Sweetie Belle Review Fic # 6: Drama King

Alright, Drama King, by LuminoZero, is a short Romance, Slice of Life, and Comedy story that I am reviewing on request. It's recommended that one have knowledge of the 'Button Mash's Adventures' animation prior to reading this (there's a link to it in the story description).

I felt the first half of the story, the setup for the whole situation, was decent, and Sweetie's character is established quite solidly. We get an understanding of how she regards her sister and sees Ponyville. Pinkie, on the other hand, performs some slightly questionable actions, making me wonder what she wants out of the situation by playing matchmaker.

Once Sweetie and Button Mash start interacting, we get a fun look at how Sweetie perceives the situation that Pinkie has gotten them into. Her view offers as much insight on how she sees Button Mash as how she sees her own relationship with her sister. The story also fills in the blanks of how Sweetie and Button Mash ended up on that date in the animated short, and gives believable reasons for how both characters act.

I rather enjoyed the story up to this point, but then Pinkie appeared once again. And I still don't really understand Pinkie's reasoning for it. I guess she just likes to play matchmaker a lot, but it felt kind of out of character for her. It seemed almost as if Pinkie was taking on a bit of the author's will and that was the reason for her actions, instead of having reasons of her own. The brilliance behind Pinkie Pie is when you realize the method to her madness, the reason for her actions. She's a character driven generally by simple objectives, yet she often achieves those objectives through fairly convoluted means. So I think that if the story coalesced by having Sweetie's own actions more obviously aligning with Pinkie's own objectives, then the story would have ended great. But as is, I felt the ending was kind of forced in a way. (Why does Pinkie want to ship these two?)

Sweetie Belle's action at the end of the story seem not to coincide with her already established character. One might argue that it is because she is flustered and not really knowing what she's doing, but I honestly don't really know why she did act like that. To me it felt forced, and because of that, it drained the comical punch out of the ending for me.

Overall, I think Drama King is a pretty decent story, it has a solid enough start, is well paced and gives reason for the characters to have acted the way they did in the animation (as a world builder, I really appreciate stuff like that). Unfortunately, I found that the end fell apart for me and left me wondering at the actions instead of laughing at them as I was supposed to. I have to wonder what other people might have thought about the ending though...

That's my review of Drama King, by LuminoZero. Thanks for reading. Now I'm going to be prepping myself for some binge writing (NaNoWriMo, that's 50 000 words over November). Looks like about 7 chapters between the two stories over the whole month.

Here's to writing,
~SilentBelle