May
15th
2016
Project Horizons pre-blog blog · 5:07pm May 15th, 2016
I just finished book 3 of PH and need some time to process things.
Until that's done, I thought I'd put out a call to folks who've been following my review of it and have issues with the story. Book 3 ends more or less on the destruction of Hightower Prison; up to that point, what are the problems you see with the story? I'd like to have something to address in the review other than rattling off what happens to the characters, because at this point, though I have a few things to talk about, I feel like that's all I can do. :B
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Up until that point, my issue with the story was that there were not enough chapters. But that was fixed later.
Hightower Prison? That's about where I got to before throwing in the towel.
Anything you read beyond that is unknown territory, PP, so beware. Here be dragons.
I got quite a ways because I was looking to read about the alicorn featured in the cover image. The story was good but it felt... not "draggy," but... "overly extended" maybe?
There's also a subtle tone difference that bothered me, if I recall correctly. Little Pip went around to a lot of places, ran into awful things, sorted them out, and found neutral or friendly ponies tucked away here and there. She made a group of good friends who also had friends, and the whole extended group changed the world.
PH did most of that (the core group was still so beset with strife though...) but when Blackjack encounters something awful, it's often much more awful than things Little Pip encountered. (Project Chimera versus The Goddess, Blackjack's old stable versus Little Pip's, Blackjack's injuries versus Little Pip's, the screaming basement - as I like to call it - versus... ummmm...). Essentially, after Little Pip, it felt like some of the things happening to Blackjack were just so something really awful would happen to her.
That would be my complaint.
Honestly my only issues come at the very end, and even then they are few. I'll wait to interject when you find Chapter 72-75.
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That pretty well sums up the issue with the whole story to me. Blackjack exists to be kicked by the setting. Her back story is just enough to try to justify why the reader shouldn't get fed up with it because she isn"t a very good person so clearly she deserves some of this, but at the end of the day the whole arc is seeing if she can be made sympathetic through sufficient torture porn.
Oh shoot, I missed Part 2 of your review. I'll have to catch up when I find some time.
I loved Project Horizons and Book 3 and the Sanguine arc were probably the highest point in terms of my interest in the story. Eventually however, its slow updates slowly killed my enthusiasm for the story to the point where I haven't even read past Book 4. You're lucky you didn't have to deal with that!
As far as story elements go, I found that the story started adding too many characters to the main cast. Adding Psychoshy and Stygius felt like the addition of Reggie and Kage in the original story - they have their purpose in the story, but the characterization suffers due to how many people there are surrounding Blackjack. You also notice the story becoming more and more anime (or kaizo in the SS&E sense), and some action scenes have stuff that kinda stifles the atmosphere (e.g. Psychoshy's "I'm talking... to a really... hot guy here!" in chapter 45). I think it's mostly alright for this volume, but it's something to wary of for Book 4 especially.
Also, I just want to say that "Lucidity" was probably a top 5 chapter in the whole story for me.
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What number is that?
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43. It's the chapter in Happyhorn Gardens.
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Oh yes. :)
Every now and again, it seems like it takes too long to get where things are going. It's not exactly slow pacing, because there's always plenty happening, but sometimes the portion of stuff happening that feels like it matters dips a bit. Somewhere in the late 20s there might have been room to condense a bit, Hippocratic might have been able to have been slimmed down, perhaps with one fewer chapter and the others a bit longer, and probably in the neighborhood of 10k could have been cut from Hightower.
Especially in volume three, an issue I have is that a lot of the main cast just isn't there. So not only are the relationships and interactions that are one of the big selling points absent, but because of the feeling of invincibility you've called out in the past, the stakes can't quite seem as high because there aren't people around Blackjack that you care about as much as Glory, P-21, or Scotch Tape, and in Hightower, where you do have some of the main cast, it's the high-powered portion. So you're not likely to feel too much dread about the prospect of Rampage dying, and Psychoshy is pretty high up there too and doesn't have the same degree of long-term building that the others did, leaving mostly just Lacunae as core cast on the line. So unless you really quickly get attached to newly introduced characters, one axis of tension is mostly foreclosed.
The FoE crossover part was, I thought, mostly okay, especially after a couple changes made after initial release. But I think you're probably far enough along that I think you can see why the ambiguous-love-scene ending of the one chapter was something that, while potentially fun at the time and maybe even a good thing in the context of an ongoing serial, was probably a bad decision in the context of PH as a finished story.
Then there's the personal frustration thing which I suspect was actually intended to happen. Basically, Blackjack making the kinds of too-goody-good decisions that leave you just knowing that it's going to end up biting her in the ass. But that's who she is, and in the long run, I at least like it. But in the moment, it's grating, and maybe doesn't need to come up quite as much as it does. Or maybe it did. Eh.
I don't remember enough details about the story to give any useful comments. I'm actually starting to look forward to reading it again when it is all out on Fimfiction. Just to see how I react to it now.
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HURR DURP GOTTA WRITE THE REVIEW STILL X.x
(Do you still need this? Still catching up on my feed.)
I have a hard time differentiating between Books 3 or 4 of PH. Everything gets kinda muddled together in my brain, not because I think that the story is bad or uninteresting at that point, but because I think that the narrative kinda loses itself in going through some quite cool things that have to happen in order for the endgame to work out. I do remember the stuff that takes place, but I don't quite remember why they happens in the order they do. Small logical necessities aside, there isn't really much of a reason for why, say, she couldn't confront Sanguine after High tower. There is a lot of scene setting (particularly when it comes to making Blackjack learn how to cope with her trauma), but there's a certain lack of coherence, of an overall theme/narrative impetus, that hurts the fic a bit.
Which is unfortunate, because my favorite chapter, where she journeys a bit with some gang members, is right around here.
(Then again, it has been a few years since I read it. Take from that what you will.)
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Check out the review blog, it'll fill in some blanks. :)
I do see what you mean, though. The next book is being set up as "either Dawn Bay or Shadowbolt Tower" and I don't think there's any kind of time limit on going to either place first.