A "Fallout Equestria" Review · 4:12am Jan 23rd, 2020
A Review by Pone_Heap
[Adult story embed hidden]
***I read the story through the end of Chapter 8, which ends the first act of the story.***
Grammar score out of 10 (1 is grammar that needs to be worked upon as basic principles such as capitalization and spelling is an issue, and 10 is impeccable): 7
Mainly comma and semi-colon usage. Some sentences use them correctly, and others are inconsistent when applying the same rules. I also noticed a couple instances of “unnecessary verbs”.
Example, for lack of being able to find the actual ones again: a sentence might have the words “gone” and “going” next to one another. And not as in “going, going, gone”, but as in “we’re gone going”. It’s not a huge deal and did nothing to harm the story’s integrity.
Pre-readers can really help to catch such things. When we read our own work—especially silently—we often miss errors, deletions, or unnecessary additions because our brains make connections whether they’re there or not. We simply miss issues because our brain glances over them. Another set of eyes will better catch things a writer may miss.
What I like to do? Most web-browsers have a text-to-speech feature that can be used on this site. Before I release a chapter, I will listen to the awful robot voice as I read along with my own work. It’s easy to pick out problems when you hear them out loud. As I said, the brain compensates in silent reading, but you’re forced to better analyze when you hear it. It’s tedious and may take up to an hour or more, but it helps.
Pros (list three pros):
1. Very descriptive. It’s easy to visualize pretty much everything going on in the story, and you always see as much as the main character does, resulting from the first-person narration.
I enjoyed the similes used to describe characters’ conditions, the surrounding environment, and those made by the main character; the similes helped keep things “fresh”.
2. Grittiness was appropriate. It’s easy to turn things over-the-top or cartoonish when it comes to violence or the nastiness in such a setting, and it’s also easy to go too easy on the grit. My very limited experience with it tells me Fallout just isn’t really a “Teen-rated” backdrop; it doesn’t work without that level of grit. Good job on toeing the line between “enough” and “gratuitous”.
Violence was believable and pretty much obeyed “physics”, at least are far as it might in a magical world.
3. Characterization was enjoyable. All the characters had pretty good depth, and even minor characters that showed up were fleshed out enough to get a bead on.
Corners is an odd little mare, and I enjoyed her almost as much as the protagonist.
I’ll really miss some of the characters if/when they bite the dust. Some are already missed.
Cons (list three cons):
***Don’t worry that this section is more detailed; it’s just my style, and some of the “cons” can be spun positively***
1. Very descriptive but sometimes lacks “poetry”. Things are plainly stated with little embellishment. I know not everyone enjoys reading about “executing Technicolor® yawns” in place of “vomiting” or hearing “Dixie” after sucking down a few inches in a bottle of bourbon, but I surely do. I like hyperbole, but that’s me. Maybe the Dadaistic thing doesn’t have a place in Fallout.
Treating things with a Devil-may-care attitude isn’t always appropriate. In this case, it likely isn’t, considering the little mare that serves as the main character and first-person narrator. Maybe she will continue to change more as the story goes on.
Still, though the similes kept things fresh, some passages would’ve been better built upon if the descriptions were more “visceral”. It’s something I harp on (as some may know), and the detail in this story was good, but I really like a “vicious intimacy” in writing. I think I’ve just read too many military memoirs and too much classical literature that rely on really ugly descriptions appealing to sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch, but it’s simply something I’ve come to appreciate. Often, it’s unnecessary and gratuitous.
Still, the grittiness and detail—often lacking in even mature-rated fics—is welcome in the story, and sticking to more plainly stating things is an author’s choice.
The level of description, in certain instances, is sometimes enough to “pull the reader away” from the situation-at-hand. If you want the reader to really focus on something, use such a level of detail. If you want them to glance over something—or if it’s not very important to the story—it’s better to give a glimpse to establish the mood or situation and move on.
It also is less tedious and tiresome to write for the writer; you can really get hung up on details and wind up with a few hundred or even a thousand words that don’t add as much as is put in. I know I’ve gotten hung up when trying to describe something, only to realize simplicity is the better choice for the situation.
2. As initially stated, there were some mistakes in comma and semicolon usage. I add semicolon usage because I saw an instance that caught me rather “off-guard”—in the first chapter when the creatures first met in the “dumping-ground”—where a comma was appropriate instead of a semi-colon, but I couldn’t find it again for the life of me when I looked for it. It just made no sense and I had to re-read the sentence a few times to “get it”. I also saw instances in the story where a new sentence was a better choice than using a semicolon to join two sentences. Semicolon usage is tricky, and they are best used only between two related complete clauses.
I’m very guilty of this—commas and semicolons—in my own work, and no matter how many times I go through my stuff, I still always find more of them. As I’ve come to better understand the rules—a couple Youtube videos and a couple small website articles taught me more than I ever learned in 12 years of formal schooling—recently.
It interferes with flow and rhythm in writing, especially for people that are really hung up on proper usage to direct the course of their own reading. It’s like reading music to some, and they take cues from everything presented to them; a “disjointedness” can occur in music as it can in writing to the reader.
That doesn’t mean you’re alienating too many readers—most won’t mind as long as grammar issues are minimal, and some choices in grammar are a choice—but some really follow what’s on the page. But when grammar decisions are a choice, consistency is important. Still, most won’t mind if the story is good and entertaining, which it is.
3. I say this because I can’t find much else wrong: some readers are turned off or even daunted by long chapters, and some of the chapters are quite hefty. I’m not bothered, personally, and I make my chapters as long as they need to be for me to get across the point I’m attempting. To accomplish this in some chapters, 2K words suffice; others need 12K.
While some of the chapters in this story easily top 10K, I don’t feel they “overextend” what needs to be said, and they accomplish what they need to. I haven’t read further on than Chapter 8—some of the chapters top out at 16K—but I imagine it’s not wasted words.
Some look at chapters as “mini stories”; there’s a setup, problem, solution, and resolution to each chapter. I don’t think that way, and where would cliffhangers wind up? This story doesn’t necessarily tie up all the loose ends presented by a chapter’s end, but it gives me enough to feel it’s “complete”, and that’s not a bad thing. Not at all.
Notes Section (how you can improve your fic, at the very least an elaboration of Pros and Cons section):
First off and again, my apologies that the “cons” section is more detailed than the “pros” section. I just have less to say when things go swimmingly. All the “cons” can be spun in a positive way or are things that don’t detract from the story.
This was the first Fallout fic I’ve ever read, and I know next to nothing about the franchise. I didn’t even research it before or as I was reading; I just went with what was presented in the story.
I liked it and will continue to follow it. I hope I don’t catch up too fast.
