How Could I Forget...? by Saberking2012
Dark Equestria Girls Sad Tragedy
2,530 words

Technical: 18/20 - The technical aspects — spelling, grammar, punctuation, consistency, tags.

Grammar is technically solid, if a bit simplistic, and a hair clumsy at times.  Spelling appears to be good throughout.  There are a few minor issues with punctuation, but nothing of any real note.

As with too many stories on Fimfiction, there are too many tags, most of which do not apply.  Since this does not involve the failure or downfall of the protagonist, there no Tragedy here.  Likewise, the story doesn't deal with themes of evil triumphing, descent into madness, or the meaninglessness of life, so Dark really doesn't apply despite the backstory death of a background character.  Sad certainly applies, and is one of the few stories I've read recently where it does.  Slice of Life, which is missing, would be more appropriate than either Dark or Tragedy.

Canon Characterization: 20/20 - Handling of canon main and secondary characters, and alternate character interpretations.

Silver Spoon and Diamond Tiara don't have any real character development in the EQG world, but this seems to fit in fairly well with their canon pony counterparts.

World: 20/20 - Handling of show canon or alternate universe worldbuilding.

Canon doesn't really make much of an appearance aside from places and names, so there isn't really anything to go wrong here.

Story: 14/20 - Concept, coherence, internal consistency, story structure, pacing, flow.

This is where things start to fall apart a bit.  Consistency and coherence are good, but pacing and flow are sadly lacking.  The majority of the story is made up of short, simple sentences, giving it a choppy, stilted feel.  Much of the information about the character's feeling and backstory is given in expository infodumps, which makes a certain amount of sense given that most of it is Diamond Tiara's internal monologue, but it would have been better if more of it had come out as action or character interaction, particularly during the flashback scene, which is the most exposition-heavy.

It also felt like everything happened too fast, and we didn't get to spend enough time with the characters to develop any real empathy with them, or get a strong idea of how they were dealing with such tense and complex emotions.  This is particularly lacking with Diamond Tiara's tone shift at the cemetery.  The entire progress of the story feels too rushed and abbreviated to invoke any sort of strong emotion.  It came off more as cheap "feels", attempts to tug heartstrings with stock tropes — a murdered (surrogate) mother — rather than anything particularly thoughtful.

Total Score: 72/80 for a score of 90%

Conclusion - Final thoughts and recommendations.

Again, overall, it just felt too stilted and artificial to really enjoy.  There was a great deal that could have been developed better.  This reads more like an early draft rather than a completed story.  I would like to have had more time with the characters, to come to know them, and really feel the impact of the events, because there's definitely the seed of a decent story here. That's very hard to do in such a short one-off, and it doesn't really work here.  The high score reflects more a lack of serious errors than a real recommendation.