Today’s review is something we don’t see very often: a longform poem! This review covers Golden Fang Ryu Shenron’s Tears of Black, a Zebrican folk tale told in rhyming couplets. This fic is listed as a sequel to Tale of the Caged Bird, though it doesn’t appear to be related.

Opening Thoughts

There’s quite a few things about this story that make it unusual: firstly, rather than a more traditional fic, this one is more of a piece of mythology. Characters in folk tales are typically written to represent a single trait or archetype, and as such can get away with being a bit flatter in terms of narrative purpose, motivation, or development. It’s also a poem, meaning I’ll need to be a bit harsher on writing style than I typically am. Lastly, the story (based on description alone) seems to be fairly disconnected from FiM canon. I will be considering all of these unique elements in my review.

Plot/Concept

The concept is appropriately straightforward for a folk tale: a young cheetah is kidnapped by a headstrong zebra, and his mother stalks the plains in anger and sadness searching for him. She experiences such a profound sadness, in fact, that her tears mark her species forever.

In anything else, this concept wouldn’t work. It’s overly simplified, it’s not entirely sensical, and it doesn’t mince words when it comes to establishing the villain of the story (hint: it’s the zebra). However, placing this story in context, it actually works really well - we are meant to view this as a story told in Zebrican tribes, after all. Thinking of it that way, it’s easy to see how this story might serve an important function: to prevent young zebras from approaching cheetahs, along with a helpful visual cue to remind them that cheetahs are dangerous (the black tears). It would be really creative… if it weren’t precisely the same plot as a common Zulu folk tale.

Look. I think MLP adaptations are super fun! Lord knows I’ve enjoyed a ton of them over the years. But you need to remember two important things if you’re going to write an adaptation: (1) you need to build sufficiently on the original - this story does nothing more than swap out the nameless man in the original with a zebra, to say nothing of actually integrating it into the FiM universe, and (2) you need to be up front when you’re adapting something.

In conclusion: the plot is great. It’s a real shame the author didn’t come up with it.

0 / 5

Pacing/Length

I get that fimfic has a 1k minimum on fics, but this story is just way too long. Folk tales are quick and to the point - the length of this one is just far, far too much to work as a story told around a fire, or anything that makes sense in-universe. I would understand if this was a wholly original story that the author wanted to upload and needed to artificially inflate the word count… but it isn’t. It’s actually part of a small series (including Tale of the Caged Bird, King of the Mountain, Angel of the Snow, and The Sphinx King) of folk tales told through poetry - why are they not simply part of an anthology with reduced word counts? 

As a result of this artificial inflation of an incredibly brief and simple story, there is an opening hunting sequence which drags on for half the word count. This entire section could be cut, as it really doesn’t do anything for the explanation or lesson.

It’s still passable, and definitely complete, but the length and pacing really don’t serve the story at all.

3 / 5

Characterization

There really isn’t much to talk about here. The characters are as dimensional as the plot demands them to be and no more. Under normal circumstances, I would probably give this a pass because the characters work for the style of the story (a folk tale), but the characters are just another thing lifted directly from the Zulu version.

1 / 5

Writing Quality

Alright. The plot might be 100% plagiarized, and it might have almost nothing to do with the FiM universe, but the choice to write this fic in rhyming couplets is, at the very least, something new.

Let’s start by defining a couplet. Traditionally, couplets are two lines of poetry written in the same meter (meaning their rhythm and syllabic emphasis match), they rhyme, and they contain one whole thought - much in the way that sentences must contain whole thoughts, even though they logically connect to the sentences before and after. It’s all well and good to break these rules occasionally, but this should be done with purpose and direction.

I’d also like to take a moment to think about why one might choose to write a story in poetry rather than in traditional prose. Choosing to write in poetry implies that rhythm and lyricality take precedence over plot - it’s the reason such a simple story can still be an enjoyable experience when communicated through poetry. When writing poetry, extra attention must be paid to word choice and emphasis, and the focus must be absolutely clear; straying from the core of the piece for the sake of a rhyme isn’t good practice, nor does it contribute to the enjoyable experience of reading a poem.

With all of that in mind, I should first mention that there is no sense of rhythm in these couplets at all. Rarely do they work together in any way, and never do they use the traditional mirrored rhythm and emphasis in traditional couplets. 

Now that lyricality is out the window, I’d like to share some specific couplets from this piece that frustrated me. Let’s start with some couplets that were poorly worded or metered:

Walking past animals big and small

Even ones that were as short as they were tall

As far as I’m aware, cheetahs aren’t all that “tall”. 

