Elements of Honor
By SpitFlame

Reviewed by Asilin

So whee! Time for another fly by review! Or something like that. One last review before buckling down to finish a rewrite, doing this year’s NaNoWriMo, and retail holiday season.

Today’s offering combines a game I’ve been semi-eyeing with our esteemed pony world. Dishonored is a stealth action game where you play as a bodyguard who is forced to become an assassin in part to clear his name. Can’t go into too much more detail since I haven’t actually played it, but it’s supposed to be pretty fun and fairly open-ended in choice and narration.

So we’ve got a dystopian dark stealth story and MLP. Let’s see how well they combine!

Hey, you got your grim assassin game in my ponies! Well, you got your ponies in my grim assassin game! Hi, Rinnaul here. Asilin’s letting me spruce up her review with my usual image-based hilarity, so I thought I’d go ahead and add some commentary as well.

Pretty standard “oh no we have all the problems” opening. Not bad, but it’s severely lacking urgency. If your reporters are supposed to be talking over one another, then you need to show it. That means dropping the tags and just letting the dialogue stand. Is it really important to know that a mare cried this line, or a stallion that? Also, beware repeated saidisms. You used “cried” three times in a row.

Wait. We have magical issues of immense proportions (yes, I realize that these are apparently a regular occurrence on the show) and Celestia is all zen and tea?

I can understand a calm façade, but I would expect the ruler of a kingdom to be trying to do more research at home even as she’s sent investigatory teams out. And why is Twilight only just now seemingly finding out about all of this? And you’re going to send out guards to reassure the crowds after their princess has fled from them?

Yeah, think about that one. What would you imagine the reaction to be if the President of the United States fled from the podium during a crisis and left Secret Service agents to control the crowd?

Time out! Just time out. This is the first in your Dishonored series, right? Or what will be a series, yeah? Why are you building a backstory for a time they would have met before? It serves no practical purpose. Granted, it can give you a line for distrust, but given the current scenario, why do you need extra? A strange looking creature shows up during a time of strange happenings and you need further reason for the natives to distrust him? Further, the presentation of this information is completely out of nowhere. Like literally. You go from her thinking about her friends to “oh hey, remember that guy who tried to kill us?” And you never connect it to the current scenario. Why is she thinking about him anyway? What reminds her of him in the current situation? Was the previous situation similar? By introducing this backstory, you’ve now introduced a ton of questions. Since you don’t have a previous story to actually reference, you have to start building these connections quickly.

And POV jump to our assassin. Who’s…remembering his previous time in Equestria. Again. Why? What is bringing these thoughts up? And who’s this Outsider? Is this from the game or something for the story specifically?

Back to Equestria, and now Celestia’s enraged? Her kingdom is under threat, but she’s mad over a single guy returning? Threat to her life or no, this really makes it seem like her priorities are a bit skewed.

Wait, he really expects that line to work? “Stop it because this is the present, not the past?”

…why did you let that work? *headdesk*

And we’re going with “I’m sorry, I’m totally not going to kill you this time, and I’m not lying”? That’s the worst way you can possibly present a case. Okay, maybe acting like everybody is stupid for not believing you is the worst possible way.

At least Celestia isn’t buying it right off.

I keep imagining Deadpool in this situation instead of Corvo. You know, the ponies are facing him down, and he’s just like “Look, what happened last time was totally different. I haven’t done a single thing since I got here! What? This? This is ketchup. A lot of ketchup. Spilled it everywhere over by that hedge you don’t need to look behind.”

The dialogue, particularly his, is very stilted. And not just in a “I speak more formally” kind of way. This feels more like “I don’t know the language”. With a bit of Shakespearean declaration thrown in for good measure.

“Stood midmost”? What?

“Red-yellow sun”? “Black-shadowed corners”? You are trying way too hard here.

Why does Twilight trust him? No, seriously. “He seems truthful doesn’t” cut it. This is the man who tried to kill her. Why is she relaxing around him?

Wait, was it a few months or a year ago that he showed up? You need to keep your own timeline straight.

And more of the same, only more characters! Why keep having the reactions if you’re just going to blow them off?

Skimming at this point. But…”vision turned to nightshade”? Why can’t you just use simple descriptions?

When she read that line to me, I thought Vision and Nightshade were the names a couple edgy OC ponies, and I was prepared to mock that. I don’t know what to say about this.

This story is rough. Not going to lie. The main plot is being kept at bay to focus on the horrible, horrible Corvo who… isn’t so horrible? That’s what the reactions keep telling me. It’s all “he tried to kill us!” in one moment, only to switch to “well, he might be trustworthy enough” and “we should become friends”. Granted, I only read the first few chapters, but those are the key moments to hook your reader.

And that’s a big thing this story is missing: a decent hook. Your first chapter should have a good solid hook: some problem, an interesting character, effective world building that leads to your main conflict. Something that gives us a taste of the world and what’s to come. The story wastes all of the openings. Problem/conflict? We’re given it, but we run away and go drink tea. That tells me that your problem isn’t an issue. Interesting characters? Well, we have two who are drinking tea, and one who’s trying so hard to be dark and mysterious that he falls flat.

