Vertigo Reviews: A Pie Without Filling, Cheating on your Waifu, How We Found Love, Twilight Sparkle Eats Exactly Two Bananas, and Skystar

Hello, dear reader! It’s time for more reviews—five this week. Sadly, none of the requested fics that I’d asked for are involved today due to a slight mishap with my schedule. Those will be amended for on either Monday or Tuesday. Starting things off is a story I had intended to get to last week, but sadly didn’t, is A Pie Without Filling by  Amethyst_Dawn.

Pinkie comes home after a visit to an old friend, but something seems to be bothering her. Something has wounded her, and Cheese wants to know what.

But he never could have prepared himself for what he was about to hear.

This story was a gift to a user by the name of Summer Dancer. I’m familiar with her, having both chatted with her and reviewed a story of hers that was in a blog that no longer exists because I’m a big brained genius. That said, this is a story I’ve been meaning to get to. In the way of a premise, this is about as “Sad Pinkie Pie” fic-like as you can get without using cover art of Pinkie crying. Lucky for us, Amethyst Dawn is nothing if not a completionist and the cover art is of Pinkie with her mane flat and her face buried between her legs. Let’s get on with the story though!

This story centers on Pinkie Pie and Cheese Sandwich. The former comes home from a supposed party for Nurse Redheart and is sad. Cheese wonders why and it’s revealed something is wrong with Pinkie. It wasn’t what I expected and while it caught me a bit off guard, I can’t quite say it saddened me.

You see: Pinkie reveals that she didn’t go to a party for Redheart, but rather went to an appointment. As it turns out, she can’t have kids. This is something that I rarely seen done and I give credit to the author for tackling. And before I continue: I want to say that I’m not a fan of kids. I have very little patience for them. That isn’t to say I hate them, but I hope to never have any as I can’t see myself as a parent.

This might attribute to my reasoning for not feeling the gut-punch I expected (which was that Pinkie had cancer), but I also think it may be because I’m a bit worn out as I type this (I did the reviews out of order because I always do things out of order). Nevertheless, I will say that this also didn’t affect my enjoyment of the story—in fact, it wouldn’t have mattered given the emotional strength between both Cheese and Pinkie is so well handled. Nice work on that, Amethyst.

Moving on, this story is  very short, coming in at a mere 1,309 words, Surprisingly, given the topic at hand, it’s quite well paced, managing to tell a story that, surprisingly, feels complete in spite of how much build up I’m used to emotional stories requiring. The characterization of both Cheese and Pinkie is really well handled too.

On the grammar side of things, I didn’t spot any errors. Good job!

Overall, this is a well handled story about a topic that I seldom seen done. Perhaps you’ll be emotionally impacted by it though.

Final Score: B+

Moving in, our second story is Cheating on your Waifu by Czar_Yoshi. Fun fact about this story, I listened to it via FiMFiction's text-to-speech reader as I’d always been curious about how it’d be. In the end, I had quite a bit of fun. Before anyone gets on my case that I didn’t experience the story properly though: I went back and read it myself. Both times I came to the same conclusion: this story is really good.

Spike has a Rarity plushie he's cherished all year. Then, he gets a Starlight plushie for Hearth's Warming…

At face value, this story is incredibly silly. Shock of all shocks, it is. Coming in at 3,838 words, this is pretty much everything I could have fathomed it’d be from when I first saw the story’s short description and to when I began reading it for myself.

Classified with the Romance, Comedy, and Drama tags (the third of which I will get to in a little while), the story is centered purely on Spike and his adventures during Hearth’s Warming and an ensuing party that’s held at Twilight’s castle. With the author’s skillful use of prose and very humorous use of the Starlight plushie and its never-changing stare, this is by far and away one of the most lively comedies I’ve read in quite some time—if not ever in my time on this website.

The characterization of show’s main cast is brilliantly handled; their interactions feeling real and genuine. However, it's Spike’s dialogue—along with the descriptions of his actions—where the story truly shines. From his adorable interactions with his plushies to hs “exchanges” with them, I can't think of a story that's made me love Spike as a character more than this one.

Seriously, this story made him so adorable. Kudos, Czar.

Pacing wise, Cheating on your Waifu wastes no time in cheating its way to your heart; the adorable actions, descriptives, and overall adorableness coming on heavy and hard and skillfully staying that way until it ends. Seriously, despite how often this story can get wordy, it seriously manages to never feel like it slows down. It flows remarkably well.

Grammatically speaking, I noticed no errors. Good job!

