• Member Since 31st Aug, 2018
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Ghost Mike


Hardcore animation enthusiast chilling away in this dimension and unbothered by his non-corporeal form. Also likes pastel cartoon ponies. They do that to people. And ghosts.

More Blog Posts234

  • Monday
    Ghost Mike's Ponyfic Review Monday Musings #114

    Last Week, I dove into a great new tool that Rambling Writer cooked up, one which allows one to check any Fimfic user and see how many and what percentage of their followers logged in during the last day, week, month and year. Plus any

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    13 comments · 145 views
  • 1 week
    Ghost Mike's Ponyfic Review Monday Musings #113

    If you didn’t know (and after over 100 opening blurbs, I’d be surprised if you didn’t :raritywink:), I do love fussing over stats where anything of interest is concerned, Fimfic included. Happily, I’m not alone (because duh :rainbowwild:): Recommendsday blogger, fic writer and all-around awesome chap TCC56 does too, and in his latest

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    18 comments · 188 views
  • 2 weeks
    Ghost Mike's Ponyfic Review Monday Musings #112

    Another weird one for the pile: with the weekend just gone being May 4th (or May the 4th be With You :raritywink:) Disney saw fit to re-release The Phantom Menace in cinemas for one week for the film’s 25th anniversary (only two weeks off). It almost slipped my mind until today, hence Monday Musings being a few hours later (advantage of a Bank Holiday, peeps – a free

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    23 comments · 249 views
  • 3 weeks
    Ghost Mike's Ponyfic Review Monday Musings #111

    It’s probably not a surprise I don’t play party multiplayer games much. What I have said in here has probably spelt out that I prefer games with clear, linear objectives with definitive ends, and while I’m all for playing with friends, in person or online, doing the same against strangers runs its course once I’m used to the game. So it was certainly an experience last Friday when I found myself

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    19 comments · 194 views
  • 4 weeks
    Ghost Mike's Ponyfic Review Monday Musings #110

    Anniversaries of media or pieces of tech abound all over the place these days to the point they can often mean less if you yourself don’t have an association with it. That said, what with me casually checking in to Nintendo Life semi-frequently, I couldn’t have missed that yesterday was the 35th anniversary of a certain Game Boy. A family of gaming devices that’s a forerunner for the

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    16 comments · 172 views
Jul
31st
2023

Ghost Mike's Ponyfic Review Monday Musings #73 · 5:00pm Jul 31st, 2023

Two weeks ago it dawned on me that, with July 10th having landed on a Monday this year, I’d missed a prime opportunity for a themed throwback feature on that day. As July 10th is the day Fimfiction was launched in Beta, I could have had a week themed around the site’s 12th anniversary. The bad news is I missed my chance. The good news is, with today being July 31st, it’s prime for an even better celebration of the site’s twelve years.

And what might that be? Well, though I wasn’t around at the time (six-and-a-half years off joining the fandom, I was!), I have observed from stats and other sources that the process of Fimfiction becoming the hub for Ponyfic didn’t happen overnight. The Pony fandom during Season One, and in its immediate aftermath, lacking a centralised fanfic hub, tended to post in general fanfiction websites (fanfiction.net, AO3, others I’m forgetting), or straight on Google Docs that they then shared on public places. A look at any Equestria Daily feature page for a fic that early will typically link to a Google Doc instead, after all. Thus, when Fimfiction did launch in July 2011, despite it being an impressively-constructed and immaculately presented website from Day 1 (if looking quite a bit different design-wise compared to today :twilightsheepish:), few folks were bullish enough to consider it a foregone conclusion that it would be the main Ponyfic hub, at least instantly. Looking at the site statistics for stories published by months (that are still public), the first three months were flat, with only the start of Season Two overlapping (or possibly driving) a huge spike that only flatlined in March 2012, a huge boom of output that the site remains at for two years before, shortly after Season Four, starting the downward trend in output we’re still seeing today (though there has been an aberration currently, enough to put 2023 200+ stories ahead of last year, though it won’t hold enough for the year to not finish behind when it’s done). And even after that surge from late 2011 to early 2012, Fimfic didn’t settle as the hub for a while – while they are most common during that surge period, you can see fics published here as late as 2014 and even 2015 where the long description notes they date from 2011.

Thus, the trend I was interested in was this. To feature only fics published here in July 2011, the site’s first month (actually, just the first twenty-two days). What options would early adopters have had to choose from to read exactly twelve years ago? What kind of fics were being written then? What sort of perspective would we get now to look at a very narrow time capsule? We all know the quaintness and trends that tend to mark early-fandom fics out, when the show had barely explored Equestria, but how would that be for this specific range? And, how would these fics hold up?

I didn't find out until after I'd started assembling this week that my fellow Ponyfic review and good friend Loganberry had done exactly this theme way back in December 2014, looking at the site's initial month. We even share two of the same fics! Guess some ideas just write themselves, though such a theme would have felt far different then relative to the dinosaur it does now. :moustache:

Now, obviously, the fics published then weren’t all written in July 2011. A quick glance at the publish dates as I scanned down the search results after filtering it to fics approved before 2011-8-1 showed over half of the 91 complete fics (it would be 166 if including incomplete, hiatus and cancelled fics) came from the site’s first three days. Even without some long descriptions making it clear, this early, many folks were just cross-posting their fics here for extra coverage. But that’s a necessary evil. You can also tell which writers later revised their fics’ packaging, both by the number of shorter descriptions (I think Fimfic used to have length restrictions on the long ones…?) and the lack of cover pictures for many.

Which, yeah, those factors made choosing fics tricky, after the first two I had in my backlog from this month already. I already knew this feature couldn’t represent all trends from back then – the length issue alone would exclude the adventure fics into worldbuilding and lore many miles removed from where the show would end up going, one of the first things most of us think of when we think of old fics, on top of leaving this mostly confined to small slice of life and character pieces  – but even a pool of 91 fics didn’t leave many to choose from. Lots of fluffy nothingburgers that were clearly My First Ponyfic for the authors, a couple of M-rated fics way off limits, dumb joke fics, human/anon/OC self-inserts (some trends were always there, it seems!), and so on. To be fair, if one were just picking from the 91 most recently published complete stories right now, they’d have a fairly difficult job too.

So, in the end, the five featured fics don’t cover the whole shebang, not nearly, but we have, I think, a good sampling of those I might have picked out to read back then, and which show some of the trends that were popular then, and possibly still, or possibly not. There were just enough CMC fics, and especially Scootaloo/Dash friendship/teaching/bonding ones, that one of them made it in for representation. A short RariJack shipfic for the “because I like these two characters” aspect (though PinkieDash would have been better, considering how that ship was huge early on but tapered off in popularity after the fandom’s boom years).

Another mainstay of early Pony fanfiction is interpretations of the ponies’ later lives and careers when we had no reason to assume the show would ever have a status quo change at all (cartoons were barely starting to become more commonly serialised in 2011, after all), so a showcase of Rarity’s later career is here. Fics featuring the Princesses behind closed doors was huge from the fandom’s start, so we have a Celestia fic here (and, alas, the only showcase today of a pre-“Luna Eclipsed” approach to Luna, who varied in takes but was, I understand, often rather Fluttershy-like, or at least shy in her own way). Finally, we have the high concept fic represented by one of the earliest (I’m not going to assume it is the earliest) instances of a main character’s life in the world of the show being wish fulfilment of a normal horse on Earth (not an overused story type, but there are a decent few examples around).

Definitely not the best assortment, and of course, even with known fics’ reputation and other Ponyfic reviewers’ takes to fall back on, there was still some blind picking here that didn’t always pay off. But in a way, that’s appropriate for the initial batch of fics folks would have had to choose from to read back then: some jank, a lot of guesswork, a lot of newbies feeling out the craft. And yet, a lot of fresh passion for this new fandom that already meant the world to these people in less than a year, and which carries a certain energy that, even when the fics were lacking, I always found invariably fascinating. An energy that wasn’t there is quite the same form even a year later, to say nothing of twelve It’s important to look back on the beginnings, and while this isn’t the absolute beginning of Ponyfic, short of trawling through old forums or the earliest EqD feature pages, it’s as good a representation as any.

