A couple of chapters ago, Esteem told Twilight that he had killed and eaten Spike before he died. The more I thought about this plot development, the more my anger at this development shifted from Esteem to the writer. The reason why this happened is because the circumstances surrounding that death are just about the least satisfying ones that I can imagine. The most important detail about said circumstances is that Spike had not appeared a single time prior to this in the story that I can

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I like the structure of today’s chapter. It alternates between two different subplots that draw a parallel to each other thematically. That’s good stuff. It’s almost like this was real literature I was reading as opposed to an unpublished (and legally unpublishable) labor of love dedicated to the awesomeness of a cartoon for little girls. In regard to the actual contents of those subplots, I greatly prefer one to the other, so we might as well get the weak one out of the way.

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Remember when I said that I felt guilty that I’d overlooked Applejack’s first fight scene in the chapter? How it felt like she was easy to overlook compared to other characters in the show? Well, as it turns out there’s another character like that: Spike, the baby dragon who serves as Twilight’s assistant and little brother. Whereas the members of the mane six were all fairly easy for me to characterize from the get-go, it took me a little longer to nail Spike’s personality down. Basically,

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Ohhhh, this story really got me going. I thought I knew where it was going to go, that it didn’t have any more surprises left for me. It got me to let my guard down. But before I can compliment the story on the new direction it’s taken, I have to make a couple of notes on the chapter’s structure.

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I had to sit on this post for a while because I had to sort out my feelings for this particular chapter. The post was going to begin with a long-winded explanation on getting a balance between a writer being completely predictable and throwing logic out the window to focus on surprise. But that tangent was really only inspired by the fact that some, though not all, of the chapter was predictable. The more I thought back, the more I realized that the events were still mostly satisfying and made

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Despite a minor hiccup in the pacing of this chapter, I can say that this is one of the better ones I’ve read from this story, mostly for one scene at the end.

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Okay, maybe I was wrong about Titan. Maybe. He tacitly admits to Esteem that he’s anticipated everything his enemies’ know that they think he doesn’t. So maybe, just maybe, he’s got something up his sleeve and letting Celestia escape was part of his big master plan. I’ll have to wait and see if his plan is all that impressive. Obviously it won’t be, since convention dictates that he’s going to lose, but I still want him to get more of an edge.

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I don’t like Unimpressive all that much, and I can’t entirely articulate why. The wisecracks he made weren’t that great, but that’s not much of a deal breaker on its own. The fact that he’s willing to kill real ponies who side with Titan is a little eyebrow-raising, since that issue hasn’t come up in the story before this, but given the backstory he gives Twilight to try and snap her out of her pacifism, what with the horrible death his mentor suffered at Esteem’s hooves and all, I honestly

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EVIL ORIGINS

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-As soon as I begin the chapter, something occurs to me about Coconut Crunch, the first viewpoint character not important enough to get a cutie mark page breaker. Namely, it’s kind of weird to see an original character with such an innocuous name. All of the Steel Rangers in Fallout Equestria had names related to baked goods, and they clad in power armor and armed to the teeth. I can’t tell if this is a self-aware attempt to acknowledge the inherent absurdity of cartoon ponies making

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