Rainbow Dash has a recurring dream where she is given an award. This would be fine, if not for the fact that it becomes all she can think about.
With this dream driving her nuts, Rainbow decides to embark on a path to end the recurring dream once and for all.
Special thanks:
totallynotabrony, for both his skills at editing, and for one of his stories inspiring me to write this one
The Kerbal Space Program developers, for allowing screenshots of their game to be used, and for making such an amazing game that also played a role in inspiring this story.
Chapters (10)
*Unofficial sequel to my fic XD*
Have some fitting music
Well, this is interesting. Wonder what happens when they build the first rocket for Equestria.
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Oh trust me, there is a great deal more to come!
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I was a little confused when I read that for the first time, then I checked out One Small Step.
SWEET CELESTIA THE FEELS!
But seriously though, that was really well done. When I have time, I'll definitely have to check out your other stories too.
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Well, I can tell you this much. First, they *REDACTED*, then once they *EXPUNGED*, they gather the didgeridoos for the final showdown between the long forgotten alicron army and scootaloo.
Okay so that may be a tiny bit inaccurate.
Then next chapter should be out pretty soon though, and it may contain what you are looking for.
Cool.
The following review is brought to you by Zero Punctuation Reviews
For the few pestiferous fucks out there with consistent and reliable sleep schedules, allow me to wallow for a bit by explaining to you that I suffer from 'transient insomnia'. Basically every now and again, my melatonin levels decide that I don't appreciate them enough and that the best way to punish me for my hubris is to only permit me 2-4 hours of sleep a night for about two weeks. I'm on the tail end of it now, and so many fiscal and academic deadlines have piling upon my fragile body that I'm stressed in that special way where you completely stop giving a shit like apathy is the defense mechanism your brain employs to stay thoughts of auto-cannibalistic fits. I try to start off every review with a cute little metaphor that encapsulates my thoughts of the story and the preceding garble is the excuse I give for not coming up with one. Sorry Tarnthelos.
So, to put matters bluntly, "Breaking the Barrier" is alright; It's plot is alright and it's ideas are alright. However, it's sitting in the same pool of mediocrity as "Dream Whisper" and "Wish Upon a Supernova" that makes me sad to my core because I think that it's got wondrous potential that isn't being met. Take that with massive amounts of salt reader, because I think the same of the US government, showing just how credulous and naive I truly am.
Make no mistake that this is Rainbow Dash's story, fixating on her longing to go into space because of science reasons that are apparently too robust and complicated to make apparent to reader. Other characters show up every now and again, sure, but they behave more like plot points to drive the story and don't get to have personalities. Normally I'd pounce all over poor characters, but as established earlier I do not possess the capability to give a shit. The flat characters used for plot points don't bother me within the context of this particular story because it's not about them, it's about Rainbow Dash. She's the star and the only one we're directed to care about, so the other characters having glorified cameos is fine.
What is not fine is that Rainbow Dash is apparently secretly posh and haughty because the narration is articulated and structured in a way that I pictured the speaker as an overeducated Malcolm McDowell type. The way she's presented creates an uncanny cognitive dissonance, for she's well within character in her dialogue and actions but is not in character in her thoughts nor narrations. Maybe Rainbow Dash is a budding Holmesian intellectual underneath her brash veneer, but I'm not buying it because it is not appropriately established. I get that she has to be intelligent to become MLP's first rocket scientist, but she feels like another character has supplanted her and is wearing her face and words. Unless you're plotting a big reveal in which Rainbow Dash pulls off her face to reveal that she's been Old Man Withers all along, the way she narrates and the way she behaves are at odds with each other. This can easily be fixed by scrapping the first person perspective so that the Malcolm McDowell narrator is not Rainbow Dash, or by adjusting the language so that the narrator's tone and voice fits the character.
The second of the glaring issues is engagement. Former events slipped from my memory with lubricated ease and I found myself backtracking more than once to figure out exactly what was happening. Now that may be entirely my bad since I was operating on a sleep schedule that a fucking giraffe suffering from constant night terrors would call less then satisfactory, but I wasn't engaged. I wasn't interested. The experience was a tasteless saltine cracker; edible but unsatisfying and entirely forgettable.
The main obstacle hindering "Breaking the Barrier" from ascension is that the story is kinda boring. It's an acute sufferer of what I will hereby name "Dream-Whisper-Story-Syndrome" in which a story with big ideas is severely crippled by it's own presentation. The two primary symptoms are 'dull-first-person-perspective' and 'tell, don't show'. While Dream-Whisper-Story-Syndrome will hardly prove fatal, it does weigh the story down and reduce the experience to a slog. No feeling that might exist behind the ideas is coming across, leaving the work to feel void of human emotion.
I suppose the first person perspective could be forgiven if Malcolm-McDowell-Dash wasn't so fucking insipid. All the narrator does is flatly and robotically tell you what happens, which seems like a silly complaint. Surely, one needs to be told what happens but I want to be shown what happens. I want to feel like I'm there, like I'm some voyeuristic ghost watching all the action from the safety and comfort of an ethereal realm that looks strangely like my messy dorm room. I want to lose myself in the story, I want the character's emotions to influence mine. But I can't because there's no entrance to this fun space party. The premise has all the appeal of a ball pit full of disembodied breasts and cupcakes baked with mother's love but sadly the ball pit is sealed in a vault made of mythril on the dark side of Mercury.
