Ghost Mike's Ponyfic Review Monday Musings #112 · 7:00pm May 6th
Another weird one for the pile: with the weekend just gone being May 4th (or May the 4th be With You 
) 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 day! 
).
The film remains what it is to every viewer, be that abject failure or delightfully idiosyncratic science fantasy. Myself, I have shades of both, but leaning a fair bit more positively – and whatever one wants to say of it, I think it’s pretty indisputable that, once you get past the story and characters, everything else works, and is often exquisite. An inconsistent and wobbly for sure, but this many years on, the pros outweigh the cons. Also, it being filmed on film, and still using tons of practical effects, means it’s aged much better, visually, than the other prequels*.
* The tl;dr for those not fully tech-savvy on this matter is that Episodes II & III were filmed on early-generation digital cameras at a resolution equivalent to that of DVDs (if with a much higher bit rate, of course), and unlike film negative, they can thus only be upscaled so much.
Here’s the weird part: since I only got into Star Wars in 2006, this is the only Star Wars movie I’ve ever seen in a cinema (unless one counts the peculiar The Clones Wars pilot chucked into theatres in 2008; either way, no Star Wars movie has been made since, as we all know very well 
). And I’ve seen it twice now (the other being the 3D rerelease in February 2012 that was planned for the rest of the series but cancelled)! 
Strange world, eh?
Being honest, given how much Disney doesn’t do theatrical reissues except for very significant anniversaries, I had written off ever seeing any of the others this way ages ago, but after this? 
What with the ten animated films for D100, and theatres often still being anxious for extra content for smaller screens, what with the COVID effect still steering many newer films away from cinemas to the death toll of streaming, you never know. Stranger things have happened!
Out of science fantasy back to pure fantasy (no EqG fics this week, I’m afraid! 
), here’s some lovely horsewords for you all. By coincidence, three of them are after the series’ end, a period I normally avoid, though it’s more window dressing than the proper focus.
This Week’s Spectral Stories:
Gone With the Light by TheAncientPolitzanian
An Entire Encyclopedia on The Comprehensive History of Equestria, Featuring Autumn Blaze and Bulk Biceps by SparklingTwilight
Moonbug by Sledge115
Twilight Sparkle’s Day Off by Moosetasm
Stormy Affair by Jymbroni
Weekly Word Count: 34,242 Words
Gone With the Light by TheAncientPolitzanian
Genre: Sad (w/Death)
Twilight, Spike
2,791 Words
December 2021
The sun is setting over Equestria, though it is not the only thing dipping below the horizon today. Twilight Sparkle should be used to this – after all, being an alicorn, she’s seen too many come and go over the years. But now that her first friend is about to leave her, her once-little dragon assistant and little brother, it’s time for their final words.
Yes yes, it’s another take on Twilight losing a friend to time. Even ones of the friends being Spike long after everyone else has gone, quite the reverse to the pre- “Magical Mystery Cure” fics of Spike losing Twilight to old age, are quite far from novel, even before the show ended. That said, there is a reasonable bit of alchemy at work here, for while this story is not some must-read piece by any means, a combination of its tone, a careful delicate touch and actually preserving the essence of the characters without mutating them into too-fanon takes makes it shine. Obviously it couldn’t happen in the show, but the topic of death aside, it wouldn’t feel out of place.
This is not instantly the case: the first half is mostly just a plug-and-paste on the final farewell genre, especially during Twilight’s thought as she lowers the sun, and then on those who visited Spike earlier in the day as she approaches his giant, slumbering form. Once he wakes up and they talk, though, it hits its stride, first from the warm, comforting, dancing-around-the-topic quips Spike makes. Even when it later turns to Twilight on her own after this, and her reassuring Spike that he was the best assistant and friend throughout his long life, there’s a certain quiet acceptance and warmth that makes the sadness, while bittersweet, also hopeful and realistic even as its light. It certainly moved me more than most sadfics, perhaps from showing the maximum most writers miss, of things being happy and sad all in one, even if one seems to dominate more.
