The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Reviews #07: DEATH BATTLE: Twilight Sparkle VS Lightning Dawn · 7:46pm Jun 5th, 2017
Greetings, my good ladies and gentlemen, on this fine early summer day. It is my hope to find you well fed, well rested and in a generally awesome state of being.
I shall not beat about the bush on this one: today's fic is bad. Really quite terrible. And I knew it would be so going in: this is a Death Battle fic, explicitly written to spite the author's enemies, real and imagined.
Before we begin our journey together to see how deep this particular rabbit hole goes, a reminder of our scoring system:
The Good: Fics of clear high quality, showcasing the work of an excellent or promising author.
The Bad: Fics of clear low quality, showcasing the work of a poor or inexperienced author.
The Ugly: Fics blighted by an underlying nastiness, against characters or real people, showcasing the work of an unwise author.
Onward, then, to the main attraction:
Tags: Alternative Universe, Anthro, Slice of Life
Description:
Lightning and Twilight meet up on a field to prove who is stronger than the other, but Lightning is very disappointing with Twilight's horrible attitude and misguided information.
Read this blog before reading the fic
https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/722638/reason-i-made-the-death-battle
First Impressions:
When the only appropriate opening response is the legendary facepalm of Jean-Luc Picard himself, you know things have gone somewhat pear shaped. The cover image? There isn't one. The tags? They're wrong. The description? One short sentence, with mangled grammar, and a damn great red flag.
Let's deal with those tags first. The main issue here is Slice of Life. Here is how it is defined, for the purpose of this site:
A story focusing on daily, normal experiences. Unlike adventure, the story is not driven by action or discovery of new, exciting things, rather bringing the mundane to attention, such as attending school or a dinner party.
Perhaps I have led an abnormally mundane existence, and have thus been blinded to the dreadful and violent truth, but last I checked, a death battle does not really qualify as a daily, normal experience.
I honestly cannot guess what the author was thinking when he selected that tag.
Cover images are a topic on which I have spoken before. The gist is this: you need one, preferably a good one, to draw the eye to the fic. This fic doesn't have one, and it suffers for the absence.
The title of this fic hardly speaks of anything good, but the description, that's the real red flag. The grammatical error is hardly great (should be disappointed, not disappointing); this sort of thing is forgivable in the bulk text, typos happen, but in a one sentence description?
No.
Still, that's small potatoes compared to what follows after:
Lightning is very disappointing with Twilight's horrible attitude and misguided information
My first impressions are quite straightforward: this tells me, in no uncertain terms, that this fic is going to suck balls.
Story and Characterization:
First, a simple fact must be completely understood: Twilight Sparkle is out of character. Not a little bit out of character, nor even quite a lot out of character. She is COMPLETELY out of character. Think My Immortal levels of bad characterization. Every trace of her personality has been expunged:
“Shut up!” shouted Twilight “We’re having this battle so I can put you in your place once and for all!”
Lightning sighed again, “You disappoint me. I thought you Equestrians were all about Friendship and understanding… Well, I guess I thought wrong, but again I suggest you agree to call this fight off.”
Twilight could only scoff, “Two things! One: This is no ordinary fight, it’s a Death Battle… and two: Why should I agree to call it off. You Space Ponies are nothing but blood thirsty war-mongers who denounce friendship at every corner and solve your problems with violence, and worse you claim that you’re Oh-so-much better than we Equestrians.”
Does this sound like Twilight to you, my good ladies and gentlemen? Even a little bit?
It goes without saying that the fact that they are having a Death Battle at all goes completely without explanation beyond the above. Death Battles in general just don't work in prose literature, as there is no plot to speak of and few easy ways to incorporate the required analysis. They are best left to YouTubers.
As for this particular bit of anti-characterization, normally, I would look at such a thing and use it to bluntly analyse the author, with often deeply unflattering results. In this case, however, I don't need to: the author has helpfully done my job for me:
Twilight may have been acting way OOC, but she was in fact behaving EXACTLY like most people behave towards characters I support (Long before I wrote about them) and Character I create... (scorning them wrongfully... Blowing them way out of proportion and deliberately leaving out facts that are clearly written... refusing to listen) So I made her behave just the same way.
