THam Radio Rarity

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

Who's the true ham here....?

• Human
• Second Person
• Spike
• Other
• Main 6
• Starlight Glimmer
• Anon

23 KM To Nerdiness · 2.8k words  ·  47  10 · 1.2k views

I read: Completed at 2,830 words, 1 chapter
Rating: 6/10
Recommendation: Read if you like 2nd Person or Rarity being a drama queen.

Clusterfuck.

Well, technically clusterbuck but you get the gist. Somethings will be chaos if you put Rarity, notable scenery-chewer, in charge of them. This story, in which that exact scenario is explored with a radio play is certainly no exception. 

It turns out that being a drama queen does not one a director make. Anon, as well as Starlight and the Mane 6, are conscripted into reading off a script for about twenty minutes in front of a microphone. What could go wrong? Well, everything.

This is a comedy of errors and the comedy hits, hard. TheKMExperience bounces the characters off of each-other well and works in some genuinely fun pieces of interaction and chemistry as the whole scenario gradually disintegrates after Rarity attempts to cram about an hour’s worth of stage play in twenty minutes of radio. Anon, for once, manages to stand out here and his weary snark plays off excellently against the more enthusiastic Mane 6.

However, this isn’t to say that this story is perfect. I don’t italicize the opening for just any reason. The main fault here is that chaos, unless spectacularly well executed, is hard to follow. The writer uses surprisingly few speech tags (eg, “I like books!” said Twilight) and that makes it difficult to tell who is speaking. Furthermore, the cast of about seven ends up playing loads of characters which, again, is hard to follow and I had to read over some passages multiple times to figure out what was going on.

Furthermore, to borrow from Schattendrache’s review of this same story, just because something is “bad” (in this case it would be the acting of the characters) it doesn’t mean it is funny. And that certainly applies here; while comedy is subjective I can’t really say that reading the cast screw up their lines got as many laughs out of me as TheKMExperience might have intended. Watching it in an episode, perhaps, but reading line after line of untagged speech where the dialogue alone isn’t enough to suggest character, no.

Plot: 3/5. Good take on comedy of errors
Characters: 3/5. Anon and Rarity shine but the others are lost under the acting and dialogue
Style: 3/5. Functional but sometimes hard to follow
Execution: 3/5. Comedy hits regularly but plot doesn’t
Overall Rating: 12/20 = 6/10

To TheKMExperience: Good work here overall. Your comedy works well and you can write 2nd person decently too. However, I would advise that you put more personality into dialogue and use more speech tags in something this dialogue heavy. Even though it is a radio play here, we as readers can still be told about the actor’s reactions and movements far more than you did. Twilight as a narrator for the play also works but maybe take another look at how narration is in most radio plays - from personal experience, it is more than I thought actually and the same thing goes for stage; it's just acted out rather than spoken.

For something like this: A Stellar Performance
Another group of lovable morons tries to to drama, albeit in the EqG universe with the Shadowbolts.

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

6984362
Huh, nice review. I attempted to review this one, and yet... I never really got anywhere with this one. It just didn't excite me.

I shall continue to improve myself. 🤓