Description

One day, Sonata Dusk closed her eyes... And she died. Before she knows it, she wakes up... And she finds herself in hell. They say, Sonata Dusk was not ready to go to hell. But the truth of the matter is... Hell isn't ready for Sonata Dusk. Now that begs the question: What happens next?

Initial Thoughts

Welp, a dead Sonata is a sad Sonata, but we’ll have to see where SunTwi takes her. I see that in the description, the author notes this story is partly inspired by Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss. Admittedly… I haven’t watched/seen either, so I hope that ignorance doesn’t detract from the overall experience. 

However, before I move into that, I have to note that there are some inconsistencies with the description. It begins in past tense, but then moves into the present. The sentence, “They say, Sonata Dusk was not ready to go to hell.”, clearly uses both tenses, when it should have stuck to one. It’s a small issue, but ought to be corrected as soon as possible.

Onto the story. Spoilers ahead.

Summary

Hard to do a summary for but one published chapter, but here we go: 

After a freak accident involving a taco truck and bad timing, Sonata winds up in Hell. Satan is there to ream her for all her sins, but Sonata is able to outwit him and challenge him to a fight in order to prove his immortal heritage. Victorious, Sonata regales the angels of heaven with what happened, but they inform her that she has upset the natural balance of things, and must therefore take up the role of Satan. After a quick wardrobe adjustment, Sonata is returned to Hell, operating now as its new head.

Plot

It’s hard to judge the plot of an incomplete story, but I’ll try to examine the first chapter as its own, self-contained story event. 

I admit, again, to not having seen anything of Hazbin Hotel or Helluva Boss, but it seems that, at the very least, prior knowledge of either source isn’t necessary to read this story. In terms of plot, then, this more-or-less is a comedy of errors (as the tags determine). It follows a certain pattern then: unfortunate accident leads to situational comedy leads to unforeseen consequences leads to even more comedy. Even with one chapter, I can anticipate how the rest of the story will relatively unfold. But, that isn’t to say that that makes the plot bad, just that it wears its genre influences on its sleeve. 

Let me therefore begin by discussing the best part of the story: the comedic tone. It’s over-the-top, it’s zany, it’s slapstick, it reads a bit like a tumblr post, but it gets the job done. Though I won’t pretend and say I necessarily laughed at some lines, I did get a nose exhale at the juxtaposition of personalities between Satan and Sonata. The author definitely had a lot of fun writing their exchanges of dialogue, and the comedic beats work well enough with one another. The tone of the narrative, in this way, also stays consistent, with the author never straying too far from that sort of humor. 

But that tone operates on a surface level; that is to say, it coats the surface of the story, but does nothing for what lies underneath, and that’s because there really isn’t anything there. Comedy makes up for what might be the heart of the story, if there is yet to be a heart.

Let me explain further by backing up a bit. The premise here is an interesting one: Sonata dies and wakes up in hell. The progression has potential. Sonata and Satan talk. Satan loses it over Sonata being Sonata. Cool. But then there’s this shift to Sonata defeating Satan which seems to serve only the comedic element of the story and not much in terms of believability or authenticity (authenticity within the narrative; of course it isn’t real that Sonata fights Satan, but the story doesn’t exactly sell that event to me). 

Furthermore, the conflict of this chapter is the fight between Sonata and Satan, correct? But that’s just kind of shoved in. How it starts, with Sonata questioning Satan’s immortality, feels contrived and forced, as though the author couldn’t think of a way for Sonata to get out of his clutches. (Speaking of clutches, there’s a weirdly sexual undertone in some of what Satan says and does, and I can’t decide if that was intentional or not.) 

Here’s what I mean. By examining the section, we’ll begin to see a few things:

Satan lifted his arms, as a pillar rose underneath the girl. But to his surprise, she quickly dodged, jumping over the pillar, rolling across the reddish mounds, and brushed the dust off her pink skirt.

