Yeah, I'm not doing chapter 20.5. As my mind-bogglingly slow trudge through Romance Reports has shown, it's painful enough reading porn of characters I like - or at least, characters that are supposed to be characters I like. Romance Reports turned the characters I like into these things that are pretty annoying. But 20.5 is about Littlepip and Homage having sex, and those are two characters that I distinctly do not like. Besides, you already know what I'm gonna say - I'm gonna bitch about Littlepip hopping on the angst-train and Homage for acting like Littlepip is a character I should admire. I'm so predictable I bore myself.
Anyway, no. Also, Seraphem started his own liveblog on Fallout: Equestria, from a much more sunny outlook, highlighting the protagonist's selflessness and shit and insistence that the action scenes aren't incredibly boring. But it'll be another week before I can proceed with chapter 37 of Fallout Equestria, and until then I don't think I want to bother with the story in very many capacities. The more I think about the damn thing the more it just makes me miserable with its annoying, unlikable characters, boring action scenes, and insistence that I admire violence. Yes, I'm kinda bitter right now.
This time, instead, I'm going to go over another fic by the author of Romance Reports, titled Like Fine Wine. Set in the same "universe" as Romance Reports, because it's such a gripping premise and continuity and shit rather than some stupid story about Twilight Sparkle having a lot of sex. The story is as follows.
Some years later, Rarity has a successful business in Canterlot. She also has a lot of sex with various ponies, but isn't in an actual relationship, and is in fact somewhat resentful of ponies that are in relationships. She's also getting older. Anyway, Twilight and Spike are currently in Canterlot, and Spike's a teenager and stuff. Spike visits Rarity, confesses his love for her, and they have sex.
That summary was sixty-eight words. The actual story is around twenty thousand words. I just saved you a lot of words.
It's funny, a few days ago I was on /mlp/ and there was a Spike appreciation thread. One of the deals there was to post links to Spike-centric fics, and someone posted this one, and either he or someone else said that it was really fabulous and that it accomplishes more in twenty thousand words than most fics accomplish in six hundred thousand words. If anything, SleeplessBrony is the exact opposite, giving out massive wordcounts in which fuck all happens. I swear, chapter 3 of Romance Reports made my eyes glaze over with how bored I was throughout the whole thing. A lot of fics might suffer from poor pacing and padding, but at least those fics actually have shit happening.
If there's one nice thing I can say about Like Fine Wine, it's that the idea of Rarity accepting that she's getting older and isn't going to be as young and pretty as she used to be has some merit, but that's forgotten well before she's introduced to Spike's double dragon dongs.
And now, carrying on a sort of theme, I’m going to proceed mocking my own fic, ‘’The Book of Friendship,’’ because that’s probably the closest any of you will come to reading it. In case you forgot, it centers around two ponies: Brother White, who’s handsome and thoroughly bland; and Brother Scroll, who’s a wimpy nerd. Both of them are in a quasi-religious organization dedicated to spreading word of the magic of friendship, and both of them are probably gay. They’re assigned to a town on Earthquake Island, which populated solely by earth ponies. This is a problem for Brother White, as he is a unicorn and the locals are somewhat racist. So far they’ve been threatened by General Quake, the local warlord who runs the place, and have witnessed two murders.
And it was at this point that the author was informed that he couldn’t just end every chapter on a shock death, and so he came up with something else.
Chapter 3, therefore, opens with the missionaries on the evening of their first day on the mission. Said first day has been utterly miserable, what with seeing two murders, and so Scroll suggests that they go out to a local tavern for the night. There they meet Tap, the mare who runs the place. She’s fairly friendly and offers them free booze, and they proceed to get drunk. White starts making up some terrible lyrics, which reminds me of a joke I forgot to make in Fallout Equestria. Ah well.
Scroll, meanwhile, starts hitting on the barmaid, who responds by having sex with him. Yep. So then the missionaries wake up and Scroll remembers what happened and rushes over to the tavern, where Tap tells him that it was basically pity lay. And then he starts about it.
So when shock deaths wouldn’t carry the story, the author introduced a new character to make the protagonist miserable. By ripping off of Glee.
