Hello, everyone! I’ve found myself with an excess of time this week, so today’s review will be, I hope, a little less rushed.

Anyway! It seems like I’m on a roll with reviewing stories by reviewers from our group, because today’s story is Bonds, written by fellow reviewer Nailah.

[Unpublished stories cannot be embedded]

Twidash is best ship.

That is all.

A Quick Summary...

This is a Romance story with Adventure elements, with Rainbow finding that she has feelings for Twilight and yet being unable to confess this to her. This is where the story starts, with Chapter 1 opening with Rainbow at Twi’s library after having decided to tell her. Of course this doesn’t work out, and Rainbow decides she needs to take Twilight on a big adventure as a sort of date. This inevitably spirals into a larger quest to help Daring Do stop Caballeron and his henchmen from stealing a priceless artifact from a museum.

Review

I suppose Romance would be right up Nailah’s alley, she’s well-known for loving light-hearted, fluffy stories. Naturally, I was pretty excited to read this story, and the description seemed to paint a pretty exciting picture, too!

Unfortunately, what I found is… lackluster, to say the least.

To start off, the writing quality is inconsistent, at best. It seems alright in Chapter 1, but gets worse as the fic goes on. The description says this story has three editors; this is difficult to believe, when the typos, tense errors and formatting errors are so common. Heck, there’s a part in Chapter 3 which repeated a entire paragraph, with some weird formatting errors.

"You! How dare you case me such Mayhem!" Spoke Dr.Caballeron, his muzzle lowered, almost snarling towards Daring Do as four heavily armed ponies marched alongside him. [Tab]

On his far right being a light brown Earth pony stallion with deep black mane and tail, green eye, part of his one eye was covered by his mane to hide a scar. He wore a simple vest, and belt around his waist, that held his rapier at his side, a long scar that ran down his covered eye. Drawing his rapier and pointing it directly towards Daring Do
and it was clear why. The stallion in the front shouted at Daring.

“You! How dare you cause me such mayhem!” spoke Dr. Caballeron his muzzle lowered, almost snarling towards Daring Do.

On the storytelling side, the Romance plot progresses at a snail’s pace, if even that. It barely develops past “Rainbow can’t tell Twi how she feels” in the first four chapters. She gets interrupted or loses her nerve every time she’s about to say something, which happens somewhere in the ballpark of ten thousand times in the first four chapters.There’s only so many times you can read this exact scenario taking place before it gets old.

The Adventure plot, on the other hand, progresses at a breakneck pace, without much of a transition or any signalling before jumping to the next plot point. We move from Rainbow in Twi’s castle wanting to bring her somewhere, to the museum getting a tour, to meeting Daring in the span of like, a quarter of Chapter 2. This probably would have been much better if there were actually scene breaks where they should be.

Also, the main MacGuffin of the whole story — the Stone or, something — is barely introduced for like, a paragraph before we’re sprung into this chase with Daring and Caballeron totally out of the blue. And Nailah gives little reason to care about this plot either, as nothing is really explained beyond “we can’t let Caballeron get this thing” for some reason.

Of course all this would be just fine if the characters were compelling enough — this is a pretty character-driven genre, after all!

But… well, this is gonna sound harsh, but the characters are probably the worst part of this fic. The characters themselves — that’s Twilight, Dash, and Daring Do — are flat, one-dimensional things, which is not exactly ideal for a Romance story. A lot of times they seem to be acting according to what would be easiest to progress the plot, not according to what they would do based on their personalities.

For example, Twilight barely reacts when Dash pulls her out of her library out of the blue to go visit a museum. Nor does Dash react when Twilight just assumes Dash is bringing her to a Starswirl exhibit. They just go along with it so the plot moves along faster. The way that the characters behave in this story just feels uncanny and unrealistic, to me.

That’s the gist of how I feel about this story. Let’s get to the scores, shall we?

