What the Sun Can’t See
By FFFX

Reviewed by Asilin

I don’t usually talk about my personal fandoms here, but with this one I absolutely have to.

I adore roleplay games. From JRPG like Final Fantasy to dungeon crawler styles like Legend of Grimrock to more open-world like Elder Scrolls, I love them all.

Most importantly, I am a massive dork who still loves it when she can get together for a good old fashioned pen and paper game with friends. And World of Darkness (WoD) is one of the systems that I enjoy. Depending on the edition, though.

What is WoD? In a nutshell, it’s the RPG that consolidated and popularized most of the modern interpretations of supernatural lore; the world where humans are secretly protected, hunted, haunted, tricked, and such by beings beyond our normal senses. Where vampires and werewolves fight, wizards control the very fabric of the universe, and the fae manipulate our dreams and imaginations.

It’s a pretty epic setting, although it’s unfortunately a bit heavy on the angst in all the different games. We tend to work that out of our homebrew setting though.

So, given all that, I’m sure you can understand why I was a bit giddy to read this story. So how did it fare?

Well…

My first immediate thought upon loading the first chapter was “how do you misspell your own title?” The story title is the very first line and can’t is missing an apostrophe. Sadly, the poor apostrophe is going to be highly abused throughout this story, missing in places it should, turning up places it shouldn’t, and it’s a major distraction for me.

But we’ll talk about that more later.

The story starts off strong, with our following the mysterious protagonist as he flees from some unknown, yet deadly, enemy. In fact, I really enjoyed the first few paragraphs as great descriptive, action oriented sections.

It was that blasted fifth paragraph where things start to become undone. Yes, I’m sure the werewolf would be surprised by ponies living in houses, but did we really need to repeat the word so many times? Plus, a bit further on, we get this line:

Oh. Also, they can talk. What the hell?

This is just bad exposition. Seeing as it was ended at the end of his thought, it’s obvious that the author realized that the werewolf should have some reaction to ponies talking so just tacked this on.

And then we start the head hopping. We start in the were’s head, then we’re in Applejack’s, then Granny Smith’s, Big Mac’s, and then Applebloom’s before going back to Applejack. All in the first 1400 words of a 9000 word chapter.

Again, we’ll talk about that more in the review section. Back to content.

So the werewolf stops at the Apple farm to save the natives. Somehow, despite being in wolf form, he’s able to gain the trust of Granny Smith who believes him and forces the family out. Run to Ponyville, and he and Applejack go to get Twilight.

I will admit the were’s name was perfectly fit for WoD. “Howls-With-Laughter”, hah!

Anyway, he tells the two ponies that he’s being chased by what sounds like a thestral (the Harry Potter creature, not the fan name for bat-winged pegasi), and that they need to get everyone to safety. Oh, and he’s completely bleeding out right now, but that’s okay since he’ll heal soon, so nobody needs to panic about that at least. Never mind it’s pooling.

Yes, I know he really will heal that fast, but the lack of reaction from everybody else in the room bugs me. We just get a “wow, that’s a lot of blood”, and it’s dropped.

And, of course, we had to head hop into the villain’s head. Of course we did.

Anyway, thestral sends out evil shades to steal the shadows of everyone in town.

The town flees to gather in the town hall as Howls fights off the incoming shades; however, one family is lagging behind. It’s Scootaloo and her parents. Howls saves them, barely in time, but they get to the Town Hall in decent shape. Minus Scootaloo soiling herself and having to be led to the bathroom by Sweetie Belle and Applebloom and was this really necessary?
So Howls gets help in the form of Rainbow Dash, who is readily beaten by the thing after she tries some sort of dive bomb attack. I’ll admit the writing here is really strong. When we’re dealing with action scenes, like this fight, the author’s strength is readily apparent. It’s quick, descriptive, and really tight.

Well, Howls gets kicked to the side as well, leaving Ponyville open to having their shadows consumed. However Scootaloo stands up to the thing and that gives Howls his opening to attack again.

