Oh boy, what has appeared in my review box? 

EReflections

• MLP: FiM
• Romance
• Sad
• Slice of Life

Reflections show you what you most want, but what you envisioned cannot always be seen. Dinky learns this the hard way.

• Other
• Dinky Hooves

Emotion Nexus · 1.4k words  ·  119  28 · 1.7k views

Potentially sensitive subject today, so here's a quick obligatory disclaimer. I don’t have any personal experience with the themes in this story, nor am I familiar with anyone who is. 

Also, sorry for the long wait on this review, haha

After a trip out to buy groceries, Dinky finds his fears and insecurities about his gender identity catching up to him, and has an emotional breakdown. His marefriend, Lily Longsocks, helps him through it.

Written for the Pride and Positivity 2020 event, and based on the Aero-Replies comic / askblog.

Also yes, I will be referring to Dinky as ‘he’ in this review. Seems appropriate.

Okay, starting off, it’s an event fic. I’m not too sure whether there’s additional rules but so far as I can tell from reading the event rules the constraints on the story are that it has to have a happy ending, and it has to showcase some pride-positive topic, like race, gender, you get the idea.

Also, I’ll try my best to approach this as a regular story, without going too deep into the themes in the story. I’m not too confident in commenting on them, anyway.

Right, I think that covers all the administrative stuff? So let’s go ahead with the review.

Review

This is, at its core, a very simple fic. In fact, that short summary up there pretty much covers the whole story — this is in essence, a “day in the life” story where Dinky has a gender identity crisis and receives comfort from Lily. Simple, cute, and pretty effective, for what it is.

What did I think about it? Well… long story short, the first half didn’t really work for me, which made the second half less enjoyable, though it was well-written and I actually did like it on subsequent reads. For those who have read the story, I’m defining the “first half” as everything before Lily enters the story, and the second as everything after that.

In essence, my problem is that the story really speeds through the first half. In this half, Dinky moves through several locations, but we really only mostly get to see inside his head. There’s a minimal interaction with the outside world, and what interaction does happen, Dinky barely seems to react to.

“Here you go, Miss.”

Miss. I’ve always hated that word. Well, not always. It didn’t really bother me when I was younger, but that was then.

I barely heard the stallion at the front desk, trying to ignore his annoying attempts to flirt with me.

The effect is that the story in this half starts to feel more like Dinky telling us about his situation over the backdrop of him buying groceries. In this context, the little conversations he suffers through feel less like the latest in a long chain of events, and more like convenient exposition starters. 

This feels like the worst of both worlds to me. If the emphasis is on his exposition of his situation, the brief times when Dinky interacts with the outside world serve as distraction more than anything. If the emphasis is on how he’s feeling lost and misunderstood because of others’ treatment of him, the exposition is so ubiquitous that how Dinky feels is lost in it.

It also affected the second half of the story for me, because it didn’t seem to me that Dinky was in a bad enough state emotionally for him to start crying in the middle of his room while his roommate was around. It felt like the emotional breakdown didn’t really have enough backing it up, in other words.

Anyway, that’s enough negative stuff, because the second half of the story is really quite well done! Lily and Dinky have a very cute relationship, and I loved reading this part, independent of any problems I might have with the first. It’s very much the focal scene of this story, and it shows through quite well. It’s just very heartwarming overall to read Lily accepting Dinky’s decisions and helping him through it, culminating with Dinky’s epiphany about his gender at the end.

Though, I’d be remiss to not mention a small issue? It feels like the characters here are all very generic. Dinky is the trans character and Lily is his accepting, encouraging marefriend. There’s little to distinguish them, specifically, as Dinky and Lily, as noted by Winston’s comment on the story. I get that it’s a short story and a contest entry, but these characters feel just a little too… non-specific? I’unno

And, lastly, there are quite a few tense errors scattered around here and there. I suspect it’s a consequence of the first-person perspective that makes some sentences’ tenses confusing, but there are definitely some sentences which should be in past tense that are in present tense.

Anyways!

Final score: 6/10

A simple, cute story with a solid ending but a very shaky beginning. It’s brought down because of its somewhat cookie-cutter characterisations, but I can forgive it, for being such a short story.

Short review, but short story as well. Again, sorry for the wait on this!

Hay, I read that one. It was one of the stories that motivated me to start writing my own stories.

So apart from being a bit on the short and simple side (speedwrites generally are) it did what it was supposed to do, which was support and inspire someone.

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Oh, this was a speed write? Didn't know that, hmm

And hey, that's pretty great! I've been seeing this story mentioned here and there recently, and yeah, it seems it inspired quite a few people

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I think so, might misremember. Think Quills and Sofas ran a trans event.

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I thought the Pride and Positivity event had nothing to do with Quills and Sofas…

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You may be right. It's how I got started writing for them anyway.

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I ran an event for Q&S Speedwriting during pride, aiming to generate more stories for the Pride and Positivity event specifically. SigmasonicX is a real hoopy frood and I love helping out for a good cause.