xjuggernaughtx's Top Down Review #11 - Brother · 3:30pm Sep 25th, 2015

Spoiler Free Summary

Brother is an excellent story about Big Mac’s commitment to family. It has strong prose that tilts a little toward grandiose from time to time, but is overall well done.

Plot and Characterization

I find it hard to talk about fics that I don’t really have a problem with. I feel like I need to justify complaining about stories that I’m going to give a low rank to by backing up my opinion with examples. It’s more difficult to figure out how to do that with things I liked. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s challenging for me, and this story didn’t help in that department. It’s great.

We’re introduced to Big Mac as he struggles to pull a sled through heavy snow. He’s tired. He’s cold. He’s in a lot of pain, and he just wants to lay down for a few minutes in the increasingly warm snow. As he fights loss of consciousness, the events of the past few days come back to him. Finally, filly Applejack (his cargo in the sled) wakes him up in a panic, and he realizes that if he doesn’t get moving, they aren’t going to make it. It’s a race against time.

Big Mac shines here. In a story without dialogue, it’s sometimes difficult to get a sense of character, but that’s one of the advantages to using Big Mac: He rarely talks anyway, so action speaks just as well for him. I totally buy his stubborn refusal to give up when his sister’s life is literally on the line.

This story is a good example of what I’m always telling people to do both in their fics and in film work: Work within your means. I’d have to go back to Martian’s story page to see what other lengths he’s worked in, but here he fully develops a tale in just about three thousand words. It’s not too long, nor too short. It resolves nicely within the frame of those words. I greatly dislike when people are trying to write some crazy nine hundred thousand word epic when it’s apparent that they don’t have the resources to do that, whether that means time, ability, or external editing. On the other end of the spectrum, no one likes a twenty thousand word idea stuffed into fifteen hundred words. The length of your fic compared against what it needed is really, really important when it comes to my enjoyment of it.

Like I tell filmmakers: If you have ten thousand dollars, don’t try to make a three hour sci-fi epic. Make a really great five minute short. This story is a really great five minute short.

One minor complaint: The ending line feels a little schmaltzy to me. I have a hard time hearing it come out of the mouth of a very young filly. The emotion of it doesn’t sound right. It feels more like what the author wanted a poignant ending to be rather than what a five year old might say.

Technical Things

What impressed me the most here was the prose. I liked it quite a bit. Take this, for example:

Another step, a feeling of nails being jammed into hooves. The harness of the sleigh about his shoulders creaked from the movement, long since iced. Another step, pull hard, keep the sleigh moving. Ignore the ache, push past the bone-deep chill. Again. Again. Step. One hoof in front of the other. Can't stop. The sleigh felt like it weighed ten tons, felt like trying to drag an entire barn, the entire town.

Lots of short, action-oriented sentences to keep us thinking like Big Mac is. His focusing on the immediate, just putting one hoof in front of the other. It gives me a very clear idea of how hard this is.

How about another:

In minutes, the world around the two Apples had been reduced to a circle no more than twenty steps across - the rest of Equestria was swallowed by white. Beyond was only a wall of fluttering snow with the barest glimpses of shapes beyond. It was a blizzard, but not the violent thing most imagine the word to mean: there was no wind here, no driving wall of snow, no sound except for the whisper of the sleigh's runners, Mac's breathing and the crunch of his hooves in the new snow - all sounding somehow curiously distant and apart.

I was impressed by this. How many of us would have gone for a shrieking, all-out storm of a blizzard? I probably would have. Instead, Martian gives us something gentle. It helps build tension, and feels no less dangerous. I do think that it didn’t need to be explained to the reader that this was defying expectations, though. That brings the marks for this paragraph down some.

This story does dip into the hyperbolic from time to time, though. I waffled about it some because Big Mac is in a pretty extreme situation. I went back and forth on stuff like this:

Every step he took hurt, hurt like nothing else he'd ever experienced.

and

It hurt to breathe, every gasp was like breathing jagged icicles

On one hand, Big Mac is literally facing life or death in a desperate situation. If grandiose description is ever warranted, shouldn’t it be under those conditions? On the other hand, it does get wearisome as a reader to see thing described this way for long stretches. I kept feeling a little annoyed by the phrasing, then apologizing for it because the plot justified it. In the end, I felt that while it could have been dialed back some, it did fit the situation. It’s not a big enough problem to derail my enjoyment of the story.

What could have been better here was my emotional connection to the events described, but that’s always going to be a hit or miss thing. Several people told me that Sun Princess was a fine enough story, but just didn’t hit them all that hard emotion, whereas it totally crushed me. That’s how I feel about this one. I really enjoyed it, but I don’t connect with it emotionally in the way that I imagine some readers will, especially those close to their brothers and sisters. Since I don’t have any siblings and my family really isn’t all that close, it doesn’t resonate as strongly for me. One might say that it’s the story’s job to create that resonance, but I do believe that our reactions to such things are often dependent on how important they are too us going in. That’s not to say that a story can’t make us understand or care about new topics. It’s just easier if we are already predisposed toward it. It’s going to take a truly magnificent story to make you care about something that you had no real interest in before.

Are You The Intended Audience

Probably. I’d expect that most readers would enjoy this one. Big Mac comes through clearly. The plot works. It’s probably a little feelsy for a large segment of those viewing it. I think this story has a lot of upsides. The only thing holding it back for me is a lack of emotional connection to it, but I think a lot of other people will find that here.

I give it: