FimFiction Link - Short ID: 450660/trouble-in-tiatarta
Published: Oct '19 — Jan '20
The parts of this story that I enjoyed the most were the unraveling of the mystery around the middle and the big set piece fight scenes closer to the end. It was very engrossing to read about Smolder, Ocellus and Chrysalis each attack the mystery of who is poisoning nu-lings in the out-of-the-way resort town of Tiatarta,. After it all blew up in their faces, the brawl between the involved parties was very well done. I would definitely point to this fic in the future for a template, especially since it manages to weave multiple concurrent brawls together and keep them very interesting with shapeshifting, flight and other magic uses.
The romance is fine. It could have been bad, since it relies on a potentially stupid characterization of Smolder that amps up draconic greed into an ever-present, overbearing perception filter and hinges on her conflict over loving Ocellus as conflation with the desire to own Ocellus as property. One of the main things keeping a lid on this is that any delving into this shallow concept is quickly cut short before the story goes back to its adventure and mystery base.
The main things that drag this story down, though, are pretty bad. For one, it starts off with a bunch of unnecessary student 6 bullshit. You can skip the first two chapters to solve that, the setting and required characterization for Smolder and Ocellus is repeated in chapters 3, after which the story actually starts with the cast’s arrival in Tiatarta. Related to this, you can skip the prequel, since again everything important from it is repeated multiple times in this fic.
Worst of all is technical failure. It has a similar amount of typos to Twilight’s Plan, and they are distracting. The author also struggles with homophones, and there are several sentences that are just plain bad fanfiction. The beeg tweest sucked a lot of the fun in the story when Smolder and Ocellus are separated, and it turned into a very adventure when their interactions stopped propping the fic up.
Finally, and especially unfortunate, the story uses the worse Chrysalis from the show. Not the proud and able queen of the changelings, but the insanely obsessed and wrathful Chrysalis, broken from having lost to multiple Deus ex Harmony events. I appreciate the arc the story takes her on, regaining her center, but she’s the butt of too many jokes, far too diminished a character overall to be an enjoyable read.