Paul's Thursday Reviews LII · 12:07am Oct 21st, 2016
Well, crud.
After my last 11-hour workday for the week, I come home thinking I'll finish my regular DeviantArt hunt before doing today's reviews. But hey, I've got a new external hard drive, on which I've transferred all my files from the old one, so I can start saving to that, right?
Nnnope. It turns out that the art folder got corrupted during the transfer and is untouchable. It's being scanned as I type, but odds are I'll have to delete it. Now, I still have all the art on the old drive, but that old drive is steadily crashing, hence the reason I was trying to move all my crap off of it. If I can't safely remove my art from it...
That's 4 Gb of art. It doesn't sound like a lot? That's 15,000+ images. I've been collecting them for over a decade.
Fortunately, it appears my literature folder was spared this issue and transferred everything correctly. Thank goodness for that, now I can store my stories in three places again, making me feel much safer. And I'm sure the only reason the art transfer failed is because I tried to do it en masse. Next time I'll try to move them one sub-folder at a time.
In other news, I'm considering pushing back my entire review schedule by a week. I'm having trouble with scheduling lately, not helped by the selection of stories for my next Round Robin. I still haven't decided on this, but it'll partially be determined by my next scheduling run, which is always on Saturday. If things go poorly, then I'll not be doing reviews next week in order to give myself a bit of breathing room.
Stories for This Week:
Inexscusable by cleverpun (Sequel to If You Came to Conquer)
Descent into Hell by DemonBrightSpirit (Re-Read)
The Last Petals Of Our Lives by Regidar (Re-Read)
Why Me? by Viking ZX (Re-Read)
And There Was, Like, Death'n'Stuff by TodayIWriteFanfics
Total Word Count: 22,886
Rating System
Why Haven't You Read These Yet?: 0
Pretty Good: 1
Worth It: 2
Needs Work: 2
None: 0
Inexscusable
6,350 Words
By cleverpun
Sequel to If You Came to Conquer
In If You Came to Conquer, we learned that Luna is in fact Nightmare Moon, who returned from a future in which she won in order to murder and replace her younger self. Why? Because victory wasn’t half as sweet as having her sister around. She’s lived with this lie ever since her return from the moon, content to keep Celestia in the dark. But then Tirek shows up, and Celestia announces the stupidest plan imaginable. Nightmare really has only one choice in the matter.
Just to get it out of the way: thank Goddess I’m not the only one who recognized the sheer idiocy of Celestia’s scheme in Twilight’s Kingdom (heck, the idiocy of the entire finale). Granted, Nightmare probably only defied it here because she knew she was going to get screwed regardless of the outcome, but it was nice to see somepony show some brains and take Tirek out properly. Listening to Celestia piss and moan in this story about how terrible taking even his life is, while certainly cementing her character, was grating in the worst imaginable way. At least Cadance and Twilight were shown to be more reasonable.
Okay, got that out of my system.
The obvious hook here is Celestia and Nightmare’s confrontation. On one side, we have a devoted pacifist willing to sacrifice her entire world if it means not killing. On the other, we have a mare willing to do anything keep her sister and the world alive and at peace, including killing herself. One would think the moment of revelation would be a whirlwind of drama and theatrics.
So why did it feel so… unenthusiastic?
Maybe it’s me. Maybe I just couldn’t get into it for some reason. I don’t know, but I felt as though there was a lot that was missing from the conversations that went through this story. Everything happens so quickly. I feel as though everything resolved itself much too easily and swiftly for things to resonate. cleverpun did a much better job on the whole compared to this story’s predecessor when it comes to narrative description and body language, so I can’t make an argument against it over that.
I hate it when this kind of thing happens, but I just can’t explain why this story didn’t do it for me. I’m reasonably certain it has something to do with the writing style, but I can’t put my finger on specifics. It just seems like there are things… missing. Important things.
Well, I guess all I can do is apologize for being unclear. It’s apparent that the story is a huge success, given its massive positive rating. I don’t even think the numbers are wrong in this case. If I can’t tell you why the story didn’t work for me, who am I to say the general public got it wrong?
I’m putting this one in the middle ground. I can’t call it great, but I can’t tell you why, so I can’t call it bad either.
Bookshelf: Worth It
Descent into Hell
3,807 Words
By DemonBrightSpirit
Re-Read
Ah, yes. I remember this one. It was written for a horror-themed contest, as I recall, and I offered my services as a reviewer for the entries (there were only two). This was before I was doing reviews regularly, and may have been one of the very first stories I wrote one for. It wasn’t a positive one by any stretch of the imagination. So when I saw I would be reading it again, I hoped time and my own development would paint the scene in a better light.