It’s a modest fic without much ambition beyond some quiet character work in a snapshot, but it excels at those goals with virtually none of the usual traps and with almost exactly the kind of authentic Twilight and Spike relationship depiction I adore (which, pulling from late show lore, is nothing short of a miracle). Even the generational bonus in-joke towards the end hits the right balance of not calling attention to itself, as long as one doesn’t meticulously read the comments. There’s a lot to appreciate here.
Rating: Pretty Good
An Entire Encyclopedia on The Comprehensive History of Equestria, Featuring Autumn Blaze and Bulk Biceps by SparklingTwilight
Genre: Comedy/Slice of Life
Autumn Blaze, Bulk Biceps
7,213 Words
May 2021Reread
To better relations between Equestria and its neighbours, Twilight has asked representatives of each nation to do presentations to their kinds on Equestria’s history. Something kirin thespian Autumn Blaze is only too delighted to indulge. However, knowing much of her village does not take well to her tendency for lengthy retellings, she enlists a pony of few words who’s something of an expert at being precise and to the point to assist with this. Bulk Biceps has mixed feelings about this.
This story was written almost as a dare for the 2021 Pairings contest, where the rulings said on length to try and not go over 10K by much, and listed writing "an entire encyclopaedia on the comprehensive history of Equestria, featuring Autumn Blaze and Bulk Biceps" as an oft-kilter madcap example of such a story. Well, SparklingTwilight took this as a challenge, and wrote just that. Even if it was turned into a stage play and didn’t come anywhere near 10K (he had wanted to make it 10,001 words for the style points, but couldn’t reach that length naturally), that’s admirable.
Apart from being a comedy pivoting on the contrast between Bulk’s nervousness and Autumn being her boisterous self, and the liberal use of disinterested-to-hecking kirin in the crowd, there are several other techniques at play here too. Shifting chronology that starts things off in media res before cutting back to flashes of how this came to be is one, along with cutting between parts of the show both to speed things along and for perspective (sometimes with a scene break without jumping further forward, like to switch between Autumn’s rising Nirik side at Bulk being downplayed and how this spurs him to take charge and calm her down with the techniques that do the same for him – it works well in practice). Mostly, this is seeking to subvert a “boring” idea by doing all manner of sideways things with it.
In practice, it possibly goes too far, starts to feel a bit desperate to please, and loses enough energy that the momentum sags throughout. This isn’t a story interested in character insight except in the kind of inferred moments that mostly serve to boost the comedy, so it comes back to how funny one finds the various ways this plays off these two. They make for a good and unusual pair, but the distant perspective that isn’t going for character interiority beyond the dialogue does place some limited returns on it.
A bit of a mixed effort then, but its shortcomings aren’t at all tied to the reason such a story was discouraged, it’s too inventive for that. With a tighter, shorter focus, and maybe a less elliptical, opaque perspective (there’s a tendency to overwrought prose, especially in the paragraphs with Autumn speaking), it could have really excelled, but even in this form that doesn’t quite carry all its ambition, I’m glad I reread it.
Rating: Decent
Luna’s love of flowers doesn’t stop at decorating the castle at night with lovely lavenders. She’s quite the bona-fide gardener when it comes down to it. When King Thorax is visiting for a diplomatic something-or-other, she meets his brother Pharynx, as well as his general distaste for potted plants and “unnecessary” flowers in general. Luna, of course, isn’t one to let this stand, even from one who is technically a prince, so she arranges a visit to the hive both to introduce them changelings to the wider joys of gardening, but also to show Pharynx the error of his ways. It won’t exactly be a crash course lesson.
That’s spelling out more than the story does, and probably doing it a disservice. Though at the same time, this isn’t one of those pieces that is smug enough to assume we don’t know pretty much exactly where it’s going early on either. Some might call that predictable, but if so, it’s not the distracting variety. Luna knows her goal and infers it to the reader, but doesn’t state it, and all the details and layers along the way – going to the hive not just for Pharynx, the game of one-up-ponyship they end up in to a friendly level, and especially the heavy-but-welcome number of episode timestamps across the several months this story is spread across, making the other characters and backdrops not feel like just a canvas for the intimate story – keep it fresh and the furthest thing from losing interest.
