Word Count: 209,507

Conflict of interest disclaimer: The writer of this article is a friend of the author - Randimaxis - and thus the article may be biased in terms of criticalness. 

Spoiler Warning: If you haven’t read this story. I am spoiling some of it in this review. So just skip to the conclusion if you don’t want to be spoiled.

Obsidian: Daughter of Sombra is a story written by Randimaxis dictating the events of an alternate universe where Sombra had a daughter, Obsidian, who survived and entered into the modern world with the return of the Crystal Empire. With the story mainly being a journey of seeing how she adapts to a world unlike her own. 

I feel like at the start of a review of a story like this, I must quote a guy from the Equestria at War Discord Server.

This quote is accurate to this fanfiction. As admitted in the Credits chapter, this story was based on a roleplay between Randmaxis and his friend, Wungiel. As such, this can be seen reflected within the story’s structure. 

The main issue with the importing of a roleplay into a fanfic, tends to be an issue of spacing. As a person who has roleplayed a lot, this is an issue that can emerge when roleplays are a more fluid entity in terms of its nature compared to a story. Due to such, this is reflected within the story’s pacing. 

From Chapter One along to Chapter Seventeen, the story could be described as ‘low stakes’. If one understands the nature of roleplays, one can understand why such long and slower portions of the story exist. It fits comfortably more into the idea of slow and slice-of-life roleplays. Which runs counterintuitively on how a story usually works with hooks that attach to previous hooks that brings a reader along and allows them to want to read further. 

Due to this, there is a, for a lack of a better term, a gap between the initial hook and the main hook of the rest of the story. This is detrimental in grabbing the attention of a reader, especially since the length between Chapter One to Chapter Seventeen is approximately seventy thousand words! An impressive amount, that does in fact serve to build the world more around the story into a possessing a more solid foundation, but one that ultimately acts detrimentally to its pacing. 

The later chapters, from Chapter Eighteen onwards, looks at the issue that the previous seventeen chapters lacked conflict, and chooses to throw a brick onto the acceleration pedal and kickstart conflicts which draws interest back into the story. This in turns draws attention back to the story, but due to the notably long and slow paced initial chapters, the later chapters in fact suffer from it due to the worldbuilding not sufficiently grabbing the reader’s attention enough to pay off in the second half. 

Regardless of the issues in the first half of the story, the later half of the story was able to properly take on the nature of a usual story. With conflicts increasing in worry until the apex before winding down.  Occasionally, the origin of the Fanfiction as being a roleplay pops up in such sections, occasionally such critical scenes often feel like they drag on just a bit too long. Or perhaps just a bit too short. They are not critical errors, but enough for regular readers to feel just a bit off balanced when processing these scenes within the chapters. 

This demonstrates slightly the issue that comes with essentially using the narrative equivalent of a Modulator-Demodulator and transforming a Discord-based Roleplay into a Fimfic-based Fanfiction. It doesn’t exactly transform properly, just like how analog signals aren’t exactly transformed perfectly into digital signals  by a Modulator-Demodulator and results in some errors. Roleplays are an interesting format stories can take on, but of course, due to where some of them are hosted, it might be hard to access and as such, transformation of their domains to something more suited to propagation is necessary. 

Some leeway must be given to the author, as it is admitted this is his first domain transformation of a story to a more accessible medium, as admitted in the final chapter. Revealing that such transformation was based and inspired by the transformation of the Fimfic story ‘A Cultural Exchange’ by Illiad Easle. Which was similarly made from a discord-based roleplay edited into a proper story.  

From this, it could be seen that most of the errors discovered within the story, can be mostly traced back to this issue of the story initially being of a domain not native for fanfictions to usually occupy, and thus suffer in its transformation. But the existence of other stories transformed from Roleplays into Fanfics (mainly A Cultural Exchange), prove that most of these errors can be alleviated with a healthy dose of editing. 

Moving on from a general overview review regarding the structure and metanarrative of the story, we move on to the actual interior of it. 

The story focuses and follows Obsidian, daughter of Sombra, as she attempts to survive and adapt to this modern and terrifying world with antibiotics and… spas. Much of the interest one has in the story, can be attributed to wanting to see how Obsidian, a mare who can simply be described as foreign as possible from the standard Equestrian, adapting to a world we are used to seeing in My Little Pony fanfictions. Her ways are suitably archaic, and her motives for why she tries to understand them mesh well to create a believable character. After all, she was raised by Sombra! The closest analogue we’ll get to a proper evil decadent dictator in the show (Chrysalis does not count, she’s more vague in her role, especially considering the state of the changelings and lack of substantial knowledge regarding how she treats her subjects - and Thorax is a dissident, so his treatment doesn’t count). So observing a pony taught by the teaching Sombra trying to reconcile and adapt to a more modern world is an interesting story to be seen. 

