Para's Old Lengthy And In-Depth Fanfiction Reviews

by nodamnbrakes

Rating: everyone
Tags: Horror
Length: 32436

Fun for the whole family and Budd Dwyer.

Fun for the whole family and Budd Dwyer.

Published 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC
Last updated 2016-10-04 01:12:33 UTC

Ace Combat: Divided Feelings

Okay, normally, I don't review stories in-depth.

And guys, I don't say it very often, but I really love getting comments. I love knowing that I've affected someone with my writing enough for them to say something to me about it. Sometimes people don't like my stories or comments, and that's okay too—I just want to know what people have to say. Though I can be pretty weird to my commentors sometimes, I value even the most unpleasant input more than silence. Comments show me that I made you think, or laugh, or cry, or get angry, or roll your eyes, or do something. And knowing that makes me really, really happy.

But once in a while, I'll get comments like this.

I get suspicious when people say a generic, unspecific compliment and then ask for a favor in the same line, especially when they try to act casual by putting "Hey..." in front of it, like they only thought of it after writing their generic praise and it wasn't the actual point of the comment.

So I took a look at this guy's story. Then I took a look at the comments.

And I notice that a number of the reviewers have either mentioned being asked to read the story by the author, or else have implied that they aren't even interested in the genre, which (after some detective work) led me to find that this guy has been asking various authors to check out his story via the comments section. In fact, I have a cap of Armalite summing it up pretty well.

Ace goes onto stories and userpages, posts a vapid comment that amounts to "I like your stories generally" or some comment about something that's visible on the summary page, but never actually mentions anything related to the stories he claims to like. Then he asks people to read his stories. I even saw the exact same comment that was on my page posted on MythrilMoth's page as well, without any changes whatsoever.

I really, really, really don't like people who do that.

So now, Ace has inserted his little dick into a hornet's nest. I did read his fic, and it sucks. This the first chapter is every Counterstrike fanboy cliche rolled into a single poorly written story with an incomprehensibly AU plot, bad English, stilted dialogue, and lazy narration.

This is the summary:

Scootaloo has a great life; two loving mothers who are also her idols, and the best friends a pony could ask for.  However, when Luna appears in one of her nightmares with an opportunity, Scootaloo makes a choice that will place her at the highest ranks of a new flight team, and that will ultimately put her in conflict with Equestria itself.

This is a sequel to The Order by Bad_Seed_72 and sequel to My Mother is a Wonderbolt One and Two by Blueball-Blitz.  Reading them first is highly recommended. This story will involve other MLP characters from their own stories, but Scoots will be the center of it. Un-tagged characters include:  Rumble, Flash Sentry, Luna, Celestia, Thunderlane, Cutie Mark Crusaders, Spitfire.

FIrst of all, fuck Flash Sentry. Second of all, the bastardization of something written by Bad_Seed_72 is reason enough to rape this story again and again: Bad is an amazing writer, and I'm reasonably certain she didn't approve this "sequel".

Third of all, I have to make a huge distinction between the first chapter and the rest of the story—the first chapter is completely unrelated to the rest of the story, despite being the longest and most bizarrely bad of all the chapters. The first one is about fighter planes, and the rest is about 8 year old Scootaloo making goo goo eyes at Rumble and whining about how her mom abandoned her and other domestic shit.

It's as if two different stories got mashed together, like two globs of feces being mashed together, and they mixed and became homogenous.

Let's look at the first chapter. I'll give you a sample of the horror to start with; like a love tap before the real beating.

Steel Wing then launched a missile at Scootaloo who quickly evaded it and ordered,  “All NLR fighters, the Equestrian fighters are hostile!  Repeat: the fighters are hostile, fire at will!”  Scoots then launched a missile and shot down one of the fighters.  “Protect our new civilians at all costs.”

That’s when all tartarus broke loose; every fighter in the area began fighting at each other, and the Shadowbolts were doing better than the rest.  In just 10 minutes, enemy fighters were being shot down by the Shadowbolts; Dread Wing score 6, Diamond Eye 4, Blackwing 8, Star Scream 11, and Scootaloo 21.  But even with all of the losses, the Equestrian fighters were endless.  The enemy kept out maneuvering the other pilots and taking them down.

“No matter how many we shoot down, they’re still taking a whole lot of our own pilots,”  Diamond Eye said.

Yeah.

On to the review.

As I said earlier, in slightly different language, the story chapter suffers from Counterstrike Fanboy Syndrome.

Anyway, you know that story you wrote when you were 13 where you spent 10 pages describing the protagonist's super-awesome ArmaHeavy Industries FU-3758A Model 69 sniper rifle with a top-mounted Interrotech laser-guided Jewhunter scope with 100x magnification and optional night vision and light-bending modes that could spit out belt-fed .834955432mm caliber rounds at a rate of up to 10,000 rounds per second through a special ten foot barrel with a DthPRcMe, Ltd., ultra-silencer on the end so that when the hostile target was effectively dispatched and neutralized (cuz that sounds more army than just getting his head blown off) no one would hear it and his brains just exploded out of his head like a watermelon getting crushed by a falling Oprah Winfrey...?

That's Counterstrike Fanboy Syndrome.

If you got bored of reading all that shit (I don't blame you) it's a fixation with inserting terms, acronyms, and military-sounding jargon into stories in places where they're either completely inappropriate, or else are appropriate but used in a way that means the reader will have to google every other word if they're not familiar with what an M60A1 RISE/Passive is. More than that, it's actually very similar to namedropping, where someone offhandedly mentions their close association with an important person or place or thing, with the expectation that people will then be awed by it. In this case, the CS fanboy wants to show off how much he knows about the military, and maybe have some people ask him what this or that means so he can then explain it to them in a long-winded, spergy essay, and feel important and knowledgeable.

It's a way of affirming that they are indeed part of the culture, despite not being in the military and being too retarded to ever be in it when they finally graduate community college. They're very comparable to the 2000s phenomenon of white people trying to act like black gangstas and spouting gang terminology all over the place.

Granted, it's not nearly as bad in this story chapter as it could be, but it's still pretty bad. I'm going to skim the story chapter and just make a list of some of the instances of Ace abusing military words and designations to sound cool. This is not even all of them.

July 16, 2001

NLR territory, 5 miles from the Equestrian border.

      (note: "NLR" is never defined within the story chapter, but I am assuming it means "New Lunar Republic"...)

squadrons of NLR Su-35 fighters

      (note: this is a fucking lazy way of showing what the plane looks like without describing it)

the legendary Shadowbolts in their Su-47s

      (note: see last note)

mare’s voice said through the com of her Su-47 exo-suit

      (note: what was the reason for mentioning it was on her exo-suit?)

The rest of the pilots responded by turning on their IFF signals

      (note: "IFF signal" is never defined or explained)

She then contacted the V-22 Ospreys picking up pony immigrants.  “All Ospreys, how’s the pickup?”

      (note: these are not even mentioned to be aircraft. Also, Ospreys are American, and the SU35 was designed in Soviet-era Russia...)

Radar is picking up 17 dozen bogies coming from the Equestrian border

      (note: I don't think they even call them bogies anymore, do they? Either way this sounds more like a video ga—Oh wait.)

Steel Wing’s weapons went active.

      (note: "went active" is yet more military jargon that doesn't need to be here)

“Do you think there’s an AWACS nearby?”  Dread Wing asked.

      (note: "AWACS" is used repeatedly in the chapter, yet is never defined or explained)

//////////****//////////

1 mile from the conflict zone.

      (note: that reminds me, you'll see more of this guy's bizarre fixation with exact distances and figures later)

“It’s been hard enough trying to get there with rundown F-16 exo-suits

      (note: stop fucking namedropping advanced techno shit like you know anything about it)

And... I can't go on. I'm less than halfway through the first chapter and I'm already sick of that shit.

A note about Equestria's cultural jargon: a lot of people try to just transplant earth stuff into Equestria. So you have a city named Canterlot and a train system called the Friendship Express, and a plane called the SAU-745 AV Jet Aircraft. Doesn't fucking work, does it? Ponies have a different culture than ours—they adore innocent, clunky things. The Elements of Harmony aren't the "6 Faceted Unity-Based Defensive Security Network (6FUBDSN, AKA EoH)", they're "the Elements of Harmony". Don't try to do similar stuff unless you're trying to A) parody something or B) create a completely different, much more streamlined modernistic Equestria, in which case I would recommend not having characters named Scootaloo, either. Call her "Poultron Unit B-2 (Colors: Orange, violet; cutie mark not included).

It doesn't even matter what you're trying to create, really—if you're not trying to worldbuild a technological utopian version of Equestria, don't fucking namedrop technological crap. I'm also writing an AU story focusing on an advanced, militaristic Equestria. One of the differences between it and this is that despite them having modernesque technology, there aren't any pointless acronyms or overuse of military jargon just for the sake of having them. A pony holding a bolt-action rifle based on a combination of the Springfield and K98 rifles is described as having a "rifle". A pony with a submachine gun based on the Gustav M/45 and MP40 submachine guns is described as having "a machine gun" slung over his shoulder, because that's what people are going to think of it as anyway. They fight to forcibly instill harmony around the world, rather than to dominate it; there are no "Deathwing" groups or "Shadow Soldiers" or any of that GI Joe shit.

But I digress, and I'm coming dangerously close to being a hypocrite here.

Let's get to the actual story chapter 1.

Spoilers (fuck you): Apparently the first chapter is supposed to be a look into the future. Yes, it was all a nightmare/prophetic future dream Scootaloo had while Flash Sentry was cleaning a latrine out. No, I am not kidding. I'll fuck this real quick anyway.

Basically what happens is the ponies from Equestria are all leaving. Millions of them are migrating into the "newly founded" (All newly founded nations have the most advanced air force planes and the most advanced natives to fly them, obviously) New Lunar Rectum like bacteria into an open head wound. Scootaloo and "Blackwing", "Diamond Eye", "Star Scream", and "Dread Wing"—yes, those seriously are the names of his OCs, I am not even shitting you—are supposed to watch them get picked up by Ospreys for some reason even though they're in the Lunar Rectum now.

But then, the EVIL equestrians come after them because the nobles don't want to lose all their money (again, not shitting you here). In fact, I'll even show you the astounding logic used to explain why Equestria would not want millions of its own people to leave and join another nation, never to return.

Star Scream flew closer to Dread Wing and answered,  “It would be extremely bad for the noble’s economy.”  Dread Wing was even more confused till Star Scream explained it,  “They are half of Equestria's population, so they would be losing all that money when these ponies left.”

Do you see now?

"Don't let them go, because then they can't buy our... Oh wait, we're rich aristocratic nobles with vast inherited fortunes. We have tons of money already if we pulled out of the stock market before it crashed, which it already has because of the panic of millions of ponies leaving and can't be recovered anyway. And with the economy so fucked up, the value of the Equestrian bit will inflate, then deflate, and we will be left richer than ever. Not to mention that we have a new  neighbor to trade with and increase our profits, assuming they're not communists. Maybe we'll just move there too. I hear it's nice there this time of year."

And then, they have a horrible little fight sequence that is basically the first two paragraphs of what I quoted at the beginning. That is the entire battle. They look for some... thing... to blow up, and somewhere in this clusterfuck, Flash Sentry's eeeevil Equestrian commanding officer orders him to fire on poor innocent civilians that the brave NLR people are trying to save because the author likes the NLR. Oh Christ, this is going to be one of those stories where all the characters the author likes are on one side and are smart, beautiful, and kind, and all the characters he dislikes will be on the other side and will be uncharacteristically mean and stupid and greedy. Next, we'll watch Celestia and Blueblood burn down an orphanage! But don't worry, Scoota-Sue will stop them.

The twist that occurs after this is so boringly written it might as well... something. Basically Flash Sentry gets his orders to kill people, protests, is told to stfu, calls the NLR guys, and then blows up the guys he trained and flew with for (apparently) twelve years. This is yet more proof that Flash Sentry is the antichrist, but the author seems to think it shows he has a good heart.

Then, I don't know. They do some stuff and Scootaloo wakes up and it was all a dream, but apparently that dream was about the future, and then a couple of chapters of Scootaloo making paper mache cutouts with Rumble and giggling and the author trying to rip off bats (I guess), and then I just don't give a shit so fuck you. I'm not touching that garbage see way below

July 16, 2001

NLR territory, 5 miles from the Equestrian border.

This is meant to be typed across the bottom of the screen, right? That was fine in Black Hawk Down; not so much in a My Little Pony fanfiction.

It was a bright sunny day

Fuck you seriously. Stories should only only open with phrases like that if the writer is parodying bad fics. This doesn't seem like a parody—it's just a bad fic.

millions of ponies were migrating from Equestria to the newly founded nation next to it

This lack of information makes a little more sense seeing as it's a prophetic dream, but it's still like having 8 dicks rammed down my throat at once.

Also, that reminds me:

In the sky were squadrons of NLR Su-35 fighters

The irony of this being that SU35s are a Soviet invention. So, since the author is obsessively intent on making all of this stuff so specifically relevant to earth (see: list of acronyms and terms), the NLR is analogous to either a repressive communist dictatorship or a homophobic clusterfuck full of drunken skinheads that used to be a repressive communist dictatorship.

And Ospreys, btw, are American. What gives?

rogue Equestrian fighters might try to take back their former ponies

What, do they have pony magnets on the bottom?

“And that’s the reason we’re still defending these ponies.”  Scootaloo said.  She then contacted the V-22 Ospreys picking up pony immigrants.  “All Ospreys, how’s the pickup?”

“Everything is ok captain,”  one of the Ospreys answered,  “We’re picking up the young and the weak as you ordered.”

Remember what I said about Scoota-Sue saving burning orphans?

2 miles away from the immigrants

Specifying things like the exact distance they flew. It really adds to my experience of this story.

Here's one of the other things about this author: he likes to specify things in numbers. Here, have a look at this autism:

5 miles from the Equestrian border

In just 10 minutes, enemy fighters were being shot down by the Shadowbolts; Dread Wing score 6, Diamond Eye 4, Blackwing 8, Star Scream 11, and Scootaloo 21

Fuck that shit I'm not going to go find another—

Age's of Flash and Scoots.

Scootaloo's age 2001: 18

Scootaloo's age 1989:  6

Flash Sentry's age 2001: 27

Flash Sentry's age 1989: 15

Ahhh fuck

fuckkk

now I know how vivian felt when she was doing the annotations for the sonichu audiobooks

its like my soul is on fire

“And that’s the reason we’re still defending these ponies.”  Scootaloo said.  She then contacted the V-22 Ospreys picking up pony immigrants.  “All Ospreys, how’s the pickup?”

“Everything is ok captain,”  one of the Ospreys answered,  “We’re picking up the young and the weak as you ordered.”

Scoots smiled but then noticed that one of them was behind and asked.  “Osprey 84, you’re falling behind. Is there a problem?”

“Yeah, engine 2 is slowing down for some reason,”  the pilot responded.  “Hey, number 2, what’s wrong?”

“The dang propeller got loose somehow, and now it’s not going fast as it should,”  the pegasus in engine 2 of the Osprey responded.

Scootaloo heard this and proposed, “84, I think you need to head back to the capital for maintenance.”

Before the pilot could answer, the pegasus in engine 2 answered,  “Negative, captain. If I can fly faster then engine 1, I may be able to get it equal again.”

Scootaloo thought for a moment.  "Alright engine 2, but if you get any further problems, turn back immediately."

“Roger that, captain.”

"Lol my propeller fell off captain!"

"Go and getted a plane fixed!"

"No I am good! Can fly speedy!"

"Okay stay! Or go back after stay!"

Okay, fuck this shit.

It sucks. That's my final verdict. I'm exactly one chapter in, and I already want to kill myself. If I were a fluffy pony (god forbid), I would be in the wan die loop by now, though I also wouldn't be smart enough to read so that's irrelevant.

The worst part is that this is not even the actual story. The actual story is some slice of life shit about Scootaloo being in love with Rumble and some other garbage, and apparently she's going to grow up and do all this. It's just that, fuck, I don't want to review all that. The author just told us what's going to happen anyway, so who fucking gives a shit?

Actually you know what, I'll review it anyway because I have some free time today.

*long, heavy sigh*

Well, it's a fine day to die.

Chapter One: A River’s lullaby.

Yeah, I puked too.

Warning!  This is the part of the story where you need to read the "My Mother is a Wonderbolt One and Two" by Blueball-Blitz and the story "The Order" by Bad_Seed_72.  If you don't then this will make no sense, these stories are in my favorites for you to read.

This disclaimer is actually the reason why I'm bothering to review past the first chapter. I fucking adore Bad Seed's writing, and Blueball Blitz is pretty good, too. If I did a sequel to one of their stories, I'd have links up to your ears. But this dick person didn't even bother to link to the stories he was sequeling, just said "Look thru muh favs lawl". That's fucking rude, boss.

Anyway...

