference is, alongside a musical number of the Mane 5 ruminating on their fate, in between the singing, Twilight gets in queries about how they got these new cutie marks.
It’s hard at the best of times to consider the content of “Magical Mystery Cure” past its controversial Buy Our Toys ending and purpose, the musical numbers, and the heavily rushed nature of the whole affair. One such casualty of that, both in the episode and in any fanfic I’ve read, is the absence of how the Mane 5 ended up with these switched marks. So delving into that is promising enough, as is getting the Mane 5 to tell their cutie mark story to Twilight while she and the reader waits on edge for where it all changed.
Sadly, the execution fumbles hard. First, the actual solutions are canon-compliant to the point of being wheel-spinning, with each story playing out exactly the same as in “The Cutie Mark Chronicles”, just with a for-the-bare-minimum change late in the story so the pony gets a different mark. In most cases, the pony still does the task of their true purpose as they do in the correct timeline, and are good at it and still like it, but change to this other thing “just because” of their mark and fully abandon what they want to do. The way they express this exact sentiment to Twilight is even more mechanical than I’ve made it sound (meanwhile, the two ponies that don’t follow that formula are the last two, by which point the story’s become a drag). Plus, the story ends with where Twilight was at the song’s end, so this is a “scene in the middle of an episode” sort of story, to the degree of being so focused on slotting into canon it provides little actual entertainment in doing so, and the bare minimum of creativity in the tales therein.
That probably doesn’t sound all that damaging, but between the short length of the chapters, some regurgitation of “What My Cutie Mark Is Telling Me” as Twilight approaches each pony, and the majority of each story being known material, it leaves very little of interest to actually latch onto here. A quick length is the right call for sure, it worked wonders in the Season One origin episode itself. Here, the better call would have been to ditch the framework of Twilight going to and hearing each story, least after the first, and have each chapter just be a dramatic perspective one, thus both getting to the good stuff (or the potential for it anyway), and opening a perspective window to have more emotional register. Because each Mane 5 recalls their story in the same bland, chirpy monotone in total contradiction to the show song they were just reciting.
It’s probably clear by now, but the mechanics and prose of the story also let it down quite hard. Dialogue is blandly expressed and asked, everypony accepts Twilight not knowing their cutie mark story, there’s are several continuity mistakes throughout purely in reference to itself, and overall it just has the feel of an author so excited about their idea that they’re willing to make contrivances to get there and are too blinded to the closeness it gives them to see the actual meat just isn’t.
Despite my at-best indifference to the episode, I was quite intrigued by this. Alas, it only served to reinforce why the majority of attempts to provide answers to lore-constraining question marks in canon (and this isn’t even one of those, really – I think most of us just assumed the botched spell would be powerful enough to alter the Mane 6’s marks stories enough for proper answers) are futile exercises in flop sweat. Unless you’re really swayed purely by the ideas therein and don’t demand much of them, there’s very little here.
Rating: Weak
Trixie Comes Out by King of Madness
Genre: Comedy/Random
Trixie, Starlight
1,011 Words
September 2022
It wasn’t until Trixie found the right pony that she realised she was lesbian. Now she is both introducing said pony to Starlight and coming out, over the moon about both. It is in the midst of this that Starlight decides she has not had enough coffee this morning.
I, personally, did not see the end punchline coming, and it fits Trixie perfectly, so if that is all one needs from quick li’l random comedies like this, you’re all set. All it thus needs to do is have enjoyable jokes along the way. It does, by and large, though they are purely of the “Trixie boasts about herself on the side in nearly every sentence while Starlight just replies in ignored deadpan or doesn’t reply at all” variety. And not quite so inventive as to prevent that grating somewhat by the end. This wants to be a drabble or writeoff story, but stuck with the 1K Fimfiction limit, it’s a protracted vignette. If not more variety in creativity in the jokes, a quick early prologue of a different context might have kept this feeling fresher.
As it is, it’s moderately funny enough, so folks fond of quick reveal comedies like this with Trixie and Starlight being themselves in limited but agreeable ways will like it fine.
Rating: Decent
A Figment of Her Imagination by PaulAsaran
Genre: Romance/Sad/Slice of Life
Daring Do, Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy, Twilight
23,239 Words
December 2013
On Rainbow Dash’s prompting, Princess Twilight has designed a spell to summon Daring Do from the pages of her own books. The spell seems to go off without a hitch… until the part where, rather than being a prop from the book aware of what she is and content to answer fan questions for the duration of the spell, Daring is an independent thinker, as sapient as any other pony, and not taking well to the fact of all her memories being works of fiction, much less that she will disappear when the spell expires. Her being alive complicates matters, so while the princesses debate the ethics of this situation, Daring is left to deal with not just her own feelings about her existence, but also her blossoming feelings for a timid yellow pegasus.
