• Member Since 19th Jun, 2012
  • offline last seen January 3rd

xjuggernaughtx


Only mostly dead.

More Blog Posts688

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    The image in question.

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  • 173 weeks
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Aug
10th
2015

xjuggernaughtx's Top Down Review #7 - The Epic Battle of Good Versus Slightly Less Good But Still Pretty Good in the Long Run · 2:20am Aug 10th, 2015

My head hurts. Let’s just get through this.

Spoiler Free Summary

This is a study in how to make a story that I intensely dislike.



I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this. It’s poorly written and isn’t about any ponies that I know.

Plot and Characterization

This story is about two alicorns that have a pillow fight that escalates into a water balloon/food fight. These two ponies are called Princess Celestia and Princess Luna, but they don’t resemble them in the slightest. They act like ten year olds and wreak havoc across the castle.

The ending of the story is perhaps one of the worst conclusions that I’ve come across. It basically boils down to “And then other stuff happened, but I’m tired of writing this, so whatever.”

Honestly, I don’t even know how to break down where the problems with the characterizations lie other than to say everywhere. I could buy the plot of them letting their hair down a little and having a pillow fight, but not like this. I mean, Celestia is galloping through the castle screaming that they are under attack and to mobilize the guards. Yeah. Totally something Celestia would do…

Look, this is a story that is basically character destruction for the sake of comedy, but character destruction is only funny when it’s used to skewer the natural state of the character. This does nothing to poke fun at Celestia or Luna. It’s just them acting out of character for no discernible reason.

I do have to bring up Princess Luna’s dialogue because it’s horrendous. Here are some examples:

“Yes,” Luna nodded slowly and completely seriously. “Perhaps thou couldst have caught us sooner should you decrease your portions of cake, sist-”

“Forsooth, surely you could have seen that I could not be defeated!”

“Bwa-haha ha!” Luna tossed another balloon, which Celestia caused to implode with a powerful cupcake barrage. Her supply of dripping water balloons was steadily dwindling, but she still had many. “There will be no end to the water balloon mugging, this shall be known in history as the day Celestia was defeated!”

This is some of the laziest Olde English-style writing I’ve read. I’m not a huge stickler for exactly correct Elizabethan dialect like some people are, but this story can’t even manage to keep the style together in the same sentence.

Technical Things

I knew I was in trouble from the first, um, paragraph? Set of paragraph-like sentences? What to call them. Let’s take a look:

Princess Celestia had just gotten ready to settle in for a long night of sleep, the pale moon shining in brightly through her bedroom window.
With her golden tiara in one hoof, Celestia stifled a yawn and began to clamber into bed after a long day of guiding the sun, free at last for just a little while from the constant politics of the castle.
At least, she would have snuggled into bed for a good night’s sleep, were it not for the fact that something rather large and puffy had suddenly obstructed her view.

Why is each one of these sentences a paragraph? They belong together in one. We have what is essentially a comma splice in the first sentence and an unnecessary comma in the third. Finally, that finally bit is describing a pillow smacking into her face. Does that seem like evocative language to you for describing being whapped in the face with a pillow? It certainly doesn’t to me.

From here on, the story is full of awkward phrasing:

Celestia, the slowly spinning helmet still dangling atop her horn, menacingly began approaching with a slew of pillows raised.

“Ah ha!” Luna crowed in victory as the last of the levitated pillows was knocked aside, and Luna flared her wings.

And lots and lots of sentences broken up as paragraphs for no reason:

However, Celestia was obviously not helpless, as she still had the pillow that she retained in her mouth.

With an almighty uppercut, Celestia slammed Luna in the chin with enough force to knock over an entire teacup.

For that moment, however, Princess Luna had nearly overcome her sister’s nigh impenetrable fortress of flying pillows, save for the one that Celestia held in her mouth.

“Ah ha!” Luna crowed in victory as the last of the levitated pillows was knocked aside, and Luna flared her wings. They cast a dark shadow over the hall as Celestia slowly began retreating, her lowered head bowing ever so slowly as she backed away. “Forsooth, surely you could have seen that I could not be defeated!” Luna pranced back and forth on her left and right hooves in excitement, drawing closer to her helpless prey.

