TFriendship Is Magic - Extended Cut

• MLP: FiM
• Adventure
• Mystery

Season 1, Episodes 1 and 2 of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic rewritten and expanded as a mature fantasy adventure.

• Violence
• Death
• Alt. Universe
• Twilight
• Spike
• Celestia
• Nightmare Moon
• Main 6

AdmiralSakai · 112k words  ·  170  7 · 3k views

Description

Twilight Sparkle didn’t care about overseeing the Summer Sun Celebration in some podunk little town. She just wanted a chance to study the history of the Lunar Rebellions and maybe, just maybe, convince Celestia that her sister’s return was a real possibility. Now it’s a lot more than just a possibility, and one Canterlot egghead isn’t going to be able to take on Nightmare Moon and her army alone.

Initial Thoughts

Let’s take a look at that title: Extended Cut, it boldly declares. And based on the description, this looks to be a heavy rewrite of MLP lore. By the author’s own admission, this is a mature fantasy rendition of the Season 1’s premiere (the rating aside, I get what they mean), and it would appear to be heavy in a new kind of history. To what extent is “Friendship Is Magic” extended, well, we’ll just have to see.

Before I get into the review, I want to say that this review is going to be a special and different one. Due to life and personal reasons, it will be the last review I write for this group, if not for the time being, then for a long while. I appreciate having the opportunity to share my thoughts on the craft and helping authors grow and improve, and I wish the group and all its members a bright future.

Summary

It’s the first two episodes of MLP, but revamped, revitalized, and rewritten. 

Plot

By its premise, AdmiralSakai’s Friendship is Magic - Extended Cut seeks to revisit the Season 1 Premiere and expand it past the presented runtime. To do this, it must do several things: first, it must approach the matter of expanding forty-two minutes into a novel-length story; second, it must consider the lore that seeps into the gaps of those two episodes and decide what to keep and what to change; and third, it must sell such changes through a believable backstory to the world it now wants to present.

Now that the story stands at just over 112,000 words and 14 chapters, I can assume that, broadly speaking, the attempt succeeded. 

Specifically, though, I want to first turn attention to what AdmiralSakai has done in terms of developing a familiar yet wholly different world. They’ve chosen to revamp Luna’s fall into something that spans more than a thousand years—oh, certainly, a thousand years has passed since Luna was banished to the moon, but AdmiralSakai wanted to expand upon those years and create a new kind of history that fills in the spaces the show would otherwise have left alone. Luna’s fall, in particular, has become a long and bloodied conflict between the Royal Sisters that not only culminated in the former Princess of the Night’s banishment, but also considerable changes to the Equestrian landscape. I won’t get into exact details, since that is something a curious reader will want to find out on their own, but the decision to turn that fall into what amounts to a tangential history book about the Lunar Rebellion was an inspired one.

It’s that Rebellion that actually is the inciting question of the entire story: what even was it? Instead of the Elements of Harmony, now, being the thing to get Twilight Sparkle to start asking questions, it’s the fact that not enough is known about some of the events. Coupled with the natural mystery of who Princess Luna was, this makes an easy progression from one question to the next, with the reader and Twilight being led through each chapter on a quest to find the truth.

All of this, strictly speaking, is pretense for the story. Since the plot is not entirely linked to the historical, day-by-day events that constituted the Lunar Rebellion and all of its machinations and spinning gears, AdmiralSakai presents this information primarily through what Twilight discovers or explains. In this way, we learn much about the kind of Equestria we’re dealing with, which is a combination of fantastical elements (magic, unicorns, myths, even a few hints at foreign languages, concepts, and hidden lore) and somewhat more modern was—not necessarily in terms of technology, but in terms of political and social concept. 

Thus, this is a story that, in its newness, seeks to craft an entirely different world. These ideas are complex, and based on the amount of information that Twilight—and by extension, AdmiralSakai—presents to us throughout the course of the story—from specific historical moments, trivia, asides, and so forth—it’s clear that much effort has gone into seriously thinking about the world of MLP, and how best to draw it into an epic fantasy setting. 