Scootaloo wakes up from a dream. But it's not the dream that was the entire focus of the first chapter! What is this shit? She's dreaming about her mom, and crying hysterically, and then Spitfire (who is Scootaloo's new mom now) is like "your mom loved you" but in a really strange, stilted way that activates my uncanny valley senses, and then Scootaloo is just like "Thanks mom2" and everything's great.

Actually, let me show you how the whole shiznit goes down, because you need to see it to believe how autistic this conversation is.

Scootaloo shot up from her bed, sweating head to hooves.  She looked around and saw that she was in her room.  She then looked down on her covers and mumbled, “Why did you leave me?”

Scootaloo’s door opened and a yellow mare with a fiery mane trotted in with a worried look on her face.  She trotted to Scoots bed and looked at her. “What is it, sweetie? Is something wrong?”

Scoots took a moment before she tentatively answered, “It was just another dream… of her.”

Spitfire wore a frown and put her hoof on her adopted daughter’s shoulder,  “It’s alright sweetie.  It was just a dream,”

“I don’t understand!”  Scoots screamed, pushing Spitfires hoof off her shoulder.  “Why am I remembering that memory of HER!”

Spitfire put her hooves around Scoots, hugging her while stroking the little filly’s mane and whispered to her,  “Scoots... I don’t know why you’re remembering the memory of your real mother, but I know from your description that your mother loved you very much.”

Scoots finally smiled and hugged her adopted mother back.  “Thanks mom. I really needed you here.”

Yeah.

That's the whole thing. There's one line before the quoted part and two after, and then the scene ends.

Then we have... oh god.

Scootaloo's dream where Luna watches her mom abandon her or some shit.

It wouldn't be that bad, just soulless, except that the obnoxious author thought it would be a good idea to put a Youtube link and the lyrics to River Lullaby or some shit in the middle of it, apparently sung by Scootaloo's mother. Oh god, oh my god this is so... ugh. I can't even describe the way this makes me feel, but I think it's similar to having my tits deflated with a pickaxe.

Scoots was crying out for her mother, when she quickly came back and leaned over her daughter, beginning to sing as tears flowed down her face.

[hebrewtube shiznit, not gonna repost cuz fuck you]

“Hush now my baby

Be still now, don't cry,

sleep like you're rocked by the stream.

Sleep and remember, my lullaby,

I'll be with y

Yeah, it's bad. And it goes on. He put the entire lyrics to the song in there, I just stopped quoting them pretty fast because it got too retarded.

So Luna tells Scootaloo that her mom loved her, and oh, by the way, has she ever heard of the Shadowbolts? Because that's her real reason for being there in Scootaloo's dreams, apparently—not the fact that one of her subjects was having a nightmare, but the fact that she wants to ask an 8 year old to join a team of fighter plane pilots in the future.

And Scootaloo, despite being explicitly told that Dash would choose the wonderbolts and not like her anymore, takes exactly one line to say "I accept" after this, with (as shown in the rest of the story) no emotional investment or character development whatsoever depicted.

In the third chapter, we get the author's idea of cute puppy love, which just comes off as autis naive and virgintastic. Apparently, Rumble is going to be Scootaloo's love interest.

Also, Cheerilee basically teaches her children that Luna's republic is better. This is not unexpected, given that the author wants to portray all those characters he likes as good guys and all the ones he doesn't as bad guys, and he has made two sides to conveniently separate them into. Cheerilee gives a rather retarded dissertation about the Lunar Republic and the Treaty of Stalliongrad and a bunch of other SNCA, and we get a picture of Luna's flag that the author stole from deviantart and didn't credit the creator of.

Fortunately, I am here, so I can tell you that this was made by lonewolf3878 of deviantart.com.

“Why are we learning about this?”  Diamond Tiara said with a bored expression.  “They’re just a bunch of ponies a long time ago that didn’t even last long.”

It's pretty funny because Tiara is supposed to be a callous, uncaring bitch, and yet she's pretty correct. Also, isn't it convenient how they're learning about the Lunar Republic right after Scootaloo got an invitation to be a Shadowbolt? This is like a saturday morning cartoon, except not remotely entertaining ever at all.

“Scootaloo and Rumble sitting in a tree, K.I.S.S.I.N.G.”

Yeah. I'll let that speak for itself.

I haven't even touched half the things that are wrong with the second and third chapters, and I honestly don't want to. Every time I look back, there's more illogical caca to be confused by. I'm not even going to review chapters 4 and 5, because—I can't. I don't have the patience, and my body can only take so much super-rape.

But I want to leave you with this.

It's the author's note from chapter 3.

Very important meta information.

Are you ready?

Author's Note:

Rainbow Dash and Cheerilee age's.

Rainbow Dash's age: 18

Cheerilee's age: 22

Yeah.

Somehow, that sums up the story better than I ever could.

Excuse me while I kill myself.

Mystquestria/The Mare Who Wants A Human Child

First of all,

You will see why this is relevant later.

I am Jaxxon M. Citadel, age 27, and I’m much more than just your average Brony.

Yes.

Yes you are.

You're...

...

...

Um...

...

Shit.

...

...

No.

No you're not.

You're exactly like all the other bronies.

Except you are now going to get reviewed by me.

The ride will never end, baby. We'll do such glorious things together.

(Title credits now roll, consisting of somebody hanging cut-out name tags in front of a badly drawn parasprite with oversized tits while humming fanfare in such a way that it sounds remarkably similar to farting)

Anyway.

As you may have noticed by now, I only bequeath the honor of Lengthy, In-Depth Reviews to people who do everything they can to earn it. They earn it by being utter and complete douchebags, in a way so obvious and so fetid that nobody could ever mistake this for an attack blog when I'm dissecting just how much their godawful bullshit opinion pervades what they write.

That's really the key. It pervades their writing. I can tolerate unpleasant authors--I am one. But there are a few people whose unpleasantness actually, tangibly, finds its way into their work. Sometimes, this is in the form of a smug, smarmy atmosphere (as in the case of an author who I will review another time) or sheer laziness, as in the case of Ace, the writer of Ace Combat: Divided Feelings (or whatever it was)-- you know, my last review, where the guy ripped off Bad_Seed_72 and Blueball Blitz because he was too uncreative to come up with his own ideas.

Once in a while, though, there's a special case; a disturbance so profound that it comes out in the form of actual, specific statements in and about the fic.

This is one of those cases.

See, The Mare Who Wants a Human Child is a typical story about a human who falls in love with a pony. Yeah, yeah, we've heard it before. But oh, you wouldn't believe what nightmares you can find buried beneath the first layer of permafrostshit in some of these fics.

I'm getting ahead of myself. I should start at the beginning.

The Mare Who Wants a Human Child is the story of Jaxxon M. Citadel, a 27 year old brony who is not like all the other bronies. Yes, I know. I'll make fun of it later.

Here are the relevant parts of the summary that aren't devoted to smugboxing about getting featured:

Thanks to my own genius (and quite a bit of luck), I've managed to open a travel agency to allow Bronies to take vacations to Equestria.  However, I hadn't expected to fall in love, and now I have a secret family who I must keep hidden from my parents and siblings at all costs.  This is a story of my struggles to keep my wife and foals a secret from my own flesh and blood in the human world.

Yeah.

BTW, the idea of him having a secret, forbidden relationship will become really, really relevant in a bit, just like that hot man at the top. Wait for it. We're getting closer.

Based partially on a dream I had.

But honestly, that's not where I started facepalming. No. It was neutral to me until I opened it and read the first line.

I am Jaxxon M. Citadel, age 27, and I’m much more than just your average Brony.

That line... actually does not sum up everything that's wrong with this fic, but it tries pretty goddamn hard.

Edgy misspelled name? Check. Oddly specific age older than the usual brony age and thus probably also the writer's age? Check, although actually I think he's 23. But I digress. Statement of being part of a particular group while also claiming to be "more than your average [x]" where [x] is the group in question? Check! Abrupt introduction showing no understanding of flow or atmosphere! Check.

There, I made fun of it.

And as I read down, I knew instinctively

I managed to imitate the book portal idea from the game Myst, and apply it to a slightly modified version of the complete script of My Little Pony:  Friendship is Magic.  Now I can go back and forth between Equestria and Earth whenever I want

that this would be an unparalleled exercise

“Honey?  I need some help with the kids again!”

in cultivating my own personal hell to look forward to

I’m secretly married to Lyra Heartstrings

when all the facehoofingpalming and cringing either caves in my face or causes me to break my own spine by accident.

Actually, I can't lie: this story isn't especially awful at this point. It's soulless, which is far, far worse. It's an idea with surprising potential, all of which is wasted on a generic self-insert gary stu fic.

It's not BAD, per se. It's just boring. Basically jASSon wants to have a brood of mutant freaks with Lyra, who has a gigantic humans fetish. There's like 2 lines of explanation for this, but eh. They can't be together, forbidden romance, bla bla bla, people angry, guns shooting, badass gary stu--you've read this all before, so why should I explain it again? It was in every other gary stu fic in history.

He is a gary stu, by the way. A self-insert. So is Lyra. So is everybody the author doesn't hate. More on that in a bit.

The dialogue and interaction is surprisingly good for a story of this nature; I'd go so far as to say it doesn't reek of pure undiluted autism like most other human in Equestria fics always do. It's still stilted at times, but there's little that's particularly cringeworthy aside from the content it's showing. The narration, though, is obnoxiously smug and self-celebratory at times:

Oh, did I mention that the two of us can actually think semi-clearly during sex?  Well, we can.

They have sex, they interact with their kids, they do stuff. It's cute. His clop writing isn't totally awful, just... really fucking lacking, like everything else in this. And although it could be argued that he's going for a minimalist effect because of how sparse the detail is, seeing as it's not just a clopfic, I highly doubt that's the case. But I think you'll get why he doesn't find writing about nice hetero sexy time appealing in a bit.

What makes this so memorable, or part of it, is related to the gary stu part. Jaxxon is an immense gary stu, don't ever think otherwise--he's a clever, yet misunderstood, genius with a hot body and a hot pony wife living a tortured existence because society won't accept his innocent differences. But there's not much at all to say about it, really. I can't even be arsed to go find examples because, well, the whole thing is an example.

The problem with this story, more than anything else, is that this is one of those things where the creator lets their political and social beliefs do far more than influence the writing. This thing is a dissertation of soapboxing on various topics. Even the non-soapbox parts have soap suds on them. These characters are nothing but self-inserts (at best) and finger puppets that regurgitate the author's thoughts on a particular topic (at... not even worst).

Let me give you an example or two. Just two, actually, because I want to get to the real gold of this review. There are tons of other examples if you care enough to look.

“For example, from what the show tells about this world, all the denizens are clearly heterosexual.  Unfortunately, due to the show never going into detail besides just showing that the only romantic relationships in the show are straight, some fans have taken… liberties on the lack of detail.”

My wife shuddered.  “If you told Princess Celestia about that, I think she’d demand to speak with the producers of the show about this world and force them to clarify that that is not normal here.  We have support groups for ponies like that.”

Oh, god.fgdhj

Oh god this is literally setting itself up.

And I'm not just talking about the homophobia. That's obvious. No, there's something far more hilarious in this story that we haven't gotten to yet. But it'll come in just a bit. Heh... cum.

In the meantime, take a look at this.

“Son, isn’t owning a fully automatic weapon illegal?” my father asks as he eyes the weapon with concern.

        “Not really,” I explain as I pull out three clips of twenty rounds.  “The mainstream media is just so anti-gun that they act like they are.  There’s a federal fully automatic firearm registry, and I’m on it.  Buying ammo and weapons that fall into that category isn’t easy, though.  You usually can’t find them at gun shows or weapons stores.  I bought this stuff on a military base, and it was far from cheap.”

Chrrrist.

Do I even need to?

I own four firearms and I still found that grating.

Are any of you familiar with the comic artist known as Jay Naylor? Because this guy has exactly the same problem as Naylor does--his work is a combination of excessive fanservice, soapboxing, and strawmanning, with little actual substance between all that. Attempts to tell an epic story are fisted by the use of characters as either mouthpieces or strawmen, and they even have the same brand of douchebaggery to spew, and everything else is dropped in favor of gratuitous panty shots, cleavage, and badassness.

I really don't have much more to say about this beyond that. I couldn't even keep up with the plot because it was so convoluted and boring--something to do with angry people not liking the idea of a grown man fucking a pastel horse and trying to lynch them, or the mafia, or Scrubs, or that one time in Badass Land, or something. It's utterly irrelevant; there's no real growth in the fic, just the author using every single character he likes--particularly Lyra and his gary stu--as puppets to talk about his political and fandom beliefs at every opportunity.

So, really, this wasn't worth reviewing. It's not horribly bad, it's not particularly out of the ordinary, it's not good, it's not anything. It's just bland, uninspired HiE fuckery with some clop and plot thrown in. There are people who will find it entertaining, sure--I can understand it legitimately appealing to people who like HiE, because the premise is slightly out of the ordinary.

But then there's that little thing about homosexuality in Equestria.

And I'm going to focus on that a lot for the rest of this review.

Because, really, it hasn't been talked about enough in the flames the story has gotten. It needs to be brought to the attention of the masses, because it's what made me want to review this at all.

We've established several times that the author is a soapboxing conservative. Let's look at that in depth.

Look.  I'm the kind of person who believes that right and wrong are set in stone.  Public opinion can just go f:yay: itself.  Throughout history, there have been societies that popularize some kind of wrong act and think that just because they say it's right, it suddenly is.  I'm sorry, but I have difficulty supporting the lifestyle of people who throw rocks at missionaries from a religion that just happens to disagree with them.

Hint: when the word "lifestyle" is involved, and the speaker is Christian, we're talking about

fucking huge sinful gay anal faggotry

Yes, yes. I know.

This person is advocating the bestial impregnation of animals by humans while at the same time bashing homosexuals for being an abomination.

That would be enough, and I'm not going to lower myself to mocking a guy for basically fapping to about half the stuff I schlick it to.

So, I was going to wrap this up, still a little bit confused and feeling that I was still missing out on something important... and then I saw it.

AND THEN

LIKE A SHINING ANGEL FROM THE HEAVENS ABOVE

THERE WAS THIS (emphasis mine):

I'm not "anti-gay", I'm an ex-gay, whether you choose to believe me or not.  Take a look at this link:  http://www.homosexuals-anonymous.com/  People like these helped me to overcome my unwanted same-sex attraction.  Yes, I was born that way, but I didn't want to stay that way.  You can change almost anything about who you are, and orientation isn't set in stone, either.

Look, normally, I don't do ad hominem attacks outside of Skype.

This is no different.

Before any of you go whacking your dick against the report button, this shit that I am talking about is all in his story. I don't care what OP does in his personal time. The homophobia, the conversion therapy advocacy--It's all in his story, the notes for his story, or explained in the comments when people asked him what the fucking hell he was thinking.

Let me explain, without even using his comments as a reference:

It's a story about a man who's in a socially forbidden relationship that he's hiding from the world at large.

This man wants a kid with his partner but seemingly can't have one.

The world hates their union.

Derr, I wonder if this could be a subconscious expression of something.

Furthermore:

OP made Lyra an ex-lesbian (or at least someone with a psychosis triggered by being accused of being gay).

Equestria is shown to advocate gay conversion therapy.

Several times.

So does the narrative.

If anyone thinks this is not relevant, please, I eagerly await your presented anus to jam both fists into.

Oh! And the author's notes also preach that pseudoscientific garbage, by the way.

When asked about his homophobia, he explained that homos can be cured for Jesus.

This man is using his story's popularity to preach something incredibly harmful to people who might be insecure or ashamed of their sexual/gender identity. He's advocating harmful "therapy" that's been proven repeatedly to be ultimately ineffective and psychologically scarring to those who undergo it. He will think this is a good and righteous thing, but I happen to disagree with him, and since we're in Britain (as per the location of kniggy's sex mansion) I don't have to abide by any de facto freedom of speech between anybody at all, because Britain is a monarchist nation that only cares about the freedom to drink tea.

You can preach whatever you like, and I'll respect it where I'm required to, and maybe even defend it, because I think fedora atheism is far more annoying than Christianity of any brand--but the moment you sneak that crap into your fucking story, it's fair game for me to comment on right here.

Things like this are why I try to keep my stories as apolitical as possible, whenever possible. FIMFics in general are neither the place (some hoers country) nor the setting (my little talking pastel hoers) to cram politicfagging into the narrative.

This is not a bad fic, by most measures. But what it stands for is hypocritical, and what it advocates is disgusting.

I have already spoken against the author enough, so I won't even begin to address the blogs he made about his fic getting reviewed by Rage and ending up in Plan 9. That's been addressed repeatedly elsewhere, and I'm actually not making this solely to attack the author--just the mountain of garbage under the surface of his story. It's just... difficult... to convey the full measure of what utter faggotry this thing is comprised of without knowing exactly what kind of faggotry is going on behind the scenes.

It's a mediocre mess that got popular because I don't even know why. But it's a mediocre mess with a hidden core of hate and self-denial, like... like injecting fucking Zyklon B into a McDonalds cheeseburger. Both are bad for you, but one of them is a lot worse for you than the other.

