Drake's Thursday Reviews #9 · 10:36pm Mar 14th, 2019
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Family's Coming by Dusty Miller
This fic is just under 2.4k words long - I swear half of it is in the first two paragraphs. Beyond that, the fic is... weird. I mean it's just constructed weird. Discord is stuck as a statue, but he can talk, and they know this and can talk to him, I think - some of the dialogue seems to be in response to things he says and then other times he is ignored. The fic also has some odd choices of mechanical elements and sentence structure. Discord's character voicing is way off, I'm trying to hear his dialogue in John deLancie's voice and I can't. And then out of nowhere, Discord quotes The Room.
Once you get past those elements, this fic is very easy to explain - a petrified Discord rambling to himself while Twilight reads nearby. Narration is minimal yet there are massive paragraphs of dialogue that are just Discord talking and talking. I'm not even sure about what, the paragraphs of dialogue are so huge they wear on you. The fic's summary says "If Discord said he knew something about the origin of your family, would you listen?", except apparently they can't hear Discord and as far as I can tell, he doesn't talk about family at all, certainly not Twilight's.
Recommendation: There's no nice way to say it, but it's the most accurate summation I can give - I've had fever dreams more coherent than this, and more entertaining too.
It's Not Your Fault by Boltstrike58
This fic is basically a fifteen-second scene stretched to 1000 words. I can't fault it that or speak ill of it for it, I've done the same thing. Spike feels bad that his talking up Twilight during Rainbow Rocks helped stress her out, he feels bad, Twilight consoles him. Not much more to it.
Recommendation: Some quick and light Twilight and Spike family feels.
This is Not a Drill by Tumbleweed
The Grand Galloping Gala is a disaster. Again.
The first part of the fic is the fun of piecing together what happened, then Celestia revealing an odd but amusing explanation for why she doesn't mind it year after year.
Recommendation: A fun diversion for a few minutes.
Shimmering Therapy by TheNewYorkBrony
This fic looks at Sunset going to a councilor about her issues. However, it doesn't have much to say on that front. Sunset definitely has some stuff she could talk over with a therapist, but this fic doesn't really delve deep into any of them. Sunset discusses her backstory (with token mention of Sunburst as a brother), mentions she's not sure she fully recovered all her memories after the Memory Stone incident, and talks about how good her friends have been for her. There's no real exploration of Sunset's character here, really it's just kinda a recap of how far she's come. And TBH, there's no much of interest here - it's not even fully clear why Sunset went to the councilor now, I assume she would go because of a specific thing she's concerned about, but nope.
Recommendation: Neat idea, subpar execution
That sounds like all my experiences with that author