The Black Hoof: A Mafia Story by patridam
Adventure Alternate Universe Comedy Dark
25,833 words to date (unfinished)

Grammar: 4/10
Spelling appears to be good, didn't notice anything clearly wrong.

But I did see punctuation issues; mostly excessive punctuation, but also misused punctuation. Author appears very fond of hyphens, which he uses in place of emdashes consistently throughout. Despite that, the text is missing a few hyphens where they would be appropriate, eg. "U-turn" or "U-shaped". There are a number of common/semicolon swaps as well.

Grammar errors are moderately common, though not severe. Mostly errors of declension or homophones, and missing words; but there are some bad constructions as well, such as extraneous prepositions. Example: "the two mares walked over to behind the rock"; where we have multiple conflicting prepositions; "over to" or "behind", not both. One preposition per action. It's possible the author left out an "and" between "over to" and "behind", but that would still be unnecessarily long when "behind the rock" would fully convey the action in a more concise manner.

Sentence structure is inconsistent, and about half the text is composed of either clumsy-run-on sentences, or short, choppy sentences and fragments.

There are also some questionable word choices, such as referring to a car driving far out into a particular location as "delving further into the desert". That isn't entirely gibberish, but it's not a particularly good metaphor either, as "delving" refers to digging into something ("delve" is synonymous with "dig"). A few rather bizarre made-up words pop up from time to time, such as the ridiculously clumsy "ambihoftirous" for the perfectly legitimate "ambidextrous".

Characterization: 5/10
There is next-to-nothing about the characters that tie them to their canon counterparts. In a few cases there are some superficial qualities that are similar, such as Dash's arrogance, but aside from that one could change the names and there would be nothing that would readily identify them as in any way related to the canon characters who share their names.

The characterizations themselves are also quite flat. Not entirely cardboard, but relying too heavily on stereotypes and genre tropes to be fully realized.

Use of show canon: 5/10
Is pretty much non-existent. Remove the names, and there is nothing here that links it back in any way to the canon universe. Only taking off half points since it's tagged AU.

Plot consistency: 7/10
The plot seems solid enough, no real internal inconsistencies noted. But the plot itself is a pretty by-the-numbers
use of the gangster thriller tropes, with no real attempt at individual interpretation; and entire scenes lifted wholesale from well-known sources (the head-in-the-bed scene from The Godfather being a particularly egregious example).

Coherence: 6/10
Although somewhat de rigeur for this type of story, the use of exposition is still too heavy. It would work better if it was presented as internal monologue narration, or if it was spread out more and better integrated into the story, instead of coming out as extended, overly-detailed infodumps. There's also a good deal of redundancy as well, for example: "a new construction site proclaiming it to be the new home of a new casino". That's about two "new"s too many (a better construction would be "a construction site claiming to the be future home of a new casino").. Not the only problem with that particular example, but it's the one that jumps out right away.

The pacing is slapdash and inconsistent, dragging through extended infodumps at some points, and rushing through significant story points at others. Spike's fall into the mob life is badly rushed, with barely a thought. His first job is repossessing cars, and he manages to take care of two in a perfunctory, even dismissive, manner; hardly remarked upon, and without any real visible compunction. He also managed to jump right into picking locks within moments, with no evidence of the training and practice that he'd have needed to develop that particular skillset (either that, or car manufacturers in that universe use really crappy locks).

There are a lot of details like that throughout the story, things that are depicted in a way that is far enough from their real-world characteristics as to break suspension of what little disbelief the story allows.

The story and world development are minimal, based entirely on tropes and cliches native to the genre. Almost like they were cut and pasted from any number of other sources.

Extra things depending on genre: 4/10
The genre tags don't really fit at all. It's tagged as an Adventure Comedy; but it's actually a Thriller, although a bit lacking in those qualities that make it one. I haven't seen any real attempt at humour, and there's no adventure at all.

Content tags are mixed. The Dark tag definitely applies. The Alternate Universe tag is addressed in the Additional Comments section below.

Touchy topics, if any are present:
Gore, death, mutilation: 2/5

Death and violence are expected in a gangster thriller; even so, it's treated even more cavalierly and off-handedly, even callously, than is strictly warranted; and so far doesn't appear to have any real long-term impact on any of the characters. Not even Spike, who is new to the entire business and has ostensibly never killed anyone before. In fact, Spike reacts much more strongly to his car getting torched than he does to any of the people he kills or sees killed.

Total: 29/60 for a score of 48% - Rejected

Additional comments:

As with far too many stories on the site, this one badly mis-uses the Alternative Universe tag. An AU needs to be recognizably related to the canon universe, there have to be some points of commonality besides mere names. Otherwise, it's not an "alternative" universe, it's just a different universe. In this case, it's a garden-variety gangster thriller with a pony paint job.

Overall, this is little more than a collection of gangster thriller tropes stitched together with a load of pop culture references. It's clumsily written and nothing about it grabs my interest. Calling it a "thriller" is being a bit generous, since despite the fact that it uses thriller tropes, there's really no sense of danger or suspense built up at any point. The author also dwells too long on insignificant details.

One thing that I found particularly questionable was the use of ponyfied song lyrics at the start of every chapter. I'm assuming that they're changed sufficiently from the copyrighted originals not to trigger any TOS violations, since the story hasn't been taken down; but it's something that I'd strongly advise against doing. It doesn't add anything to the story; and just looks lazy. If you're going to include something like that, then come up with something more original, or at least more clever. The story is already clearly borrowing heavily from a lot of places (the author kind of hits the readers over the head with references); no need to advertise that fact so blatantly and broadly with even less original writing. Further, the quotes are simply much too big. A quote shouldn't be more than a single stanza or chorus, at most one of each. These are way too big, and again, don't really add anything to the story. I was able to skip them and not miss anything of substance.

As bad as the rest of it was, I did like the addition of the radio broadcasts at the ends of the chapters. I don't know if it was original, but it was a nice touch.

5972810 Forgot to remove the story from Submissions, and for some reason the trash icon isn’t working for me. Could you amend this, please?

EDIT: nevermind, figured out how to delete with the new folder module... thingy. Also found five hidden fics in Submissions, one having since been passworded, and the other four giving me 404 errors.

5976439

Sounds like you got it sorted. Not much I could have done anyway, since I’m not an admin.

5976576 Well, I found how to fix it at least. Went and stuck a PSA in Submissions and got rid of the counter, since it’s no longer needed due to my fixing ze problem.