This Week’s Spectral Stories:
Somewhere Only We Know by PatchworkPoltergeist
Keep me hanging on by XanaToast
Longer than Diamonds by SPark
Celestia's Teeth by Abalidoth
Rainbows and Sunsets by Sagebrush

Weekly Word Count: 25,386 Words

Archive of Reviews


Somewhere Only We Know by PatchworkPoltergeist

Genre: Sad (Alternate Universe)
Rainbow Dash, Applejack, Rarity
4,721 Words
July 2011

Rainbow Dash loves to fly. She loves the open air, the rainbows, and she loves the town and her friends in it. She loves it so much, that you might almost say it all only exists because of her… or for her.

I cannot tell if I read this before, or whether it was another story with an ordinary real-world horse dreaming/hallucinating of being Rainbow Dash the pegasus. No matter: this early fandom classic (literally, published on only the website’s 3rd day) holds up especially strongly for something that old. The core idea of Equestria and the world of FiM being the dreams of an ageing, battered carriage pony in the real world (one which feels like a 19th century period piece, more on than later) is enough to hit hard. Then we have that pony being Rainbow Dash, longing to run free, and being unable to do so due to age, lost spryness and a knocked-up knee. Oh, and she recollects on her older pony friends that used to be frequents around her stable, but which have been long since sold on; when she sees them whilst on a city trip, the lack of their former vitality ain’t pretty, to put it mildly.

Stories from the viewpoint of domesticated animals in a human-dominated world can have a direct route to our fears and emotions (there’s more than a few Black Beauty parallels in this one, and for good reason), whether that be the mix of nobility, pride and naivety that makes things they see hit harder for the reader, or just the simple, unbiased presentation of cruelty. Among other things. This story does both, naturally, and its ability to make later lines such as “Oh, Applejack” land hard is exemplary.

What’s more impressive for me, on reflection, is how it makes the difference between Rainbow’s dream characterisation, with an unwavering will, and her real-life horse incarnation, not defeated but knowing it’s not worth struggling against her human captors, actually mesh with reasoning beyond her simply being too old. How much one decides to picture Rainbow the pegasus’ unbreakable will as being a projection is up to the reader, but me, it makes the fic click.

This isn’t altogether absent of some of those distracting early Ponyfic elements that mark old fics old, though they are basically negligible thanks to the concept requiring a dreamscape version of Ponyville – it could pass for being from 2014, I found, or possibly even more recent. The Equestria dream parts that bookend the story do a good job of having a different enough style befitting the Dash we know, though they definitely feel rather more pedestrian. That’s about the only reason I can come up with for being mighty impressed, but not utterly blown away. At the very least, I felt I should be sad more than actually being sad.

Make no mistake though, this is still a very impressive fic no matter the expectations and age, and if you’ve missed out on it up to now, I can’t recommend it enough. You’ll forgive me for being somewhat cryptic about it. Delightful to see PatchworkPoltergeist, author of the fantastic The Silver Standard and several great associated stories, had her writing skills this honed right from the fandom’s start.

Rating: Excellent / Really Good LEANING STRONGLY TOWARDS REALLY GOOD


Keep me hanging on by XanaToast

Genre: Romance/Comedy
Applejack, Rarity, Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash
1,760 Words
July 2011

Reread
Listened to via TheLostNarrator's reading

At Pinkie’s latest party, Applejack finds herself in major flux, wrestling with her unrequited feelings for Rarity. So when, drunk off her high horse, the mare of her affections demands Applejack’s assistance to get home, it’s all Applejack can do to avoid acting on her feelings.

