A Thousand Years
By Vinyl_Wubs

Reviewed by Rinnaul

Four clopfics to go. Just four. I’m almost at the point where I can stop reading perverse tales of sex between cartoon ponies and go back to writing them. I know some people get tired of reading about rock-hard horse dick and descriptions of the female orgasm clearly written by (likely virginal) males, but that’s why I do my best to make these reviews funny as well as helpful to the author.

Anyway, now for my usual suggestive image, which in this case is actually less overtly sexual than the fic’s cover art.

Commentary and Review combined due to brevity.

So, the last few clopfics I’ve reviewed, they’ve tried to weave in adventure, romance, drama… even comedy, once. This one doesn’t bother. I’m not going to fault clop for clop’s sake, even if I do prefer a bit more to the story, personally.

So, long story short, Luna’s Nightmare Moon transformation didn’t just give her a darker coat, enhanced power, and a big pile of megalomania—it also gave her a dick. And guess which one of those things she kept after coming down from her little episode. Hint: it was the dick.

This is futa transformation fic, after all, and I think any fan of this particular genre will admit they’re pretty predictable in that respect.

Contact poison joke? Prolly got a dick now. Drink a mystery potion? Gettin’ a dick. Mess up a spell? Got a dick. Go through a magic mirror? Gonna have a dick on the other side. Become an alicorn? Definitely earns you a dick. Transformed by the forces of darkness? Yep, a dick.

Anyway, so seeing as how the time from Luna’s final transformation to her banishment was maybe 5-10 minutes, she didn’t really get a chance to use her new features at the time. And it’s questionable whether she even had a corporeal body on the moon. And ever since she got back… well, I guess by then taking care of it herself wouldn’t cut it, because by that point she’d been pent up for 1,000 years.

Seeking relief, she goes to her sister, since they’d shared so many (dickless) nights together in their youth.

Oh, royalty and incest. At least in Equestria it doesn’t involve a bunch of hideous people like it does on Earth.

Anyway, our setup involves a lot of LunAngst that’s rather blunt and ineffective, and Celestia’s responses… I dunno. They lacked impact, but it’s hard to say exactly why. I think they didn’t seem to offer as much comfort as they could have—reassuring Luna that Celestia would love her even if the public didn’t, instead of telling her that she’d always love her and the public would come around.

Quite a bit of emotional telling in there, as well. It makes sense for Celestia, since she’s in first-person, but Luna’s feelings shouldn’t be so clearly on display to the readers.

I’m not terribly concerned about all that since this is blatant PWP smut, but this stuff still takes up 750 words of the fic before the dick comes out. If it’s going to be in there, it ought to be done to the best of the author’s ability, even if it’s not the point.

I will say, I did actually enjoy most of Luna’s dialogue. She sounded formal and a bit outdated without going full-on Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe like many authors do. “Fooled around” broke the voice a bit, but not terribly.

There are some grammar mistakes present, like “breathing quickening”, which should just be “breath quickening”, and comma usage errors, while improperly punctuated dialogue is a constant problem.

"T... There's something else..." She said nervously.

"What is it?" I asked.

"When Nightmare took over... She gave me more than just power." She said meekly.

There were problems with this everywhere, but I grabbed this in particular because it’s brief and shows all of the problems together. First, if you’re going to use an attribution (i.e., “she said”) at the end of dialogue, you conclude with a comma, not a period. Second, an attribution is a continuation of the sentence in the dialogue, and is only capitalized if it begins with a proper noun (so you’d capitalize “Luna said”, but not “she said”). Third, when you end dialogue by trailing off with ellipses (…), consider what punctuation you’d have used if the character hadn’t trailed off, and then treat it the same. If you’d use an attribution, then end it with a comma. If you’d go back to narration, end it with a period.

Next, you seriously overuse that “trailing off with ellipses” thing. You have one hundred and ten ellipses in 2200 words. You’re averaging one ellipses every twenty words. The most I’ve ever used it was in an unfinished story that involves Celestia and Twilight getting stuck somewhere and trying to pass the time. Even with that much opportunity for boredom and awkward pauses, I only use ellipses twelve times in 3200 words.

