A Doctor Whooves tale starring the Seventh Doctor.
The Doctor goes to Whinnychester Castle to pay a visit to his former companion, the Alicorn Celestia of Equestria. What starts as a social call becomes something else when the Doctor learns Celestia's sister has been working herself to exhaustion investigating something that has been attacking ponies in their dreams.
But even that is simply a prelude to something far more sinister. Something that will require the Doctor, Celestia, and the captain of Princess Luna's Night Guard to travel through the dreams and memories of the Princess of the Night. On their quest, the trio will uncover the origins of great darkness and maybe, just maybe, avert the calamity of Nightmare Moon.
Cover Art by DiscordedWhovian
Proofreading courtesy of Unimpressive Vagaries
Thanks to both of you guys.
So far so good! I look forward to more.
2837278 good start well keep writing. onwards and upwards!!
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That is all.
2890276
I don't get it.
2890311 You don't need to. Just enjoy it...
i guess this doctors in the darker stages of his life fendric era or more mel era?
2912068
I'm going for Fendric, since technically post-Ace. Which should explain some if Celestia's frustration with him.
2912123 he always was a dark bugger wasent he are we going to get full on dark doctor soon?
2912200 not sure how dark he'll actually be. I'm playing up his mysterious/manipulative side and going from there. Hopefully I won't disappoint in the end.
2912686 god your amazing <3
2912686 i reckon the 7th i the most dark/cunning one out of all of them tho
Wow.
That's awesome.
Enough said.
10th and Derpy would make sense, 7th and Celestia...
Go on...
3799713
Just about everyone does 10th & Derpy or 10th & Twilight. So I've mostly worked out combinations with the Classic Doctors. Another combination I've used is Big Mac & Cheerilee with the First. General idea is that, with a couple exceptions, "present day" Earthborn companions have a pony equivalent.
I guess, but if you think about it, the Doctors become progressively younger with each regeneration. Except for the Eleventh, who for some reason becomes significantly older, but not as old as the First. Personally, I think that Pinkie would have a field day with the Fourth.
3800793
That classic Doctors went a bit more back and forth. Peter Davison (Fifth Doctor) was youngest person to have the role until Matt Smith came along.
I have Pinkie pegged with the Eleventh as (a) who else are you going to call the "Impossible Girl?" and (b) it puts "Too Many Pinkie Pies" into a whole new perspective. Though my twist is that the Doctor's Pinkie is not Ponyville's Pinkie.
3801968 You mean that the Eleventh's Pinkie is like Clara?
3801969
Yep. And, as you saw in their cameo in chapter four, Scootaloo & Pipsqueak are my Amy Pond & Rory Williams (if/when Scoots family shows up in canon, it'll be because the second Big Bang succeeded)
I always admired the Seventh Doctor as opposed to others, would you perhaps show me a dark moment of him from a Youtube clip or something, so I can get a quick understanding for the story I'm going to be reading right now.
3871709
I think I have just the scene in mind but it doesn't seen like I can access it from my phone & I can't use my computer right now. I'll edit this comment to add it when I can.
If you want to hunt it down, it's from a serial called the Curse of Fenric, and towards the end the Doctor has to break his companion's spirit in order for an ally to be able to finish the villain (like that Eleventh Doctor episode where they're stuck in the hotel)
EDIT: (Here's the video)
Actually kind of glad to get an excuse to post the video, since I'll be making a small reference to it in my finale chapter.
dam i do love the 7th doctor his dark side was a refreshing side we needed
3920444
Were I don't think I made him especially dark, I do hope I've managed to get his manipulative/secretive side across.
Oh, I love this Doctors version of 'I'm holding all the cards and telling you how doomed you are, but you wont figure it out in time" Its so much more smug and mysterious than the normal.
3926890
While I wasn't thinking in exactly those terms, that was the vibe I was going for. The Seventh is known for being several moves ahead of everyone else, so I wanted the scene to demonstrate that he long since knew what was going on.
Twilight Moon?
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Hey, how come your first Doctor Whooves Story isn't on this site?
4018486 Got pulled for being TOO close to the original episodes.
Hm, not bad
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"Bowties are indeed cool."
Brilliant. It was an absolute joy to proofread, and it fully deserves my favorite. Keep up the good work!
Hello, sir, this is ChromeMyriad here with your requested WRITE review! For those about to read, beware of SPOILERS!