Here's a link if you want to read it for yourself.

~para

Air Superiority

Humans Acting Villainous is a fad.

The following is a dictionary definition of the word fad:

fad

noun    /fæd/

› a style or activity that suddenly becomes popular but which usually does not stay popular for very long.

Like x_verbs_a_y, Halo crossovers, inb4regidar, and Chess Game etc, the cosplayer-in-Equestria sub-subgenre of the Human In Equestria subgenre of the whatever I don't know genre... Anyway, just like those, HAV has exploded in popularity due to a great many incompetent, stupid people shamelessly copying the ideas of a few competent authors who released similar, much better, fics around the same time as each other.

Contrary to popular opinion, HAV stories are not universally bad by default. The concept has been done reasonably well by a few people, including RainbowBob (who is RainbowBob, nuff said) and RealityCheck (who, despite his ego, is a very, very good writer). Its infamously low average quality and lack of originality are the result of the same problem that plagues general Human in Equestria fics: it's popular, has an established formula for success, and can be fun when done properly by real authors. This makes it appealing to multitudes of talentless hacks, who then ride the fad into the featurebox and guarantee themselves everlasting e-fame until people move on to the next fad.

This flood of poorly written ripoffs of Malideus, The Rise of Darth Vulcan, and F*** it I'm having fun resulted in a generally negative perception of cosplayer-in-Equestria stories. Many would agree that the existence of over two hundred of them--as of this writing--is a cancerous growth on the ass of FIM fanfiction itself.

Let me clarify now that I'm not going to spend this entire review spewing hate for cosplay fics. Most of you already know how much I dislike them, and furthermore I've already made it clear right here that I don't. There are only so many ways I can say it before it starts to get stale. I'll comment on them a bit, but I don't feel like making ten pages of shit that amounts to "I HATE THIS SHIT BLAJFHG IT SUCKS LOL IM FUNNY" would be a constructive way to waste my time. I'll sum it up like this: there are a few great ones, some pretty good ones, some mediocre ones, a lot of bad ones, and occasionally some really, really awful ones.

The reason I gave all that meta shit, though, is that it sets the background for this story I'm going to review.

The name of this story is Air Superiority, and it's by a guy called TCogArchitect.

This story manages to exemplify perfectly the very worst aspects of the cosplayer subgenre while at the same time failing to achieve even the relatively low standard of quality set by that community. It's all the negatives with not a drop of positive mixed in--like most of the fics I give Lengthy, In-Depth Reviews to, it's not only bad, but insipid. And yet, it still managed to get featured despite having only one 2500 word chapter--a chapter with no ponies in it at all, I'd like to add.

I'll get to that shit later, though, because right now, I want to give you something that will sum up exactly why this story is so pathetic.

Behold:

I only chose this particular bandwagon because it's still relatively active, and I'm sick of getting on bandwagons too late for them to actually be fully enjoyable. The popularity thing only assures me that I am, in fact, capable of making something that can be popular.

--The author, TcogArchitect

Yeah.

At least he's honest.

Title credits roll over a loop of video where a topless fat black woman with grotesque, mutated blue parasprites for breasts shakes her titties disgustingly, and this song plays:

Youtube Video

Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit, holy SHIT!!  Where the hell am I?  What even happened?!  I need to find out.  Now.  Shivering on the ground in a body that isn't even yours isn't how you fix a problem.

Shall I add that to the database, sir?

Who the fuck said that, and how did you get into my head?!?

I believe the designation you have assigned me is 'Laserbeak,' sir.

That is an actual quote from the Air Superiority.

Yeah, I cringed too.

I should add now that this story is a Transformers crossover. The author has written four fics, and three of them are also Transformers crossovers. His avatar is a Transformers robot. His name is (I think; just going by what I remember from when I was 5) a Transformers reference. His short bio is (I think) a Transformers quote.

Are you seeing a pattern yet?

There's a metric ton of autism in this fic even without the Transformers bullshit. I'll start at the beginning, with the summary--Oh, and I almost forgot: the story pic is a fucking Transformers go-bot, too.

I finally saved up the money.  I finally had a costume I felt was sufficient.  I finally got to go to Botcon.  As Soundwave.  I even practiced his special disturbing walk cycle for extra effect.  Granted, I had to do it all with a missing Laserbeak, but hey, I could always roleplay that the little bugger was off on reconnaissance. Then I saw a way to skip that little mistake altogether:  A perfectly sized, articulated Laserbeak, with straps to hold it on properly.  I didn't even think about it.  I didn't think about why what appeared to be an entire prop shop was set up in the middle of a con.  I didn't think about what the chances of this particular prop even existing were.  I couldn't even be bothered to think about the creepy dude wearing a creepy hooded robe working the booth as he chuckled at my enthusiastic strapping on of my perfectly-sized addition. Now I'm in the world of ponies, and have been turned into one of the most technologically-advanced villains of a completely different universe.  Nothing to do now except make myself useful, I suppose.

And thus, I throw my hat into the ring with all the other LoHAV stories.  I've been wanting to do this pretty much since the whole trend started, but couldn't figure out which character to use.  Let's see how this goes, shall we?

Of note is the fact that I condensed this a little bit to save room. It's so long that I had to expand it just to read the rest of the fucking summary. By comparison, the average summary length for most decent fics is between three sentences and two paragraphs. The summary is not the fucking story--don't tell one in it!

Anyway...

Oh.

Before I continue, let me grab something from the summary and bring it to your attention, since it was probably lost in all that santorum.

I even practiced his special disturbing walk cycle for extra effect

his special disturbing walk cycle

special disturbing walk cycle

Never mind the fact that that shouldn't even be in the summary... You know what, fuck, I'll just let you come up with your own reasons to be annoyed by those four words. Trust me, if you read that line a couple of times in your head or (god forbid) out loud, you'll come up with a lot of them real fast.

In we go. First chapter is called "Data File 01: Location Unknown" because the author likes Transformers way too much. You know, in case you didn't already notice he likes Transformers way too much.

It's the standard waking up in an alien place schtick, which I'll dissect in a little bit. But first, if you don't know how a cosplay fic typically goes, let me give you a rundown:

--Average human male of college age dresses up as a fictional character the author thinks is badass.

--This human then goes to a cosplay convention, or a Halloween party, or whatever the excuse to wear the costume is.

--Character is then mysteriously transported to Equestria for absolutely no reason at all.

--As a result of this Without any explanation at all, the human gains the powers of the fictional character they're cosplaying.

--The human receives a brain-liquefying head injury/magical spell/voodoo/autism that causes them to believe that they are the character they're cosplaying.

--Equestrians then think they are that character, resulting in hilarious misunderstandings and the protagonist being edgy and badass.

Do you see?

The story starts out with a typical jarring opening. The protagonist falls out of the sky and lands in a heap. Shitty writing starting every sentence with "I", the usual.

But then, we get this... mayhem.

Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit, holy SHIT!!  Where the hell am I?  What even happened?!  I need to find out.  Now.  Shivering on the ground in a body that isn't even yours isn't how you fix a problem.

Shall I add that to the database, sir?

Who the fuck said that, and how did you get into my head?!?

I believe the designation you have assigned me is 'Laserbeak,' sir.

People totally talk to themselves that way in their thoughts.

I am currently having a discussion with myself about whether I should continue to analyze this or just kill myself, and this is literally what is going through my head, word for word.

I have to finish this reviews, but I hate this story so much it makes me want to die. It kills my soul. Oh, damn, I'd like Shining Armor's penis in me. Oh god. Why am I thinking about that? I need both holes stuffed by futa ponies. Shit, what is this. I need it together. Come on! No, I want to masturbate to futa porn and then end up in Equestria. NO YOU DUMB WHORE YOU HAVE TO FINISH WRITING THIS REVIEW. FUCK YOU CUNT I DO WHAT I WANT!!!

And in the end, the second alter won. I will be seeing my psychiatrist tomorrow at 5, by the way.

So this guy apparently turned into a Transformer. Gee, I didn't see that coming a mile off--even before I read the summary. OP lives, eats, breathes, shits Transformers. The autism predicts the outcome. What's unique about this particular autistcome is that the protagonist spends about half of the fic's lines conversing with this dipshit in his head.

The dipshit, who is actually a little metal bird named Laserbeak, functions as a convenient exposition device to suck out any suspense from the story whatsoever while OP heads for civilization through a swamp.

Except for this question, which haunts me.

Why are there no ponies in the first chapter?

None. Nada. Zilch, save for a thing at the end with "a colt" who hid in a tree while the protagonist fought a gigantic crocodile. The amount of pony in this chapter is 3 lines of colt in tree, comes down after and is amazed when the protagonist says.

I fucking quote:

"Crocodile inferior, Soundwave superior."

Yeah.

But it gets better.

Afterward, he says this to himself:

Yeah, I thought, now that's a catchphrase for the ages.

I won't even comment on that.

But this brings up the reason why it really exemplifies HAV flaws. The reason, in fact, why I found this worth reviewing, in the end.

Air Superiority isn't about ponies at all.

This guy likes to write about talking horses. It's something he's comfortable doing. He also likes to write about Transformers. It's something he's comfortable doing, and it's apparently his fetish (Hey, I'm not gonna judge). The problem is that he likes to write about Transformers more than he likes to write about ponies, and it shows in this story and two of the other three he's posted.

It's a common complaint about crossover fics that they use the FIM world as a vehicle for the author's favored non-MLP characters to posture in. It's basically presented as "what if this came into contact with ponies", except it's really just an exercise in showing what the author likes about that character in the context of ponies discovering it. In fact, that's a common complaint about crossovers in any fandom.

Good crossover is not just "take this thing from one world, put it in another world", it's a process of blending two very different universes. The same is true of HAV fics, which are actually crossovers because the protagonist is just a particular character that used to be an OC.

In this case, OP wants to show off how cool Transformers robots are, because... I guess that makes him horny, or something. Again, I can't judge--I get off to some kinky stuff. Anyway, OP does this showing off by having Soundqueef defeat a giant crocodile in front of a wide-eyed, amazed colt, who is then treated to that stupid catchphrase.

Actually I have to mention at this point that in the second chapter, it turns out the colt was just freaked because he noticed all his stuff fell in the river, or some contrived fail of that nature. Which, in turn, implies that the protagonist's comment was supposed to come off as a sort of Austin Powers "I think I'm so cool but I'm really not" thing, except that the author thinks he's cool, and so he writes him to be cool (by which I mean bland and uninteresting) except for that one line.

But it's not about ponies, again. The second chapter shows this just as well as the first.

OP got in a bit of trouble with the mods once people started complaining that there were no ponies in a featured story on a site about ponies. But that just makes me wonder: how the hell did this get through moderation? Say what you want about the moderation team, but they're usually pretty good about basic stuff like, you know, being relevant to the site it's posted on. Somebody derped.

Maybe they just got so fucking bored reading it that they scrolled down to the bottom, saw the word colt, and gave it a pass because, on those grounds, it technically does fulfill the site requirements... I guess. Anyway, I don't really blame them. Mistakes happen, and the real one at fault was OP.

In the end, OP was forced to publish his unfinished second chapter, which someone (I think it was BlueBastard) pointed out appeared to have been written in the FIMFic story box instead of, say, Word or Gdox. Just a little tidbit to make you lol.

His second chapter is essentially the same as the first, but more boring. It has some bland, uninteresting bullshit with the mane 6 in the forest for some reason I can't even remember, and the author actually--

Wait, back up. I want to show you something.

Well, then, it's time to start acting like a communications officer, and intercept some information.

Like the walk cycle line, this is amusing for reasons I can't quite pin down. There are a couple of things I could point to, but none of them are really sufficient to sum up my feelings about it. It's just a very bizarre, stupid line that tries to sound cool and fails, I guess. I don't know. Somebody help me out?

Anyway.

He actually writes this to denote POV shifts:

POV Shift, Third Person

POV Shift, Soundwave

If you have to do that to alert us whose POV it is, you need to make your characters more interesting. I don't think I'd have even known it was Soundwave's POV if he hadn't been doing... Soundwave stuff, and if it didn't have that disclaimer. He's that boring and forgettable.

Gotta say, this fic even fails at being a cosplay fic. Cosplay fics usually at least make it clear that the character is a cosplayer that thinks they're a... whatever. But this one, aside from a couple of references and the typical "shit what's going on how do I get home oh ponies blafrghgdhf" it's basically just this nameless dickcheese running around as a Transformer called Soundwave.

Part of the humor in legitimately good HAV is the fact that these people are not the characters they think they are, and they don't actually know what the hell they're doing. This fic is exactly the kind of thing that, if HAV were a parody subgenre, it would likely be parodying. It's just the guy showing off how badass his OC-turned transformer is. Even the end of the second chapter sets up a situation where the guy will beat up wolves to save the mane 6. Fuck you, I think they'd rather die just to get out of that story. (pardon my breaking of NPOV for a moment there)

And again, the ponies are utterly incidental. They only serve to compliment the Transformers character's AWESOME traits like beating up crocodiles, talking to people using soundbytes of their own voices--And another thing. Apparently, this guy also knows how to use Transformers tech even though it doesn't correspond to real tech. Earlier HAV stuff didn't imbibe the characters with new knowledge (of technology that's nothing like ours, to boot) but rather just had the character think like and think they were a particular character, and maybe get that character's weapons.

I'm going to end this before I break the page with the amount of text I write. There's literally that many things wrong with the fic: it fails at being MLP fiction, it fails at being HiE fiction, it fails at being crossover fiction, it fails at being HAV fiction, it fails at being fanfiction, it fails at being interesting, it fails at making sense, it fails at engaging remotely intelligent readers in the slightest, and ONNNN and ONNNN.

You see?

It's that bad.

There's one more thing to bring up, and that's the author's conflicting attitude and expressed feelings towards writing.

You see, when Peppy asked him why he made this, he said:

I only chose this particular bandwagon because it's still relatively active, and I'm sick of getting on bandwagons too late for them to actually be fully enjoyable. The popularity thing only assures me that I am, in fact, capable of making something that can be popular.

Later, when defending his writing against the increasing heat directed at it, he said this:

TcogArchitect

1 · Chapter 1 · 5m, 16s ago · · ·

BlueBastard

No, I haven't done anything original yet.  You know why?  Because it's the FIRST CHAPTER.  Nothing new is going to happen in the setup.  Expecting something new to happen in the first chapter of a story based on an entire trend is like expecting a whale to suddenly give birth to a shark.

Just because I shouldn't jump on the bandwagon doesn't mean I don't want to.  And just because there's a whole bunch of people who don't like the bandwagon doesn't mean I shouldn't have fun with what I want to have fun with.  If I went by that logic, I wouldn't watch MLP in the first place, now would I?

3.  First of all, I don't really care too much about writing clop.  I have an idea or two, yes, but even those would probably never make it to the featured box, either.  Second, I don't measure myself by the public's standards.  I never have, really, despite the occasional bout of lonely depression it brings on.  Beyond that, though, I never show things to people if I don't think anyone will like them.  It's part of the reason I don't draw.  All of my art is garbage, which I don't think people would enjoy.  I think people will enjoy this, though, so I'm going to write it.  And no amount of irrational hate or incessant insults is going to stop me.  You don't like it?  Fine, hit the dislike button and leave.  You think you can help me make the story better?  Leave a comment or send me a PM.  I have endless patience for constructive criticism.  But if your entire argument against something is that you don't like the original premise, than you really aren't a brony.  Because this fandom is supposed to be about toleration, and that includes tolerating things or people which you may find displeasing.  Deal with it and move on.

tl;dr: this guy wants all the popularity and no criticism.

Guys...

Yeah.

I think I've made myself pretty clear, but still.

Look, there's no such thing as an inherently bad idea. Anything can be made good if the writer is competent and engaged in making the story worth reading for more than its expected popularity.

But if you write something as utterly soulless as this dreck, you might as well not write at all. Sure, you'll get a ton of boneheads saying how great it is, but do you think half of those people would even be able to pick a good story out of a lineup? Are they a good standard for how good your fic is, when they'll upvote and fav anything that appeals to their particular perseverations and fetishes?

There's a ton of shit about achieving and dealing with fame and whatnot, so I think you guys know by now that while it's good to aim for the featurebox, you shouldn't just jump on the bandwagon because you don't want to be late.

Don't be that guy who writes for the worthless e-fame and nothing else. Some people with counts of upward of two or three thousand followers write nothing but bland garbage that's guaranteed to appeal to as many mindless upvote bots as possible--you probably know who one or two of them are, so I won't mention any names. Yeah, they get e-fame, but what's that worth, in the end? Most of them just use it to... get more e-fame, and occasionally organize personal armies to attack people who criticize them.

