Main Reviews #16: Besides the Will of Evil (part of the Million Words in June) (spoiler warning) · 4:13am Jun 18th, 2015
About this time in 2014, I read and reviewed one of the more grand adventure stories this fandom has produced. While far from perfect, I found it an incredible read despite its setbacks, and resolved to eventually read its sequel. And you know what? I'm glad I waited so long for this review, because I have more positive things to say about it.
It's a dangerous business, reviewing sequels to beloved stories. But someone's gotta do it; may as well be me.
Check below the break for Jetfire's sequel to his critically acclaimed debut: Besides the Will of Evil
Author: Jetfire2012 (formerly just Jetfire)
Synopsis:
An ancient evil has awakened. No, really, it has. From the depths of time, a black, noxious threat has risen up after millennia of imprisonment. It washes like oil over Equestria, swallowing up towns and uncovering terrible secrets long buried. Twilight Sparkle, Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy and Rarity are prepared to combat this great darkness. However, to do so, they must uncover the truths about the Elements of Harmony, and the truths about the ancient forerunners of Equestrian culture. What they find will challenge their conceptions of their own places in history and ponydom's place in the world. The six Bearers of the Elements must draw upon their friendship and the strength of their hearts to stand firm against the darkness. If they fail, it will mean the end of everything.
Length: 179,236 words over 44 chapters, averaging 4,074 words per chapter
Status: Incomplete
Review: Hoo boy. Been a while since I tackled an epic like this. I’m a little (a lot) excited to actually be reading this now. Those of you who’ve been following me for a while may recall that I reviewed Dangerous Business about this time the previous year. Finally, I’m touching base with the sequel. I had a few issues with that otherwise phenomenal story, so I’m really hankering to see if Jetfire actually learned from those over the past few years and grew as a writer. Time says “likely,” as does Heart.
So, the burning questions: is Besides the Will of Evil a worthy sequel, and does it improve upon the original, groundbreaking as that story was back in the days of old?
To answer this question, we must first analyse the differences between the two, for they are vastly different in tone. Dangerous Business’s main draw was the incredibly rich world-building that went on as we explored far beyond the realms of Equestria into foreign lands, with foreign ponies and otherworldly creatures. Lots of different species were introduced. We met Gildedale ponies, Komagas, and the deerfolk. We crossed valleys and mountains, forests and plains, all realised in graphic detail. The world felt alive; it was fresh, it was new, it was outside-the-box thinking. Many a headcanon about Equestria and beyond were swayed. Back in its earliest days, Dangerous Business was captivating to thousands, and even now remains so.
Besides the Will of Evil is less description and world-building, and far more action and dialogue-heavy. It leaps into action immediately, and the battle lines are drawn from chapter two. Having established the world, the main characters, the lore, and the imminent threat to everything and everyone, Jet instead launches into a proper winding and twisting plot. That’s not to say he doesn’t bring anything new to the table. Recurring characters show up, and a whole swath of new ones are introduced as well, though they aren’t given anywhere the same amount of one-on-one development; instead, there’s just enough about each character given to keep them interesting in their own rights without trying to involve them too heavily.
The Lord of All the Herds is broken, but not beaten. He stirs, he recovers, and at first it’s not known exactly why the heroes don’t just hurry along to finish the job. This feels like a major plothole—and in fact he only exists in this story as a result of the completely avoidable actions taken by the heroes of the first story—however trust me when I say that an explanation does come in far later chapters. Whether you may accept it or not is another matter.
The Herd Lord is a villain possessing unspeakable power. While far from at full strength for most of the story, he still manages to outwit all our heroes as he steals the very life essence from their beloved country. Death and destruction follows in his wake. He is an entity of pure power, malice, greed, complete disregard for the world and everything in it. His gaze reaches all of Equestria. His thoughts can fill and consume minds. He can hide himself in a fog so dense it blocks magic, messes with the senses, and can even cloud the otherwise-reliable Future Sight of Lady Falalauria.
He’s essentially a cross between these three beings:
Melkor, The Silmarillion
Cell, Dragon Ball Z
Galactus, Fantastic Four
It’s really hard to gauge what people will think of this. Both lesser and higher-educated individuals may point and call the Dark Lord a Villain Sue: He might seem like he’s being challenged by equal or even greater powers at times… but even in defeat, he wins in some way or another, and even manages to make it seem like he suffers no true setbacks at all. As King Pyrrhus once said after his most devastating great battle: “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.” He is everywhere at once, and yet hides easily.