At least they finally stumbled upon their quarry

grazing under a sky that was every bit as starry

Every bit as starry as… what?

The mother continued to creep closer still

Thankful that she was not hunting on a hill

Why? Trust me when I say that no further context is given for this remark.

Of course, there’s plenty of other couplets that exhibit such poor word choice that I was forcibly torn from the story to marvel at why, of all things, the author chose this for a rhyme:

A clone that came in the form of her son

One that could’ve been no bigger than a bun

They trudged through the pains of the Zebrican savanna

The strands as yellow as a luscious banana

The mother cheetah then felt her hunger spike

One that rolled faster than the tires of a bike

But the cheetah silenced it with a bite to the neck

With the equivalent of a pirate crew stomping on a deck

From not to far away stood a zebra stallion

His large frame looking him like a part of a battalion

He eyed the club sleeping next to her, looking like a little stinger

A sinister idea beginning to linger

He then swiftly vanished back into the dark

Into the village that was larger than a park

Crossing through territories of other enemy cats

Cats that could strike her down with the force of baseball bats

Alas, there was still no sight of her baby

Her hopes of finding him dwindling like the navy

They came out wild, loud and hard

Coming out sharp enough to slice up a card

He trudged through the plains and leapt through the trees

Going through the area with the vigilance of bees

They soon found the mother alone and cold

Looking like a torn and ruined piled of mold

The answer is, of course, because these words rhymed. That’s pretty much it. It’s not because the words worked (why bring up bicycles, pirates, baseball, or the navy or what is supposed to be a traditional folk tale?), it’s not even because they had a nice sound or cadence (I can’t, for the life of me, understand why “mold”, “bees” and “card” were used - those are not nice sounding words). It’s simply because they rhymed.

Poetry takes a certain amount of creativity - especially if you’re sticking to something as rigid as rhyming couplets. You have to be comfortable bending sensible rules of grammar to allow for a couplet that is pleasant to read. Perhaps you noted the pattern with problematic words in these couplets: they are all the final word of the second line, meaning the author backed themselves into a corner on the first line, hit up a rhyming dictionary (or just pulled the first word of the top of their head), and slapped something in there. This couplet:

He eyed the club sleeping next to her, looking like a little stinger

A sinister idea beginning to linger

Is the exception that proves the rule. Rather than the final word of the second line, the author wrote a couplet that did not rhyme, and jammed an utterly nonsensical clause on the end of the first line to make up for it.

And, to top it all off, here’s two couplets that mutated into triplets:

And not interrupt his mother on her quest

Least he turned it into an unnecessary fest

And spoil the hunt they knew would be her best

He then turned to look back at the elder carnivore

And she looked up to look eyes of the lone herbivore

Allowing him to see a sight that shocked him to the core

There’s ways to write poetry without adhering strictly to a set of rules. There are poems that do not rhyme, poems that are rhythmically disjointed, and poems that shift throughout. The important thing to keep in mind with poetry is that the structure and style really have their own voice - much more than other forms of writing. This structure and style is saying “I got sick of writing poetry a few lines in, and I don’t care enough about this piece to go back and revise previous lines”.

I don’t know if that’s necessarily the attitude the author brought to this piece, but the state of the couplets speaks for itself. “Undercooked” doesn’t really begin to describe it. This is just plain lifeless.

1 / 5

Je Ne Sais Quoi

On my first read through of this poem, I was unaware it was plagiarized. I actually had a nice time reading it, despite the often lackluster poetry, and was considering giving this fic a rather high score for its plot and characters. It was actually the quality of the poetry that led me to do a bit of googling and discover the original Zulu story upon which this poem is based - I had a hard time believing that an author would spend so little time rendering such a creative idea for a story.

Needless to say, I was left with a bad taste in my mouth when my suspicions were confirmed. It’s hard to feel good about reading a story that was so lazily translated into a fanfiction, and hard to have any positive takeaways that aren’t spoiled by the act of plagiarism. The few couplets that worked were not enough to redeem this story.

1 / 5

Final Thoughts

A traditional Zulu folk tale that was quickly and mechanically translated into iffy rhyming couplets, given a dubious connection to the FiM universe at best, and sold as original work. I was frequently frustrated while reading it, angry upon figuring out its origins, and disappointed while searching for anything at all to praise.

1.2 / 5