Pleasant Commentator and Review Group Reviews

Mature-fic Saturday!

What, you think that'll actually be a thing? Pff, don't be so silly.

Linkedy Link: Horns for Days by WiseFireCracker

As an aside, this fic isn't finished, though I've read as far as I can at the moment. That's like, 8, 9 chapters, 50K or so words? That's a lot, bae. More than enough to do a review of it.

First Impressions

Synopsis:

Two horns. That’s all it took. One too many, and then, you’re nothing but a tool, a means to an end.

Oh, gently, it’s not your fault you were born like this. But you must help, you must contribute to the survival of the species. Pick your poison - we mean choice, of course -. We will protect you.

Even if you were not born a bicorn.

In the end, you are too frail and too few to be anything other than sheltered and belittled.

You’re precious.

Uhh.... you wot, mate?

I mean, we're talking about bicorns here. That's all the synopsis says.

I'd appreciate some kind of explanation as to what the story contents are, but... maybe this is it?

After all, the picture given, as well as the tags, and this description combined, make for a quite 'dark' setting. I'm guessing jail cells, bloody fights, horrible atrocities on an innocent race... or something like that. Your typical mature-dark fic, but with a new race!

Then again... when we look at the tags, we can see that blood, or at least a lot of gore, isn't applicable. In fact, the tags we get are 'Mature', of course, 'Dark', 'AU', 'Human', and... 'Slice of Life'?

Is this some kind of dark story based in a jail cell, where we see a slice of life in the depths of criminality, or something? What have we gotten ourselves into?

Plot

That's a question which isn't easily answered, until we find out the gist of the story about 3 chapters in.

Essentially, the outward appearance is somewhat misleading. In fact, quite so. The main factor here is certainly Slice of Life, as the characters act like any normal HiE-turned pony... appear in the middle of a forest, try to find Twilight, try to get back to their own world. That's the main premise.

It starts out pretty strong, I think. The two protagonists seem to be in a world where 'bicorns', which is what they are, are treated differently. Strange... could this be some evil plot, a harnessing of their rare power?

However... it's not as dark or mature as it looks. In fact, the characters are more dark/mature than the world they've entered! They go around, get hired a place by Twilight, go shopping for clothes and so on... meanwhile, no real threat occurs. They argue a bit, get told they're given marefriends, and argue a bit more for arguing's sake. There's something towards the end about them being oracles, but there's no plot to capture them or anything, as far as I see. In fact, the other ponies act pretty nice to them.

'What happens after all that'? You may ask? Well... I've summed up the first 9 or so chapters. Slice of Life, ladies and gentlemen.

In the end, it's rather less exciting than it should be, and I feel there were some missed opportunities to really use that premise to its utmost.

Mechanics

Grammar: 99% good. All it really needs is a proofreader or two to flush out one or two problems like these:

“A treasure with a secret compartment it looks like.”

“Yeah, I agree. So, how are you holding up then, mate?” The englishmen huffed.

Minor problems here and there, but nothing that really breaks immersion, in my opinion.

Dialogue: It's... okay. A major problem I have is not what is being said, but how much it IS being said. Arguments between the two main characters are usually lengthy, and happen often. Frankly, it lengthens the fic on for way too long than it should be, and should have been told instead of shown to begin with. Most of the dialogue doesn't add anything to the story.

I'd also comment that as an English person, I had no idea what accent was being portrayed by the English person, or 'Brit'.  He says 'salutations', and this sort of thing:

“Oh no, you didn’t! I’ll have you know that I’m not one of your country’s hellish spawn!”

When he's typing, and when he's talking up-front, it's even more confusing:

“So, what you are saying, lass, is we’re magical goat ponies?”

“Hey wanka, have you ever had a ct scan? You need one, mate.”

Is he a 50-year old man who addresses people as 'lass' and 'lad' all the time, or is he a 20-year old from London say 'you wanker', and 'you need one, mate'?

(Admittedly, I doubt a lot of you will understand where I'm coming from here, but it's basically like this: No young person would say 'lass' or 'lad' to people they didn't know in England, except perhaps the... Scots? It also mentions he's in Winchester, which is right down the South. Think a man born and raised in Canada who wears a Stetson out in public, and speaks like a Texan).