No doubt about it, that’s a lot of stuff for any story to tap into, potentially a whole novel’s worth. So it’s not too surprising it ends up being rather too much for a mere 23K. What did surprise me is the particular form in which it ends up being too much. Perhaps it’s on me for reading a story of PaulAsaran’s this old (I can already anticipate the man himself groaning at me picking a story he’s embarrassed about in retrospect, though he did write a one-shot follow-up to close off some threads four-and-a-half years later, so perhaps that reading is woefully wrong), but there’s a hefty clunkiness to not just the pacing, not just the rather ungainly tell-y manner in which information and dialogue is relayed to us (I’ve read far worse on both fronts) but to what we see firsthand and what happens between scenes and chapters that we’re caught up on after the fact.
This isn’t too alarming at first; this leaps into the action a bit too soon, starting meme moments before Twilight casts the spell, but a quick opening’s better than the alternative. The opening chapter and much of chapter two fare fine as well, where Daring hides out at Fluttershy’s and calms down a bit as she takes in the reality of her situation. It’s only around the end of chapter two, when the ethical debate about the matter beyond just Daring’s feeling on the issue becomes a plot point, that it gets rather lumpy, and the hopscotching between developments begins to pervasively rob them of more than superficial depth beyond the text of the dialogue and Daring’s erratically-delivered thoughts.
You wouldn’t guess from the above that the ethical debate with the princesses happens entirely offpage, only summarised in thought bubble exposition dumps, but it is. That’s the most obvious offender, but even the elements that seem to be in the forefront often get unceremoniously brushed aside later on: Daring being chased by rabid fans ends up being a pretext for Act I and then calmed down between scenes and never again focused on, with only a few sentences to hoofwave it away. And that’s not even touching upon the scene midway through when the real Daring Do shows up: it may have felt mandatory at the time, published ten days after “Daring’s Don’t” first aired, but in practice it’s a fruitless exercise both in story wheel-spinning (it very tangibly feels inserted to an in-progress fic, with all later mentions and attempts to tie it into the fic’s main conflict coming across as ungainly repurposing other aspects), and in trying to balance the real Daring between understanding an judgmental, falling far too much on the latter side without grace to how she carries herself (I will concede this reading makes a little more sense with only “Daring Don’t” to go off of, and not later Daring episodes that have more soft moments for her, but it’s still not a good one to get through).
Of course, that’s mostly about things not in the fic or which it purports to be but end up largely not being. What of the elements actually in the fic? They fare better; Daring is largely believable as her transparent book persona grappling with the reality of this, softening and changing in ways over the three weeks of her stay. The ethics of her dilemma at a personal level, while dealt with in a pretty surface-level way, do resonate and carry through the whole fic, still making her far more interesting than the show’s Daring ever was.
The Fluttershy romance – something you wouldn’t even know from the outside, what with the long description wisely omitting some plot threads to make the word count seem appropriate – is a little sketchier; given this was written for a content with the pairing of Fluttershy and Daring Do, the fic wouldn’t exist otherwise, but the fic is still far and away about Daring’s dilemma in a manner than doesn’t actively involve Fluttershy. Thus it is that the romance fares well as an extra element to the debate of her fading – should Daring make a move when heartbreak is inevitable? – but once Fluttershy reciprocates Daring’s feelings with near-equal intensity (the fic really felt like it was leading to her being unsure but willing to give it a try, which would suit the ending and final chapter far better too), it feels altogether mechanical. And then the ending makes a tonal muddle of things, presenting the right ideas and story points but fudging side details to the degree that makes it feel more like structural boilerplate than a natural evolution of the story.
When the story doesn’t have ostensibly important plot or story points getting shuffled aside and ignored, and is just about its core characters and their feelings, it’s a compelling enough read, if a bit undercooked in presentation. Alas, those elements, and the fic deflating as it goes on, despite the core ideas being sound (I have no issue with the grey ethics presented that are largely what the comments have debated about, nor with the characterisation either), leave it more of a perfunctory highlights reel of its ideas. A sound fic in parts, but a rather raw and unrefined one in other parts.
Rating: Passable
It's a Dirty Job by Somerset Cider
Genre: Random/Slice of Life
Raven Inkwell, Celestia
1,943 Words
September 2019Reread
Raven Inkwell has one last task to complete before retirement along with the princesses. Checking the royal tax returns. As she does so, she finds herself reflecting on the moment recently where Celestia told her that she would be retiring alongside the Princesses, and gave a parting gift.
