FimFiction Link - Short ID: 238368/friendship-is-mind-control
Published: Dec '14 — Jan '16
Alright, time to review FiMC. Wrote this in a little bit of a rush, but I think I've kept it spoiler free.
The thing that makes this fic stand out from the rest of the smut is Twilight's internal ethical debates. They not only break up the smut, they also seem to be by far what the author is best at. When they're writing anything that is neither that nor smut, the quality drops very noticeably. For example, I've forgotten most of the break-in chapters, the final battle, and the chapters where Luna, Trixie, and Twilight comes to their senses. The highlights of the fic are when Twilight is either called out on her moral missteps or facing their consequences, e.g. Luna's introduction, the bits after Party of Six (where I started to lose sleep to the fic), and the "I expected to see Rarity before Applejack" sequence.
As for where the fic goes wrong, some bits come immediately to mind. Until the sequel, which has consistently long chapters, the chapter lengths are very inconsistent. Party of Six is a specific bad case, which has them spend about 6,000 words getting dressed. That chapter ends up being hot only through sheer quantity of porn. And speaking of length, I'm not sure where this fic gets its length from. The chapters occasionally feel a little bit long, but that doesn't explain why the content of the fic feels like it would fit in half as many words.
Another fault is that the fic is a very different beast after Party of Six than it is before. For a while after that point, the smut becomes a minor detail. The remaining smut therefore serves to annoy those that are reading for what becomes the fic's focus after that point and the lack of smut annoys those who were reading for the smut. As strongly justified as it is in the story, the author wrote themself in to a corner. The earlier chapters got the balance better, because you went in expecting smut and got smut with a great little extra. A similar fault that appears towards the end of the original (I can't yet speak for the sequel), is that Twilight starts to try harder to be more ethical with her mind control and therefore uses it less. This is great character development, but it's precisely the opposite of what I want when I'm 200k words in to a mind control fetish story.
I'm currently reading the (incomplete and probably dead) sequel just to see the hanging threads resolved. I'll drop it once I'm satisfied. Overall, it's a good fic but perhaps not worth its faults or word count.