Light-Bringer

Writers and Reviewers Institute for Technical Excellence302 stories ·46 members

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When an old foe receives unlikely help he is able to accomplish the unthinkable, conquer Equestria. With a new king, and six ruthless Governors, each with a grudge against one of the wielders of the Elements of Harmony, Equestria has lost its light. After being released from a fifteen year seal, Twilight and her friends must fight to reclaim the Elements and bring light to the world they love.

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cheezesauce

cheezesauce #1 · Sep 3rd, 2013 · · ·

Hi, this is cheezesauce from WRITE.

I’ve been told to look out of punctuation errors, and I think we’ll be looking more at under usage of punctuation here, instead of an abuse of it. Already, the first line in your synopsis is missing a comma, which I’ve added in in red.

When an old foe receives unlikely help, he is able to accomplish the unthinkable...

The rules on comma usage can be found all over the internet, so I don’t think I’ll go into them here. As a quick tip however, I find it useful to read the sentences aloud and insert commas where the natural pauses are. If you’re finding yourself out of breath, it usually means you’re missing commas.

I think it’s also useful to note that the synopsis itself isn’t particularly engaging. I mean, conquering Equestria is pretty much the norm now. Right? Every other story is talking about the Equestria being destroyed and the Elements of Harmony and yadada. When too many people write about the same things, it becomes the run of the mill. And incidentally, the last story that I reviewed before yours had also something to do with the Elements and destruction.

That isn’t to say that your story can’t be good though.

Plot Outline(with reviewer opinions):
Cheerilee, who is apparently an evil, evil mare now, indulges in dark magic from an old book of Starswirl the Bearded. She uses Featherweight as part of her evil ploy. And she gets him into it by sexual seduction. Hmm, kinky.

Anyway, it turns out that evil prick Cheerilee was the one that released Discord! Which actually fits really nicely into the show. I’m impressed.

What doesn’t fit nicely, however, is Featherweight’s reaction to Cheerilee’s mad string of confessions. Instead of great shock, he registers only mild confusion, and still has enough cool in him to narrow his eyes and speak in a perfectly calm voice, as if he was listening to Cheerilee talk about how sunny the sky was above them and how fluffy those nice clouds are.

Cheerilee’s motive for causing massive destruction is flimsy. She’s doing it because Twilight put a stop to all her minor destructive adventures. And she did those adventures in the first place because of her inherent evilness. So the motive for causing massive destruction is because she is evil. She does evil because she is evil. That’s a circular argument, and it’s not very convincing to readers.

King Sombra’s arrival was delightful. I liked that section. This line over here was great:

Sombra? I thought he was dead.

Actually, I liked the Sombra in your story a lot. What a joker, that wacky fella. Together with Cheerilee, they begin to plan a deliciously evil plan. With the two heavyweights handling things, Featherweight seems to be pulling the least weight. (Hah!)

That’s about all for the plot outline. At this point I think the story is turning out to be one of those loose comedy fics. That would mean it’s probably okay for the characters to be behaving wildly off I guess. But I’m still not taking my finger off Cheerilee’s odd character, and how she seems to have a large dose of testosterone injected into her. I’m not okay with that yet. It would, however, be potentially funny if you tied that up using a spell that went wrong and turned her into a stallion. That’s something that can be built up on.

The next thing I want to talk about is prose, and all the other parts that isn’t plot. There was a bit of a hiccup in the opening scene in the Everfree forest. You were trying to portray it as dark and eerie, and that’s a good thing to do. The way you described it though, wasn’t having the effect you wanted it to have. You made it sound more peaceful than scary. I think what you need is something like a harsh caw of a crow, or the distant howl of a wolf or something to that effect. Something to bring out the eeriness, I mean. Apart from that, the other descriptive pieces are quite nicely done.

I like Cheerilee’s punchy dialogue. She’s full of life! At the same time, there’s something about it that just doesn’t seem to fit her. See, let me pluck out a line over here for discussion:

For a while all of my problems were solved. No more squabbling! No more Cutie Mark bullshit!

I can’t imagine her talking like that, evil or not. There’s nothing wrong with having an evil Cheerilee, but the evil Cheerilee must still talk and feel like a Cheerilee. She sounds like a male, doesn't she? Look at the way she speaks! There's definitely an overdose of testosterone in there, and it's making her out of character in a bad way. But if you’d ask me to choose between having her out of character or having a dull, one-sided and shallow character, I’d rather the former. That's because there's nothing worse than having no character.

and I wouldn’t want him to find me swooning over a book. He might get jealous, and that was too much of a wildcard for me to deal with.

It's bits like these that spice up her personality and make her interesting to read about, even though it doesn’t actually fit very well as I mentioned earlier. There are other traces of good writing I’ve picked up along the way, and I’m happy to see them there. Some are nice, ‘moving’ descriptions, and there are some aptly used similes. Of course, when taken out of context, they don’t seem all that great, but I’ll just slap those that I noted down over here.

“...my smile faded into a frown.”
“Featherweight looked as if he had just been told that he was the new owner of Sugarcube Corner.”

Yup, I’m pleasantly surprised with this story. I didn’t see as many punctuation errors as I thought I would be seeing, and none of them were glaring enough to be noticed easily. I couldn’t quite grasp the strange ways the story was turning at first, but once I decided that the underlying theme was comedy, all the wackiness began to make sense. It was much more easygoing and fun to read this, instead of having to trudge through pages and pages of exposition as I expected from story premises of this sort. Nicely done. As a final comment, do consider tagging this as a comedy, because its got the feel of one. With that, I hope you’ve found this review useful, and I wish you luck on your next chapter.

--cheezesauce, WRITE’s perpetual underground lurker.

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