Border Chronicles: Book 1 Friendship In Chaos

The story of a gifted individual in a military academy that for reasons of his own has decided that friends are simply not a factor in fulfilling his ambitions. Through circumstances beyond his control, or even the control of the local demigod, he is thrown together with characters from the MLP:FIM universe. How will this affect his life, the life of those around him and even the entire universe he resides in?

Tags: Comedy, Alternate Universe, Human, Slice of Life, Original Character, Discord, Other, Main 6,

Grammar, Spelling and General Presentation: **
Typos are pretty common throughout. Grammar, punctuation, and vocabulary errors are numerous enough to be noticeable and interrupt the flow of the narrative.

Tenses change between present active and past active with occasional lapses into 2^nd person, i.e. addressing the reader directly as 'you'. Again this is attributable to the use of speech to text and can be fixed with proofreading.

Military terms are usually presented with a parenthetical explanation. The style is similar to one that would be used in a technical paper and a little out of place in a narrative.

Use of Show Canon: ***
Not a lot of time is spent in Equestria but it all seems to match with the canon. Canon events are followed when they are mentioned.

Character Consistency ***
The MLP cast of characters feels slightly off the mark, everything is a little darker and more violent, but they are consistently so. Author's prerogative allows for a little bending from canon to suit their own take on the characters.

Princesses Celestia and Luna are considerably more subdued and passive, at least with regards to Skeleton, a demigod from another dimension, and his actions. It's explained slightly in the story, but still feels out of character without a more in depth backstory established.

Pinkie Pie in this story is secretly wiser than she lets on and/or is an avatar for a higher power.

Plot Flow/Pacing **
What hit me first was the volume of expository text. Every chapter consistently has at least one large block of text to provide world background and other information to the reader.

The trouble here is twofold.

First, it's quite a bit to get through. I had to resist the urge to skim ahead to the action. Sometimes it is perfectly reasonable to do this if it spares time in bringing the reader up to speed, but in this case it slows the pacing down to a crawl. There is a balance to be struck between world details and story action. If details are too sparse then the world may be left feeling bland and empty or the reader loses any sense of place and location. On the flip-side, a narrative that is too rich in extraneous details can cause the reader to become overloaded and the underlying story is obscured.

Second, some of the exposition explains details that the reader is likely already familiar with. An example that appears early on is describing in detail the doors outside the Canterlot Castle audience chamber. One of the great advantages of writing fanfiction is that the world is already established and an author doesn't need to spend time building those portions of the world that have already been shown in the canon TV episodes, movies, and supplementary material.

Entertainment ***
There is, at the core, a story worth telling here. The world is rich with details and well thought out, and introducing the MLP characters to that should be a recipe for interesting adventures.

Overall **½ (potentially **** if the pacing and typos are addressed consistently)
This is a big story and the author has put in a solid 2-3 years on it. I'll admit up front that I did not read all of it, but I did read all the way up to chapter 9, as well as the 'The Meeting' to get a sense of the story world, then skimmed through the rest to try and get a better handle on the entire body of work.

It's clear that the author has put a lot of thought into their own world where most of the action takes place, there is a hint of a rich interesting world setting here for the OC's and the MLP characters to experience. The author also seems to have some knowledge of day to day life in the military, almost certainly Navy, and shares little bits of jargon with the audience.

But, as mentioned in the scoring, it suffers from some technical and stylistic difficulties that make the story difficult to immerse oneself in.

In all fairness, a good deal of the typographical errors are almost certainly because of the speech to text software that the author uses. A few proofreading passes through each chapter before posting would be of great benefit.

The biggest single request I could make is that I would like to see most if not all of the exposition served up as part of the narrative. Tell us about your world as your characters and those borrowed from Equestria experience it, and let your readers experience it as well. I feel that it would elevate your story to something above average.

Thanks for the review.

This review is starkly more detailed than the previous ones covering stories of shorter length, though I'll admit your metric on grammar, particularly punctuation and maybe vocab, is a bit steep and/or fickle. Other than that, hope mine gets this same level of attention.

6044336
You're quite welcome. I hope the overall tone was encouraging to you as an author. You have some skill and experience now, and you've persevered over 2 years on this tale, so you have my respect.

Please keep writing and improving your craft!