CCC: cleverpun's Critique Corner #26 — The Hays Code · 2:24am May 5th, 2016
As a matter of full disclosure, my initial meeting with Estee was not pleasant. My initial conversation with them was so unproductive and infuriating—filled with childish behavior and passive agression from both sides—it prompted me to start this critique series (rather than commenting directly on stories as I had before).
Everyone deserves a second chance, however, and so today I want to try and leave those feelings behind me. This review makes no references to authorial trends or past behavior. I consider myself an objective professional, and I wanted to review one of Estee’s stories to practice leaving my personal feelings about people out of the equation.
Hopefully this review meets the standard of my other critiques.
Title: The Hays Code
Author: Estee
Found via: the featured box
Short summary: One Ms. Hays attempts to impose her personal moral code on the film industry.
The Title/Description: The title is pretty unsubtle: it states the entire premise of the fic without fanfare or adjustment.
The description is adequate: it makes no mention of the story's main feature (the titular Ms. Hays), but it tells the reader the premise adequately.
Genre(s): Import Fic, Satire (?), Historical Reference
What does this story do well?: There is some clever wordplay and descriptions scattered about the story. I liked the running gag about the brightness of the lights: it was worth a chuckle and also characterized the protagonist.
The main character is archetypal and well-defined. She is the sort of standard-issue Moral Guardian that this type of plotline inevitably revolves around, but there’s also a decent layer of hypocrisy and incompetence around her. She’s a fun character to dislike, precisely because we’ve seen her so many times before.
Where could this story improve?: This story has a lot of sentences that are phrased in an awkward or dull way. Part of that may be intentional: the narration is obviously in Ms. Hays perspective. There are so many meandering sentences, however, that it is difficult to read a lot of the things in the story. This is particularly damning for a comedy, since this style of writing impedes punchline delivery and comedic timing. There’s also enough typos and odd formatting choices that the story is that much harder to read.
Following on this, the story isn't particularly funny most of the time. It’s the type of comedy that often populates the featured and popular boxes. They state ridiculous events, without any sort of buildup or sense of comedic timing, and then let the reader find the humor themselves. The issue here is that none of the events are actually ridiculous: all of them are ripped directly from the real life Hays Code, and receive no embellishment of any sort. Even the reactions of the characters in-story aren’t that funny, since most of them are skipped over completely.
As a result of this and other factors, the story lacks any satirical bite. Repeating history isn’t satirical or engaging. The story also has absolutely nothing to do with ponies. If the story had played the differences from real-life more, emphasized the way ponies react to it, this might have had more satirical value.
The ending is a good encapsulation of this story. The protagonist is thrown out of the studio, while all the people she attempted to impose her guidelines on laugh at her. There’s no final joke, just another line illustrating the character’s ineptitude. Perhaps the ending is intended to mimic the reader's response: point-and-laugh. It feels more childish than emotionally gratifying, though.
In a single sentence: An attempt at satirical comedy that lacks good comedy and good satire.
Verdict: Downvote. There’s nothing here. The story lacks satirical value, it lacks comedic value (with sparse exceptions), and the style that it is written in involves a lot of padding. The story sort of takes an alternate history approach to real life moral standards, but it doesn’t differentiate itself enough or highlight the events that were different. Even as just a historical in-joke, it simply doesn’t offer enough to the reader.
If you already knew what the Hay’s Code was, then this fic won’t offer you anything. If you don’t know what the Hay’s Code was, the Wikipedia or TVTropes articles will be more entertaining and informative than this fic.
I enjoyed that review, but the one you linked to at the beginning - whew, that was brutal. Not in a deliberately cruel way, but it really cut to the bone.
Objective disclosure: This was a bit of a joke fic Estee wrote to get the idea out of her head. You'd do better to look at "500 little murders" or "Naked Lunch" or well, a lot of her other work.
3920989 Yes. That's another reason I started doing actual reviews rather than comments. My reviews follow a defined structure, and I intentionally made positive points a part of said structure. Sometimes it can be hard to find things to like about a story, of course. There's value in positive critique as well as negative, both in making it more digestible and finding things to learn from.
I think that, because of how much easier it is to create negative critique, reviewers often forget to include positive points (myself included).
3921055 That's not really "objective": it's implying that the story wasn't good because the author put no effort into it. It comes off as a defensive declaration, not a statement of fact.
I've actually attempted to read many of Estee's stories: Twilight Spackle, Five Hundred Little Murders, and Pinkie Pie Has Infiltrated The Changelings' Secret Base! All of them repeat very similar issues: meandering/bland narration, awkward construction, a lack of reason to be "pony", and social commentary/satire that falls flat.
One might contend that I am biased because I don't like Estee's writing style. I've hopefully explained, however, why I dislike it. Whether this story was written lazily or not, I can't say. I do think, though, that it is representative of her work in a lot of ways (good and bad).
3922667 Is it bad that I actually want a Cleverpun-rips-my-story-to-shreds review?
3930617 I am currently open to critique requests
3930636 Well that's disheartening. The only stuff I'm actually looking for feedback on are incomplete. I suppose I could ask for Drop since that's relatively short and complete, but I don't really intend on revisiting it (another attempt at the same sort of storyline stacked up a 1:1 voting ratio and started edging towards 1:2 before I abandoned it) so critique on it wouldn't be very useful to me. Oh well.
Have you read Five Hundred Little Murders? It is probably Estee's best story.
3938532 See my reply to Super Trampoline here (paragraphs 2 and 3): 3922667
I suspected I hated Estee's writing style. Since writing that comment, though, I have also read Customer Disservice, and I found it bland. Even ignoring the one-note-ness of it (to use your wording), it has other problems.
Perhaps there is something to Estee's writing that I'm missing. After attempting to read several of Estee's works, however, I just can't summon anything but extreme ambivalence (or perhaps mild disdain) towards their oeuvre.
3938620 Honestly, Estee's writing style is very particular, and on some stories it works very well... and on others it's terrible. Estee is the only writer with a story on my highest bookshelf that also has multiple stories that I've downvoted.
Twilight Spackle was fairly lame, in my humble opinion. However, A Total Eclipse of the Fun is far better. There's a much better rhythm, and things are generally a great deal more interesting. Its one-shot sequel, Princesses Can't Cook, is also rather enjoyable and may be a faster introduction to the better side of Estee.