>>42290500
>la creatura
It’s a oneshot, alright. I like it, and it’s easy to like. It helps a lot that it’s being the best oneshot it can be. Mono likes fairy tales, and I’m reminded of Circles in how by-the-numbers this story is. Of course, Circles was great and following a well-defined path gives you the opportunity to refine it, and the story can be great if you do, which Mono did.
Well, the epilogue wasn’t part of the fairy tale structure, it just leads to the actual story to talk about.
>The Knight
This is good stuff. I can see why Mono would say this is the best story she’s written, although I think it’s more of a “trades blows” with TEL than simply the best. The Knight is outstandingly compact, in the same way that Apotheosis is, while rendering a romance in the same way that I think OtEM always intended to, but couldn’t.
To make further comparisons to TEL, that story is clearly advantaged in the AU it lives in, this one doesn’t have the word count budget to compete. With the locations visited, it falls towards a generic medieval fantasy setting, but I think not all the way out of FiM. While I didn’t really mind it that much here, Rarity and Twilight are also far more clearly themselves in TEL, unlike the way they are molded to fit in this AU setting.
As for the story itself, my only real complaint is that the vampirism is weak. Rarity doesn’t care much about feeding, and it mostly has the opposite effect of what it should to bring in proper vampire themes. The whole “intent” thing about it manifests as very arbitrary magical effects. The nature of it as a plot device is much more transparent than the other half of the prompt (TwiGuard).
That being said,
>>42290699
>I think Twilight's blindness was portrayed very well; it was one of the highlights of the fic.
This is completely true, so I can't argue with the results.
>>42290578
Yes to all of this. The ideas put into this story are very well rendered, and the low word count to get the result is amazing.