I’ll go ahead and preface this review by saying I’m not a massive fan of Doctor Who. I like the show and have watched several of its recent incarnations, but it didn’t leave a deep impression on me. I say this to inform you I won’t get many of the references being made in this fic. Take the following as criticism from a relative newbie to the Doctor.
Before I dive into the actual story, I should note the usage of ‘night guard’ in the synopsis here:
If Luna’s Night Guard is the name of the unit, it should be capitalized. The way it’s currently written implies that there is also a segment of Luna’s guard active during the day, otherwise mentioning the ‘night’ part is meaningless. In the latter case, a hyphen between the words should be included.
Forgot a capital on that second ‘our’.
That period needs to be a comma. Here’s a link to a decent resource for grammar rules. The mechanical errors in this fic seem to mostly be small oversights rather than consistent problems. A thorough review by an experienced editor should catch them if you want to clean them all up.
Infodumps are used in the first chapter to describe the characters’ appearances:
Infodumps slow down your story and disrupt its flow. Audience immersion hinges on how well the information in a story is paced with the development of the plot or character interaction. It is far more immersive to mention physical character traits only when they become relevant to the story. In this particular case, the same fan recognition of the Doctor (as well as his trademark eccentricity) would have a great deal more impact if other ponies’ reactions to him were shown rather than implied through telling. The infodump for Celestia is particularly grating due to the fact that your audience already knows exactly what she looks like. That small paragraph about Celestia’s appearance is one of those that readers skip.
Let me talk about telling, actually. Telling is when the narrator informs the audience of what’s happening baldly as opposed to showing what’s going on. Showing is when thoughts and ideas are implied through description of storyline events. Allow me to give a few examples:
These are examples of telling. The narrator is informing the audience what opinion they are meant to have rather than allowing the audience to develop their opinion based on descriptions of the actions or characters involved.
It would be more interesting to show the guards actually being better than other guards or showing us how the Doctor’s feat was impressive or to describe him swaggering, sauntering, or striding past the guards. For instance, the garb of ponies who visit this location could be described as the Doctor passes a few by. These same ponies could comment on the strangeness of his dress or even just throw him unsure or haughty looks. This would be far more immersive than simply telling us his feat was impressive.
Individually, these instances of telling are not seriously damaging to your story, but niggling errors become overwhelming difficulties as they grow in number. Telling is one of the biggest problems in this story.
Is he meant to be rolling his ‘r’s here? It’s unclear.
Ah, so he does. I’m not sure if this is a trait of the Doctor carried over from the show, but I feel like this particular act might be one of those things that’s funny to hear, but kind of weird to read. Unless this becomes important to the plot, it’s more distracting than it’s worth.
I mentioned earlier that small, isolated incidents of telling were not seriously degrading to the story. Giving Celestia’s entire history with the Doctor in the form of a block of telling makes it seem like the history doesn’t matter, as indeed it doesn’t. The implication of giving the Doctor a free pass to private time with Celestia is that they have significant history. The emotions felt during that history can’t really be felt by the audience here because the actions implying them aren’t shown to us. The heavy implication of history coupled with the rising threat to Equestrians is more than enough motivation for the Doctor and Celestia to go on their next adventure, rendering this infodump of history completely unnecessary and disruptive to the story’s flow.
Another dubious piece of the story is the Doctor showing telltale signs of being a Gary Stu. A Gary Stu is a character who is essentially perfect. They are smart, strong, competent in myriad ways, and have no flaws. The Doctor has thus far been shown to have special privilege, be a mentor to the leader of a country, have the admiration of a beautiful female, etcetera. His flaws so far are restricted to his arguably eccentric fashion sense, and even that could be seen as a virtuous rebellion against unreasonably elitist expectations. Gary Stus are generally uninteresting characters due to their flawlessness and are to be avoided by giving your characters believable flaws.
Having said this, I remember the Doctor from the show I watched not having many flaws either, but that was forgivable because the strangeness of his character gave him a lot of comedic interactions with his more relatable sidekick. The same logic applies here. The Doctor described in this tale has almost no character at all outside of being merely competent. Rolling his ‘r’s and dressing out of the ordinary do not give him character and, without an accompanying reason or an apparent difference in the way he thinks, seem gimmicky. Again, these are probably attributes the show’s Doctor has, but his character isn’t well-established here and those attributes only serve to distract.