There’s next to no variety in your dialogue structure, either. As shown above, virtually every line of speech follows the construction ”Dialogue,” she said. You don’t need to put an attribution on every single piece of dialogue. Sometimes you can just proceed directly into narrative and let the actions identify the speaker, and sometimes dialogue can follow after narrative in the similar way. Sometimes you can let dialogue sit all on its own, with no attributions or narrative, and allow context and the character’s voice to inform the reader.

You also have a lot of saidisms. You don’t need to spice up your dialogue by coming up with alternatives to “she said” like “she spoke”, “she stammered”, or “she laughed”. All these do is draw attention to your repetitive dialogue structure.

Finally, all the emotional telling. When you find yourself writing things like “she said meekly” or “she asked nervously”, stop. Those emotion adverbs aren’t helping anything.

Anyway, on to the actual clop. This part was actually surprisingly short, at only about 840 words. I approve of futa and cumflation, though things got a bit too far towards NonCon for me as it went on. But personal tastes aside, the whole thing was kind of rushed and bland. The whole first session, from penetration to climax, was what, 300 words? And Luna came twice, the second time in just five sentences.

The only real connection we get to it is Celestia moaning and begging Luna to stop, and Luna moaning back and proclaiming how good Celestia feels. Everything else is straightforward description of the physical act, with a handful of telly adverbs mixed in.

Honestly, I think this story would be vastly improved by just giving that sex scene enough room to work with.

There’s a brief “day after” scene which implies this will become their new favorite form of sisterly bonding, but there’s not much to it.

Biggest issue: dialogue punctuation. I explained it pretty thoroughly in the commentary, so have another look at the story with that in mind. While you’re at it, a good proofreading wouldn’t hurt, either.

Second-biggest issue: overuse of ellipses. There are better ways, through either narrative or language, to convey hesitancy and distraction.

Mix up your sentence structure a bit more when it comes to dialogue. Have a character take action after they speak. Have them speak after they take action. Put action or an attribution in the middle of speech. Let the dialogue stand alone and have context and voice tell who the speaker is. Particularly in a two-character short like this, you only need occasional reminders of who’s speaking most of the time. Readers will generally assume the two are taking turns.

Emotional telling. Like I said, adverbs that indicate emotion are your biggest warning sign, but any time you find yourself labelling a character with an emotion, you could probably do better. Let me take that section I quoted before and spruce it up a bit.

"There… there's something else," she said, hunching her shoulders and folding back her ears. She wouldn’t meet my gaze, instead keeping her eyes lowered and fidgeting with the hem of her shirt.

"What is it?" I asked.

"When Nightmare took over, she gave me more than just power." She still averted her eyes, but even at that angle and through her dark coat, I was familiar enough with my sister to notice her skin darkening with a flush on her cheeks. Her hands shifted from her shirt to folded in front of her, as if she were concealing something from me.

More detail, more description, more connection to the character and what they’re feeling.

Next: saidisms. This is one of the most common things I point out. 90% of the time, if “said” could work, “said” is the word you ought to use.

The grammar needs major work, saidisms and telling abound, and the clop is a bit short and unfulfilling. And while I enjoyed what interaction we had between the sisters, it was marred by the overuse of ellipses and repetitive dialogue structure. I’m afraid I’ll have to give this one a:

Needs Work.

However, this is a very close thing. There are things here to like, particularly if it plays to your particular fetishes. Fixing the poor dialogue punctuation and cutting back on the overuse of ellipses would be enough for me to upgrade this to Enjoyable.

Improve dialogue structure with some more variety, work on the emotional telling, and expand the sex scene to give it enough room to get into more detail and more emotion, and it might even make it to a Recommended.

And finally, this review has used the word “dick” twelve times now. Honestly, I’m surprised by how low that number is.