My one and only true grievance with the story is that it’s classified as a drama. While I kind of understand it, given the conflict that Spike (briefly) has towards the end, nothing about the vast majority of the story really stood out to me that was dramatic. Ultimately, it was more a pure blood romantic comedy. One can argue that it was the text-to-speech voice ruining the drama, but the second time around made it even less dramatic. While none of this broke the story for me, it’s an aspect that really stuck out to me and never left my mind.

Overall, Cheating on your Waifu is an extremely enjoyable story. From start to finish, it’s entertaining, funny, and above all else: lively. I cannot recommend this story enough. Definitely check it out.

Final Score: A+

Our third story is How We Found Love by RuinQueenofOblivion. This was a story I added in at the very last second as I wanted the number of stories I reviewed to be seven, which is one of my lucky numbers.

When Scootaloo admits to her aunts that she has a crush on one of her classmates, she isn't sure about whether or not she should tell them. So her aunt Holiday tells her the story of how the two of them first met and fell in love.

To say that our story is very simplistic in its premise would be an understatement. This story is simplicity given a literary form and while some may see that as strike against the story, I think it actually works in its favor. This story is a mere 2,900 words and it uses them fairly well. It is, as it states, centered on Scootaloo’s aunts and follows the earliest point in their relationship, starting with when they first meet and ending during their first date.

As I stated in my last review blog, I’m not a fan of romance stories. I do have a few that I enjoy, but those are exceptions to the rule. Despite that, I went in without any bias towards that genre and I have to admit it was fairly good. Working in the story’s favor is the handling of Holiday and Lofty’s relationship. It’s appropriately awkward and cutesy; never quite leaning too far in either direction to where it feels uncomfortable to read due to a lack of chemistry or feeling schmaltzy.

Speaking of chemistry, I will give props to the author for the interaction between the two feeling natural and real. Complementing this is the story’s pacing; the smooth flow of it the moments between Holiday and Lofty being nicely strung together to give us a nice showcasing of how the two met and creating an appropriately cute picture. Overall, this is easily the story’s biggest strength, her ability to make the short length of the story work in favor of a relationship that I feel would normally take a longer story to really develop.

That said, this also ends up being the story’s greatest weakness.

I’ve said it before and I will say it for each review since I know that not everyone reads these blogs religiously: I do not allow subjective views to affect the overall score of whatever story I review. That isn’t to say that I believe everything that I say to be objective, that’s silly, but I do ignore things like, “I feel this story would have been better with X”. This story is no different, but I want to mention one of those feelings as the way this story is told, while not bad, does suffer from something that irked me.

Given this story’s short length suffers the most—which I feel was largely done given that this story is merely focused on how Holiday and Lofty met—we don’t quite get much time to exactly see the relationship between the two blossom. Rather, we’re told quite a bit about how the two continued to meet each other and so on. Now, that isn’t to say that this is necessarily bad. Given that the story is a recount from Holiday not long before dinnertime, it’s only natural it’d be more abridged.

The problem is that the way the story is told, which doesn’t include narration from Holiday herself and instead a blankslate narrator, it feels like we’re missing a bit of heart that could’ve elevated an already fairly solid story to something great.

Now, granted, the story’s flow might’ve been a tad wonkier and for all I know: my vision of how the story would’ve been told could’ve ended up much less good. However, it was a detail that I found myself wishing was different. I digress though, I can’t speak for others and this is merely my opinion.

One other issue with the story is it’s grammar. This is something I’ve criticized in the now deleted reviews for the author and if you never read those: there are run-on sentences with and unnecessary commas. I’m someone who can turn a blind eye to these issues and while they did make some sentences feel very odd, they didn’t take me out of the story (save for maybe one or two). Beyond the run-ons however, I didn’t notice any spelling errors.

Despite a few minor hiccups and aspects I’d suggest changing, How We Found Love is cutesy, harmless fluff. If you’re a fan of that type of story and you haven’t read this story, I recommend it. There are those “aww” moments and, while I didn’t mention it before, there are a few moments where I chuckled. Now if you aren’t a fan of these kinds of stories, then I don’t think I need to say that you likely won’t enjoy this one. Those in-between, I leave that entirely up to you, but I’ll argue that it’s short.

Final Score: B+

Our fourth story is Twilight Sparkle Eats Exactly Two Bananas by the ever so awesome Majin Syeekoh.

Twilight Sparkle once heard an old wives' tale that warned against eating two bananas.

Twilight Sparkle is going to prove that wrong by eating exactly two bananas.

Or, at least she thinks she is.

This is a story by Majin Syeekoh and the description, premise, wording, syntax, and everything else related to grammar and literacy exudes that very fact.

This story centers on Twilight eating two bananas. Then Majin Syeekoh happens.

Everything about this story works beautifully.

Read it.

