CCC: cleverpun's Critique Corner #16 — So You've Just Slept With Your Best Friend · 12:42am Jan 21st, 2016
Title: So You've Just Slept With Your Best Friend
Author: Nyronus
Found via: Probably the featured box
Short summary: Sunset wakes up and finds Twilight naked in her bed. She recalls the previous night, particularly the beer. She needs to come to terms with her feelings and find a way to discuss the event with Twilight. Awkwardness/drama ensues.
The Title/Description: The title is inaccurate: Twilight and Sunset aren’t really best friends before the story opens. It feels like the title is a holdover from when the story was a Comedy. The “with” also should not be capitalized.
The description does a good job of hinting at Sunset’s feelings throughout the story, but otherwise feels a bit generic.
Genre(s): Romance, Melodrama, The-Morning-After Story
What does this story do well?: The first thing that drew me to the fic was the lack of a Comedy tag. Stories about this particular topic often find their way into the featured box based on goofy, shallow humor. This story not only treats the subject matter seriously, but it does so in a way that maintains some verisimilitude. The awkwardness of Sunset’s and Twilight’s initial interactions feels real, and Sunset Shimmer’s guilt feels believable.
Sunset’s character is also well-defined. Her internal narrative and her reactions to Twilight gives a good sense of her personality in a short space of time. I particularly liked the idea that Sunset’s guilt over sleeping with Twilight stems from her guilt over her previous actions in the first movie. It’s spelled out by Twilight in-story, but it makes sense.
Finally, the story handles mood well. I already mentioned the palpable awkwardness above, but it extends to other moods as well. Sunset’s guilt and uncertainty and even happiness are all portrayed well. The story accomplishes this mostly with a combination of flowery imagery and internal narrative, and it works well.
Where could this story improve?: This story’s most obvious problem is its grammar missteps and awkward sentence construction. Not only does it make the “hyphens instead of dashes” mistake, it also uses them inconsistently (some dashes have spaces, some don’t, etc.). It also punctuates interruptions incorrectly, with dashes instead of commas.
These mechanical things aren’t a big deal in and of themselves, but there’s also a large number of awkwardly constructed sentences. Some examples;
Sunset remembered something that that pink princess Celestia had found by the podunk village had taught her.
Sunset suddenly remember the night before, when Twilight had been in the same position, exposed to Sunset, vulnerable and
-threw the open bathrobe closed as quick as she could.
There’s also a lot of annoying textual gimmicks like excessive italics, excessive periods, and small text used to convey the characters’ moods and speech patterns. Combined with the lack of dialogue markers, the story can be needlessly difficult to follow.
While I complimented Sunset’s character above, Twilight character, by contrast, feels very bland. Her main points of characterization are all melodramatic outbursts that don’t really fit her. Oddly, she gets more solid characterization in Sunset’s muddled flashbacks. Sunset notes Twilight’s nervousness and how strange it is for her to bring beer over, among other details. It’s unfortunate that flashback Twilight doesn’t appear in the story proper, because then the contrast would’ve looked more deliberate.
Twilight’s characterization is a symptom of the story’s other major problem; it escalates quickly. This is an emotional situation to be sure, but the characters reactions often feel pushed along by the plot. Sunset goes from calmly thinking in her kitchen to breaking a plate. Twilight goes from calm to making corny and purple declarations of love. There’s a lot of zero-to-tears and crying and yelling in this fic, and it doesn’t have the pacing needed to fit the characters.
In a single sentence: A relatively grounded story that becomes melodrama thanks to its pacing.
Verdict: No vote. This story is one of those that has a prexisting audience: people who ship SunLight and like relationship melodrama. It also covers a very common, dare I say, cliched scenario. Since I fall outside of that audience, I didn’t have any strong feelings about the fic. It has some nice ideas, but they probably won’t be enough for you if you don’t like the genre/pairing/scenario already.
