>>42632015
>Ignorant slander.
It is. Also known as having fun.
>it could have used an interruption or two.
Not the mudpony drama (I don't think the tone of the fic was right for that), but a warm chapter of Luna could've been nice. Twi gets a resolution of her part arc; she doesn't. Hell, he could've done the Lost&Found thing and actually shipped RD with Luna.
But that would all make the fic more complex. Usually it is a good thing; however, here the straightforwardness is a deliberate part of the story's presentation.
>what would you consider the third?
>I like pure S1-ish pony stuff as much as the next guy
^This, basically. I don't think this fic would've been better if it was more "inspired". It's a small, self-contained, cutesy, and very FiM'y thing, and that's what it dreamed of being. It has nothing that would ruin this mood or overly complicate things, and while there is some tension and drama, it gets resolved in a fairly predictable fashion, as you mentioned. Except that I don't consider this a bad thing here. This kind of simplicity would be a bad thing in many other fics, but here it's actually a strength of the [character-focused] story. It's a little unfair to compare it to something like Mono's The Creature, because that one decided to paint a "better" story using ponies as the canvas (and took heavy liberties with it still, since it's actually written to be a fairy tale first), whereas for this fic, being "show-like", "pure pony", etc., was a big part of the mission. Me making grand statements praising the objective goodness of this fic was done slightly in jest and to trigger some responses, because of course that's not the only standard that you can aspire to, but I did want to highlight how well it was done here. Somewhat surprisingly, we don't get enough of these fics written well. Perhaps it's because many of the better writers outright dismiss this as a worthy goal, and that approach is simply wrong.