Descent into Hell retells the story of Magic Duel from Trixie’s perspective… so to speak. Instead of Trixie just being an arrogant jerk with way too much power, she turns legitimately evil, her empathy and rational thought rapidly disappearing as she performs worse and worse deeds, including outright torture.
Alas, my problem with this story hasn’t changed with age. The big issue is that the entirety of it is written in this offhand, ‘not really there’ fashion. You’re not witnessing events as they occur, you’re hearing about them from a third party who seems entirely detached from the events being described. Even when details are given regarding specific events, there’s no emotion offered to any of them.
To a degree, that makes sense given the narrator and what her situation is, but when it comes to holding the reader’s interest and inciting a reaction, it fails miserably. Unless you’re the kind of reader who grows intimately interested in the events of a story simply because they are happening, you won’t be attached to this one.
Compounding this issue are frequent typos, grammatical slips and bad word choice. These things are littered throughout the story, only making the immersion feel worse than it already is. DemonBrightSpirit has proven to be a capable author in the past, but this story just isn’t there.
To be honest, I credit the choice of style to the story’s overall failure. I think the author should stick their usual writing style, but I won’t discredit anyone for trying something new every now and then.
Bookshelf: Needs Work
The Last Petals Of Our Lives
4,277 Words
By Regidar
Re-Read
I do not consider myself a very deep individual, no matter what some of my readers might say about me. Every now and then, I find a story that goes a little too far for me to effectively grasp. This is one of those stories.
In The Last Petals Of Our Lives, Roseluck takes a train to Canterlot in order to set up flower arrangements for a funeral. It’s always been one of her ‘better’ jobs as a flower mare, since they are peaceful and easy. But there’s something different about this one. What it is, Roseluck can’t decide, but she finds herself abruptly thinking on her own mortality and having visions of her own, future funeral.
And… that’s it.
And this is why I don’t consider myself a deep person. It’s pretty clear that Regidar is trying to convey some sort of message with this story, but what that message is has proven beyond me. I can see that something was resolved, but it can’t just be a sense of ‘comfort.’ So what exactly are we seeing? Why is Roseluck having these visions now? What is it that makes this particular funeral affect her so much? Is it because she talked to that family member?
Well, I suppose I should judge this story based on what I know. In that regard, the story is solidly written, with nice visuals and a decent sense of atmosphere. There is a little bit of background and worldbuilding going on, but that part felt forced to me. I get that Regidar was trying to put pony ‘faith’ into perspective for the story, but doing so via exposition just doesn’t feel like the right way to go about it. Then again, with the small size of the story, it may have been done as a space-saving method. I suppose I am okay with that.
I feel as though this review is sorely lacking, and that’s entirely because I can’t describe and judge the point behind it beyond the superficial. Still, for providing a decent reading experience in the overall, I having nothing significantly negative to say about it, I have no reason to rate it poorly.
Bookshelf: Worth It
I’m not 100% certain, but I believe this may be the first story by Viking ZX I ever read. If so, it is certainly a good introduction.
One of the very few good things to come out of Twilight’s Kingdom, Why Me? acts as a character study of Discord. It shows him performing community service in order to make amends publicly for joining forces with Tirek, but his mind is continuously drifting. The worst of it? He keeps thinking about a certain purple princess. No, this isn’t a TwiCord story. Rather, it’s a very serious look at Discord’s personality, his guilt and his struggle to come to terms with his new role as a – gag – friend.
For starters, this concept? Meh. I mean, seriously, before the first part of the episode was done I bet half the Fimfic fan community was thinking up potential versions of exactly this. Heck, if it hadn’t been so popular I probably wouldn’t have even glanced at this one.
No, what makes this story shine is Viking ZX’s handling of the demigod of chaos himself. For starters, I am nothing but envious of how Discord’s antics run continuously with just enough zaniness to fit the character but never enough to disrupt the purpose of the story. Almost every action Discord performs is weird and silly, even when he’s being perfectly serious, and I loved him for it. This is how I wish I could write Discord.
It also paints a vision of his background that I’ve never seen before. Specifically, the author envisions Discord as needing to create chaos in order to build power and create more, like a self-perpetuating engine. Every time he uses his magic, he must either create enough chaos to regenerate the loss or see his reserves depleted. And, thanks to the Rainbow Wave (or whatever they call that thing), he down to such a tiny amount that normal, flesh-and-blood ponies could be a legitimate threat to him.
I love this interpretation of Discord’s existence. Frankly, my only regret is that I didn’t think of it first. It’s a wonderful way to put a leash on his abilities such that he isn’t the cure-all for every terrible event that comes up.