Regardless of that, the dialogue is used way too much between the two protagonists, and makes a lot of the story easily skippable without missing any of the... well, the story.

Worldbuilding: There's a rare species called bicorns, who are apparently oracles. They also live in large herds, and therefore the two protagonist-bronies have to marry a ton of mares or something. That's about it.

Pacing: It's too slow, man.

When you set up your story to be dark and mysterious with that cover art + the generally pretty dark-fic style tags, you'd expect there to be a darkfic. But as far as I can see, no major problems have occurred. It's literally just a couple of blokes living privileged lives in Equestria. We need a threat, or a major obstacle, in order for it to be a story.

Maybe this is just me, but I'm not a fan of slice of life stories where nothing interesting happens. Oh, you go on a date? Cool. You go to the pub? Great. Where's the point that makes this worth reading? I could do it myself and write a story about it, if I wanted to. When I'm reading stories, though, I'd rather have some bigger, more dramatic story arcs though.

While I don't this fic is entirely in the 'this is literally just slice of life' style, it's much more close to that than anything else.

PoV: The narrator seems to take on a 'all encompassing view' at times, so I wouldn't say it's fixed on those two. Probably a better way to deal with it when you're writing for two main protagonists, but I'm personally in the 'I want to have suspense, not knowing what the other pony is feeling' camp myself.

Show and Tell: Like I've said earlier, there's a lot of areas where telling might have made the pacing a lot better. I don't remember any bad cases of tell.

Impact: The start, and that mysterious idea of where the story is going to go, is quite good. How it turns out is not-so-good. I did like the mini-prologue stories, though, and thought their story was pretty interesting. The whole 'unicorn's eyes flashing' and stuff later was a rather impactful image.

Character Development

The... two characters are humans. One is French, the other is British.

The French person occasionally speaks French. He is the 'level-headed' person, or so I understand.

The British person is usually rude, for... no particular reason. Like, he just gets in ponies faces for no reason...

Would you do that, if you were in a world you presumed was fake, and you'd been watching this world for presumably years? I think an important point is to always understand where your characters are coming from, so you can write how they come to their actions and conclusions. This could be a way to improve it.

They're both bronies, yet... they don't really act like it's much of an 'amazing' world to be in. They argue a lot, and, I mean... one mentions clopping at one point?

There's crude humour where I'd rather have seen story progression, to be honest.

In general, I didn't feel very attached with either character, aside from at the start of each chapter. There's this sort of prologue-story, wherein the character's past, and how they got to Equestria, is explained. Sure, there's even more arguing... but at the end, there's some sort of story, some sort of goal, and how they react to it. I actually read the start of all the final chapters before reading the main stuff, since it seemed to be going somewhere a lot quicker than all the 'goes to pub, goes to date' stuff.

Conclusion:

It wasn't my cup of tea.

Perhaps it is somebody's, though. After all, I pretty much am rating this story for what it's advertised as; a mature, dark, human in equestria sort of deal, wherein these bicorns are meant to be persecuted. What I get is these bicorns being overly privileged with their own homes, friendly assistance around Ponyville, dates with mares who were arranged to foster their...children?

If anything, the 'dark' 'mature' bit is on the mare's side of the story, on how they got into that horrible position.

There's no real conflict, and I don't really understand why it's marked as mature or dark from this point of view. Maybe the story will relate to those points later, but for now, it's more of a teen-slice of life with a bit of dodgy romance. I'm sure people do like that sort of thing, and that's why it's quite highly rated. I'm just not the audience for it, y'know?

But even as a teen slice-of-life, I do feel that there's a bit too much time-wasting with all the arguments, and rambling-talk between the two protagonists. If there was a bit more tell, and a bit less show, this could half the size of the fic, while still keeping all relevant information.

I do hope that the story develops as it continues to progress, though, as I'd like to see that cover art and mature-theme come out at the end. It could just be a very slow setup, into a much more interesting story.

But as for now... it *needs work*. I didn't feel like I gained a significant story out of it, and felt like a lot of it simply wasn't compelling.