Title: The Need to Know by Arctikfox
Amount Read: All currently published (up through Chapter 4 -Honest Suspicion-)
Verdict: Reject (3.5/10)
Reason:

Enjoy this last review of mine, cause I just rejected my boss’ story!*

The first thing in this story I have to go after is the writing itself. It’s not very clean, and admitting you’re not great with it makes it almost more inexcusable — an editor going over it with a fine-toothed comb would solve pretty much all of those issues. Mostly: misspellings, typos, incorrectly tagged dialogue (only end it with a period if the following sentence isn’t a part of the same phrase as the quote), and so on. You even lead an editing group, man! Go give Amore and her crew some love!

The next issue, and the biggest one, is Gallant Mind/Rein himself. The first, and a rather easy fix, is that he’s referred to as a pegasus in Chapter 2 and nowhere else, including in the art you made for this story. The next issues, however, are not quite as simple: he’s an edgelord. I know you tried to avoid that, but unfortunately, you toed the line enough and eventually did send him into edgelord territory. He is completely reckless for the sake of being reckless, takes pride in constantly harassing all those around him, flashes Rainbow Dash in a dark alley basically just to prove a point, and has lots of one-liners that not-infrequently reference real-life things such as All Star’s Smash Mouth and Fluffy Iglesias that just seem rather out of place in all this. When he’s actually written moderately seriously and portrayed as more of a laid-back and jovial stallion and less as Jared Leto’s Joker, though, he’s not all that bad a character. Him pressing the buttons of others around him isn’t necessarily a bad character trait and is done well in a few places, but the majority of them are him being overly antagonistic just to be a dick and try to make his character more interesting.

As I said, though, it’s not all that bad when he’s written more seriously. Some of the detective-ing he does is interesting, and although it can stray into a Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock “I can know every single little detail about your entire life just by a passing glance at you”, when it can also remain fairly interesting.

However, as I said, there are some clear issues here. The writing is very clunky and makes readability difficult sometimes, as well as the character being edgy and for the most part over-the-top and uninteresting. For those reasons, I am rejecting this story.

*I’m joking, he’ll only fire me if he finds out about all the embezzlement from the Guild.