EHow does one boop a nose with frosting?

• Equestria Girls
• Comedy
• Random
• Slice of Life

No really, how do they?

• OC
• Fluttershy (EqG)

Leafy · 1.2k words  ·  25  4 · 449 views

Description

Fluttershy loves boops. There's nothing in the world that can replace her boop crazyness. Until today, that is......

Surn wants to boop Fluttershy like usual. But that's gonna prove to be difficult.......

Initial Thoughts

I can’t help but feel like I’m coming in a bit blind, here, in terms of accessibility to either headcanon or fanon. Fluttershy loves boops? Okay, I’ll take your word for it, though that kind of characterization has to be justified somehow. And who’s this Surn? Clearly the OC; and a cursory glance at this author’s other stories demonstrates he’s a common occurrence in them. I worry, then, that I’ll be blindsided by an established OC, with whom I’ve had no prior association. 

“Crazyness” should be “craziness”, and those ellipses aren’t doing you any favors in repetition. (In other words, you really don’t need more than the three dots to convey the point.) 

Onto the story. Spoilers below.

Summary

Fluttershy wants boops. Surn doesn’t want to give any. A day spent baking cupcakes doesn’t save him long enough for the inevitable booping, though.

Plot

Arguably it’s very simple, and it should be comedic, and it should be a nice Slice of Life plot. But the issue, unfortunately, is that it lacks proper substance and material.

This is another review where I’m almost forced to tie together two categories of critique in order to explain my impression of the story. In this case, I have to link the lack of a developed plot to the lack of a proper characterization. 

Because I don’t know Surn at all, I can’t figure out why he and Fluttershy are… whatever they are. I’m assuming friends, but there are some weird undertones of either a friendship far closer than what is considered normal (not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that) or perhaps some underlying romantic feelings. Nevertheless, this only means that the “conflict”, which is apparently that Fluttershy wants to get her nose booped while Surn doesn’t want to boop her at all, feels terribly contrived. This is to say, there’s no actual justification for it happening; the conflict is shoved into the reader’s face but given nothing to substantiate it. It shows up, gets shoved away, then rears its head at the end, just to make sure that both the reader and the writer “remember” that it existed. 

Having thus gone in blind, I come out of the story still feeling that way. Perhaps that’s because this story seems to be part of some manner of shared universe. If that is the case, though, then it really works against the author to submit it on its own, because whatever established sense of “plot” or “characterization” there was, doesn’t show up in such a strangely secluded work. 

I will say, this, though; the comedy, while admittedly a bit “on the nose,” was the story’s strongest point. Slapstick and hyperbolic reactions aside, these work well with what the story sets out to do. It just doesn’t well enough to ultimately make me care about the story. Or even enough to make it make some semblance of logical (loosely speaking) narrative sense. 

Score - 5 / 10

Characterization

There really wasn’t much characterization here. Fluttershy doesn’t really seem like Fluttershy—where’s her timidity? Her cowardice? Heck, her sweetness and kindness? These, while blanket characteristics, do make up vital components of her established character, but it never quite seemed like these showed up. She instead takes the role of a typical tropey “girl next door” kind of vibe, which doesn’t seem justified, nor particularly interesting. 

She does do her whole “yay” but, but that feels like it’s done out of obligation in order to make the character “appear” like Fluttershy, rather than be her. 

Then there’s the issue of Surn. Like I said, I went in blind, though thinking he seemed to be part of a series of stories. Coming out of it, I still can’t figure out his character. I know somewhat of what he doesn’t want, which is booping Fluttershy, but… why? There’s no nuance to him. Again, that might be because he’s supposed to be an established character within the author’s other stories, but here he just lacks any personality. 

Plus, again, there’s no reason for why these characters should 1) be coming into conflict with one another and 2) be interacting with each other in the first place. I can assume that, maybe, in other stories, they have some reason, but as it stands here, there isn’t any. 

This isn’t taking into account the secondary chapter, which includes two other OCs, Fallout and Bumble, who… just show up? Without much reason? I can assume they’re also established characters in the author’s other works, but that just means they suffer from the same blandness. 

Score - 4 / 10 

Syntax

On a technical level, I could read this story, but there were many mistakes and instances of awkward sentence structure that made me scratch my head. I found several moments where the tense suddenly changed, such as:

You see, Surn never liked Boop day. So he tries to stay away from the one person that loves boops.

This one starts out in the past tense (“liked”) but then shifts to the present tense (“tries”, “loves”). This manner of inconsistency remains prevalent throughout the story. 

I also found some misspellings:

He walked in his house and proceeded with cation.

That should be caution. 

She know's almost everything

That should be knew, without an apostrophe s in the slightest. 

Finally, some sentences just… read weirdly. For instance:

Look, the reason relations were brought together were because of the love they had for someone else!

I read that over several times; then, when it was repeated:

Are you really mad at me just because of frosting that is on your nose, thus refusing the fact that when I said that these relations are brought together are because of the love in them and not just because of some silly boops?

I read that over again, too. And I still don’t know what’s being said here. I don’t know what these relations are, or how they’re relevant, or even what the author was generally trying to convey. 

Ultimately, it’s readable, but not particularly legible. 

Score - 5 / 10 

Final Score - ( 5 + 4 + 5 ) / 3 = 4.67 / 10

Final Thoughts

I’m not sure what this story was trying to accomplish. Perhaps it was just a story written for fun. I can get behind that sentiment. But, whatever fun this story was trying to convey fell apart at the narrative seams. There… really isn’t much sense of an internal logic, which even the most silliest of stories, however paradoxical this may sound, do have; randomness is an applicable genre when in that randomness one can see where an author transitions from one idea to another and works them together to create something complete. 

At the same time, this story has several… I guess, references to the author’s other works. So perhaps this is a story which is, to some extent, for the author’s fans. I must therefore admit, for the third time, a level of blindness to whatever this story meant (loosely speaking, of course). 

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thank you so much for the review! Now I know what to improve! Also, I hope this story wasn't too much of a bother to do.....