Here’s a rare trend that nonetheless is fitting to have this early on: an author who posted this one story and last logged shortly after making it (November 2011 here). Not often you see one-story authors from that early in the fandom. Given that, it does 100% feel like an early, quickly-written shipfic: there’s no reason given for why Applejack likes Rarity, she just does, Rarity likes her back and orchestrated this, because of course, and the writing is rather telly. And the comedic setup of Dash inquiring herself and Pinkie being prophetic, plus a coda ending in place of properly resolving the actual conflict here, leaves it muddled.

That said, it does work. There must be a reason I found it fine, beyond Lost’s reading with immaculate performances for the four main characters giving it a boost, anyway. Probably the funny parts being serviceable, and the shippy parts being charming enough, with good dialogue, reasonable character interiority and remaining respectful and tasteful with Applejack refusing to take advantage of Rarity (the E rating is correct). Too slight and frivolous and kind of a nothingburger to stand out, but short enough that shippers will dig it. I can see why Lost made the reading, anyway.

Rating: Passable 


Longer than Diamonds by SPark

Genre: Slice of Life
Rarity, (Twilight), Spike
5,504 Words
July 2011

Rarity can’t help but feel as though her career is going through a slump, many years in. If not in the financial success, then certainly in the level of excitement it generates in Equestria. Thus, it’s a gift from heaven when one of her dresses is modelled by Princess Celestia for the Midwinter Celebration. The princess almost never wears clothing beyond her royal regalia – this is Rarity’s finest hour! And yet… little changes, except to bring with it more worry. Is her time neigh?

As the first fic from an author who would be a regular writer for nearly a decade, writing almost 80 stories, this is honestly a solid start. It is its age, of course; the writing is largely tell-heavy and plain, it ends up being less of a proper narrative then a scenario of a character’s resolved by a talk with others (and the dialogue heavy scenes, where one character can have a long paragraph alternating between dialogue and description that could have benefitted from being broken up). And, only at the very end with a scene from a thrice-a-pony’s-height Spike is there any benefit to this being this many years later; up till then, it not only didn’t boost it but actively undermined the credibility of Rarity’s worries, not least her only realising the truth of her worry with Twilight’s insight at the apex.

All that is enough to make this a story that isn’t exactly gripping, yet it’s pleasurable enough. It’s very amusing to see how many bits and pieces of future Rarity episodes this anticipates along the way (namely from “Canterlot Boutique”), the different future from later canon hit the balance of being reasonable enough extensions to feel natural (a cameo by Diamond Tiara really gives me insight into how folk viewed her in Summer 2011!), and Rarity herself is characterised softly yet still strongly so. More than anything, this gets at the frustration and personal disappointment clothes designers and makers can feel at their work only being relevant even to the buyer for a limited time. Among other aspects on the “Suited for Success” line of thought; though little of this fic is about the practicality of sewing, the author being a costume maker showed. It made a fic that was a bit mildewy at times feel earnest enough to be worth the read.

Very much an early fandom and early author fic: rough and unassuming around the edges, easy to forget, and improved in concept over the years by many. But as one still readable and enjoyable and well capable of getting the job done, it sufficed warmly enough.

Rating: Decent


Celestia's Teeth by Abalidoth
[No Cover Image]
Genre: Comedy/Slice of Life
Celestia, Luna (and OC)
5,332 Words
July 2011

Celestia has always made sure to surround herself with the most competent staff throughout Equestria, and for the most part, that’s paid off wonderfully, with her not having to shoulder the work of a whole nation, and having them do much of the work. Of course, one of those other parts is that they will do too much for her in some areas, including looking after her. When she finds out only after the fact that she has been appointed a royal tooth-brusher (on her behalf), she decides enough is enough, and indulges in her playful side to get her royal advisor to see reason.

