EThe Master Blackmailer

• MLP: FiM
• Mystery

This case files from Equestria take place after the death of Princess Celestia Silverlight husband Prince Justice Silverlight the father to the Royal Foal.

• Death
• Anthro
• Alt. Universe
• Celestia
• OC

keithsterling · 11k words · 402 views

Overview

Princess Celestia is being blackmailed by a pony using his real name and address. Unable to solve this conundrum herself, she recruits her three foals to assist in finding a way to solve this problem quietly.

Be warned that this review contains spoilers, but you can feel free to skip to the spoiler-free summary at the bottom.

Characters

There are a lot of characters in this piece, but surprisingly little character. None of the characters get real development, with the possible exception of Celestia. But let’s save her for last.

The Master Blackmailer, Coerce Money, is a one-dimensional evil monster, who is willing to threaten Celestia’s children for nothing more than money. Like everyone in this fic, he uses his real name at all times, even while blackmailing people, sends Celestia his home address, and keeps all incriminating evidence in a safe in said address. He is stupid enough to blackmail the princess and threaten her children to her face, and seems to have no leeway whatsoever to prevent her from just arresting him. He is given no backstory, no motive beyond money, and no real dialogue beyond asking for said money. As a result, when he dies at the end it is written off as entirely justified because of how evil he was, despite it being a clear case of murder.

The other main characters in this piece are Princess Celestia’s three kids. They’re referred to repeatedly as “foals” throughout the piece, but all of them hold important government positions so are clearly adults. Despite this, Celestia repeatedly acts like they are either helpless and need her protection, easily manipulated, or are in grave danger from the array of nameless nobles who would do anything to unseat her. None of these threats materialize at any point in the story, despite the threat to her foals being the major driving factor for Celestia’s actions.

First, we have Princess Aurora Sol Silverlight, the oldest, the only alicorn, the head of the Solar Guard, Celestia’s bookkeeper, and clearly the favorite child. Despite this, she is still reduced to a sex object at the end, as her final description includes both the color of her bra and how perfect her breasts are. 

Next, there’s Somnus, the Luna of the group and definitely the most interesting. He is the one Celestia goes to first, and as the Royal Investigator and the sibling who works the most with Luna, he is clearly the one most willing to get his hands dirty getting things done. Despite this, he too uses his real name when going to negotiate with the Master Blackmailer, and is somehow shocked when Coerce Money figures out who he is. This is a recurring theme of the piece. No one seems to realize that the royal foals, who all publicly use their full names (including their last name) are somehow related to Celestia Silverlight, or that Celestia is related to any other Silverlight. This is treated as a shocking revelation every time it comes up, which is several. Exchanges like this happen multiple times:

“I finished my nursing studies abroad and was offered a job here in Canterlot by the Director of Royal Canterlot Hospital Blueberry Swirl Silverlight.”

"Director Blueberry is actually Princess Blueberry Swirl Silverlight. The youngest daughter of Princess Celestia Silverlight and the granddaughter of my friend Duchess Ophelia Silverlight the boss mare of the Silverlight unicorn family."

Finally, since we’re already talking about her, there’s Blueberry Swirl Silverlight, whose name does not fit the pattern at all. She’s Royal Coroner and also Director of Canterlot Hospital, but much like Aurora, has no real personality of her own. The best that can be said about her is that she’s ‘the nice one’, as she seems quick to forgive and of course is presumably a doctor in order to help people. 

Then there are a bunch of side characters, many of whom are entirely unrelated to the plot. There’s Baroness Alexandra Royal Blue and Captain Lancer Cadet, who are set to be married before the Baroness calls it off and the Captain kills himself. Neither of them get even a single line of dialogue, and the investigation into the Captain’s death by Aurora and Blueberry reveals several very strange things that lead nowhere and seem to have no bearing whatsoever on the plot, so I’m not going to go into them. 

Then there’s Duchess Ophelia Silverlight, the grandmother of Celestia’s late husband, and her friend Countess Clarice Brightly. Each is the noble head of their respective estate, and they spend all their time talking about how noble they are and who they’re related to. Most of their scenes contain no information of any substance, other than to establish that they are friends and who they’re related to.

