This story accelerates into "We didn't do the book things!" and lots of screeching very quickly rather than escalating, but I can't say that bothered me.

A note: the dialogue tags are overwritten for the majority of the fic, but... but, but, but. In this exchange:

“Do you know what this means?”

“Absolutely nothing!” insisted Rarity.

“CUTIE MARK CRUSADERS WEDDING PLANNERS!”

“WEDDING?!” screeched Rarity.

“Oooh, when’s the date?” asked Sweetie Belle.

“There is no date!” shouted Rarity.

They really work for me here (comedy rule of three, maybe), although shouted should come before screeched for full escalation: insisted -> shouted -> screeched. They put a good, fun image of Rarity's despair into my head.

This is strong, well-written, effective. Lovely execution. I guess I could try to criticise, but I feel like I'd be nitpicking pointlessly. I didn't find it too "safe", I enjoyed it a lot, and I remembered it clearly upon reading the title and knew I wanted to read it again. Thanks for writing it.

I liked the part where the CMC were hanging out and then 'defending' themselves to Applejack, but I think it fell apart when you had to justify why they needed to defend themselves in the first place. Then the premise becomes confusing. Ponies fishing leads to drinking and overspending and gas? And then AJ lies about something? What? Why? It feels like at that point the answer is 'because prompt', and I'm sorry I feel like that, but the more I think about it the more contrived it all seems.

I'm lost on that last 'joke', actually, which is unfortunate, but overall I enjoyed this, and I definitely remembered it from the title. It reads like a comedy article, though, so I think you should get rid of those two opening sentences. This doesn't feel like a speech at all.

I also feel very strongly that this should have been a Mayor Mare story rather than a Twilight Sparkle story. Haze does make a good point about committing fully to the absurdity to bypass the fact that this doesn't gel with canon!Twilight characterisation, and that could work, but Mayor Mare just feels like a shoe-in for the story, without all that much tweaking needed either.

I could remember this one from the title, so I agree with Posh on this: Blueblood seems like exactly this sort of pony. I liked seeing him act like a prat and then get his comeuppance, even if the "punchline" is too weak (long) to punch properly. I'll go ahead and educate myself about the real-life "selling the bridge" con, too, thanks to this story.

Unlike Misternick all I could remember about this one was "Oh this one has a protagonist whose name is White something right?"

I guess I never got on board with the Cupcakes setting in the first place but mostly when I read this I have a hard time thinking of it as a pony story. Bud's Buds? TV adverts? Kebabs? Gotta agree with Posh's comment on that.

I would have been more sold on this though if the protagonist wasn't so inconsistent with her moods as well. If you're asking me to suspend my disbelief over this setting then please commit to the crazy! Don't smile internally, White Vase, grin like a mad pony! Struggle to contain yourself! Call the bloody sight glorious rather than grisly, or maybe gloriously grisly! Make me feel like you barely got away with it and you're giddy with it. I'd have much more fun with it that way.

I read all of my ballot a couple of days ago so I'll be saying whether I could remember the story from the title alone in my reviews, simply because this round I can tell you that. I couldn't remember this one when I read the title. A major reason for that is that I think it's mistitled.

Considering the title is "Glass", there are too many other motifs. The water in the opening and the idea of waking up from a dream at the end get way more emphasis simply because they are at the start and the end. The image of glass receives a few mentions, sure, but only once we're halfway through, and to boot it's surrounded by other images (songs, nightmares). I don't mean that you have to push glass on me as a metaphor in every sentence to make it worthy of being the title, but I just don't think it's important enough as is.

I agree with the sentiment that framing this around an actual event would give it more impact. Since being joyful is the nice dream that Celestia keeps waking up from, why not show us Celestia in a dream that's nice but also increasingly filled with manifestations of how empty she finds it? She'd have something to react to, and we as readers could infer more.

Well, this prompt isn't doing anything for me, but we'll see how the day goes. However, I enjoyed reviewing during the last minific round, so see you all in the comments even if I don't submit an actual entry!

I have a lot of enthusiasm for this purely because of the content. I want to know much more about this relationship.

Ultimately I feel like it's hindered more than helped by being in script format. I really like your dialogue, which is great because dialogue has to be powerful and emotive in a script. But the final monologue... it has too much to explain in too little time and it doesn't succeed for me. It doesn't explain why they did it, and it's too long to ring true as a real, in the moment emotional confession (unless Sandra's a writer, I guess; my real life experience is that writers are the only people who'll even think to say something like, 'I feel like a leaf on a hurricane' out loud. ymmv).

I don't have suggestions for improving this that others above haven't already said, but I'd love to see it again if you choose to take this one further.

Cut away the bits that don't read like a newspaper article, as Andrew suggested, and you could probably fit in segments about the shepherds and about Herod a dictator wanting to murder all the baby boys as well.

I liked it, even if it was on the nose. But then again, I'm pretty sure I'm the right audience for this one.

