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ChudoJogurt
Group Contributor

By Request Blunt Review:

Heir to the Shadows 

By Miraldan.

Summary:
The original long summary is overwritten, meandering and both spoilerific and vague, so instead I'll just say that this is another set of adventures of yet another very speshul OC alicorn who thinks that friendship is for ninnies and her edgelordiness shall conquer all.
Where do those people even come from?

Grammar
The author doesn't know words. Or at least not their meaning. The ones he uses clearly do not mean what he thinks they mean, and occasionally whole swaths of texts become nigh-incomprehensible because of that, forcing me to guess what the heck is going on.
However I must admit that the spelling is (for the most part) spellchecked, the punctuation is taken care of (again, baring the ocasional more complex case), the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed.
13/20

Style:
Incorrect word usage and occassional weird double-line break between the paragraph really make this fic hard to read, but even if you look past that there are plenty of problems to this fic. The sentence structure is beaten into submission and contorted unnaturally, the author has a tendency towards choppy, simplistic sentences, and when the author goes purple he goes so far he almost comes out on the other end of the spectrum.
Also - my personal pet peeve, numbers written with numericals.
It's hard to read and harder still to make sense of.

It does manage to have consistent (if abrasive and uninventive) and distinct characters, the pacing is decent and the paragraph breaks are done reasonably well.
10/30

Plot:
The author's note says that is is a slapdash pony job on some sort of DnD mashup-heartbreaker-homebrew. Smack-dab from the start we get a quaint little coterie of unique snowflakes: The first character is a (non-rhyming) Zebra druid with a domesticated Timberwolf. The second - an immortal amnesiac alicorn tsundere-like child, who is about as precocious and amusing as a sound of nails dragged across a chalkboard and happens to carry with her at all times the full list of D&D adventurer equipment up to (and I'm pretty sure including) the ten-foot pole. Later they are joined by equally "colorful" and "inventive" bunch of D&D class stereotypes.

The first narration of the story tells us how everybody is stupid with their stupid friendship and their stupid princesses and how "ancient rumors" of vague genericness and "prophesies" of nonspecificness keep "arising".
And it only goes downhill from there.

Generally, though, it is indeed reminiscent of a poorly thought-out D&D session, with special snowflake players and railroad-y plot where most things happen purely because the plot says so.

The plot threads lead to nothing, (metaphorical) ninjas come at the characters out of nowhere for no reason and with no consequence or point to them.

The characters themselves reason and act with a vertigo-inducing over-complicated and disjointed insane troll logic well familiar to anyone who did one too many beers while playing badly planned RPG session, and their dialogue consists of nothing but boring expodumps and jokes without punchlines that are only funny in the heat of chat of the play group, and pointless, meandering and weird otherwise.

Finally, the unemotional, guiltless and consequence-less mass slaughter of whatever faceless nebulous mobs are thrown at them comes as an expected complement to the above.
5/40

Personal Preference.
Wow. This is bad. Not Sir Top Hat bad, but in the department of "so bad, it would be good, if you stand to read it" this little baby stands right up there with "Rose Potter", "Arianna Black" and "Magic is Believing" by Dakari-King Mykan. 1/10

Total Tally
You know what? It's a pretty ugly duckling, but since it's the authors' first story - kudos to you dudes. This is a massive work, in which some effort was put in, and some care was taken. Even if it is not done with the level of craft I want to see from the stuff I read, it is a decent first try.

As long as you don't assume this thing is the pinnacle of perfection, it is not as bad for a first try as many things I see on this site.
29/100

Do try to tone down the speshulness of the protagonists, take care with "why"s and "how"s and think about an actual plot and actual side-characters outside of faceless nameless NPCs and you can write something that's actually good, not "so bad it's almost good".

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