At which point, we find out what this shadow thing is called (Erebus, by the way) as Celestia and Luna show up to intervene. Apparently, they have a compact with this thing, and poor Howls has unwittingly violated it. So, as compensation, Erebus gets to leave the lands uncontested, and gets to take Howls’ shadow with him (which keeps being treated as the equivalent of his soul).

And that’s just the first chapter.

I did read the next two chapters and the basic highlights are that Twilight is absolutely freaking out over Howls being a predator, we keep having little situations where he could calm everything down by transforming into his least threatening form/most versatile form yet doesn’t, lots and lots and lots of background exposition, and, oh, hey, new bad guys to jump heads into. Also, lots of emphasis on how Howls comes from a “world of darkness”. And yes, those words exactly were used.

Did I mention the second and third chapters are around 12K words each? >.<

This is the point where I have to say that I don’t even care why something’s trying to break out of Tartarus, because the story certainly doesn’t care itself.

Long story short, this fic reads like a roleplay write up. There’s a lot of comparative exploration that tends to happen when you’re writing out roleplay conversations, along with the random “we’re building a relationship” generic conversations (I mean, seriously. Why did we need a demonstration of how strong Howls’ nose is?) On top of that, despite the synopsis promising that we don’t need to know the game, some very specific terminology is used from the game with very little explanation and sometimes with too much. For example:

Howls held up his own paw, his brow furrowed in concentration as he struggled to bring his Gnosis to the fore, eventually leaking out a trickle of energy that gradually began to form a orb of energy that swirled with green, red and blue light.

While the section is talking about essences and magic, this one is easy to glean what you may be talking about. However, it also misses part of the definition from the game (the connection to nature), and, frankly, I’m not even sure if this is something you can do with Gnosis, seeing as it’s both your innate connection to nature as well as a measure of your magical reserve.

We also get a full discussion of the Imperium (which seems rather unnecessary and out of place, even when discussing the fact that the ponies are freaking out around him), and the Hispo form is mentioned several times before the authors get around to coming close to describing what that is.

But all of that is rather minor issues. Let’s talk the big ones.

First off, this story was co-written, and it’s rather obvious. As noted in the commentary, the grammar is all over the place. Yet, there are whole sections where the grammar is near flawless, and the story reads easily because I’m not having to interpret where apostrophes belong or weird phrasing. This calls to the fact that one author must have written one section while another wrote another.

This isn’t a good thing. The best part of having a co-author is having somebody who can cover for the things you’re not strong in. My husband and I routinely co-write together; he’s amazing when it comes to characters and small details, while my strengths lay in the overall plot structures and grammar. One of the authors should have been looking over both parts to make sure that the voice and grammar, at the least, were close to the same.

And speaking of grammar...

Contractions need an apostrophe. Possessives need an apostrophe. Making something plural doesn't make it a possessive, even if it sounds the same. And after someone speaks, if you're following it with any saidism (he said, she shouted, he laughed, etc), the pronoun is always lower case.

Next major issue is all the head hopping. Now, there are times and stories where head hopping is more acceptable—romance novels tend to use it—but the major rule with any story and any POV is that it shouldn’t confuse the reader. And in this case, the head hopping causes confusion by providing way too much information and very little emotional connection. We have to contend with Howls’ confusion at the setting, Twilight’s fear and anxiety, Celestia’s fear and anxiety, AJ’s stubbornness at times, Shining Armor’s bromance with Howls, and all in all it paints a very confusing picture. There’s no emotional integrity with any single character, so it makes it hard to care when we hop to the next person. Because, frankly speaking, I don’t care to know what they’re doing. Or thinking.

