CCC: cleverpun's Critique Corner #27 — Palimpsest · 11:17pm Jun 6th, 2016
Title: Palimpsest
Author: NorrisThePony
Found via: the featured box
Short summary: Because of how the Elements of Harmony work, a little chunk of Nightmare Moon has been festering inside Twilight since the beginning of the show. Now, Celestia and Twilight must spend the night removing it, regardless of the physical—or emotional—toll it will take.
The Title/Description: The title is one of those “single word but the word is uncommon” deals. I’m never sure how to feel about them, but I think it grabs attention adequately. It’s not accurate to the mechanics stated in-story, but obviously that would’ve taken more than one word.
The description is adequate. It isn’t particularly gripping, but it does describe the major conceit of the story and makes its genre and tone obvious.
Genre(s): Character Piece, Platonic shipping
What does this story do well?: For most of the story, the sentence-level descriptions are easy to read and flow smoothly. There’s enough clever dialogue and eloquent descriptions that the story reads very smoothly. There are some exceptions, as noted below, but overall the story is easy enough to read on a sentence level. I liked the descriptions of Twilight’s gradual transformation, in particular.
The characters are also generally well-done. Celestia feels like a reasonable version of her show self: she panics internally, but obscures and hides her emotions. I am a bit biased here, since this matches up with my headcanon. There are times when some of Celestia’s behavior is a bit awkward, but overall I like the way her pristine facade starkly contrasts with her thoughts in narration.
Twilight receives less characterization, and her overall portrayal is much vaguer than Celestia’s. She does have some nice character moments, though, like the part at the beginning where she chooses not to sign some legal documents excusing her behavior.
Finally, the story uses a fantastical situation to explore characters. It can be difficult to take a completely made up situation and use it as a characterization point. Because the situation is removed from reality, the author can’t reference real life to give it verisimilitude. I suppose here you could compare the situation to being drunk (especially since the author makes a lot of mentions of Twilight being “stripped of her inhibitions” and such) or similar, but even chemical alteration isn’t quite the same as magical soul poisoning.
Where could this story improve?: While I complimented the descriptions above, some of the sentences are phrased rather awkwardly. There’s a number of sentences with a lot of waffling/needless qualifiers or with a lot of clauses, and they read very awkwardly. There was also a small smattering of typos. Overall, this isn’t the worst, but it contrasts greatly with the eloquent phrasing elsewhere.
Following on this, the story has a huge amount of magical technobabble. Technobabble—meaningless technical explanations—should be used sparingly even in the best of situations. This story mentions magical buzzwords and terms constantly. This is even worse than regular technobabble because it has absolutely no basis in reality. Technobabble that references real things at least has some meaning behind it, even if it is being used too broadly or awkwardly. The many terms being thrown about here mean nothing: I have no idea what a “dark magic storm” is supposed to be. You could argue that the use of these nonsencsical terms is supposed to be evocative or a catalyst for speculation. They receive far too many mentions for the former, however, and multiple scenes rely on technobabble to help understand what is going on (in the case of the latter). It draws a lot of attention away from the story’s point.
The story focuses a lot on Twilight’s behavior during her magical purge, but a lot of her behavior felt a bit underwhelming. Several of Twilight’s major arguments (like Celestia sending others to do her dirty work) are regurgitated fandom cliches. Ideas like Celestia being lazy have been flung around the fandom so much that they aren’t interesting on their own, and the story doesn’t have high-on-dark-magic!Twilight regurgitate them with any new spin or real weight. This renders a lot of Twilight’s in-story complaints somewhat anemic.
Finally, the story has a very weak ending. It ends very abruptly, and the author admits in their author’s notes that they just wanted it over with. The major conflict peters off quickly, and none of the characters involved comment or reflect on it afterward. For a character piece, there’s just not enough character interaction, especially given the nature and magnitude of the events.
In a single sentence: A story that is easy to read and has some nice descriptions, but doesn’t use its premise to its fullest and ends weakly.
Verdict: Downvote. This story has an interesting premise, and on a sentence level it is easy to read. There are even some moments where the writing is quite nice. But between the weak ending and occasionally cliché ideas brought up by the characters, I don’t think there’s enough here to recommend.
A character piece should explore its characters, and this story does do that. But the way it regurgitates old ideas and overfocuses on technobabble robs that exploration of a lot of its weight and interest.
Naturally a story I myself can admit is kinda mediocre and cliché compared to some of my other stuff is what garners so much attention.
Anyways, thanks for the review. Very comprehensive. Nothing here I can object with.
Although...
Nah, it was more a matter of "I have less than an hour to get it into the contest submission thread and I still have to edit it so I'd better hurry this up"
4004138 I think that the premise was certainly a large factor in the story's popularity. Also contests have a habit of increasing story traffic. Ultimately, though, predicting which of your works is going to be popular is a crapshoot, like any other subjective thing. My first 3 popular stories were and are complete garbage, for example
Synthetic Bottled Sunlight is actually on my read later list, but I tend to prioritize shorter things and complete things.
4004138
I know this pain.
4004229
4004138
Premises are the #1 factor in predicting story traffic. Bad Horse called "I Have This Friend..." as being featured without seeing anything but the story summary. CV has called a number of my stories as being featured in advance, as have a few other folks I've had edit for me.
Premise + cover art + title are what drives most traffic to a story. This is why quality is a relatively poor predictor of success, though it can help - especially if it makes other people blog about/promote/link to your story elsewhere.
4004229
Well, I sincerely hope you enjoy it when/if you ever get around to it. A lot more planning and effort certainly went into that story than this one.