Badfic Slaughterhouse #21 · 4:39am Apr 1st, 2015
I don’t know if this was driven by malice, self-loathing, or a little of both, but I decided to do something a little different this time. You see, I’ve been kinda disconnected from ponyfic lately. It’s not that I haven’t been reading and writing; I just haven’t been doing it here, and that kinda bothered me.
I figured it was about time I got back to being active in this community, but I wanted to do something a little unusual. I briefly considered starting the next Special Edition post, but that would take at least a week, and I really wanted to do something right away.
But what to do? I could review the feature box, I guess, but that’s been done to death. I could focus solely on requests, but I don’t know if I could really cut loose on those. Then, as I was thinking about giving up, I looked below the feature box and found a gold mine. Lots of short fics with endless potential for comedy.
The new stories list.
So I opened up a bunch of tabs and went to town on the first three. And then I went to bed and hardly read anything for the next couple of weeks. Oh well. Maybe the reviews will at least be funny.
Do Whatever You Like!, by Demented Dementia
Tags: Gore, Dark, Random
Rating: Teen
Length: 3,781 words (Status: Incomplete – 1/2 chapter(s) read)
Synopsis: Spike buys Twilight a hot tub.
Review: Since this is the first story on my list, this one is pretty much going to set the tone. If it’s good, I’ll be inclined to take these reviews seriously. If it’s bad, the snark will flow. So let’s see what we’re in for…
Already weeks into her Princess status, Twilight is stressed out from all the paperwork she has to fill out writing her signature on every piece of paper that comes to her. She had bags under her eyes from not sleeping and just plain tired of the paperwork, yes she herself did large amounts of work but they where what she wanted to do not what others wanted of her.
Oh dear.
If you didn’t notice from that excerpt—which may actually be the most polished part of the entire chapter—the presentation of this story is akin to a monkey smearing crap on a canvas. It’s loaded with grammar errors, spelling errors, punctuation errors, capitalization errors, run-ons, awkward dialogue, tense confusion, and general awfulness. Honestly, it’s hard to get past that and examine the story it’s trying to tell. I’ll try, though.
The easiest place to start is with its characterization. Now, this is 1.5k words of an incomplete fic, so I guess there’s time to improve on this, but what’s in this opening chapter is a crime against… Well, I’m not sure. Is “everything” a valid way to end that sentence?
Anyway, the major characters in this chapter are Twilight and Spike, and neither of them come off well. Twilight feels inauthentic because she’s doing a task we’ve never seen her take on in the show: filling out endless piles of government paperwork. Spike is determined to do something nice for her to relieve her stress, and that’s all well and good, but it doesn’t make much sense for his first idea to be giving her a massage (or “message,” as it frequently appears) nor does it make sense for him to leave the castle when she snaps at him (ugh) for trying to help.
In spite of the effort-free writing, the story has an air of trying way too hard. The prose frequently attempts to be witty or clever, and it works about as well as a rhino playing miniature golf. Events are exaggerated in an attempt to be funny, but it’s the sort of humor that you’d expect to come from an emotionless alien’s first attempt at comedy after hearing about the concept second-hand.
You know, it’s so difficult to read some of this that I wonder if it can possibly be made worse. I’m going to experiment with it a little. Let’s start with this bit of internal monologue from Spike:
"There must be something that I her number-one assistant can do for her...Maybe we can split the work...but I don't know Twilight's signature...maybe I can give her a message, a nice back rub might relive the stress after all it works on Rarity. I am such a good assistant"
Now, I’m putting it through Google Translate a few times. First, I’m translating it into Chinese, then Albanian, Yiddish, Spanish, and back to English. The result is:
" It must be something of my own high idea could do to ...... maybe we can share the work ...... but do not know sign Twilight ... .. maybe I can give you message , nice back rub possible. I like a good assistant " After all, this applies to revive rare press
I can’t actually say it’s better, but it’s definitely more interesting! You heard it here first, folks! You want your badfic edited into something enjoyable? Google Translate!
Verdict: This is almost like reading a trollfic, but I’m a little nervous about laughing at it when it was obviously meant to be taken seriously. It’s horrible, but if you find that sort of horribleness funny, like I do, this might give you a few chuckles.
A TwiLuna Fic, by SerenaTheMoonPony
Tags: Romance
Rating: Teen
Length: 3,594 words (Status: Incomplete – 1/2 chapter(s) read)
Synopsis: It’s a TwiLuna fic. Duh.
Review: Well, if nothing else, this one has to be better than the last one, right? ...Right? Please?
"It truly is a lovely night tonight, per usual" The smaller lavender mare remarked.