Really, though, as one would hope for any pairing of two characters who never interact in canon, the real reason for success here is those characters. Luna being a gardener is always quite a good stroke, fitting with the same nurturing instinct she applies to her dreamwalking. What struck me more was how well Sledge wrote Luna without any of her traits being overplayed. Many writers lean too heavily on either her snarky, fun side or her archaic speech, but both are kept in reign here (the latter had to be, being a Season Seven story), and there’s none of the moody brooding that she is often victim to either. Which is fitting, given Pharynx is the one really changing here, but it’s quite remarkable how soft and gentle this Luna is, all while still feeling recognisably her. Pharynx is mostly the kind of bringing out of his shell that you’d expect, but there are enough extra wrinkles, in how he takes to gardening, the specifics of his fears for the hive’s futures, and the unsaid closeness both parties feel develop towards each other (take out the epilogue, and this is barely a romance at all, yet that epilogue also feels very earned).
Very effective at employing poetic sentences from time to time and balancing when to show versus when to tell, this is a very hard fic to praise given so much of it lies in the subtleties of the beat-by-beat execution that impress and immerse rather modestly. Couple that with the wider details at the margins that make this story’s canvas not feel insular even if the story is (Sledge reportedly wanted it to feel like a complete story, not a one-scene slice of life snapshot where the rest of the world freezes), plus the many ways connections are drawn between the two featured characters (another goal met with resounding success: despite both being siblings of rulers and that being how they met, the story is about them, not their relation/being in the shadow of their siblings), and this is just a solid, cosy winner. Sweet but always authentic, I think a lot could be learned about writing Luna from here.
Rating: Really Good
Twilight Sparkle’s Day Off by Moosetasm
Genre: Comedy/Slice of Life
Twilight, Spike, Celestia
5,005 Words
December 2020Reread
Running a kingdom can be stressful, especially around the holidays. Even the best rulers need a break. Most ponies would just find someone to fill the void while they’re gone, but Twilight is not most ponies. She instead indulges in some special magic of her own invention such that no one will even notice she’s gone. It doesn’t go as expected, though far away with her former mentor having the spa treatment of a lifetime, she isn’t privy to that.
One has to accept a certain level of silliness and Plot Armor/Idiot Ball with this kind of story, chiefly in Twilight not even designing to tell Spike what she’s planned. And this is Twilight in a rip-off Flash model of Celestia, or at least close to it, so that kind of recklessness on her part is hard to swallow. Especially when she is otherwise even bit the calm, serene, boring Celestia expy she was in the epilogue episode, minus the plot hook of learning to take time for herself and the personal moments she and Celestia have while alone.
In essence, while the comedic contrast between the spa scenes and the chaos in the castle once the simulacrum Twilight fashioned goes wrong is the point of the fic here, it still doesn’t feel like they’re even of the same fic at all. Rather than boosting each other, they just tend to dilute each other, not helped by a super stock “so, what did I miss” closing note what it is all said and done.
The rhythm of the dialogue transitions between the two types of scenes is diverting enough, even if the spa scenes don’t really have a narrative arc or point to them beyond contrasting the ascending chaos at the castle – a more structurally sound story would make both threads work on their own even before they’re combined, so it doesn’t feel like there’s wheel spinning. All in all, it’s amusing, though muddled as to how to maximise its concept for best results.