Even if you had ignored A Song of Ice and Fire (it's not even finished, why would it be included on a show like this?) and picked a book that could be summarised in just one word, to end the story with a greater punch, you'd still have the problem of relying on the reader to know the book. Because of that I think this has to go a bit further and show the reaction of Laura's fellow contestants and/or the host, as Zaid said, and end on a different short and sweet note.

All I can do is agree with Andrew's review.

It'll be in the middle of my slate because like everyone's said, this is clever and cute, but I don't get a sense of an over-arching link between the literature you chose.

I think I would've preferred this if it was about actual hiding-under-the-bed, Monsters Inc monsters. I don't care for the subject matter, to be honest, but none of this hits the mark emotionally. It feels fragmented, jumping between topics: Abdel's story, philosophising on obsession the protagonist's first kill, Abdel's suicide, random sentimentality over music. If he's regretting his choices, why is it a relief that there's no way out? Is he in so much pain that his mind is flitting about between different thoughts, as if in death throes?

I'm just not sure what this is trying to say, and sometimes I like that in a story, but I'm sorry to say it didn't work for me here at all.

Mono and Zaid raise good points, but I admit I got completely hung up on a 'technical' issue in this story. In several instances you have the same character continue talking but place their dialogue on a new line without providing a reason to do so, e.g:

“Lucky guess.”

“So, what, you think you’re going to get away with cheating on a test like that?

This pulled me out of the story because I had to reread it to understand what's happening. I expect the next line of dialogue to be from George because it's written without dialogue tags as an exchange, but it's actually his father continuing to talk. This is what happens in the other instances too. In this example at least you just need the extra words that explain he paused before continuing (I assume that's what you meant) so as not to confuse me, but I couldn't figure out a reason for the line-split for the other instances.

By the way, the following is notably contradictory.

The car's noisy yet silent atmosphere began to settle.

Overall, I think this needs cleaning up and another few editing runs. I think cutting down the existing conversation dialogue to create more room for more conflict would also be of benefit, because at present George's dad says George is right at the end simply because we've run out of room. But there's more to this argument, even if it's just tension manifesting as frustrated, disagreeable silence.

I thought the character voicing and dialogue was strong in this one! It wraps up too neatly with Hunter suddenly feeling guilty just because Ylva starts doing the werewolf equivalent of crying (come on Ylva, what did you think would happen?), but that's my only quibble with this and a pretty minor one tbh.

I don't think you want three paragraphs of dull set-up at the beginning of an action piece. It'd be a stronger opening to start with, "Car!" and sprinkle in a tiny amount of set-up alongside the shooting / work the first three paragraphs in with the action (I don't think you need most of that information though). I don't have anything else to add that others haven't already said, so I'll just add my agreement with the above comments.

I feel if the theme of body language was emphasised throughout (e.g. human body language instead of auditory information in the final section) and the first and final sections were from a human perspective rather than a cat's, or instead if the whole story was from the cat's perspective, the pieces of this story might fit together more effectively. As it is, it feels disjointed.

I found this solid and entertaining. For me the I-persona not being technical was a nice touch, I have this habit of glazing over as soon as I read something like 'compression algorithm' so I'm glad you kept it reasonably short, although since it's basically hand-waved away as 'latest in AI tech' I wonder how much technical explanation the story needs in the first place.

The final punchline didn't work for me the first time because I didn't know what it meant. I actually thought it was going to be “A smell of petroleum prevails throughout,” or "42" or something. That's not your fault, but I guess a word that isn't slang but has the same meaning would avoid that issue. Anyway, I did chuckle once I'd found out what it meant, so yeah, nice entry.

I thought it was a divine 'end of the world' scenario rather than a suicide bomber so I agree that clarity on the details would be helpful in this story.

I liked the back-and-forth between the two characters though. Pretty solid entry imo.

guys, why

I enjoyed this.

What It's Worth: Retrospective

I agree with all the criticisms levelled at this one, so I'd just like to thank everyone for commenting and pointing out where I could improve. I enjoyed writing this, but once again I tried to cram an idea into 750 words that needed more space to breathe, and characterisation and clarity suffered as a result. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson by now!

Thanks again, all.

Aside from a grin at a couple of the jokes with Vinyl, the lol!random nature of the story didn't do anything for me on first read. The random meta references in the middle really didn't endear me to the story either. Then bang!--it ended.

But I warmed up to this one. The pacing is fast and even at the first read it kept me going without skipping anything, and the jokes come thick and fast: Iron Will's technicality rhyme is spot on, and Luna sashaying is a great image.

It still screeches to halt on account of the length restriction, and it doesn't end on a strong punchline. I still don't like the meta references either. But I think I misjudged this one first time round. Nice work.

Like >>Not_A_Hat said, the sensory description in this is wonderful. However, I never felt remotely unnerved while Rainbow was looking around, and I never expected a twist, so as long as that was your intention, we're good. If you did intend to creep me out, though, it didn't work, and I can pin the main reason for that on the title. It clearly implies nothing bad is going to happen.

It might be a little bit creepy though that the room/Starlight is casting a spell on Dash to make her read/study...

Oh. Oh. If that was the intention, author, touché. I just got it.

Moving further up the slate, on that basis.