It’s really been closer to two months, but who’s counting?

Oh right, Cromega and Rinnaul probably have that on record. Time to break the rust off the wheels and get my review train back a-rolling!

Every single time I look at the username, I keep thinking that Kevin Costner is behind this.

I must ask, is this the real intent behind your username? Anyhoo, on with the review.

To be honest, I don’t really know what to expect out of this fic going in. The description almost sounds like it’s going to be a Big Mac/Sweetie Belle (aged up) romance, but the tags say otherwise. I’m just going to guess that Sweetie Belle is fed up with stallions not being polite to her, and that Big Mac shows courtesy to her and she changes her mind.

Yeah. We’ll just roll with that.

Here’s a quick synopsis so that Kevin Costner knows I actually read and paid attention.

Sweetie Belle is in her late teens, possibly early adulthood, and reminisces about how much she used to love snowfall as a filly. She looks back on it fondly, though it is a bittersweet memory, considering the hard facts of growing up.

She is working for Rarity as a clerk at the Carousel Boutique one winter day as a snowstorm is approaching Ponyville, and a heavily pregnant Cheerilee comes in with her husband Big Macintosh and firstborn child, needing alterations for a dress to wear to her sister’s upcoming wedding. Rarity is away, but Sweetie Belle agrees to take measurements to get the process started in the meantime.

Just as Sweetie Belle is getting things underway to help with taking Cheerilee’s measurements, a customer comes into the boutique. He is the unruly type, and because Rarity (and Fluttershy, the backup seamstress) is away, he becomes enraged when Sweetie Belle can’t help him with his problem right away. He starts berating her, which begins to stress her out. She is on the brink of tears when Big Macintosh steps in. He tells the other stallion to leave, and is met with a punch to the jaw. Big Mac takes the unruly stallion outside and promptly disposes of him in the way that a mountain of pony like himself can do: by literally throwing the other pony into a snowdrift. He comes back inside and calmly takes a seat, and the book ends there.

Alright, time for me to gush a bit about this.

For those of you who know me at all, you’ll know that I am about as big of a fan of Cheerilee as you’ll ever find in this fandom. As a result, I ship Cheerimac pretty damn hard. I didn’t look closely enough to notice the Cheerilee tag on the story before I dove in. Quite the pleasant surprise!

There may or may not be a few bonus points in this for you because I am very biased when it comes to Cheerilee, as you can clearly see here.

And now that I’ve talked about my obsession for a minute, let’s get into the plot itself.

Personally, I find the premise to be a very good one. While I have never worked retail before, I have heard plenty of horror stories out of those who have. As sad as it is, the unnamed demon customer is an all-too-real fact of life for those who work retail. My heart goes out to those of you who have to put up with that crap.

Another thing I want to point out is that Big Mac had more than one really good reason to intervene. Not only was the demon customer (I’ll refer to him as Frank, in reference to both Frank Barone of Everybody Loves Raymond, but also to my good buddy FamousLastWords, because he can be a real punk) nearly making Sweetie Belle cry for no really good reason, but he was also putting his pregnant wife into danger of having to walk through a snowstorm. Both are very sound reasons to get into a fight, if you ask me.

The story revolves around a central theme of chivalry, showcased by Big Macintosh’s actions. I wish I could find some other clever themes to pick out, but this is a short story. There simply isn’t enough time to address all sorts of deeper themes. It’s a simple story, and when you read it for the simple joy of hearing a story about our favorite stallion standing up for what’s right, then you’ll leave perfectly satisfied.

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t find an achilles heel to knock the story flat with. After all, that’s my job as a reviewer: to highlight both the strengths and the weaknesses of the story.

While it may not be a story-killer, one particular thing that stuck out at me was the ending. Recall what you likely learned in middle school language arts, about how stories end with a falling action and resolution. These give the reader time to come down from the tension of the story beforehand. Longer stories may devote up to an entire chapter to this, but a typical one-shot like this can usually pull it off in just a few paragraphs for one simple reason: They usually don’t build up nearly the amount of tension that a story of larger scope does.

Despite this story’s short length, it manages to build up a quite heavy amount of dramatic stress in that short amount of time. While I give props to the author for that, I cannot approve of the way the story went from climax to resolution so quickly. Sweetie Belle was pretty distraught over what happened and I’m sure Cheerilee would have some idea of what was going on, and there was little of that. The entire premise of the story was that Sweetie Belle learned that chivalry is still a thing, and really, we only hear her say ‘thank you’ to Big Mac. I see how you wanted a short, crisp ending to the story, but I think you would have been better served to extend the story just a bit, perhaps provide some insight to Sweetie Belle’s viewpoint. It would really bring things full-circle.

Grammar/Formatting— The grammar in this fic is well-polished. No typos that I noticed, but I will note that the extra spacing between paragraphs was a little odd. It isn’t a factor to deduct points over, but I haven’t seen it in any other fics I’ve read on site.

Worldbuilding— Not much world to build beyond the fact that this is set roughly ten years ahead of MLP’s current timeline. We know the Carousel Boutique quite well from the show, but getting to see how the ponies themselves have changed is the real worldbuilding strength of this story. One particular thing that struck a chord with me was how Cheerilee is now a Mrs, and how she corrects Sweetie Belle when she refers to her as Ms. It was a small detail, but it spoke volumes about how time has passed.

