6-Star Reviews Part 111: Yours Truly

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Although I mostly restrict myself to fanfiction reviews around here, I'm going to branch out a bit and offer my review of Bud's Best brand Orange Dreamsicle Cookies: they taste exactly like dreamsicles, if dreamsicles were dry and crumbly instead of cold and creamy.  For a bargain bin find, they are definitely okay.

On second thought, maybe I'd better stick to what I know.  Below, my review of Thanqol's Yours Truly.

Impressions before reading:  Thanqol is an author whose stories I've consistently enjoyed, so it's no surprise that I read this one when it was posted.  Although I definitely didn't dislike it, I'd have said it was my least favorite of his stories to date.  So I'll be curious to see if that was strictly a relative comparison or if there is, upon further review, a good reason for me to prefer his other writings to this.

Zero-ish spoiler summary:  A series of letters between various ponies, mostly the main six, documenting the passage of years as they grow old, drift apart, drift together, and discover themselves.

Thoughts after reading:  Epistolary writing shares many of the same restrictions as journal writing when used as a narrative format: both must hold themselves strictly to a character's point of view (though with a series of letters, that point of view can shift from note to note), both can consist only of those details or information which the viewpoint character could reasonably be expected not just to know, but to actually write down, and both must hew closely to the character's viewpoint and preconceptions--there's no such thing as an objective observation in either format.  Because of this, it's rare to see either form of writing executed well; it's simply too easy to fall into the trap of forcing characters to communicate details about setting, background, or their own biases which just don't belong in such writing styles.

Yours Truly is a shining example in this regard, however.  Although some of Rarity's letters fall flat (a repeated bit of humor concerning Pinkie mailing out drafts of her letters, complete with her notes to self, skirts the line between self-aware humor and excessive goofiness, and for me it ended up falling into the latter category), the various ponies' notes do a great job on the whole of communicating both personal and setting-related events without ever straying too far from what those characters might actually write to one another.

Another thing this story exceeds at is balancing seriousness and levity.  At turns, Yours Truly is a love story, an adventure, a slice-of-life idyll, and the very definition of a random comedy.  For a story to be able to incorporate both the bleak despair of a life-threatening winter which the princesses are powerless to stop at one point, and Pinkie the Pirate grousing about how her pegasus crew refuse to walk the plank properly at another, and for neither to feel like an unwelcome intrusion, is a feat.  It's true that not everything fits together perfectly (a Whoovian nod near the end spoiled the mood of the last letter for me--I have nothing against the Doctor, but he was an unnecessary distraction in this case), but for the most part, Thanqol does a reasonably good job combining disparate elements throughout his story.

Some of the more meme-heavy moments were less than impressive in this case.  From the above-mentioned run-in with the TARDIS to Rarity's sock-related business ventures, references to the fandom abounded, and not all were terribly well-integrated.  The author has never shied away from such references in his other works, but here some feel like pandering, rather than integrated plot points.

I suspect at least part of the problem is the epistolary style.  Simply put, it's not easy to provide a lot of context through such writing, and while Thanqol does a surprisingly good job of conveying setting through this limited format, there's only so much he can do to smooth over such inclusions.  By their nature, letter-stories rely to a great degree on the reader to fill in the details.  In cases like these, perhaps it's just my own biases showing (though I know they're biases I share with many other readers, in this particular case), but I found the memes to often be jarring, rather than natural.

Speaking of readers filling in details, it didn't take me long to remember what I didn't like about this story when I first read it, but since it's major spoilers, I'm going to break out the tag again.  Don't click it if you don't want a significant plot point revealed.

I actually found Fluttershy to be extremely out of character in this story.  The fact that she continues to passive-aggressively pester Dash to keep coming home, even after discovering that doing so is jeopardizing Dash's career/dream, is bad enough.  The fact that, despite putting Dash between a rock and a hard place, she refuses to take any responsibility for Dash's repeated trips to see her, I thought atrocious.  She acts in an extremely manipulative manner, and besides being upset that Dash ended up with such a harpy, I was also disappointed with how at odds this portrayal seems to be with Fluttershy's canon characterization.

At this point, those of you who've already read the story (and if you haven't... for pete's sake, what did I say up top about spoilers?) may well be wondering if you and I read the same version.  The interpretation of Fluttershy and Dash's relationship in the paragraph above is based on a liberal reading of Dash's "I can stay.  I can go.  Pick one." letter from a bit less than halfway through, coupled with a few smaller bits culled from Fluttershy's letters and Applejack's descriptions.  Although it's the impression I got both initially and upon re-reading, there's absolutely nothing in the text which should make a person favor the "Fluttershy is a conniving harridan" reading over the more conventional "Fluttershy loves Dash, and is trying her best to put on a brave face for Dash's sake, but failing."

So why do I bring it up?  Because it highlights one of the potential pitfalls of leaving too much to the reader's imagination: as they sift the clues which they have been allotted, readers have a distressing tendency to jump to all the wrong conclusions (as I assume mine are, in this case).  Sometimes, that tendency can be used to great effect.  But as my own experience shows, sometimes a sympathetic character can become a shrew by this process, and a sweet story turned sour.

Oh, also: shipping all over the place, if that's an issue for you.  Nothing that tripped my "this is stupid and contrived" mental wire (one advantage of a format which requires that one frequently skimp on setup: less chance of doing such a poor job setting up a relationship that the reader revolts), though readers who object to lesbian ponies in principal can consider this fair warning.

Star rating:  ★★★☆☆ (what does this mean?)

Looking at the story as a whole, it's remarkably solid, considering what it is.  However, although it generally does a good job of creating a believable setting, Yours Truly regularly tosses out lowest-common denominator humor which doesn't mix with the hinted-at depths which define the world about which his characters write.  Sometimes it works, and the choices of where to insert levity are usually well thought out, but other times it simply falls flat.

And before people start asking: to be clear, the the bit in spoilers didn't particularly weigh on the rating.  I was just trying to point out though my own experience one of the potential flaws in open-ended storytelling, which is that alternate character interpretations can easily crop up, and can sometimes lead to very unsatisfying resolutions.

Recommendation:  This is probably the best fanfic of its kind that I've read; it's not easy to turn a collection of letters into a coherent, satisfying, and structurally sound story, but that's exactly what's been accomplished here.  Readers interested in seeing a well-executed example of such should definitely read this, and the shipping tag oughtn't discourage any but the most hard-line anti-shippers.  Some meme-heavy moments and a general lack of detail may discourage readers who tend to take exception to either, however.

Next time:  Allegrezza, by CoffeeGrunt