Title: A Thanksgiving to Remember
Author: The Blue EM2
Genre Tags: Sad, Slice of Life, Tragedy

Rating: 2/10 (Reject)

The Review

“A Thanksgiving to Remember” is a short fic that follows the adventures of a troubled, young, human Babs Seed. When her necessary self-defence rapidly turns into a violent altercation, her family suggests flying her out of New Jersey to visit her amiable hillbilly relatives in California. 

There’s a lot wrong with this fic and it all has to do with its execution. The story concept itself is innocent--if cliche--enough and doesn’t have a whole lot riding on it for it to make a difference either way in terms of whether the story was good or not. Babs is different, she has issues regarding her security in her own identity, and gets frequently bullied for it which her school predictably does nothing about. That alone isn’t a terrible fic idea itself (even if I’ve heard the format dozens of times before) and I want to make it explicitly clear before I get into the rest of the fic that I have no qualms with Babs being in this story as she is, nor do I have conflicts with the general structure. 

What I don’t like at all is how it’s formatted. The narrator is in the third person, meaning that the author is free to make observations that each of the characters do in order to fill out the setting outside of dialogue. Yet this never happens. In fact, most of this fic is told exclusively in singular lines of dialogue, which only take a few seconds to read and thus only feel like the character has been there for a few seconds themselves. 

The concept of time passing is irrelevant here. When Babs is suddenly tired from her long trip from New York’s airport, the audience doesn’t feel that same tiredness because most of what has led up to this point has been cursory one-liners with no descriptors in between. 

The other parts that aren’t are instead composed of the narrator going off on tangents to spell out, in a few paragraphs towards the beginning of the fic, what our character looks like, what ails her, and how her day usually is. Even in the few parts where narration is used, it’s always in broad, general terms about the setting or straight up telling the audience useless information about a character’s appearance. 

 It feels weird, like the writer doesn’t quite understand how they could be meshing their story with intermittent dialogue, and that’s honestly my biggest critique of this story. 

Let me give you an example and point out how it could be fixed for the better:

Priscilla Orange stepped up the stairs to talk to her daughter. She had yellow skin and orange hair, with blue eyes. She was dressed in the nondescript business suit she wore every day to work. “What is the meaning of this?” she demanded.

This is already a better start than most of the rest of the fic, but what we don’t get from the narration is understanding how our main character feels about her mother walking up the stairs. “Stepped” doesn’t invoke emotion, it’s what you’d expect from anyone, but if you used “stomped” or “stormed” or even “raced” in its place, then you’d be giving a sense of urgency and possibly fury that Babs would be looking to confront in the lines that follow.

Additionally, Priscilla’s physical description means squat. It means nothing to the reader because it supplements nothing to the scene unless there was action given to it in tandem with her walking storming up the stairs to speak with her daughter. Otherwise, why does the audience care what these characters look like, especially if we already KNOW what they look like? 

This is a problem that permeates the fic, where characters are explained by their physical appearances alone instead of other observations. How do they hold themselves? How does Babs react to them? What kind of expression or vibe do they give off, et cetera? There’s never enough here to sift through and by the time the audience has been given the mental image of what colour of hair they have, the story’s already moved past it and onto one-liner dialogue again because it apparently doesn’t matter to the narrator either, despite the time spent on it.

So here’s how I would rewrite that section, if I were to make Priscilla and Babs as upset as I possibly can write:

Priscilla Orange stormed up the stairs to confront her daughter, her scuffed and worn work shoes making thunderous echoes as she walked. Her face was contorted by frustration, bits of unkempt orange hair hanging freely in front of her stormy blue eyes. She shoved the door to her daughter’s room open with some difficulty due to the growing debris of unresolved clothing that had piled up on the floor behind it. 

Priscilla stepped into the room, over a grey bundle of… something and saw her daughter standing in the opposite corner, fists clenched at her side, staring magenta daggers right back at her mother. 

“What is the meaning of this!?” Priscilla roared. “First you’re avoiding me and now you’re attacking your fellow students at school?”

I may be just a reviewer but I do find it helpful as a reviewer to offer what little writing advice I can, based on what I’ve read in my lifetime. My apologies if I stepped out of line there. Anyway, back to the rest of the fic.

What I’m trying to prove is that since most of the story that follows is written entirely in checklists of dialogue, a lot of the story loses its emotional weight, something that’s very much needed with material as heavy as this. Even if Babs never ends up leaving New Jersey because of the sheer length that that fic could work itself up to, it would do a much better job at being more cohesive rather than feeling like I’m reading through the narrative equivalent of a grocery list. 

The pacing feels awful too, especially after Babs starts to leave New Jersey. Each individual scene is made up of one or two characters saying things that are meant to get the plot moving to an obvious action that they need to. Then, once that action looks like it’s about to happen, the story cuts away from it and moves on to the next one. Moments where we’re allowed to dwell on things happening to Babs always happen to her after the fact and with no interaction or dialogue from her at all, making both dialogue and narration feel unceremoniously disconnected, as I’ve stated before. 

Settings aren’t given time to develop, and by the time Babs lands in California the fic becomes severely limiting in what it chooses to say versus what it allows Babs to interact with. I can’t describe it beyond saying that each scene either kicks off with a line of dialogue and ends with a direct statement of fact, or it starts off with one cool thing (like the steam at the train station) and then ends with something similar to the effect of “and then Babs did this”. 