On a completely unrelated, non-sequential note that is completely random and has nothing to do with the preceding paragraph: next, I'm going to review Aegis Shield's The Return of Princess Nightmare Moon. If he'd like to decline to be reviewed, all he has to do is send me a PM with a polite request that I not write bad things about his story. Since, as all of you are probably aware by now, I don't write these blogs about people who show themselves to be nice, I will honor that request. All he has to do is contact me and ask nicely. Which I am sure he will do, because he is very, very willing to mingle among the non-3000 follower plebeians.

Speaking of people with less than 3,000 followers...

There are a lot of very underappreciated authors on here, and a lot of us with the power to reach large numbers of readers do our best to promote them. I (and many other people) make frequent blog posts promoting stories by undervalued FIMFic writers--the ones that I make usually stay up for about two months, and then I remove them to avoid clutter, although I keep rec blogs for exceptionally good fics (like Asylum).

So next time you see a fic recommendation posted by someone like me or Kaidan or Tittysparkles, you should check it out.

Because whatever it is, it's bound to be better than this cancer.

Link to the fic I have reviewed --> Air Superiority, by TcogArchitect <-- Link to the fic I have reviewed

The Old Dragonslayer

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.

Silent Protecters

...

...Just give me a moment while I recover from how unbelievably bad this story is.

...

...

...

...

...

...Okay. Yeah I'm good.

So, hey guys! I'm doing another review for your entertainment and my masochistic, self-destructive. pleasure. This fic I'm going to review now is... Well, let's just say I've rarely seen anything less good in my entire life.

A lot of people think that blowing up terrorists in Counter Strike is, like, totally awesome, dude, and because of this they decide to write fanfiction crossing the military with their favorite perseveration, My Little Pony. Now, the contrast between war and the MLP world is pretty strong, so that can make for good drama. But sadly, the average person who writes stories crossing MLP with irl military stuff is a sad little weenus who can't separate reality from fiction, and has an all-consuming fetish for casually spouting military acronyms as if they're used to using these terms in their daily life, which they aren't. This combination of ignorance and misfired testosterone is called Counterstrike Fanboy Syndrome.

That is where the story I will be reviewing today comes from, except that it is also a crossover with shitty writing and some of the most awful logic you'll ever encounter. But let's not get ahead of ourselves--we still have to establish the basis for reviewing the fic, because something this bad needs to be understood in order to prevent it from happening again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again.

And again.

In my review of Ace Combat: Shattered Feelings, I defined CS Fanboy Syndrome as this:

You know that story you wrote when you were 13 where you spent 10 pages describing the protagonist's super-awesome ArmaHeavy Industries FU-3758A Model 69 sniper rifle with a top-mounted Interrotech laser-guided Jewhunter scope with 100x magnification and optional night vision and light-bending modes that could spit out belt-fed .834955432mm caliber rounds at a rate of up to 10,000 rounds per second through a special ten foot barrel with a DthPRcMe, Ltd., ultra-silencer on the end so that when the hostile target was effectively dispatched and neutralized (cuz that sounds more army than just getting his head blown off) no one would hear it and his brains just exploded out of his head like a watermelon getting crushed by a falling Oprah Winfrey...?

That's Counterstrike Fanboy Syndrome.

As I also said, it's basically the same thing as namedropping or using huge words that you don't even know the meaning of. It's done by people who are insecure and want to impress others, in the same way that white kids in middle school used to drop gang terminology to make themselves seem badass. By using these words, all this military language, they are affirming to themselves that they're part of military culture, even though they probably got rejected for service because they have asperger's or just were too cowardly to sign up in the first place.

Without a doubt, Counterstrike Fanboy Syndrome is one of the most godawful annoying things to encounter in fanfiction, because the story is often too busy jerking itself off with descriptions of the guns the characters are using to actually tell a story. There's nothing wrong with painting a picture with words, of course, but reading 10 paragraphs about the guy getting dressed is too goddamn much, yo. But I don't think you guys actually understand how fucking pervasive it can be. How thoroughly it can ruin one's enjoyment of a fanfic. How it can make you pull muscles with the amount of cringing one chapter produces. So I'm going to show you.

This story is called Silent Protecters, and it's fucking CS Fanboy squared. It's CS Fanboy meets debilitating autism meets ponies. Also, yes, that is a spelling error in the title.

Here, here's the cover:

I know it's not strictly relevant to the story, but one of those guys (the dude on the right) looks like Christian Weston Chandler. Doesn't he?

It's prophetic given the story's content.

Silent Protecters is about two Delta Force dudebros that go to Equestria and, for no reason other than "fuck you we're the good guys", hide in the woods and shoot everything that looks remotely threatening to Ponyville. Yeah. That's the story--I just told you the story, and that's all it is after taking out the Rainbow Six jargon. Now, with that said, let me show you the actual summary:

2 Delta Force Operators, SFC David Grayson and Sgt Elliot Lee, find themselves in the Everfree Forest after a helicopter crashes. After a day of recon they decide to become Ponyville's silent protectors, only coming out at night, stopping the criminals and saving ponies. During the day they watch over the town with binoculars, hunt, fortify their base, and search the forest. For weeks ponies have been reporting seeing 2 tall figures looking out over Ponyville from the Everfree, walking the streets at night and stopping criminals before leaving them outside the headquarters of the Ponyville Guard, unconscious and tied up. Tune your radio to a certain frequency and you may be able to hear chatter between 2 creatures.

You know, it just occurred to me that if the author had written like a normal human being and ended at "silent protectors", it might have been a much more dynamic summary. But no, that would deprive him of the opportunity to use pointless military jargon, inappropriately abbreviate ranks where it would look better to just write them out (or preferably just remove the names altogether in this case because we don't know who these people are in advance, so it does nothing to interest us), draw attention to the fact that they talk in more jargon on radios, imply that "you" are in Equestria as well and "you" have a radio despite this being unsupported by anything in the show, and show his skills at writing by failing to type out the simple word "two" three times in one paragraph of information.

Yeah.

But that's nothing.

From literally the outset, we're bombarded with godawful military jargon. I was not kidding when I said this was CS Fanboy squared. Just look at the heading from the first chapter, which is the first thing we see when we open it:

From the Perspective of Sergeant First Class David H. Grayson, 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta(more commonly known as Delta Force)

Bolded as it was in the original, too. Yeah, it's this kind of story, people.

You know that text that gets typed in the lower corner of a shot of the desert or something, going "Allied Region 65 "Sandcrapistan", 0400 hours" at the beginning of a scene in, say, a Michael Bay action film? That's what this is. It sums up almost all the problems with the story in one neat little package: the writer is trying to write an action movie. The problem is that while film, being a visual medium, has to do this kind of telling to effectively communicate certain things to the viewer, we don't have to put those kinds of headings up in writing. In addition, these kinds of movies are also usually jam-packed with testosteronized visual candy and have nothing of substance to offer, and that translates VERY poorly into writing.

In written fiction, the narrative is doing both the showing and the telling, so it's easier to integrate information into it over time--and it also gets really awkward when people don't understand the medium they're using. For example, in a film, we can instantly visually identify an MP5 with a scope, laser sight, flashlight, and double magazines in a film, and its appearance is such that we know it will be fully automatic and shoot 9mm bullets, because it is a submachine gun. There's no need to stop the movie to give a little infomercial about it.

In a story, you only have to write "a submachine gun" or "MP5", and then you can fill in details like the scope as they become relevant. Stopping to describe every fucking centimeter of this gun retards (heh) the narrative severely. Unless it's really important to the entire story that this gun be an MP5 with a goddamn scope that's never used and a laser sight that has nothing to do with anything and a bunch of other shit, you shouldn't waste time describing it.

1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta(more commonly known as Delta Force)

To be fair, I also use this kind of jargon sometimes... with the deliberate intent to make the reader feel like they're looking at something "impenetrably bureaucratic" or otherwise obscure. Here the writer seems to be trying to create an atmosphere of being leagues above his readers, as evidenced by his shoving the entire name of the Delta Force detachment in our faces immediately, then adding something that says "Also here's the name you plebeians call it by, even though it's the WRONG name that I don't use because I know more about army guys than you."

Now let's have a look at the story--which, by the way, is told in first person, completely negating the need to identify the character by name before writing about him. In first person, you don't need to know the narrator's name immediately, because he's "I", not "Alex" or "Skeeter" or "RainbowBob". But I'm getting kinda sidetracked. Have a look:

I awoke on the ground in a clearing in a forest. I slowly got up and what just happened came flooding back to me. The Blackhawk, the RPG, being thrown out of the open door.

I grabbed my rifle and checked it. Seeing nothing wrong I began searching my pouches. Ammo, compass, binoculars, grenades, radio, journal, pen, some silencers and my IPod. I looked at my compass and it was going haywire, so I assumed that either we were above a large iron vein or magnetics didn't work here. I checked the other operator to see if he was ok. He was unconscious and I recognized him nearly immediately. He was Sgt Elliot D. Lee, a country boy from New York, expert marksman, nearly immediately designated our team's sniper. I noticed the sound of water and got an idea of how to wake him up. I took off my helmet and went to look for the source. I found a small pond with a waterfall and filled my helmet with water. I walked back to the clearing and poked him a few times before resorting to Plan B. I poured the water in my helmet on his head and he nearly immediately woke up. "Rise and shine, sleeping beauty."

God this is lazy writing. It looks like this review is going to deal heavily with "show don't tell", which I guess is appropriate because it's one of the main issues with military stories. People try to sound clipped and efficient like they think an "army guy" would talk, and they just end up telling the story at about 90 million miles per hour, until they pause to describe something completely irrelevant to anything at all.

Also, this is an incredibly unrealistic reaction to nearly dying (even though they're actually dead--not really a spoiler, because the "die and wake up in Equestria for no reason" is a lazy staple of HiE), even for a soldier. If I had just been thrown out of a fucking helicopter I would spend a moment clinging to the other guy who apparently survived, and I'm sure a lot of soldiers would do exactly the same thing, because, you know, they're people. Special forces or not, things will affect you once in a while if you're not a complete psychopath.

That's really the other problem with these kinds of stories: the soldiers aren't portrayed as human because the writer sees them as superhuman. They seem to be completely devoid of normal reactions to things like, I don't know, getting hit by a rocket. People like these writers don't respect the military for their sacrifices, but for the fact that they think the military is, like, totally badass, man, and admire the respect that other people show soldiers without actually understanding it.

This is why we respect soldiers:

And this:

And this:

And this:

Not this:

Or this:

Or fucking this:

Also, let me just add now: this author's characterization of everyone is a singular instance of "Michael Bay Movie Badass #394" generalized to all characters present in the story. I mean look at this fuckwad:

I poured the water in my helmet on his head and he nearly immediately woke up. "Rise and shine, sleeping beauty."

I physically cringed, I really did. I'm sure he's supposed to come off as "cool as ice" and, like, totally unfazed by anything, but he just seems like he has a big sticky note on his face that says "Author is trying too hard". But it gets better, trust me: the literal, exact wording of his subordinate's response to having water poured on his face by his superior officer is "Dude, what the fuck was that for?".

Remember how I said they're dudebros? That wasn't an exaggeration. This is not "military comradeship", and it doesn't make them seem like they know each other well enough to be casual with each other--this is two stupid gamers in a land of talking horses playing army guys. Also, I'd like to repeat that their helicopter just got shot down and that's the last thing they remember, and neither of them have even considered the fact that, I dunno, the guys who shot them down might still want to kill them.

"I really didn't want to, you looked so cute when you were sleeping. However, this look like where we were before?" He realized that what I said was true and that we weren't in the Russian countryside. "We aren't in Kansas anymore Todo.

Another thing, among many, that you'll come to despise about this story is how everyone in it speaks in cliches and borrowed catchphrases from other movies--Sorry, from movies in general. I keep forgetting this isn't an action B-movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger as its star. Actually, actually, come to think of it, this is exactly how an Arnold movie would go, right down to the characterization of everybody as casually badass! Except that Arnold actually does look pretty badass and can pull that casual awesome thing off, and he doesn't talk like a gamer dudebro.

You up for some recon?" He nodded and was about to say something but was cut off by a feminine voice. I whisper-shouted "Grab your gear and hide in those bushes." I scrambled towards the bushes I pointed out and hid. The private grabbed his sniper and SMG before scrambling towards the bushes.

First of all, why did you say private? The guy's a Sergeant! Second of all:

I whisper-shouted

Isn't that a contradiction?

This author uses a lot of strange phrases that crop up repeatedly. Let me give you another example:

I recognized him nearly immediately

nearly immediately designated our team's sniper

he nearly immediately woke up

As a bonus, all of those instances of "nearly immediately" occur within the same fucking paragraph.

Attention was thankfully drawn for us

I immediately ate my words when I saw it

Nearly immediately the wolf's head exploded

we'll never be at a loss of fresh water

The prose in this story is awful. There's just something about it that reminds me of ESL speakers; like the author doesn't have a firm grasp of the way words fit together and is trying to use the syntax of his native language. But no, I'm pretty sure he's American, or he wouldn't have written a story about American special forces soldiers. I could go on about the prose, but at this point, the story is about to get really, really bad, and I don't want to waste time on that shit when I can dig into this...

The owner of the voices turned out to be 6, small, multicolored ponies with wings and horns.

Hey, there are those unrealistic reactions again. I'd think I was on LSD if I saw "6, small, multicolored ponies with wings and horns".

But anyway, the mane six show up. And when I say "the mane six", I mean caricatures of them. That is not an exaggeration; it's actually an understatement, to be honest. Within the first line they speak, each of these ponies has uttered a phrase associated with the character whose name and appearance they share, but in a completely inappropriate way that does nothing more than identify them.

Watch as I identify them by the buzzwords in their dialogue:

The owner of the voices turned out to be 6, small, multicolored ponies with wings and horns. "-stia said that there was a large magical disturbance in this area, Rainbow. We should look for something out of the ordinary. Well as normal as you can get in the Everfree Forest."

Celestia

Magic

OH IT'S TWILIGHT LOL cuz that's all she talks about.

"Well what should we be looking for egghead."

Egghead

OH IT'S RD LOL cuz she always calls Twilight egghead 1000% of the time.

"I'm waving at the big green guys in those bushes over there, DUH."

Knowing mysterious things but being an idiot about it

"DUH" punctuation

OH IT'S PINKIE LOL cuz she's a hyperactive 4th wall breaking marechild and adds "duh" to everything to make herself seem ditzy and stupid.

"Darlings, look over here would you. It looks like somepony poured water here recently."

Darlings

OH IT'S RARITY LOL cuz she says darling literally all the time ever.

"Yeah, sugarcube. And it looks like somepony was pouring it on somepony, look at the outline."

Sugarcube

OH IT'S AJ LOL cuz she says sugarcube literally all the time ever.

Yes, that's right. This is an example of characterization by quirks instead of, you know, actual characterization. But, sadly, quirks don't make characters--for example, if all Heath Ledger did in The Dark Knight was laugh psychotically and go "Why so serious" every other line, The Joker would have been a really boring character, wouldn't he?

I won't go too much more into it because I'm getting sick of this story already, but the characterization in this fic is incredibly bad. It's worse than what I've posted, but I can't keep this up without it becoming unfunny. Just know that it's terrible, and keep that in mind.

Moving on...

At this point I'd like to draw your attention to yet another horrifyingly stupid aspect of the fic: the humans in it, when they're not acting like dudebros, talk like they're in a military video game. That means tons of outdated jargon that sounds cool, and... Oh god I'll just show you.

the pony I had designated 'Rainbow'

I now designated her 'Regal'

I designated her 'Country'

said the pony I designated 'Purple'

a yellow pegasus, who I still hadn't come up with a designation yet

I'm not even going to say anything negative about this, because I'm sure whatever you're thinking right now is sufficient.

Oh, here's a gem.

"Tomorrow we'll observe where ever they came from. Today we set up a base camp, I found a pond with a waterfall. If we set up nearby we'll never be at a loss of fresh water. We'll need camouflage to hide us from predators or any ponies that try and find us. We can make ghillie suits for extra camo."

At this point I'm really starting to get sick of this fic. I'm not even kidding. The first chapter is 1,500 words long, and it honestly feels like it's 15,000 words at the very least. It just goes on and on! I can't even keep up with all the stupid shit that I want to talk about; there's just too much of it.

More than anything, the characterization keeps coming back; specifically, the lack of response to normal stimuli. But even halfway through the first chapter, Elliot or whatever his name is breaks through "bad characterization" and enters into the realm beyond. I swear to god, this man has a brain tumor that prevents him from thinking logically about what he's saying. Look at this, look at this fuckery from his journal entry:

Sgt Elliot and I have awoken in a forest. We don't know where, but we assume that it is not on Earth because there are talking ponies, unicorns and pegasi.

we assume that it is not on Earth because there are talking ponies, unicorns and pegasi.

There is literally nothing I can possibly say that would appropriately convey how stupid this line is.

It's not even the "no shit sherlock" factor, since the guy seems to have failed to consider the rather more logical theory that he might have been poisoned with chemical weapons and is hallucinating, instead of magically falling out of his helicopter into a My Little Pony episode. No, it's how he just seems to accept all of this like there's nothing odd about it at all; like it's an everyday thing. Fighting Russians, meeting talking pastel unicorns, what's the difference, really?

