Anon03/15/26, 15:00No.43106755
Secretly starting a new fic, in
>/FSBC/is almost completely tonally disjointed from the first. I actually liked it much more (I'll get to that in a moment), but the first fic ends the moment Twilight sets her trap, and what follows effectively reads like a different story. The first is formally about the SoL'y [Mystery], but really it's about younger pre-S1 Twi interacting with ponies and Twilighting in a low-stakes, enjoyable story; it is fluff, but a decent fluff. The second part, however, takes an IMMEDIATE dive into the tragic part of the story of the Two Sisters, and the narration matches it with a wistful, mysterious tone of nostalgia. Luna is the main character, Twilight secondary (with almost none of her fun part 1 charm), and everypony else disappears from the fic without as much as saying goodbye. The second part of the fic has none of the lightness, but it exchanges that for such a lovely sense of mystery and longing. Do they fit in the same story? No, not particularly. But it made for an unusual experience and revived the fic for me; at the time, I was starting to get bored with it. Why?Because the second thing I must bring up is that the fic cheats! Doing a pre-canon non-AU fic imposes certain restrictions on you, namely how that story fits with canon and how you can go about mentioning relevant information that the characters do not know at this point. Yet this fic decided to completely toss that idea to the trash, milking FiM's best story for all its worth and then some—only to cope itself back into canon with what is basically a memory wipe. Okay, the author is clearly at least somewhat capable, so he tried to justify himself and escape the pointlessness and fakeness of the 'conflict' with, "But some part remains, and that's how we got to EP1!" It is still pretty fundamentally lazy and must be called out. He tries to eat his cake and have it too, ha ha. It was really annoying when he held onto it like a crutch, constantly prodding the reader with "Look, it's LUNA!11!!".And then you have the epilogue. I must stress that I really liked the Luna part of the story, despite my criticism of the creative process that led there. What can I say? People can be divided into two groups: those who still gush over the C&L story in 2k12+14, and those who have bad taste. The atmosphere in the moonlit encounter was amazing. The Tuna epilogue, then, exists to both make that part more valuable in the context of the show and to basically justify the fic's existence. It succeeds on both fronts, imo. This is a really good ending. Also, it helps that the author is a pretty capable writer, efficiently conveying the moods* and subtleties of each scene.
*Younger Twi using the subjunctive was cute. In general, the characterizations and character voices come through very strongly here for Twi, Spike, Luna, and Celestia. Shiny, too!
(1/2)
