Back at it again, today we’re going to tackle another work by the wonderful SilentWhisper, To Those Who Didn’t, a story about those of us who get left behind by everyone else. It’s a short little read so I don’t think this review will be all that long, so let’s hit it.

So overall I did like the plot itself of glimpsing into the future, and how two of the main six choose to stay where they are while everyone else runs off to do amazing things. Now that being said, something about his story sadly fell a little short for me.

I think that the plot itself is straightforward and the pacing feels nice, but I can’t shake the feeling that not much really happens. Yes, sometimes slice of life stories are like this, but I feel like this story lacks a lot of substance to cleanly get away with this, if that makes sense.

Let me extrapolate. Yes, there is a message at the end of being happy where you are, but I just feel that there could be more to this, yet there isn’t. Perhaps they could have talked about memories they had of their friends or something, because as it is, Applejack kind of gives some brief information to the audience as to where everypony went, and that’s kind of it.

Perhaps this is a problem, perhaps it isn’t. I for some reason feel conflicted as to whether or not I like this or not. It has a lot of subtlety to it and what there is is done well, but I just feel like there’s not enough to fully convince me. 

There were only two characters in the story: Applejack and Pinkie Pie. And the characterizations didn’t feel as strong as they could have been in my opinion. Granted I do see the choice of Applejack, as she’s the one mostly likely to stay put, what with her farm and everything. Overall she felt alright and was depicted pretty well.

Pinkie Pie, however, didn’t feel as well-developed as Applejack did. Granted, she is asleep for the majority of the story, but as another reader pointed out, she could probably be swapped with, say, Fluttershy, and I feel the story would still have the same effect.

I don’t know, there are a lot of pieces of this story where I feel conflicted. I’ve read through it multiple times and have changed my statements so many times that I don’t even know what I can say truthfully. 

A lot of the structural stuff in this story read odd to me. For example, there’s a line that says

They'd invited the others, sure. Or, they would have, if they had been around to receive invitations.

That doesn’t quite read right to me. The first sentence implies that they did send invitations whereas the second immediately negates this by saying that nobody is around to receive invitations.

There were a few other passages that didn’t quite read right to me, but I think most of it was due to some odd word choice. I dunno, a lot of this story felt strange to me. 

Overall, I think this was a nice little story, but I do wish it had a little bit more to stand on. It has a lot of subtleties to it, but beyond that I don’t know if the core of the story is very strong outside of that. I think the characterizations could also be a little stronger than they are, but the message is nice.

If you like sentimental pieces with a nice little message at the end, I’d recommend you read this story! 

Having read a lot of your stories, I sadly don’t think this is one that I can really get behind, and again I’m not sure exactly why this is, but I think it’s a lot less explicit than some of your other works are. It’s still a good story, yeah, but I think I like some of your other stuff a lot more!

Stay awesome! 

Plot: 5
Characterization: 6
Grammar: 5

Average: 5.33 

Having read a lot of your stories, I sadly don’t think this is one that I can really get behind, and again I’m not sure exactly why this is, but I think it’s a lot less explicit than some of your other works are. It’s still a good story, yeah, but I think I like some of your other stuff a lot more!

Eh, that's reasonable. It's not one of my best. You've read most of my best, though, so it's like... either I submit to you stuff you got to read for the contest, which feels weird, or I give you stuff that's old.

At the very least, I'm proud to see how far I've come as a writer. Thanks for the review!

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such is life, but I crave m o r e