In fact, the only time he ever acknowledges that this is out of the ordinary is this halfhearted line:

"We just watched technicolor ponies with horns and wings come look for us. How much weirder could this day get?"

After which he "immediately ate [his] words" upon seeing a timber wolf. Which he then shoots, by the way. They go live in a cave to hide from the talking pastel cartoon horses and blow up a wolf made of wood--All in a day's work for Delta Force! Generic B-movie action translated into words, with the author's painfully autistic prose to compliment it.

At the end, Twilight is listening to the radio ('kay...) and overhears all this shit going on as they're KKKRRKKing back and forth on their radio units. It's a good thing Equestria has the capacity for radio communication, since magnetism apparently doesn't exist there. Who knows what other forces of nature could be missing or altered? Maybe all the water in Equestria reacts with human urea to create nuclear explosions. They'll sure get a surprise when they pee! Also:

A few minutes ago I was randomly changing frequencies on my radio when I came across a normally static frequency that now had voices.

How convenient! I often randomly change frequencies on my radio, searching the waves and waves of empty static for hours. Such fun!

Twilight, after hearing some creatures with guns blow the head off a large creature for looking at them funny (those creatures, by the way, are right outside the town), writes Celestia a friendship letter and goes to bed. In the context of this story, I imagine it's a perfectly normal reaction. Maybe this takes place in the universe of The Metamorphosis, where no one ever really questions why Gregor changed into a gigantic cockroach.

I'm not even going to dissect the second chapter. I can't. It's too painful.

This is one of the worst stories I have ever read in my entire life. It's lazy, unengaging, unintelligent, ignorant, poorly characterized, poorly written, and its protagonists are a couple of fucking idiots. Everyone in this story speaks in cliches and catchphrases stolen from the show and from other franchises, or else they speak in cringeworthy badass military jargon. There is nothing good about this fic--it's not good, and it's too stupid to even be entertaining. To give you an idea of how bad it is, kalash93 from Zero Punctuation Reviews actually dropped out of reviewing this alongside me because of how fucking awful it was. The fact that this has a 90:23 vote ratio is beyond my personal comprehension.

I'm done with this. It's fucking terrible on a level I have rarely encountered.

Link for posterity ------> Silent Protecters <------ Link for posterity

Heaven? Hell? Nope, Just Ponies

The above picture is very similar to how I looked after I finished reading this abomination.

I had no hope left for humanity.

I still don't.

Heaven? Hell? Nope, Just Ponies is one of the worst stories I've ever read. Norton Antivirus has deleted this lulz for your protection. However, a copy still exists and can be found by clicking the gdox link seen previously (thanks Iggy).

But I have been charged with reviewing Heaven? Hell? Nope, Just Ponies, of all things, and review it I shall, regardless of the pain it causes my mortal soul. Also, I think this is the longest review I've ever written for a single chapter of a story.

Fuck you all, I did this for you.

First, to start off, let's begin the starting off of the beginning by making an analogy. It's based on music, so you'll probably enjoy this a lot or get really mad at me, or both. Regardless of your faggotry,  I'm a big fan of the band Swans.

Swans is a very grating, ugly group that rejects both the "fun" atmosphere and commercial appeal of modern pop music and the childishly angry "fuck you" ones typical of "dark" bands. What you then have is a bizarre style that does its best to avoid appealing to anyone in the normal sense. It's not fun, it's not all that heavy, it's not "totally satanic and like anti-establishment and stuff, bro"; it's just ugly and unpleasant.

Regidar is also a fan of Swans, but he likes Nirvana, too.

Nirvana was far more pop-oriented (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), so they're much more listenable than Swans. A lot more people like Nirvana than Swans, since more listenable music is often more marketable. Both of them are very different, but both have nearly undeniable artistic/creative strong points that make people want to buy their albums.

There are also people who like Waking the Cadaver, who are these douchebags here:

Waking the Cadaver was a terrible slamcore band that was popular a few years ago and no one today has heard of (and rightly so). They were basically 16 year old scene boys who thought slamming us in the face with violence and sex and bad music were the fucking manliest things you could possibly do. Like Michael Bay's horror remakes--actually, it makes me wonder if there's some kind of common link, since they both appeal exclusively to the penis and are utterly without any kind of redeeming quality at all.

My ranting about music and Bay aside, I will now make three comparisons in the fanfic world that are about equal. Some people, like myself and Regidar, are fans of Fiddlebottoms, a writer who eventually disappeared from the site, most likely due to suicide. He was a very strange person and an incredible writer, but his writings were always impossibly weird and disregarded normal story conventions.

Other people also like Shortskirtsandexplosions, who is basically a normal writer with a lot of talent. Sometimes he gets wanky, but most of what he's put out has been both popular and artistically creative as well.

Then there are guys who are basically the slamcore douchebags of the writing world: impotent, uncreative, ham-fisted hacks, lacking in everything except unfulfillable aspirations, and possessing a sense of maturity and proportionality approximately equivalent to the average of a junior high lunchroom. And then there is The Coywolf.

He has already deleted one of their stories because it got bad reviews (though I never read it, I can say I probably agree with them based on what I know). The only story he has left is Fallen From the Stars, which is a crossover with Star Wars; naturally, the fact that it's a crossover led people to mistakenly assume it's good because the original material was good and upvote it en mass because it was added to the billions of crossover groups that autism built. While I admit I haven't read that one past the first chapter, I doubt anything coming from an antisemitic testosterone junkie with dubious intellectual competence would get that many votes if it wasn't a crossover featuring General Grievous. There are also spelling errors in the summary. gg fimfiction.

But I'm not here to complain about that.

I want to say right now that I genuinely thought coywolf's Heaven? Hell? Nope, Just Ponies was a troll fic when I first saw it. It's that bad. But no, it appears to be serious. I'm not sure what the author was smoking when he came up with some of this stuff. Just the name of the story, I think, should indicate that this is something to be avoided at all costs--But, as some of you know, I have a 10 mile wide masochistic streak.

And the badassness, oh, the badassness. It's loaded with more misfired gun fetishism and penis envy than any story I have ever read, except maybe Silent Protectors. Not that action with guns can't be done well in stories, or that ultraviolence is bad to write--just read something by Kalash93 if you want a good war fic.

But the most devastating blow to the story is really the fact that the author is not a good writer. There are spelling errors, homonyms, and an incredible failure for anyone to act like they're not in a cheap knockoff of Rambo 9000.

I mean, just look at this single excerpt:

"Come back here you BITCH!" yelled a man in a black jacket, running after his speeding green army truck. He soon stopped running and fell to his knees.

"See ya latter fuckers!" shouted Rick at the top of his lungs, soon making his way off of the dirt trail and onto the road. He soon began to pick up speed at 30 miles an hour.

"This. is. THE BEST DAY EVER-" Rick was cut off by a bright blinding light that appeared right in front of him. He then felt some sort of energy flowing through every part of his body. And then, in an intent, he felt his whole body being thrown forward. But was stopped by his seat-belt. He felt the wind get knocked out of him at the impact of him and his seat belt.

"God...What happened." mound Rick as he unlock his seat belt and leaned against the truck's door, witch apparently opened. Rick then fell out of the truck and rolled onto his back.

"God why?" mound Rick. He felt like a concussion grenade/flash bang grenade hit him in the head. His vision was very blurry and all he could hear was a high pitch ringing. He got up, aimed his BERETTA 87 and said.

"WHOEVER JUST FLASHED BANGED ME IS GOING TO HAVE THEIR FUCKING SKULL CRUSHED INTO POWDER AND HAVE THEIR EYES PLUCKED OUT WITH THEIR BRAINS!!!"

I can't even begin to analyze these two excerpts because... where the fuck do I even start? My god, it's amazing how bad this is. You know what, I'll just cut the bitching and go to the very beginning. This is going to be a very long review. I can hear it breaking down the door as I type.

Youtube Video

Earlier I said that the story's name alone should have been a reason for you to avoid it. Well, if you were dumb enough to click on it anyway, here's another reason to avoid it: the summary. Just fucking read it, okay?

    Hi, name's Rick and I live in an apocalypse nuked world where everything is dangerous or dead. But that won't stop me from having a good time... Even if what I call a good time is getting pay back at a gang of well armed thugs. And I get payback big time by stealing their newly upgraded truck, tons of supplies, guns, and enough ammo to keep me happy for months. It just gives me a good laugh to get some good payback... That is, until I drive into a portal and end up surrounded by colorful, crazy (Sort of insane) ponies. Guess what, that's not it! They think I'm a monster that devours foals and kill for fun! Great, just great.

Author's Notes:

    I hope you guys like this story. If you where reading Reclaimer and want to know what happened to it, click here. If you want to know how this story is going to be updated and more, click here. If there's any grammar problems then please let me know. Also, story takes place a week after the events of season 4 finally: Twilight's Kingdom. This story is rated Mature for Gore and Language.

Yeah. To save time, I'm just going to make a list of everything that should have been a red flag after the title and the super-edgy pic had finished processing:

--Half the summary is in a quote box for no reason.

--It starts with "Hi, name's Rick".

--The phrases "pay back" and "well armed".

--In the next sentence, "pay back" becomes "payback", as it also does in the sentence after it.

--The entire summary sounds like a thirteen-year-old talking about a video game he likes.

--"If you where reading".

--"If there's any grammar problems" ("there's" is singular and "problems" is plural)

--It actually links to a blog called "How I make my stories".

Special attention goes to two things:

The phrase "apocalypse nuked world". I know what he's trying to say, and what it says on the surface, but trying to parse the literal meaning--that is, what the words themselves combine to mean without any context--is actually so impossible that I almost had a seizure trying to do it. It's like "apocalypse" has become a word halfway between a noun and an adjective, or else he thinks "apocalypse nuked" is itself a phrase that is an adjective. It doesn't make any sense adsadgsafgdshg

What the fuck does this guy actually do this crap for? He talks about "pay back" and "payback" three times in three sentences, but he never actually explains what the hell that refers to. He also says "It just gives me a good laugh to get some good payback".

What?

I get what he does: he lives in the desert because... he's a nonconformist... and steals shit from some gang to survive in the apocalyptic post-nuclear world. But he confusingly refers to this as "pay back"/"payback".

Why does he steal their shit, shoot them, then giggle abut it, having forgotten whatever just made him angry enough to murder other human beings? Based on the summary, he's saying he does it for revenge, and then he says he enjoys getting revenge and implies that he actually just likes stealing shit and laughing at these people. If anything, these douchebags should be getting "pay back" at him, not the other way around!

This guy is a complete psychopath, by the way. You'll see.

So after reading all that bullshit, you should have realized that this is going to be monstrously edgy and like dude it's gonna be sooo badass bro. There's gonna be more fucking testosterone than there was in fucking 300.

But you don't truly understand. Not until you've opened it up and seen this:

Chapter 1: The Best Day Ever

Anyway, literally the second line of this story is this enthrallingly stupid list:

1. BARTETT M82 50 CAL. and BERETTA 87.[X]

2. Combat Knife. [X]

3. Gas-mask and Gear. [X]

4. Snack. X

5. Ammo. X

6. Backpack, Supplies, and jacket. [X]

Again, I will make my own list in response to this. It is not a list of everything that is wrong with the quoted material, but rather of everything that is wrong with it that I could come up with in under twenty seconds of analysis. I like to challenge myself.

--He linked to pictures of his guns and knife in the story.

--But he didn't link to pictures of the rest of the gear to make it at least consistent.

--This implies that he didn't care what they looked like as long as people knew what his guns looked like.

--This "My Little Pony" fanfiction links to a website called "killerdillard". Just think about that.

--The guy is living in the middle of the desert in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but he has has super duper tacticool guns

--Including a handgun with a pointless infrared scope on it.

--And a gigantic .50 caliber sniper rifle.

--"Ammo", he says, never specifying what he's low on.

--He needs a fucking list to remember these things, keep in mind.

--Wouldn't "snacks" fall under "supplies"?

That's not all of them, obviously.

I want to give special mention to the fact that this guy apparently chose his character's guns because they looked cool, not because they would be effective for that sort of environment. Why not just get a bolt-action .308 or something? That would be a thousand times more practical for just about any situation than a M82--the latter is designed to be fired on vehicles and equipment and bombs, not people. I could see it being useful in a group, maybe, but as the primary weapon of what he seems to be building as a lone wolf sniper, it's utterly pointless.

He has a severely limited ammunition carrying capacity due to the weapon's caliber, no support to get him more ammunition or kill faggots for him or anything like that, and each thundering gunshot is going to attract more bad guys as it echoes and echoes. What's wrong with a Springfield with a scope on top? Is there too much wood and not enough black plastic?

Here, use this.

Also, he acts like a retard with them later, so it doesn't really matter. Hurkadurr.

"Everything seams to be here. Thank god." mumbled rick, stuffing the paper in his coat's pocket. He then grabbed his guns off of a old wooden coffee table and got off of an old, stained, and a little torn couch. He then put on his backpack on, making a snap as the buckles of his backpack lock together. He then walked out of an old darken wood door, as soon as Rick got done locking the door, he took a deep breath of the fresh cold morning air.

Oh Christ I'm like a paragraph in and I already want to go watch Reality Check make an ass of himself instead of doing this. Should I review his new story after doing this? y/n

Anyway,

Everything seams to be

mumbled rick

an old darken wood door

no speaka anglais

Of coarse this deep breath was taken behind a black Toxin Hazard Gas Mask (THGM for short) that connected with his Toxin Hazard Suite

Thanks we needed to know it was a black Toxin Hazard Gas Mask (THGM for short, you non-military-knowing casualplebs) that connects with your self-insert's Toxin Hazard Hotel Room. One of the things you'll notice, since I'm going to point it out, is that the author keeps using homophones for tons and tons of words. Look at the last one. Suite is not the same thing as suit, god damn it! It's different k. Seam and seem are not the same. Grate does not mean great!

There's some weird, weird, weird shit about the Cold War. He seems to believe that the Cold War caused there to be a lot of toxins in the atmosphere and they only came down the night before when it rained. This is why he's wearing his Toxin Hazard Gas Mask (THGM for short) that connects with his Toxin Hazard Suite. I know, I don't understand it either.

Did I mention the summary is in first person and all this crap is in third person? Why the sudden change? The summary sounds like it's talking directly to you, not some kind of quote or "found" material. But the rest of it is in third person. It also looks like it was adapted from first person in many places. I guess what probably happened was that he wrote it in first person and then somebody told him first person is bad, so he changed it a bit and put a quote box around the summary.

"Perfect day for a sneak attack on those dam thieves."

Or those dam dirty trolls.

According to the narrative, this guy has been planning this attack for five months, despite just implying that he randomly chose the day because it was nice out and he had nothing better to do. He also has apparently been trying to trick those gangs of dam dirty trolls, I mean thieves, into going to war with each other for various reasons (it's italicized in the story and I don't actually understand why, so I'm just going to reproduce it mindlessly), because he thinks it's funny.

Also, he convinced them that he's part of another group "at least 60 miles away". Why 60? Why not 61? Why not 100? Why not 50? Is their boundary exactly 60 miles? What? I don't know, can't you explain some of this autism for once?

Rick had this whole thing planned right down to every signal detail to who would likely win and how armed each group would be. Everything was going according to plan.

The use of the phrase "how armed each group would be" makes me feel like this was written by a 12 year old. My apologies to the author if this is inaccurate, but the entire story literally reads like a Rainbow Six fanfiction I wrote when I was in like 7th grade. There's no consideration towards anything except trying to pack in a bunch of references to how super ultra badass the main character is. How he's cool as ice. How he kills dam dirty trolls and doesnt afraid of anything.

Just sayin'.

Also, I'm exactly three paragraphs into this cancer. Are you fucking terrified?

Three hours of hiking down latter

Yep, that's a fucking scene transition. It exists. I'll let you think of ways to insult it.

The factory was an old, steel rusted, three story building. The factory was a logging facility and was prospering until the war. There where three names that could describe the war in Rick's mind. World War 3. The Cold War. The Apocalypse.

First of all, it's were. Second of all, the Cold War (capped, tCW for short) is the actual name of an indirect conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. Are you saying that the Cold War was different here and there was direct nuclear engagement? Because then it wouldn't be called a cold war.

A cold war is a war in which the participants aren't openly fighting in battle, but rather are doing so through proxies and propaganda. Since an apocalyptic nuclear world war would by definition involve the most powerful nations on earth engaging in direct military actions against one another, it cannot be a cold war.

Who the fuck taught you history?

Here's some advice for people who are writing anything at all. If you're not 10000000% sure of something, look it up! There are only so many dumb errors like "apocalyptic nuclear cold war" you can get away with before it starts to mess with the audience's ability to take what you're writing seriously.

That brings me to something else that I'm going to introduce now and expand on later: we're given no backstory on this supposed world war anyway. That's going to come up later, along with the author's other "big mistake"; or, at least, one of the many, many big mistakes that are, collectively, this story.

