• Member Since 27th Aug, 2013
  • offline last seen Jan 12th, 2015

Unselfish Knave


A humble wordsmith who only hopes to make your time with his works worthwhile.

T

Twilight Sparkle expected that her life would change when she exalted as an alicorn and became a princess of Equestria. That much was obvious. What she didn't expect was to learn of the threats that besiege Equetria every day, the kind of threats that would drive mortal ponies mad and make the mighty despair.

Twilight is no stranger to saving the world, but can she manage to maintain her relationships with those close to her when she has become something much more than any of them? And what happens when foes from the distant past threaten to topple even the Exalted Alicorns?

Welcome to Equestria, here's your shovel. This is My Little Pony playing by the rules of Exalted.

Chapters (4)
Comments ( 12 )

You look like you could use some feedback

Grammar is solid. Nothing jumped out to me as an issue. It shows that you care.

I don't get any real vibes of the canon characters being off or impostors, with the obvious exception of Pinkie. It seems like a strange choice, making her not really be Pinkie Pie. They seem to be acting in a fairly true and genuine matter, aside from a couple of things. For example, I found Applejack crying in the first chapter to be grandstanding, and not exactly true to her character. As an audience, we don't experience any emotional build leading up to this moment, so it's difficult to feel sad with her. The "background pony" gag is a pretty ripe offender. Your story seems to be relatively serious fantasy adventure fare; why shatter the suspension of disbelief with a fandom reference? (You have another one of these with Fluttertree.)

So far, your story is heavily on dialogue and rather sparse in detail. Setting the scene is important. As a general rule of thumb, don't open with a line of dialogue (unless the POV character is just waking up or something). It's disconcerting to open immediately with an action, like speaking, because if the scene can't be imagined the action exists in a void. Of course, there is a fine line here. Too much detail, and you have a host of adjectives and adverbs that don't really add anything.

Infodumping in author's notes is better than infodumping in the actual story, but there are better approaches. Details like what you're sharing should be worked into the story itself. There are good ways to include exposition, and there are times when things should be left a bit mysterious. How you're working the two settings together can be interesting to the audience, and it's better shown than told.

So far, this story gets off to a fairly fast start, which is good, but it feels like it's missing something. Opening with the dream sequence is pretty off-putting. It's probably a good idea to start off with things making sense. Presumably, Twilight "exalted" much the same way she did in the show, but that feels almost out of place with the other setting elements your including. I keep expecting some sort of flashback.

The conflict bursts through the doors rather suddenly. It's good to get the conflict into the picture as soon as possible, but I'd recommend hinting at it before throwing it out there in full. As it stands, there's absolutely no buildup before a villain is attacking the protagonist. There's no opportunity for the tension to gain traction before we're in a full-on crisis, and the moment of crisis is left without any impact.

In general, it's best to separate character thoughts from the text of the story, especially in the case of questions. Lines like "Why had she wanted to kill herself?" make it seem like you're asking the audience the question (the answer: I haven't got a clue). I'm guessing its Twilight asking herself the question, but in my humble opinion, it would be better presented as an italicized thought, like: "Why did I want to kill myself? Twilight wondered." This clearly shows that she is just in the dark about the weird dream as the audience.

There's some general telly-ness in your prose. For example, when you say, "A part of her was hurt that Applejack wasn’t being supportive, but another part just felt ashamed because she couldn’t deny what Applejack was saying." You're telling us what Twilight is feeling. In general, it's best for characters to show what they're feeling by what they say and do.

That's all I've got. It's good, but it's rough around the edges and could definitely use some polish.

Unlike AdrianVesper, I don't think the background pony nod was a reference to a meme; it sounds more like you were trying to temper the meme's notoriety by having Applejack use it as an existing phrase. If that's the case, I approve, but I also think you should have chosen a different pony to express that sentiment.

What does bother me is that Rarity and AJ desperately want Twilight back in Ponyville, but don't seem to care much about having Spike back. Applejack doesn't ask about him at all, and to Rarity he's just an afterthought. Some friends. They're more rude here than they were in the pilot episode, gushing over Twilight while ignoring the dragon as if his friendship couldn't possibly be as big a priority as that of their fellow pony. It's also borderline despicable that AJ is only tearing up over Twilight outliving everyone, but not Spike (unless he's a subspecies of dragon with a lifespan similar to ponykind's).

This ugly idea that Spike's closest friends don't feel the same way about him is the only thing about FiM (or MLP, in this case) that takes my good mood down a few notches and pushes me to dislike the mane six. Isn't the show about friendship, not racially exclusive friendship? Like Applejack the Hypocrite says, their Element status has never had anything to do with their personal lives.

