Before I get into this review, I’ve got an announcement to make. There are about ten or so stories left in my folder. Once I finish reviewing them, I will step down as a reviewer to try and sort out some things in my life. Thanks for following along!

Today’s story is Event Horizon, a long, tense story by RubyDubious. This is a political, action-filled story that’s got its tense moments and pretty fleshed out worldview. However, there are times where the story feels a little too winded, and gets a bit weighted down by its complexity.

Remember that I am just one reviewer and my view varies from others. This is especially important because at times I can be inept, and things that are perfectly obvious sometimes sail way over my head.

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!

Ready? Let’s hit it.

The story follows Trixie after her acquisition of the Alicorn Amulet in a quest to bring her dead sister back from the dead.

Now, along the way the story takes a few curves and turns, but tries and maintains this aspect of her fallen sister as the driving force. Unfortunately, towards the tail end of the story I think the author loses sight of this a little bit, and though it comes back in the end as a callback sort of deal, I think that this point isn’t as central as it feels like it should have.

Let’s come back to that in a bit. The story takes a lot of turns as it moves, and we follow Trixie throughout her journey, from an orphan on the streets of Canterlot to the gates of Hell itself. The plotline at parts can seem a bit sporadic, as if the author wasn’t quite certain where they wanted to go. It has a tendency to unfortunately meander for a bit, and I think this lack of focus ends up hurting this story in the long run.

But don’t get me wrong: there were some absolute great moments in this story: the action scenes were very well done and kept me quite invested. Trixie gains a lot of powers, and her physical battles with others are very fast-paced and rapidfire, balancing things out quite nicely.

There is another point I want to make about this story: the author has very clearly done a lot of research in a range of topics. There are a lot of components in regards to military strategy, philosophy, politics, and economics as well. And for this I applaud the author, as the world building is very rich and well done.

That being said, a lot of this information can be thick at time, perhaps almost too thick to a casual reader. There are times where we take a break from the action to analyze a particular aspect of Equestria, and their current war with the zebras.

For example, here’s an excerpt from the chapter ‘Makeshift.’

The economy of Equestria lent itself to producing materials for whatever war we were fighting, which lent itself to contracts, jobs, expansion with each increase of the border. In short: profits. Celestia didn’t strike me as someone who’d go after money. What could she possibly want that her money or her influence couldn’t get her? Money could get power, certainly, but only so much. She understood like I did that power that beats other power becomes greater. Her country being geared to war created a cycle of it, and though she promised to be laxer, Concrete and I weren’t fools. Celestia already viewed the motivations for war as self-defense, nothing would change except her power.

Other countries weren’t foolish either, and they’d want revenge or vengeance. That fucking monarch was playing chess with everypony’s lives and she was winning. She knew I’d show up, and that Concrete would try and defend me. It didn’t matter what Concrete said, Celestia would’ve forgiven her anyway. There was no way she could plan this from the start, but if this really was a chess game, she’d have options for each move. By some miracle, she’d gotten everypony, including me, to play right into her hoof.

Now granted the entire story isn’t like this, but it’s recurring enough that I feel I should point it out. There is a lot of background to things in the story, like Equestria’s war with the zebras, that seem secondary and largely inconsequential to the plotline of this story. From what I’ve gathered, the author has the intent to continue a sequel story which would explain. 

I find it interesting, because it obviously would be a shame for none of this research to be shown in the story. But on a whole, I don’t know if all of this really affects the core of the story or moves in time with its central plotline. I’ll make a separate point later about characterization and motive justification, but again, this is a story with a lot of layers, and the geo-political depictions of Equestria only add another layer to it.

And I think this is a critical thing in the long run, especially when we’re dealing with a story as intricate and complex as this one. That being said, there are quite a few continuity things I had. In particular the prologue, which in my conversations with the author, have learned that they themselves are not all that pleased with it.

The prologue, for example, states that:

Unluckily for me, it didn’t kill her. Her screams from her tower shattered the peaceful quiet of Canterlot and sent droves of guards to meet me. Naturally, they posed no threat to me, but who they brought with them did.

But in the story, we find that Violet Star dies after Trixie murders her. In addition, towards the end of the story, things began to move very quickly and I think I missed a few points along the way.

For example, I had to do some digging to figure out what exactly Concrete’s plan was with Violet. Like, I can figure out that Concrete realizes Trixie wants to kill Violet and uses her as bait, but I can’t quite figure out why Trixie wants Violet dead, or how Concrete even knows about this.

As I said before, I feel that the plotline kind of takes a strange dip towards the end and a lot happens in quick succession. I think that if the author wanted to touch up this story, they should focus on these chapters and try to make the flow a bit more streamlined.