After some digging, it turns out this story was something of a minor comedy classic, at least in the fandom’s early years before it faded to memory. And it certainly has a lot going for it. From the premise, you would expect a structure of Celestia indulging in her playful troll side (“A Bird in the Hoof” was barely three months in the rear view mirror at the time) as retribution for this decision and to prove a point. This does happen, through Celestia’s bad breath antics at two important functions, yet it also subverts it slightly with enough wrinkles to keep it fresh (twelve years on, that’s not easy), and keeps a solid balance of being a comedy with something to say over being a laugh riot. Which is good, because the actual comedy was, a few rare belters excepted, more of the amusing, slight grin variety, not enough to carry the fic alone. Plus, it has a good tonal balance of Celestia’s mischief being harmless and not undermining her taking her duties seriously – none of the “she’s a klutz behind closed doors” tomfoolery here. This is a grounded, gentle amusing fic, so if the premise put in mind a festival of absurdity, not quite.

It really is the parts that have something to say that stick the most, as effective as the ponies’ excessive deference towards Celestia is. It’s not just about proper communication and respect between rulers and their staff either, or the level of responsibilities both should have. A brief appearance mid-story by S1 Luna leads into how the relationship between a monarch and her subjects can shift, what either side is truly afraid of, and how the ruler can inadvertently ruin others’ lives. Perhaps because the humour is so grounded, it feels all the more real. The fic really surprised me there.

If I did have an issue, it was the technical writing. Not that it’s poor; vocabulary range and restraint worked, and the editing made the fic feel dense yet skip on by (it certainly doesn’t waste incident). It’s more tone; this is a rather flat fic that, were it not for the well-constructed story, events and competent dialogue, it would be hard to get a bead on the reaction or modulation intended from most moments. It was enough that I was often more aware something was done well or funny then actually feeling it, and the only culprit I can find for why the fic didn’t wow me; you could take this exact story with only the tiniest of flow and incident changes, just overhaul the prose somewhat, and produce a classic (in quality, if not in fame) at any point in the fandom’s history.

I don’t know that the fic fully feels the whole of its parts, but it was a pleasurable read, dense and well-paced, and deftly balanced between wry amusement and pressing questions without either upsetting the other. Even the inclusion of bureaucracy felt a part of the whole. I found I admired it more than devoured it, but I did admire it very much. If half the fics from this early were still this pleasurable to read 12 years on, we’d never run out of oldies yet goodies to gush over. Despite just a Pretty Good rating, in terms of its historical value and showcase of the impressive-despite-rough qualities possible even this early, it would be a Really Good. 

Rating: Pretty Good


Rainbows and Sunsets by Sagebrush

Genre: Slice of Life
Scootaloo, Rainbow Dash, (CMCs)
8,069 Words
July 2011

In the aftermath of another failed attempt to get their cutie marks – at least this one had minimal damage – the topic of Scootaloo’s lack of flight comes up with her friends. Ever supportive (sure Sweetie Belle can barely levitate yet!), they suggest getting tutoring help on the matter from Ponyville’s best flyer, Rainbow Dash. It takes a bit of prodding – would Dash even remember her enough to care? – but eventually, Scootaloo’s game. As well she should be, given that learning to fly turns out to teach more than just the technique.

As the above teaser shows, this really is a S1 Dash-tutors-Scootaloo story. Rather than starting in with the tutoring, or with Scootaloo asking for it, it has some frivolous scene-setting of the Crusaders’ latest attempt to get marks (though it’s amusing and lively enough) before the topic comes up, and being that Scootaloo had barely interacted with Dash onscreen, just having “The Cutie Mark Chronicles” for this and her fangirling, the idea comes from the others and she is too timid at first, thinking Dash would never notice her. Naturally, it can feel a bit of an obstacle to get through in the wake of all the future stories that cut straight to the point (and the opening mark-hunting scenes are the kind of show-aping scene a new writer does out of still being in show-awestruck mode), but at the same time, it’s so firmly encroached in the canon information as it existed then, and in such an earnest most, that charm lets it off the hook there. Plus, there’s some honestly good comedy here (Rarity and Spike have small moments that feel exactly like the kind of humour the show would do in its S1 cartooning prime. Enough so that, as slack and “going through the motions” as it is, I wouldn’t have minded a story of that.