What a careful reader may note of this review so far, however, is that for the most part I’ve been speaking into the abstract. I will admit freely that worldbuilding is not something I do myself, so I approached the matter with a grain of salt, not knowing what to expect. I will say that, overall, the aesthetic of a fantasy setting, complete with, again, new history, came out strong throughout the entire store, and for the most part I enjoyed what the author wanted to play with. In terms of inherent quality, I believe the ideas that this story presents are, perhaps, some of the coolest and thought-provoking ideas I’ve been confronted with, because not only is history considered, but science, magic, economies, politics, social class and prejudice—and probably a dozen other small things that I am forgetting but which serve the express purpose of making this world real. 

The ideas, in a word, are radical. But the execution of many of those ideas is a bit disappointing. 

As is the nature of such a story, exposition is to be heavy. We are dealing with a new setting, a new world, and no story of such scope can get away from the haunting spectre of exposition. Nominally, this would be done in a way that makes us forget exposition exists—it would be combined with, say, action, or dialogue, or some sort of premise that would allow for an easy relation of this new information.

At times, the story does do this, but from the very beginning it suffers from a problem of placement and emphasis. Take, for instance, the following quote from the first chapter:

While Equestria’s official record system had been well-established by the First Century of the Circadian Era, the secrecy and corruption and factional infighting that increasingly surrounded the ruling Council of Five Hundred had seen it degrade significantly as the century approached its end. Once Luna’s rebellion began in earnest and even the time of day became subject to a battle of wills between two recalcitrant Princesses, the public annals had disintegrated completely into a series of contradictory polemics. Anything dating before about the mid Second Century was now generally recognized to be unreliable at best and pure propagandistic garbage at worst.

For context, this follows Twilight giving a faux-lecture / speech to Spike about her discoveries and their implications. This kind of exposition gets in the way of the exposition those discoveries already posit, and, in fact, seem to take away from the significance of what Twilight even says. Put another way, here, the story shifts from Twilight being an active narrator and supplying us with active exposition to dumping this information on the reader and expecting them to understand.

This happens more times than it should in the story. For instance, in Chapter Two, at the first sight of this story’s Rarity, Twilight muses:

The general historical consensus was that the last true holdouts of the Lunar Rebellion had died out by the early 500s, and had been a shadow of their former influence for decades before that. Occasionally ‘Rebels’ or ‘Moon Cultists’ had made appearances right up until modern times and would in all likelihood continue to do so, but universally these proved to be groups of disaffected young ponies who thought that wearing too much eyeshadow and writing poetry about Nightmare Moon’s "gaolment within the stygian voids of tormented dissolution" made them seem impressive. Needless to say they bore little to no resemblance to the terrifying zealots described by General Gold Dust, the Black Talons, and other genuine First Century sources.

Note how many historical terms, groups, and names show up here. They don’t show up elsewhere. This is lore for the sake of lore, not story, and while I admire the amount of thought put into trying to come up with a detailed history, I cannot say that this is particularly as important to the story itself as the author might think. 

These are but two examples, yet such a problematic method shows up repeatedly, almost in every chapter, several times. I note, of course, that there must be some sacrifice in the story’s physical presence when it comes to exploring and detailing new lore, but how that information ends up being presented is more often than not a miss rather than a hit. Consider, now, this one example of where this kind of lore-building, world-hinting is done effectively, also from the first chapter:

Twilight spent a few more seconds following the flight of a Royal Navy air cruiser as it made its final descent towards the docks located at the edge of the city. Behind them lay an elegant series of scalloped terraces that provided the bulk of Canterlot’s commercial and residential zoning, and closer still were the intermingled spires of the Royal Academy of Magic, the Halls of the Day Court, the School for Gifted Foals, and the Guard officers’ academy at Hurricane’s Green which collectively made up the entire district somewhat misleadingly referred to as Canterlot Castle.

Here, we have an actual observer in relation to the hints of lore. We see this is a highly developed Equestria and a Canterlot ever so slightly different and new. While it’s far from perfect, it allows for the inclusion of new information alongside an easy and clear description. Such a method isn’t going to work all the time, but it does work here. 