This arc is what we see for the first half of the story, the second arc is seeing her being forced to choose between the new ideas she was exposed to and the old ways creeping in trying to force itself in and take over Equestria in the form of her other siblings, coming back as well and plotting to restore Sombra through the power of self sacrifice. And Obsidian has to use the friendship, the ones she made in the first half to beat her foes and stop the return of Sombra. 

There are several main directions Obsidian is being pulled throughout the story. The first is clearly her own self interest. She’s been raised by Sombra of course she’s going to have a strong urge to do stuff her way and not anypony’s else’s way. The second way is the one we see her develop. The wellbeing of her friends and wanting to be friends with them for much longer. And the third way she’s being pulled is introduced in the second arc. Her siblings trying to convince her that hey we should reunite with daddy dearest. 

Of course, the first and third eventually lose out to the second. We all know that because the dark tag is not present on the fiction. But the progress of her slowly affirming on the second and deciding ‘yeah, I should help my friends’ is interesting to unravel and observe. The way a character unveils the way they think and seeing it influenced, is a niche but insightful phenomenon to see. 

The rest of the characters present around Obsidian also have their fair share of traits and goodies that make them believable for the setting and incredibly true to the spirit of the show. There is a sense of ‘aliveness’ to them along with the way they dance on the narrative stage. They seem like something befitting a story of the calibre of My Little Pony whilst keeping a degree of depth suitable for most readers to hook on and enjoy them as is. They are just all cute, fluffy, believable characters. 

They are written well, and with depth and that when the story decides to hit them with the standard conflict arc, you can properly see them growing so. This coincides with my, mild commendation regarding the writing of the Mane Six in the story. It attempts to extend the Mane Six into their later years and their characterisation sort of holds. This is to say their characterisation within this story oscillates between questionable to ‘Yeah they definitely would turn out like that’. But it’s not fully consistent. There isn’t an objective way to evaluate this, as it is more of a feeling and extrapolation of their portrayal. The only exception to this is Pinkie Pie. Yep, she fits well into her original personality from the show and the extrapolation to her being a mother attains well. This may be because she is portrayed more in non-action scenes, but alas, she is an anomaly in between the rest of the Mane Six.

The characters, well, the Main Characters of the story other than Obsidian of Stalwart, Cupcake, Thunderclap, Rover, and Mica are well built in their characterisations and in some way or another prove a foil to Obsidian. Beliefs, cheerfulness, confidence, interests, and actions of theirs prove something interesting for Obsidian to interface with, providing insights into her character which I feel could’ve been way more than they currently are. They feel real. And if more time was spent on more dialogue between them, we could’ve dug more out of the interesting phenomenon that Obsidian is so much we could have gotten to her Noumenon.  But alas, it was not explored as such as the issue of the story's origins pop up again. There is definitely more that could've been dug through the introspection, but as a story, these issues could be overlooked as what is present is enough to show to the reader of how Obsidian has changed, and changed for the better. Adapting to the modern world and becoming a more proper pony than the one her past is trying to impose upon her.

The story as a whole is, not really that type you would throw into a ‘feel good’ category, as by its nature of exploring a pony of a genocidal dictator out of time trying to adapt to the modern world and making friends along the way is not exactly 100% ‘feel good’. It befits itself an adventure tag, and is overall a good story with the aforementioned technical issues messing up the pacing to an overall good read. It isn’t exactly a masterpiece, as personally, the introspection to Obsidian’s characters could be deeper, but felt alas a bit swallow to the nature of it originally being a roleplay. But alas, it is a decently good story that deserves a read if one could… hold on despite the hookless first sixteen chapters. 

TerribleSpeller’s Review Matrice:
[Engagement]: 5/10*
[Insight]: 6/10
[Character]: 9/10**
[Technical]: 6/10 

*This is a mean of a high deviation score that increases dramatically after Chapter Seventeen. Chapter Two to Seventeen scores about in 3 and Chapter Eighteen onwards scores a decent 7 to 8. 

**The main bias of the writer of this review can be found in this score. 

[Overall]: 6.5
Recommended to those who want a story that can reliably be seen as having ‘taken place’ in the show along with fitting it’s style and tone. Warning provided for the issue present in Chapter Two till Chapter Seventeen. Not the best, but still a comfy ish read.