Fanfiction Reading Update: Twyrant's Kingdom Special Part 2 · 8:48am Oct 28th, 2014
Advisory: contains unmarked spoilers to the fanifcs The Rise of Nightmares, Twilight's Rage, and The Ultimate Rebellion.
The grimdark ride continues as round two of the Twyrant Sparkle contest—the longfics this time—ends. Rules and grading scale are the same as the previous round. Let's get the misery and death started with...
The Rise of Nightmares takes us back to the very foundations of the evil!Twilight genre. The days before Twilight's canon use of dark magic rocketed that plot to center stage. The days when the Nightmare reigned supreme and almost every fic involving evil!Twilight had some variant of “Sunset Dusk” as her evil name. Nostalgia's always good.
As with the oneshots, the running theme of “Twilight makes horrible split second decisions without thinking” has carried over. Very much like Miasma, the Nightmare is tagteamed into the battle with Tirek. Unlike Miasma, Twilight isn't left in an “And I Must Scream” situation, instead feeding on the desire for revenge and Spike's pseudo-death (another common theme in some evil!Twilight fics) to tap into the power.
The story's only two chapters in, so it's very much unclear what exactly is going to happen. Given implications by the author, the story is prepared to barrel down the grimdark abyss at full speed—and with Discord, the princesses, and the Elements of Harmony out of the running, it appears not even a normal plot can stand in the way.
What's going to be interesting going forward is both how the author will play and use Twilight—will she assume an empress role and try to rationalize her rule, or is it going to be more a “wandering boogeyman” kind of thing with her creepily stalking Berry Punch in the fog—and who will be centerstage in the story—is the story going to focus on Twilight's struggles with evilness or on the Mane Five's attempts to save her? These are questions that are still unanswered due to the incomplete nature of the fic.
Based on my gut reaction, I'd say things are probably going to spiral downhill. Characters will fall to Twilight's charm and be converted and all hope will seem lost. It'll be interesting what direction the author will take the story then. The Rule of Grimdark states that: “the length of a story is inversely proportional to the the story's ending being grimdark.” That is, the longer a story gets, the less likely it will have a grimdark ending. Once a fic hits about 30k, it becomes very unlikely it will end badly, and it will be interesting to see if the author leaves any “good ending” options open as the story progresses.
On the downside, the characterization does seem a little “off.” Not quite as bad as some fanfics, but Tirek and Twilight's banter and internal thoughts still weren't quite as good as they probably could have been. Careful attention must also be made to the characterization of evil!Twilight. So often, authors basically make “Nightmare Dusk” an OC devoid of Twilight's charm, when that charm is part of the reason people want to read evil!Twilight—our previously pretty purple pony partaking in perverted, profoundly pernicious plots.
TL;DR: While having a somewhat rocky start with characterization/dialogue, the return to some of the old fashioned evil!Twilight, coupled with the fearful grimdark potential make it worthy of being tracked for future chapters.
****** (Six Stars).
Continuing the “Spike dies and Twilight gets pissed off” theme that The Rise of Nightmares started, Twilight's Rage starts with an eerily similar plot. Spiek dies and Twilight goes full Gohan on both him and Discord, before turning her sights on Canterlot and the rest of Equestria.
Whereas The Rise of Nightmares employed the old Nightmare Dusk plot, Twilight's Rage instead decides to use the equally as old “Twilight acts like an irrational idiot” plot. This plot can probalby be best seen in fics like Faith and Doubt and As Twilight Falls. Something bad happens to Twilight and she responds by acting far from logically.
There's a certain leniency I grant to this type of plot. Everyone responds to trauma differently, after all, so me and my disbelief can tolerate some idiot balls and OOC for a period of time—but that's just it: it's a period of time. If a character doesn't start getting a clearer head, OSHA's called in to inspect my disbelief because it's about ready to collapse.
This is the fundamental problem “Twilight acts like an irrational idiot” plots have—they rely on Twilight continuing to act OOC through out most of the story to propel it forward. In Twilight's Rage, it's shown off with Twilight's strange logical leap that Celestia and the other princesses giving her all their power in an effort to buy time and slow Tirek's continued power level grind somehow equals them doing absolutely nothing to dealing with Tirek.
Again, in the heat of the moment, blaming others is perfectly fine, but as the days pass and Twilight only angstily stews more, that OSHA inspection quickly comes to ahead. Things finally shatter completely when she fulfills that mandatory fanfiction requirement to show the Royal Guard as being totally incompetent—by killing a company's worth of them and staging a full coup. All this because Spike died. I shudder to imagine what would happen if her mom bit the dust.