From the author's accompanying blog post.
...Right.
...Okay.
Let's see if I understand what is going on here. The author has turned Twilight into an avatar of his critics, enemies and random trolls (in truth not Twilight at all, as none of her personality survived this process), and proceeded to have the resultant un-Twilight fight (and lose to) his OC, which is to say, himself.
I believe this is a new, transcendent plane of Strawman. It's refreshing, in a way, to see an author so blunt and forthright about his bad literary behaviour.
Needless to say, un-Twilight doesn't win:
Twilight reared up on her hind legs, neighing like the horse she was, and charged forth, straight at Lightning, whom just stood casually where he was with his arms by his side and a rather unimpressed expression on his face.
Twilight roared as she readied to ram him, but at the last second, he seemingly vanished causing her to miss. She looked behind him, and there he was.
“How did you do that?” she asked. “Elementary my dear princess.” he boringly replied.
She doesn't come close:
She sensed for him again and charged, but missed again, and again, and again.
“Let me guess… you have night-vision too?” Twilight asked.
“Don’t be silly…” sneered Lightning. “Even if I did, my eyes aren’t even open.”
Twilight froze on the spot.
“That’s right…” continued Lightning “We train for many situations in Starfleet. I may not be able to see you, but I can still tell where you are and where you’re coming from… by the sounds of your breathing and your footsteps.”
It goes on like this. Un-Twilight repeatedly charges blindly, and repeatedly misses. Everything she does, he has a counter for. His armour is "more than ten times stronger than titanium," his speed is too great for her to process, he is "invulnerable to magics beneath [his] level." Naturally, he can No-sell the Elements. He even ends the "fight" with his own rip-off version of them:
He unleashed a massive hyperactive wave of golden energy so powerful, it cut right through the Element’s blasts, knocking the six elements away, and blasting the images of Twilight’s friends to ash that sped past Twilight as she SCREAMED IN SUCH TERROR…!!
And so ends the fight. Just one last condescending bit of patronisation, clearly meant for the reader:
You’ve got to consider all your possibilities, realize that your way is not the only way, and most importantly… listen to what other have to say instead of jumping the gun and assuming the worst and thereby making things worse than they already are.”
And we're done.
This fails as a story. It fails as a story so badly that one could make a compelling argument that it cannot be considered a story at all. I shall not insult anyones intelligence by further spelling out why.
It also fails as a Death Battle. To begin with, there is a huge disparity between the power levels of the two combatants, which is exaggerated further by the fact that the author is deliberately underutilising one of them (un-Twilight is breathtakingly stupid). The author would deny this latter accusation:
Also, when using her powers, I looked up a Death Battle Fanon wiki and saw a list of all Twilight's potential powers, which is what I used to choreograph the fight.
Beyond these faults, there is a bit of a key oversight: there is no analysis. The OC was pulling new powers out of his arse left, right and centre, with no defined limits. No limits on what powers the OC has, nor on what the limits of these powers are.
A compelling argument could be made that this is not a story. An equally compelling argument could be made that this is not even a Death Battle.
Conclusions:
Just right this second, I'm going to make a new character. He is called Tornado Sunset, and he is better than whoever you could care to name. With his amazing powers, which are whatever I need right now and are better than anything anyone can come up with, he can do anything I feel like.
Watch him casually curb stomp Superboy Prime. Gasp as he effortlessly No-sells The Omniking's (WARNING: spoilers in linked site) Multiverse buster.
Stare in shocked amazement that I actually put my OC, with his undefined and clearly broken powers, in a Death Battle.
Look in awe upon the transcendent Strawman I have set against him.
Shake your head in bemused disbelief that I actually think this has proved something.
To be fair, Lightning Dawn does have defined, if broken, abilities. But to know them, one must read through the author's full body of work within the fandom. I recommend this only to dedicated connoisseurs of shitfics.
I should be angrier at this fic than I am. The fact is, though, it's just too pathetic.
This fic fails at every conceivable level. It is fractally wrong. The only question remaining is why I would choose to review it at all. Let's just call it a warm up. A depressurisation chamber, to acclimatise myself to anti-characterization and general unspeakable shitiness.
