Title: Between Bassdrops and Bowstrings by Quillian Inkheart
Amount Read: Halfway-ish (through Interlude: Wish I May, Wish I Mite)
Verdict: Reject (5/10)
Reason:

I’m here! Don’t worry. Unless that was why you were worrying. In which case, carry on as before.

So. Yes! Picked up this story, intended to read all of it, unfortunately didn’t get to that. Oh well, blame life. I always do dislike reviewing a partially-read story, but in the interest of time, I only got ~60,000 words or so into this. Still, I feel as though there’s plenty that I can talk about, so let’s get onto it.

So, to start, the main issue I saw with all of this: the writing itself. It’s very dry and telly, with very long sections of exposition before we get into any dialogue, which then tends to be pretty sparse. Even then, the dialogue isn’t that much better, just feeling very rigid and not being vibrant enough to offset the large amounts of exposition that we’re given. This makes the whole story come off as dense and hard to read large amounts in a single sitting — it’s not as bad if you go chapter by chapter with breaks, but when you sit down and try to read multiple chapters at once, it gets pretty rough.

Next, this story has two seemingly contradictory issues. Namely, it goes both too fast and too slow at the same time. How, you ask? Activity and advancement in this story seem to come in spurts, and when they come, they come fast. The biggest and most prominent example I can think of is the event that actually sets this all in motion: Octavia and Vinyl’s fight. They’re best of friends and sharing in their dreams, then one comment later and they are worst of enemies.

...except replace “Mudasir” with “Vinyl” and “Salman” with “Canterlot” and...you know what? That was a terrible joke. I’ll admit that, I’m just bored and it’s late.

But all the story progression seems to happen like that. You get through multiple filler chapters, only for one chapter to have so much without a lot of real buildup to it. It’s like rush hour traffic in that regard, where you’re just so stop-and-go abruptly.

My next issue is that for a romance between Octavia and Vinyl, there’s remarkably little of it. I’m roughly halfway through this story (I’m about 57-58k words through a 120k word story), and only pretty recently has Octavia started feeling anything for Vinyl, let alone the fact that Vinyl has just now started getting a tiny inkling that maybe she might like Octavia. I can get that you’re wanting to draw this out and not just throw everything at you at once, but we’re halfway through the story and we’re just now planting the seeds of the romance between them.

Finally, for flaws, there’s just a lot of minor things I saw throughout this that don’t deserve a full section devoted to them: descriptions of music are boring to read because they’re stuffed with overly poetic language and this is no exception, Fiddlesticks is only thrown in when we need drama, Octavia doesn’t recognize any of the Mane 6 at the Grand Galloping Gala despite Applejack literally being her cousin, Fiddlesticks doesn’t seem to have dependant personality disorder (I’m no psychiatrist so I could be wrong, but she seems able to make decisions, if very close to Octavia), the Mite just comes out of nowhere and is very over the top, and as I said before, there’s a lot of filler in this. Like I said, nothing worth elaborating on beyond noting them, but worth noting nonetheless.

Despite this, though, there are some good points to this. For one, dealing with multiple storylines. Telling just one story is hard enough, and telling two simultaneously without stepping on the toes (hooves?) of the other one is difficult, and this does so very well. Even the last full chapter I read (Once Upon a Time in Canterlot) switches perspectives multiple times and it doesn't feel jarring or out of place; in fact, it even works, and it works very nicely. Two-sided stories are just much more interesting than one-sided, because we don't have to infer the other character's thoughts and feelings like the character we're following does, we can see it. Dramatic irony is always a nice thing to work with, and there's plenty of it here.

On dramatic irony, I also think the story between Vinyl and Octavia is interesting and pretty realistic for a relationship. Both see themselves as inferior, as living in the other's shadow, and they're both balking because of that. It's some refreshing realism from a lot of stories on this site, and showing inferiority in a pretty real way hits home for pretty much all of us. Everybody feels inferior about something, and conveying that without making the characters just whiny or overly harsh on themselves is difficult and commendable when done right.

All in all, despite all this having a lot of flaws I pointed out, it’s not like it’s a bad story. It’s got its flaws sure, but not like they’re really really destroying the story, as well as there being some very god execution on some rather difficult aspects. You can make a decent story and while your writing is stiff, you can still write. However, there are enough flaws to bring this story down, and as such, it is a reject.

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At first, this review crippled me. Gods, nothing hurts like a 50-50 score and a Rejected mark. I went in expecting a 7 or 8, but that 5 was seriously -- and a little painfully -- unexpected. And that was my fault. I went in expecting something and that was absolutely the wrong mindset when asking for a review. I didn't submit my story so I could get praise, I submitted it so I could get an opinion; I submitted it to get reviewed. And I was, in fact, reviewed.

So, I was hurting. I may not agree with the review in it's entirety, but I also know that sometimes things aren't entirely as we want them to be. I love my Fic and I will continue to love it. I screwed up, but not irredeemably so. And when I was falling into a pretty bad place mentally, it was actually the reviewer who helped pull me back out, without even knowing I was in a bad place at all. Here's what they said:

Since I discussed inferiority in the review, you're not as bad an author as it seems you think you are. The story has got some pretty good attention, especially for a longfic, so you clearly did deliver to a lot of people. I'm just one person who believes it isn't quite at the peak for stories, but there's a lot of subjectivity in reviewing. We try to minimize it at the Café, but in the end, you can't eliminate it entirely. My review is not the end-all-be-all of judgment on this story. Plenty of people seem to have enjoyed it, and you put a lot of effort into a tribute for a group you clearly feel deserves a lot of praise. People throw "it's the thought that counts" around a lot, but it's true. You put a lot of work into something just to express your gratitude towards some people I imagine you've never even met, and if that's what you're going for, that means more than the score one guy gives your story.

So, regardless of the score and the Rejection, I want to thank Okemos personally -- not for his skill as a reviewer, but as his skills as a person. This isn't to say his reviewing skills aren't good; just harsher than I expected them to be. But there's that word again: expected. I think my expectations were the issue here, not the review. So I'm looking at the review in a newer, more positive light. I'm seeing it as a means to improve, rather than a chain-and-ball to drag me down. So thanks again to Okemos for the review; it will help me achieve new heights, I'm sure.

Edit: One thing I do feel needs pointing out; Fiddlesticks isn't meant to be important right away. Her importance comes in a few chapters after where you stopped. Her role is to support her sister in her own strange way. She shows a handful of the characteristics of Dependent Personality Disorder, so perhaps it's only a minor case.

However, Fiddle's big thing is, her role in this story in minimized because this isn't her story. Her story is my planned sequel: Fiddler in the Hoof.