Well howdly doodly again, neighborinos!

Alright no, I can’t Flanderize this review. It would mean being too agreeable and nice. On the chopping block for today, a fic that might as well scalp your emotions like a savage.

More on that later. Let's hop into the unprecedented third review of the day!

Alrighty then, let’s take a looksie at what this story is dishing out today! I’m not entirely sure, but I think our friend Inquisitor is from the Royal Guard or some prestigious reviewing authority. I say we scrutinize this fic EXTRA hard and make him feel a taste of his own medicine!

I bet he just cackled happily at that. Anyhoo, let’s get our butcher block out and start hacking apart this fic!

Here’s a short synopsis:

A griffin warrior named Osvald awakens in a pony home, injured and feeling like a prisoner. A mare named Lemon Drizzle is his caretaker, and he slowly begins to realize that he is not in captivity, but is being cared for by the ponies.

As the story progresses, more and more details about the circumstances prior to Osvald’s awakening come to light, and more and more is slowly revealed about a massive plot of subterfuge surrounding griffin/pony relations. It all comes to a head when a number of the ponies in the town kidnap one of their own foals and uses her as bait to lure Osvald into a trap. Osvald manages to clear his name with the elder pony of the town, who acts as the authority figure, but the town ponies are still a danger to him and the mare who is caring for him.

In the end, Osvald leaves the village and returns to find that his entire homeland has been razed by the pony military forces. He swears revenge just as the camera fades away, leaving us to ponder what will become of him.

Sounds a little familiar, doesn’t it? Settlers upsetting the natives? Death because of misunderstandings and anger? The natives getting the short end of the deal?

Did you mean the story of the American West?

Exactly. This story puts a few interesting spins on the story of basically all native peoples who encountered the Europeans at some point in the last seven hundred years.

While there are several things left vague, some purposefully and some not so much, it’s not a huge problem. Setting up a compelling all-OC story in just twelve-thousand words is hard to do, and it gets done here well. The fic doesn’t trip up its pacing in the exposition, instead starting in the middle of the rising action and sprinkling bits of exposition in all throughout the story.

All in all, the plot of this fic is quite immersive. It tells you just enough, and then lets your mind fill in the blanks. Also, that ending to the fic is just heartbreaking. A tragedy indeed.

Grammar— As I would expect from someone of Inquisitor’s prestige, I cannot find any problems with the grammar. Nothing else needed to be said here.

Dialogue— The dialogue has some quite powerful moments, particularly the gap of cultures shown between Osvald and Lemon Drizzle. (more on that later)

When I read dialogue, I try to assign a voice for the character and mentally read their lines in that voice. The mark of good dialogue is maintaining that character’s tone throughout in a way that lets me keep track of the lines through their voices. This fic shows all of those hallmarks, with Lemon Drizzle’s calm, motherly tone and Osvald’s partial fluency in pony languages. Excellent crafting of the dialogue.

Worldbuilding— This fic has an interesting take on worldbuilding. We start the fic off with next to none for a considerable amount of time, and then things are very slowly and methodically revealed as the story progresses. At times things seemed a bit vague, but the world was fleshed out very effectively.

Pacing— The pacing is generally slow, but it balances nicely with the points of action and rest. It was executed well.

Point of View— The story is told by Osvald in the third person limited perspective. It effective maintains this viewpoint throughout the fic.

Show/Tell— As with the pacing, a nice balance was maintained between the showing and telling language.

And here’s the category that I consider the most important of all: Characterization. In my opinion, this story displays some good characterization, but not quite the best ever seen. Let’s take a look at Osvald.

Careful. Calculated. Stonefaced.

Warrior.

All good tropes for a character of his archetype to possess, but there’s not really much variation from that. He has few quirks. He always seems to talk as if he is a wise shaman, never foolish in any sort of engagement. He doesn’t have many visible flaws, and this is a result of the relative shortness of the story itself.

Or is it? A lot can happen in twelve thousand words, and a lot of things can be revealed. I’m sure more would have come out should this fic have become a long epic, but perhaps this was all Osvald was ever intended to be. He’s a good character, don’t get me wrong. He is written well, behaves well and works well for his role, but there isn’t a lot of variation or originality put onto the base of his archetype.

The same for Lemon Drizzle and the rest of the ponies in the story. They are all characterized well enough, but there aren’t lot of variations on their base archetypes to go off of.

However, there are a lot of good little character moments contained within. How Osvald feels disdain for so many aspects of pony culture that he does not understand. The reasoning behind why Lemon Drizzle took it upon herself to help the griffin, and many others make for a memorable work of fiction indeed.

In the world of ponyfics this is quite original content. Rarely are topics like the suppression of native populations addressed, and even more rarely are they handled well. This story draws a lot of inspiration from the American West and how Native Americans were forced into assimilation with more European styles of life. In al, it is a masterful idea that captures both sides of the war well, and how both sides had distorted views that led to many of the conflicts that took place.

Good marks for originality.

And finally, how much did this fic resonate with me.

A lot, actually. The story is memorable for the struggles between not just characters but entire cultures at large. And being a tragedy, it has the advantage of pulling the rg out from under the reader at the end and leaving their emotions in a wreck if the rest of the story leading up to it was done properly.

And to be honest, I did not pay attention to the tragedy tag going in, so I really got floored by the ending. As Osvald finally broke down, I got a little misty-eyed. I really felt for him, and the memory of that will persist.

High marks for Impact.

To close, Pride is a story of a griffin’s first true encounter with pony culture, and how it indirectly destroyed the life he knew and loved. It masterfully carries the reader through the twists and turns of the plot, eventually dumping them out on the ground and kicking them in the stomach.

But if you saw that tragedy tag and read anyway, that was what you wanted. Here are my final grades.

Plot: Woven well and flows nicely 19/20
Mechanics: The worldbuilding was a bit vague occasionally, but otherwise flawless19/20
Characterization: Strong characterization only weakened by lack of variation from archetypes. 17/20
Originality: At times feels like a ponified history book, but avoids falling into that nicely.17/20
Impact: Left me reeling and feeling. Great stuff.18/20

Thanks to you, Inquisitor M, for submitting your story to the Pleasant Commentator and Review Group! Now that your fic got reviewed, START REVIEWING MORE.

See you all next time!

Thanks, Jack!

The reason I specifically wanted to submit this story to the group is that it had such a staggeringly polarised reception. PresentPerfect gave it a Highly reccomended, which is hard enough to attain on the best of days, and rated it as his 2nd place story in the Outside insight competition. it then went on to not even place among the finalists.

When asked, one of the bits of responses I got was 'it felt like a story that was cut into pieces and then reassembled at random. The characters are well realized, but the narrative arc is in tatters.' That's a pretty wide margin. Another thing that got mentioned was 'There is too much going on in this story.' It's a difficult thing to make sense of feedback like that when other people seemed to put it together just fine.

It seems to me that, since I tax the empathetic capacity of the reader more than most, I get very polar responses based on whether they can keep up: those that really struggle seem to find it an indecipherable mess, while those that manage (even if only just) find it much more rewarding than the average fanfic for exactly that reason. If it's just a limited audience thing, I'm fine with that, but the question is always about how to distinguish that from just a poorly constructed work. This story was rushed for a competition deadline, after all.

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