“But, why don’t the Elements of Harmony take care of him?” you may ask.
Firstly, this is set just shortly after the Season Four premiere, so you already know what that means. Secondly, there’s a whole lot more lore about the Elements brought up in conversations, which I shall not spoil here. What I will say is that as the Herd Lord continues to gain power, Equestria continues to lose it. Ponies and all other creatures suffer the greatest losses. Towns are completely wiped out. Cities are practically destroyed. The lands themselves are scarred and made barren. Allies turn on one another, as tentative alliances are both formed and shattered.
Chapter after chapter, battle after battle, the story continues to spiral downward into a seemingly irredeemable and irreconcilable defeat. It seems as if there can be no happy ending—and yet, Jetfire promises one blatantly in the comments of the story. While I’m sure it was intended to ease the minds of the readers, this has oddly had the opposite effect on a lot of them. There are no small amount of concerns stated by readers that the plot is being forced into such a tight, dark, hopeless corner, and that nothing short of a universe-shattering Deux Ex Machina will fix the situation. This of course has lead to some people crying foul over the oppressive atmosphere and hopelessness of it all, with many announcing they won’t even continue the story.
In the words of Tom Araya:
“Propaganda war ensemble
Burial to be
Bones shining in the night
In blood laced misery
Campaign of elimination
Twisted psychology
When victory is to survive
And death is defeat
Sport the war, war support
The sport is war, total war
When the end is a slaughter
The final swing is not a drill
It's how many people I can kill”
But there is hope. And it’s not just a sudden ass-pull, either. Chapter 38 in particular seems to have had the effect that Jetfire desired. After all the crushing defeat, the seemingly unstoppable blackness, the fallen heroes… things seem to be looking up. I, certainly, am enjoying exactly where the story is going, and though I share many sentiments with other readers about how screwed everything has seemed for our heroes, Jet has simply been waiting to spring this upon us all. In fact, he’s been waiting years. I have faith that the slight climb out of the deep hole will only get us closer to the surface again.
Besides the Will of Evil is one of those stories that requires complete knowledge of its prequel, so I cannot recommend it properly to anyone who has not already read Dangerous Business. That said, as I enjoyed the latter very very much, I highly suggest it. It’s rough around the edges, as should be expected by a person’s first fanfiction, but still highly enjoyable in the obvious Tolkien-esque way. In fact, you’ll be hard-pressed to not feel like you’re reading a reskinned LotR + Silmarillion, and yet there’s so much stuff in this series that I’ve never seen in any other story before. As far from cookie-cutter as one can get while keeping everyone in-character—AU notwithstanding—and yet its foundations were cut from the obvious template.
As for the actual writing itself? Well…
Technically speaking, it’s an improvement over the prequel. The style is very much the same as ever, with Jet’s odd little quirks littering the pages like italicised emphasis on not-always-random-but-often-enough words in narration, as well as boldened—and even pink, in a certain pony’s case—unquoted words for telepathy. The formatting retains the standard book-style of single-line paragraphs and tabs, which some like to complain about but I have no problem with. This is problematic itself though, as the majority of new paragraphs only begin when another character speaks. The PoV might switch between three or four characters sometimes before we get a new paragraph; there was even a scene where, just for a single line, the story cut to the Dark Lord’s thoughts and then we were immediately back in Twilight’s head. A truly third-person-omniscient narrator is in control the entire time. But it’s just so schizophrenic and everywhere. Head-hopping is a regular occurrence, as are exposition and telly language where they are really neither required nor wanted. Jet’s narrator seems determined to tell the reader absolutely everything about the world and the characters… and yet somehow it finds a delicate balance between showing and implying as well. Talking heads rears its ugly… head… every now and then too; there’s a lot of back-and-forth chatter between characters while nothing else seems to happen around them.
There is one thing I will comment on that I’m glad to see being put into practice. If any of you have read Dangerous Business at all, or even glanced at my review of it, you know exactly what alabaster, violet, green-and-purple problem infests it. Yes, I recall counting over 500 individual cases of Lavender Unicorn Syndrome in the prequel. What I saw—note that this could be entirely coincidental—was that from about chapter 13 onward, posted around the time I posted my review, I began to see a significant decrease in the amount of LUS that I came across. Oh no, don’t get me wrong; there’s still tonnes of it, but… far less of it as the story continues from that point. Perhaps my words made a difference? Perhaps Jet realised of his own accord? Who knows.
