The Majestic Rise of King Thorax by Dropbear
Gore Comedy Dark
19,305 words
 
Technical: 17/20 - The technical aspects — spelling, grammar, punctuation, consistency, tags.
 
Technically, there are few problems with the writing, just the rare typo or missing bit of punctuation.
 
Paragraphs are overused, however, which breaks up the flow significantly in places, and can sometimes make it difficult to recognize who is speaking.  Paragraphs tend to be only a sentence or two long, and change even when the speaker or thought does not.
 
Canon Characterization: 5/20 - Handling of canon main and secondary characters, and alternate character interpretations.
 
Canon pony characters are barely present, existing more as a backdrop than anything else, so there's no way to really judge characterization there.  Shining Armour and Cadance get a tiny amount of real screen time, but mostly to act as targets.  Flurry Heart exists predominantly to act as a MacGuffin and Deus Ex Machina.
 
The character of Thorax is diametrically-opposed to his canon characterization.  While there is an explanation of that, it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense in canon context, and the story is missing an Alternate Universe tab.  Worse, he's little more than a cardboard Designated Villain in the most ridiculously cartoonish way possible.  And just gets worse from there.
 
Chrysalis is pretty much as expected at first, and then like everyone else goes rapidly off the rails.
 
Other Characterization: 10/20 - Handling of OCs, canon background characters, and crossover characters (-5% each for cliché alicorn, red-and-black, OP, or Mary Sue).
 
The converted changeling characterization doesn't work.  They've just been freed from their bondage to an oppressive queen, given the means of true independence, and we are now expected to believe that they would simply kowtow to king who is not only far more evil than Chrysalis was, but is in the process of destroying the hive?  It simply doesn't make sense, even for a crackfic.
 
The zebra crone is inconsistently portrayed, dark and cryptic at one moment, cartoonishly goofy at another.  It's as if the author couldn't quite decide how to handle the character.  Which fits in well with the entire story, really.
 
The rest of the OCs make even less sense, and come completely out of nowhere.
 
World: 5/20 - Handling of show canon or alternate universe worldbuilding.
 
Starts out from a canon foundation, then rapidly diverges into nonsensical re-writing of the world that makes little sense even internally.  It ends up being a hodge-podge of random references to any number of things that have no relation whatsoever to the canon world it ostensibly takes place in.
 
Story: 5/20 - Concept, coherence, internal consistency, story structure, pacing, flow.
 
There simply isn't enough of a coherent story here to even apply this category beyond the most rudimentary level.  Internal consistency is quickly jettisoned in order to engage in what feels like random pop-culture references (whether or not they are) and self-indulgence.  Random actually describes this story fairly well, but it's missing the Random tag.  There is a very basic plot, and a whole lot of scenes and digressions that are at best tangentially-related tacked onto it.  Things appear to happen because the author thinks they'd be "cool", without any significant attempt at logically integrating them into the canon world, or into anything else in the story.  Absurdity piled on top of absurdity.
 
Despite that, or possibly because of it, the pacing felt slow and uneven.
 
Total Score: 42/100 for a score of 42%
 
Conclusion - Final thoughts and recommendations.
 
This is a crackfic, pure and simple.  It starts from a canon foundation, then goes off the rails at an increasingly rapid pace, discarding anything coherent and believable in favour of mashing up a bunch of tropes that are played relatively straight.
 
It's tagged as a dark comedy, but neither aspect is handled particularly well.  Rather than building up to dark humour, the story simply jumps jarringly between creepy and outright goofy, with nothing whatsoever in between.  Like too many people, the author appears to confuse "gory" with "dark".  The story was far too silly, and any deaths too inconsequential, to qualify as dark.  The humour fell similarly flat, as there was no real contrast to build on.
 
It all felt like an excuse to just mashup a bunch of random nonsense.  Despite this, the flimsy story that everything hung on was eminently predictable due in large part to being just a simplistic collection of tropes strung together to provide an excuse for everything else that happened.
 
And if that wasn't bad enough, it committed the worst sin a crackfic could possibly commit: it bored me.  By the time Chrysalis meets the zebra, the entire thing had become so predictable that there was literally no point in continuing reading it.  Nothing stood out, nothing demanded my attention, it was strictly by the numbers  Reading through to the end simply confirmed everything I expected, but even more disappointingly.  Only the competent use of language makes this in any way readable.