Reviewer's comments:
It's becoming common practice to make follow-up posts when doing reviews, something I find extremely beneficial for several different reasons. I'll get back to you when I think of a few.

My first review after a lengthy hiatus was for a one-off called Pray, a story that predates anybody born on New Years' Day, twenty-fifteen, by maybe a couple of weeks. Upon posting my review earlier today, I was greeted with this response:

This story is so old I'm surprised it's still even getting likes every now and then. Trust me, my current works are much better, but I have yet to post something new on this account. I use this one more for art. This story was awful and I only leave it up so I have something to compare my new work too.

That was posted by the author of Pray, SapphireColors, at around six o'clock.

It wasn't the reaction I was expecting, but... no, wait, yes it was. The backlog was a problem a year ago, and I guess it still is today. But that's beside the point. I'm largely satisfied with my review: I feel it covered all points, was concise enough to read in one sitting, and was Yahtzee-esque enough to pass as genuine at a glance. The only thing I might not have expressed in the review was how overwhelmingly lackluster the whole experience was. But don't just take my word for it: read it yourself. Overall, it isn't the worst thing I've ever read. It was, as I express in the review, par for the course.

This is copied straight from GDocs. I omitted the group plug, since it would do nobody any good to link to the group's page from here.

Story is here: http://www.fimfiction.net/story/236501/pray
Everything below this is the actual review.

Ah, “Pray”. Are you sure you didn’t mean “Prey”, as in “I fell prey to my self-loathing and insecurities”, because that’s the vibe I get when I see the word “Pray” surrounded by rectangles sporting team jerseys. You have depressing pink, angry-face red, boring brown, and the ever-innocuous grey one, as if you’re worried about the headcanon you have safely nestled between installments. Combine that with the picture of a crying, half-demonic Sunset Shimmer to serve as the ferryman on your trip to fan-fiction hell, and the name of the ride, “I Walk Alone”, which only serves to remind me of Green Day (which, in turn, reminds me of Nickelback), and you have the perfect recipe for critic gold. Mix in a pot, bring to a low boil, simmer for two-thousand words, serve hot. Make sure you’ve mixed in an adequate amount of angst, or the fan-fiction will taste chewy and cartoonish, with a slight hint of ‘parody’.

Still, it wasn’t all bad. Comparable to spending the weekend with your step-mother. It was bad, yes, but survivable. Plus, I got this neat trilby for reading it all the way through!

The plot is everything you’d expect from the title and tags, nothing more and nothing less. Sunset Shimmer is feeling a bit salty after events that I haven’t had the pleasure to witness myself. Abandoned like an unwanted puppy at an unspecified age, Sunset grew up with nothing but vitriolic animosity for her peers, and a slight craving for the table scraps they didn’t eat. She lived, as even Potato-head Jerry would have guessed, alone. Apparently, she came to enjoy the solitude, not unlike I came to enjoy the solitude I had when I still lived in my mother’s basement.

Details about her past were scarce; almost as if the author wrote a big, blank space into the story and labeled it “Make Your Own: Sad Backstory”. The author, via Sunset Shimmer, will moan inconsequentially for roughly three-hundred and forty-six words before the real story begins. Now, I’m not an author. Just kidding; I am. If you want people to take your setup seriously, you do not use the phrase “I am ‘X’ and I’m going to ‘Y’. Or so I thought.” under any circumstances. Yes, it’s a cheap way to up the ante, but like anything cheap, it’ll fall apart the second you give it a rough stare.

Let me get this off my chest first: this story has no pacing whatsoever. There is progression, but it jerks like a blind, arthritic prostitute found the controls for the carousel. It takes three paragraphs of moaning and whining to get into the story proper. It takes Sunset Shimmer two sentences to wind up in purgatory. She gets hit with a ‘magical laser’ - presumably the Elements of Harmony she worked so hard to obtain during her debut - and suddenly ‘everything went black’. It’s not a trope per-se, but I like to call this the “Waiting Room”. The Waiting Room is a place where protagonists go after being defeated, but are still needed for the story because the author isn’t quite as imaginative as he/she thought. It’s a cop-out, really, for an otherwise fatal situation. It’s also where protagonists usually end up when they need a recoup from doing protagonist stuff, like growing as an individual or learning a life lesson.

