ERart.

• MLP: FiM
• Comedy
• Slice of Life

Rarity wants to. Anon does not.

• Rarity
• Anon

moonbutters · 1.5k words  ·  127  5 · 3.3k views

Review: Rart.
Writer: moonbutters
Genre: Comedy, Slice of Life - Rated Everyone
Read: Completed at 1497 Words, 1 Chapter
Rating: 4/10
Recommendation: Skip.

Rarity wants to make everyone’s favourite self-insert a dress. Anon, for obvious reasons, does not want a dress. Rarity, for obvious reasons, wasn’t in the mood to take “no” for an answer; dresses are her thing, after all. Pinkie Pie is there too.

Now, this is one of those fics that I didn’t really enjoy. I can see what the writer was going for; amusing, vaguely heartwarming, sort of fluffy; but he missed by quite a bit. The characters just don’t have enough personality to carry a thousand words of back and forth bickering here. I like the fact that moonbutters did change font and capitalized Rarity’s yelling, but that wasn’t enough on its own; the typically elegant fashionista comes of here as whiny and annoying, without being dramatic enough to warrant this.

This really is one of those stories that can really benefit from speech tags; livening up all that dialogue with a few basic actions or expressions could make it a lot less boring to read. And, for a comedy, as Rarity would say, boring is “The Worst Possible Thing!” Honestly, I didn’t laugh once reading this, and a lot of the jokes moonbutters made fell flat. That’s rather unfortunate too, because this idea has potential to be really amusing, but it just isn’t here.

Furthermore, the narration itself is rather stilted. At one point, Pinkie Pie jumps out and blasts Anon with her party cannon; this goes over in a really matter-of-fact way. On one hand, this makes sense, because this Anon is fairly jaded and used to Pinkie’s antics. On the other hand, this doesn’t make for fun reading; it isn’t deadpan enough, in my opinion, to really carry a scene. As such, most of the narration feels like Anon is just bored and mildly aggravated, which he is, without really having enough personality to make a joke out of it.

Plot: 3/5. Solid, but nothing special.
Characters: 2/5. Underwhelming.
Style: 2/5. Too bland for a comedy.
Execution: 1/5. It just isn’t funny.
Overall Rating: 8/20 = 4/10

To moonbutters: Don’t be afraid to let Anon have a character of his own; sure, he is a self-insert, but we all have quirks and whatnot. Give him some. Furthermore, remember to make all the characters endearing; there’s nothing worse than having to read through a story with unlikeable main characters; reading through a page of Rarity's whining isn't that impressive. You do have a good setup for conflict here, but practice on capitalizing on that.

Thanks for the honest critique

6865549
No problem mate. It is just my opinion after all, clearly a lot of other people enjoyed it quite a bit.