That’s as action-packed as we get in this chapter. A few paragraphs later, and Sonata is challenging Satan verbally. I’m not sure I can buy that even this parodic version of the fallen angel himself would fail at killing an already-dead ex-Siren teenager. Even if I could buy that, the natural question is how come Sonata can get away with it?

These things happen without much effort put into demonstrating how Sonata, as the main character, tries to get them to happen; her efforts are entirely off-screen, and yes, while that works somewhat for the comedic aspect, it begs the question as to if we can even take this moment as seriously as some of the other characters are.

I understand, however, that many of these issues have more to do with the fact that there is only one chapter involved. As such, it makes more sense to assume that such concerns will be addressed the more the story is developed. My main point here is that for the comedy to stick, there has to be something rooted in the narrative which suggests the comedy is natural. As it’s used here, though, the comedy is just a tagged-on item; it’s there to make up for the material, meaning there isn’t much material to begin with. 

Score - 6 / 10

Characterization

Well, Sonata is our main character, and based on previous experience with this author, I think she writes the Siren sisters fairly well. The same can be said here, in that Sonata’s natural air-headed nature and lovable silliness comes out in droves. 

And then… that’s kind of it for her. 

Granted, Sonata never got much characterization in Equestria Girls, so there’s a certain credibility to utilizing her most iconic lines and tones as her most dominant characteristics. But sometimes, how she is portrayed in this story clashes with other places therein. Mostly this is because of the dialogue.

“Of course, silly! And I really must apologize. You seem really cute, but uh… I’m not really into the whole, how do you put it… Torture role-play thing… That’s more of Adagio’s shtick. I think there’s been a slight misunderstanding; if you could kindly point me to the exit, we can forget this whole thing ever happened.”

A bit risque? Yes, but it certainly sounds like Sonata. She’s not too serious, she doesn’t put on any airs, she doesn’t seem to be overly polite or orderly or mannerly or whatever. She’s Sonata, here, and that makes sense.

Two paragraphs later, though, and we have this next quote:

“If I may say, this is the lamest prank ever pulled on me,”

Sonata starting off with such a polite phrase—“If I may say”—that just sounds wrong. There’s an element of forced “high society” at play here that I’m not sure was intentional. All it really does is conflict with what has already been established as Sonata’s character. 

Harder still is trying to grasp what Satan’s character is supposed to be. Obviously, this isn’t the Biblical Satan. It’s a fan interpretation, and one that moves about freely in the realm of the imagination. However, it was still hard to pinpoint exactly who he was supposed to be. On one hand, you have a demon exerting its intimidating factor:

“Welcome, Sonata… Welcome to Hell… The place where your eternal damnation… Awaits…”

On the other hand, you have someone who takes himself too seriously, to the direct point of parody:

“I’ve been called many names… Lucifer… Beelzebub… Mephistopheles… But you can call me… Satan!!!”

And on yet another hand, you have someone who’s little more than a disgruntled, jaded businessman, tired of a teenager’s antics:

“No, no, no, no, no, no… No! This is not like your filthy mortal brothels. This is hell, where the damned are prisoners of their own sins! I am the REAL Devil, every nightmare you’ve ever had… Your worst fears come true…”

Can all three characterizations work together? Maybe. But for the sake of ease I would recommend trying to figure out which one is the dominant one, and therefore which one can be Satan’s (admittedly brief) most pervasive trait. 

More or less, the issues I have with the characterization is that there isn’t enough time spent dwelling on the authenticity of the portrayal. Contradictions abound in manner and stance, which work against the comedic effect by taking me out of the narrative. Cohesion is, actually, an element of comedy, in that the ability to coincide disparate elements together, however strange, creates an additional, resonating effect to accentuate the initial comedic “punch.” Characterization of a comedic figure, then, would follow much the same suit. 

Score - 5 / 10 

Syntax

It is an unfortunate occurrence that I have to be so critical of the writing here, past the issues of plot and characterization. Just from a fundamentally mechanical level, speaking in terms of composition, form, grammar, etc., the story is a mess. 

