Review: "The Ballad Of A Raging Sunset" by 13 Shades Of Sunset - Reviewers' Mansion

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Arkane12 #1 · Feb 11th, 2021 · 4 · ·

Story Overview:

This Review may contain some spoilers. As always, I’d recommend reading the story first, then coming back to read this. You’ve been warned.

TThe Ballad of a Raging Sunset

All I have to say is........ BRACE YOURSELVES

sunsetshimmer_13 · 1.9k words · 23 3 · 1.4k views

“The Ballad of a Raging Sunset” by 13 Shades of Sunset is a story that follows Sunset Shimmer on one of her weekend adventures as she spends some time playing video games. And losing. And taking it out on the world around her.

As a gamer myself, I’ve definitely had my fair share of rage inducing moments. I also have a small mountain of broken controller parts to prove it. So I definitely get where she’s coming from during this story. With that out of the way, let’s get on to the story.

Grammar/Spelling (5/10):

This is a tough part for me. There are moments in this story that make it clear that the grammar and spelling are thrown out the window for the sake of the plot. Therefore, I can ignore certain issues. With that said, though, there are several moments where the story contains misspellings, shifts in tense, and just some rather confusing bits of dialogue.

The first one of these that caught my attention is Sunset responding directly to the narrator by calling him an asshack. While I have no issues with fourth wall breaks in stories, this seems to come out of nowhere, as at no point prior to this does the story make it clear that Sunset can hear them. The bigger issue, though, is that the dialogue has several issues with spacing and punctuation that makes it rather difficult to tell who is speaking. It took me several reads to even realize the transition.

On top of this, there are several misspellings and punctuation errors throughout the piece. This is the part I can give some leeway as several of these are meant to convey the informal nature of the piece. But there are still limits to such a rule.

Of course, as always, the grammar is not the most important aspect of a story. So let’s move on to the plot . . .

Plot (6/10):

As stated in the opening, the story follows Sunset during one of her gaming binges and the resulting rage. While that’s fine for a quick little story like this, there are several issues that kept me from getting invested in this.

One of these is the rapid switching to different characters and games. While the transition between different games are shown with page breaks that denote the passage of time. Those are fine, I suppose, but the shortness of each scene doesn’t allow the reader to get involved in the scene before tearing them away into a new game. Because of this, the piece almost causes a sense of whiplash as you read.

Still, the story does do what it promises. It shows Sunset raging as she plays video games. And as I also stated in the introduction, I’ve been in situations where I’ve raged while playing games. So believe me when I say that I have shouted several things along these same veins when I rage (Minus the eggplant threat . . .). So I will give the author props for portraying a convincing show of video game-induced anger.

Characterization (9/10):

Normally, I would cover each character one-by-one. However, since Sunset is the only real character here, I’ll cover her in this section. I would like to say that the story actually does cover how I think Sunset would react in such a situation, albeit not quite in such a violent manner. Still, the character works well enough.

If I am remembering correctly, there is actually an established bit of lore that covers a scenario like this. Specifically, a video where Sunset tries to play against Fluttershy in a certain video game and loses. Badly. And she responds with rage. So, this character does resemble her cannon counterpart, and is simultaneously portrayed in a way that is comedic and believable.

The only points lost here are due to the limited scope of the character. In a longer fic, we might have been able to see more of the character. Here, though, she only has one mode. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but there could be a little more diversity to her character to keep things entertaining.

Total Score:

Grammar/Spelling: 5 / 10

Plot: 6 / 10

Characterization: 9 / 10

Final Score: 20 /30 (6.7 /10)

sunsetshimmer_13