But for now, let's deal with one of the other huge mistakes!

There weren't that many patrol as usual. Rick only saw three patrol groups. The groups had five to eight people in each group. They had there particular weapons, like AK-47s, FIVE SEVENs, and M1014s. These weapons where the usual in these groups. But that's not what he was aiming for. Onetime, Rick saw them carrying PKP PECHENEG into the factory. After 30 minutes of playing the waiting and watching game, (as he liked to call it) he saw movement up on on the dirt road.

And no, none of that was changed at all from the original. The pictures, the capitalization, that's all raw from the original. Holy shit, this guy. I can't even. Besides the fact that, being thieves and therefore criminals and therefore not the best and brightest (read: gang thugs hellbent on rape and pillage), they would probably carry less standardized/tacticool weapons around, having likely stolen them from dead victims or military depots... my god.

OP, what were you thinking? Why did you capitalize all the gun names? Why did you feel it necessary to show us what they looked like? Why couldn't you just say "a handgun", "a shotgun", "a machine gun"... and I guess the AK-47 is acceptable since it's so recognizable, but seriously... Are you getting paid to advertise these guns? It's the only valid reason I can think of for anyone to do that, unless they were retarded. And I'm not calling you retarded, OP. I'm just sayin'.

More advice for the budding writer: you don't need to say what kind of gun your character has. We don't care if it's a .380 saturday night special or a goddamn desert eagle with a jewhunter scope unless it has some relevance to the plot. Gun porn is no better than any other kind of porn, and it just makes you look like a fucking mall ninja, okay?

This will be you:

And for the love of fuck, if you really find it necessary to specify the gun... make it at least fit the situation. That should be applied to everything, actually. Never choose anything for a story based on how badass it looks or sounds, especially if it doesn't fit well with the rest of the story. And don't type the names of guns in allcaps with links to pictures of the guns, please. I beg you. We honestly just do not fucking care.

Anyway.

These thieves are apparently killing random people at a factory for reasons I neither understand nor care about. Or they're just blowing shit up for no reason. I guess they're trying to rob the factory for... some reason... which is odd because it's like a logging place I think, but this story doesn't make any sense about anything else and I'd be a little disturbed if it started making sense now. They're doing that, and this guy comes along and shoots them because he's the good guy and they're the bad guys.

Rick Climbed down the rope ladder and ran to the edge of the woods. He then keeled, looking through the scope of his  BARTETT M82 50 CAL. and aimed it at the truck that was killing off the patrol groups. He aimed at the head of the gunner. He pulled the trigger and the gunner fell off of the truck with his head no longer intact with his body. Rick quickly aimed at the driver and pulled the trigger again. The bullet hit the head of the driver, splattering blood allover the trucks windows. The truck a made a quick tern to the right and did some barrel rolls, crushing what was left of the patrol group.

See, I told you he was going to get retarded with his oversized mall ninja weapon later on. Absolutely no concept of how to effectively use a gun beyond imitating the TOTALLY AWESOME scenes he's seen in action hero movies and probably some Counter Strike shit. In fact, I doubt OP has ever fired a weapon in his life--he's probably played games quite a bit, but I sincerely doubt he's ever touched a real gun; he'd probably piss himself with terror if he shot an actual M82.

Also, it's turn, not tern, and lol barrel roll.

His thoughts where interrupted as he heard a fain help me. Rick turned around to see a man on his belly, chocking and coughing up his own blood. He was crawling over to rick, bagging for his help. Rick walked over to him, knelled down and said.

"You know, I heard the same thing come from my Grandpa as you basters tortured him.

I laughed. I actually laughed out loud as I read this for the first time. Then I cried. It sums up the fic so well:

Also, I'm starting to understand where all of these errors came from. I think OP was just unbelievably lazy about writing it, so he used a speech-to-text program to actually dictate his fic to a computer. That's why we have all these homophone errors: because of OP's speech impediment. This is actually supported by the fact that these errors don't just happen once, they happen consistently. Look:

But lucky for you I have mercy on my enemy, unlike you basters."

See?

Grandpa was tortured with a vaginal douche.

Or maybe a baster is some kind of derogatory racist slang word and I'm just missing all the social criticism because I'm a sleazy whore who spends all her time high, drunk, having sex with old businessmen for large amounts of money, or screaming at younger, less successful men over tumblr for having penises, and actively ignores all aspects of reality that do not exclusively serve her ego. Yeah that got a little off track, but it's kinda true in a way.

at that last word, Rick plunged his Combat Knife into the man's skull, slowly twisting it and plucked it out. Rick then stroked his Combat Knife agents the tall dry grass, cleaning the bit's of brain and blood off. He got up and ran across the field to the factory's back door.

I should really be disturbed by how much the author seems to fetishize this kind of violence while continuing to regard his self-insert as the hero of the story. It's the kind of thing that indicates a predisposition towards engaging in a repeat of, say, Sandy Hook. But I honestly can't do anything but laugh madly at this after seeing Rick refer to his grandfather's torturers as turkey basters. It's literally driven me insane.

And it gets more horrifying, too--I guess the author meant his character to be a war-hardened bastard baster with a good heart underneath his gruff exterior. The typical action hero, you know? A good man trying to play by the rules of an evil world that forces him to do evil things. So to show that his character is good under all the emotional armor he's been forced to grow to defend against his surroundings, OP has him execute his enemy's medics for no reason.

Wait, what?

The room had beds along the sides walls, most of them full of bloody bandaged bodies. In the center of the room was a bed with a man in it. The man had his entire right arm torn off and was coughing up blood. Then two man came into the room holding a man on a stretcher. Rick then aimed and fired two shots. They both fell dead to the floor with a bullet wound to the head. Rick then walked through the old factory, aiming his BERETTA 87 at every corner, making sure that there wart any of those basters in his way.

I sure hope there wart any of those basters in his way.

The worst part is that he has no real reason to kill these people other than that he doesn't want to bother not killing them. We've already established that it was the other gang that killed his grandfather (or whatever the bullshit freudian excuse for this psychotic rampage was), so why does he also need to slaughter these people, too?

They obviously have enough humanity to establish a fully functional medical center for their wounded and have done nothing wrong so far, so how are we expected to think of them as the bad guys when Rick just fucking shoots them because they exist?

Rick is a complete douchebag, oh my fucking god.

This character is unlikable. He does all kinds of horrible things, including executing wounded men and shooting apparently unarmed medical personnel, but the narrative goes out of its way to justify this. He has a tragic backstory of having seen his grandfather die, boo fucking hoo. This is presented as a completely reasonable excuse to murder people and be a dick in general. And while it's great to have protagonists with flaws who won't acknowledge their flaws, you, the writer, have to at least be aware that they're flaws in order to write the story well.

The biggest problem with this story is how it's so wrapped up in its own testosterone-filled bullshit that it can't even see past the idea of "I am right because I am the hero". It's a really dangerous way to think, because it creates a dual sense of victimization and superiority at the same time: "I am me, and being me automatically makes me the hero of my life's story, and being the hero means anyone who disagrees with me is a villain, and anything I do to the villains is fine because I am the hero, because I am me."

I'm sure the author isn't that bad, though--he seems alright and likable for the most part. But this character is just disgusting and obnoxious, and unintentionally a much more genuine psychopath than the knife-waving Pinkies that shit up fimfiction stories. That could have been a really amazing character to watch as he's imposed onto a peaceful setting, if the author had known what he was fucking doing, but instead, we have the usual badass whose bad acts the story goes out of its way to excuse.

Another major problem with this that I haven't even touched on yet is the fact that creating and showing an entire post-apocalyptic world is completely useless if you're going to change worlds after one chapter and make it a fish-out-of-water story instead. If, say, Fluttershy had ended up on this empty, destroyed earth, that might have been interesting. If the story had started with ponies and introduced Dick Rick after a little while, with none of his world shown, that would have worked as a character-driven story.

But to make a world-driven story work, you have to make the world relevant to what you're going to show. It's doubly hard with AU stories. And since this dipshit already left the world we were introduced to and went to Equestria, it's no longer so. We have only the outcome of the character to focus on, rendering the introduction of his world a total waste of time. Maybe it would have worked in a movie, but again, this is not a movie! Movie stuff doesn't follow the same rules as writing, because they're entirely different mediums of entertainment.

That's about it for this cancerous assfest. I'm not gonna touch the second chapter, as much as I'd like to dissect the implications of a gun nut using the Star of David as a symbol of black magic. I just fucking can't. Christ, this is so bad. It's one of the worst stories I've ever read in my life. The sheer lack of basic logic is itself frightening and impressive to behold. Maybe I'll review the second chapter of this fic eventually, if Kalash93 doesn't, but I hope he does.

Somebody please read his other fic, Fallen From the Stars, and tell me if it's anywhere near as terrible--I'd expect it probably is, but I can't say for sure because I really just don't want to think about the fact that it exists, much less look at its contents.

To close out, let me rehash the last few lines of the first chapter.

"

"God...What happened." mound Rick as he unlock his seat belt and leaned against the truck's door, witch apparently opened. Rick then fell out of the truck and rolled onto his back.

"God why?" mound Rick. He felt like a concussion grenade/flash bang grenade hit him in the head. His vision was very blurry and all he could hear was a high pitch ringing. He got up, aimed his BERETTA 87 and said.

"WHOEVER JUST FLASHED BANGED ME IS GOING TO HAVE THEIR FUCKING SKULL CRUSHED INTO POWDER AND HAVE THEIR EYES PLUCKED OUT WITH THEIR BRAINS!!!"

Youtube Video

To Thaw My Cold Heart

[4:25:47 AM] Kalash93: I ain't drunk enough for this stupidity.

...

fuck you kalash

...

fuck you for leaving me to face this monstrosity all by myself

...

...

...

Hello, my fellow critics.

Grammar Nazis.

Dicks.

Niggas.

I wrote several introductions to this and deleted them because none of them really captured the sheer scale of how awful this particular story is. Ultimately, this review is 10,000 words long and took me almost 12 full hours of writing to complete.

It's very hard to pin down just what is so insipid about this particular story, even for an experienced fanfiction-spelunker like me. Oh, there's undeniably something! But it's far more complex than the average crapfic, simply by reason of having such a multifaceted and diverse range of failure on a fully global level, and also by the fact that, like the homo-bashing Mystquestria, it managed to stay both unnoticed and reasonably well-liked for so long. It's accumulated almost 450 likes (as of this writing) and only 70 downvotes, despite being--

Yes, I'm going to say it.

This is the single worst MLP: FIM fanfiction I've ever read.

I'm not even exaggerating. I have gone through hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of fanfics on this site since joining, and I have never read one as awful as this.  I'm really sorry for all the hyperbole, but I truly cannot get over how immeasurably bad it is. It's amazingly bad. Silent Protectors and Nope Just Ponies don't even hold a candle to this level of what-the-fuck-were-you-thinking.

Alright, that's all well and good. But you still don't believe me. So let me show you some proof.

I'm sure that by now you have seen To Thaw My Cold Heart in the feature box once or twice. You have probably seen that the author appears to be kind of almost capable of normal spelling and grammar to some degree. Most likely you are now saying "Surely it can't be that bad".

Well fuck you. It is that bad.

Just having a poorly written story doesn't make it a bad fic. There are lots of poorly written stories that are fun to read--just look at about 90% of the coherent clop on this website. It sucks! But we don't care, because it's clop, and what matters is whether it's sexy or not. This story, by the way, promises clop later on. Way later on. God forbid. Anyway, no, just being a bland or generic writer doesn't cause one to make something this horrible. Neither does being a troll. This is a special kind of bad where the story fails fractally. When I say that, I mean that no matter how closely you look at it, you will never find something that it does not fail at.

And now I'm going to make an attempt to show you as many of those fractals as I possibly can, so that no one can ever fucking disagree with me about it.

Let's-a-go.

This is honest to god torture and you probably like watching it.

I think the reason I skipped it over early on might be the cover art. It's generic HiE cover art: completely unrelated to pony at all, so bland and harmless that I hardly bothered looking in the first place. It's just some dragon sitting in a cave, looking like the cover of a young adult novel. But it hides great horrors, ladies and gentlebeards.

Here's the summary:

What else is there to say? I'm a human. I'm in equestria. There's not much else to reveal, to be honest.

Well, there is, actually. But why should I really tell you? That job is already left to the six mares who've come to be my 'friend', so I don't really need more people invading my privacy.

I swear. Quite often actually, to the point where it's become a common thing in my life. You know what else has been a common thing in my life? The 'conservative' assholes who jeer at me since they can't accept me into their society, because I'm 'A hairless ape.'

'

There will be some slight bashing on certain characters due to the altered personalities that I gave them. The best romances are the ones that have fights, in my opinion.

This will eventually become a clopfic, but that's in the distant future.

Somewhat inspired by Terran34's Tales Of The Oppressed.

Cover image shamefully used from Lifefantasyx (Mabinogi: Ice dragon pet.)

Zheck ze artist out! he/she draws gud shit.

http://lifefantasyx.deviantart.com/

Already you're starting to understand, I hope. No?

I guess I should start with the... No fuck that, I'm just going to do the list thing again because it's easier. And I'm going to limit it to all I can think of after reading the summary exactly once, because if I read it again, it would take longer.

--Normally, one says "What else is there to say?" when there is nothing else to say, not as an introduction to everything else.

--Normally, one does not introduce oneself to a complete stranger with "What else is there to say?", either.

--"What else is there to say? I'm a human. I'm in equestria." reminds me so very strongly of "We all know the story, guy goes to a costume party, gets transported to Equestria..." and other such failed lampshades.

--Equestria should be capitalized.

--"There's not much else to reveal, to be honest. Well, there is, actually. But why should I really tell you?" I'll deal with this in a sec.

--" the six mares who've come to be my 'friend'," One frequently occurring characteristic of this story is grammatical confusion and awkward phrases of this sort.

--"The 'conservative' assholes who jeer at me since they can't accept me into their society, because I'm 'A hairless ape.'" Will deal with this godawful shit in a second, particularly in relation to him saying he swears constantly.

--But, "'conservative' assholes"

--And, "'A hairless ape.'"

--There will be some slight bashing on certain characters due to the altered personalities that I gave them. This was added after people complained.

--"This will eventually become a clopfic, but that's in the distant future."

--"Zheck ze artist out!"

--the random period in the middle of nowhere

Good god! Read all that over again, remembering as you do that this was featured on and off for a week and 450 people liked it. Have you done that? Good.

Now let's address some more complex issues in the summary (yes, we're hardly even at the gates of hell).

1. "There's not much else to reveal, to be honest. Well, there is, actually. But why should I really tell you?" -- I probably wouldn't even have consciously noticed this if Aryame hadn't pointed it out, because it's so subtle, but the author does this constantly. He says something, contradicts it, contradicts it again, and then contradicts it again. It's a constant theme where everything actively contradicts itself, even in terms of the basic logic that the story is running on to get its points across to the reader.

In particular, OP seems to want to portray his character as withdrawn and conflicted, which is fine... but he's doing it by having him tell the reader very personal things and then saying "but I'm not going to talk to you, reader, because I like my privacy". At one point later on (and I'll point this out to you) he mentions how he wouldn't be a pedophile or anything, not even with little foals, and then like 2 paragraphs later he refuses to talk about how ponies defeated an ice dragon because it's private or something. What?

What even?

Literally, my reaction to this person would be "did you take your medication today and where is your caretaker?"

I hope to get across to you just how pervasive this contradiction thing is. It isn't just limited to this instance, oh no. In fact, I'm going to address another instance of it right now.

2. "I swear. Quite often actually, to the point where it's become a common thing in my life. You know what else has been a common thing in my life? The 'conservative' assholes who jeer at me since they can't accept me into their society, because I'm 'A hairless ape.'" -- Alright, the full absurdity of this requires a bit of knowledge from later in the fic itself, but you should be able to tell how hypocritical he is from this sentence alone. He swears quite often and it's become a common thing in his life -- in a world where no one else swears and it's probably considered rude and stuff. One other thing that has become common is people hating his guts.

Derr.

I mean, they're fictional, but even within the world of the story, it is established that ponies find his swearing embarrassing and offensive. OP seems to think this makes him sound cool and jaded, but no. No, it makes him sound like an asshole. I can see why people would think him a douche based on the fact that he swears at them just because he doesn't care.

But it goes further than that if you look into the story. This guy really is a massive asshole. Not on par with that guy from Nope Just Ponies in terms of sociopathy, but still a stupid, annoying, obnoxious little shit who does stupid, annoying, obnoxious little shit things that the author thinks are cool but which actually aren't cool, they're just fucking stupid. He's the kind of douchebag that you'd kick him out of the party after 15 minutes because he's so obnoxious.

First chapter:  Still Living, I Guess · 30th Aug 2014

These are the first three lines of the chapter.

I don't really know what else to say.

I became the unwilling host of the Elder dragon.

A big one too.

