The Revenge of Norry's Bi-weekly Fic Review Thingy (Issue #3) · 2:31am Feb 9th, 2018
No I'm not dead.
Just been having an interesting time, and a plethora of weird IRL garbage fires to put out.
But fuck all that, we've gotta get on with these reviews.
Please Kill Me by JackRipper.
Why Did I Read This? - Top of the featured box, clickbaitey title, short wordcount.
Genre(s) - Comedy, apparently.
Every once in awhile, I'll come across a story with a bizarre sort of description/tag duality—a quirky sounding premise is implied in the description, for example, but the story itself contains something that surprises me by how profound it is.
Or, in this instance, the opposite: the premise is a bait-and-switch for the silly content of the story. We've got a title and description that suggests something serious, but the story doesn't handle it as such.
And that's honestly it. I don't know what I was really expecting from this story, but I think at the bare minimum I would have liked, y'know, some actual jokes. Because there's none to be found here. It's tagged Comedy, but I don't quite know why. It doesn't really function as a decent look into Twilight Sparkle's character, either—she's just kept out of character quite deliberately for the sake of silliness. Nothing she says or does feels like it's something she would do, which would be okay if there was some actual payoff.
Everything else is just sort of serviceable. The story bloats the basic premise just enough to make the 1k publishing limit, never deviating from the joke(?) of Twilight being suicidally stressed.
See, the thing about comedy is that when you try too hard, it's obvious. I get that. But at the same time, it's just as painful when an author assumes that simply putting characters into a ludicrous situation and then having them reiterate over and over just how ludicrous the situation is passes as comedy.
Ultimately, when you've got a comedy story that makes no real effort to be funny beyond the initial premise, that also doesn't offer any interesting insight into the characters, it just sort of comes across as a Slice of Life that was too silly to quite make it. I really have to question the point of this story.
Verdict: Downvote
Safe by Sharp Spark
Genre(s): Darkfic, Flashfic
Why Did I Read This?: A friend recommended it to me.
For as quick and to the point this story was, I was quite impressed with just how much it fit into the compressed wordcount. In only 1000 words, the amount of worldbuilding presented here is very striking, even if most of it is happening in the background and is kept ambiguous. While the situations presented here aren't ones I imagine we would ever see in the show, they still feel like something very very believable in a world where 'the end of peace and security as we know it' is basically a pressing concern every second week. I really liked the Cold War-esque vibes rampant through this story, and the disturbing, believable insight into how a group of children accustomed to constant danger can become eerily desensitized to it.
What makes this story work is that it doesn't beat you with any of that, though. It's an incredibly brief vignette of war-time as told from the perspective of a child, and I have no problems at all with recommending it.
Verdict: Favourite
Eh, I think we're only gonna do two again tonight. I'd wanted to review a longer story, but I think I'll save that for its own blog post. For now, I'm tired as fuck.
Welcome back, Norris!
Your life.
4792767
Listen here you little shit
4792777
I bet you think you're so clever!
4792779
I'm the cleverest!
People FAVORITED my little story about sparkling vampires getting together with Celestia.Seriously, it was a dumb little story for April Fools Day. How it got so many views I don't know, and favorites?! I guess people really will like anything *stares at Trump*
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Thanks!
Welcome back, hope you haven't run out of fire extinguishers.
4792782 Hm. Twilight Sparkles - When the Princess of the Sun adopts a vampire for a student, most ponies expected the end result to be a pile of ashes in relatively few days. What they did not realize was that Celestia was preparing her nocturnal student for the return of Nightmare Moon, when vampire would face off against vampire, and all of Equestria would be held in the balance. Because only a vampire with friends could defeat the evil that had stolen Celestia's sister away from her, and as unlikely as it was, Twilight Sparkle was her only hope to become reunited with Luna again.
4792869
That's a dumb idea. Or maybe just my intreptation of it.
If Twilight couldn't cure her own vampirism, WHY would Celestia expect her to cure Luna's?
4793168 Only if Luna's vampirism is curable. If she's *always* been a vampire, and Nightmare Moon is just a corruption of her form...
fc01.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2013/365/4/8/vampire_twilight_by_alasou-d705q89.png
(Vampire Twilight, by Alasou at Deviant Art used by permission)
(Courtesy of Anonymoose)
i.imgur.com/fCj8O3yl.png
Word casts the spell: necro post!
Yer a dork.