State of the Lemur - 07/17/2015 · 3:44am Jul 18th, 2015
Aw hell yeah
Have I ever mentioned that I'm a spoiled asshole of the western first world? It's been barely a week since I hopped back to WDW, and I wanna go again. F'naaaaa.
Seriously, though, I'm still feeling the wyrd high from my return visit several days later. If I had two days off in a row this week, I would definitely fart my way back over there.
Instead, I'll have to keep myself happy with horsewords. Since this little travesty, I've been working off-and-on through another fic. It's a meandering mess at about 11k words so far... definitely far from my greatest work. But, in a wyrd way, it hits a silly, personal note for me... so I might still upload it under the caveat that it's a "slice of life" exercise. Aka tons of horse heads talking and not much else going on. Meh. We'll see.
Other than that, I have two other mini-fic ideas that I'm contemplating. So, long story short, I'm not exactly feeling "dry" at the moment. It's kinda energizing. Gotta tap into the mania when it gushes, dreit?
Speaking of manic mistakes, time for another round of "Clueless Reader." This one is just a hop-skip-and-a-jump from last week's romp. So, in keeping things thematic:
By Titanium Dragon
Comedy
4,825 words
None of Twilight's friends would be silly enough to believe a newspaper article that claims she was killing herself every time she teleported, right?
Why I added it: Titanium Dragon is a good reviewer who deserves being emulated. Also this fucking thing.
Review
I dig meta. I really do... at least in theory.
Before I started doing this lemur-reads thingy in my blarghs, my only legit exposure to other fanfics was... through scanning their friggin' descriptions in the Feature Bar. That's how I discovered that my respected colleague and Noble J00rist Zaponator had published a well-received melancholic story on Twilight, death, and teleportation. Lo and behold, within a week or so, this animal gazelles its way over the fence and takes up the spotlight for an eon.
Now, I subscribed to Titanium Dragon quite a while ago, because I found out that he did really, really in-depth reviews. Not only that, but he did in-depth reviews with balls... as in he was unafraid to tear fics a new one, objectively speaking, that is. I sorta put him in the same department as Chris and Candle-Stick-Head, in that so much as receiving attention from said lemurs is good enough reason to feel tickled pink, cuz they analyze everything with such an attentive brain bone.
Lately, Titanium Dragon has been spitting out fanfics like a Catholic woman decorating a bathtub with fetuses. What's more, most of them have been hitting the feature box. It's almost like he's experiencing a sort of mini-renaissance of sorts. So I went into this with open expectations and even open-er eyeballs.
But I also went into this story with... a presumptuous mood. I swear, I was about two pages through the horsewords when something about the narrative tone really threw me for a loop. So, out of stupid curiosity, I glanced back at the header and was all: "What the buck? This has a comedy tag?!" Sure enough, this is a comedic sequel to Zaponator's super-grim existential analysis of Twilight Sparkle and her Jeff Goldbloom farts.
Or... is it? I mean, nowhere in the actual body of the fic does it go out and say that it's a sequel to "Blink." And yet... it's the same dayum concept written in the shadow of the other fic's feature bar success. I tried scouring Titanium Dragon's blarghs, and I found a tiny entry that suggests the fic was the spawn of a literary write-off. So... uh... perhaps both his and Zaponator's stories are separate interpretations of the same prompt? F'naaaa. I don't know. And I'm not sure just how crucial it is for me to know. I mean, I went into this fic thinking that the two installments were inherently related, and if that is the case--then I find the tone shift to be insanely jarring, and I would have lurved a bit more of a contextual inclination on behalf of the author(s) to indicate such.
But, as I am finding none, I'm going to assume for the time being that "Dying to Get There" is its own entity. In such a case, it's... okay. I mean, I think it's rather obvious that as much quality came out of it as effort went into it. That's not to say that Titanium Dragon is "sloppy;" far from it. This is undoubtedly the best-structured fic that I've read for these blarghs as of yet (at least until I tackle CiG, f'naaaa). But I get the distinct feeling that he sorta... lowered himself to Skirtsian (lulz) standards to write this story. Like, his heart is in it, but perhaps not his intellect. That doesn't make the story unenjoyable. I just found it... kind of bland and flat in places... especially the humor. Now, I write humor a lot... and the jury's still out on just how well I construct syntactical pie-throwing (spoiler: I suck). It's just that, to me, I felt that a lot of the gags worthy of the COMEDY tag were there for the sake of saturation bombing. That is to say, I know what it means to have a huge quantity of silly ideas and sorta just... throw them at the grocery store's tampon aisle and see which ones stick. A lot of the gags in this fic didn't quite do it for me.