"Why thank-you, Twilight" The slightly larger cobalt blue mare replied.
"I love stargazing with you, Luna" Twilight exclaimed.
"As do I, my dear" Luna replied.
Well, at least it’s readable. Crap, but readable.
First of all, it’s telly to an extreme. The entire backstory is given in a quick infodump, the emotions of the characters are strictly told, and the conflict is completely spelled out in the narration.
The version of Equestria hinted at in this first chapter seems to be almost dystopian, in an unintentional sort of way. The problem seems to be that Twilight and Luna want to get married, but “filly-foolers” and “colt-cuddlers”—I really hate those terms—tend to get chased out of towns and exiled to the badlands.
The mechanics are almost passable but not quite. At least the spelling is sound, but there are a bunch of punctuation errors, especially in regard to comma usage, that reduce readability, and the formatting is all over the place.
So in a nutshell, we appear to have a shipfic about lesbian lovers wanting to get married in spite of societal prejudices. That path is so well-traveled on Fimfiction that it’s become a canyon between Clichétown and Boringville.
Verdict: Boring. Useless. Waste of time.
CM Punk: Equestrian Pony Wrestling, by super57s
Tags: Romance, Comedy, Crossover, Alternate Universe, Human, Anthro
Rating: Mature (so no link)
Length: 4,264 words (Status: Incomplete – 2/4 chapter(s) read)
Synopsis: CM Punk goes to Equestria.
Review: Oh God… Please tell me this isn’t real. Why can’t there be any good wrestling fics? Why must they all be obvious garbage? You all know by now that I enjoy professional wrestling, and I think Punk is pretty damn awesome, but he deserves better than this!
Before I even opened this fic, I knew I was going to hate it from this line in the description:
So yeah, This CM Punk is gonna be like the real one except awesomer XD.
Way to show you’re a fan, dude. I’m pretty sure a proper fan wouldn’t be like, “Imma rite CM Punk in a storey and its gona b beter then reel life cos he dont play tha caractor rite.”
And apparently, this author’s idea of improving on CM Punk is to turn him into Deadpool. He and the narrator constantly banter with each other, and the scenario is unapologetically ludicrous, involving Punk being hit by falling rocks at a construction site, which freeze him solid until Earth explodes and sends him careening through the cosmos, eventually landing on Equestria.
Once he’s there, more stupid stuff happens.
Now, I have to admit, I can actually see a reason for the anthro tag, for once. If you’re going to put a wrestler in Equestria, you might as well make the other characters something he can wrestle against. As for the other tags, I haven’t seen anything to justify Romance; Comedy is a sick joke (kek); and Alternate Universe appears to primarily refer to Punk himself because the author has taken major liberties with his story. All those tags, and it’s missing the one it needs most: Random.
Mechanically, this is poor but not dreadful. Comma issues are a frequent distraction, although considering how stupid the story is, being distracted from it is probably a mercy.
Verdict: Someone should inform the real CM Punk that this piece of shit exists. His reaction should be hilarious, assuming he doesn’t murder the author. Then again, that might make it even funnier. Seriously though, this is bizarre enough that I think you should have a look. It’s as mesmerizing as a train wreck, although only people familiar with CM Punk will be able to appreciate (or should that be “rage at”?) it properly.
Beneath your feet, what Treasures, by TheJediMasterEd
Tags: Romance, Sad, Slice of Life
Rating: Everyone
Length: 1,445 words (Status: Complete – 1/1 chapter(s) read)
Synopsis: Spike has a secret hoard with a special meaning.
Review: Let me get this out of the way right up front. I am not this story’s target audience. Far from it, in fact. This is a very “artistic” sort of piece, and for reasons I’ll get back to in a minute, I don’t like that approach.
Since this fic appeared, I’ve seen quite a few people promoting it. It’s the first story published by TheJediMasterEd, who’s been active in the community for a couple years, and people have apparently been waiting to see it happen for quite a while. The level of excitement surrounding this fic seems almost palpable.
And it’s okay, I guess.
Like many fics of its length, this story is built around a single idea—that of Spike having a secret hoard of gems representing his friends—and the narrative serves as a vehicle to express it. It meanders through some dull, mundane events and delivers a load of narrative exposition before finally giving the audience enough information to decode the meaning of it all. At under 1,500 words, my time commitment was low enough that I was merely left feeling underwhelmed. If it had been twice the length (with no additional depth) I’d have been annoyed.