As three of this story’s four prior comments note, it is in dire need of a copy edit, with everything from mis-capitalisation and tense shifts to (understandable) spelling errors and misordering of brackets. But the author gave a reason for not changing it, so other than to note it does rather get in the way of appreciating the content at times, I won’t dwell there.
As for that actual content, it’s a reasonable concept. The actual tax returns aspect ends up just being the parting notes each princess leaves for Raven, some short and evasive, others longer and law-abiding. And I won’t lie, this is disappointing, but not fic-ruining. It just leaves it rather like any other “Raven retiring fic”. The actual meat of the story is Celestia telling Raven she’ll be retiring too, as Twilight is bringing on her own staff, and gifting a retirement place courtesy of both princesses. And this is moving enough, and has light moments along the way to keep it fitfully amusing.
For a story that drops a lot of potential in both ideas, incident, and especially technical execution, it still manages to suffice and not feel like a timewaster. Which, with a fair share of Raven retiring fics, is no small thing.
Rating: Passable
A Bridge to Somewhere by Skywriter
Genre: Slice of Life
Starlight, Double Diamond, Party Favor, Sugar Belle, Night Glider
4,363 Words
March/June 2017Reread
Ponies didn’t come to Our Town from nowhere. So how was it that Party Favour, Sugar Belle, Night Glider and Double Diamond ended up there? What experiences let them to willingly choose to relinquish the mark of their personal talent? It doesn’t just start and end with the mare leading this isolated town out in the wilderness.
I’m never going to run out of fantastic authors whose work I have read yet are only getting to reviewing a story of this far into the Ponyfic reviews, am I? Sixty-six weeks to get to Skywriter, my god… But this is a solid display of his craft, for despite its short length, there’s a lot of density to a story, especially for one that’s told almost exclusively through monologue. Especially where there’s two levels on which this is working.
For the first three chapters, the gist is straightforward; the featured Our Town pony is venting about how they came to be unsatisfied with their talent or mark, be that not living up to the bar in that field, seeing the harm it could be used for, or even the bad side of friendship. The dialogue is lively and realistic, lived-in, where you can feel the breaths and sighs even though they aren’t told to us. The short length benefits them, letting what amount to flavour text additions to these ponies enrapture before fatigue at the formula set in. And this flavour text is really cracking stuff; Party Favor’s start off with mostly expected notes before Sugar Belle’s and Night Glider’s take some hard left swerve that nonetheless feel just right. Even the flavour text of the flavour text makes these anecdotes really stick around; there are some cracking lines of dialogue here with some absurdly wonderful conceits and ideas within. You really believe these ponies’ desperation, and they would join this cult. Even just from this, it’s a really solid collection.
And then the fourth chapter comes along, and what was basically an anthology collection of vignettes on the same theme turns out to have had an overarching story. Firstly from Double Diamond’s story being from a rather different angle that flips the script and shows without ever saying how he was Starlight’s right hand pony, and then from making it more about Starlight herself, a journey that is complete by the final chapter. It really solidifies thoughts about what makes these ponies do these things, and makes five really solid chapters more than the sum of their parts when put together. That it also is both creepy, unnerving and hopeful really makes it hit home too.
This isn’t only the featured Our Towners backstory fic I wanted, it’s the one I didn’t deserve, yet got. Don’t let the short length fool you: if you’re willing to read between the lines – a reading the fic implores and thus doesn’t feel like effort – this is an immensely satisfying take on the concept.
Rating: Really Good
Spooky Summary of Scores:
Excellent: 0
Really Good: 1
Pretty Good: 0
Decent: 1
Passable: 2
Weak: 1
Bad: 0
Will the executives take note and for the first time in their stuffed-shirt careers realize that their own hubris doomed the generation? Or will they once again blame millennials, piracy, computers, and the price of oil, then declare themselves bonuses?
Tune in next time for-- Oh who are we kidding? This is America!
You are sadly mistaken, oh incorporeal one.
While I do not deny the story's faults, nor will I defend them with anything other than my own lack of critical experience at the time (and by "critical" I mean having people actually criticizing my work), I am not nor ever have been ashamed of that or any other story I have written. In truth, I've always had a soft spot for that one and wish I'd had the time back then to make it something bigger. I wrote that sequel four years later because of nostalgia, which in turn led me to wanting to address some topics readers had brought up. I dare say the sequel is a better story for focusing on a much narrower topic, even if it relies on readers already knowing the events of the original.
Even if you did tear it apart, I appreciate the old story getting some attention after all these years.