I have to give Aryame credit for pointing out what was wrong with that particular sequence and why it was so... off. I would have just chalked it up to the uncanny valley effect of something that looks like writing, but is actually fecal matter smeared in vaguely letter-like patterns.

If you're wondering, it's that line 2 references the Elder dragon, while line 3 implies that either there are more than one of the Elder dragons or the protagonist is a really fat host for the Elder dragon. It's one of those fractal things I talked about--it contradicts itself on literally every possible level, even a grammatical one, and even in its own opening hook.

My new theory is that FIMFiction does not actually read the words of stories. Users simply vote on the ideas and make up the rest in their heads, because they are so atsumitc that they can't read a story if it's not about them or their OC.

And I almost forgot.

That Elder Dragon shit.

I have no concrete idea what an Elder Dragon really is, even after reading the story.

A couple of people asked this question as well. This was the author's answer:

Either you have no knowledge of the words 'elder' or 'dragon' or you are just plain idiotic for forgetting that 'elder' just means old (hence the term: "respect your elders"

Now, in reality, OP just stole the Elder Dragon thing from Skyrim. Look it up, seriously. And generally, an elder is not someone who's old, but someone who's wise and greatly respected--both of which are typically associated with age, hence the term: respect your fucking elders. There is a big difference between these two things. Respect your fucking elders. Respect your fucking elders. Respect your fucking elders. Respect your fucking elders. Respect your fucking elders.

(This is also the very first of many, many instances you will soon witness of OP being a complete asshole to people for no apparent reason. Just like his character! Like father, like son. Remember your fucking manners. Remember your fucking manners. Remember your fucking manners. Remember your fucking manners. Remember your fucking manners. Remember your fucking manners.)

Ever since the attack on ponyville. Living conditions have gotten worse. Well, for me to be specific. Everyone despises me, they see me as some monster, and that was before the elder dragon attacked. Insults here, insults there, the most common one being referring me to a diamond dog, I don't even know what a fucking diamond dog is, let alone figure out why they would compare me to them, despite me not having a single inch of diamond on me.

What do I say to this?

Let's see. I'll just try rambling because... I don't know. It's as good as anything.

Ponyville should be capitalized (again, that's the second time). Period between that and Living should be a comma, and you obviously didn't hit the wrong key because you also took the extra effort to capitalize the word Living. It doesn't even tell, much less show; we only know that living conditions are worse or were worse or something. It switches tenses mid-sentence. Also, while this rambling is connected to the story, the story's rambling is just completely asinine drivel about nothing. We know you don't have a single inch of diamond on you! Nobody's going to take that literally unless they're retarded! Maybe you would I don't know Also Elder dragon is capitalized in the previous praagraph and not here. Why? Why do you do this? And commas are not periods, you should not use them like this, unless you're deliberately going for a rambling effect, like this, it looks stupid otherwise, like when you used it, because you don't know what the fuck you're doing.

I live alone, well, almost alone.

WORDS MEAN THINGS

When you say you lived alone, you cannot then say "Well, almost alone" in literally the same sentence. First of all, it's incorrect English, and second of all, "alone" means "nobody else", and "almost alone" means "somebody else but not many somebodies comparative to a larger number of somebodies". Ergo it is by definition a contradictory statement and you just used it in the same sentence!

I was kindly taken in by a yellow flying horse when I got here. That reminds me... How the fuck did I get here again? Oh and before you forget, my name is Raijin, as in Rye-Jin phonetically, not Ray-jin, because that sounds like a sad excuse of a mixture of an American name and a Japanese name.

Alright.

Number one.

That's one other fail fractal about this story: it has no focus. It cannot stay on the same topic for more than one and a half grammatically incorrect Engrishy sentences. It is like a child with ADHD and atsimu and nothing to do and a television remote and a big flat screen TV. There is no focus. It goes from "I stayed with a flying hoers... How did I get here again cuz I forgot the most traumatic event of my life? Also fuck yall niggas I got swag and hey wanna see my penis? It's almost an inch long."

But I'm pretty sure you didn't even notice any of that because you were busy gawking at the protagonist's name, weren't you.

Oh and before you forget, my name is Raijin, as in Rye-Jin phonetically, not Ray-jin, because that sounds like a sad excuse of a mixture of an American name and a Japanese name.

Raijin, as in Rye-Jin phonetically, not Ray-jin, because that sounds like a sad excuse of a mixture of an American name and a Japanese name.

Raijin, as in Rye-Jin phonetically, not Ray-jin

I expect you knew this story was going to be bad, but this is probably the point at which you begin to realize, slowly, that it really is the worst FIM story ever written. And if not, let me enlighten you as to how this author story is not only terminally unimaginative, but also terminally stupid: OP stole his protagonist's name from Mortal Kombat. (sort of cuz it's Raiden but I don't play MK so fuck you and also japan people talk funny so it's still raijin)

Yeah. That Japanese video game where you beat the shit out of people for no reason other than to beat the shit out of them. Now, if you ever play it again, you can do so with the knowledge that one of its characters is the namesake for an angsty, whiny little douchebag with a potty mouth from a horrifically bad My Little Pony fanfic.

Not that there's anything wrong with lifting names you like. I do it all the time. But usually it's a good idea to not give Japanese names to American character and stuff, you know? Furthermore, OP seems aware that this is kind of a no-no, so he tries to lampshade it by blaming us for "mispronouncing" it and making it sound like... what it actually is, I guess.

So Ricin RAIJIN gets a job at Sweet Apple Acres, as per every fucking HiE ever. He works there... bucking apples. Okay then. :rainbowhuh:

Maybe he has steel-toed boots?

When I say he gets a job, by the way, he gets a job. That's it. There's almost no other information given. He gets a job, he likes Big Mac because he doesn't annoy him with questions about hoomans, AJ is annoying, BUT he just keeps his mouth shut and works because he's grateful to have work, or he used to be--I can't tell because the story keeps switching between past and present tenses. At this point it starts to become clear that... You know what, I'm going to just cheat a little and borrow his totally not-moonspeak nickname from later on in this chapter because it's easier than typing all that.

At this point it starts to become clear that RAI is a victim.

One of those chronic victim characters who's held down by life.

He's a Gary Stu of the angsty kind, the kind that justifies itself by opposing imagined oppression in the story. He's just so nice, but everyone hates him because they're evil bigots and stuff. But even worse, we haven't even seen any oppression, and all we're even told is "everybody hates me and I can't get a job waah". The whole tone of the story, and especially the lines about keeping his mouth shut, are just so fucking passive-aggressive and whiny that... Oh god damn it it's too early for me to be drinking. not anymore lol

I'll dissect the hatred he's shown later. For now, we get this bizarre line out of nowhere, with no real context other than him rambling about how pretty the 8 year old Apple Bloom is:

I'm not going to be a pedophile, even if it's with young, talking foals.

Well, they sure are attractive, but not even with them, god damn it!

Keep in mind that we haven't had any dialogue yet, no actual scenes, just this expository poop. I'm not even a tenth of the way into the 2200 word chapter. It's that fucking bad, okay? But I'll pick up the pace.

Other than that. There were 4 other mares that I'd met over the course of my stay. They were white,pink,purple and cyan, the cyan one having a fucking rainbow for hair. If I was gonna stay here indefinitely, I might as well acquaint myself with them.

The purple one asked me and the others to come to a Café to properly greet myself and them, to which I agreed to. Hey. If I'm getting free food for just introducing myself, I'm fucking taking it, because I've had enough of anything that's related to apples and flowers.

And so, we greeted ourselves.

What... Excuse me?

Alright, it's list time.

--You used the actual number 4

--put,spaces,after,your,fucking,commas

--Who the fuck still calls Dash cyan in 2014?

--You are talking about staying here indefinitely, but you literally have not oh fuck I'll just give it a thing.

You are talking about staying here indefinitely, but you literally have not even explained, shown, or hinted at how you got to Equestria! All you've told us is that everyone hates you, you buck apples like a hoers, you won't go pedo even for foals, and you got some dragon stuck in your head. At least give us some hint at how... Raijin... god how I hate that name... got here, or give us a reason why you can't give a hint. Having him randomly spout "Hmm how did I get here again?" in the middle of something else doesn't count.

Also, you seem to be jamming all these elements into a story that doesn't need them. They hate him, he has a dragon in his head, the mares want to fuck him, he gets raped or whatever that shit in the other chapter was. I don't know, and I honestly don't think the people who upvoted it knew either. They just saw the human tag and the sex tag and popped their cumulative 2 inch erection and history was made.

Even Mystquestria had a clearer plot than this.

3. What on god's green earth does "And so, we greeted ourselves" mean?

Just when everyone started to bear with my presence, in comes a fucking dragon out of nowhere to, and I quote 'Bring Equestria to an ice age' .

In comes an epic battle, yada-yada, and then they defeat him. I'll tell you about that later, because I'm not really ready to spill my memories to complete strangers.

Do you see what I mean about contradiction? He talks about how he had an erection jammed in his head... No, wait. Fuck. He talks about how he had a dragon jammed in his head, assures us he wouldn't fuck kids, not even foals, how everyone hates him and his feelings on the matter, how you pronounce his name, how he met his only friends--but wait, this is too much! Generic anime battle #47375734754375 must be redacted.

Did he defeat the guy by lighting him on fire with a fart or something? That would have been a cool twist.

Did the mane six defeat him by having an orgy with him? That would have been a hot twist.

Did he spend the entire time scratching his butt and masturbating while he hid in the cellar? No one cares.

Did he do some tragic stupid shit that got someone killed or hurt? ...No, doesn't look like it.

It looks like the author just wanted to avoid having to write extra words.

Not saying he did, but that's what it'd look like to someone glancing through the first chapter without any knowledge of the rest.

Now, to be fair, there is a dragon battle flashback later in the story--in chapter 5, to be specific (lol spoilers... not that it really spoils much because there's no plot...). If you've read the original and are already formulating your response about how he actually does show it later on, please see my note toward the end regarding chapter 5 (since I didn't have anywhere near enough space in this thing to review that part).

Back to chapter one.

I meet two other mares during the battle, Celestia and Luna, who I preferred to call 'Sunbutt' and 'Moonbutt' from the tattoos on their asses.

First of all, stop changing tenses holy shit!

Second, this is a nice highlight of one of the story's most gaping flaws: the characters in this story do not follow any sort of consistent logic, both in-universe and in terms of the actual universe itself.

Consider that the character (fuck calling him "Rai", he's just "the character") has been kicked around and shunned by his peers ever since he arrived. He can barely find work and he is treated with suspicion, and he is in an alien environment where he is almost entirely dependent on these suspicious creatures for food, medicine, shelter, protection, etc, at least for now and as far as we know (and depending on which side of the "I lived alone/almost alone" dichotomy you choose to assume is correct)

Now he is presented with the arrival of two immortal beings who are, generally, pretty calm and neutral about shit (at least, Celestia is). It can be assumed that they will judge him not for his external appearance as many have done, but for his internal merits; for what he has to offer, for his positive traits, for the things he has yet to do and show. They could grant him a new lease on life, redefine how ponies view him. In this situation, it would be logical to approach them as a calm gentleman, yes? With politeness, with manners, with humbleness, with humility.

But no he calls them Sunbutt and Moonbutt because the author read an HiE where the protagonist does that and it was cool and he wanted his character to do that too!!! LOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!

Do you think I'm judging too harshly on one event? I'm not. The protagonist constantly (you'll see more of it) substitutes an attitude of "I'm too cool to give a shit about anything lol" for any sort of genuine logical behavior. It seems to be because the author thinks that kind of behavior is "cool" and "jaded", not because he's intended to be an annoying ignoramus for comic effect.

Also, "sunbutt" and "moonbutt" are not funny. They have never been funny. Please, writers, stop putting them in stupid stories and using them like they're actually funny. If you use those words in your story you're a stupid and you should drown yourself I guess? Burn a small high-pitched dog for Lord Satan.

They told me that in order to make sure that the elder dragon could be of no threat, they had to seal it away forever. In comes me, the most hated person in ponyville, to be the host of the other most hated being in ponyville.

A flash of light later, and now I'm a host to an ice dragon.

None of this has been shown.

I've been doing this for like 6 hours (14?). I have no idea what's going on.

Also, it should be noted at this point that somebody in the comments asked why he had to be the host for the ice dragon and why the Elements couldn't just something something something. You know, like they usually do. The author did not answer and I believe he deleted the comments and blocked the person who pointed out this gaping plot hole.

I won't spend too much time trying to decipher his mindset beyond "That looks pretty I like it it goes in my fic now". Also he stole the ice dragon pic from a board game apparently... or something. I don't even know. It's in the comments somewhere. I don't care that much.

And then I'm stuck in the castle of Canterlot to be 'observed if thy sealing worked.' I got to be a part of the 'Royal guard', which sounds cool, but that ended pretty badly, and I honestly don't wanna talk about it. At all.

There's that consistency again! "Hey, one time this thing happened to me and it looks pretty okay amirite, but I'm not gonna tell you about it cuz it sucked". Now obviously OP is trying to set up some kind of drama for later, but it's just done so lazily and without regard for how it fits in with anything else (even the stuff in the same sentence) that it looks more like he just didn't feel like writing that part, either. You know, it just occurred to me that all the stuff he's zooming by in the first part of the story would make a better story than what it actually turns out to be ("a guy and some mares in a hot tub, also dragons sometimes lawl").

Hey also...

I've never heard of any branch of any government agency or military allowing its members to refer to the chief of their executive branch by a childish, retarded nickname on a regular basis. In fact I believe there's a direct and explicit prohibition against soldiers insulting the commander-in-chief (at least, in the US military, because the prez is, like, the boss of the entire army n like the green berets n the nukes n the f15s n sheeit, and also in most militaries soldiers are expected to remain politically neutral while serving).

I imagine all this would be so in the Royal Guard, seeing as "Royal Guard" implies that they exist primarily to protect the Royalty, and thus watching over the safety of Celestia and Luna would be held as the most important and serious element of their code. Imagine if a Secret Service agent started calling Obama "Blackface" due to... well, you know, his black face. Now do you see what I mean?

This guy is a stupid, irrational asshole. He lives in a stupid, irrational universe.

And oh dear god here comes this part.

I have to say though, its not all bad. I'm pretty much a Jinchūriki like in the show: Naruto. And boy, did I love that show. Maybe someday I could transform into something that's similar to tailed beast mode, though that's gonna be set somewhere in the very distant future, as my relations with the Elder Dragon are still quite rocky.

I honestly think this is one of the most cringeworthy points in the entire story. I can't even pin down what part of it makes it so incredibly awful.

Maybe it's the overall wording of it. The wording is so vulgar and presumptuous. It's not even a comparison to a similar concept or subject in order to paint a picture; it's more like a thinly veiled, smug-ish statement of "yeah, I'm pretty much exactly this thing that I like to watch on TV, except not because I'm also creative and original."

Or maybe it's the fact that this part bizarrely jumps out of the narrative and becomes meta without ever leaving the character's narration. It's one of the strangest things I've ever seen in writing because it seems perfectly normal for this particular story; it's not at all out of place, and yet my brain knows there's something wrong with it.

It makes me wonder if the author was so desperate to become his Mary Sue that he momentarily forgot he wasn't actually in the story and just started typing his own thoughts instead of his character's: "Oh boy I love Naruto one day I'm gonna turn into a giant Japanese thingamjigger in the distant future... Oh yeah, I'm supposed to be this guy that I made up... Awh, but hitting backspace would be so much work... Ugh... better just leave it. Nobody will notice. Naruto is awesome. Unghghh ohhhh goddddd I love Naruto soooo much..."

On the other hand, I do have to give it credit for at least acknowledging, in a roundabout way, its origins, and the fact that it is not really a story. This guy is trying to make an anime, not a piece of written entertainment. Think about it: everything here, every single element of this story, would not in any way be out of place in an anime. Raijin (or whatever his name is) is referred to mostly as "Rai", and both are moonspeak names. His narration--when it isn't undifferentiatably bland--sounds exactly like the dialogue in a 4kids animu dub. Even the beginning seems more like the recap for an episode halfway through an animu season than a story.

Also, "something that's similar to tailed beast mode"?

What are you even trying to say?

In fact this whole paragraph makes no sense at all, even subtracting the completely random and narratively unwarranted Narutard sperging. "Rai" seems to be predicting his own future-- "Maybe someday I could transform into something that's similar to tailed beast mode, though that's gonna be set somewhere in the very distant future". What? My brain can't parse that...

Normally at this point I would be wrapping up the review up and explaining the fundamental reason why the story sucks, but that's the big thing that makes this one so bad. There isn't just one consistent thing, nor are there lots of little things that crop up. There are huge, gaping plot holes everywhere, stupid dialogue out the ass, awful narutardation, the sheer failure to even logic in this universe, the fact that the main character is a douchebag--

What's happening is that with each successive line, more and more huge problems crop up. But the introductions don't eventually taper off once the author's writing style has shown itself in all capacities, nor do the existing ones fail to reappear. What makes this story so bad is the constant and consistent introduction of continually reoccurring failures. It's like if you had one sample of The Annoying Orange talking for 5 hours, and then you doubled it after 20 seconds and had it continue for the entire 5 hours, and then you doubled that for the entire 5 hours too, and on and on, and on, and on, and on.

