Post of the Day #139

@Steve: I read the first three chapters. The prose itself is pretty good; probably better than what I could churn out unless I spent a lot of time tweaking it. Any problems I see so far are minor; the gore strikes me as a bit gratuitous, and I think LP is a little bit too competent at dealing with the outside world for somepony who was raised underground. I'm also curious as to what her exact goal is, because she seems to be just sort of aimlessly wandering around town at the moment, although I'm well aware that I've barely scratched the surface, and the actual plot will kick in soon. All in all, it's pretty good, but given that my main issue with the fic in general is how it handles canon stuff, which there hasn't been much of so far, I can't really make a judgement.

The only thing that really rubbed me the wrong was is that I think the description of the library was overkill; the content itself doesn't bug me too much, but I felt like the purpose of the scene was basically to see how much the library could be desecrated by turning it into a hellhole. I'm guessing the effect was supposed to be to impress on the reader how nasty the world had become, but it came across more like a deliberate effort to gross out the reader. It probably doesn't help that I think that implication is way more effective than detailed description; I probably would have found it creepier if more had been left to the imagination. Some bits ran a bit foul of Show, Don't Tell. I don't need the narration to explicitly tell me that the pony was raped and tortured. Just hint at it and let the reader fill in the blanks.

But overall I was pleasantly surprised.