Rating: Passable
Stormy Affair by Jymbroni
Genre: Romance/Adventure (Alternate Universe)
Zipp, Sunny, Pipp, Queen Haven
9,451 Words
March 2024
Zephyrina Storm is a once-in-a-lifetime captain of the Queen’s elite guard, with quite the esteemed record for somepony so young. But even as the duties of a guard remain the same, the political climate around them changes. Such it is when the earth pony king visits Zephyr Heights in an attempt at negotiations to broker peace in the aftermath of a terrible war for all the different pony tribes. Oh, and Zipp finds herself assigned as the personal bodyguard for his daughter, an earth pony princess. This will require strength of a different sort to not ruin peace before it’s even attained…
This is openly acknowledged as a tribute/conceptual spin-off of Monochromatic’s Bodyguard!AU Series, a series of loosely connected one-shots in a drastic AU where Rarity is a Princess and Twilight, just a unicorn, is her bodyguard. Of course, coming from Mono, the author who basically made RariTwi a thing, the focus is very much on Rarity’s silly and cute playfulness with her attraction to Twilight that the latter resists in the name of duty (until later entries have them properly together), and actual focused worldbuilding beyond little teases here and there is very much not a priority. It doesn’t set up context either for how such a situation came to be, it just is.
Here, the priority is almost flipped. It makes sense: given G5 starts with the pony tribes separated, it’s not nearly a leap into “totally different verse just to fuel the story” as the Bodyguard!AU is. Sure, Sunny’s a princess, Zipp and Pipp are not, and it has the mention and possibility of violence not in what Hasbro signed off on, but it falls in that territory of not being such a massive leap from canon, so it is obliged to give a lot more direct focus to the practicalities of the situation and verse.
Happily, the fic is really good at letting such details come out as window-dressing through character interactions, from a training scene that starts it off, to some light ribbing from Pipp, to Sunny’s interactions with the stoic, untrusting Zipp. All without ever turning into an exposition dump: it falls into the balance of the reader really wanting to know more, but not feeling unsatisfied with what’s here. Any story purely about the character interactions that nonetheless ends up being really satisfying on the worldbuilding front is always worthy of notice.
Said character work is certainly interesting. Given Sunny doesn’t appear until the story’s second half, she has less time to make an impression, but she retains her naivety from canon while being more timid in some ways, less so in others, in ways that track for being a princess during a time like this not trained for it. Zipp obviously isn’t rebellious and works hard to squash down her inquisitive side even as she knows how important this is and how most pegasi and earth ponies have massive distrust that won’t fade yet. It certainly leads to some poignant scenes between the two, with Zipp losing her cool at Sunny’s naivety then finding a way to make it up through showing rather than telling. Such ways are unbecoming for a pegasus, after all. Heck, even casting Pipp in her role as lieutenant, and having her playfulness while removing all the social media gunge, actually makes her both likeable (beyond her sisterly relation) and entertaining, not something to be sniffed at either.
If anything, this fic is good enough at taking its time and making the lived-in scenes feel natural that, though it is a full story, it can’t help but feel incomplete at the end. Not that I fault Jymbroni for trying an AU out and only finding out when it’s done that he’s hooked enough to write more (I wrote this review a few days before he published a sequel), but I wouldn’t fault many for thinking this feels like the first chapter or two of a longer work. Which I’m not bothered by, except the romance tag is basically a lie, with only the barest traces of moments that could be interpreted that way if one squints right at the end. Certainly not enough for the tag. Not that I personally mind beyond the false advertising, but some folks might.
Either way, it’s a really satisfying fic on most fronts, and whether on its own or with future fics (though I would caution against Jymvroni from continuing it as one-shots, as opposed to an anthology of such), it excels no matter one’s take on G5. Guess it just took a radical AU as opposed to a light one to produce satisfying worldbuilding and atmosphere! 
Rating: Pretty Good
Spooky Summary of Scores:
Excellent: 0
Really Good: 1
Pretty Good: 2
Decent: 1
Passable: 1
Weak: 0
Bad: 0
I saw the entire prequel trilogy in theaters, but only because there was this sense that I should, you know what I mean? I was fifteen and everyone was talking about it, I kind of felt like the thing to do. But ultimately I never became much of a Star Wars fan. I was never even that partial to the original series. Indeed, the only Star Wars movie I greatly enjoyed was Rogue One, i.e. the one that everyone else seemed to dislike because it supposedly broke a lot of Star Wars movie formulae or something (at least that's what I recall people saying way back when).
