Ah, a Western.

Full disclosure, I’ve not read or watched many Westerns. Being like, halfway across the world from America, and also being busy uh, not existing when they were apparently a thing, I haven’t really been exposed to the genre a whole lot.

But that’s enough preluding, here’s today’s story!

[Adult story embed hidden]

That short description already has like three grammar errors ohboy — ahem. Anyway, instinctive response to grammar errors aside, how does this story do?

In two words, not well.

Let’s start from the start.

We begin with a gruesome death. An unnamed stallion lies on the desert ground, dying from a shot in the gut. He’s been shot by our protagonist, Bad Whisky, and is begging for a merciful death while vultures descend on him from above and—

Oh, right, I should warn you, this one has some pretty graphic scenes, so beware if you choose to read on.

Anyway, back to the story. Bad Whisky, after having shot this stallion, promptly follows all the cliches of her hero archetype and takes a swig of moonshine, before walking away with a witty quip. Walking away, mind you, from a stallion who’s currently being eaten alive and whose stomach acid is leaking all over his organs. Who, by the way, we have no idea why he’s being killed.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present: our protagonist!

Right. Jokes aside, there are several problems with this opening, but I’ll get to them later. For now, let’s take a look at the rest of the story.

The main meat of the story takes place in Love, a small town which is, as the story description says, “filled of the nicest ponies you’ll ever meet”. It turns out, though, that that’s a wildly inaccurate description, as all the ponies we meet in this town are total asses.

The town is full, instead, of fanatical Celestia worshippers. How fanatical? Well, one of our first encounters is with a pony whose face has apparently been burned off, preaching to a crowd about having experienced the touch of Celestia. Expectedly, our protagonist takes this opportunity to muse about how she sees Celestia as “just a unicorn with wings”, before heading off towards an inn.

Inside this inn, while she’s staying for the night, she’s approached by a young colt, who tells her that his baby brother is about to be sacrificed by the priest of this town, who’s apparently declared all second-borns as the spawn of Nightmare Moon. The colt pleads with Whisky to save his brother, whoo at first refuses, but then relents after he offers her a small handful of copper coins, and seeing his devotion.

The rest of the story follows Whisky as she proceeds to murder every single participant of the sacrificial ritual, including the town sheriff and his two deputies who step in to stop her. After describing in some detail how she manages to overpower a room full of ponies with ease, the scene eventually ends with her torturing the priest to death and saving the baby from the room.

...whew. 

This story was not an easy one to get through.

It’s not just the gore and death everywhere, though those do factor into it. It’s about the way the story presents Whisky and her actions. For a clearer explanation of this, though, let’s take a closer look at the introduction. I think the beginning of the story is emblematic of many of the problems that I have with the story. 

An unsympathetic protagonist

First, and most importantly, this opening image is not ideal for convincing anyone to be supportive of any of Whisky’s actions. If the intention was for Whisky to appear badass and hardened, then well, yes, she does appear that way. But she also appears immoral, uncaring, and sadistic. And it’s hard to get behind a character like that.

Whisky continues to act in this way throughout the story, with an extreme reliance on violence, and little care for anyone else. If you were hoping that she’d maybe be characterised with a little more care, or that the story would shed a little more light on why she believes acting in this manner is justified, then you’d be disappointed. 

Additionally, the story insists on showing her as the “good guy”. Or… gal, in this case. In this respect she seems like a Mary Sue — no matter what she does, she’s always in the right.

Cliches

Secondly, the story relies a lot on cliches to characterise the ponies. This is immediately apparent in the first scene, where Whisky is shown to be the typical cold, merciless killer. A capital “B” Badass, with witty quips and a deadly shot.

Throughout the story this is apparent as well. There’s the gritty, jaded bounty hunter who’s hardened from a life of killing and unquestionably deadly. There’s the gruff, abusive innkeeper whose whole shtick is being unlikeable and really just acts as a foil for Whisky. There’s the guileless, earnest child who pleads with the protagonist for help.

Now, I’m not saying that using cliches to dictate side characters is necessarily immediately a bad thing, but as a writer, if you’re relying wholly on cliches to characterise your protagonist in a story like this one, you’re doing something wrong. As a result, not only is Whisky wholly uninteresting as a character becuase we already know the cliche that she’s based on, all the characters in the story are lifeless and robotic as well.

Rushing and pacing

Next, this story really has no sense of good pacing. This is a lot more obvious in the middle section of the story, but the beginning has some traces of this as well. The entire scene of the stallion getting left to die happens over roughly six paragraphs, with two of them being dedicated to describing Bad Whisky and two of them just being Whisky talking. The story doesn’t linger long enough to really articulate this scene clearly before moving onwards to the rest of the story.

This happens through the rest of the story too, most especially at the time when Whisky first enters the town. Very little time is spent actually showing us this new place before the plot kicks in and Whisky sees the preaching Celestia worshipper, and very little time passes in between this and the next plot point, where she enters the inn. Because of this the story has no atmosphere, and no sense of an outside world other than the events happening directly to Whisky.