Pacing— The story is pretty evenly paced. It moves at a moderate rate at first, and then it speeds up pretty significantly as the fight breaks out. It worked quite well.

Point of View— This is told from the 3rd person limited point of view, with Sweetie Belle taking the role of the viewpoint character.

Show/Tell— The fic starts out vividly shown, letting us glimpse the passage of time through Sweetie Belle’s love of snow. It shifts more to telling as the narrative speed up, but always maintains enough showing for everything to run smoothly.

This is a piece that doesn’t require heavy character development. We know Big Mac, Sweetie Belle, and Cheerilee quite well from the series, and there’s only about three thousand words for the development to take place.

Despite this, we see some pretty effective development in Sweetie Belle, with how she handles the jerk customer. Big Mac also shines pretty brightly in how he handles things, but I guess I always expected him to be that type of pony. The jerk customer was basically an archetype and nothing more, but he played the role of the jerk quite well.

The narrative voice was pretty solid. It was descriptive, but some of those descriptions were worded a bit awkwardly (“Cheerilee stepped out of the room, bother etched upon her features.” was one descriptor that tripped me up slightly.) It worked effectively, nonetheless.

The narrative was told from Sweetie Belle’s perspective, and it would have been a much better emotional payout had it been told subjectively from her viewpoint. However, the narrative has a much more objective feel to it, and it costs a bit on the potency of the characterizations in the fic.

This section brought to you by Tic Tacs, because to score well here, it is imperative that you…

This concept is one of those that hasn’t (to my knowledge) been done to death. Sure, there’s plenty of fics based around Big Mac being a model citizen, but I’ve yet to see anything take this sort of path. Top marks here!

Achievement— What was this story setting out to accomplish?

Based on the description, the goal of the fic seemed to be to have Big Mac stick up for Sweetie Belle and show her that stallions can still be chivalrous. This happened, but some of the emotional payout was hampered by the hasty ending and overall narrative. It was still good, but it could have easily been better.

Impression— And for the point that is pure opinion, openly prone to bias.

And biased it shall remain! The fact that you put a developed Cheerimac relationship (they’re married, with kids!) into the story is a bigtime bonus as far as I’m concerned. It resonated decently strong with me, though it was a bit hampered by that ending. Still, I’ll be a cheater here and let the sheer fact that it has Cheerimac in it score you a bonus point or two!

It was a fun little story, all in all. Sure, it could have finished stronger, but it did a good job overall. I liked it just fine!

And now for the numerical system that determines your score as objectively as I can possibly muster.

Plot: It flowed well up until the end, which was somewhat lacking. 14/20
Mechanics: Mechanically, this fic is quite competent 18/20
Characterization: Though not groundbreaking in character portrayals, it is nicely handled. 14/20
Writing Style: It was effective, but needed to be more emotionally involved. 7/10
Originality: Goes down its own path. 9/10
Impact: It acheived its goals well enough, but could have been better. Also, CHEERIMAC! 16/20

Thanks for submitting your story, Dancewithknives! I take my leave with the most relevant piece of artwork I can think of right now.

See you all next time!

5079310 Beautiful.

It's always nice to see Big Mac in fanfiction get put to good use, versus the semi-one note roles he gets on the show. Alas, supporting characters.

Read it, liked it! (The story)

The review had a lot of effort put into it as well. Five minutes in ms paint or not, the extra mile in critiquing always helps!

5079310 Just read it and enjoyed it. The story is defiantly relatable in many areas. Nice review.

5079310 Ive been meaning to read this and respond, but I have been really busy. So you will get a response... eventually.

5079310 Good review.

I'll try to answer your questions in order.

The story about my name was that years ago when my brother had an Xbox, I wanted to make my own xboxlive gamertag, and So I had to think of all sorts of names, but I could never think of anything that wasn't abstract, and I wanted to think of something...heroic. So I decided I wanted to name myself after some sort of well respected prizefighter or bullfighter, So I originally wanted to be named Danceswithroses, kind of like Vega from Streetfighter.

This was back when I still asked my parents for permission for everything, and the sparknotes version of what my mom said was "That' fuckin' queer." So I decided to change it to just Dancewithknives, which is fitting after I discovered my obsession with Butterfly Knives.
Example video courtesy of xcapeartist:

Otherwise, I will not say that this was all carefully crafted or super planned out, but the flow from this story (as stated in my blog) was a direct lift off of a lived experience I had while working during college. The flow of the story of dead slow, to meh, to intense, to dead stop mirrors the actual event, and while I could have had Sweetie Belle kidnap Cheerilee in order to get her new Senpai to notice her, I felt it wasn't really unnecessary. But, you made a good point, I just wouldn't know how to tie something in.

The only thing I really tried to put a deliberate effort into showing, though was the beginning, with Sweetie Belle waiting for the day to end, because I wanted to try to capture the absolute boredom and agonizing it is to be sitting at work without any customers and nothing else to do.