The writing style still has a lot of trouble with general sentence structure: accidental simultaneous actions that don’t make sense, incorrect participial modifiers, and of course that strange head-hopping 3PO-PoV. Then again, how can one have trouble with such things if they aren’t aware they’re problems? Or if they are aware, if they simply don’t care about such things? Quite simply, I turned off my editing brain for basically the whole story, as I expected the style of writing to remain very similar to that of Jet’s from years earlier. After doing that, I found that it read quite easily—but I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. It suggests to me that either the story has been aimed specifically at less-experienced readers who aren’t bothered by such things, or that Jet himself simply doesn’t care to develop / alter his style in any way, regardless of criticism.
The one final thing that annoyed me was the continued use of hyphens in place of dashes. Seriously, it’s not hard to produce a dash. Alt codes are your friends.
People have their complaints about this story, and people have their high praises. There are tremendously low points, but that seems to make the very few high points of the story shine so much brighter to compensate. Like I said earlier, if anything helps to redeem this story from the crushing black pit it appears to be falling head-first into, it’s chapter 38. I’ll be damned if that wasn’t one of the single greatest depictions of Pinkie Pie that I’ve ever seen.
Oh, and Discord?
What about him? 
Overall, while Jet still has a lot to learn about writing—either that or he just tends to ignore most advice—the story is an enjoyable romp. Shadows and darkness crush all that oppose them, and yet there are six candles that may yet pierce oblivion. The Herd Lord is a living Black Hole that our heroes must find a way to plug at all costs, lest the universe and all existence be consumed. This is perhaps the greatest threat I have ever read about to threaten Equestria before, and if you can get past the overwhelming negativity to grasp a tight hold of the faint glimmers of hope in the black, you will enjoy it.
7.5/10
Words read so far this June: 580,449
Phenomenal review as always, CV! Your journalism skills will always impress me.
But on a side note, I don't think what makes a villain great is how physically powerful he is: that he's a great evil that can blow up planets. What makes a good bad guy (in my opinion) is when you can relate to him. The more human an antagonist seems, the scarier he'll be. Another way to make an amazing villain is when he's able to pull of a xanatos gambit with words. Now that's hard to write!
3159191
Wow, I never knew about that trope. But yes, in fact that's pretty much what the Herd Lord manages to do throughout almost the entire story so far. He seems unbeatable even when the ponies and deer have repelled his attacks.
Another thing I like is that even though the story gives him what one might call a tragic backstory, there is never any indication that we as readers are ever supposed to feel sorry for him. He was a prick even before he became this insatiable black hole of power.
My main annoyance with this story at this point is the number of readers who are just dumping pessimism in liquid form in Every. Single. Chapter. I've been pretty happy with it once the momentum turned around, but apparently the people who are unhappy feel the need to constantly keep sharing their misery.
3159633
Aye, and even when something sweet does come around to turn the tide, suddenly it's an "ass-pull, or the Worf Effect."
Readers, amirite? Never satisfied.
I'm just trying to ignore the more vicious comments.
3159633 I hate it when people do that on any story; mine or others'. Or, they drop a five page rant, then leave.
If you're that upset, flame away via PM and put the story down. Would you call up Tom Clancy and yell at him because you disagreed with his choice of villain?
3159636 "Empty happy ending" is the popular phrase being passed around at the moment. Apparently widespread infrastructure damage is an insurmountable obstacle, never mind the fact that it's a very high magic world with like 6–8 alicorns/proto-alicorns plus Discord almost destined to survive and that in-story Ziggy's previous defeat was accompanied by some variety of mass world restoration. Nope, everyone is going to starve, no exceptions.
3159668
As if there's anything wrong with the world simply returning to normal or being in a slightly worse state. If anything, the worse-off the world is, the better; it means the survivors truly have to bond together to restore things to how they were. Whether it takes days or centuries. Lessons are learned and remembered, passed through time. Mistakes should ideally not be repeated to that same magnitude ever again.
I think some people take the words at face value and some implications, but their imagination stops working.
Shit, it happened at the end of Final Fantasy VII. Holy and Aeris repelled the Meteor, but Midgar and a lot of other places still remained completely destroyed, even 500 years later if you take the intro of Advent Children into account. Would these people call that an "empty happy ending?"