Here’s another example from Chapter Two:

“Wait a minute, you opened up a Lunar Cairn?” The Cairns were easily the best-known and best-documented physical remainders of the Rebellions. Indeed, they were the only Lunar-built structures to occasionally be found outside of what was now the protean Everfree Forest. There were perhaps several hundred in total, holding all or nearly all of the doomed Lunar Army -accounts couldn’t agree whether Celestia had ordered them wiped out to the last mare, whether they’d committed some form of mass suicide, or if some had in fact slipped away to continue their insurrection elsewhere- and old laws intended to protect friends and family from retribution by the victorious Solars also forbid tampering with the tombs.

Such a quote uses the tried-and-true method of using dialogue to transition into exposition. But dialogue justifies the shift in focus, because in a way the dialogue is asking us what we already know about the Cairns. Assumedly, the narrator (who, in this case, is not Twilight for the moment, but instead is a more abstract entity without name) sees that we do not actually know a lot, and so provides for us a quick blurb of information about what these things are. 

I have more examples highlighted and commented on throughout my marked-up version of the story, and I would be more than happy to share that document with the author, should they be interested. But, my overall point, is that while these ideas are well-thought out and highly developed, not all of them are necessary to the plot, or, in most cases where they somewhat are, take the focus away from the plot and cause the story to come to a screeching halt as it attempts to explain itself without tripping over two left feet. 

That said about the lore and exposition, there is one final element I must draw attention towards because it redefines this story dramatically. If you’ll recall from the original premiere, friendship is a kind of magic, one that Twilight doesn’t initially care for until she realizes its connection to the Elements of Harmony. In fact, those very same Elements represent the elements that make up harmonious friendship in the first place (hence the show’s subtitle, Friendship is Magic). We’re well aware of this particular facet of the world of Equestria and have more or less accepted it as a special kind of force. Alongside dark magic and dragon fire, “friendship” is something that can be harnessed. It’s energy, or magic, or both. 

This story doesn’t use friendship as a thaumatological phenomenon nor as the power behind the Elements of Harmony itself. This is to say: friendship as an essential aspect of the character of Equestria doesn’t show up. 

On one hand, I think I know why. With so much needed to be done, in terms of re-inventing this world, something had to be sacrificed. Friendship could just be a quirk of G4 that could easily be dispelled with minimal cost to narrative consistency. 

But on the other hand, part of the mystery and appeal of the Elements of Harmony is this equation: Friendship Is Magic. In this story, when Twilight unlocks the powers of the Elements and uses them against Nightmare Moon, Friendship doesn’t show up. In fact, the Elements aren’t actually called anything in relation to what they’re supposed to embody: Honesty, Generosity, Kindness, Laughter, Loyalty, and Magic as mere terms don’t appear in the final stretch. Though I can grant that what AdmiralSakai has done in order to present how each of the Mane Six embody such elements is unique and fitting, I cannot grant easily the idea of not using the show’s core bit of lore. 

Combined, then, with choppy exposition, I’m left with an interesting assessment. In terms of plot, there is certainly much at play, but in terms of developed plot, there are more hurdles than victory hoops here. At times the story wanted to read like a historical text and less like a story, and while undoubtedly there are reasons for this, I do not think the majority justify the end result. 

Score - 7 / 10 

Characterization

For the most part, all the characters are themselves, which is always a good thing. All the Mane Six act accordingly and, indeed, embody their Elements by the very end. I very much enjoyed how AdmiralSakai wrote Applejack, whose honest nature actually made her feel like the grounded center this story needed at times. The side characters, while never quite taking center stage, also function strongly; by the “second act,” with the resurrection of the Lunar Knights, we’re introduced to an interesting set of characters clearly out of place with the world, yet, somehow, striving for noble means, and appearing, despite their position in the narrative, to be more than just enemies that our heroes need to overcome. 

The most drastic change in character, though, has to be found with Spike. 

My understanding of this change is that AdmiralSakai wanted to present a somewhat older, more mature Spike. The adolescent is gone, replaced with someone who can keep up with Twilight’s idiosyncrasies, genius, and even character failures. Given the setting, I believe this makes sense on paper, but it is not without its flaws.

