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To Feel is to Understand

[Unpublished stories cannot be embedded]

Today I get to tell you my thoughts on a story I’ve been meaning to review, but haven’t been able to get to because of a need to wait for chapter 2. So now that it has been published, we get to see what is going on with our GTA wanabes.

The story, so far, is about this gang of criminals out to rob a museum. The job goes bad and people get seriously hurt. Then, a strange voice tells them it wants to know their birthdays, but only the general 30 day period, and it only accepts answers in the form of associated self-mutilation. Said self-mutilation is actually some arcane ritual to use that portal from EQG when the stars are not right. I don’t know why this works, maybe it’s because the mirror is some eldritch being that likes bodily fluids.

Ok, now I want to write a story about that.

What was I saying? Oh, right. So, then barbershop gets sent to Equestria as ponies and that’s the end of the pertinent plot so far.

In terms of what I liked, the story seems to have an idea of what it wants to be doing. I know this is not high praise from me, but you sort of need to read the whole review to understand my thinking here. I liked the story conceptually, and the author knows the rules of writing so I had a pleasant read in terms of not having to correct words and sentences in my head constantly, but… well… sigh, I’m not going to keep pussy footing around the issues I had.

As for what I didn’t like, the first issue would like to bring up is the writing. Now, on a technical level, this isn’t bad, I can tell what is happening and things make sense, the issue is that it’s not very elegant. While I can understand what the author is describing, I can’t help but have the editor in me look at these sentences and paragraphs and yell ‘this could have been done better’ over and over again. Here is an example.

Moon abandoned his admiration of the forest and looked back to Arthur. Seeing his pain, Moon put a hand on his friend's shoulder. "We shouldn't." Arthur could only guess what Moon was thinking, his face was expressionless. He continued, "But, we have to. You know? I mean, how else will we live in peace? Don't forget, money makes the world go 'round."

Now compare that to this.

Hearing how despondent his friend sounded, Moon turned away from the forest rushing past his window and looked back to Arthur. He could see that Arthurs hands were clenched tightly and turning white from the pressure, as well as telltale shimmer of too much fluid coating the eyes. Moon calmly and softly placed a hand on his friend's shoulder and did his best to look him in the eyes.

"We shouldn't." Arthur looked up at Moon as he said this, hoping that there would be something in his eyes or in his expression that would tell him what Moon was thinking. He was disappointed to find that Moon’s face held no more emotion than a corpse. When Moon continued, the tone of his voice was halfway between comforting and matter of fact "But, we have to. You know? I mean, how else will we live in peace? Don't forget, money makes the world go 'round."

There is just more emotion and inference one can draw from the revised paragraph that make the scene that much more interesting. The primary issue I would say is present is that there is a lack of details in terms of what is being described. We read about things happening and a general appearance to things, but we never get the specifics, leaving the scene feeling hollow.

What I mean by all this is that there is this almost detached, analytical tone to what is going on. I should know, it’s what all my editors give me hell for doing in my own stories. The writing needs to have some more emotion put into it; set the scene, tell me all the subtle, little things that everyone is doing when the action is low, describe how the character looks away slightly at the mention of his past, SOMETHING to liven up the scene and make me get invested.

The second thing I would like to address is the names. This might not be that important, but they impact immersion significantly. We have Arthur and Uyada, fairly normal names, so we must be starting in the world of humans. Nope, we’ve got Moon and Potato. I cannot express how strange it is to read this mix of sensible names and what should be nicknames. My problem is that there is a fifty-fifty split on real and not-so-real names, so I am just left confused. If Potato and Moon are nicknames, why doesn’t Uyada have one? And if those are their real names, making it seem like this EQG humans, why do two characters have human-human names?

Finally are the characters. The problem here is mostly to do with the second chapter, but Potato in the first one was rather grating, but that is more of a personal thing. First off, when Moon is opening up to Twilight, it just didn’t feel natural, hell, all of the interactions didn’t feel natural. While I will give you that there was a week between the end of chapter 1 and the start of chapter 2, the casualness of the interactions just didn’t feel right. It might just me my introverted self, but if I suddenly found myself in the body of a dragon, or a pony, or any other mythical creature, hell, any body that wasn’t my own, I would still be in panic mode for about another 2 weeks before I got this comfortable interacting with the individuals around me. But seriously, these people are way too casual at being transformed into ponies.

Past that problem I have with the characters, I have to say that there is a surprising lack of depth to them. If you have ever herd the phrase wide as an ocean, deep as a pond, this description fits the characters here. While I get that mystery is important, and that dumping a characters entire backstory on the audience all at once it terrible form, the audience should at least have something to latch onto. In the two chapters we have, we learn next to nothing about who any of these people are, which is frustrating as there are opportunity after opportunity to learn about them, only for that opportunity to fly by.


Final scores;

Writing: 9/10, On a technical level, this is a well written story. There are few, if any errors that jumped out at me and made my inner editor cringe. The parts that did involved an almost criminal lack or information regarding what was going on. Scenes feel less vibrant and cause me to occasionally stop to correct the paragraph in my head into a more pleasing version, but that is primarily an issue with…

Pacing: 4/10, So I spent a long time trying to determine what and how to score this and writing. The thing is, reflecting on this story’s issues, the problem is the pacing. The writing feels clunky not due to technical issues, but stylistic ones, brought about from lack of detail. There is so much going on, with so many scenes that should be dripping with descriptions and little action, something to give me an idea as to things going on in everyone’s heads. Going forward, and should the author decide to rework this story, the writing should include more descriptions to liven up what is happening and add more impact to scenes that should be emotional in nature.

Characters: 6/10, Connected with the pacing and the lack of detail, we are not given enough time to really sit down with the characters so we can come to care about them. There is moment after moment where these characters feel like they are going to be flashed out, only for the scene to change and our questions to be left unanswered. There needs to be more development done to these individuals for us to properly care about them, especially if there are scenes where the author is attempting to get an emotional reaction out of the audience.

Atmosphere: 7/10, This and World Building more placeholders at this time. There are interesting concepts being brought up here that look promising, both in terms of the tone and the background to all the humans. The issue is, there is not enough here for me to parse what the story wants to be, and I can’t very well grade a story on ASSUMED plot elements and threads that look like they will be interesting and worthy of praise.

World Building: 7/10, See above.

Total Score: 33/50 or 6.6/10, This is a very interesting story that DESPERATELY needs MORE words to make things feel more organic. The story is not bad, far from it, but the problem is, imagine being told you are going to eat a cake, and when it is presented to you, it is just two plain pastries stacked on top of each other with some buttercream between them. It is still a cake, and it tastes fine, but it’s just bland. Going forward, I would like to see the author put more effort into describing things so scenes feel more fleshed out and the emotional moments actually resonate, rather than feel like ‘he was sad’ before we move along.

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