Cube
By Dev Conz

Reviewed by Rinnaul

Kinda tired, doing some more random short fics before getting back to the clop or the epic-length ones.

Anyway, I think this is a conceptual crossover with a thriller film that I vaguely recall seeing advertizing for. It’s been incomplete and idle for months, with only one chapter up.

Commentary and Review combined due to brevity.

The cast selection here seems pretty random: Twilight Sparkle, Apple Bloom, Soarin, Fancy Pants, and Octavia. I’m going to go ahead and guess we’re just using ponies who parallel characters from the movie.

However, upon beginning the story itself, our viewpoint character seems to be Vinyl Scratch, and immediately the writing style feels awkward. First line is a good example.

Soreness was the first thing to come into the mare’s mind as she was birthed back into the realm of consciousness and actuality.

First, it’s in passive voice. Second, it comes off as kind of pretentious with the raided-a-thesaurus word choices. Both of these issues continue to be present for the entire story. It’s pretty consistently bland as well, serving as an excellent example that beige prose can’t be fixed by just reaching for a thesaurus.

Setting her azure veil over the handle, she twisted it clockwise twice until it gave way to a click.

Okay, as a general rule, once you find yourself using “azure” in place of “blue”, it’s time to put down the thesaurus and step away, barring writing a scene from Rarity’s point of view or something—she’s both melodramatic enough to use it in an effort to be poetic, and concerned enough about design and color choices to use it intentionally to refer to specific shade of blue. I don’t see Vinyl using it at all.

As we meet the second prisoner of this weird cube place, it unfortunately starts to look like we’re going to have an Idiot Plot.

I don’t mean this as an insult, but instead, it refers to a plot that requires one or more characters to do stupid things to force the plot along. In this case, the problem is a failure to communicate (an apparently known) danger. Why would the character be so vague about her warning? Why not insist on its importance?

Maybe I missed something, but this just feels like it’s forcing things.

The story comes across as beige despite it’s large vocabulary because the constant passive voice leaves it without any sense of action. The whole thing reads like a list of events rather than something that’s actually happening

Big words aren’t always the best choice.

Vary your sentence structure a bit more. You have almost no simple sentences throughout the entire piece.

While nothing’s wrong with the concept per se, the style and structure don’t serve the premise well, making the entire story awkward and dull. It doesn't earn its rating through numerous and varied errors or huge mistakes, but a chronic handful of basic problems.

Needs Work. Though not as much as many others.