The most prominent is that Spike’s voice is inconsistent throughout the story. At intervals he’s a loveable smartass who’s loyal to a damn fault when it comes to Twilight. In such places he demonstrates a careful but courageous heart, perhaps exemplifying the very best of who Spike can be in the show. At other places, though, something about the way he speaks feels contrived and forced. 

I want to draw attention to this one scene that happens at Rarity’s Boutique. Spike is trying to excuse himself and Twilight, as well as trying to soften the blow to Rarity’s pride that came with Twilight’s rudeness. The following lengthy exchange occurs:

He stopped and regarded a dummy in the center of the shop clad in a leather duelist's harness of the same sort of light, unconstricting type favored by the better class of Canterlot sportsmares. “I for one think that a harness like this would suit a dragon quite well, if you wouldn’t mind cutting off a few of the buckles for me.”

“Oh! No no, that’s not for sale!” the tailor snapped, and Spike leaped backwards as if shocked. “I’m… terribly sorry for raising my voice,” she continued in a more normal register, “It’s just… I’ve had that piece since I was a filly; it was… the first thing I ever made myself, in fact. I… couldn’t bear to part with it after all these years.”

“I’m terribly sorry, in that case I wouldn’t ever suggest-”

“Oh, darling, it’s quite understandable. Everypony in town knows how attached I am to it, so I never had any reason not to put it on display and show it off, but with so many creatures from far and wide arriving for the festival I should have realized-”

“No, no, it’s no trouble at all, and I must say the workmareship is truly incredible.”

“Oh! You’re too kind…”

No doubt you’ll note that Spike, here, speaks with forced diligence and professionalism. It sounds vaguely Victorian—excessively polite—and mirrors, in fact, the way Rarity typically speaks, creating distance from emotion and intent by way of many adverbs and clause effects. Not to get into a lecture about the grammatical aspect of things, but this doesn’t sound like Spike. It sounds like someone acting like how they’d imagine Spike to act in upper-class society.

I can extrapolate a few reasons to justify this, however my complaints may sound. For instance, Spike might know how to speak like this since he is from Canterlot. Then there is the fact that he’s trying to get himself and Twilight out of a sticky situation by reverting back to manners and politeness as a strategy. But that suggests, to me, that Rarity somehow wouldn’t have noticed how forced this dialogue sounds, how cheesy and inauthentic Spike comes off as being, and that doesn’t seem to be the kind of Rarity AdmiralSakai wants to demonstrate. Fundamentally, it’s a case where the attempt did not quite match the intent.

(A reader will also note that, among other things, Spike’s crush on Rarity is done away with. I have no opinion there.) 

That’s all about Spike, but now I must point to another glaring issue of characterization that, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t justify. It’s that of our protagonist: Twilight Sparkle.

In a word, she’s snobby, and I don’t really understand why.

Yes, she’s from Canterlot, yes, in the show, she was annoyed by Ponyville’s antics, yes, she’s a bit arrogant and assumes she can learn everything there is to learn, but I would never have pegged her as being downright rude. Aloof, yes, and socially ignorant, yes, but rude?

To explain what I mean, let’s look at the passage that first alluded to this kind of characterization. This is from Chapter Two, right as Twilight has arrived in Ponyville:

... Twilight doubted any of the locals here had read anything more complicated than a beer label in a good long while.

Where exactly is this kind of assumption coming from? It sounds downright mean-spirited, which doesn’t really fit Twilight’s character. Consider, for instance, that in the show, while she did not want to make friends, she was at least kind and polite. She did not call, even implicitly, anypony illiterate or dumb or whatever.  Even if this is an alternate universe, the thing about AUs is that when they do these kinds of changes, there has to be a sufficient amount of justification beforehand to, well, justify it. Here, it doesn’t seem like the story’s spent enough time justifying this kind of pompous and presumptuous behavior.

Given, then, Twilight’s frigid interaction with Rarity, it’s hard to justify meta-textually her character as presented. It seems, then, that that particular interaction was designed to show us how bad of a pony Twilight could be, or at least how mean, when her mind gets set to something. Fine, but this matter isn’t actually addressed or resolved in the rest of the story, at least from what I could tell; Twilight’s rudeness is “absolved” off-page, and she returns to the booksmart horse we know and love. What, then, does that say about her assumptions? What, then, does that say about that kind of portrayal? Are we supposed to accept that she used to be this presumptuous about Ponyville until she saved it? 