Normally, I would just pass on to the next interesting morsel, but something caught my eye. Paragraph twenty-seven, second sentence, word five. “Devil”? Oh really, now? In an alternate pony-world, where pony-world is an idealistic expression of our world (like a photocopy of a photocopy, but with two ‘horse’ filters being applied), when did they say that the “Devil” existed? Sure, it could have just been an expression of sorts. “Devil” might be equivalent to some kind of pony-myth, like Pony-Thor and the Pony-Thunderbird. But it’s capitalized, which implies a proper noun. So, in Pony-world’s Human-world, where cities are named something like Anthropolis and Hand-ville, there exists a tiny fragment of Real-world Christian teachings. Interesting, that. Too bad it bloody well can’t get explained!

After spending some time in the Waiting Room, human-Sunset gets to meet draconequus-Discord. And, as one typically does, the first question she asks of the entity that brought her here is “why does everyone say my hair looks like bacon?”. Granted, she does make an effort to sound spooked, like the pony she’s supposed to be, but it doesn’t last nearly long enough. Or maybe she’s just remarkably self-conscious about how tasty and fattening her hair is.

To make a short and very boring story shorter, Discord is an emissary of Celestia, sent to make sure that Sunset isn’t still mad after the nondescript “sad backstory” we opened with. He does his usual “I can bend reality to my will” gimmick a few times during the conversation, but it felt more like a sticker that was slapped onto the character, rather than an innate part of his being. Those instances were short and not well incorporated, like some of my body parts during intercourse.

All this build-up, and we’ve finally reached the million-dollar question. Throughout the story, Sunset Shimmer has been very passive-aggressive about how her crippling loneliness is affecting her ability to function in a high-friendship space. It’s implied that the Elements restored her. But not so fast, readers! If that had happened, we wouldn’t get to cap the story with more pointless moral drama! Through the dull very enlightening and boring ingenious conversation to follow, we discover that, of course! Sunset Shimmer wasn’t cured of her morbid depression afterall! We also learn that Discord is here to “show her the error of her ways”, and “ensure she’ll never be evil again”. Sounds to me like a cult indoctrination, or the setup to a poorly-written ‘adult movie’.

But about the million-dollar question. After all this, Sunset Shimmer caps the story by asking “What if I don’t want to be good?” Well, what if? I might’ve said ‘too bad’, if the premise hadn’t been interesting enough to spark my intrigue. Here we have a perfectly redeemable villain who seems to be genuinely repentant, but doesn’t want to be a ‘good guy’. I feel that this was a missed opportunity to explore the depth of this created Sunset Shimmer, as the story cuts off immediately after she asks the question. So, instead of an interesting romp through the psyche of the franchise's more interesting villain-turned-hero’s, we get a lame story with an obvious premise that comes off as pretentious above all else.

Now, usually, I’m all for these pseudo-philosophical romps through the human condition. But, as the title implies, this isn’t one of those romps. This is you, sitting at a computer, having a character’s condition force-fed to you. Sunset Shimmer starts the story being miserable, she’s miserable in the middle, and by the time she reaches the end, she’s only slightly less miserable. She doesn’t develop as a character, and you really don’t do anything with her except make her wallow in self-pity for two-thousand words. Then, in the ending, where you could have capitalized on a chance to explore this character you made, you cut it off after a moody platitude. It almost feels like you wanted the reader to finish your story. “Here’s a scenario,” you said, “now give me an ending.” Well, I’ve never been bothered by skimping on the classwork, and this sounds awfully reminiscent of something my old English teacher used to pull. But here’s my question for you, author: what if I want you to finish your story?