Paul's Monday Reviews XII · 6:09pm May 11th, 2015
As much as I love visiting my parents and extended family, sometimes it can be so frustrating. I just blew three straight days that could have been devoted to writing, reading and job hunting. I'm abruptly way behind in my writing and my reading for reviews (the former of which I may have to push back by a couple weeks) and I'll be scrambling to catch up.
...
Ah, who am I kidding? It's worth it.
Stories for This Week:
My Little Doubt by Knackerman
When the Stars Align by Borsuq
Be Mine by LightningBass94
Broken Gladiator by BronyWriter
Souvenir by TinCan
Rating System
Why Haven't You Read These Yet?: 1
Pretty Good: 1
Worth It: 2
Not Bad: 1
None: 0
When I first saw this story, I had some rather high expectations. I’m a bit of a horror fan, and if I see something that looks like it might be friggen scary I tend to get interested. The description combined with the creepy-ass cover art pulled me in pretty easily. In fact, that cover art alone is more than enough to get my insides churning, and as such I was both dreading and looking forward to what the story would offer.
Coming away from it… well, it’s kind of a mixed bag. There are some great things about the story, but also some not-so-great things.
The concept of the story is tried and true horror who-done-it: the Mane 6 find themselves trapped in the Crystal Caves beneath Canterlot, where all their potential routes are blocked by doors that can only be opened by ‘sigils’ that someone carved into all the ponies’ bodies… except Twilight. They realize that someone has put them into a life or death version of the game Doubt, in which one player acts as the ‘changeling’ and tries to trip others up and make them not trust one another. The others have to either escape or determine who the changeling is. Unlike the childhood game, however, not solving the mystery quickly can – and does – lead to death.
The entire story is based heavily of the manga Doubt. This wouldn’t be a problem if it was just themed on the manga and took its own path, but according to Knackerman he specifically chose the characters’ actions to keep in line with the manga.
This was a bad idea. First off, not a single character is in character. Not. A. One. The only time they are in character is in the very first chapter, but there they spend so much time making direct quotes from the show and doing ‘character identifier’ things that their characters feel forced and hollow rather than being individuals. I began to wonder how many homages Knackerman intended to squeeze into a single chapter.
But after that first chapter, all bets are off, because the characters are completely unrecognizeable. Knackerman might as well have used a bunch of OCs; it would have been much more believable then. By the end of the story, we get some explanation for the behavior of two of the characters. All the rest? No excuse at all. They just… “do things,” things that they readily wouldn’t do even under the circumstances.
Knackerman tried to explain this away as saying “if you’d read Doubt, you’d get why they’re doing these things.” That in and of itself is a big problem. If your readers absolutely must understand the source material to get your crossover, you’re doing it wrong. I have since looked into Doubt and discovered that Knackerman followed the actual plot of that story extremely closely, which is also a big mistake in my mind. When you just repeat what someone else did, you’re not exactly being creative.
Add to this the fact that the writing style certainly needs work. I’m supposed to be scared of the events that are happening throughout this story, but instead it’s just… happening. Don’t get me wrong, the way each of the Mane 6 ultimately ends up dead is horrible, but Knackerman didn’t do a very good job of getting into the characters’ heads. There wasn’t any time for the reader to experience the terror of the events, to take in the brutality or the panic and trauma. Things just happened, rapidly, one after another.
What’s most troublesome about all this is that Knackerman can achieve that attention. He proved it with the very last chapter, which was the only one that had me legitimately horrified. No crap, that chapter gave me exactly what I was looking for. If the entire story had been written with that attention to detail, it would have been much better even with the bad characters and poor plot decisions. Simply put, I read this story because I wanted to be scared, and if that had been achieved from the beginning then I’d have been much, much more forgiving of the story’s many flaws.
There was one thing that worked well for me, though, and that was the mystery. I devoted every single chapter to trying to figure out who the ‘changeling’ was, coming up with all sorts of theories and ideas based on the given facts. In that sense, My Little Doubt was a ton of fun, because with each chapter my expectations got thrown in a new direction and my guesses changed dramatically. I genuinely enjoyed trying to solve the mystery, and I’m pleased to say that, while I had a small smidgen of a guess towards the ultimate truth, it did surprise me.
The only problem is that the mystery so closely followed the events in Doubt that I can’t actually praise Knackerman himself for creating the mystery.