My final issue is the fact that we keep running into times where a lot of shit can be resolved by Howls transforming. First off, I don’t understand why he’s remaining in wolf form when at one point he declares that he was born human. Most people tend to revert to their “natural” form when they don’t have to specifically remain in another form. So why’s he staying wolf? And even if wolf is more natural for him, there’s several times where he thinks about the fact that he’s having issues by not having thumbs, so why isn’t he resolving that issue? There has to be a reason why he’s not transforming to the human side of things. Heck, if you want him stuck in the wolf forms, at least have him make the attempt to turn human only to be blocked! That would give us a reason why he’s bitching about not having thumbs but not fixing the issue. Plus, given the story’s silly obsession with him not being allowed to eat meat (which doesn’t make sense to me either, given that I know one character owns a dog, and there are other nations composed of meat eaters, so obviously there’s a meat source somewhere), him turning human would be less threatening because, hey, no pronounced canines! And a stomach that can process veggies! Problem solved!

However, there is some very good writing in here. The action scenes are generally well done; some of the conversations flow very well; and there’s a lot of world building going on in this fic that I can appreciate. For example, the story had to create an Underworld and mythos around it in order to have an undead connection that the ponies would understand. It could have been related to us in another way besides info dump, which this story does a lot of, but I can appreciate the work that went into it, and it’s fairly creative.

The idea behind this story seems interesting, but the biggest problem for me is that it’s buried and forgotten under a lot of slice of life storytelling. We’re not here for the day to day comparisons and conversations; we’re here for an adventure. So get to it.

Streamline, streamline, streamline. This story does a lot of talking, but it’s not all geared towards moving the plot forward. I read through around 33K words, and we’re still stuck at the castle resolving our differences and not addressing the major plot.

How can you streamline? One, choose what’s important. Do we really need to see Howl demonstrating his sniffing prowess to Shining Armor? Do we need to see how Ponyville’s being rebuilt when we’re just jumping to the castle anyway? Or see the three princesses having a conversation that mostly rehashes previous conversations to catch one of the characters up?

Another good way to streamline is to limit your POVs. This forces the question of what scenes are important (obviously, not all characters are going to be available for all scenes, so you have to figure out what scenes are vital, and who’d be there for them) as well as help provide emotional connection. For example, I really wish the opening, where Howls’ saves the Apple family, was all from Howls’ POV. That would give us time to connect to Howls and how weird his situation is even as he’s trying to protect these strange creatures from an evil he can’t understand.

Alternatively, if you really want to do an omniscient POV for this, do a proper omniscient POV. I recommend this article to get you started on that.

And, finally, show us the villains’ plot by having it affect the characters, not by jumping into their POV. One, when you jump to the villains’ POV, that allows you to be lazy and not actually force the story along. The protagonists (who are your movers) don’t actually have to do anything because the villains will be doing it all. Two, it doesn’t get us emotionally invested. Why should I care that two of the villains are having a conversation? That doesn’t affect my main characters. Why should I care that the villain is planning how to attack the group? I’m going to see the effects in the next scene, so just cut to the next scene.

In the long run, while I can’t say I particularly enjoyed the story myself, it’s also not that bad. If you like werewolves and don’t mind more character conversation than plot development, you might enjoy it as it stands. Me, I’m done after that third chapter. But it still gets an

Enjoyable.

3703211
Just so you know. You rock!
Fantastic Job!

Hey there, I am the other co-writer of this fic. Just wanted to say thanks for reviewing it, and I agree with 90% of what you wrote in it :D.

This was my first attempt at major writing, and it shows. I've since written others and improved, and since I just saw this I felt I should at least let you know I am doing a revised version of this story.

Hopefully it will be better

Again, thanks for the review!

3705022

You're quite welcome :) We've all got to start somewhere, yeah?

But let me know when you're done revising; I wouldn't mind re-looking it :)

3705293

Hey I appreciate the review here. This was primarily Talon's project from the get go and I occasionally stepped in to try to help him where I could, and host it while he had trouble getting his FiM Fiction account working. I think he's come a long way and have been trying to guide him along on his revision.

My ability to revise Talon's works was limited due to time as well as the sheer volume of errors at the time (I don't think he got a spellchecker until halfway through) and we were parsing it all through the clunky nightmare that was Skype (we now Google docs this stuff). Needless to say, the version you read was the edited version, but my attention to detail was lacking in the sections I didn't write myself and I apologize that it was so noticeable.

All in all, and hindsight 20/20? I'm probably a pretty horrible beta.