Then the next chapters focus on basically winning everybody over. While it’s presented as being “reluctant”, there’s still the fact that the two most powerful characters of the setting are willing to take his word after one night of conversation. It’s highly unrealistic, particularly since Corvo really just kept repeating himself, and continues to repeat himself, on this topic. Repeating “I’m sorry, I’ve changed” doesn’t make for an effective argument. If anything, it should put people more on guard because it proves nothing and merely reveals the fact that he’s desperate.

On top of all of that, the writing itself is rough. The descriptions suffer from purple prose, with elaborate, over the top descriptions like “red-yellow” and “black-darkened”. Plus there’s quite a bit of what I’ve been told is called “lavender unicorn syndrome” on this site. You literally call Twilight a lavender equine in several locations.

Then there’s the fact that the language itself seems to be striving for something more formal and archaic than can really be supported. Words like “wroth” make an appearance, and the speech patterns feel more like being grand pronouncements than actual conversations, especially when Corvo’s involved. This all lends to the story a stilted, unnatural feel that makes reading very difficult.

Also, why are you using wroth at all? It’s a highly archaic word that you could easily replace with wrathful. But if you must use it, then please note that it is an adjective on its own and cannot be converted to an adverb. Wrothly is not a word.

Asilin tells me the word “wroth” came up bizarrely often.

Dialogue tagging is an issue. There a number of points where said or some other saidism is used multiple times in a row, which calls attention to their use and drags a reader out of the story. It also makes for highly boring prose, particularly when you’re sitting in a meeting and it’s “Princess Celestia said”, “Twilight said”, “Rainbow said” without end.

There’s also a number of grammatical issues. A big one seems to be in terms of tense and phrasing, like here in the opening paragraphs:

To everypony, there have been many strange occurrences throughout Equestria

I have to wonder if there were translation issues or if this story was written in present tense to begin with and then converted to past.

Biggest one: get rid of the complicated backstory. You don’t need it, you’re not really using it, and when you do use it, it actually undermines its use. You cannot have a character in a position of justified mistrust be given that much trust and free reign right away. Better to have him be a stranger in a strange land and have a generic mistrust that is much easier and more justifiable to shrug off since you don’t seem to have any intentions of really addressing it.

Choose a tone. If you want formal, then the whole thing needs to be formal. Choose a time period and mimic it. Want it to be like Austen? Pull an Austen book. Like Hornblower? Same thing. Otherwise, just keep it modern day. If a character is supposed to be more formal, then it lets him stand apart through his language. Trying to blend the two makes it come off wrong.

Finally, find a hook. With a good hook, you’ll be able to convince readers to come along during any necessary slower periods because you’ll have gotten them excited for your story. You want readers interested and captivated. Tip your hand a little. It’ll be worth it.

The writing is rough, the character reactions and reasonings make no sense, and the pacing is slow. This work needs a major overhaul.

Needs Work.

4771069
You've only read the first few chapters? Hmm, I see. A slow pace and purple writing can definitely mar first impressions.

But anyway, thanks for the review. It's appreciated.

4771340

10k words. If you cannot entice a reader to continue in that amount of time, you have problems.

4771345
I understand that philosophy. But out of sheer curiosity, how many chapters did you make it through?

4771356

Four chapters.

4771340

A slow pace and purple writing can definitely mar first impressions.

Um... that's not what they said. They said because you didn't settle a proper backstory, the whole fic was the consistency of stepping into fresh concrete. And the writing made it ten times worse since you can't decide whether the sun is red, yellow, or both. From what they described, and from what I viewed, I would've put it down after a thousand words.

Why?

Hooves holding microphones shoved through the bars in Twilight’s direction, and several ponies called out to her, all at once.

Sentences like these. That's why. There isn't even an identifiable subject in this one. It's a clause, a conjunction connected to a separate thought, and then the when-how of the ponies calling out to her.

Another example:

A white mare shoved him aside and called out to Twilight. “I’m telling you, some kind of dark magic is causing these weird events across Equestria!”

I know this is new to this mare (since it was sooo important to mention her), but really? In distress, people or ponies alike do not suddenly speak in stilted sentences.

The words highlighted in bold are the ones that make the dialogue hard to understand. Making a situation this vague with awkward word choice kills immersion, just sayin'. You should be more specific here. What are "these weird events"? Why is she unsure of it being dark magic?

Also, yikes. Talk about redundancy. You don't need to mention Twilight if we already know they are distressed because Twilight is a differing logical point of view. That italics section does not need to be there.

Heck, as Asilin said, why even have non-dialogue filler in here? You don't need to do that for this scene. It takes so long just to get through that one section when it could've been summed up in around 50 to 150 words with the purple prose added. Slow pacing is not an excuse for proper scene creation. If I'm having to sift through words that I know shouldn't be there, then there is a problem, and that's not because it's me. It took you three hundred words just to get through a basic scene of distressed calls from a crowd. It should not matter what gender they are, what each individual member of that crowd is doing (meaning connecting who with what they did), and how they managed to cut someone else off. Unless their individual actions each effect part the story line, that is not worthy of mentioning. Simply, the crowd was erratic. That's it. Five words to describe probably 80-100 words of filler.

Stories shouldn't be like going through a swamp or a muddy creek without boots on. I shouldn't be sinking like I'm in quicksand when reading a piece of fiction because that's how fast I get pulled out of this story with poor word choice, awkward dialogue and scene creation, and all the other factors Asilin had said in this review.

Story rating of *Needs Work* shall stay as it stands.