In summary, My Little Doubt had all the potential to be a horror gem. If Knackerman had used OCs instead of the Mane 6 (thereby negating the completely OOC behavior of everypony involved), had done a better job of channeling their fear, and not completely ripped 90% of the plot from Doubt, this story might have been horror gold. Instead it’s just so-so; a lone moment of genuine fear doesn’t make up for 40k of meh.
Bookshelf: Worth It
What drew me to this story? One word… or rather, one name: kilala. I love kilala’s art style and character designs, and upon seeing that someone had created a story based on her characters I had no choice but to dive in.
When the Stars Align focuses on Starburst, the teenage daughter of Twilight Sparkle and Flash Sentry (braces for the wave of Sentry hate heat) and her drive to defeat the son of Trixie Lulamoon, Starfall. The story starts off with Starfall arriving in Ponyville and causing havoc in a playful but ultimately dangerous ‘show’ not unlike how his mother used to do. The display leads to Starburst and her friends trying to capture Starfall, but he eludes them, ultimately outsmarting even Princess Twilight in order to escape largely unscathed. Thus does Starburst make it her job to find and put her new nemesis in jail.
There were some things that didn’t quite work out with this story. For example, the action sequences often seemed to stretch on into infinity, usually lengthened by annoying banter and pointless tangents. Borsuq made extensive use of exposition in all the worst ways, resorted to more than a few telly or repetitive lines and is obsessed with explaining everything, incluiding the things we don’t need to know about.
The one thing that I won’t be overly critical on is the frequent word choice mistakes. Borsuq often made small errors like using the wrong verb tense. At first I thought I was seeing typos, but as the story went on the mistakes were nearly a constant element of the writing, which leads me to believe that English isn’t Borsuq’s native language – these are the kinds of errors I saw often from foreign students back in my tutoring days. If that’s the case, then I can be forgiving of their presence, even if they proved an immense distraction from the story.
Speaking of the story, that’s the good part. Borsuq did a great job weaving the tale into something believable, fun and at times even exciting. The characters were interesting, the fights scenes well conceived, the magical theory and explanations creative and believable. I found very few flaws in the overall plot, and those I did encounter were little more than subjective nitpicks. Not only did Borsuq weave an interesting and believable tale, but he did so with characters that were interesting and endearing – all while staying true to their origins in kilala’s AU. I am thoroughly impressed.
This one’s a keeper, folks. Though the decisions made regarding how to write the story are questionable at best, the story itself is fun, interesting and all-around strong. If Borsuq can correct the English problems and learn to streamline the story away from so much exposition and tangents, this would be in my favorites.
Bookshelf: Pretty Good
Be Mine is one of those very direct stories that I wanted to read purely to satisfy my eternal love of romance stories. The premise is as simple as it is obvious: Twilight finds that somepony left her flowers, candy and a gold necklace, but has no idea who because Rainbow Dash didn’t bother writing her own name on the items. Determined to figure out what stallion gave her the gifts, Twilight promptly travels all over Ponyville asking every stallion (and a mare or two) if they were responsible, all while Rainbow Dash watches in frustration.
I can sum up this entire story in one word, two if you want to get into semantics: hamfisted. Right out the door, LightningBass94 hits us with a whole paragraph of exposition explaining – wait for it…
Why Twilight Sparkle opened her door.
Spoiler alert: she wanted to buy groceries before the shops closed early for Hearts and Hooves Day. I know, riveting. This is not how you catch your readers’ attention.
Anyway, the story moves on, only briefly showing a few conversations with the stallions Twilight meets (namely Big Mac, Caramel and Soarin), has lunch with Rainbow (unaware that Rainbow considered said lunch a ‘date’), and finally gives up when the day is done just for Rainbow to finally come clean. This leads to Twilight – who up ‘til now hasn’t so much as cast a second glance Rainbow’s way – suddenly being in love and thinking Rainbow Dash is the most beautiful mare in Ponyville.
The dialogue was weak, the emotions fell flat and the conclusion jumped straight from the revelation to sloppy tongue action. Making each character’s thinking be color-coded didn’t help matters much, furthering my belief that a writer shouldn’t use colored text until they know exactly what they’re doing. This is a romance that appears to exist purely for the sake of existing. As it stands, LightningBass94 needs to examine proper dialogue and emotional impact, cut down on the exposition, stop using colored text and maybe get some prereaders/editors (although the grammar was spot-on).