...I was five when Phantom Menace hit the theatres? Jegus. And yet I distinctly remember seeing it, this bloated, unfocused mass of film that only vaguely felt like the three Star Wars movies my folks had marathon'd the night before. It needed a firmer hand at the editor's desk... maybe that's why I grew to like editing and/or salvaging.
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I can absolutely see the editing issue as regards the base writing and filming. But I felt, and after today still do, that the editing as regards taking the footage and choosingwhat order to cross-cut scenes, when to start and end them, all that (you know… what film editing actually is, and not just "cut this scene"), is largely sublime. Often helped immeasurably by the music and sound effects driving the focus (it's very fitting legacy sound editor Ben Burtt became the full film editor on the prequels) – even though the visual transfer I saw was kind of bad, alternating between crisp and marred footage something from shot to shot, the sound mix is a godsend as it ever was.
Don't get me wrong, I agree there's a lot of bloated and unfocused material and execution here, and felt it even as I was watching it, but 95% of the time that is not on the editing.
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What I've heard about it tells me I'd probably like it, as the people who like it happen to despise the sequels-that-do-not-exist for much of the same reasons as myself. And yet at this point I'm so burned out on bad Star Wars under Disney's iron hand that, if it ain't animated (that stuff is made my a different team and not subject to nearly as much of the corporate politics as the live-action stuff), I ain't watching it. Better things to do with my time and mental health.
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Whoa whoa whoa. But ... Mando? Andor?
I mean, I'll admit I enjoyed Ashoka, in part because I FINALLY got to see Thrawn on the big screen.
But The Mandalorian and Andor are personally the best use of live-action Star Wars since the original trilogy.
There were definitely more memorable contributions from the prequel trilogy, and that's excluding the much-derided stuff. From the first movie alone:
Yoda:
fourminutebooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/yoda-quotes-11.jpg
Whoa! A well-written Luna? I'm there!
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Is that just a way of referring to him being in live-action after so many novels, video games, etc.? Because unless that miniseries had a limited run theatre screening somewhere at a Star Wars event or something, pretty sure it was just a Disney+ thing.
I'll concede I have heard very good things about Andor, and from people who are rightfully hard on Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan, so I'm primed to trust them. And I did enjoy Mandolarian and could really tell they put a lot of effort and quality into it.
But, it's like… okay, sometimes you reach a point with something where you're just burnt out from how many times its let you down, and you just have to sever ties with it, you know? Even if you know it'll still do good stuff in parts going forward, and people you trust have said so, you know if you watch it too much you'll get suckered back in? And you're kinda better off not being obsessive about it the way you once were anyway.
It's what therapists and solicitors call "severing all contact with your divorcee".
And yes, I realise that it would only take a few adjustments to retool this to how those who grew up with the original trilogy reacted with the prequels. That irony is not lost on me.
But given even prequel haters largely agree they're still much better than the sequels, hopefully you can see my reasoning.
I can watch the animated Star Wars stuff because it's mentally "separate" from the live-action stuff, and my main thing of being an "animation guy" gives me another mental path to watch it without running the risk of getting suckered back in. But there's no such security blanket for anything live-action there for me, even when they are making properly good material (also, it's telling how visible it is that everyone making all those shows despise the sequel trilogy as much as we do).
Oh, neat. A double-feature with my editor and prereader!
I'm glad you enjoyed both "Gone With the Light" and "Stormy Affairs." AP and Jym have really been critical in helping my stories, so I was very happy to return the favor and edit their words. I'll let them talk about any behind the scenes stuff if they want to, it's their stories to tell after all, but this is so exciting to see!
Also... 25 years? So I was 10 years old when that movie came out. No wonder I liked Jar Jar.
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I can freely admit, part of my love for not just the prequels, but Menace in particular, comes from how it has the best and, critically, most idiosyncratic worldbuilding in the franchise.
