All Nighter by Sunlight Rays will be the next story I will review today. 

EAll Nighter

• MLP: FiM
• Drama
• Slice of Life

Lyra Heartstrings spends the night up preparing for her concert.

• Lyra

Sunlight Rays · 1.7k words  ·  15  0 · 200 views

This review will include spoilers. Do give this story a read before you proceed with reading this review. 

Summary

Lyra Heartstrings is exhausted.

She has a concert scheduled the next morning and, despite having prepared for it for the past few days, she is not ready. And so she stays up the night, practicing for her concert as she runs on caffeine and sheer willpower. But those two assets can only carry her so far....

Content

In the modern world, there are many instances in which this is relatable; from student life to overtime work, pulling an all-nighter is now commonplace. And here, the author wishes to convey the experience of needing and thus pulling an all-nighter from the perspective of Lyra. 

As an individual who has had experience staying up through the night due to the nature of my work, it became abundantly clear that the author, too, has undergone the same experience. I found many of the measures that Lyra did to keep herself awake justifiable which added to the authenticity of the prose. From drinking absurd amounts of coffee to washing your face in front of the mirror, these details convey the resilience, or even desperation of Lyra to keep herself awake, especially if she had a strong intrinsic motivation. 

The reason why Lyra was staying up in the first place (in fact, for the past three days, which would be another point of discussion further down in the review) was that she had to master a piece for the concert tomorrow in the context relative to the time in the story. However, the stakes surrounding the concert tomorrow were shown to be insignificant, as Lyra’s doppelganger had explicitly stated. 

Is it the only concert you’ll have in the future, or the most important one among many that’ll happen?

The lack of any tangible, direct response to any of these rhetorical questions offered by Lyra’s doppelganger meant that it was difficult to identify with Lyra’s need to stay up so late. While I must acknowledge that Lyra had been presented with a deadline of one week to prepare for the concert, I felt that there was something missing in the equation that would show how beleaguered Lyra’s position was that would force her to stay up through the night.

I think that the most convenient way to look into this matter would be to consider Lyra’s character, in terms of her standards and the demands of herself. Noting that she intended to press ahead with the schedule even though she might have known that it was unreasonable, it can be assumed that she wanted to uphold her reputation or maintain her standards in her profession. I wished that the author could have allowed Lyra to wail about this to her doppelganger to not only explain why she decided to press on with such an arrangement, but to vent out her stress. Certainly, it was this stress that provided the motivation, be it intrinsic or extrinsic, to drive Lyra into accepting and working through many nights. Therefore, the driving force that pushed Lyra into this experience was somewhat conveniently forced for the story to move along. 

Another interesting, albeit less critical, observation would be why Lyra had decided to stay up for three nights when she had a week. She could have underestimated the difficulty of the piece, or simply had poor time management skills. She might have even procrastinated. Again, inserting a few pointers such as these into Lyra’s mind-over-matter confrontation would provide a better glimpse into this blame game she had had with herself. 

Lyra’s lucidity in meeting her doppelganger reminds me of another matter. Lyra was in the final leg of her marathon to master her piece and was too sleepy to play her harp properly. It was hence surprising that Lyra had a decent awareness of her surroundings. This was particularly evidenced by how she still cared for Bonbon’s wellbeing in spite of her state (though Bonbon did have a pretty hard time as well). 

Her behavioural acumen was slightly jarring in the context of the story. I would have expected a dazing, half-dead Lyra trudging around in a zombie-like state. She should be too tired to concern herself with other matters, as the frontal issue was with herself. If she still had this level of mental capacity, I would find it difficult to convince myself that she would bow down to the pleasures of rest since she was not as fatigued as the story had made it out to be. This mismatch between how the story had painted her position to be and how the story explicitly stated her position to be was conflicting, and weakened its resonance with the reader, especially if the reader had personal experience. 

This, to some extent, can be attributed to the flow of the story. The speed in, for example, how Lyra was able to come to a decision on what to do to counter the effects of her sleepiness was not expected of an individual grappling with a detrimental lack of sleep. This, coupled with the level of consciousness Lyra had in executing what tasks her mind brought her made her behaviour odd for the context of the story. Therefore, in my opinion, taking all these pointers together, it almost seemed that she had a defeatist attitude, in spite of her shown determination. 

Language

I struggled to find any technical errors of significant import. However, I would recommend paragraphing more to help regulate the flow of the story. One instance would be in when Lyra had to collect herself and bring herself to wash her face up. 

Stance

This is a decent piece that captured the struggles of pushing on without sleep. However, Lyra’s motivations and the way the story had chosen to explore her actions and character were not necessarily conducive to the plot. 

Content/Plot: 5/10
Flow/Communication: 5/10
Language/Readability: 7.5/10
Overall: 5.8/10

<For archive purpose: 5.8/10>