Title: (The Eden Project:) brave by FauxPass
Amount Read: All
Verdict: Reject (3.5/10)
Reason:

For being about 22k words, this story doesn’t feel like it was that long. That can be both a good and a bad thing, and unfortunately, this time it was a bad thing. It’s bad for one main reason: it feels like it should be longer. The relationship between Braeburn and Daring Do seems to be moved through very quickly, with some of Braeburn’s first words to her being that she can be loved, and very quickly opening up about some of their own deepest dreams and desires. There’s almost no time in between them being strangers and becoming connected at an extremely deep level, and the fact that this short story takes place over the course of at least a year just makes it that much more difficult to really get invested. A lot can happen over the course of a year, and when trying to tell an anthology of two ponies who have that strong and deep a relationship, it cuts out so much of the development and growth of that and just leaves us with a lot of jumping around.

While I do think jumping around was a problem in the story, there’s another issue I saw that is almost the opposite: the seeming stagnation of their relationship. Namely, all the chapters seem to blend together because a lot of what Braeburn and Daring Do talk about seems to be more or less the same thing. They both open up to each other, sure, but it doesn’t really feel as though they’re doing much beyond talking with each other beyond the same two or three points throughout the story. It’s kind of like one very long conversation that gets broken up into multiple different chapters, and it makes you just want more out of it.

So, in short, I think the execution of this story needed some work. Not only does it speed through a relationship very quickly, but it never really develops much of it beyond what we initially see from it. So, for those reasons, I am rejecting this fic.