5733028
It is a stretch to take my assumption of "embarrassed" and interpret it as "ashamed"?
Possibly for my mental definition of the words, but it is your fic, so you know best here. In any case, I meant it largely in the sort of "comical blush" sense of embarrassed, less the "aw geez, come on, that's not me!" sense.
Though perhaps you not being ashamed/embarrassed just means you're more mature, wise and reflective of your writing resume and how it brought you to where you are now, relative to a greener one like myself. Proof I'm still learning this little game called life!
Though, aren't we all?
Yeah… it must have been a bit of a surprise, and probably not that pleasant a one, to follow the review notification and see the rating, given on close to half the weeks no fic dips below Decent. Hopefully, it never came across as unfair or mean-spirited (I mean, based on your reaction, I'm sure it didn't but you never know).
Even now, I'm not really sure how this one got my my radar. Obviously wanting another fic of yours, and one that appealed to me, which ruled out both most of your EqG fics and the Them series. The cited praise from the now-defunct Royal Guard was definitely a swaying factor too, though I think it was sealed the story's packaging not acknowledging the romance with Fluttershy; if it had, the warning bells of there being too much here for the length might have gone off. As it is, I assumed prior to jumping in that it was just with Dash, who was already a key player anyway, and thus less of an expansion of elements. If you get me.
And, yea… I probably went overlong with the review of this one, didn't I?
I think you can always tell when a pic's quirks really latch onto my brain, for better or for worse. Probably made for a less structurally sound review, though (okay, a less sound review period 
).
Thank you for the review, a fair and honest critique.
Something like Dirty Job is written as much for myself as for any potential readers. It is a challenge to myself because I'm no writer. I just scraped through English language at school some 35 plus years ago, horrendously dyslexic too boot.
I still do Loganberry's flashfic 150 contest occasionally with great enjoyment, have even won on a couple of rare occasions.
Anyway once again, thank you for the review.
When I saw the promo for that I had a good chuckle - if your franchise that has a main character who is also a pop star suddenly needs a 'special guest appearance' by another supposed pop star, well...perhaps things aren't going so hot.
Added Skywriter's story to my RIL (which I need to start whittling down again). The only one I'd previously read here is Trixie Comes Out, which is an amusing little drabble, yes, and while I could see the ending coming that didn't make it less satisfying.
5733054
Precisely why, at first I thought it was Pipp with a different hairdo. Pink pop star pegasus? Who else could it be?
It was easy to pass off the darker shade as just the lighting (or bad saturation of the animation, since this show has had plenty of that).
The ironic thing is, this special would have been written and voice recorded between the movie's release (so they did thus know the whole generation would be nothing but Netflix and YouTube) and the debut of both series. So they didn't yet have the bad reception of the show to go off of, only the movie's good reception (in the eyes of the critics and target audience). Meaning they did this character creation and stunt casting already knowing full well the show would need the commercial "boost" by then from its… lacking quality thus far.
Don't we all!
Especially in my case as regards Skywriter's works.
The best kind of amusing little drabble then!
5733058
I think too much attention has been pointed at Hasbro, and not enough at Atomic Cartoons, more specifically their management. Hasbro doesn't want the show to fail, they just want it to be profitable. Faust managed to get the crew at DHX to want the show to succeed, but Atomic approached it from the usual "We won the contract as the lowest bidder, we're going to under-staff and deliver this as cheaply as possible to ensure that we're profitable even with the low bid, also this is for 3-6 year olds who don't care about quality anyway."
If anything I think the unfortunate element is that there does seem to be some people at AC who care, but their efforts just make the rest of it look as bad as it is, and worsens the whole.
That said, the toy clearance at Amazon, the fact that I pretty much never find the G5 toys in stores (not since the first few months after the movie anyway), and yes, the lack of any renewal while they've started to string out the YouTube series does not point to something that's going to last. Which is a shame, as the movie, while imperfect, laid enough of a foundation to build from, but somewhere along the line the plans got lost and now we're getting a roach coach where a steakhouse is supposed to be.
5733063
Oh, full agree. There are many reasons why this is clear, not least the utter lack of collaboration and syncing between different teams and episodes and such. But for me, the biggest sign is how absolutely mangled the visual pacing and flow is, in a manner that could only come from storyboarding, pacing and shot timing being assembled haphazardly and not enough care being made to adjust the final result after pooling them all together. Something close to half lines of dialogue are actively worsened by not having pauses with thoughtful looks, or having them where not appropriate. Even in a kid's cartoon, and even in one aimed this young, you don't realise how important such aspects are to making the immersion until they're taken out.
