Para's Old Lengthy And In-Depth Fanfiction Reviews

Yes, yes, I know I said I wouldn't be doing it anymore, but this story pissed me off enough to make me break my word within two days. I'll try and be a little bit nicer than I normally am, since the author wasn't much of a dick. This isn't so much of a personalized review triggered by the author's individual behavior as a commentary on the LoHAV subfandom in geneneral, so give them some slack, okay? They seem like a nice enough person; it's just that their first story was a bland mess that got the deserved lack of attention, and this story was a bland mess that got a ton of undeserved attention simply for being a story about a guy wearing a villain costume in Equestria.

In keeping with my attempts to be more constructive, a large portion of this review will be less about insulting the author and more about how to actually write properly, using their story as a jumping-off board.

I'm going to start this review by addressing the fact that a few of you have been mindlessly downvote-bombing things that I link you to. Fucking don't, okay? If you're going to downvote something I review, read it first! Don't just assume it's awful just because either A) it's LoHAV or B) I said [insert reasons] or C) you're just a cock and want to downvote something. HAV is a cancer, but we're just as bad as the idiots who spam every single cosplay fic they can find with upvotes if we act like that. Be more intelligent. Write your own reviews or at least try to be remotely helpful. Don't just downvote things because "hur praa sed is bad" you fucking eichmanns.

Now...

This fic is called The Old Dragonslayer. It caught my attention because of a line in the summary that's become a staple of LoHAV fics.

Actually, what caught my attention was the fact that it had only a 59:6 vote ratio, and yet a comment by the right honorable nodamnbrakes had a 6:0 ratio; something that's becoming typical of LoHAV stories--a high upvote count on every single story, but also, oddly, little real opposition to criticism on any of the minor ones; as if the voters never bothered to read the comments, and only the critics ever stayed on the story for more than a minute or two. Here, let me post the two critical comments that appeared there.

Voting oddities aside, what I want to focus on first is the summary, which both users pointed out a number of cliches in. There is one in particular that I would like to bring to your attention, but I'll post the full thing right here before I do that:

You know those stories of a guy going in costume to one place or another and having an essential missing piece to their outfit discovered? Yeah, well, this isn't exactly the norm. Ornstein is what our hero goes by, for he doesn't remember...well, much of anything. In this tale, one will follow his journey through Equestria, his memories, and his legend, all to find one simple thing...himself. But given a choice, will he return to his home, or will he remain in Equestria as the Old Dragonslayer?

Now that we have that available to us...

What I am going to do now is post snippets from other summaries of other LoHAV fics. I want you to see if you can figure out what the recurring theme in all of them is.

Evil has come to Equestria in many ways. But they never expected a mild-mannered human and a sapient ring holding the soul of Corruption itself

Have you ever gone to a Halloween party dressed as a bad guy? Have you ever been transported to Equestria? Okay, but...have you ever done it as a Xenomorph?

We all know the story, human from earth goes to Equestria from buying a mystical prop from a mysterious unnamed salesman to attend Comicon. But what you didn't expect was the prop to be a puppeteers crafting kit.

Just another costumed human turns Equestria conquering wizard via the Alicorn amulet story. But htis one will be the worst of all. It's mine, after all

You all know the story. Some shmuck goes to a con cosplaying as something, gets transported to Equestria, gains the powers of their costume, and wreaks havoc on cute, pretty ponies.

Do you see what this holocaust train of hate and misanthropy is chugging towards?

It's a perverse, autistic form of self-awareness.

There is literally so much unoriginality in LoHAV now that people actually think that lampshading the unoriginality inherently makes it original. None of those stories is any different from the other 201 in the HAV group--and, on a side note, the are more than 201 of them now, ever since the official group stopped accepting most of the cosplay ones. The one I'm reviewing isn't in it. Think about that. Just think about it for about twelve seconds or so. Doesn't it make you feel dead inside?

I am going to spell this out in the clearest possible way I can.

Just because you acknowledge that something is a tired old cliche does not automatically not make it a cliche anymore, in the same way that merely saying the words "Justin Bieber has gay buttsex" is not particularly funny unless you are doing it on live international television with Justin Bieber's parents in front of you. Something (and forgive me for resorting to this cliche) bronies and fandom autists--and, really, people in general, but it's bronies and fandom autists who do it to an extreme and laughable degree most of the time--tend to misunderstand is that association between one thing and another is not a correlation. It's not the same thing as correlation/causation, though you can think of it as the next degree of removal.

I'd say I don't know where that idea came from, but it kind of makes sense, in some ways. Lampshading certainly works in fiction to a degree, and it can be very useful for writers who know how to use it properly. I frequently lampshade politically charged ideas to obfuscate them from conscious observation in order to introduce them properly, without prejudice. But here's the thing about lampshading: it's a plot device that's supposed to help maintain suspension of belief in the face of minor cliches. When your entire plot is a cliche, there is no lampshade on earth that will fit over it.

What really baffles me is how people keep saying it's original because... it's a different costume...? I won't even get into that.

In any case, the story is immensely unoriginal. The author thinks that making his story edgier (we'll get to that right about now) will make it more original, where in fact every other author in the subfandom has also had that idea. So, we get a 1,098 1,068 lol dyslexia word chunk of edge that I could slit my wrists on if I wanted to. Yes, by the way: he got a 59:6 ratio on a story with 1,068 words, and no, that is not abnormal for LoHAV, because, and let me just take a moment to be a whiny bitch and quote some of the responses explaining why it's a super-dee-duper originalfest:

Instant like doesn't need to read

Yes, that is an actual comment on this story, by the way--grammatical error and all.

