Site Post » Reviews! Round 27 · 11:37pm Sep 15th, 2013
Corejo walked up to the office, holding a large binder in his hands. He shuffled through it with a frown, looking at the list of potential candidates he was able to scrounge. If he were to be honest with himself, he’d much rather have more than two, but every contribution helped. The orders from corporate had said the Angels were slacking as of late, and he couldn’t deny that past schedules had been... slow. But he thought that getting outside help was a bit unnecessary.
Then again, it was better than actually doing the work himself.
“Okay, I found some people we can read our reviews to,” he said, looking back down at his papers as he fumbled with the handle. The door to the office slowly creaked open. “While I don’t exactly like corporate’s ideas, I do agree that the responsible thing to do would be to have someone pre-read our reviews before they’re released to the masses.”
He paused, glancing up to the scene in front of him.
Pilate and Razgriz sat hunched at the near end of the table, staring back over their shoulders at him.
For some reason, Rainbow Dash sat at the other end of the room, looking incredibly bored and slightly annoyed.
It took him several seconds before he could get a word out. “What.”
“So everyone’s ready to do this?” Razgriz asked, bringing up a stack of papers and ordering them on the tabletop.
“Whose idea was this?” Corejo asked, but the only recognition he got was from the pony giving him a pleading look. “I thought we were going to have someone pre-read our reviews!”
“We are!” Pilate said, producing some papers of his own.
“I thought we were going to get some one who, well, actually reads to do this!” Corejo said. After a second he looked across the table and hastily added, “No offense.”
“None taken,” Rainbow Dash dismissed. “When can I go home?”
Her question went unanswered. “Hey, we put some serious thought into this,” Razgriz reasoned. “I’m more than certain she’s capable of telling us how crappy we are.”
“I don’t disagree in the slightest,” Corejo said, shaking his head slightly. “But I thought we’d get someone better like, I don’t know, like another one of the Angels? Or, if you’re going to pick a pony, at least someone more bookish like Twilight.”
“Yeah, well, we couldn’t find her,” Pilate was quick to say.
Rainbow Dash furrowed her brow. “We were in the same room when you two abducted me!”
Corejo planted his face in the palm of his hand. Sighing heavily, he took a seat beside his two coworkers. “Fine. Let’s just get this over with.”
“Oh, shut up,” Razgriz muttered and slid his stack of papers across the table. Two more bundles quickly followed, all settling right at the edge of where Rainbow Dash was seated.
She pawed a hoof through what was there and frowned. With a slight tilt to her head she looked up at the three and said, “I’m not going to get a say in this, am I?”
After getting no response, she sighed and reached for the first review.
ROUND 27
STORY 1
Autumn’s End, by Martian
Uh oh, a Scootaloo story. Guess I’ll have to give this an automatic thumbs up for best pony.
Nah, let’s just give it one for being a great story. But stating it as such feels off, as this isn’t so much a story as it is mood setting.
Very little happens in this fic. Two clauses would be sufficient to summarize it (no reason spoiling it, but you get the gist). But that isn’t the point. The point of this story is in the atmosphere, how it makes us feel as we watch, hear, and feel what Scootaloo is doing. It is the changing of the seasons, when we, like Scootaloo, experience a sort of sentimentality.
There is something majestic about this idea, and Autumn's End captures it perfectly. With nothing productive to do, Scootaloo retreats from the bustle of life. She goes to a place that only she knows to be alone with her thoughts as the world keeps turning. She simply wants to sit back and watch, to become passive instead of being the rambunctious filly we know. It’s the indescribable feeling of wanting to hold on to what is leaving while also looking forward to what lies ahead, that knowing life moves only forward, that makes this fic so beautiful.
And this isn’t simply an instance of a single person waxing sentimental, as most of the story would have us believe. With the ending, Martian makes it clear that this is a universal feeling that people, deep down, want to share. There are no words for it. And capturing that emotion is the brilliance of this story.
We ended up with three rather short stories for this round of reviews; it’s a narrative form I think we don’t see a lot of, but that I’d like to see more of. Specifically, the short-form offers a poignant option when exploring slice of life; the length nearly makes the figurative expression literal. Autumn’s End takes this idea and runs with it. While seemingly a simple and straightforward series of events take place, the subtext is loud and clear, delivering an emotional salvo in under 1,000 words. Meaning and plot are delivered strictly through action and description. This is done effectively, and it immerses the reader quite nicely—nearly instantaneously—such that they are left simultaneously sated and stuck longing for more.
My only criticisms come from a desire to make the story stronger at every sentence as the prose is sometimes left feeling stilted, or unnecessarily roundabout. This is, at most, a minor thing that I willfully ignore for the sake of the tenderness of the narrative-at-large.
My cohorts have also spoken to the atmosphere of Autumn’s End, and how the journey is somewhat a simple excuse to deliver scenery and emotion. I must agree. Undoubtedly there is a great deal of well manicured atmosphere. The story delivers greatly in this regard, and the reader is most certainly going to feel themselves racing through an autumn day, or perhaps nostalgia for childhood adventuring. I must also point out, however, that it’s not the atmosphere that the story seeks to deliver, rather, it’s atmosphere the story seeks to utilize as characterization. The piece is a brilliant and succinct encapsulation of Scootaloo’s entire character, using simple imagery to deliver complexity. Each moment of her rushing through the forest, of her enjoying the day, is a metaphor, is poetic imagery meant to lay out who she is and how she feels. I cannot recommend it enough.
There are several different things a scene can focus or rather put emphasis on. For example there’s character interaction, plot devices, or in the case of Autumn’s End, atmosphere. With a short story such as this one which ultimately does focus on atmosphere, understandably not much action goes on. However, that isn’t to say it’s a bad thing, and I would say how it’s done here is almost majestic. There’s just something about this story that makes it an honest pleasure to read.
We start off with, and pretty much end with, Scootaloo. In a nutshell, she’s going from point A to point B and as far as events go, that’s pretty much it. But this story isn’t so much about the journey as it is the setting. As the title states, autumn is ending and winter is just around the corner, and if anything that’s what the story is about. Scootaloo and her travel plainly serves as a vehicle to develop the atmosphere around her, but there’s something more here. There’s emotion just urging to be shared.
What Autumn’s End is best at is the way it immerses the reader. The descriptions are top-notch and the pace is probably the most level I’ve seen in a long time. This story does exactly what it needs to do in as exactly as many words as needed, no more or less, and the emotion that is evoked is completely natural. It’s not a bad feeling or necessarily even a good one, but it’s the sensation of sharing emotion that sells it. It’s like a little hearth lit in my stomach and it was absolute solace.
I can’t think of anything bad to point out here, honestly. Maybe there was a grammatical error or two, but I’d be hard-pressed to find one. The feel of the story is just entrapping.
Those looking for an actual story, as in a grand adventure or something of comedic or romantic value, will find none of it here. Nevertheless, there’s a feeling here that can’t quite be put into words, but it’s positively satisfying. This story is a prime example of descriptive writing.
Horns, explosions, conspiracy theories, oh my! So this is a story about Sombra’s horn surviving the explosion from the season 3 opener. At 1.2k words, it seems unqualified for review, but as is the norm, looks are deceiving. It’s worldbuilding time!
I have to get this out of the way first and foremost: this story is hard to accept without an open mind. It is very abrupt in its headcanon, almost to the point of making me want to stop reading. But I kept myself from doing so on the grounds that I could see something developing.
The first of two ideas is the close connection of Sombra as the narrator. I don’t know if it was Goblin Scribe’s intention or just good luck, but the redundant and loathing narration fit Sombra’s obsessive, demented mindset perfectly. It shows the kind of pony he used to be: arrogant, bold, headstrong, and, if you read closely, that he was once completely different. This last attribute leads us to the more thoughtful of the two ideas: who was Sombra?
Throughout the (albeit incredibly short) story, there are hints as to who this villain used to be. Any details I could give would spoil it outright, but the scope of Goblin Scribe’s world is beyond vast. Every other sentence is an allusion to his past life and rise and fall as king. There are (or at least were) other emotions beneath the hatred. The way Goblin Scribe details Sombra’s hatred lends to the idea of how powerful these emotions must have been and how greatly the events of his past had scarred him. A rich story lies within this simple thought bubble of a fic, buried like treasure. And that, in my honest opinion, is this fic’s greatest pro and con. We’re given so much, yet so little. We see only the tip of the iceberg, and are left wanting more.
So for all of this review, I have only one request: Goblin Scribe, I beg you, finish this story.
Ah yes, example two on our little exploration of the short-form narrative: take a small moment and expand upon it. Sombra’s Horn Survived The Blast is quite up front with you in that regard. Where as Autumn’s End explored a character in the present, Sombra’s provides an opening to a vast backstory. We have seen other examples of this type of world building, and I am glad to see more of it start to surface.
On premise, the idea that Sombra is contained wholly within his horn is somewhat farcical, but it is something easily looked past as the stream of consciousness is laid out. The story does wonders when it comes to filling in the blatantly vacant backstory that Sombra left, and it provides an interesting jumping off point for other stories in-universe, or at the very least the reader’s own head-canon.
I’m not entirely sure every nook and crevice was required, there were times when each new sentence felt like it was harping on the same emotional well, but I am not going to fault a story for making a valiant attempt and trying to provide context and motivation. I encourage anyone reading my words to read Goblin’s, and I encourage Goblin to reread and refine his own.