Final Score: A++

Trekking onward, we come to our fifth and final story: Skystar by Crystalbreeze… oh boy. Before I start, let me say that I try my absolute best to be as positive as I can. I try to always convey the most positive aspects of a story as to not demoralize an author; whatever criticism I have I tend to give in a concise and cohesive manner. I believe that everyone can write as it’s a part of human nature to tell stories. Whether or not we opt to pursue careers as authors is entirely on us. So Crystalbreeze, if you want to be one, I wish you the best of luck. That said, I’m going to give you criticism that may seem harsh now, but I promise you isn’t intended to be “mean”.

Thanks to his job, Anon E. Mouse became tired and frustrated. His usual life was a living nightmare. He needed some kind of therapy which can make him calm and relaxed. But he didn't need a therapy. The only thing that he needed was a pet. A cute, smart, beautiful and lovable pet.

In the petshop he couldn't choose, beacuse there was many kind of pet. Parrots, lizards, fish etc. Under the tour in the petshop he suddenly looked at an interesting aquarium and its content. In that aquarium he found the perfect pet. A tiny seapony called Princess Skystar.

There are many two major things I dislike about this description and one major thing I dislike about its premise. Let’s start with the description, I’ve personally never been a fan of the “Anon” character or “Anon-a-Miss”. Now, granted, “Anon E. Mouse” isn’t its own separate beast, it’s merely a play on “anonymous” to give the character a full name. It’s been used before and it doesn’t change my grievances with the Anon character. While it can be done well, I find it to be very rare.

Another issue, and a significantly bigger one, comes in the form of the wording. Now, it is worth mentioning that the author is Hungarian—as stated in his short bio. Fine, I understand that not everybody speaks English. As such, I’ll give the tiniest bit of leeway for the fact this description has more grammatical errors than I care to count (let alone the entire story which has more errors than I likely have blood cells).

This doesn’t excuse the fact that FiMFiction has plenty of groups dedicated to finding an editor.

Looking at the second sentence, we are told that Anon needs some kind of therapy. In the following sentence, we’re told he doesn’t need “a therapy”. If I go up to you to pitch a story to you, I would expect you to laugh me out of the country for saying something like that. While I won’t laugh at the author, this is an absolutely terrible way to put a story onto the internet. Proper grammar is key when showing off a story to the world, especially on the internet. While I understand English may not be the author’s native language, it’s not a good idea to forgo having a native speaker of the language look over your story.

As for the premise, it’s My Little Dashie with Princess Skystar. One can argue that stories about people getting characters from My Little Pony to be nothing new. This is true to an extent, but a miserable person getting a character from the show comes across as feeling like My Little Dashie so much that I can almost sense it resting its hand on my shoulder whispering songs of love to me.

Let’s get on with the actual story though. Our main character is Anon E. Mouse and his personality traits begin and end with him being a blank slate for us to put ourselves into. One can be forgiven for forgetting he’s even a character. Admittedly, Anon isn’t exactly a compelling character due to him having no established traits. He is, at his heart, Anon. For more experienced writers, they can craft someone very interesting out of Anon by using him as an OC with name recognition to back up familiarity. For a novice author, they can hope to ride off of that name recognition to overshadow how poorly they write OCs.

This story falls somewhere in between those two.

To the author’s credit, their take on Anon isn’t an unlikable swine. On the flip side of things, he really has nothing to him in the way of personality traits. He’s miserable at his job and buys a pet. That’s about it. I can’t quite say that I felt anything for him. Sure, he loves his pet magical princess, but many others also love their pets.

This is a serious issue I see with many novice authors and, admittedly, I myself am also guilty of it. When writing OCs, it’s best to get the reader connected with them. When writing fanfiction, we already have a connection of some sort with the characters. Most of the users already love Twilight Sparkle, Rainbow Dash, and the other main characters. It’s likely why we’re on this website. When we see them going on adventures, we already feel an attachment to them because we love them.

A character like Anon doesn’t have that benefit; he’s a blank slate that varies from writer to writer because his gimmick is that he’s meant to be us. We’re meant to put ourselves in his shoes. It’s why his stories are generally told with a second-person perspective in mind. This story is told in the third-person and as such, we need to follow him and not put ourselves in his shoes.

With this author, we’re stuck following a character who’s as lifeless as the supporting cast of World War Z.

On the brighter side, Princess Skystar is the shining star of the story. Her actions are minimalistic, yet properly adorable. She is, by far and away, the life blood to a story that was in otherwise dire need of some semblance of joy. I’ll give the author credit for doing well in this regard. Given that Skystar lacks dialogue throughout the story, the fact they could pull this aspect off is quite a surprise. Good job.

