Golden Oaks Book Club mini-review #7: A World Without Kindness (spoiler warning) · 3:59am Mar 19th, 2015
The eighth story to come under Golden Oaks Book Club’s analysis happens to be a contest winner. Taking first place in Equestria Daily’s More Most Dangerous Game Contest, it outed over eighty other competitors. That is quite an impressive feat… but does it read as well as one would expect from a high-tier group of judges?
We elected to find out. Grab my personal impressions below, or click on the link supplied above for a broader range of opinions and discussion.
Without further ado: A World Without Kindness.
Author: billymorph
Synopsis:
The war between Nightmare Moon and Princess Celestia has destroyed Equestria, leaving the few survivors to struggle to survive in a dying world of eternal twilight. Fluttershy, twisted by the war, now ekes out an existence in Everfree forest, but even that life is under threat. Twilight Sparkle is coming, leading the last army of Dawn, and she will let nothing stop her from retrieving the Elements of Harmony and saving the world; not even old friends.
Length: 16,568 words (one-shot + epilogue)
Status: Complete
Review: I’m going to preface this review by stating that, as is no secret, I adore Fluttershy and find Flutterbat equally as endearing. So it was to be expected that this story earned my vote in the GOBC, due to its description and artwork. However, that doesn’t mean I’m incapable of criticising a story with her poorly written. In any case, this being an alternate universe, I’ll probably allow for some deviations to her personality.
Now that’s out of the way…
I have to say, I was immediately struck by the beautiful prose in this story. First-person Fluttershy as she hunts for food, while reminiscing about more favourable days past, was filled with lovely descriptive language. billy has done a wonderful job of showing what kind of world she lives in, even before getting into the world’s description itself. Look at this statement here.
I missed the gentler days when woodland creatures wouldn’t run in fear at the sight of me, but less than I missed the taste of celery.
What a world, if it can drive even a pony like Fluttershy to carnivorous tendencies. Yeesh.
There’s a particular spot I found confusing at first, shortly into the story. Fluttershy is ambushed in her home by a unicorn, but manages to escape, while accidentally leading her pursuer into a lethal trap and, with no other choice presented to her, is urged by said unicorn to slay them and make the death quick. Given who it is, and where they found Fluttershy, I find it very difficult to believe that they were unable to recognise her, even in her alternate form, until what I thought for sure was going to be their final moments. So for me, the story stumbled a little there. Pinkie Pie also appears not to recognise this unicorn soon after, which strikes me as incredibly odd.
There are some strange word choices and less-than-ideal sentence structures about the place, such as this sentence.
I landed in the courtyard of the ruined castle, letting the carcass of the deer fall to the earth with a weary sigh.
This is very wordy. It’s fairly inactive too, looking at it. Instead of “the courtyard of the ruined castle” it could have been written as “the ruined castle’s courtyard”. Same deal with “the carcass of the deer”; “the deer’s carcass” (or even simply “the carcass”) would have been better there. What that does is make the sentence more active and engaging. “fall to the earth” gives me the idea that the carcass might have been dropped from a height, although it’s written that Fluttershy dropped it after touching the ground herself. In that sense, “fall to the ground” might have been a better word choice. Or even just “drop,” a single word replacement. Finally, look at the entire final line.
letting the carcass of the deer fall to the earth with a weary sigh.
Even with the suggested changes, it would still read as “letting the carcass drop with a weary sigh”. What’s wrong with this wording? Let me clarify. The carcass—not Fluttershy as I’m sure you intended—has become the last addressed subject. This participial phrase is incorrect, as the way it reads has the carcass letting out the weary sigh.
In any case, there’s a decent amount of that throughout the story, but not to the point where it really affects readability. That said, that passage did read weird to me and I had to do a double pass over it to clarify what was going on. Even though I acknowledge that the majority of regular readers don’t even notice when those instances occur, it’s something to be mindful of. (That goes for anyone reading this review: fewer words + greater activity = more engaging, unless you’re deliberately being over-flowery and purple, in which case Fimfic’s general readerbase probably isn’t your target audience)
Story suffers from a fair decent amount of annoying saidisms. Many of them aren’t so bad, but a few stick out like the elderly at a deathcore gig. Examples like “inquired,” “chirped,” “blurted out,” “I tried again,” etc. A few misspellings too, though few and far between (like En mass instead of En masse). Sentence fragments every now and then, as well as a few comma splices. Again, not terribly distracting, but definitely present. What I do get rather annoyed at is a lack of commas for direct address, and if there’s anything I hate most as a prevalent error in this fandom, it’s the misspelling of Apple Bloom as “Applebloom.” Applejack’s accent wasn’t too butchered, but it still annoyed me at times.
So, yes, the story does have quite a few technical and mechanical flaws. At this point it might seem I don’t think it should have won the contest. But I pressed on anyway, to see how the rest of the story played out with these factors considered…
It’s a pretty great story, all things considered. It has that certain something about it where every character is different on the outside, changed from their horrific experiences yet fundamentally the same deep at their core. It’s these different interpretations and interactions that sell the story to me, and sell it well. We’re offered a glimpse from both sides of the War that caused the great calamity; even though this is Fluttershy’s story, both armies of Dusk and Dawn are at least represented in some light. A lot of thought went into creating this dystopia, creating everypony’s different motives for fighting the war.
Honestly, the way that the Elements came together as Fluttershy described, even with all the negative thoughts on her mind felt very shoehorned in. While it’s great to have that ending, it didn’t feel like the ending this tale should have had. It was definitely far less dark than I imagined, when it had been gearing up to end in tragedy—a final stand. In the end, I can’t fault an author for ending a story differently to how I thought they would. It just doesn’t feel quite right to me… no matter how awesome it was that Fluttershy became the leader of Harmony instead of Twilight.
A good read, but lots of mechanical flaws, a great many of them basic ones. I’m not entirely sure I’d have picked this for the contest winner, but I can’t make that call on any basis, since I’ve hardly read any of the other entries. I think in the end, this story’s prose and the little tidbits of alternate worldbuilding such as the Elements healing Rarity’s leg instead of restoring her mane made it worth the effort. I can look past a story’s faults if it is legitimately a good story.
6.5/10
I'll be sure to check it out, thanks for doing these!
I know I don't comment much, but I get busy with other stuff and forget.