It’s not even a bad decision; in fact, it could work and give Twilight a very interesting dilemma: cold calculated victory or opening herself up to warmth and feeling? But as it stands, it feels wrong and I can’t believe in it enough to justify it to myself. 

This is offset by how great the other characters are written, but considering this is Twilight’s story, it leaves me feeling somewhat confused and disappointed. 

One final point: the use of OCs in this story. When used in a historical sense, I found myself deeply involved. Paper Clip was a great character that Twilight got to discover, through and through.

When the OCs have to take present action, though, as is the case of the incredibly short Chapter Thirteen, they feel contrived, underdeveloped, and useless to the story. Given how late they show up in the story, too, it makes it hard to care for them, or even remember their names and relevance.

Score - 6.5 / 10 

Syntax

One unspoken component of writing, but which, if you ask any writer, they’ll probably understand at least intuitively, is the concept of syntactic accessibility. Put simply, it’s a text’s ability to convey its meaning to the reader. A text will do this by use of a certain unit, that of the word, and when it strings these words together in certain ways, it develops syntax, that is, sentences. Thus, when we speak of syntactic accessibility, what we really mean is how easy or difficult it is to read and understand a text. And I use this “and” importantly, if a bit strangely. Here, “and” as a conjunction tells us that through the act of coming to a text, we read and understand at the same time. That’s the ideal scenario. But truly speaking, when we come to a text, most probably we’ll read first and then come to an understanding. This makes the act of reading a sequential one of several levels, all operating to that end goal of understanding what a text says. 

I bring this up because this story is rife with issues of syntactic accessibility. That, I must admit, was part of why it took me so long to write this review. There was much to unpack, much to read, much to re-read, and much to re-re-read, just to understand one chapter at a time. 

As the above quotes may demonstrate, there are long chunks of block-texts throughout this story. I don’t particularly mind these as a technique, because sometimes, aesthetically, you just have to have those long paragraphs. But sometimes, these paragraphs stretch on for too long. Some could be broken up into two, such as the following:

“Well, not exactly,” Spike cut in, “I was just wondering who gave you the idea to include those patterns.” The banner pony gave him an odd look, but he continued, “In… the Dragonlands I’ve never seen their like. Are these designs common in Equestria? I can’t remember any in the other towns we’ve toured.” Twilight had to admit she was impressed with Spike’s verbal maneuvering, and wished she’d thought of the ruse herself. Given the accent and her general demeanor it wasn’t hard to guess that the white unicorn had aspirations to move in the same circles as politicians and foreign diplomats; obviously if she’d managed to accomplish that dream she wouldn’t be in Ponyville. Twilight had grown painfully familiar with the sort from Celestia’s numerous political functions -back before she’d accumulated enough academic clout to stop attending, anyway. She figured that such a pony would jump at the chance to impress a dragon ambassador without recognizing the absurdity of dragons engaging in diplomacy or questioning why word of his arrival hadn’t been made available beforehand. Twilight could have done without Spike’s insinuation that she was some sort of attache or security officer assigned to support his fact-finding mission, however.

At this point I’m going to quote from my own notes, just for clarity’s sake. 

This should have been a separate paragraph.
 
It seems there’s an issue with association of ideas and the structuring of their relations. If we consider sentences as units, and paragraphs as the sum function of these units, then paragraphs ought to, as much as they can, consist of one function at a time, whose units all associate with that single function.

In this exchange, we have one sum function in the form of Spike responding. We also have another sum function, Twilight’s internal monologue about what Spike said. These don’t belong together; they should exist in separate paragraphs.

That’s speaking mostly of length of paragraphs, but what about instances of overly long sentences? Let’s take a look at one. Here’s Twilight’s observation of Rainbow Dash from Chapter Four:

Her voice was odd, simultaneously scratchy and fillyish, giving the impression of a teenager who spent most of her nights screaming along to those horrible My Mystical Romance records that had swept through Canterlot a few years back; although Twilight recognized the condition as equally common among high-altitude fliers and airship crews who spent more time than was entirely healthy sucking down cold, dry, low-pressure air.