Furthermore, AJ's reasoning behind her feelings of insignificance falls pretty flat against Spike's status as a servant who's only done manual labor and fax machine work as far as we know (and has only ever contributed to saving Equestrai). She's shedding tears over some incredibly selfish feelings.

I see what you did with the Fluttershy=tree thing here as well, lending logic and substance to what people would typically just see as a nod to the fandom. Fluttershy has stated in canon that she would like to be a tree, and Discord has the ability to make that happen with ease. The animators even gave her a tree disguise at one point!

You can live your whole life being the best in the world at what you do, but then it all turns out to be just a footnote in the history of some alicorn who could do your job better than you without even trying.”

And here we have Applejack still failing miserably to empathize with the dragon who saved her from a towering monster once.

I know rather little about Exalted, but these footnotes are rather helpful. Can't wait to see what Rarity is NOT planning, and how she does NOT advance in a NONEXISTENT organization.

Wow. Thank you so much for all that feedback. This is my first real effort at writing a fic, and I appreciate the thought and care you put into your comments. I'll keep these things in mind for future chapters.

Poor Applejack - life really sucks for mortals in Creation. I get the impression that Exalts are a bit rarer in Equestria though - it's the princess thing. Is every Exalt automatically a monarch, or just solars, or just a few of them?
And of course Pinkie is a Sidereal. That explains so much :pinkiehappy:

So Star Swirl appears to be an enlightened mortal with a Brigid's-Mantle-style effect (presumably the Amulet), given his demonstrated spells. That or he's been akuma'd up the wazoo.

And Twilight bought a bunch of neat sorcery and non-combat charms and didn't bother with silly things like don't-die stuff. didn't she? Someone should tell Applejack she could probably smack Twilight around like an infant, it might cheer her up. Or make her even more upset.

Rainbow's only an enlightened mortal? I would have thought Air-Aspect was a shoe-in, particularly if she's learning Air Dragon, which is generally out of the reach of enlightened mortals.

Something I noticed: Applejack, as a heroic mortal with obvious significance to Fate and no connections to any other source of Exaltation or Demon/Fae/God-Bloodedness, is in a pretty good position to snap up a Solar or Lunar shard if one comes around. More likely Lunar, though; her ambitions in life are too ... lowly for Solar Exaltation.

I find it hilarious that Pinky and Fluttershy are probably the heavy-hitters of the Elements at the moment. Unless Fluttershy has sunk all her XP into extra custom be-more-of-a-tree charms and animal communication/healing stuff. Wait ... of course she did. Never mind, it's on you Pinkie.

"Nah, all the XP I could spare from navigate-the-insane-bureaucracy-that-is-my-life charms and make-better-resplendent-destinies-to-cope-with-all-my-zany-hijinks charms went into throw-better-parties charms. Priorities, y'know?"

Uh... Rarity?

"Well, I suppose I might be able to help out ... if I knew the secret killing arts of a clandestine society, which I don't. And if the battle took place during a social function, which it very likely won't. Sorry, darling."

So we're down to the enlightened mortal martial artist and a heroic mortal farmer. Hey Applejack! I guess that's one thing you can do for Twilight - bleed.

Spike is interesting me, something that doesn't happen that often.

Proceed.

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Oh, Dash is definitely Dragon-Blooded tier. By "enlightened," I mean that she's taken an enlightening charm to grant access to Celestial Martial Arts (the Tiger and Bear line, for those curious). I realize in retrospect that this terminology is a bit ambiguous. I choose to say that this is Exalted's fault, not mine. I imagine there's a lot of overlap between training for Air Dragon Style and training for trick flying.

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Trick flying would involve much less killinating and murderizing, I imagine. Dash has to love getting to be invisible, though - great for pranks!

I'm seriously uncertain as to what Starswirl threw at Celestia. I mean, if it's what I think it is (and it just about has to be), Starswirl managed to bootstrap himself up to Solar Circle Sorcery. Which is possible, I think, if he's akuma - but then, which of the Yozi (or local equivalents) owns him? What would they think of what he just did to himself (obviously they approved, he was allowed to do it, but why)? And why did Celestia not perfect it away or Adamant Countermagic it? (my best guess is she got caught in a battle Combo that didn't have a surprise negator in it - in which case, she's a moron and should hand her shard over to Starswirl and apologise for ever doubting him, because there's no excuse for a Solar her age to get caught like that.)

An extra aside for Exalted newcomers: the charms Celestia used are all stuff a starting Solar could have. Celestia didn't even get out of first gear - probably for the same reason she hadn't wanted Twilight to see how a Solar fights at all. Doesn't want to traumatize the girl, after all.

This is a really good story. I hope you continue it sometime.

Spike is looking like some sort of Infernal Variant, which is very interesting.

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