And this brings my back to why I often dislike “artistic” writing. When a story with a singular meaning and no room for reinterpretation, such as this one, is obfuscated, leaving the reader to ponder and puzzle out the author’s intent, I hate it. If you ask me, a story that only has one meaning should explain that meaning well enough that the reader doesn’t have think on it or re-read it. We’re supposed to come to the same conclusion anyway, so instead of potentially alienating a large percentage of readers with a lack of clarity, just make the damn point.
In mechanical terms, the story is passable, but it would have benefited from some proofreading. It has a bunch of comma errors, and while they don’t do any significant harm to readability, they were pretty noticeable.
Verdict: As I said, I’m not this thing’s target audience, and there’s no meat to the story besides the idea it’s built around. If you like “artistic” stories and enjoy puzzling out meanings, though, you should probably give it a shot.
Change in Perspective, by Quicksear
Tags: Romance, Adventure, Human
Rating: Everyone
Length: 39,833 words (Status: Complete – 10/24 chapter(s) read)
Synopsis: Discord brings the most obnoxiously generic human ever conceived to Equestria.
Review: I think you can guess by now (from the synopsis and the fact that I read less than half of its chapters) that this story isn’t getting a positive review.
Honestly, I don’t even know how this thing found its way onto my Read Later bookshelf. I don’t add much in the way of HiE fics, and I seldom read them. The mood struck me, though, so I picked out the one on my list with the most reasonable-looking length. The rather decent rating—155:9 when I started reading—gave me a little hope that it might be okay, even though the description looked bad.
Based on that description, I expected a low degree of mechanical proficiency, and it was exactly what I expected: lots of missing punctuation, capitalization errors, some missing/misspelled words. Still, I’ve seen some otherwise outstanding stories that lacked competent proofreading, so I didn’t let that deter me.
One of the first things I was treated to was a scene with two characters who were purportedly Celestia and Discord, but they were both wildly out of character. Especially Discord.
The quality of the writing is poor. POVs jump around without warning. Settings are lacking in description. Dialogue is often stilted, awkward, and completely wrong for canon characters; Applejack’s dialogue is often nigh-unreadable due to it being written with a ridiculously heavy “eye accent”; and there’s a lot of stuff like this:
"You should have asked me before you gave him anything!" Twilight was very mad.
"You wouldn't have let me give it to him! I was just trying to be friendly, you'd understand if you weren’t trying to shove all that history down his throat! He didn't even know that pegasi eat fish!" Rainbow defended herself.
Gee, author, thanks so much for telling us that Twilight was mad when she yelled at Dash. And how could anyone have ever figured out from Dash’s dialogue that she was defending against Twilight’s accusations without that clarification? There’s a time for subtlety, but this is clearly not it.
The protagonist, Marc, as mentioned above, is completely insufferable. He always behaves with perfect diplomacy, making the ponies the ones who are jerks for not instantly loving him. And of course, to drive that point home, he has to get attacked by them for no good reason. And of course they quickly see the error of their ways and apologize to him because Marc is only one letter removed from Mary (Sue).
The story is full of plot holes, as well as a plethora of things that just make no sense. What is a “psychiatric orphanage,” and why does Marc live there? Why does Twilight’s translation spell know his language despite magic not working on him at all? Why does the translation spell follow him around town when it was clearly said to be stationary? Why is he moved out to a shack on the outskirts of Ponyville while he’s basically comatose instead of kept in Canterlot, where he can receive proper medical attention? Why doesn’t Twilight want to feed him anything but apples, and why doesn’t Marc ask for something different?
Is it any wonder I couldn’t force myself to finish it?
Verdict: This is absolutely terrible. Only recommended for huge HiE fans who have recently been lobotomized. Twice.
Hope and Hopelessness, by LittleKhan
Tags: Sad, Slice of Life, Human
Rating: Everyone
Length: 2,399 words (Status: Complete – 1/1 chapter(s) read)
Synopsis: While taking a walk, Celestia encounters an odd, depressed pony named John.
Review: There’s nothing original in the idea of a human being transported to Equestria, turned into a pony, having no cutie mark, or living as an outcast. The idea of having Celestia interact with such a character, completely oblivious to his true identity, however… Well, that’s a different matter.
The story is short, and the focus is on their interaction. Prior to that, just enough of a scenario is built to contrive a reason for their meeting. The remainder is spent showing us a portrait of a character (John) with severe problems, filtered through the perspective of another character (Celestia) who misinterprets those problems. It’s simple and effective, although it’s a bit difficult to find it sad when there’s no time to get invested in the human character.
While the story is sound on a conceptual level, the execution lets it down. As mentioned before, the scenario is contrived, and the lack of characterization limits empathy for the character’s problems. That’s not where the issues end, though.
