ELab Horse: Redux

• MLP: FiM
• Comedy
• Random
• Slice of Life

A filly lives on Earth with a jobless physicist. She's just figuring out life, while he's going broke. She has no idea what she's doing.

• Human
• OC
• Other

TheMajorTechie · 12k words  ·  28  6 · 1.1k views

Read: Completed as of this review at 5,502 words, 7 chapters
Rating: 5/10
Recommendation: Skip unless you like PiE.

This is one of those stories that really gave me the feeling that the writer didn’t really know where he was going with it before he started writing it. And now that’s not always a problem, and it is certainly something I’m guilty of, but at the same time it does give a certain lack of direction to a work.

This is one of those works, par excellence. Our protagonist, Gadget the Pony in Earth, does a lot of meandering. She does a lot of rambling. Put plainly, she does a lot of stuff. Not all that stuff is interesting and, here, TheMajorTechie doesn’t write enticingly enough to make Gadget a charismatic enough character for spectating her day-to-day life to be worth it. There’s a lot of telling and very little description - entire periods of character building are skipped over in a few lines. I get that this is supposed to be a diary, but the character can definitely talk more than that here.

My second complaint involves the comedy or, rather, the lack thereof. You’ll notice, dear reader, that this fic is tagged “comedy” but, again, Gadget isn’t that funny. Yes, there were a few jokes here and there that hit home but they were in the minority. Really, this felt more like a drama than a genuine comedy, albeit one with a somewhat snarky lead.

Furthermore, the story’s main plot - the mystery of how a pony is on earth - doesn’t actually get engaged with much from the get go. Yes, it is brought up. Then it is dropped in favour of Gadget going to school - again, little description is given here and from the way her classmates react, it's almost like talking horses are commonplace in this universe, something they most certainly are not. This doesn’t really create an engaging story because the writer isn’t really focusing on the interesting bits of Gadget’s life, at least, he wasn’t for me.

In conclusion, this story was a bit of a letdown. Admittedly, it was very easy to read letdown and the stream of consciousness narration flows well. However, I can’t shake the feeling that there really should’ve been more here, whether that’s in terms of structure or description I’m not sure.

Plot: 3/5. Gets bogged down by slice of life. 
Characters: 2/5. Weak supporting cast.
Style: 3/5. Lot’s of tell, little show - even for 1st person.
Execution: 2/5. Not doing the trick.
Overall Rating: 10/20 = 5/10

To TheMajorTechie: Firstly, I’d say to focus on painting an idea of how the world looks and how human interaction can be told at a later date - as that’s what I’d say is really letting the story down here. As for the mystery aspect, I’d recommend you have a look at something like Stephen King’s IT - while not exactly tonally related, he executes the mystery and atmosphere rather well. For something on the site that does a similar concept, albeit from the other side of the portal, check out Anthropology.

As always, if you enjoyed this review, why not check out some of my own writing here?