FimFiction Link - Short ID: 98069/chasing-winter
Published: Apr '13 — Jul '13
The best way to summarize Chasing Winter is this: In chapter eight of this Trixie-focused story, the author got the color of her magic wrong. Commenters immediately pointed it out and he changed it. About five chapters after that, he proceeded to make the same mistake again. Twice.
This is the level of consistency you can expect from all aspects of Chasing Winter. Being the charitable anon that I am, I tried to pay as little attention to the writing as possible but there's only so much one can do when faced with sentences like these:
>I’d like to ask permission on behalf of my friend to use another spell on you that would permanently grant you an understanding of your language.
>She just fell over. I guess she must have had a heart after all since it seems to have stopped suddenly.
I am not cherrypicking, this is what the fic is like. Don't get me started on longer sentences that I couldn't fit in this post; while not all of them are necessarily wrong, many are so ugly that they make Twist look pretty.
And while I'm on topic of twists, let's talk about the plot. It was extremely underwhelming for me. There is, indeed, a major twist about halfway through the fic but in the end all it basically comes down to inserting a short a short OC story into the fic, with little effort spent on trying to tie it to the rest of the story.
A quarter of the wordcount is spent on an epilogue. It's not the worst epilogue -- Trixie does something in it -- but 75% of those four chapters are an unnecessary filler.
An even bigger issue is that most characters and arcs go absolutely nowhere. High Life -- an OC unicorn of Blueblood family -- is the prime example of this. He's introduced in a negative light, begins becoming somewhat sympathetic as Trixie's rival and then randomly attempts rape and disappears from the story only to come back in the final confrontation and do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING before running away for good. What was even the point? That's a question I found myself asking a lot while reading.
There's another problem with the story: an incurable case of plot conveniences. It starts out small, barely noticeable even, but it becomes worse with every chapter. By ch.12, the characters are semi-regularly saying things they couldn't have known just to push the plot forward. Not that there's any reason *to* push it forward. Notably, this fic features one of the worst final battle scenes I've ever seen. It also fails to maintain almost any tension, leading to what is overall a rather uninteresting read. For anyone reading this review at a later date, this was a /fimfic/ book club fic and several anons couldn't bring themselves to even finish it.
In summary, I don't mean to imply that there's nothing to like about this fic. The worldbuilding, for one, is rather good. It's just that literally everything else ranges from mediocre to less-than-mediocre. I can't really recommend it.
That makes it a 3/10? 4/10? A boring 4/10.