cleverpun's Concise Critiques #6 · 6:48am Jul 10th, 2016
Unfortunately, not every critique can fill up a thousand word blog post. Here is a selection of reviews/critiques, in two sentences each.
Cant by Rambling Writer:
This is perhaps the most anemic horror story I've read in some time: not only are the stakes incredibly low, but the narrative goes out of its way to point out and clarify everything. While the situation does fit Twilight's character, and the ending isn't bad, this story lacks any real suspense or interest.
Alicorn Time by Alicorn Priest:
Another Blog Post Story: a story that presents concepts/ideas, rather than telling a proper narrative. There is the beginning of plots here, and the concept is interesting, but that's all it is.
An Empty Feeling by Shadowsciver:
Stilted dialogue and narration makes it impossible to take this one seriously; not only do none of the characters sound like themselves, but the narration mentions a lot of extremely pointless actions/dialogue tags. This is all excacerbated by the involvement of "Anon"; all of the main six give up and Twilight gets a literal faceless character to help Spike, resulting in an anemic and ludicruous attempt at feels.
If Titanium Dragon is the final boss of Fimfiction, cleverpun is the optional boss that's even harder to beat!
But seriously, I'm curious how you pick these. None of these authors seem to be big names, and if you grab stories at random, you're going to get a lot of amateur work.
(Aside: I do not use "amateur" as an epithet. In fact, yesterday I dug out some writings of my own from ten years ago, and they were arguably worse than any of those you mention here.)
4081846 Cant and An Empty Feeling were both from the featured box. Alicorn Time was because I follow Alicorn Priest.
Generally, a lot of things I review are going to come from the featured/popular boxes or users I follow. Some of them are also going to come from requests or recommendations/reviews from other users. Obviously I don't pick things at random: most of the time, the description and user comments are going to be enough to make preliminary judgements about a story.
If a story has a low vote/view count, but still looks interesting, then I actually tend to prioritize it slightly more. If a story has already been reviewed by four other users, then I tend to prioritize it less.
Ultimately, though, I don't have a real system. It's mostly a matter of intuition and what mood I was in
Your link for Alicorn Time is to one of the comments.
4107987 Yes, that's intentional. If my review is a summary of one of my comments, I usually link to it.
I suppose it might be better to link to the story and put the link to the comment elsewhere, so the reader might see the story first. But I'm not sure where to put it otherwise.