Surf-on-the-Shore-Brings-Sand-to-the-Depths is a sea-pony. This, in itself, would not be strange, if any other sea-ponies had been seen in Equestria for the past 500 years.
Why, then, has he washed ashore now, covered in what look like hundreds of shark bites?
Written for the February Writing Contest of the World-Building Alliance - although, frankly, I'm not sure I've done enough world-building to even qualify. It started out as a more comedic endeavor, referencing the Gen. 1 song "Call Upon the Seaponies" from "Rescue at Midnight Castle" at every available opportunity, but it evolved into a romance after I listened to this song about ten-dozen times.
It is what it is. Inspiration struck, and I hammered it out. C'est la vie.
Chapters (1)
This is a great story, please write something like a sequel! A side-story? ANYTHING.
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I will take your request into consideration.
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THANK YOU.
This is really well written, too! I didn't see many mistakes at all, but then again I'm not the best quick proof-reader.
Wow, you really excel at world-building. Every time I read one of your stories I feel like there's an entire mythology that goes along with it, as if the story is just the tip of an iceberg. With your colorful characters to bring it to life, Tall Tale felt every bit as real as Ponyville. Great job.
That was a pretty cool story you had there. But there was one
massiveproblem I had with it.SUDDENLY, ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP AND KISSING AND STUFF!
Seriously, man. That came outta nowhere.
See that line? If that had been the beginning and end of it, it woulda been cool. No relationship was forced on the reader; it was merely a mention of things that happened later. That's cool. What's not cool is suddenly having a forced Romance in the middle of a cool story.
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Hm... Thank you. I'll keep that in mind.
I blame the suddenness of it on the 5,000 word limit, though.
This was a rather good read; short, but it built an immense world around itself. Well done.
Short and sweet. I approve.
What intrigues me, now, is the fact that while most sea-pony names are full sentences, at least some are just noun phrases, similar to a lot of pony names. At first I thought this might indicate gender- Suos and his father have full sentence names while his mother has a noun phrase- but then the introduction of The-Depths-Are-Immune-to-the-Sun as the Queen becomes an obvious counterexample. Did you have a rule in mind for which circumstances merited which type of name, or was it more or less random, like how most ponies in canon have simple noun phrase names but some have less intuitive ones like Rainbow Dash or Pinkie Pie?
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I hadn't even thought about that. No, name type had nothing to do with gender - they were just based off of their talents and personality, much like the names of regular ponies. Scallops-with-Anchovy-Sauce was a chef. No-Wave-Breaks-Against-Water was a smith whose job it was to create weapons and armor that would protect the water (their kingdom) against waves (attackers). Surf-on-the-Shore-Brings-Sand-to-the-Depths was destined to reconnect the surface world and his own.
Thank you for the compliment - I'm glad you could read so much into it.
Hi there. I hope you don't mind, but I liked this fic so much I have put together an audio version on YouTube.
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Hello yourself!
At first, I was going to reply with a generic "Thank you, of course I don't mind, what a wonderful thing!" But then I thought "Hm... perhaps I should actually listen to the thing first."
I'm not even a third of the way through, and I'm already squeeing my head into oblivion.
Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, and a million times again. I cannot properly express in words how much something like this means to me - that my story not only made enough of an impression for a like or a favorite, but enough of one that you took the time to do a full-on, high-quality audio rendition of it. I'm something of an amateur in the field of narration and podfics myself, but I can barely imagine how much time and effort goes into something like this.
/end gushing
But in all seriousness: for an author like me, who can barely find the motivation for short, contest-entry stories like this one on the best of days, something like what you've done is a major boost in my belief in my own ability. At risk of sounding like a broken record, thank you.
this was the first fic involving nothing but ocs that i really enjoyed. good work.
i listened to scribbler's reading of it and, YES! wonderful story, brilliant reading,
This story put me in a comma coma.
That was simply lovely. The ending was unexpected to be told from a historical standpoint, but effective in wrapping something much larger into something much more manageable for this story. I may or may not have teared up several times (but I'm a total sucker for well-done romance, so take that as you may).
You did a fantastic job at creating an epic world with all kinds of potential in just over 5,000 words. Triplicate's dialogue, both internal and external, was excellent and wonderfully snarky. She felt a great deal more like a Twilight who had gone into bookkeeping and stayed there, while still being original.
I thought the romance was rather sweet. It's subtle, which is something I appreciate far more than the sudden overt "I'm completely in love with you, please marry me" trope far too many stories fall prey to. Although, I did have the benefit of listening to Scribbler's radio play version of it, so that helped a lot.
There's only one problem. The sheer lack of attention this story has received. It deserves far more than it's gotten.
Bravo!
A sweet and deeply engaging take on seaponies and why we haven't seen any. My only wish is that we could've seen the historical summary in greater detail, but even this was a delight. Thank you for it.
I loved this.. I grew up watching Gen 1, and it's wonderful to see a new and.. less cheesy take on Sea Ponies. Wish there were more stories about them. Thank you for this, it made me feel like a kid again. ^.^ - Would very much love to see more like this, perhaps branch offs of this story, anything really. And of course, the writing was wonderful, which is always a major bonus for a story, as so many great stories can and have been ruined, for me at least, by having a great plot and story, but poor writing, be it too detailed (Seven paragraphs about putting on a sock, for example), or not detailed enough.
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It didn't seem sudden to me... Well, sure, it didn't take long from reading the first sentence of the story to reading about the first kiss, but time in-story is not real time, and the progression seemed to take a reasonable amount of in-story time for the characters.
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I second this.
Full review here, but in brief: fascinating world-building, both for Tall Tale and the seapony stuff. Not so keen on the infodump late on, but still worth an upvote for me.
This was beautiful, shedding liquid happiness here.
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You 🤘