Linkedy Link: One Last Act of Tragedy by Majin Syeekoh

So... this one's going to be short.
Not because of my like/dislike of the story. The story itself is really short!
That was also a problem during reviewing, because I was all like, "Eh, it's so small, it'll only take me 20 mins", so I kept procrastinating Remind me to review some bigger stories next time.

First Impressions

A bolt of fire, a mighty crash

A demon turns to powdered ash

Remember the day that Tirek died

And also the day the Princess survived

-Equestrian Nursery Rhyme

Every year, on the day Princess Twilight Sparkle saved Equestria from its greatest threat, she mourns the loss of who she was.

No issues for me at the moment. As an under 2k word fic, you want the point of the story to be a single scene, and that's pretty much what this story offers. The tags are relevant, AU and drama, although I would say that if you're 'mourning', then it's probably going to be a switch from a drama tag to sad (You wouldn't want to put both in).

Cover art is nice. Do you know how much more I'm interested in the fic because of cover art? At least a bit more.

I suppose I can also add on the 'manuscript' into first impressions, since it's an 11-word chapter. 11 words!
From my understanding, it's meant to explain what the story being read during the main part of the story (story within a story, I know, confusing) is, but it failed for me. I don't know who starshine is, so adding this bit didn't help me. Don't get me wrong; I like the idea, but this might not have been the best application.

Plot

The scene this shortfic centres around is Twilight editing a book excerpt, talking about her success in fighting Tirek. That's pretty much it.
It wasn't my favourite kind of commentary, but I feel that it might be more interesting for other people. It's Twilight doing generic Twilight analysis-style commentary:

Understatement of the millennium. I penetrated the atmosphere with him at a significant percentage of the speed of light and he vaporized.

Imagine her saying stuff like this throughout about 700 words, and you get the picture of what this fic is.

While the main block of fic didn't appeal to me, I did kind of like the end sentence. She goes off to her niece's party, which didn't really seem to be any kind of twist or anything (maybe I'm wrong? I didn't take it that way anyway) and gave me the impression that, the way she ended it, this was something that had been on her mind for a while, maybe... influencing children the wrong way, and she had to correct it. That was a pretty neat way to end it.

...Except it wasn't the end. The next chapter is not much really new, however, as it appeared to me to be a copy-paste of the previous chapter, with yet more added commentary that wasn't very compelling at all:

*Also, I really like hayburgers.

Honestly, I came to the conclusion that the entire third chapter was done to add word-count so the thing would be published. The first <800 words were totally fine, this sort of spoilt it. There's even a chapter after the third one, which was pretty much the same thing, but a lot shorter.

Conclusion

Grammar was flawless, at least from what I could see.

Plot... well, I think it was an interesting experiment at first, but the other very similar chapters weren't interesting at all for me.
I thought there might be something more about this birthday party she talks about..? Maybe that would have been a way to expand into. I would have really liked to find out that she was correcting this story during the birthday, or something pretty crazy like that. As it stands, the experiment overstayed its welcome.

52/100

Thanks for submitting to the Blunt Review Group! For others reading, if you like this review style, and wanna see more of it... send a fic to my submission folder! We've changed the system a bit, and if you have any qualms or helpful advice to give about it, be sure to PM me or put it in the relevant threads as a reply.

5738109 I could see how you'd come to those conclusions.

I'm not really going to argue with you because I asked for your take on it, and that's exactly what you delivered. Also it gives me stuff to ponder about.

Thanks for taking time to review this. I appreciate it.

5738117 Honestly, I think it's just how I personally take stuff. I'm a lot more of a 'adventure out into the deep unknown' sort of person, as opposed to the thoughtful stuff that you really have to find meaning behind... if that's what you were going for.
If that's not, please, tell me yourself, I might have got the completely wrong end of the stick here.

5738125 Yeah, the story was how the commentary on the passages itself shifted over time from self-revulsion in the first chapter into finding the positives in the second chapter, and then finally accepting fully that she can't change what she did so there's no use crying over spilled milk in the third chapter.