Robot foot soldiers that actually look like they were mass-produced for cheap cost and aren't just "men in suits", plus rolling droids with shields that can be problematic to even Jedi? A beautiful mountainous/Venice-esque city that is also on a planet with bulbous city inhabited by frog men, and water tunnels through the planet core (plus the energy chambers of the final duel)? The familiar desert planet Tatooine, but a totally different place that well portrays what life is like on this fringe isolated from the large galactic government? Chariot races of old reimagined as 900 mph hovercraft racing around the desert? A city planet realised in a way technology never could before? A greater variety of alien species than ever before (I do not believe they were any kind of intentional ethnic stereotype, but of course the ethnicities Watto, the neomoidians and the gungans are frequently accused of being aren't ones I grew up around)?
And all wrapped up in a cinematic package that manages to not make them feel too "indulgent" in a way a lot of sci-fi can and thus off-putting? Sign me up!
Why would you feel the need to apologise? even prequel haters have largely dug the podrace sequence. Or is that the point, that no apologies are necessary?
It was always something I was aware of, but after watching it again today, Liam Neeson is actually doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Of course it's nothing on the level of the film with which he built his name and profile, where the script and actor-direction was on point (yes, I will not deny the about George Lucas), but thanks to him, Qui-Gon is able to vibe with Watto great in the scenes they share (which is quite a few), have genuine warmth with Anakin, and really portray one sticking to the true mantra of the force and what's right over the other Jedi bogged down in bureaucracy. Really making for an interesting tragic hero, both for the die-hards who've absorbed everything from the franchise but also just within this film.
Meaning that he was killed off when so much more could have been done with him across the prequels? I can see that for sure. Or specifically Obi-Wan's finishing move?
McDiarmid alone just always seems to know how to play either character in the whole trilogy 100% of the time (Neeson above still has a fair share of scenes where he's lost at scene), and playing these two halves to the point it's not even clear they are the same actor is a great part of it.
Obviously it doesn't stand up on balance to the three-way third act of Return of the Jedi, where even though the Luke/Vader/Emperor conflict is the best, all three threads are great. Here the lightsaber duel does rather overshadow the rest, no question. I think that's more for how great it is than the other ones being bad (while I certainly don't gain any entertainment from Jar Jar and his "comedy" invariably lessens any moment it's in, I don't think it's film-killing). Still, even as a kid rewatching the DVD for this one, I was also hyped to get to the 1:40 mark (PAL runtime) for it, and would often just watch it on repeat. So you're totally right.
More generally to everyone: you know, I heavily considered not mentioning Star Wars at all today, in risk of today's comments totally ignoring the fics. Or at least just mentioning the film without saying a word on it, just that it's the only live-action one (
) I saw in a cinema. I settled on a quick mention of my thoughts, figuring most folks would say a bit on it, then focus on the fics (if they have anything to say there).
Well then. Evidently I've forgotten how intense debates with two-word sci-fi properties that start with the word Star can get.
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And for what it's worth, you are indirectly responsible for me reading both (you'll note the lack of a reread tag), my friend. AP's story for him chiming in with his views on Spike when you felt guilty about how you expressed your to me that time, and he mentioned this story to show how it worked the other way. Jym's, while I had seen in the featured box and was curious, your comments were enough for me to give it a look. So you can smile for that too!
Hey, I've read Moonbug! i found it sweet and pretty good.
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I did like Rogue One, but the main sticking point for me is that it becomes obvious early on that it'll be and "everyone dies" movie.
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Then I'm happy to have passed your kind words forward to them. They both deserve more attention than they get for their hard work and pulling through my edits.
Excellent slate this week.
I can't speak highly enough about Moonbug - I'm both a huge fan of Sledge's and Moonbug itself is just a delightful, wonderful fic.
I also have to give a big thumbs up to Stormy Affair. Jymbroni's an excellent new writer and I'm loving the fresh twist on the Bodyguard AU that Mono established way back when.