Scores

Quality of Writing and Use of Language: 5/10

Generally readable, but errors and typos abound. There are some pretty serious ones that are difficult to ignore, which really break immersion.

Pacing and Impact: 4/10

Moments and scenes zoom by without much build up or transition, and no particular scene has much of an impact.

Character and Characterisation: 3/10

Characterisation is, as I mentioned, my least favourite part of the story. The interactions just feel limp and unrealistic, and fall far short of my expectations for a Romance story. 

Dash is preoccupied with confessing to Twilight, and doesn’t seem to give much thought to Twi’s feelings towards her semi-awkward passes. Twilight is unnaturally accepting of Dash’s actions (like dragging her out of the library without warning when she already had plans for the day), and on top of that doesn’t seem to have much of a character at all. And Daring… is just a grump, really.

Final Score: 4/10

In summary, this story isn’t all that engaging. Characters are a huge part of the problem. At many points, the way they behave just doesn’t seem rational, or the way they’d actually behave in such a situation.

But I think the larger issue here is that the plot is just not very interesting. The Action part doesn’t hook, nor give much reason to care about its existence. It seems to only exist to disrupt Rainbow’s efforts with Twi.

And speaking of that: the Romance plot really only exists in small moments when Dash is trying to tell Twilight about her feelings — moments which are slotted seemingly at random into the action scenes. With that being the only real thing happening in it, you start to notice that the romance plot has not much substance to it.

To conclude: if you're looking for a really great, heart-warming romance story, this one doesn't look like it's shaping up to be what you're looking for. Of course, it’s still only four chapters in (no matter what the chapter names might say) — there’s still plenty of time to improve the story from here.

Feedback for Nailah

My advice would be to think about conflict a little more.

First, the Action. A really important thing that a conflict must do is actually be interesting. For that, you need to give us a reason to care about it. So what if Caballeron gets the Stone? What are the stakes? What does the Stone actually let him do, specifically — and what’s he going to do with it once he gets it? Give us a reason to really not want him to get it. The stronger the reason, the better.

Then, there’s the Romance part. This one is a little more tricky. For a quick explanation, let’s take a look at the characters. Specifically, let’s look at your main character, Dash. What conflict is she facing?

There’s the obvious ones: she’s trying to confess to Twilight, but can’t. She’s trying to stop Caballeron from stealing the Stone. These are the two major ones.

What’s the problem here? Well, these are both external conflicts. Dash repeatedly getting interrupted when trying to confess to Twilight only highlights the fact that there’s no internal conflict — or at least, it’s not brought to attention enough.

Internal conflict is important to make characters more realistic and relatable. Without it, you get exactly what I was talking about above — flat, uninteresting characters. And it’s really not just as simple as “Rainbow’s too shy to confess to Twilight”, either! Why’s Rainbow too shy? Is she not confident? Scared of losing Twilight as a friend?

Whatever the internal conflict, it has to come from some flaw that Rainbow as a character has. Because if it really is just “Rainbow’s too shy to confess to Twilight” — which is not at all specific to her character — not only does Rainbow become a less interesting character, the Romance falls into cliche.

Hmm, it seems my Feedback sections have been getting shorter and shorter. I don’t quite know why. Maybe reviewing more’s made me lose my confidence in my ability to pinpoint problems accurately? I dunno. Though I sure did have a few more things I originally wanted to slot in there…

Anyway, I’m going to take a page from Leroy’s book here and do a fic recommendation: A Bluebird's Song by Ardensfax is an incredible read for a good Twidash story. It’s also pretty old, as most of my favourite fics are — but hey, it’s still really good.

And as a quick little notice to wrap things up: I’m going to be on hiatus for two weeks ahead while I go for a vacation with my family. So expect not to get another one of these for a while. Sorry to all those people who’re still waiting on my reviews!

Good review. I'll pull a Leroy here and recommend you keep at it and make more. Enjoy the holiday.

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Haha, thanks Leroy