Sure, a stockpiled line I have from a wrap-up review to Chapter 2 I never finished, yet which I continue to stand by, is this. The first line, that is. The rest is just a bonus.
Most evident from the character animation; a lot of it is still firmly in "they only had one pass so it's merely okay even just in isolation" territory, yet more and more I am seeing evidence of the animators getting better at managing these character models and making them emote better. But because the visual pacing and flow is so mangled as a result of not properly collaborating it, these moments are always cut short by something immersion-breaking before they can be appreciated (we're lucky to get two moments an episode of something visually/technically impressive that doesn't cut its own argument off in five or less seconds, I am not kidding). Animation is a collaborative medium, and the collaboration factor is really, really low here.
I mean, the director sure as hell doesn't care. His prior credits are largely for Barbie DVD/streaming movies, after all.
5733068
The moment I ‘noped’ out of the show was the first episode of…I guess it’s Chapter 2? Whatever came after the first special (so glad the naming on these has been logical), where Pipp rushes in, asks where Izzy is, is told she’s gone, then shouts “Oh no, I gave her bad advice!” and the others just go “oh I’m sure it’s fine!”
Uh, are you really sure when you haven’t heard what the advice was? What if Pipp had told Izzy that the glue factory down the road was looking for testing candidates for a new formula?
Granted, that might actually have been exciting…maybe I’ll make a note for G5’s version of the Rainbow Factory.
I will maintain that while it’s certainly doable without the crutch, I think they did themselves and the show a disservice not structuring it with commercials in mind. There’s a narrative strength that comes from having to build your plot efficiently in blocks of between-commercial time that G5 could really benefit from, but we’re treated to 20ish minutes of mess that does feel very disjointed.
In all truth, it wouldn’t surprise me if they just didn’t hire storyboard artists for cost reasons. “Just chat occasionally and it’ll all work out!” probably sounded good to accounting.
Skywriter is one of my favorite authors here. I wasn't much interested in Starlight's secondary characters, but... Skywriter. Turns out the story went straight onto my Favorites shelf!
As for "season" 4 of G5... The shortcomings of the animation, shot composition, lighting, texturing, etc were pretty obvious to me, but I think they would have been perfectly adequate to support a good story. With fun, engaging scripts I wouldn't have had time to look around in an effort to find something of interest, and thereby notice... well, yeah... all that.
I stopped watching TYT a while back, but thought I'd allow my completist compulsion to drag me into one last dip into G5. I really should have resisted.
5733075
The three-act structure feels so natural to people today because of commercial breaks! It's one of those common "invisible" elements that people don't notice until they're not there.
I think you're right about the lack of boards, too. These guys don't seem to have a pipeline... more like a leaky bucket-brigade.
I admit G5 is having a very small renaissance in my own headspace, almost entirely carried by the Opaline Alone TYT episode which I unironically found hilarious (enough to put a G5 fic on my to-write list). Chapter 4 is getting good buzz among the people who like G5, which has tempted me to slowly catch up. It seems too little too late, but hey, it'll kill a few hours next time it comes to paint minis.
5733106
To be fair, that short did elicit positive reactions from me as well, and I unironically dug the song too (thank goodness for longer album versions!). It helps that the artstyle of TYT, bland and cookie-cutter and in possession of unappealing pony bodies as it may be, lends itself to that kind of “can’t even take the villain seriously” level of farce far better then MYM does.
I have heard the same from the advent defenders of G5 too. Not having yet seen the last episode, where stuff on that front actually happens, I’m still willing to bet it’s fully just a case of (expected) things actually happening for Misty’s arc being a cause of celebration, with the crowd being so numb to MYM’s regular shortcomings.
Artistic hobbies well suited to background-watching jank MLP for the win!
Though in this case, I didn’t do that, as I wanted to still pay full attention (or, well, as much attention as I could) and takes notes for theoretical future blog discussions. Which I am not likely to ever action, but this saves me from having to do full rewatches again. 
5733116
That song was fire. And like, the gags really genuinely landed for me. She went through her dresser sorting through crowns to 'keep' and 'donate.' It was funny, but also somehow cozy. I have a huge soft spot for relatable, ultimately-harmless villains, and FIM never actually went that route. I felt like it happened for an episode with Chrysalis (where she cloned the Mane 6, rambled about starting a new hive of ponies, then was instantly betrayed by her own creations), but then she got super cereal again.
5733095
Aw, thanks! High praise from an author of your caliber as well.
Thanks for another review, Ghosty; hope Trixie Comes Out got a laugh outta ya. Quite a bit different from the previous story of mine you reviewed, aye? No one can say I lack variety.