What happens when one combines angled trajectory, a dark presence, and a horn? Nothing age-appropriate, that’s for sure. But there’s an exception for every rule—or so I’ve heard—and I would gladly like to point in the direction of Sombra’s Horn Survived The Blast. It’s a bit short for what it does, not to mention it’s rather sudden with its devices. To some this might come away as a turn-off, but there’s something to be found at the end.
The story begins with the end of the Season 3 opener, wherein King Sombra goes kablooey and his horn is sent sailing through the atmosphere, never to be seen again. But in this story, Sombra’s conscious mind is tied to this one physical fragment, and he has a bit of an existential crisis. Understandable, considering the circumstances. But what makes this story commendable is just how much backstory it gives Sombra in little more than twelve-hundred words.
Going off of what the show canon has given us, or rather hasn’t, King Sombra is a flat character. And yet, Sombra’s Horn Survived The Blast paints a picture of this villain and alludes to a life that is, in some regard, pitiable. In no way does this story try and excuse Sombra, but rather it explains him.
There are a lot of ideas in this story that, for better and for worse, just aren’t expanded on in much detail. For what this story accomplishes, I say not having a great amount of detail is a good thing. However, what past events are referred to are just begging to be flushed out as stories of their own.
I get the sense that this story is like the tip of an iceberg. There’s so little here it might be off-putting to some, and while there’s a greater backstory just waiting to be developed, letting a reader’s mind fill in the gaps and infer for themselves might just be this story’s strongest point.
I don’t often read a lot of fiction, but the times that I find myself doing so it has to do with stories like this. The Brightest Timeline is a stellar example of a short, profound story done right. First impressions might tend toward silliness in the vein of Feeling Pinkie Keen, but reading anything beyond the first hundred words will quickly prove otherwise.
protractor does well with setting the stage at a digestible pace. Even for a story clocking in at only 2.5k words, nothing feels out of place or too sudden. Each event flows into the next, and the characters are all in their right states of mind (and in Pinkie Pie’s case, in the correct wrong state. But that just lends perfectly to her sympathetic personality).
My complaints with this story are few. There were instances of clear editorial slip-ups and some clunky phrasings, and I can say that some of the dialogue felt a little separated from the characters that spoke them. But in reality these never hindered the story nor my immersion. This is a recommended read.
P.S. That ending will get you.
Last in this trifecta is a short that takes the traditional approach, one with a solid three act structure but shrunken down into what I referred to earlier as the definition of “slice of life.” Timeline offers us an interesting moment in and around season one, dealing especially with Pinkie’s emotional fragility and extreme empathy. This eluded me at first, and I was quickly ready to write off each of the characters as poorly written. While some polish may be needed, they do in fact appear in character, and it serves as a striking reminder of just how much they’ve grown over the last few seasons. To that end, the character interaction is the heart of this piece. While it did have some flaws, even after considering it is rooted in the first season—Rainbow’s “voice” needs a little work—the interplay is really well done. The characters behave and respond appropriately, convincingly, and most importantly, they do so in a way that drives to unpack who they are, and build strength from their flaws, just as the show intends.
Moreover, Timeline does a really nice job of cutting out everything superfluous to what could have been a very bloated plot. The central idea, the multiverse, is a backdrop to the real story, Pinkie’s emotional center and her relationships with her friends. The concept is explained through the filter of Twilight speaking naturally, keeping the world self-contained. That is, there were no moments of exposition that felt out of place or like they didn’t belong. The story said what it needed to, and said it in a way that could have easily been a scene from the series itself. Likewise, there are no tangential moments or “side quests” to be distracting, everything flows plainly, and realistically by extension.
It’s not perfect. It, too, needs some polish and copy-editing, but I must wholly recommend it regardless. We need more of this kind of slice in our lives.
Pinkie Pie already does enough with the laws of physics. The last thing we need her to do is get into philosophy. But in The Brightest Timeline, the author had such audacity, and dare I say it wasn’t just done well, but it was done right.
This story starts of with Twilight trying to explain to Pinkie Pie the universe. Only, Pinkie Pie doesn’t end up understanding things perfectly, and as a result she has a bit of an existential crisis, one that’s completely believable given her character. The story starts out a bit on the silly side of things, sure, but that quickly changes and only gets more serious as the story progresses.
Setting aside the actual story for a moment, The Brightest Timeline is a wonderful example of the characters’ personalities. Each event is fluid and the dialogue comes naturally, and everyone’s mindsets are as they should be, however right or wrong they may be.
There are a few technical errors I noticed in my reading of this story, but they aren’t at all distracting and it’s nothing a thorough editing sweep can’t take care of.