There’s one more point I’ll make about the plotline here: I think that there’s a little… too much deus ex machina going on at times. For example, towards the beginning of the story, Trixie is working at the Pies’ Rock Farm.

After a discussion with Concrete Pie, she’s persuaded to go to Las Pegasus and sign up with the EUP. Then, a trader arrives and we get this scene:

“Dainty Sunbeam, and yeah. I am kinda new to this. I’m not a merchant, I’m just carrying this heap of stuff from Canterlot to an oddity shop in Las Pegasus.”

What a coincidence. “Well lucky you,” I said, positioning myself in front of the sign, obscuring Dainty’s view of it, “Trixie happens to know the way there. But she’s gonna need something off this cart.”

Even Trixie herself notes that this is really incredibly coincidental: here, Trixie learns of a powerful amulet that’s in Las Pegasus, while Concrete also advises her to go to Las Pegasus and sign up with the EUP. 

Things feel almost too perfect, as here there are two plot devices to get Trixie to Las Pegasus, and I can think of a few ways around this. For example, maybe Trixie reasons that if the amulet doesn’t work out, she can still sign up at a local booth there rather than at the Headquarters like Concrete says.

I noted a few other spots but stepping back and looking at this whole story overall… I dunno. I feel that the story gets a tad bit messy at times, and I think this is because of the concept of motivation justification. Let’s move on to characters. 

Briefly, I’ll go over some of the main characters in this story. We have Trixie, who is not the same one as the show Trixie who challenges Twilight. She’s orphaned on the streets after her parents die in a house fire, but her younger sister Sabrina survives. Unfortunately, towards the beginning of the story, Sabrina contracts a fatal disease and dies. Her death is the primary factor in Trixie doing everything she ends up doing in this story.

From here, the story takes off and we get a whole slew of characters: Paid Tab, Moondancer, Paper Trail, Stellar Solstice, Point Blank, Glass River, Arkon, Black Ice, Solar Team 12… the list goes on. There are a lot of characters in this story, most of them OC’s, but I don’t think it’s necessary to know who all of them are. 

There’s one character I’ll call out here: Concrete Pie. General Concrete Pie is, I think, one of the better-written characters in this story: her personality is quite well done and she feels a lot more fleshed out than most of the others in this story, in fact, she’s probably my favorite character in this entire fic. So props to the author!

Now that we’ve established the characters, let’s get one more fact clear: I absolutely hated Trixie in this story. And that’s largely by design. You see, Trixie is not exactly the hero of this story: she’s a villain. A villain who kills slews of ponies after corruption by the alicorn amulet and commits horrendous crimes while largely escaping punishment. Yet Trixie is also the very epitome of an unreliable narrator.

Her parts are narrated from first person, meaning that the audience has a direct pipeline to her viewpoints and thoughts. And Trixie remains utterly convinced for the entire duration of the story that she’s in the right, and that infuriates me. Like, seriously, I don’t know if I’ve ever harbored this much of a hatred for a fictional character. Much less a fanfiction interpretation of a fictional character.

Anyways. All of this is intentional on the author’s behalf, and they did a fantastic job in portraying her as evil here.

But let’s get into a point I found interesting. This is a story that really doesn’t have any heroes. And this boils down to the concept of character motivations, because for every character we get, we also get insight into their beliefs, their behaviors, and why they do the things that they do. And while this may be true for almost every story out there, the way this story does so is unique. Because I can not say with confidence who the hero of this story is supposed to be.

It isn’t Concrete Pie, who’s plan, while well-intentioned, caused Trixie to become more powerful than ever. It isn’t Celestia, who’s almost manic obsession with war drives a spike between herself and Luna. It isn’t Glass River, who lets a personal grudge get in the way of Trixie’s threat, it definitely isn’t Trixie herself.

So how did this story make it work? Throughout the story, we constantly get the ideas of personal beliefs and personal philosophies getting challenged. I mentioned before how a lot of research and work clearly went into this story, and a lot of it gets reflected here. Questions like “how much is the value of one soldier in the grand scheme of things?” and “when should the death penalty be justified, if at all?” are raised, and we see these characters struggle to come up with the answers.

Now I will say that for a casual reader, this may be almost too much. There is a lot of motivational sequencing here, and we get glimpses into the head of virtually every single character to learn a bit more about their beliefs and intentions. For those who want a cleaner action story, they might see this story as a little muddled and confusing.

But I think for a story like this, this is a necessary concession for the author to make. In a way it reminds me of Tom Clancy stories, set against the backdrop of war with a whole cast of involved characters, while taking the time to show all the moving bits and pieces involved in something as complicated and horrific as war.

So I’ll leave it with this: there are a lot of characters, and we get the chance to understand each character a little bit more with each section they have. The downside is that this is a complicated matter, and may dissuade some readers who want a more action-based story, however, in this scenario I can see why the author made this decision. 

