[Adult story embed hidden]

So, in accordance with what I am known for, I am once again reviewing a story about dark, screwed up topics. Today, we take a look at an AU story about what would have happened if Trixie had her horn broken in her first episode and undergone a Killing Joke life after that. Yes, this story is a cross over with The Killing Joke/The Joker movie.

Unfortunately there are only a few short chapters, so pros and cons, especially since I don’t know how complete this story is, are only going to be surface level and not all too informative.

For pros, this story is, so far, in an excellent joker-isation of Trixie/crossover. If you are familiar with the aforementioned pieces of media, you will have a fairly good idea of how the story pans out. And, like the last story I reviewed, this story can stand on its own apart from the source material while borrowing heavily from it. Additionally, the story does a good job of making the decent into madness on Trixie’s end feel justified/sympathetic. With regards to the characters used, the author does a good job of establishing who they want you to root for and not make it too preachy. (read as the protagonist is not overly pure and Jesus-esque and the surrounding characters are not all Joseph Hitler Zedong)

As for the cons, the first and most prominent issue I found was that the writing, while correct in the sense that these are to my knowledge properly formatted English sentences, is a bit of a nightmare stylistically.

This was on the mind of a unicorn with azure coat, white mane, and dark violet eyes named Trixie Lulamoon that night. Across the land of Equestria, she was known as the Great and Powerful Trixie, a traveling magician known for performing dazzling feats of magic in towns such as Trottingham and Hoofington. In fact, she was just finished with another acclaimed performance in Dodge City[…]

This was the thought that was coursing through the mind of the azure coated and white maned unicorn with dark violet eyes named Trixie Lulamoon that night. Across the land of Equestria, she was known as the Great and Powerful Trixie, a traveling magician recognized due to her performing dazzling feats of magic in towns such as Trottingham and Hoofington. In fact, she had just finished another acclaimed performance in Dodge City[…]

The corrections I made are not high level corrections, as the sentences here can be further improved upon, but minor ones to address style issues such as the double use of the word ‘known’ in the same sentence. The best way I can describe this is to compare it to a DIY desk held together with duct-tape and an overabundance of glue. It works perfectly fine for a desk, but it’s not winning any aesthetics competitions.

Past that, the pacing is on the faster side of things, to an almost detrimental degree. Now, I realize that this might be based on the comic, and comics by their very nature are ‘relatively’ fast paced, but this is not a comic. While having this be at a comic-book pace might be right stylistically, it causes minor issues with establishing characters. If you are familiar with the adage ‘the book is always better’, you will likely understand that this is due to there simply being more information/context in the book compared to the adaptation. Here, the author does not take advantage of the fact they do not have to work around page limits or any form of a budget, so several pieces of information that would spice up the story are just missing.

Final scores;

Writing: 7/10, As I said earlier, this writing is serviceable, but lacks polish or a degree of eloquence that would have gotten me to be more forgiving as I would have seen an attempt to utilize a higher level of the English language.

Pacing: 8/10, A good pacing for a comic book based story that keeps things moving along and gives you just enough to entice you on. The issue I have is that it is ONLY just enough. I would have preferred more of a light-novel vs the anime type deal rather than more of the directions for the comic.

Characters: 7/10, Serviceable, but lacking the depth and complexity I expect from a good story.

Crossover Accuracy: 9/10, This is very much the MLP version of The Joker/The Killing Joke. It keeps to the spirit of the first while veering just far enough away to be its own thing. The issue here is that just like The Draconequus with the Dragon Tattoo, and even more so in this story, it is uncomfortably close to the source material in that I don’t feel that there is enough different to justify me saying this is distinct from the original.

Atmosphere: 9/10, As may have been noticing, I have been constantly saying that this feels like the outline/drawing-less version of an MLP-Joker comic book. This lends fairly well to consistent tone with the source and a pacing/flow that matches. That being said, because it matches so well to The Killing Joke, if you are at all familiar with that story, this one won’t hold all that much in the way of surprises and takes some liberties with MLP canon to get the plot to come together.

Total Score: 40/50 or 8/10, This is a rather nice story I would like to see continued as The Killing Joke is one of my favorite comics and this author seems to have a good grip on how to translate that story into the MLP-verse.

[To end, the Rarity scene was really nice as it was a nice bit of Karma. Trixie lost her horn that was the source of her livelihood which caused her brother to die. Rarity lost her eyes, the main thing she needs for her livelihood, which resulted in her inadvertently killing her sister.]

Thanks for your constructive feedback. I promise to keep your points in mind when writing the upcoming chapters.

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Interesting, I may check it out