Title: Walk for Me by mlpsc26
Amount Read: All
Verdict: Reject (3.5/10)
Reason:

My principal criticism for this story is that it’s just kind of all over the place. There are a lot of scenes packed into this, and most of them are very short and don’t seem to add a ton to the narrative. There seems to be a central point to this, but the rest of the story isn’t wrapped around it very well, instead just sort of meandering around insteading of focusing only on the idea it wants to get across. Even the initial farming of the story, dealing with Fluttershy’s stalker, seems fairly undeveloped and I don’t think it did a very strong job of introducing the main plot.

Another thing I disliked was the characterization of Fluttershy and what little we saw of Rarity. For Fluttershy, pretty much the entire story she’s a very flat and static meek without a ton of depth to her inner thoughts or her actions. As for Rarity, she gets almost mad that Fluttershy was hiding some mad personal events from her. I get it, she’d probably be upset that Fluttershy didn’t feel safe telling her, but she wouldn’t get full-on mad. She’d understand Fluttershy’s hesitation, not get mad that her friend didn’t feel comfortable sharing something about her safety potentially being at risk.

Finally, the writing. It’s kind of rigid and dry, with not a lot of variation on how it gets written. There’s a lot of “She did this. She did that”, and it starts melting together after a while. Additionally, for a story written in 1st person, I don’t feel as though that added a lot to the narration. As a strong advocate of 1st person myself, that viewpoint is a very good way to get inside the characters’ heads and truly allow them to express what they’re thinking and feeling and experiencing in their own words, but I don’t think that was utilized very well. There wasn’t a ton added to this story that couldn’t have been done in 3rd person through the choice of 1st person.

In short, I think this story didn’t have a strong main idea, as well as the exposition not being executed very well. For those reasons, I am rejecting this fic.