That is 66 words in one sentence, and the sentence isn’t even complete. It ends on an incomplete dependent clause, aided in no part by the semicolon and adverbial phrase, “although”. The fix would be easy: End the sentence after “back”, then get rid of “although” since it won’t do us any good. 

Then there’s this tidbit, found near the end of the entire story:

Fluttershy seemed about to reply when a collective groan emanated from a pile of crates currently serving as an impromptu table-and-chair-setting for Pinkie Pie, a collection of Academy mages, and a few of the more bookish sort of Navy pony with Friendship: The Gathering cards spread out in front of them.

To pull briefly again from my own notes:

... I’m reminded of something Harrison Ford said to George Lucas about the script to Star Wars: “You can write it, George, but you can’t say it.” Granted, prose has more leeway with breadth of sentences and speech, but there’s always a better way of turning long sentences into short ones, especially when long sentences do nothing to help the reader get through the information presented…

Such lengthy sentences, I found, are primarily seen in one particular instance: whenever Twilight has “room” to comment on something. This can stretch into her dialogue:

“In particular, if ‘the stars’ really will aid in her return, then a number of these puzzling stellar convergences within the outer etheric shell could in fact be reinterpreted as a deliberate attempt to create a sort of giant astrological summoning circle capable of manifesting a pony-sized object on the surface of the Material Plane!” (Chapter One)

Or into description and narration:

That was another concerning development. The ceiling she’d seen corresponded pretty much exactly to a rectilinear projection of a five-degree angular sector stretching from the Moon to the opposite end of the sky- she’d recognized the constellation Canis the Diamond Dog taking up most of it. Unless major sections of the sky were duplicated, that implied a total of only seventy-two Lunar Cairns, far fewer than the accepted estimate of two to three hundred. Even if the Cairns were in general twice the size of the one she’d explored – which Twilight doubted, as the dimensions of their construction seemed of strong ritualistic significance, and in any case that would give each an even larger portion of the sky – that still meant only about five thousand Lunars in total were interred. That was out of a force estimated by farmers’ sales records and similar documents to have numbered closer to ten or fifteen thousand, a staggering casualty rate by any reasonable modern standard but low compared to other known battles where entire Rebel brigades had fought to the death. Why didn’t they do so at Everfree, and what exactly happened to the ones who weren’t buried? (Chapter Four)

But that last quote intrigues me because… well, I swear, I’m not dumb, but I have no idea what the heck Twilight is attempting to describe here. There are no concrete details; everything is an estimate or a comparison, a guess or a necessary ambiguity. I’m not sure what I’m looking at or what Twilight is looking at because the paragraph intends to drown me in these superficial details of no-meaning. 

Part of this, I’m sure, has to do with the fact that this is Twilight’s head we’re in. She is an intelligent mare, I will easely grant that. But if that intelligence comes at the serious cost of clarity, then it’s not a characteristic that accentuates the writing, but rather impedes it. If it gets in the way of being able to read it and, in fact, its difficulty doesn’t do anything else but be difficult, then it has to go, I’m sorry. 

This all made getting through the first four chapters of this story a difficult task, despite my general interest in figuring out where the plot and story were going. Several times I had to take a break from my reading just to figure out what I’d just read, and several times I found myself slogging back and forth through the other chapters, comparing word counts, and trying to get through whatever I had left to read. 

Yet, strangely, after Chapter Four, the story became easier to understand. The same issues as presented above still popped up, but I believe that something changed within the story’s landscape that made getting through it easier. I might say this has to do with the fact that now we have action. I might say it’s because we broke several times away from Twilight’s dense perspective, allowing a break from that very same density which slowed the story down to nearly unbearable levels. I might even say it’s because I was able to skim the long sections and focus on, instead, the relevant portions. Whatever the case, I must point out that those four chapters will turn away readers who do not have the patience to sit and slog through dense prose. It may be a sacrifice worth making, but again, clarity is key, and everything else is flavor.