Some character voices are bad. Thankfully, this is only a problem at the beginning, but this line was nearly enough to make me close the tab and read something else:
“Well, y’all,” she Applejack, “that was a lovely way to spend a morning, but A’hm afraid that Ah need to get back to Sweet Apple Acres – Big Mac needs mah help with the new field.”
The eye accent pushed my buttons, for one thing, and there’s really no excuse for the error in the dialogue tag. Even the most basic proofreading effort should have picked that up. Also, what’s with AJ saying “lovely” like that? Is Rarity dressing up like her again?
Mechanically, it’s flawed. There are lots of punctuation errors, some capitalization errors, some formatting errors, and an assortment of other things a good proofreader would fix. These things add up and hinder readability somewhat.
The style is also flawed. It’s overly heavy on telling, often when no exposition of any sort is needed; lots of sentences are awkward or useless. One character’s dialogue is frequently placed in a paragraph with another character’s actions, sometimes making it difficult to determine who’s supposed to be speaking.
And you know what? In spite of all that, I still liked it. I’m not saying it’s a great story, but it was at least worth the time I spent on it.
Verdict: The execution is lacking and the scene isn’t exactly original, but the way it’s presented entirely from Celestia’s (clueless) POV makes it seem unique, and it’s kind of refreshing to see a story where a human has an appropriate reaction to being turned into a pony and stranded in Equestria. If the idea interests you, have a look.
I’m guessing the end of the hiatus will draw me back into the fold. Here’s hoping, anyway.
In the meantime, I'm gonna get started on SE#2.
Want to call my wrath down on a particular story? Make a request in the comments.
Rules:
—You can request a story of any length.
—It can be yours or someone else’s, and I don’t care whether it’s good or a train wreck, but I make no guarantees that I’ll read anything. These are requests, not orders.
—One request per person per review post, and only on the most recent one.
—If I don’t like your story, don’t be butthurt over it. It's just one (really picky) guy's opinion, and I'll *probably* recommend it for someone, even if I hate it.
How about an OC centric story? One of my own, so... have at you.
Here it is.
Edit: Because I am also a brainless idgit, loved the reviews!
It's okay, we all made that mistake once.
Actually, I do sometimes scan and look for things that might be interesting. Mostly not so much, though.
Recommendation!
Those Who Live Forever by Moose Mage. Pretty obscure story (especially before I reviewed it myself), but hey, it actually turned out to be pretty good in my eyes. Maybe it will be good for you as well?
The opening few paragraphs are what hooked me on it:
Per the Geneva Convention, "crime against everything" is a legitimate charge. It was supported almost unanimously by holders of all-weekend passes, and also had significant backing by Saturday-only convention attendees.
Oddly enough, the Albanian->Yiddish->Spanish track is often used by Chinese movie bootleggers when preparing back-of-the-box copy for their English-language DVD cases.
I'm reminded of a particular canyon in Larry Niven's "Known Space" setting/series. It was carved from orbit by an enormous disintegration weapon with a spaceship wrapped around it...
Sounds like that's right up my alley!
Yep, banishing ponies for being gay is totally something Celestia would do.
I've seen too many stories like this. I can see there being low levels of homophobia in certain parts of Equestria or certain situations. But when it gets to this level it's just asinine.
At the CM Punk one, it would have actually been kinda funny if he quit the story halfway through since he didn't like his character being written this way.
Even though the joke eventually got old, I loved how Machinations in the Dark of Celestia's Prophet parodied this, and showed just how stupid it is.
Hm. I guess for a request, it would be interesting to see a modern review of an old story. How about Take It! by Gapaot?
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Added it to the list.
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That story is already on my radar, but I'll put it on the request list.
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Added to the list.
And for a chuckle, I also put Machinations in the Dark of Celestia's Prophet on my Read Later shelf.
It's okay, I wanted to write what I wanted to write the way I wanted to write it, and I knew it wouldn't please everyone.
You may like the next thing I write. Or not. At least you'll hate it in a different way and that's progress--right?
Or maybe I should send you my MLP/Metalocalypse crossover drabble. ..
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It's true that you can't please everyone. Trying will only drive a person bonkers.
Anyway, I didn't outright hate it; it had some clever ideas and good imagery. I just wasn't keen on the presentation. I'll definitely check out whatever you publish next.
I'd like to see you do a review of one of your own stories, Prak. :P I'm not saying I think your fics are bad fics, I just think you'd be able to make it really funny and entertaining!
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Funny you should mention that. I considered posting a gag blog yesterday, in which I'd have insulted all of my own stories. Decided against it, though.