Partially that’s because the actual flight tutoring, especially after a length Act I to get to that point, is kind of just there. It’s not helped by a heavy amount of perspective switching throughout the whole story being most prominently distracting here, but even purely at the level of incident, it doesn’t come up with much beyond a few slack drills for Scootaloo to do before she rapidly improves (yes, it’s early enough in the fandom that her being potentially flightless isn’t a thing here). If the earlier section was dated in a charming way, this just felt dated, plus outclassed in writing structure, technique and flow quite handily. Meanwhile, an epilogue does provide something of a fitting, wistful and inspiring ending to the fic, but isn’t tied much at all to what the fic was about, at least enough to feel like the fic earned such a grand ending (it’s the sort you’d expect for a novella on this topic, put it that way). If you’ve read a single other “Dash-teaches-Scoots-flight” fic, it’s very hard to not find this overly simple and wanting.

Overall, while some of this fic was quite a charming time capsule (the plot-disassociated Act I, ironically), most of it was a serviceable yet rather unremarkable Dash-teaches-Scootaloo fic, possibly even at the time. The lack of a consistent thorough line or focus throughout only serves to make it too episodic to land either. Short of its particular structure making it more adept of a history lesson than most other fics from the time (something I did appreciate, make no mistake), there’s not much to actively recommend reading this today.

Rating: Passable


Spooky Summary of Scores:
Excellent: 0
Really Good: 1
Pretty Good: 1
Decent: 1
Passable: 2
Weak: 0
Bad: 0

Comments ( 12 )

An interesting idea. Pity I never considered it, although I have read ancient stories before.

Unrelated: I recently decided to read through my physical copy of GhostOfHeraclitus's Tales from the Civil Service. I had forgotten how delightful they are. I couldn't stop grinning. Alas, I've already reviewed them all.

Thus will I now recommend you read everything in your fellow specter's library, specifically those things related to the Civil Service 'verse. Which is to say, everything except Twilight Sparkle Makes a Cup of Tea, but only because it is the only one that isn't in said 'verse.

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But read Twilight Sparkle Makes a Cup of Tea also, because it's a very nice character piece.

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No difficulty convincing this phantom – I've already read and reviewed Twilight Sparkle Makes a Cup of Tea! In only the 2nd blog featured here too. It got an Excellent, the first one I ever gave, because of course it did.

At the time, I'd noticed how he only had three others stories, one an anthology, all considered stone-cold classics too. The main reason I hadn't jumped on looking at more was because of a comment Horse Wizard made on that blog, explaining that part of the reason GhostOfHeraclitus never wrote more stories was because he being afraid of producing something that was only received as "very good", something Horse Wizard took to mean a fear of people catching on that he wasn't all that talented. Which, well… expectations can do a lot damage to one, no denying that. But I did feel a certain sense of respect, and not wanting to devour it all too quickly and be left wanting.

Regardless, it probably is about high time I get another of his works on here, 70 instalments of Monday Musings on. Look forward to that!

An interesting idea. Pity I never considered it, although I have read ancient stories before.

Well, it's hardly original; as noted, I discovered midway through assembling this that Loganberry had done this theme in December 2014. Which… well, it's freaky to think that almost qualifies as early fandom now…!

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I discovered midway through assembling this that Loganberry had done this theme in December 2014

That was more than four hundred Ponyfic Roundups ago (no. 35), so maybe it's time I had another go at it! I'm not sure whether there are enough fics left from July 2011 I haven't read (and that aren't crossovers, incomplete, etc), but August might be an option. We'll see, I guess. Also, I sometimes feel I'm pretty much "old fandom" at this point, even though I only came into it a year and a half after it began! :rainbowwild:

I am not in the least surprised to see Somewhere Only We Know rate highly. It's that rare thing, a very early story that really would still be considered great today. I think the Black Beauty parallels help, but given how obvious one or two of them are, I do occasionally wonder whether they might be less effective on readers who haven't read BB. (And there are plenty of people around who still fondly imagine Black Beauty is some "cute horse story for kids" and don't realise what's actually in it or Anna Sewell's reasons for writing it, so...)