The only reason these characters seem to exist is to establish the two most important members of the Brightly household: Their adopted daughter Lady Fiona Halcyon, and her maid Gusty Shady. These two are the only characters to get a full explanation of their backstories. Unfortunately, these backstories come in the form of long exposition dumps that add nothing to their characters. On the one hand, I appreciate that there was an attempt to flesh out their characters. Unfortunately, the fleshing out is a dry telling of their histories with no tie-in to the rest of the story.

Gusty in particular deserves mention because she does actually have a personality. That personality is “pissed off about being a maid.” It’s not much, but it’s something, and it does make sense given her backstory and the reveal that she is actually working for the Master Blackmailer. Which at least makes her a character that is relevant to the plot.

Finally, let’s talk briefly about Luna. She doesn’t appear for long, but she does appear long enough to reveal that she knows all about all the illegal things the royal family has been doing (mostly from Celestia’s late husband), and to seriously imply that she’s not-so-secretly having sex with Somnus. I can’t confirm that this is actually what is happening in the other fics the author has written in this continuity, but I don’t know how else to interpret this:

"I'll be free later in the evening, my dear little Somnus. You may punish me then, I could use the stress relief. I have two very annoying meetings during the night watch today. You know who I am talking about, Somnus." Luna comment as Somnus chuckled and shook his head.

Luna is similarly totally cool with covering up any illegal activities the rest of the family engages in, and that seems to be her only purpose in this fic - to help the main characters literally get away with murder.

What murder, you ask? Well, let’s talk about Celestia, the main character here. Celestia, uniquely among the characters here, actually has an arc. She begins the tale distraught about being blackmailed over some letters she wrote in her youth. What exactly is in these letters is never explained, but apparently if they were released it would ruin her so badly that any noble could use the leverage to make any of Celestia’s children do anything they wanted. Regardless of whether this is a legitimate threat (it doesn’t seem to be), Celestia cares so deeply about her children that she takes the Master Blackmailer’s demands seriously. But she cannot conceive of a way to solve the problem herself. Then, later in the story, she learns that her husband and sister had repeatedly gone behind her back to break the law when they needed to, without ever telling her. And finally, this prods her into taking matters into her own hands by disguising herself as a disgruntled maid, showing up to the Master Blackmailer’s house with a gun, and murdering him in cold blood.

This is definitely a character arc. A character encounters a problem, gains new information, and then enacts a solution that they never would have considered based on that information. It is a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, it is undermined by the solution being murder, and more importantly, by the obvious solution of just arresting the blackmailer being completely ignored. And finally, it is undermined by the rest of the cast being completely on board with Celestia just murdering someone, and helping to cover it up.

Plot & Pacing

The plot of this story is brought down primarily by ignoring the obvious solution, over and over again.

A blackmailer is blackmailing the Princess. This blackmailer sends the Princess his name and address. Later in the story, it is made clear that the main characters also know exactly where he keeps the incriminating evidence he is using to blackmail them. 

Just arrest him. He’s clearly breaking the law. You know where he lives. There’s no contingency in place to release the letters if something happens to him, because it doesn’t go off when he is actually murdered. And you are literally the Princess and your daughter is in charge of the Solar Guard - who actually do arrest one of his underlings on camera. There’s no excuses here, not even a handwaved one, of why he can’t be arrested. And yet literally no one comes up with this idea ever.

This hole is big enough for the entire plot to fall apart. It immediately solves the entire story with no fuss, and the story not only doesn’t show why this wouldn’t work, it seems to go out of its way to make it clear that it would work. 

This alone would be enough to drag this section of the score down, but there are other issues here. There are a half dozen extraneous characters that don’t need to be here. There’s a subplot involving a Solar Guard Captain who killed himself when his marriage fell through, but who may not have actually been who he said he was at all. The story goes out of its way to have a flashback to his death, and then does nothing with the character. His story is never resolved or tied into the main plot in any way, it’s just dropped. 