Unclear writing and grammar errors

Lastly, there are several blunders on the more technical side of writing. There are grammar errors, sprinkled here and there, but more common are awkward sentences, misplaced punctuation marks, repeating sentence structure, and the like. Things like:

On the gallows beneath the dead lovers, painted in a gruesome sanguine red was a sign of welcome. ‘Welcome to Love,’ it said. Beside it in the same red was a heart.

Misplaced punctuations

Which should be:

On the gallows beneath the dead lovers, painted in a gruesome sanguine red, was a sign of welcome. ‘Welcome to Love,’ it said. Beside it, in the same red, was a heart.

And this:

When she walked further into town, Bad Whiskey noticed a gathering of ponies around a well. Her first thought was some poor foal had fallen in. Only, there were no signs of panic. And the only voice she heard was a single, hoarse drawl from the crowd.

Repeating sentence structure

Going into further detail on a format like this would be difficult, so I’ll stop there.

... though as a side note there are several references to “hands”, “arms”, and “feet” in the story. What the heck are those?

Right, I know not everyone is into ponyisms, but when the story describes somepony gripping something in their hand, it makes me wonder a little what these ponies look like.

Ahem, anyway, continuing on with the review, something I found pretty good in this story are the descriptions. For the little amount of time the story actually spends lingering on them, the descriptions of ponies, places and objects are surprisingly quite well done. Anarchywolf is able to describe things well and in detail… even if half of those descriptions are of gore scenes. There’s still something to appreciate in them, is my point.

All these in mind, I think it’s about time for the score.

Final score: 2.5/10

You might notice I give lower scores for stories with poorly conceptualised characters — this story clearly demonstrates why. By starring a badly conceptualised, cliche protagonist and showing her in an overwhelmingly good, moral light, the story goes beyond being boring and becomes actively quite annoying to read. Flat supporting characters and an overly rushed plot compound these issues to make this a really deeply flawed story.

Feedback for anarchywolf18

Right, so, I’ve seen your stories popping up quite often on this group. It’s clear that one thing that shows up all the time is the badass protagonist — your stories, at least those on this group, invariably seem to have this archetype. So today, let’s talk a little about badassery.

On creating Badass characters

One thing to keep in mind, always: badass characters, regardless of their coolness, are still characters. Any tips for creating good characters also applies to creating these sorts of characters. Meaning in order to be compelling, these characters still need some sort of depth beyond their surface “coolness”. The most noticeable difference between creating badass characters and creating regular characters is that, for the former, it’s very, very easy to just make a totally unlikeable character; especially if you’re not certain of what you’re doing.

So the question is, how do you make a character like this likeable?

Morality
Make the character Good!

This is the most basic method; make the character be a force for Good. A naive approach to doing this would be to make sure the character only does moral things  — though that’s hardly applicable to all, or even most stories. A more useful guideline is, make sure that in their moments of badassery, these characters, and the readers, believe that they are doing the right thing.

Focusing more on your style of stories, an easy way to do this is to make all the characters that the protagonist faces Bad. Like, if we think the protagonist is the hero, and the antagonists are the villains, the protagonist beating up those villains would be perfectly warranted to appear cool doing so.

In the context of this story, take note of this for the introduction. Whisky kills the stallion, but it’s never revealed to us why this brutal killing is warranted.

Fallibility
Don’t make a Mary Sue!

A good traditional protagonist has flaws. Flaws which the story acknowledges. If the protagonist never fails, the story becomes boring and predictable. Also, a character who always wins usually doesn’t endear themselves to the audience very easily. For more on this problem, just search “Mary Sue”, and you’ll get a list of issues with this very well-documented phenomenon

Importantly, fallibility doesn’t just mean that the character can be injured in a fight. It means that they can be wrong — they can have lapses in judgement, or they’re not always certain of being able to solve a problem. Whisky is always 100% sure of herself, to the point of arrogance. So sure of herself that she just walks into a potentially hostile room full of ponies with no information on who is inside, perfectly assured that she’ll come out victorious.

Depth
Give the character actual likeable traits!

Back to the golden rule: badass characters are still characters. They still need to be fleshed out more beyond their surface characteristics, and being cool doesn't excuse them from being judged by the readers. And, removing all the traits that make them cool, if your protagonist appears absolutely despicable… it might be time for some re-writing.

Let’s take a look at your story. Removing all perceptions of being cool, what kind of character is Whisky?

Well, she’s violent, unempathetic, and self-centered. Really the only redeeming scene is the one where she agrees to help the young colt, and even that is arguable because she only does it after getting money out of it. Without any contrasting scenes that could hint at Whisky actually being a character we should support, we, naturally, don't support her.

All this boils down to, if you're going to write a badass character, make sure that they deserve to be badass. 

Whew! That was way longer than I thought it'd be. I know the feedback here is kinda general and vague, but this review's long enough and I don't want to spend more words rambling on this subject.

Hope someone finds this helpful.

ALSO: please follow our group rules on requesting reviews for your stories. This one was placed in two folders, the General folder and my personal Request folder. The only reason this story wasn't rejected from the group is I didn't notice until I'd already written this review. If you want to submit your story to another reviewer or folder, make sure to remove the first one. Double-submission is not allowed

7197223 Not to sound like I'm defending the fic, because I'm not, but it clearly lists anthro on it so that would explain the limbs thing.

7197248
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oh

7197261 It happens, we're all human... its still not very good.