Apparently it's a crossover with Dark Souls or one of those ultra-edgy video games that I don't play because I have better things to do with my time, like getting my back waxed and having gorilla orgies. I don't care. I read the story, and I can tell that even if I'd played the video game, I wouldn't find this story entertaining or original in the slightest. There's nothing different about it in comparison to the norm, which makes the author a liar. I will now show you, in depth, why.

Here, have the first paragraph.

Crumbling stone...crumbling? Why was it crumbling? I can't breathe...crumbling stone...where am I? Let me out...I can't breathe...I can't...light? Why is there light? Why...can I feel again? I can feel myself falling...falling. That...is that ground? Yes...ground...I am free...ouch!

Ouch! This crap, by the way, is not italicized and I thought the whole story would be first-person until the second paragraph.

I frequently write fuckery like that when I'm doing stream of consciousness... in my first drafts. The difference is that I revise my first drafts, as do most good authors. Occasionally you come across someone who can honestly just bang out a story really fast, like Kaidan or Akumokagetsu or Regidar or Rainbowbob, but for the most part, good authors rewrite their stories at least once or twice, if not a dozen times. The more rewrites you get in, the better your story will be (although you have to balance time vs. effort, etc).

The form amongst the pile of rubble shifted, revealing the source of its discomfort. A long, finely crafted spear, partially obscured by the stone, shone in the light of the sun. The figure stood, claiming its weapon, and looked itself over. It wore finely crafted armor of an origin known only to itself in this world. The golden sheen had been reduced to a dull grey, but if one looked closely, the armor still had that elegant tint in the light. As it confirmed the truth of the fact, it began to chuckle, remembering how it all began. It was so stereotypical, after all. Going to a costume party in a homemade outfit, getting offered that one essential piece that was missing. But it hadn't had a missing piece. Indeed, if one had looked it over, they would have been hard-pressed to deny that the legendary warrior of the Souls series, Dragonslayer Ornstein, was in the area. So the being in the costume had no idea what the stranger had been talking about, but had been nonetheless intrigued...hadn't it? There was something about a box...wasn't there? It was just so hard to remember...

This may be a bit difficult for some of you to follow due to the fact that, well... it's not very interesting... but anyway, the basic gist is that OP is trying to subvert the trope of a guy appearing in Equestria in a homemade villain outfit with a missing piece thinking he's that villain by literally referencing it in his first chapter. No, not just the fact that he was in Equestria in an outfit blahblah, but literally, if you read it carefully, the middle part of the paragraph is all devoted to adamantly stating that this person's Dragonslayer Ornstein costume is in fact completely intact and has no physical missing pieces whatsoever.

Because apparently this is... very important to the story? It's only 1,068 words long, after all, so he obviously felt it was worth using the space for that.

Ironically, he includes a number of other cliches in this paragraph alone, and I'm going to actually list some of them for you right here.

—Referring to his character not by name, but as "the form" and "the figure", which sound more menacing and badass, as does using the gender-neutral "it"

—Evil laughter as "the figure" stands in the shadows, about to inflict himself upon the world

—The ever-popular partial amnesia where they offer some hints about the story, but... they're just kind of... broken up with... ellipses like this... and not really... coherent... it's just so hard to remember...

—Strange, awkwardly phrased statements that will obviously make sense later but don't make any sense now, and are supposed to make us go "GEE I WONDER WHAT THAT MEANS LOL".

The Dragonslayer heard a sound. It took a moment to place in its mind...no, HIS mind! That's right, his! He took the necessary moment, and so placed the noise. Hooves and clacking armor. Guards! With a great leap, Ornstein ascended, landing on a balcony with practiced ease. With a glance backward to confirm his suspicions, he leapt once again, exiting the grounds of the castle, the one place he remembered clearly. The place where he had been accused...where he had been defeated. Refusing to confront that memory for now, he used his inhuman athletic capabilities to spring far, leaping from building to building, seeking to leave the...the...city! The city, of course! One giant leap, and the Dragonslayer was racing across countryside, away from the city of his disgrace.

Okay, why isn't this just a crossover?

The charm of the original LoHAV stories, as I've said before, is that the character either didn't have the superpowers but thought they were that character, or else they thought they were that character but didn't have the same level of power. This either led them to comedic situations or forced them to improvise cleverly, depending on the situation they were put into. These new ones are just people saying "Lol, I want to be a transformer!" and POOF! You're a fucking transformer! Which, I know, has been said a million times, but people don't seem to get it.

Goddamn!

This is literally just the Dragonslayer or whatever his name is with a different backstory of being the author's self-insert. Apparently, this dragonslayer character kills dragons in Dark Souls or something. So why not have him be in it instead of making him a fucking self-insert going heh-heh-heh in the shadows? That's actually kind of a good plot, the mane six having to stop him from killing Spike or... something. IDK. Why does it have to be a self-insert? Why? I don't get it, except that I do get it. I do get it. I understand. I do understand. I do. I really do. We all understand. We all float. Down here, we float. We all float.

Why did this need to exist, and why did it need a backstory of... nngh. Alright, basically, the Dragonslayer-self-insert slew dragons in Equestria and was sealed in stone for a thousand years, and now he's free.

Now, I got through that in one sentence because fuck this. I'm out.

I was going to talk about how to make a better character, but I can't do this. I'm going to go get high and write some hoers porn, or something. Also, this shouldn't even be on FIMFic--there are only three paragraphs that are actually about ponies, and one of them is exactly one sentence long. I shouldn't be reviewing it because it shouldn't be on here.

----> The Old Dragonslayer <----

No, but seriously, the author hasn't been the worst person I've ever encountered on here. They're just a product of their environment. A poor, hapless victim of a corrupt society. =( Give them hugs.

But the fic still sucks.

It really, really sucks.

A lot.