Then there are the minor characters that have their entire backstories dropped into the story with no rhyme or reason. Both Fiona and Gusty have a whole scene of exposition each, and their entire reason for existing is for Gusty to give the Master Blackmailer Fiona’s incriminating letters and then for the royal family to use a party for her as a way to get the Master Blackmailer out of his house. This ends up not even working because he comes back to his house when Celestia calls him back to kill him, and even if it had, any high society party would have sufficed, without the need for Fiona to exist at all.

There are recurring issues with characters making the same obvious mistakes over and over again. No one realizes that all the ponies named “Silverlight” are related, despite them never once using pseudonyms. Every character in this story just writes down everything that could incriminate them, and then is surprised when it’s used against them. No less than four characters have “incriminating letters” stolen from them, and at the end of the fic, Luna directs Somnus to write down all the illegal things they did, presumably so that someone else can steal them later. At some point, you’d think they would learn not to do that.

And finally, the biggest problem is the message of the piece: murder is okay, so long as you’re doing it for your kids and the person you killed was a really bad man. 

Technical Skill

There are a lot of technical issues with the piece. Beyond the purely grammatical issues, of which there are many, there are quite a few that interfere with the understanding of the piece. One of the noble houses is named “Brightly” and yet the name of their house is capitalized probably less than half the time. When the house name is also a common English word, this forces you to stop and re-parse the sentence every time it happens.

There’s also the scene descriptors at the top of every scene, which are usually unnecessary, and often confusing. While in the middle of a flashback, “that same day” is used to mean later in the day within the flashback, and then we jump back to the present using “that same day (present)” which is not immediately obvious at all.

And then of course there’s the real elephant in the room: Character descriptions. Here’s a typical one:

Standing outside the door press against the wall was breathtaking beautiful white-colored pure alicorn mare with a golden blond mane and tail. Her 6ft 5in perfect equine figure was attired in Vanilla ice colored slightly below the knee-length dress. Why her twelve-inch long white bare feet were encased in a coral-colored crew wedge sandals with a one-inch platform, a single thick ankle-strap band held the sandals to her foot. Her white-feathered bird wings were folded on her back. This pure white alicorn mare was Princess Celestia Silverlight, the mother of the royal foals and co-ruler of Equestria.

This is not the first time we meet Celestia - this is in chapter three. Every character is introduced this way. Species, color, height, dress color and length, foot size and what shoes they’re wearing. Finally, “this is (name).” Ignoring the obvious grammatical issues, like using “ft” and “in” in prose, there’s no reason to describe characters this way. We don’t need a full description for characters we’ve already met, and we don’t need to know the size of everyone’s feet ever. This story is rated E and it reads like it wants to be a foot fetish piece. Never mind the on-screen murder and subtle implications of incest. 

This story is in desperate need of an editor, but all that said, it is at least followable. While there were definitely parts that needed to be read multiple times, I at least understood everything that was going on, which cannot be said for every piece of fiction. 

Rating

Character: 1.5/5 

The characters are almost all one-dimensional. Many of them are entirely unnecessary to the plot, and only one of them has any kind of arc. None of them talk like real people, which makes it very hard for them to have personalities. But some of them still do manage to be distinct, which avoids the lowest rating here.

Plot: 1/5

The plot doesn’t make any sense. It’s full of holes big enough to invalidate the entire story, it drags in places as it gives paragraphs of exposition that aren’t relevant, and everyone involved repeatedly makes the same mistakes.

Mechanics: 2/5

Full of grammatical errors, weirdly focused on feet, and sometimes difficult to follow. But I still followed it, so points for that.

Final Score: 1.5/5

A plot that could have been easily solved in its first chapter, full of characters that don’t feel like real people, and in serious need of editing.

Final Thoughts

This story needs a lot of work. There might be an interesting AU full of political drama buried in there somewhere, but this isn’t it. The characters need to be made more distinct from each other, and need to start feeling like actual people. With editing, this could be made more readable, but solving the central plot hole likely invalidates the entire story, so a major rework is needed to make this story actually work.