I recommend this story to anyone who likes Pinkie Pie, or just a story that’s thought provoking. The ending is where everything comes together, and I’ve been trying hard not to spoil it, but it makes everything right.
Rainbow Dash set the last of the reviews down and blankly stared at the pile. The three Angels at the opposite end leaned forward in anticipation, some more eager than others.
“Well?” Razgriz said after an unhealthy pause. “How are they?”
“Tell me mine were comprehensible, that they made sense!” Pilate squeaked.
Rainbow Dash slowly lifted her chin to gaze across the table. Her eyes spoke of unrivaled disinterest. “Is that it?”
“Were they good?” Corejo asked. “Readable, at least?”
“Yeah, sure, whatever. Can I go home now?”
Corejo nodded. “Door’s right there,” he said, pointing behind him. Rainbow Dash gave them all a weird look before quickly taking to the air and darting past them, blowing the door open and almost knocking it off its hinges.
“Be sure to tell your friends about Seattle’s Angels!” Razgriz called after her.
“You can recommend stories for reviewing, too!” Pilate added, nearly falling out of his seat.
“That could have gone a lot worse,” Corejo said with a hint of surprise. He sighed and stood up. “Well, the good news is that we can go public now. Good job, you two, I think.”
-------
The camera panned across the room, showing the three Angles in various states of happiness as they all left the office. The monitor flickered, being the only source of light in the entire room. Behind his desk, Seattle_Lite brought a hand to his chin and looked towards the ceiling, deep in thought.
“I’d say this has been a success,” he mused aloud. “At least nobody will see this recording. It’d save the poor saps the embarrassment for once.” Right then, something out of the corner of his eye suddenly diverted his attention. He swiveled around his chair, seeing a large “On Air” sign emitting a deep, red hue.
Seattle_Light just sighed and shook his head. “I don’t get paid enough for this.”
You actually get paid? Damn I'm in the wrong business. Anyway I have a fic you guys should take a look at From Twilight to Sunset I need some unbiased opinions on the story I wrote and I think you guys should give an honest view.
1353127
Jokes are jokes.
You can make recommendations in the recommendation thread. However, we don't review erotica (clop), and we don't accept self-promoiton. Sorry! There are a number of groups on the site that offer pre-reading and editing services. I'm sure one of them would be happy to take a look.
1353127
Seattle's Angels aren't the sort of group you're after. We unearth gems and promote them on site blogs. And besides, we don't allow self-promotion.
If you're after constructive criticism, you should go check out WRITE
I'm not sure whether to laugh at the mental image or go comfort Pilate.
Do you only review completed works?
Oh no. Now there are three Angle Bunnies...
1353424
No.
1353457 In that case, review Sharaloth's Harmony Theory. It is without a doubt the most criminally underrated fic on this site.
I actually wrote a comedy one-shot with an extremely similar premise to The Brightest Timeline. Pinkie gets the crap scared out of her by physics.
1353472
As much as I'd love to, it has over 2k unique views last time I checked. We prefer to keep things right around 1.5k at the most.
But I do agree that it is criminally underrated.
1353127>>1353472>>1353538
If you have any stories you'd like us to take a look at, feel free to head over to our Recommendation Thread. Please bear in mind, however, that we have rules for suggestions which include No self-promotion and Under 1k views.
Some of said rules are flexible, but you've got a much greater chance of succeeding if they follow them all (and no, the self-promotion rule is absolute)
I take it Tim Messenger wrote this one.
"Good morning, Sergeant Angle!"
1353673
Mea culpa, but I wasn't trying to promote myself, just point out something interesting.
Some good stuff this time.
1353472
The Angels are well aware of Harmony Theory. In the last podcast of theirs I listened to, they actually mentioned that they were a 'Harmony Theory free zone'. It was very cute.
1354594
Right, and the podcasts before that? There is no such thing as a 'Harmony Theory free zone', not when it's Pilate you're dealing with.
1354612
We only declared that because he would not shut up about it. And unlike him, I have self-control.
1354594 Why do they hate it?
It's the single greatest fic on this site.
1354926
They don't hate it. Some of them love it to tidbits, it's just not Angels Review material. Also, thank you very much for the compliment.
1354973 I meant it from the bottom of my heart.
1354926
We hate it? Lolwat?
Wow, Thanks for the review! I've always been a fan of this review thing you guys do, and I am very thankful for the exposure!
I just recently found out I got reviews here, and...holy Lamashtu! I'm pretty darn floored. So thanks a ton, and let me just say...
I seriously love the implication that I just stumbled into making something good by luck. No joke, it fits me perfectly.
I can't actually say whether it was intentional or not, sadly. It's been a while. Guess my brilliance is an enigma even to my own self!