And on.

...

...

...

...

And on.

It would be one thing if it was all obvious, but it's just subtle enough that 1) people like it, and 2) it generates a discomfiting sort of uncanny valley feeling because this story is so bad and yet it's so hard to sum up why without typing thousands of words.

But, everything comes with a price. Remember when I mentioned that the horses/ponies of ponyville hated me for being different? Now they had two people two hate, in the same body. Everything just got progressively worse and worse the longer I lived.

And so, we're now in present time. Every day I receive death threats from the same people I meet in the streets every day, some even consider trying to beat me up, to no avail of course.

At this point the grammatical errors and awkward writing are not even worth mentioning compared to the fact that, for no apparent reason, Equestria is suddenly a land of hate-filled thugs. There is not even an attempt to explain why they hate him other than "Ponies don't like diamond dogs and hairless apes".

If you're going to change the general atmosphere of the universe that much, you might as well have them, oh, I don't know, march around in parades wearing Nazi-like uniforms and send changelings to death camps for the glory of a Greater Unified Equine Nation as per the orders of Princess Celestia. At least it would establish that there's a definite and extreme disconnect between the canon version of Equestria and what we're seeing in the story, even if an in-depth explanation of the disconnect isn't given yet. Also that would kinda make a pretty good story.

The biggest problem Yet another problem with To Thaw My Cold Heart is that it has so many conflicting ideas of what its Equestria even is. From all indications, the author is trying to say that this is the same place we saw on the Friendship is Magic show. He seems to want to depict a darker undercurrent to it, which is fine--but he does this by stating that "the ponies are all violent bigots, except my friends because my friends are cool." There is absolutely no worldbuilding process engaged here to explain how a seemingly peaceful society could become so violent when, even at their worst, they've been depicted as hiding from things that scare them and being bigots due to fear of change and things they're not familiar with, not hatred for that which is different.

We're expected to accept that the show is nice until they come in contact with this particular character, who, for reasons apparently not his own fault, suddenly elicits the mistrust and hatred of an otherwise extremely peaceful (if mildly xenophobic at times until proof to the contrary is given) race. The story states (does not portray; there is no portrayal because it does nothing but make vague statements in a vacuum) that ponies have even more reason to hate him once bla bla this dragon thing happens--which is really not in line at all with the show.

Canon ponies don't seem to look for excuses to justify an existing dislike of other races. They're a very peaceful and friendly (again, if twitchy due to being a prey species with a dislike of change) race in every canon portrayal so far. Rather, all canon instances so far of ponies being xenophobic have been reactionary attitudes based on things that frighten them. They don't try to fight or drive out that which they fear; they run from it and hide from it and generally behave like a prey species actually would.

Now, it's fine to play with that (Solitary Locust and Splinterwood both deal with opposing elements of the xenophobia topic), but if you're going to do that, you have to at least nest it into a somewhat coherent universe. This universe here, as I have spent the last 7,000 words or something showing you, is utterly incoherent. It makes no logical sense at all.

I'm not even good friends with any of them except from Fluttershy, Applejack, Rarity and Applebloom. That was because I actually depended on them. Rarity made me clothes, Applejack lets me have something to do for the entire day, Fluttershy gives me a home, and Applebloom for... moral support I guess.

I don't really get on with Twilight, she tries to make me do lessons on magic, which I despise doing. If I wanted to go to magic school, I would rather watch Harry Potter than spend an entire day with her. Then there's Pinkie, the one who's always hyped for something. I don't know what it is about her, but I'm keeping my distance.

Finally, Rainbow Dash take the prize of being the biggest asshole I've ever met (I said flankhole because she'd be more pissed, and she was), she's just like the people I meet on the streets, that is, if I'm the one to start the argument. She was the least friendly when I met her, and she still is even after a year. If she decides to act all nice all of a sudden to me because I do something good for once, she can go fuck herself.

Before we jump deeper still into this man's tsundere goatse, I just want to point out one other thing. And it's not how stupid and incoherent the writing is, or how it doesn't actually say anything. No. It's how this guy is literally saying that the only living things willing to waste time on him are not even really his friends, except for the ones who give him things that he needs. I get that OP is going for some kind of reverse-tsundere thing here... I think... but my god, how much more ungrateful can you get?

He isn't endearingly withdrawn or awkward or jaded or cool or awesome or badass or any of the shit I'm sure he was probably intended to be. He's just a douche. This guy has been bitching for the entire chapter so far about how nobody likes him, and then when somebody does express a desire to be around him (for some reason I can't fathom), he says "Well we're not really friends and I don't want to be around you because you're boring". Remember, yet again, what I said about this story constantly contradicting everything it says at every possible opportunity?

He hates Dash most of all, though. I'll get back to that shortly.

Basically they take him to a spa and he's pissed about it because... reasons... plot stuff... you moron how dare you demand a more coherent plot... and they sit in shit mud and do some stuff and talk and words words words. And in the process of going there, he of course gets stared at with haaaaate even though he's pretty much done absolutely nothing to earn it and has been hanging around Ponyville for quite some time, and see my earlier rant if you want more proof that this is a contrived plot thing and nothing more.

And then we get this line.

I'd gotten pretty used to ponies giving me stares of disgust, it was one of the reasons that made me into the cold (emphasis on the cold) bastard that I am.

This is one of those times when I would normally just say "I'm sure whatever you're thinking is at least as awful as what I am". But I want to make it absolutely clear that the "emphasis on the cold" part was not added by me. It was in the original, with that exact formatting, just like that.

Literally there are no words that can sufficiently describe the feelings this single line induces in me. You should look it over until you have taken in the full majesty of its edgy fail. I was reminded of the basters line from Nope Just Ponies, but this is far, far worse because reading it doesn't even offer the distinct psychological advantage of making me laugh so hard I fall and crack my skull, ending my suffering.

It's just stupid. It's unfunny and painful. And somehow it doesn't even begin to sum up why this fic is so bad. No single thing can. Think about that.

Let's get away from this place of evil and move on to the next layer of Hell: the tsundere romance.

I want you to read this sequence, which is the first four lines of dialogue in the entire story, and remember, as you do, that this story has 450+ upvotes and was featured several times. Keep that in mind. Keep it in fucking mind.

"Maybe this spa can finally help you relax Rai." Twilight said.

"Let's send a male into a spa with 7 mares, good choice." Rainbow Bitch said.

"Yeah, well fuck you too Dash." I retorted.

Had I looked back to the mares, I would realise that they had tinges of red in their cheeks, probably from the comment that I made.

"G-great, now we have a r-rapist." Dash meekly replied.

Never mind the fact that the author calls his future love interest "Rainbow Bitch" as her very first dialogue tag, which strikes me as not only immature but somehow bizarrely misogynistic by virtue of stupidity as well. Never mind that this story has a completely random rape joke in it that the author seemed to find appropriate for the situation--No, forget that. This is literally a "I-it's not like I like you or anything... b-baka..." situation, except that OP thinks "r-rapist" is a socially acceptable and humorous substitute for "b-baka" outside of hentai.

So when she's screaming that you're a rapist and she's going to call the police, remember that she's really just saying you're stupid and she's never going to fall in love with you...

...cuz it's not like she likes you or anything... *b-baka*...

Oh, and it gets better. Do you remember how he said he's not a pedophile even for foals or whatever the wording was? Look at the part after what I quoted if you have it open later (you know, to express your love and stuff). Basically he explains sex to Applebloom out of nowhere by telling her that her parents "rutted" and "fucked" to make her. I can't go into detail because I'm literally running out of room to type here.

You know what, I'm done dissecting this blow by blow. I can't take any more, and I won't have time to sum it all up if I keep going.

Basically in the rest of the chapter he calls Dash a tranny, receives "subtle amounts of hate" from the masseuses, gets randomly called "disgusting" for absolutely no reason (I can feel the fucking love), shows off his bare, heavily muscled chest to the mares, who all gawk over how fucking hot he is and swoon and blush and giggle and stuff, and says this:

No-one has ever seen me in my underwear apart from my family.

Whatever you're thinking is probably a good response for this, btw.

Do you know what the funny thing is? I had to stop reaming this in-depth halfway through chapter 1. Only halfway through.

I literally do not have enough room to finish reviewing the first chapter of this story because there are so many things wrong with it. Most of the really ugly parts are ones that casual readers (by which I mean casuals) won't immediately notice--but that's no excuse for this fic having a 450something:80something ratio. Even if you can't see the truly awful parts, you should still know better than to give validation to something this obviously bad.

The protagonist is completely unlikable. He is an utter douche bag who does nothing but spout "cool"/"jaded" phrases, curse gratuitously and complain about the fact that everyone hates him. But ignoring the complete failure of this story to lay down a basic groundwork of logical rules by which to operate, it is actually completely reasonable that everyone would hate him.

His idea of a normal conversation is to tell his "friends", one of whom he mentally labels "Bitch", to go get fucked. He does this in front of an 8 year old that he may or may not have sexual feelings for, and then when she questions what "fuck" means, he explains with more vulgar language how she was conceived. He insults the heads of state in a land that is putting up with him despite disliking him, then wonders why he got kicked out of the royal guard or whatever happened. His idea of "friends" is "people who give me free stuff". He freely admits that he starts arguments in the street, and acts like a dick to pretty much everybody--most of his dialogue is actually him being a complete douche for absolutely no reason at all--but neither he nor the author seems to see this as a potential cause for him being disliked.

The story makes no sense at all and frequently rapes itself. We don't know why the character is where he is, why we should care, or what the plot actually is beyond this guy making an idiot of himself in front of Rainbow Dash and being hated by everyone "for no reason". Most of the potentially interesting points in the story, like the defeat of the dragon and his time as a royal guard, have already been glossed over in the first couple of paragraphs so we can get to the boring tsundere "romance". There's that weird shit about the Elder Dragon--which, at the end of chapter 1, I don't know what the hell this thing even is and why I should care, and it hasn't been relevant at all. All we have is a bunch of mares in a sauna with a naked guy.

And it doesn't get better. Chapter 2 is just Chapter 1 Part II: Dash X Human In Sauna. Chapter 3 is mostly just this doofus getting shit thrown at him by Angel while talking about Dash. At the end, he talks to the dragon in his head--by which I mean he snarks at it and doesn't show any sign of discomfort at having a second mind shoved into his own. He ends the conversation with the incredibly badassly sarcastic "Love you too". All his other lines of talking to the dragon are just snarky crap.

Chapter 4 is him turning into a dragon-thing and showing absolutely no emotional investment in the situation whatsoever. It has nothing to do with ponies in any way, shape, or form. Chapter 5 is the potentially incredibly interesting dragon battle that was glossed over early on. It also has nothing to do with ponies, even though they show up. To highlight how how this story genuinely manages to fail exponentially and fractally, the transition to the battle is headed with this:

*Insert harp playing flashback here.*

What does that even?

Please note that I'm not just nitpicking one little bit of the chapter I didn't like. Every single line of every single chapter is easily as bad as what I reviewed. However, I have, like, other stuff to do besides spelunk further inside of this story, and also I am actually, for the first time in my life, approaching the character limit for a blog post. I don't have the space or the time to dissect it more. I have transcended my own ability to review.

I do want to spend a moment discussing the author's apparent decision to pull his story from the site, owing to the "criticism" leveled against it--by which I mean a few people pointing out plot holes. When he didn't get the hugboxing he wanted, he then put it on hiatus and put this passive-aggressive spiel as his new summary:

6/09/2014

This story will be in an indefinite hiatus on fimfiction and will be continued over in fanfiction.com under my pen name, which is the same as the one here in fimfiction.

This story is unoriginal, I get it, it was my first fic and it soon got out of control, gaining praise and hatred like crazy. I just couldn't handle it. So go ahead and flame on my story if you like, It's not like every other critic has done that before.

I'll probably return to this someday, and add the new chapters that it missed out on over in fanfiction.com, but, I don't think that I can handle even seeing the comments section without my self-esteem breaking down quickly.

Critics can hurt people deep, man. So yeah, I guess you win, you selfish bastards. For those who actually tried to help me with my story by pointing out the grammar mistakes I made, I thank you for your help.

I'm sorry to the others who actually liked this story, I really am. But for now, I'm going to focus on my other story in fimfiction, and that is 'The Bear And The Mare'.

I, knowing the truth, will repost a few of the selfish bastards' comments.

*Looks at tags* "Huh, a sad romance slice of life with a human, not the most common combination-" *Sees that it's marked mature for sex and the character tags are the Main Six and two foals* "This can either go badly... or really badly. Either way I'm out."

A character perfect in every way doesn't suddenly stop being perfect if someone decides to hate him. "OH no people hate me for no reason" is not a character flaw. It's, at best, a flaw of everyone else and a worst a poor attempt to draw sympathy for your character. And from what I've seen, the character being an ass is reason enough for the hate, except that when it's made clear that we're supposed to root for the jerk is when it becomes a problem. Because the only thing more sue-ish than someone everyone else hates for no reason, is someone everyone loves for no reason. He is a Gary stu. An anti-hero one perhaps, but he is still one.

It might be helpful to understand that treating your critics like they're necessarily stupid is a good way to draw a lot of negative attention to a story in a hurry.

Now we are going to look at some examples of OP's behavior in the comments using his own words as a reference:

So what of I make a story not likened to your tastes, sue me.

Either you have no knowledge of the words 'elder' or 'dragon' or you are just plain idiotic

It's 1st person, you moron.

Nobody likes getting flamed, but even if you feel someone is being rude to you, that doesn't mean you have a right to be rude back. I mean, you totally can be a dick, but generally, you'll be considered a lot cooler if you respond to criticism without slinging childish insults like "fuck you" and "moron" and so on.

Alright... This is pretty much where the line ends on this journey of fuck, at least for me. I'll leave a link or three at the bottom if you want to have an adventure of your own. Hey, it would be pretty cool to see a review of the other chapters. I encourage you to learn from this review. Before I leave you to your own devices, I just want to talk about one more thing: originality.

Nothing is original. We know that. But that's not an excuse for blatantly copying other things over and over and over. This clusterfuck came about--I guarantee it--because somebody saw a series of badly written stories in the feature box, ones that pandered to the lowest common denominator, and said "that story would be better if it had my character in it and it was about what I like". It's the backbone of fanfiction, of course, but when you have inspiration that's already stupid and derivative, so too will be your own end product, unless you have real talent at reinventing shit (and you do not. Trust me).

A fanfiction directly inspired by Twilight or Michael Bay's Tran$former$ series is simply not going to be on the same level as one inspired by, say, The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

In that same vein, if you're inspired by the same schlock that everyone else is doing, then your output will more likely than not also be... well, schlock. This is schlock. LoHAV was schlock. Your Human And You is schlock. Chess Game of the Gods was schlock. This whole fad of people getting turned into Pokemon is schlock on a scale nearly exceeding the LoHAV thing (and I'd be most grateful if you lovely people would review one or two of those stories if you get some time :heart: ).

Most Human In Equestria is actually schlock, because the authors either A) use the character as an avatar for their own fantasies, B) shoehorn humans into the story because they have some weird psychological aversion to writing stories that don't contain them, no matter how badly it retards the story itself, or C) all of the above.

That's not to say that HiE is inherently bad. Some authors do it well because they understand how to tell a story with the elements that HiE involves. But it's a very, very difficult thing to do without the end result being lark's vomit, and almost all of the people who try to do it are not even close to competent for the attempt they're making. Here is my personal advice, if you've read this far: write a story about ponies. This show is about ponies. Leave the human fics as an occasional treat. Like chocolate, except more fleshy and kinda reddish and pink and oh god is that a bone

However... I do want to say that the average HiE author is not bad, just inexperienced. This is why we're nice unless the author is a jerk or the story is just so awful there's no saving the neighborhood from the black hole OP creates every time he types. With time, we get talented authors who write very good stories... that are unfortunately ignored a lot of the time because god who wants to read an emotionally engaging and intelligent story when they can read about Megatron fucking Celestia. Such is the world of fanfiction.

But either way, your HiE story will never be as bad as this one. Take comfort in that, okay? No matter how bad it is, no matter what flames you get, always remember that something worse exists. I said it at the top, but I'll say it again: this is the worst FIM story I have ever read. It fails on every single level. There is no redeeming factor to take into account.

Reviewing it was nothing short of torture.

Give me hugs and love. I deserve them.

And tell Regidar I'll suck his dick in hell.

...

...

...

In einem kurzen Weilchen, meine Herren, sehen wir uns ohnehin alle wieder! Das ist das Los aller Menschen!

> To Thaw My Cold Heart < Baleeted

> On Fanfiction.net <

> Riff of story <

> Blog post by the author < It was written before this review was posted, just fyi.