6-Star Reviews Part 28: The Logical Option

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I really stink at contract bridge.

Just thought you all should know that.  I've been playing for more than a year, but I'm still just awful.  If there was such a thing as strip contract bridge, I'd be typing this naked.  Luckily, my slightly less incompetent partner was a good sport about all the games I cost us over the weekend.

Anyway, my review of ADriftingThought's The Logical Option, which has nothing whatsoever to do with any sort of card game, is after the break.

Impressions before reading:  Well, it's very long.  That's an impression, right?

Unfortunately, the first impressions I'm getting (other than length) are mostly not the good kind.  The main character's an OC with amnesia who's the key to Equestria's future?  There are just too many ways for that to be done poorly.  The star rating (which must have been at least 4.9 at some point, or this wouldn't have been 6-starred) is all the way down to 4.4?  That's not even a 5-star story by EqD's measure--another warning sign.  And with both of those observations in mind, Sethisto's note that, "This one has apparently been pretty popular on ponychan for a while, so I skipped the pre-readers," starts to look pretty ominous.  We'll see, but I've got a bad feeling about this story.

Zero-ish spoiler summary:  A group of ponies mapping the Everfree discover a strange colt who's lost his memories.  Amnesia is rare enough by itself, but as time passes more and more inexplicable events begin to pile up around the stranger.


Thoughts after reading:  Well, the first thing I noticed when I opened chapter one was the author's note up top.  Apparently, he's made some major revisions (as of late November, so this is fairly recent) in preparation for an upcoming sequel.  I'm not a big fan of making significant changes to a story once it's been published--I think it's disrespectful to those who've already read your work, to tell them that they need to go re-read it if they don't want to be left behind by future chapters/sequels/updates.  But hey, if Tolkien can do it with The Hobbit, who am I to tell ADriftingThought that he can't?  That doesn't mean I have to like it, though.  Anyway, what I've read and reviewed is this "updated" version.

By in large, the story is decently edited.  Most of the mistakes I found probably crept in during the most recent revisions ("What took her less than five minutes for her to traverse," and "you already know all of this already," look to me like the kind of mistakes that come from rearranging a sentence and then forgetting to delete the extraneous words), and they were, for the most part, not too distracting.  There are many commas scattered throughout the text in places where they really aren't needed, but it never devolves into the wholesale comma abuse that renders so many amateur writers' stories unreadable.

The narration tends toward dullness.  I think this quote highlights one of the major problems: over-wording.  "Sigmund recoiled back a little bit, attempting to avoid the sparkling dust. However, shortly after the gas left the dragon’s mouth, it quickly materialized into something. Once the glow died down, Sigmund could see that the ‘something’ was a scroll."  Here's how I'd rewrite something like that, using the author's words as much as possible: "Sigmund recoiled, attempting to avoid the sparkling dust.  However, after the gas left the dragon's mouth it quickly materialized into something.  Once the glow died down, Sigmund could see that it was a scroll."  I've conveyed all the same information there, but in about half the words.  This isn't to say that the only appropriate way to write a sentence is the most direct one, but the story suffers from overly wordy narration throughout.  It's not that there's too much detail, it just takes the author too many words to say what he wants to.  The overall effect is that the writing feels kind of boring.

Character voicing was extremely variable.  Big Mac and Celestia both stuck out as having a number of lines which didn't read like something their characters might have said, though some of the other ponies (Rarity comes to mind) were pretty good.  Overall, the dialogue was less consistent in quality than the narration, but was somewhat better on the whole.

The plot through the first eight chapters is handled with workmanlike skill: not especially awe-inspiring, but adequate.  There's some very heavy-handed shipping setup in the first chapter, and everything involving the manticore came straight out of left field, but there was nothing so out-of-place that I couldn't go along with it.  Stories involving amnesia are always a hard sell, if only because memory loss is such a convenient crutch for writers that it's been done to death in every medium.  Still, there's enough going on with Sigmund the mind-wiped earth pony that I found myself mildly interested in what was going to happen, cliche plot device and dull narration notwithstanding.

Then came the last three chapters.  If I may paraphrase a famous author (and I wish for the life of me I could remember which famous author), any writer can shock his readers; surprising them is something different.  A surprise must be impossible to see before it is revealed, but seem inevitable in hindsight.  The key takeaway here is that you have to set up your big reveals; otherwise, you're just yanking plot twists out of thin air.

The end of the story makes just as little sense to me in hindsight as it did when I first read it.  I honestly have no idea where the reveal came from, as it completely upended everything we (the readers) thought we knew about not just the major characters, but the land of Equestria itself.  And when there's no setup for such a reveal...well, it comes across as a gigantic asspull.  There's no sense of satisfaction, no relief that the moment of revelation has finally come.  Instead, I was left scratching my head and asking myself, "Did I really just read that?"

Equally frustrating is the fact that several crucial points are never explained.  I can't figure out how to express that frustration clearly without resorting to massive spoilers, so I'll hide my thoughts on this matter behind the tag:

How can Sigmund do his psychic destroy-your-mind thing?  Why can he do it?  As far as I can tell, the answer seems to be that nobody knows, and nobody particularly cares.  He simply passes it off as something that "just happened" while he was frozen, and everyone seems to think that's good enough.  What, he's the most powerful creature on the planet and nobody even cares how he got that way?

And what's with Celestia banishing him?  How does that protect her in any way?  He's already shown he's willing to use his powers to get his way (he threatened to destroy the minds of her two guards just because she might not have agreed to let him tell his friends about his past, for goodness sake!  This guy's a psychopath!), and now you're just going to turn him loose on an unsuspecting world and hope for the best?  He can destroy your mind just by looking at you.  You'll never be "safe" from him, because there's no reason he can't waltz right back into Equestria and take over by mind-raping anyone who stands in his way.

And why aren't Twilight and co. more disturbed by this guy?  He casually threatens to permanently psychically destroy two guards, apparently just for kicks and giggles.  I mean, he wasn't in any personal danger, and if it was so important that he talk to the girls first, he could have just put everyone else to sleep.  Celestia's right: this guy is the gravest danger Equestria's ever faced, because he has the power to kill anyone he doesn't agree with, and despite the Gatekeeper's alleged intentions, his sense of morality clearly doesn't extend to not destroying ponies' minds when he doesn't get what he wants.  If I were Twilight, I'd be downright terrified of the destructive potential he represents, and his obvious willingness to use it.

And although it almost seems like a minor point compared to the above: Equestria is Earth?  That brings up so many problems, exactly none of which are ever satisfactorily addressed.  I know, Sigmund's on a mission to find the answers, but you can't just drop a bombshell like that in the reader's lap and shrug it off.  You've just invalidated most of what we know about Equestria.  You can't get away with telling us "nobody knows."  Anyone willing to read a story that far deserves a better answer.

So there's that.  I wasn't expecting anything wonderful from the last three chapters, but what I got just made me shake my head in stunned disbelief.  It was almost like the ending to an entirely different fanfic was tacked onto the end.  Not a good way to close a story.

Star rating:  ★☆☆☆☆ (what does this mean?)

I hate to use derogatory language, because it's so easy for it to come across as an attack on the author rather than a statement about the work itself.  But the end of this story was monumentally stupid.  There's no other way to describe it.

Recommendation:  I don't recommend this one.  There's nothing in the style or execution that makes it particularly noteworthy, and the only things that stand out about the overall story are negative.

Next time:  Tomorrow, by Jera