There are more issues than I’ve presented extensively here, ranging from the imbalanced placement of whenever Twilight wants to say something lore-filled, such that they get in the way of action, tension, or emotion, to simple mechanical issues like not having commas in correct spots, thereby obstructing meaning and clarity (ironic, then, that I should use an overly long sentence here). But this section has gone on long enough.

We don’t have to write like Hemingway, and we don’t have to write like an 18th century person getting paid per filled page. Long or short paragraphs or sentences aside, it comes down to one question in particular: how can I make myself clear? I believe this story needs to consider that question once more, and I believe that AdmiralSakai may want to think about adjusting their style to reflect a better answer on their part. 

Score - 5 / 10 

Final Score - ( 7 + 6.5 + 5) / 3 = 6.17 / 10

Final Thoughts

Let me bring this back to the first point: Friendship Is Magic - Extended Cut is exactly what it sets itself out to be. It uses fantasy, politics, and history to craft a much larger narrative than the show initially allowed in its Season One premiere. AdmiralSakai has seen fit to add, improve upon, embellish, or otherwise promote certain things as new canon (or new fanon, really) in a bid to, as the saying goes, “make something new out of the old.”

This is not an enviable task, if I am to be honest. In something as loosely settled as FiM, to rewrite lore into a new fantasy story is already challenging enough; seeking, then, to extend upon it, to provide a new history, as it were, is equally challenging, if not more so. Some applause must be allotted for both the attempt and the idea of the attempt, for in having read and finished this story, I’m left with the conclusion that the one that the author gave was admirable. In fourteen chapters and a little over 112,000 words, AdmiralSakai redeveloped the premiere into something extraordinary.

But as the review shows, this is not without hiccups and faults. Between a plot heavy with awkward and tangential exposition, characters that veered slightly too close to OOC without resolution, and prose that was incredibly dense and difficult to understand, the story, perhaps, became too large for its own good—it had too many small parts getting in the way of the bigger ones. Refinement of each chapter, each paragraph, is what I suggest. I also have marked up the story in a separate document with some extended thoughts, so if the author would like to see those, I would be more than happy to share. 

One Final Thing

One final thing, because this is the final review I’ll have for this group, at least for a long while. The score is there to make concrete the abstract: numbers are easier to understand than words, since numbers suggest a physical relation to something. (Funny, I know, that a writer should say this sort of thing.) I have tried my best to use them and define them in such a way that makes my reviews justified and sound, but I must also acknowledge the inherent limitations of such a numerical system. Four stars, eight out of ten—these are arbitrary values for something that benefits not from a scoreboard, but a discussion.

Ultimately that is what I’ve tried to generate with these reviews: a discussion about work, craft, and storytelling. I’ve presented, to the best of my ability, my own opinions and observations about writing, things that I’ve gathered over the years. I cannot profess infinite knowledge about any of these things, for indeed, I am always learning and trying to improve. That is the life of a writer—motion towards betterment, an infinitely occurring series of inventive events seeking out, always, the next best word. 

I hope that, through these reviews, the authors I’ve had the pleasure of reading will continue to aim for that dream. Even ponyfics have the potential to be great pieces of art. 

Jarvy Jared

First off, thanks for the review; I know these things are not easy to write.

I would like to see that detailed writeup, although I am kind of getting to a "fish or cut bait" point on this story where I am not sure if it is a better use of my time to continue tweaking it or just push on and write more, better stories because this one needed a lot of patching and tweaking and reoutlining to get it to work as well as it did. Since this story was unusually convoluted plot-wise and also introduced the whole concept of EC, it was naturally predisoposed to be a lot more convoluted than other things I am planning to write and I don't think that was very good for it. I am also developing a greater sense for how to capture the key points of an episode without as rigidly following the canon plot in terms of events. So I guess I'd appreciate some input on the decision to use input as well.

Either way, I'm glad you appreciated the central concept.

7376326
Not a problem. I'll send you a PM with a link to the document.

Much appreciated, although I am currently leaning towards pushing ahead with new material to see if I've really got a handle on how to address these issues, before trying to patch the current story.