A Special Gift by iAmSiNnEr will be the next story I will review today. 

EA Special Gift

• MLP: FiM
• Slice of Life

It's the first Hearth's Warming after Twilight's coronation, and Starlight notices that Twilight has been overworking herself. She wants to make Hearth's Warming perfect, so she enlists Sunset's help...

• Main 6
• Sunset Shimmer
• Starlight Glimmer

iAmSiNnEr · 7.4k words  ·  72  6 · 1.8k views

This review is spoiler-free! You can read the story before or after reading this review! 

Credits to my honourable friend, Cyonix!

Summary

Hearth's Warming is here again, just a few months after Twilight's coronation!

During these few months, Twilight has been overworking herself and has almost no time to spend with her friends outside of their monthly meetings.

Starlight wants to surprise Twilight on Hearth's Warming but needs something fresh, and thus she enlists Sunset Shimmer's help, to ask her how they celebrate Hearth's Warming on the other side. Sunset agrees to help, and they work together to make the perfect Hearth's Warming for Twilight.

Content

While this story has a simple idea, its execution — relating to characterisation, pacing, logic and more — was an utter disappointment. 

There was little immersion to bring the readers to connect with the characters. The spontaneity of their emotions springing out of virtually nowhere, the lack of any tangible challenge or obstacle the characters had to face, the expository glimpse into their characters made them difficult to empathise with, if at all. There was little to no foreshadowing to deepen the emotiveness of the characters beyond a uni-dimensional framework. 

The dialogue-orientated pacing did not help in this regard. Interrupted only by scenic descriptors, there was an evident lack of layering of thoughts and emotions in between, which made them sound inanimate. Doing so would help enable the characters to breathe in the setting more cogently. It was a shame that the depth of development of these characters was so limited in scope, especially when the story’s idea presented many great opportunities that the authors could have taken advantage of. 

Owing to the aforementioned, the decisions made by characters in the story could be described as questionable at best. It was most disconcerting to see how the choreographed events seemed to be contrived and driven by the plot, rather than organically by the characters. Lacking ethos, pathos or logos, the characters seemed to follow along blindly to what the script necessitates.

The rapid pacing dictated the speed of the resolution of every obstacle faced by the main characters in the story, which enabled them to hurdle them far too easily to be believable, justified or even necessary. There is no need to include scenes in which it does not help to drive the plot in a meaningful way whatsoever, as it crippled the impact which this story has, which could already be described as practically non-existent. 

The shifting of scenes between various characters made the problem of a lack of development on each side even more concerning. I was greeted with dismay when scenes transitioned oftentimes at opportune moments to develop the setting or the characters more. The superfluous scenes, sometimes used to explain illogical sequences, appeared more to patch up a gaping plot hole hastily, rather than resolving them organically. 

Disturbingly, even the story’s overall justification to bring Sunset to Starlight in the first place was contradicted by the events occurring in the following scenes. The nullification of their motivations and reasoning at the start seemed to portray that the story was attempting to conjure a convenient excuse to bring these two together. It did not work. 

These factors made the overall story more of a series of actions than anything else. The skeletal, malnourished and bare-bones treatment of the ambience, atmosphere and immersiveness struggled to capture the reader’s attention or feelings. While there were descriptions of the scenery, little was done to bring the characters to step into these environments. Coupled with the tenuous link the readers have with the characters, it was unsurprising that the events came off as dull.

I implore the author to be more expressive in their writing. The lack of gestures, actions or emotions sandwiched between the copious amount of dialogue in the story kept readers guessing on how they truly felt within, when the story could have driven these heartfelt moments to the reader itself. 

This is a particularly pressing issue for the conclusion of the story, where the author failed to pack a sufficiently strong punch to end the story on a high note. It is best to step into the characters’ hooves and wonder how you would react when presented to a situation such as this. This focused thinking would also help build the plot more naturally. 

Language

Technical errors were fairly common. Formatting errors, dialogue structure and more were scattered throughout this seven thousand word tale. 

1. Em dashes should be used instead of hyphens to show interruption in dialogue. 
2. If a line of dialogue is followed by a dialogue tag like “answered” or “replied”, a comma should be employed rather than a period. If the first word of the dialogue tag is a pronoun, like he or she, it should not be capitalized.
3. Spelling errors such as “sie”.
4. Formatting errors, for example, in the number of periods in an ellipse.
5. The usage of “it’s” as a method to show the subject’s belonging to the aforementioned object. The correct word is “its”; the former is a contraction of “it is”. 

Stance

Regrettably, owing to these flaws, the interactions between Twilight, Starlight and Sunset came off as flat. Even though it was a simple idea, the author’s execution left this story with much to be desired. 

Content/Plot: 2/10
Flow/Communication: 1.5/10
Language/Readability: 5/10
Overall: 2.8/10

<For archive purposes: 2.8/10>

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