As an example, I turn to the first paragraph:

Darkness… That was all the young siren could see at first. She begins to open her eyes, very slowly. At first, she sees nothing… No other color except red, so brightly lit that it almost hurt her eyes. She shut her eyelids, drawing back into the darkness. Eventually, she opens her eyes completely… And before the siren’s eyes there was fire emanating along the ragged pathways surrounding her.

• There’s a tense change in the second sentence: from “was”, past tense, to “begins,” present tense. This change continues into the third, with “sees”. 
• The subordinate clause, “so brightly lit that it almost hurt her eyes,” is an odd choice of words. Usually we're drawing attention to how much more of a characteristic something is (in this case, the fact that the color is so brightly lit), we will then say what it does in a surprising way. In this case it would be that the color red did hurt her eyes. We’d only use the qualifier “almost” if we wanted to draw attention to the opposite or make an understatement. 
• We have another tense change, from “hurt”, present tense, to “shut”, past tense. 
• Another tense change, from “shut”, past tense, to “opens”, present tense. 
• Yet another tense change, from “opens”, present tense, to “was”, past tense. 
• We also have several abuses of the ellipses. It works in the first sentence, but not so much in the third or fifth. 

These examples occur everywhere in the story, to the point that it became concerning how much I seemed to be finding. To that end, I decided I would pull the text into a separate document to annotate it and quantify that particular data. I wanted to highlight four key areas of improper technique: tense changes, misspellings, punctuation or general grammatical errors, and awkward syntax/obscure meaning. 

At the end of that annotative document, I counted off how many of each area I found. They were the following:
Tense Changes - 40 (most common occurrences: shifting from past tense to present tense, back to past)
Misspellings - 7
Punctuation / General Grammatical Errors: 45 (most common occurrences: comma splices, comma misuse, or lack of commas)
Awkward Syntax / Obscure Meaning: 11

In the document itself, every page was filled with these errors. There was no one page without them. 

The facts, then, that something was glaring as a tense change showed up not once, not twice, but 40 times, and that something as important as proper punctuation and grammar kept being violated 45 times, are incredibly concerning. And looking back at the quote above, the fact that those tense changes weren’t even seen from the start, suggests that whatever glance was taken over this piece, it wasn’t enough. 

None of this made the story unreadable, but it did make it a hassle to get through. One or two errors will inevitably slip under everyone’s radar. A dozen or so, well, that’s what editors help you with. 103 errors? That’s concerning for the first chapter. 

I note that in the description, which has its own share of mistakes as previously mentioned, there is an editor listed. I would recommend getting more than one, then, if only to get a third pair of eyes that would catch these mistakes. They are common enough that over time they would be caught instinctively and corrected before publication, but one must be trained to look for them first. Perhaps use a tool like Grammarly if you can’t find another editor, or the Hemingway app which does partial corrections. Consider also reading The Elements of Style, a handbook that goes over the basics of convention - which every writer should know by heart before they decide to break convention for sake of style. 

Score - 4 / 10

Final Score - (6 + 5 + 4) / 3 = 5 / 10

Final Thoughts

I do wish I could grant a little more leeway with this story, for despite its many faults, I enjoyed the first chapter. But those faults proved too glaring to ignore, and thus negatively impacted my rating of the story. Several steps would need to be taken to adjust it, the first being a better understanding of sentence mechanics so that issues of tense changes and punctuation don’t become commonplace. 

Comedy is this story’s selling point, so if the author does decide to continue it, that should be the default tone of the story. How you make it compelling will be in the moments where the comedy doesn’t shine through, where a more subdued stance might be taken. Adding more chapters will also have the benefit of letting you improve—quantifiably—on the issues of plot and characterization, by having literally more words to work with. 

My final point to the author: I reiterate the suggestion: hire a second editor. Having another set of eyes will undoubtedly help you, both in regards to this story, and to future stories.