Twilight isn't the only one to carry the OOC torch. Shining Armor, Luna, and Celestia all get their chances to seem off—many times by cursing. There's a longstanding debate over swear words' role in MLP fanfics. I'm of the opinion that the real ones are unnecessary as the show already has punny substitutes. Almost every time I read one, it makes me wince, as if for the briefest of moments, the immersion is totally shattered. You could consider it one of the most condensed and powerful forms of OOC.
If real swears are used, they should be with the carefulness of a nuclear bomb, with only one or two scattered throughout your story. Here, they're dropped quite often—as if MacArthur's in charge. All it serves to do is further increase the diconnect and reinforce that the characters and motives just seem really off.
Ultimately, Twilight's Rage suffers from an all too common problem with evil!Twilight fics. It lacks subtlety. It's very upfront with Twilight's slide down the slippery slope—when it should really take a number of chapters for our purple alicorn to go from who she is to the villain the genre requires. It has her flout her evil acts—when they too should be slowly built up over time as her slide occurs. And it just seems too “flashy.” Instead of showing off her cunning and intellect—two things evil!Twilight fics need more of—it just goes with the “kill them and let god sort them out” mentality.
TL;DR: While also following an early evil!Twilight plot, Twilight's Rage suffers from severe OOC issues with more than just Twilight and a rush to get to the evil!Twilight when the ride there is where a lot of the fun is. Twilight's Rage is not followed and is cut.
*** (Three Stars).
The Ultimate Rebellion is the sequel to The Ultimate Alicorn, which, if you can remember, won my award for “First Fanfic I've Read to Have Someone Drawn and Quartered.” Things have settled down quite a bit in the years since that award was won. The grimdark checklist remains barren and unchecked this time around.
Twilight's Rage had the irrational Twilight plot, The Rise of Nightmares featured the Nightmare Dusk plot, so it's only fitting that the last story in the contest feature one of the only evil!Twilight plots left—the rebellion plot. Taking place several decades after the events of The Ultimate Alicorn, it tells the story of six OCs and their quest to become the new Elements of Harmony and overthrow Empress Twilight (well, Queen).
Unlike its unnecessarily grimdark predecessor, The Ultimate Rebellion sets up a much more level headed Twilight and her reign. The alicorn amulet once again plays a central role, and once again, just like in the original oneshot, the role of the amulet is much different to the one it fulfilled in canon. In fact, it's much different to the one it fulfilled in the oneshot.
The author decided in an attempt to solve the OOC issues that would arise, all the problems would be caused by the amulet. A decent handwave, but the original oneshot already showed how the amulet affected Twilight, and it stands in stark contrast to the “OOC evil flare ups” that it triggers in the story. It seems as though the author's trying to have his cake and eat it too. Give Twilight some “evil” moments, while still portraying her relatively in-character. While it does work, it still causes some issues.
The first is the aforementioned effect in the original story. There are no flareups, no reverting back to canon persona. Just grimdark and silly dismemberment awards. There's no indication that the amulet's effects are only acute and short—in fact, the original oneshot has Twilight doing nothing for over two weeks. As the story was a simple oneshot, it appears the classic case of not anticipating possible sequels is the culprit to this discrepancy between the two stories.
The second problem, though, is much large. If Twilight recognizes the problems the amulet's causing—as she does—why doesn't she simply take it off? Presumably, like the dark magic necklaces of old, the amulet itself is preventing it. Which, again, runs contrary to all its prior appearances. It can only be removed by the wearer, but it's just an object and there's been no indication either in canon or this story's plot that it has any malevolence in and of itself.
The story's plot bears a resemblance to the “hesitant” evil!Twilight stories like Penumbra. The issues that Twilight's characterization caused in the oneshot have been dealt with—partly thanks to the amulet retcon and partly thanks to the much increased length enabling fleshing out. The rebellion plot itself is a little stale, with little wiggle room for original ideas that haven't already been done, but setting is a large part of AU fics and the setting that has been fleshed out of a lowly grimdark oneshot is definitely good. The Ultimate Rebellion is tracked.
******* (Seven Stars).
Wow, thanks for scoring Rebellion as you did. I can see quite a lot of your concerns being 100% valid... as far as the story has progressed. You can trust that Rebellion will eventually cover every single issue you have raised concern over; I just simply haven't had enough free time in life lately to continue with it. Hence why I am glad you've decided to keep track of it. I have a lot of plans for this story, many of which you probably haven't seen done (well) before.
Again, thank you for the 7/10 (a far superior score to Alicorn's 4/10) and I hope you enjoy the story as it eventually progresses.
Six stars? on my first review?
Thank you for pointing out the characterization issues, Though you just made writing that third chapter (and everything else) somewhat more challenging.
2560347
Hurray for a better score!
2560347 7/10. Not bad, and hey, you win.
2561869
Not yet, I haven't. xTSGx is only one judge. There are at least four.