There’s also a flashback scene towards the beginning and the only reason you’d ever know it was a flashback is because 1) the narrator tells you mere lines before it starts and 2) it’s written in italics. The problem here is that flashbacks generally work best [or you could even argue that they only work] in moments that are crucial to the character that happen outside of the story’s timeframe. The flashback in this fic is a recounting of the conversation that Babs had leading up to her being shipped across the country, something that could have been a scene in and of itself, but was skipped entirely for the sake of getting her on the plane and eventually to the end of the fic. 

I wrote in my notes that this felt like a "skeleton" of a story. Everything I’ve been presented here with are the bones of a fic, the ideas and the overall story structure, but there’s no meat to it. No tasteful filler to give greater context to settings nor to Babs’ feelings or personality. Everything either exists in a straightforward vacuum that we’re supposed to assume or it doesn’t exist at all, and I feel that severely dampened the creativity that this fic could have had. 

Creative things like addressing how Babs is a minor! She specifically says towards the beginning that she’s only twelve years old, which according to Delta’s flight regulations (and yes, this fic does mention that she flies Delta specifically, nonstop from NYC/JFK to LAX) would make her an unaccompanied minor. That generally comes with a $150 fee and complications that could be resolved in discussion, maybe even further developing the rift between her and her parents when she figures out how much money they’re spending on sending her across the country. If anything, it would at least make any of the characters more tangible than passing lines of dialogue. 

There are also some questionable choices in terms of narrating on a whole that leave an unsavoury taste in my mouth. Three, specifically.

Number 1:

 I don’t understand why Babs has to be from Edison, New Jersey specifically, or why it was important to mention that particular fact. There’s no payoff for that factoid and to prove my point, you could just as easily said that she was from Satan's Kingdom, Massachusetts and that would have been at least funny. 

It’s descriptors like these that are both too specific and yet too broad to matter. Too specific in the sense that a singular city on the east coast of the USA has been singled out and yet too broad because there’s no particular reason why. Then, since we’ve spent time looking at Edison, New Jersey, there’s no time spent on building the environment around Babs as she walks home. How are the streets? Are all of the lights working? What about the door leading to her apartment complex? None of that is given thought here. 

Number 2:

For a fic that’s set around pony characters and uses pony names and even appearances for characters, this sure doesn’t seem like a pony fic. Every word pertaining to geographical locations as well as common vernacular is overwhelmingly human with only the minor idiosyncrasies of the characters being what ties it together. Why bother using fun fantasy world characters if you’re not even going to use any of the fantasy world? 

…I guess that’s rhetorical. 

Number 3:

This part right here:

Before we go any further, and to minimise any further confusion, I shall take the opportunity to explain who is related to who.

This doesn’t need explanation and makes the narrator an unimportant and very distracting character. If this was necessary for explanation for whatever reason, it would and should have been addressed through dialogue directly or at least narrated in a scene pertaining to the characters. Here, it cuts awkwardly between a conversation over breakfast and further compounds my point of how terribly separated narrative and dialogue have been throughout. 

By the time the fic ends, I didn’t feel like there was a whole lot for Babs to remember since I didn’t get to read nor understand her own emotional attachment to any of the interactions she had. She lashes out in anger, sure, but that’s only ever an action usually punctuated with some aggressive language that can be resolved quickly.

Ultimately the story suffers from an almost complete lack of narration and fails to add depth to anyone within as a result, even the main character. 

That’s all for the review segment. Below is my blind commentary of nitpicks or quotes that I picked out as I was reacting to the fic for the first time. There are a couple other tidbits of advice in there, but for the most part I’ve said my piece.

Blind Commentary

“This is your captain speaking. We have just lifted off from JFK, and are due into LA at 2:03 in the afternoon. Local time is 8AM in the morning, so please reset your watches now. Flight time is estimated to be about 5 hours.”

Nitpick: Pilots will usually say what the weather and temperature at the destination is like, which is something that could help contribute to the feeling of this fic. Maybe it’s like… 65 and overcast in LA this time of year, in turn selling a depressive atmosphere to the readers. Additionally, telling people to set their watches to the destination time is done after they land, since changing it ahead of time is kind of pointless. 

“Howdy there! Ha yoo lahk Cafornia ?”

Could have done with not giving Applejack dialogue OR indicated something like this at the end of her quote:

“Howdy!” The voice on the other line was friendly, yet the rest of what the voice said was hidden under such a heavy southern accent that, to Babs, it might as well have not been speaking English.

Babs’ brow furrowed in equal parts bewilderment and frustration. “Come again?”

From there, dialogue with characters that have heavy accents should realistically be reduced to little more than symbols or slight alterations to text. Otherwise it becomes irritating very quickly. We already know what Applejack sounds like, we don’t need to be overly reminded. 

Example:

“Howdy!” A friendly and vaguely familiar voice sounded off in Babs’ ear. “How are ya likin’ California?”

Suddenly, Scootaloo, Sweetie Belle and Cozy Glow appeared.

I just imagine someone made a jump cut and they “appeared” in the middle of a field. Then, in the distance, the main motif of “The Alien” from the Annihilation movie soundtrack plays.

“Yeah!” Apple Bloom replied. “That’s mah Steam name.”

“Then we already knew each other before I came here!” Babs exclaimed. “I’m Uptown-Funker!”

“What a small world it is,” Button commented.

THAT’S IT!? No “hey can you prove it” or “wow, do you remember when we did X thing in Y game?” This is a key moment that these characters could bond over and it’s dismissed as if they were reading Twitter headlines to each other. 

Thanks for reading my review. Based on my critiques and observations, I hope you understand that I cannot recommend this fic for the “Accepted” folder in the Reviewer’s Cafe. 

That is all,

-TK

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Yeah... I'm not proud of this one.