It'd be interesting to know what I'd make of Celestia's Teeth nowadays. I gave it (the equivalent of) four stars, but I've read a lot of ponyfic since 2014 and I wouldn't be especially surprised if it were more of a highish three these days. I haven't read much SPark stuff to be honest, but seeing that very first story reviewed is interesting. Hmm, a review theme of "first [still up] story from famed ponyfic authors" would be intriguing, though I'm not sure how said famed ponyfic authors might feel about it!

Patchwork Poltergeist is one of my favorite authors in the fandom, and I really liked that story. It was weird though: it had a delayed effect on me. I read it and thought it was good and interesting and thought provoking, but I had a similar reaction, that I thought I wasn't nearly as sad as the story wanted me to be. Then a couple days later, it hit me. I don't know why, but the almost desolate wistfulness of it came down on me later, and I still feel that way about it. It's the only story I've had that reaction to.

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We've already ben put through that wringer a couple of times, but in slightly different ways. Chris's blogs where he'd rate the opening sentence of a story once included a variation where they compared the first sentences of several authors' first and most recent stories.

I always have mixed feelings about that. Yes, I can write a lot better now than I could when I first started. But I also feel it's disingenuous to say, "Oh, that story was awful" and effectively tell readers that shouldn't bother with it, because no matter how bad it was, it has some merits. I also feel it's awkward to take that stance when there were readers who genuinely liked it. So I just kind of keep from airing an opinion on my oldest stories.

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Sounds a bit like the reaction I had to Grave of the Fireflies, that I was aware of the power of the sadness the turn, but it wasn’t until later that it really, really hit me.

As for this fic, it’s been sitting read and review-ready since… late last year? I honestly can’t remember if I had a similar delayed reaction to getting really hit by it, though I wouldn’t be surprised if I was. Or it could have just been the mood I was in at the time of reading it. No memories were triggered when I touched it up for clarity and better prose structure prior to posting this, anyway.

This made me curious, and I find I published my first story here (posted to Deviantart first) in June 2012, a hair too slow to be seen as any kind of founding member. But boyo, this takes me back: I remember EQD being my source of pony fics, thence to explore on glorious GDocs and DA profiles.

It's a testament to the fandom that 12 years down the line Fimfiction remains so popular. While we may moan of the decline from its heyday, other fandoms could only dream of generating enough content to populate a site strictly for fanfiction. There's just no other single group which can match Fimfic's *current* state, let alone those wild early days. It's really impressive.

The fics were weird, experimental, and usually poor efforts gilded in the author's own mind to be utter genius (certainly, I can't read my older works without at least a little cringe). But that all is fine. They were born of love and passion, and for some of us including myself, they turned into a hobby we became more skilled at, more intelligently considered. One learns to walk before one learns to run, and one must have the interest to do both.

An interesting topical coverage idea you had here! :twilightsmile:

However, a question. Perhaps I missed it in the writeup; however, https://www.fimfiction.net/story/65/somewhere-only-we-know looks like it was published on August 1, 2012 rather than 2011? :rainbowderp:

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The story was originally published on 12th July 2011. The chapter date is indeed 1st August 2012, though. Judging by this comment the author made in July 2012, it's a case of some little revisions to the chapter to fix errors meaning the chapter date was reset.

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What Logan said. For whatever reason, it was more common back then for authors too, rather than just pasting their edits into the chapter as it was, to delete it and add a new one. I don’t know if Fimfiction’s UI interface made direct editing of the chapter more difficult, or not possible at all (any input from veterans would be great!). But you’ll see a fair shake of old stories with the oldest chapter still having a fresher date than the Fimfiction-approved date. Also common, especially in 2012, is the early chapters of a multi-chapter work being dated later turns some mid-chapters, due to them being revised following the author’s advancing quality/changing focus as they progressed further in the story.

It’s probably a good thing this became unnecessary later, as it means the fact of a story having been edited is invisible to new readers.

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Judging by this comment the author made in July 2012

Amusingly, said comment also confirms this was another story written and published before Fimfiction. Which was probably a given, as it was published here on only the site’s 3rd day. But a primary source is always nice! :scootangel:

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