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I've read four of Sledge's fics now and not one of them has been less than stellar (not counting The Dreamwalker's Lament on my Re-Evaluate bookshelf, about which I remember precisely nothing). I'm too casual to "get" much of this Spectrumverse, but as long as Sledge's one-shots remain approachable as they are now, that don't matter one iota.
Possibly not as direct alignment between you and me on this one, given I found the best elements of the fic were those pointedly doing what the Bodyguard AU didn't. But I suppose that could fall under the umbrella of being a fresh twist!
I will say, as soon as he published the sequel, I added it to my lists, and I've gone back and added his New Blood entry from last year too. This fic was this close to a Really Good, as was probably apparent from the review. However much of his talent was home-grown or came from collaboration/learning with Rego, for a new writer to pen one of the best new G5 fics around is worthy of attention.
In which Sledge115 gets a very positive write-up. Again. As it happens I have a review of one of her other fics (Velvet Quill & Sunny Skies) going up tomorrow, and suffice it to say that nobody is going to encounter an unexpected one-star with that either! Such a consistently good writer. I like the sound of Gone With the Light, too -- quiet character pieces often appeal quite a lot to me.
Can't comment on the Star Wars stuff as I've only ever seen the original trilogy -- which, I discovered at the last Worcester ponymeet, still doesn't leave me in last position by "SW films seen" count!
Oh, my, I certainly hadn't expected this
Huzzah! I've always been a proponent that Luna is more than just a moody loner, that she's kind and gentle like her sister, just different in her approach compared to her sister. And, naturally, the Luna we see in Season Seven is not her Season Two self. I'm not keen on keeping characters frozen in their Season One-Three characterisation.
I like to write like water flows
The reports are true, I did want this to come off as a piece of a bigger whole, that even as Luna and Pharynx develop, so too the rest of the world around them, because hey, is that not what slice of life is?
I'm glad it worked
It's true there are sibling parallels that could be drawn between Luna and Pharynx, both brooding to their siblings' sunny, yet there lies more to that, and I felt like leaning on the sibling parallel would have been way too much of a low-hanging fruit.
I am touched, and honoured. I do try, with the pony I'm happy to call my favourite ever character from Friendship is Magic
Happy to see you've enjoyed it!
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I'm sure it was clear from the review, but I did read your story commentary. Such a beat-by-beat thing can be a bit draining and mostly boils down to explaining the technique, but there were valuable bits in there I expanded upon here. After I read a fic, I always look at the author's supplementary material long enough to tell if they'll be useful.
Now, I do prefer that era, not just for being when the show was at its best but because one can typically do more with characters earlier in their personal "story". But I am no less partial to them being taken in different directions later on if it's done right. I was comparing Luna not to her earlier self, but to how both the show and most fanfics write her at this point in the timeline. Which if she has evolved, it's typically to a bland mush. Or would that be devolving?
More than enjoyed it, I think I liked it even more this time than the first time I read it some years back. You dazzle one again, my friend – you may not write many fics, but when you do, they are absolutely worth us all sitting up and paying attention.
Long as there's no continuity lockout, of course.
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Oh no yeah I get you, I get you. Luna is my favourite pony precisely because there's so much to her in the little time we see her, hehe.
I may make George R.R. Martin look like Stephen King, but I try! Thank you, good sir - and of course, I try my very best to ensure each and every single one of my story work on their own
Idk the Bodyguard series, but Stormy Affair seems worth a spot on the ol RiL list, at the very least. Good AU takes on G5 are always welcome, especially since AU seems often the best bet to tell any serious story with it.
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Honestly I enjoyed to basically the same level as your recent Opaline fic, if for a lot of different reasons, of course. Knowing you, bud, I think you and this fic will get on like a house on fire.
And despite what the author says, the series has no connection in actual fic content to Monochromatic’s Bodyguard series. He’s just a huge fan and is broadcasting his inspiration from the rooftops. Which, though I wouldn’t do that, I won’t fault him for either.
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Is that
good?
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I think it’s a weird phrase and should mean things aren’t getting on well at all myself, yeah, but that is apparently the meaning of it! The English language, eh?