Beyond this great idea, the rest of the story is about what you’d expect: Discord coming to terms with his guilt with a little outside help. Not that big a deal in general, but it has the virtue of being written competently, as I have come to expect from this particular author. It also has the advantage of not being a grief-riddled angst-fest, much to the author’s credit.
If you want to take notes on how to write a good Discord, read this. Or if you’re one of those who finds the idea of Discord recovering from guilt worthwhile, I suppose this is for you too.
Bookshelf: Pretty Good
And There Was, Like, Death'n'Stuff
1,165 Words
TodayIWriteFanfics failed to provide cover art.
Another entry to the Rage Reviews F*CK THIS PROMPT 10th contest. I’m going through those painfully slowly, especially considering the group’s already past contest #14 by this point. This story was given honorable mention status, so I felt obligated to give it a read.
Okay, yes, I just wanted to know what made it better than mine. Sue me. (Not really, I’m totally broke right now and you wouldn’t get anything anyway.)
So… yeah. This is certainly one of the weirder stories I’ve read involving Pinkie, which says a lot. The vast majority of the story involves Pinkie murdering a pony named Red Velvet. One would think this should be horrifying, but I’m afraid "she cut off her legs" doesn’t evoke terror in me. The directness of the events coupled with the victim’s lackluster response left me miffed.
Then the twist comes. It’s extremely silly, makes no sense (even in the context of Pinkie), and throws the majority of the story for a loop.
I have often stated that I don’t care for ‘stupid funny.’ This is a good example. I wasn’t even mildly amused. But while most ‘stupid funny’ stories leave me annoyed or frustrated, this one just.... ‘is’. It's just not my kind of humor. It’s thoroughly disappointing, especially considering that this was somehow put on the same level as The Love Life of a Secret Murderer, which to me is vastly superior in every conceivable way. I guess there’s something to be said about differences of opinion.
I suppose if you’re into blood, stupid jokes and a certain self-awareness, you’ll enjoy this. As such, I can’t outright tell you it’s bad. Obviously, there are those who think it’s great. I guess you’ll just have to read it for yourself to find out.
Bookshelf: Needs Work
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The directory got corrupted? That's just nuts.
Thank you for the critique, even if it was somewhat...vaguer than usual. That is one of the tricky things, however, about critiquing something that is inherently subjective. Sometimes there just isn't a truly logical reason for an opinion.
I think that, perhaps more than other story I've written, Inexcusable provoked the most varied responses. Comments ranged from "Celestia is an OOC bitch" to "Why do Twilight and Cadance seem like they're on Xanex". I personally thought I overdid it on the melodrama, but the snappy (or "rushed" to be
honestless diplomatic) pacing of the narrative may have made things awkward.As a point of order, however, Celestia isn't necessarily whining about taking Tirek's life. As one commenter astutely pointed out, Celestia even calls Nightmare Moon theatrical when they talk in the dungeons. It's the truth about Luna that causes all her actual emotions, not Tirek's death. (I love it when comments on my stories highlight details I didn't necessarily intend to be important
)
Regardless of your opinion, I look forward to your comments on the final part of the trilogy if/when you read it
Also, my sympathies for the computer wankery. I know how you feel.
Dude. That sucks about your pic collection!
I'd hope you find a way to at least get some of them back, but ... 
Thanks for the review of Why Me, as well. And I'm glad it got you to give The Dusk Guard a try.
And on that note, you liked my Discord shenanigans! Excellent. A flying coconut carrying a European Swallow landed on my windowsill this morning and left a slip of pancake peel with a note on it suggesting that something in that vague, improbable madness may be winding its way this way sometime soon ...
4264719
Yeah, sorry about the vagueness. Usually I can zero in on something I really do/don't like, but not this time.
But yes, it's obvious that the truth behind Luna has freaked Celestia out and is responsible for a lot of her reaction. But she still makes it a big deal to point it out. Even if that's just a mask for her real reasons, that doesn't make it more tolerable. If anything, it makes it worse: ignoring the problem so it can get worse while telling everyone else that it's wrong to do something that will likely save them and all of Equestria in the future, herself included.
...
Besides, I really don't like anything about that episode.
4264757
50 Gb in 3 years? My mind is running rampant with theories of low standards, obsession, a nonexistent personal life, or a combination of all three.
4264785
*Tries to come up with witty retort, fails, then weeps at his lack of comic creativity*
4264642
Meh, the source drive was messed up as it was. Shouldn't have surprised me when the files within it failed to carry over.