There were a few miscellaneous typos that I noticed throughout the story along with editorial things like comma splices. There was also a rather… unfortunate typo in the prologue that’s since been fixed.

Ultimately I don’t think there were any recurring prose errors that I noted, rather just a few sentences that didn’t make sense, some scattered typos and misspellings (Fleur De Lis was spelled as Fluer Dis Lee at one point), and a few spacing things. I pointed these out in my notes should the author want them.

I’ll cover a few more prose things here. First, the very first time we switched from first person perspective to third person was a bit jarring, as we spent the first two or so chapters in first person and I was assuming we’d stay in first person for the duration of the story. I’d recommend the author add some third person scenes to the beginning to ease the reader into this idea of alternating perspectives.

Another minor thing is that characters with accents (Paid Tab, Silverstar, Applejack) had their accents a bit too thick to understand, I’d recommend the author try to streamline these a little bit for the sake of readability.

The next thing is language. I think that this story wants to present itself as dark and gritty, and for the most part it accomplishes this. However, there are occasional moments where the language of the story works against it. For example in the prologue when Trixie calls Twilight “Crylight Sparkold.” This really broke my immersion as I was picturing a dark world when out of nowhere Trixie hits us with a grade-school insult. I don’t know, this didn’t do it for me, even if it was meant to reflect Trixie’s character.

Also, there were quite a few tense inconsistencies throughout the stories: the majority of the story is in past-tense, but there are times where the author swaps to present-tense for a few sentences. I’ve pointed these out in my notes. 

Finally, pacing. The pacing, up until the second half of the story, was really great. However, the second half turned the story on its head, and we lost a great portion of the major plot points that drove the first half of the story.

There are a couple things I’ll say on this front. I think that a lot of the central driving forces aren’t very clear. For example, it’s inferred the Alicorn Amulet is corrupting Trixie, but it’s never quite explicitly stated that this amulet is driving her to kill, or that killing ponies takes their power. I think there’s maybe one line where Trixie speculates this, but from what I recall it doesn’t feel like a definitive answer.

And we don’t really see much of her power growing after the escape from Tartarus. I mean, she literally destroys the entire Crystal Empire, also implying that she killed Cadance, Shining Armor, Sunburst, and possibly Flurry Heart, yet we don’t really see her getting an increase in power.

And again, while Sabrina was originally the driving force of the story, she really falters at this in the second half. In fact, I can’t really pin down a major reason for Trixie doing any of the things she does in the second half of the story. If it’s corruption by the amulet, it’s again not explicit and the audience has to infer that it’s the reason, but even then… why?

I’m guessing it has something to do with Black Ice, but I’m confusing him with Arkon quite a bit. I had Arkon pinned as the big baddie when we first saw him, but then the story discarded him to bring in Black Ice, who we never really see much of.

The story gets a little muddy and weighted in its second half, and the driving forces really aren’t as clear as they were in the first half. Which really sucks, because it’s a pretty good story. 

All in all, this was a pretty special read. It’s very reminiscent of a Tom Clancy story with maybe a little less emphasis on technology, and the characters at play all believe they’re in the right, leading to none of them being in the right at all. It’s a well researched story that has a lot of depth to it.

But where I think it struggles is after the second half. Motivations become less clear, the pacing amps up quickly and takes off, and I can’t help but feel a little let-down. I was expecting a duel with Celestia, but instead Trixie surrenders herself at the palace, joins the EUP, and then immediately betrays them.

So all in all, this was a hefty action story that’s worthy of it’s mature rating: the fight scenes can be a tad bit gruesome. I just wish some emphasis was placed in different sections, and the second half of the story was mapped out a little bit better. There are a few prose and grammatical issues that occur as well, but I’d say the greater struggle of this story is mostly in its weight. It is a little bit edgy but I’m not sure if its over the top, but I do think that the edge adds a nice little element to the story.

If you’d like to see a very different take on Trixie and like well-researched war stories, you might want to give this one a shot! 

I hope you found all of that helpful, I know you’ve been waiting for this review a long time. I honestly didn’t feel it was that edgy, but I do think the pacing problems towards the back half of the story are something to be addressed. It does a lot of setup for a sequel, I think, but the core of this story could be tightened up a little bit to really drive the nail in home.

Still, though: this was a very good work. You’re a great author, keep writing! 

I do have my reading notes for your fic, if you would like to see them let me know.

The author requested that no score be attached to this review.

7309704
One of the no Score reviews, hmm? I still say a good review :)

Just wondering what the EUP is?

Also you have a small typo near the start: Don't get me long

7309731
I don't actually know, the author never specified what EUP stands for but it's like the army

7309735
Sounds a bit like earthpony unicorn pegasi or something like that: EUP