An important piece missing from this story’s dialogue is body language and description of facial expression. It’s important to include small tidbits of this sort to help immersion and character development through interaction. This is the perfect place to insert the comedic elements I mentioned before that saved the Doctor’s character in the show and made him interesting. The same can be said of Celestia’s and Edge Glimmer’s dialogue. The characters seem made of cardboard most of the time because their body language isn’t shown.
I feel like the response to this fic would be greater if the telling problems in the first chapter were fixed. The hook is very important to capture an audience’s attention and the telling creates a rather long slog to get to the good parts.
In your message, you mentioned some criticism regarding ‘clunky’ dialogue. I would describe the dialogue as more ‘incomplete’ than ‘clunky’. A great deal of character development is dependent on interaction between characters and the lack of clarifying emotion, reactionary facial expressions, and body language is absolutely crippling. Let me give an example:
Now, in the author’s mind, this exchange is probably pictured with accompanying raised eyebrows, pursed lips, coy glances, the frustrated ruffling of feathers, and maybe a snort or two. From the reader’s perspective, however, the only cue we’re given that either character moves or shows any emotion at all is the word ‘unhappily’. Did her gaze drop to the floor? Did her ears droop? Perhaps she also got a faraway look in her eyes as bitter memories rose, unbidden, to the forefront of her mind?
The Doctor here is even worse. Not knowing anything about the seventh Doctor, I had no character to go on for this exchange. In my mind’s eye, a ponified version of the Riddler sips tea with a dead-eyed expression as his monotone drones the dialogue like an actor who completely stopped caring. Is he a cold, unassailably logical analyzer? Is he a jovial imp having a little good-natured fun at Celestia’s expense? Is he a thoughtful creature, pondering life’s mysteries with his chin resting on a hoof?
And the rrrrrrrrr’s. Oh, the rrrrrr’s. Vernacular, or a character’s dialect, has a place in some stories because it helps readers recognize some important aspect about the character. That is, vernacular helps a reader understand a character’s origins or helps identify when a character is speaking. Vernacular can even help explain why two characters interact poorly if it’s thick enough to be confusing. The trilling ‘r’s, though, seem to hold no purpose. If they’re an aspect of the seventh Doctor’s character, I can see at least why they’re here. However, anyone fan enough to recognize it as a trait of the seventh Doctor knows what he sounds like and is already reading his dialogue in his voice. Considering this, actually writing in the rolling ‘r’s is just distracting to non-fans like myself. It would be easy to simply acknowledge this quirk of the Doctor’s character in one of the lines of dialogue without constantly reminding us it’s there. This would allow the fans’ immersion to remain without throwing in roadbumps for the non-fans. As a suggestion, you could leave this in:
and leave out all the extra ‘r’s. I think the fic would be a lot stronger for it.
On the Doctor’s character in particular, I think amending the dialogue would go a long way toward helping give him a little depth and relatability. The short explanations in the Author’s Notes are nice for us non-Whovians, so I wouldn’t change those. The Doctor’s history doesn’t need to be gone over in-depth, but he does need to be interesting. Like I said, I have no idea what his character might be and the story didn’t really tell me much other than slight eccentricities and being a bit of a presumptuous prick sometimes.
In conclusion, this fic has good and bad points. The telling is painful in the beginning, but more showing is available later on. The pacing in the beginning feels a little rushed, but it’s not terribly distracting and would likely be solved if it were revised to show more than tell. The characterization of Celestia, Luna, and Edge is passable despite the Doctor’s criminal lack of interesting character. The plot is coherent and fairly intriguing. The dreamscape in particular seems to have had the most thought put into it. I enjoyed the silhouettes, as they lent the dreamscape a particularly sinister feel.
Now, I didn’t read the entire thing. I will if you’d like me to, but I read far enough to justify my feelings about the Doctor and the dialogue in particular.
As an addendum, I want to mention the little introductions at the start of each chapter. While not strictly necessary and a little distracting, I didn’t find them to be all that bad. They lent the chapters an episodic feel that makes up for the slight distraction, in my opinion.
Enjoy your review! If you wish to ask questions or discuss the content of this review, feel free to PM me or reply to this comment.
~ChromeMyriad, WRITE’s Nanite Construct
Ex-companion Princess.. who likes bombs?
there needs to be more storys like this!!