For soon, Rage Review colleagues and I shall review something really bad. The Manos: the Hands of Fate of Scootabuse. Given its sheer length, it is also the War and Peace of Scootabuse.
One of the very worst fics on site.
As for the reviewed fic, I name it among the bad:
I mean.
I could’ve saved you five minutes by telling you “no, it’s Dakari King Mykan, no.”
Mykan’s saving grace as an author is that almost all of his stories are hilaribad on some level or another, complete with scenes lifted from Dragonball Z, a knockoff-Power Rangers premise, and general goofiness. That said, he’s one of those people who’s fun to laugh at in a group, and not as fun to talk about on his own simply because he’s the kind of bad where everyone knows he’s bad, and where drawing attention to him only increases the number of people he feels butthurt about. At this point I can’t even make fun of him anymore because it feels like punching a puppy. Yes, it chewed up a newspaper, shat on the rug, and pissed all over your shoes, but it’s relatively harmless and the reactions appear to be stunting its emotional growth.
4559781
In the review, I went to some effort to not draw attention to the fact that the author is Mykan. I'm quite familiar with him: he is, to the best of anyone's knowledge, incapable of learning, and thoroughly wedded to his status as an eternal angry twelve year old.
That said, when I read this fic, I just couldn't resist reviewing it. It was just such a train wreck.
As for his most famous work, My Little Unicorn, its greatest sins are being dull, formulaic, unimaginative and, above all, repetitive. Read one chapter, you've basically read the whole thing.
I remember talking to the author in PM a while back. It was the strangest, most ass-backwards experience I've ever had. He had this weird insistence that his characters were not Mary Sues because they were his. And also that the show’s canon characters did things he didn't like so he punished them in his stories. It was a very weird, surreal conversation. I looked at the situation from every goddamn angle there is and I still couldn't even begin to get on his level and see things from his perspective.
4559979
In this case, I didn't state that the OC was a Gary Stu, for much the same reason that I don't point to the sky on a clear summer day and say: "It's blue, that." It's just self evident.
I fail to see what the author believes will be achieved by 'punishing' characters in his fics.
I suspect that a fair amount of circular thinking is involved in the author's thought processes.
4559781
Yeah, that pretty much says everything right there.
“My Little Unicorn” was unapologetically awful. The guy is a self-described anti-Brony, anti-MLP, and writes nothing but unabashed trollfics/hatefics. Low-hanging fruit if ever there was such a thing. Still, the reviews can be entertaining, certainly more entertaining than the fics.
4560032
It was pretty low hanging, but as I said to Scarlet, I couldn't resist. You know what I have ahead of me, Batwing...
A little fun at this juncture will do me good.
4560100
I do not envy you the trials and tribulations of the road ahead.
Ah sweet irony. How I’ve missed you.
Surprised you didn’t give this an ugly rating, given that, at least from what I’ve seen in the review, it comes off as very much as a...
P.S. Oh and personally I’d be in full support of just about any OC that curbstomps Superboy
WhinePrime4561757
I was tempted, but I just couldn't take it seriously enough to warrant that. Honestly, ugly was clearly the intention of the author, but it was like being sulked at by a disgruntled five year old.
That fact that this is more than half trollfic also tipped me towards bad.
Oh yeah, the My Little Unicorn guy. I know him. A friend of mine likes to read terrible fanfics for our Skype group, and this guy a recurring feature in our calls.
I want a fic about Tornado Sunset.
If it's written by you, I have no doubt in my mind it can be pulled off well.
Regardless, a very well done review. I also wish you luck in reviewing this unnamed scootabuse fic, I shudder what to think it might be when compared to The Hands of Fate.
I'm still curious to see your joint review of the Sootabuse fic of doom.
Came across this at random. I only have one question for you... Do you do reviews at random or how does that work?
4593917
I don't have a set time for reviews (I wouldn't be unlikely to stick to that if I tried) but I do try to write a review every month or every other month, depending on what fics I find.
4593939 ah. Makes sense. Just wondering since I ran across this at random.