At least the spelling is good. I don’t remember seeing any typos.

Finally, there were two incidences where something was slightly funny, so I’ll give the author props for that.

Are You The Intended Audience

I think this story is going to appeal to people that just like to see ideas play out. If the idea of Celestia and Luna having a pillow fight is gold to you, and you don’t really care about the quality of how that plays out, then read away. This story is a goodie bag of things I really dislike in fanfiction, but if you are (way, way, way) more forgiving than me, go to town.

I give this:





Zero Rage Reviews.

Bad characters. Bad writing. Bad story. There’s just nothing at all for me in this one.

Comments ( 17 )

This... was precisely my reaction to the story when it first came out. :twilightoops:

Akumo isn't a bad guy, but I have no idea how this thing is sitting at "Seventh Best on Fimfiction".

I considered reading that a couple of times, but never brought myself to look at it. Thanks for ensuring I'll never have to subject myself to it.

3308227
I'm thinking Akumo's a gal, actually.

3308227 It's things like that that I find frustrating here. There are tons of good stories on this site sitting at 12,000th or something like that, yet this was in the number three position. It makes you want to give up...

3308233 Yeah, I'd avoid this if I were you. I also really disliked Akumokagetsu story Twilight is Doomed, so we apparently have incompatible tastes.

Isn't this the ur-example of fluff?

3308255 It is after I downvoted it. I don't downvote stories very often, but this was the rare instance where I really felt I needed to.

3308254 Depends on how liberal your definition of fluff is. I think it still needs to actually be about the characters. This just seemed like an attempt to use that picture in some form. It's just OOC drivel.

You act like this story is trying to be anything other than extremely silly, when it's really not.

3308298 I don't think that this story is trying very hard at anything, and that's a surefire way to get a bad review from me. Just because it's trying to be light and stupid on purpose doesn't mean that it doesn't suck.

3308298 3308309
Not to mention that there are plenty of stories that are just extremely silly/light and stupid that are in character and well written. Racist Barn by Ponydora Prancypants or The Saga of Dark Demon King Ravenblood Nightblade, Interior Design Alicorn by Bad Horse come to mind. It's a dangerous grenre to write in because its easy to fail at, but it should still be judged because it can be done really well.

3308259 God damn. One downvote=55 ranks down. The ranking system on this website is so broken it's not even funny. My stories have gotten to the point where less popular is better in the long run. I released a new chapter two days ago, got seven up votes and two down votes from it, and promptly dropped a thousand ranks for it. And then this shit is like seventh just for dodging downies.

3308990 Downvotes are extremely powerful on this site, and the problem that you encountered is one that I think needs some attention. It actively punishes people that are updating longer stories, since you are likely to get at least one downvote when it updates. It would take hundreds of upvotes to counter that, so your story generally keeps slipping backwards in the rankings. People can argue that rank means nothing, but one look at a story's views reveals the falseness of that. The difference in views that I was getting before Apple Ninjas and Other Vital Concerns got its two downvotes is extreme. It went from having fifteen to twenty views a day to getting maybe three or four a week. Cheerilee's Thousand will work its way back up to about the thousandth ranked position over the course of months, then receive a downvote and fall to somewhere just over two thousandth. It's frustrating, but it's the system that I've got at the moment. It would be nice for the downvotes to receive less power, that's for sure.

Hm... Very interesting. The thing that bothered me from the story was Celestia's claiming that they were under attack from the soldiers. I would have liked to have seen some kind of repercussion to the equivalent of 'crying wolf'.

As for stories that are far more popular than they should be, I've been through that ringer a couple times in my own reviews. It certainly doesn't help our self-esteem. But I've always lived by this code. "Anything that is easy to earn isn't worth earning." Now, I have nothing against Akumo or any popular author. They've never shown me any disrespect, but just writing something popular doesn't make it last.

3308990 I can relate. My long runners pick up very few new readers any longer, but they do pick up downvotes from random people, usually 1-2 per update. It does balance out over time, but I'm not so much climbing in the ranks as experiencing a very very slow fall.

Forsooth, surely you could have seen that I could not be defeated!

This looks like something T-Rex from Dinosaur Comics would say...

3313531 Every bit of Luna's dialogue from that story is like nails on a chalkboard to me.

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