The only other character is a pet store owner named Dan. He’s not really in the story, but he’s the only other named character and he doesn’t amount to much. Nonetheless, he had more to him than Anon and it’s a disappointment this wasn’t his story.

Moving on, the story is divided into two chapters. The first centers on Anon buying Skystar and the second takes place at Anon’s house. The former is 1,270 words and the latter comes in at 940 words. Both feel roughly the same in the way of length and I blame that largely on the latter devoting far too much time to describing Anon’s house when we never see anything happen in them. Sure, him having a TV is nice: why not have Skystar see something on television? I would’ve personally put on Zodiac so she could see something wickedly dark and intense and getting terrified. That might’ve lead to something funny in this story that’s tagged as being a comedy.

Anyways, one last thing of note about the second chapter is it does have a fairly adorable scene towards the end where Anon plays with Skystar. It’s cute, wholesome, and is easily the best scene in this entire story. It’s also the only one that really feels like it has any sort of substance to this 2,270 word long story. This makes the entire story feel like a chore to go through given the lack of any sense of action, movement, or interaction with the environment—save for Skystar leaping out of her aquarium to go onto Anon’s hand I’ll get into this in a little. Overall though, this story is so hollow in the way of any actual content and actions that I feel if I tap my laptop’s screen, it’ll shatter.

Pacing wise, this story has no breaks. Given that there’s no actual interaction beyond a few moments with Skystar and Anon, we’re stuck with narration that serves as nothing more than a means to get Anon from Point A to Point B. Normally, I’d see narration as a way to provide humor with a description that exaggerates something or a way to give us insight into a characters emotions. But I guess such a concept requires too much effort and this story is more keen on trying to use fluff to assist the story in masquerading like it’s No Man’s Sky.

In the way of characterization, there’s more to Anon E. Mouse than was stated earlier. His evolution—his supposed “character arc”—is given strictly through narration and him gushing over Princess Skystar when he sees her. As the narrator puts it:

Some seconds later the creature showed herself. A beautiful little mermaid creature appeared in front of him, whose head looked like a horse's head and the half of her body looked like a horse's body, but the other parts of her body looked like a fish's body. She was yellow with white blue name and tail and dark blue eyes. Her face was adorable. She was a little bit afraid, but she looked like brave. In her name he could see a pink thing, looked like a flower. And why did Anon know that she is female? Because her face looked like a female horse's face. She slowly swam to Anon's index finger and touched the tank's wall with one of her tiny hooves. As she looked at Anon, he knew that she'll be the perfect pet for him. They just looked at each other and then...

They both fell in love.

This scene comes roughly a third of the way through the first chapter and allows me to extrapolate that the “romance” tag this story sports is because Anon desires to make an army of aquatic centaurs so he can overthrow Arthur Curry.

Such a character arc should be celebrated as the most revolutionary arc in the history of literature not seen since the likes of MacBeth and Hamlet. Truly this is writing meant to be celebrated until the end of time.

Beyond that, the only other character arc of note is Princess Skystar and she has none beyond acting cute. This is arguably better than anything Anon ever does in his miserable existence in this story.

In the way of grammar, this story is so monumentally atrocious that the only way to give an example to showcase would require me to copy and paste the entire story. I get that this author’s Hungarian, but I must reinforce what I said earlier: that is not an excuse. If your native language isn’t English and you’re posting to a site that is in English, get an editor!

Normally, this is where I’d end the review. However, there’s a massive plot hole in this story has its own gravitational pull. It is as follows:

But when she landed, she wasn't a seapony anymore. She became a yellow pony with the same mane and tail and eyes, but she had wings on her back and blue slippers on her hooves.

"So what do you think Anon?" Asked Dan.

"This is the most awesome thing in my life..."

As Skystar heard this, she smiled.

"....and in this form she can use magic?"

"Nope. In this world the magic doesn't excist."

"Well, okay she'll be fine without magic. Will you?"

Skystar nodded and showed her cute face again. As Anon saw it, he caressed her little chin.

Beyond the grammar making me want to scream, the mentioning that Skystar isn’t from this world and cannot use her magic begs the question of how she got to this world in the first place. Or as to why she seems to content with existing in this world when she’s clearly not at home with her friends and family. If you aren’t going to explain why this happened—or simply not have humans be the norm in the world of Equestria—it’s best if you just flatout don’t mention such things. Some may be irked by it, but in my eyes, having it not get mentioned is better.

Overall, I need some kind of therapy. Only I don’t need a therapy. I need a drink.

Final Score: F

And thus ends this week’s story reviews! Until either Monday or Tuesday, I hope my criticism was helpful to all and I hope the others enjoyed!