I digged that Titanium Dragon went for a very MLP: FiM plot structure, wherein we run the gambit of all Mane Six and their different, varied reactions to Twilight's magical "problem." And, perhaps, my favorite thing from the story was Rainbow Dash suddenly having an existential crisis where she has to comprehend her finite, mortal existence--courtesy of an inexplicably atheist (and preachy{?}) Twilight Snarkle. Hell, that in and of itself could be a fanfic. I should know. I've written about 2/3 of all existing "Rainbow Dash and existentialism" stories to be found on Fimfiction.net. Meh.
And once the various vignettes had transpired, the fic... sorta just ended. Well, at least to me it seemed bleak and... without substance. I know, I know--a lot of it was me looking for some sort of cathartic conclusion, as if the fic was acting as the extended denouement to Zaponator's "Blink." But not only did it not have that, but it didn't really have any major resolution whatsoever, which is why--I think--the fic would be far more justified with the "Slice of Life" and "Random" tags. Seriously, though, this story had "Talking Ponies Syndrome" written all over it. I should know, cuz I defecate that stuff in my sleep, for better or for worse.
But Titanium's story is still for the better. Technically speaking, I felt a kindred spirit in the diction. Titanium seems to have a fetish for italicizing and emboldening words, much like the lemur's truly. And I found the dialogue to be playful, sincere, and full of character. I'd definitely be interested in checking out his other stuff... perhaps with a clearer head on my shoulders. And though I may have giggled once or twice, I felt the use of the Comedy tag was... a bit watered down. Too bad Knighty doesn't allow us to employ a "Sassy" tag.
Recommendation: If you like cute colorful ponies having cute colorful conversations about the fucking grim reality of Twilight incidentally murdering herself and others every time she casts a teleportation spell, have at it. Nietzsche knows 3/4 of Fimfic did back in the first week of July.
Thus, I gladly give this story three "worth readings" 
out of five. Go check out the lemur's stuff and review him whole-heartedly. But don't worry about hurting his pride. He's... well, y'know.
Good to know that Rainbow Dash dreams in Austraeoh
I think I can sum up the last episode we're gonna see for a while with the one thought that kept circling through my head while watching it: "Shiet... this is making me miss the TT days."
It's nice that a cartoon show can... give us cartoon hijinks every once in a while. This was probably the most stupidly fun installment since The Power Ponies. I mean, for realsies, it has "THIS IS A HOLODECK EPISODE" written all over it. I'm more than willing to accept this as a conclusion to the Luna-Dream-Arc introduced in S3. As for the character of Luna, it did some much needed resolution to her character, and it made for a poignant, emotional moment. But, for what it's worth, that's barely what I think about in regards to this episode, probably because every other minute of it is chock-full of weapons grade kaizo dripping out of every orifice.
Finally... I can now have the courage to come out of my "princess fetish" closet... oh wait...
Looks like Episode 100 isn't the only spot where the show jumps the shark. And, y'know what? I think I'm fine with that. There's no going back, really. It's all for broke now. Might as well have fun with it.
Okay, for real now... can we get someone to commission these two holding hooves and smiling at each other as they go on vacation to the Spirit World?
Hiatuses suck. That's for certain. But this season so far has made it rather evident that they're wanting to make the fans happy... like... Season 4 of Enterprise levels of panda-tossing. And there's still another season, another EqG, and a movie waiting in the wings.
It's always a good time to be a Brony.
Well...
At least until China invades.
Hide your cats and WoW accounts!
Nietzsche forgive me,
-SS&E
The episode title, Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep, is a reference to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which was the basis for the film, Blade Runner.
1/2 of which is pure Appledashery. Although I still prefer OOC for the sheer level of meta involved.
SS&E reviewed one of my stories! *squee*
It wasn't intended as a sequel to Blink; it is more of a send-up of the entire concept of destructive teleportation (that is to say, teleportation destroying the original and then creating a copy of it).
I think the person who is really to blame for it is Trick Question, who wrote a story a while ago called Faster than Starlight, in which Twilight realized that Starlight Glimmer didn't teleport in order to get away in the season 5 opener. Twilight goes to Celestia and finds out that the reason is that teleportation creates a copy of the person who teleported and then destroys the original immediately afterwards. And it turns out Celestia is crazy, and uses the fact that she's not really the same Celestia to assuage her guilt over putting others in danger and banishing her sister to the Moon, ect. It was a fairly dark story.
I wrote a review of Faster than Starlight, and then Trick Question pulled it down to do some revision on the story (which, alas, is probably not going to go up again according to Trick). The idea of writing something about the subject matter from a different point of view started poking at me then, but it didn't really congeal.
Then Blink came out, and about a week later, right before the writeoff, I got an idea for a story that was a send-up/deconstruction of the entire concept. Both Blink and Faster than Starlight involved Twilight discovering the terrible secret of teleportation and keeping it a secret, so I decided to invert it so that everyone else thought that teleportation involved creating duplicates and destroying the original, and only Twilight knew that it didn't, and instead of Twilight keeping it a secret, she instead had to explain how it worked to everyone else. The story pretty much wrote itself from there in my head.
That probably explains the structure, really, and possibly my tendency to throw in a bunch of jokes. Though I will note that they were carefully planted jokes; I deliberately stuck in a central joke in each scene in the story outline, and a few other jokes were sprinkled in as well.
Sorry the humor (or should that be "humor"?) didn't end up working for you so much.
Thank you for taking the time to read my story! Glad to see it got 3/5 worth readings :V
As an aside: Rainbow Dash's existential crisis was quite divisive. People spent 200+ comments arguing over whether or not souls existed in the comments because of that joke, and a few folks noted that it felt outright cruel to them, but several folks called it out as one of the best jokes. I'm not sure what it means that you, Present Perfect, and Bad Horse all called it out as specifically funny, but I'm sure it means something.
EDIT: Oh, yes. And I definitely seem to like Talking Ponies Syndrome. Which is why I occasionally write stories with hardly any dialogue in them at all in order to cleanse my palette. Because clearly, if you write some stories that are nothing but dialogue, and others which have none whatsoever, that all balances out, right? That's totally how writing works.
F'naaaa.
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>MRW another hiatus
pinkie.mylittlefacewhen.com/media/f/img/mlfw11148-1425576531569.gif
Meh, at least the mid-season finale episode was
goodfucking amazing.Some of your image links are broken.
F'naaaa?
Get out of here, ArraySeven. I came for skirts.
I had no clue that this story had anything to do with "Blink." All I know about "Blink" is that I threw it onto my pile of +1,300 titles to read. The idea of non-destructive 'teleporting' vs destructive 'copying' is something brought up by science and science fiction people before. I've even seen it brought up or referenced in pony fics. So the story can can be taken on its own.
I actually felt that "Slice of Life" managed to be a stronger episode, despite it having even thicker panda throwing. We got introduced to new characters (or unfamiliar takes on them, at least), and in the context of being on the edge of our regular heroes' antics. In these dreams, we just see the single deepest physical desires of people. Those are fun to look at for the zaniness, but unless they reveal some sort of guilt or fear, it doesn't actually tell us much about the character. Since it's all in a dreamscape, all these changes won't amount to anything. Because the projections themselves didn't change, we can tell that none of those people changed either. The only one whose psyche transformed was Luna, with the growth and absorption (I thought that was a fantastic detail) of the Tantabus. Luna is meant to hold this episode up in terms of story.
I would argue that Luna's actually regressed since "Luna Eclipsed." Back then in Season 2, she leaves her castle in hopes of getting to know people and vice-versa, and join in revelry with her citizens. She had a range of jubilation and morose, sincerity and sass. But here, it's always some degree of remorse or regret, until the resolution and closing shot. I still liked the episode, but I was wondering where this negative emotion was suddenly coming from. Admittedly, maybe this is suppose to be in line with the tendencies of a self-mutilator (as was hinted at with some impressive visuals). But I don't get that at all from here, since when Luna reveals how she's STILL hauling these feelings around, there's no shock on the part of the rest of the cast. In fact, this and "Luna Eclipsed" would line up better for her character if their air dates were switched around.
Although if we are suppose to take the huge passage of the timeline into account, and that Luna's been at this for awhile, we could conclude that the Tantabus really wasn't causing a problem until now. Although if someone doesn't pick up on that, it's the episode's problem. As I said, there's little indication of the passage of time and Luna's previous appearances.
Some people have complaints about Luna's bad habit having huge consequences for the rest of Equestria. They're not wrong about Luna's destructive tendency impacting everyone. I just don't think this incompetence would stand out TOO significantly compared to all the holes we can pick out in Celestia's world-saving plans, Twilight starting a riot for a social experiment, and nopony putting a nice big wall around the Everfree Forest. Luna's actions don't stand up to scrutiny, sure. But with all that in mind, I think it's something either we're looking at too seriously in a fantastical cartoon meant to be child accessible, or something the Ponyvillians are just use to (as one of the themes in "Slice of Life" suggested).