Bookshelf: Not Bad
I didn’t know what to expect with this one, but I’d never read a Mane-iac or Power Ponies story and this one reached a pretty high level of popularity, so I figured I’d give it a shot. The story reveals that the Mane-iac isn’t an insane villain at all, but instead is a rich and superintelligent mare who entered a life of crime specifically as a way to heighten the Power Ponies’ status and keep them heroes. Every time the fighting starts, she rigs things to make sure she’ll lose, and she then goes through the trouble of confessing to all her schemes, only to use a special chemical to erase their memories of her confession and resume the ‘mad supervillain’ role.
I had to sit back and think on this one for a bit before writing this, because something about it just didn’t jive with me. I love the ‘without villains there would be no heroes’ philosophy and, by extension, I love villains. Seeing as Mane-iac spends this story espousing the ‘being bad for the greater good’ ideal, I should love this story, but I don’t. I think I finally understand why:
Mane-iac doesn’t fit her role.
When the scene starts off, she’s bored. All her schemes fail – exactly as planned – and she takes no joy in that fact. In fact, she doesn’t seem to have much of anything in terms of emotion. Oh, she has one or two moments, an outburst here or there, but for the most part she’s talking almost like she’s reading right from a script. Granted, she has had this conversation dozens of times already, but I had this impression that she just wasn’t really into her confession for this story.
Which, when one thinks on it, may have been the whole point. Mane-iac does mention near the end that she’s been considering winning for a change (and it’s been made abundantly clear that the Power Ponies would never be able to stop her if she actually tried). Perhaps this whole story was meant to indicate that Mane-iac is on the verge of becoming a true villain rather than a pretender.
Still, I’m left with mixed feelings. I can’t decide whether the story was poorly developed or cleverly crafted. In either case, it failed to resonate with me, but still gets some credit both for a good attempt and the possibility that I’m just misinterpreting things.
Bookshelf: Worth It
Souvenir is one of those deceptive stories where the description gives you one idea and the story gives you something entirely different. I don’t mind this at all. If anything, I thought it was very clever of TinCan. What’s that? The cover art has nothing to do with the story?
Actually, when you really think about it, it does.
I’m not going to spoil the contents of this story, because that would destroy the impact. No, instead I will simply praise it, for it is a great example of showing things and hinting at possibilities rather than outright explaining everything that happens. There’s a lot of questions left behind, and in this instance that’s not a bad thing. TinCan leaves the reader wanting more and I wholeheartedly approve.
I loved this tale. Short, sweet (well, so to speak), interesting and even a bit thought-provoking, I highly recommend it.
Bookshelf: Why Haven’t You Read These Yet?
Stories for Next Week
The Pale Stallion by Yellow Sub Zero
Hidden Voices by Harmony Charmer
A Heart Encased in Stone by The Fan Without a Face
Amnesia: To Err by JLB
Unicorn Horns are Made of Candy by ocalhoun
Liked these reviews? Check out some others:
Paul's Monday Reviews II
Paul's Monday Reviews III
Paul's Monday Reviews IV
Paul's Monday Reviews V
Paul's Monday Reviews VI
Paul's Monday Reviews VII
Paul's Monday Reviews VIII
Paul's Monday Reviews IX
Paul's Monday Reviews X
Paul's Monday Reviews XI
The first round of reviews aren't up there, Asaran.
Doubt sounded like something I would enjoy at first, I'm a huge fan of murder mysteries and crossovers, but what you described isn't really my cup of tea.
So that's disappointing.
A good janpanese-esq MM that I would recommend would be The Heart of an Author by Oroboro. It's weird as Hell, but in a really good way.
Just like your stories, I'm very impressed with this review. While I haven't read the stories you have listed here, I can tell your opinion has been through studying the story and not some emotion "I like this story because of reasons" bull crap. While most of these stories don't stand out to me, I will be looking into a few because you gave them good or bad reviews and now I'm curious. Well done, you impress me around every turn.
*facebook like button*
Thanks for the review. As I've stated before, I completely agree. This is an old story, two years old, in fact. I hope you get a chance to read some of more recent material. You'll that I've improved significantly.
Waiting for your review of Unicorn Horns Are Made Of Candy. Loved that fic
I just had to read Souvenir to find out what this big twist is. Cuz when someone says something's too important to be spoiled, it's usually just hype. and... wow, that was actually really great.
3062719
Actually, no, I just decided to go back 10 sessions, which will be the case every Monday. Precisely as planned.
3063422
Well, I do try.
3063588
So be it, I'll give you another go.
...
That looks wrong compared to how it sounded in my head.
3063608
Depends on whether it's 'stupid' funny or not. I don't like stupid funny.
3063781
Good to know I might actually have an idea of what I'm talking about.