Immersion is essential and "tell, don't show" shoots immersion in the fucking kneecaps, making the experience crawl around flailing and screaming. Immersion is necessary because it can truly elevate a basically alright experience - like, say, this one - into a fantastic and timeless one. (I'm going to get so much flak for this) Take the Harry Potter series, which was stuffed to the brim with shabbily introduced plot points and weak characters (like Tonks, stop pretending that you care about Tonks) that get established and then entirely forgotten about like they were magically apparated to the no-longer-convenient dimension. (Room of Requirement? Hah, more like room of fucking plot convenience.) But I like Harry Potter because it presents itself so well, and it lets me into it's thought out world and smothers me with wonderful moments, themes and human emotion until I'm crying and begging for more. "Breaking the Barrier" isn't so kind, it won't to let me into it's world like it doesn't want all it's cool friends to find out that it hangs out with me.
Look, here's what I mean:
Every word on the page as two ultimate goals; the conveyance of information and the conveyance of meaning. Information entails things like plot, character interaction and motivation, choices, events etc. Meaning entails themes, emotions, characterization, reasons behind character actions, and most importantly why I should be interested. This story conveys information in a dull manner while all meaning is lost because of "tell, don't show." Whatever thoughts and ideas were in your lovely noggin are not coming across, Tarnthelos, and they need to. The presentation makes the work feel soulless.
These are the kinds of sentences you'll find in "Breaking the Barrier".
-Rainbow Dash drank some milk because she really likes milk.-
All this sentence does convey conclusive information. Readers become disinterested in works that arrive at conclusions for them. It causes our higher cognitive functions to switch off because there's nothing presented for us to think about. Instead of telling me that Rainbow Dash likes milk, show me that Rainbow Dash likes milk. Give me the evidence and allow me to reach the conclusion myself. Then you get to employ connotative and emotionally charged works that paint the scent and evoke feeling in the heart of the reader.
-Rainbow Dash drained the glass of milk then released a quick, satisfied sigh and a quipped smile.-
I'm not a great writer - go talk to flutterdash1 if you'd like evidence - but with this sentence you can reach the conclusion that Rainbow Dash likes milk rather then sit there and have me tell you about it. By showing the audience what is happening you will improve your work immensely. What will really stick with the reader is how the story made them feel, not what happened. All emotion caused by participating in stories stems from how you choose to convey information - what words you pick, how you structure it, etc. Give us emotional charged events, show us what is happening and we will actively search for meaning and conclusions.
At the end of the day, "Breaking the Barrier" is by no means bad. It's competent, fairly unique and has a few neat-o ideas in it's head, but it needs to trim the fat and learn how to present itself. It's got a lovely personality buried behind all the boredom, but I'm not going to bed with it. It's like a walk thru the park being decimated by heat, humidity and a robbery where the mugger isn't even enthusiastic enough to beat the shit out of you. It's like sitting in a decent history class when you've gone without sleep for 30 hours. It's like eating food from Dragacane's Mystery Chinese Food Restaurant; It's not going to give you explosive diarrhea but you'll forget all about it in about 30 minutes.
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First off, thank you for typing up such an insanely long review. I can't imagine that it took a short amount of time; so again, thank you.
With that said, let's dive right into this, shall we?
Don't sweat it. I've had a fucked up sleep schedule for the past two years, so I know a bit of what that's like.
It's funny, I actually had some delusions that this might be one of the first stories to get a favorable review.
But hey, for my first pony story I'll certainly take "alright" over "Dear sweet Jesus what the hell is this".
Hmm, I tried to make it apparent that the dream that she originally had pushed her to learn more about aerodynamics, in addition to practising more, and from there she decided to go to space since a lack of atmosphere makes things easier when you're trying to go fast.
Of course, this was all told in roughly four and a half pages, so I should probably expound on her motivations a bit.
OC development has always been a weak spot of mine, and I see that it shines through in this story. It's good to know that it isn't too much of a detriment here though.
Want to know the sad part? The nariation is very similar to how I "speak" in my head.
I was a bit worried that this might be the case, but I didn't know the extent of the issue until now.
Well shit. There goes my idea for chapter 10....
I will be doing the latter, at some point. When I write third-person, It tends to devolve into a bunch of floating, faceless, uncharacterized talking heads.
If you can, do you think you could give me any specific instances where you had to backtrack? It would make it easier to pinpoint what to change if I knew.
Alrighty then. Note to self: work on spicing up the perspective and 'showing'.
Like I said somewhere above, for my first pony fic I think I did a tolerable job, and think I'm getting the same vibe from this review. Not great, not terrible, and with plenty of room for improvment.
At some point, I'm going to slowly go through each chapter and rework quite a few things. Namely how the narration is structured and worded. Probably between the end of next month and when I actually finish writing it.
Once again, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to write out that review. It highlighted quite a few areas that I didn't know I was lacking in, and was also a joy to read.
Wait, why didn't you tell me you uploaded this already? I might have sent some views your way.
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you're quite welcome for the review, friend. i enjoy making them.
the part i backtracked on that really sticks out in memory is Rainbow Dash's transition from merely being interested in aerodynamics to building a rocket prototype. it's all about finding a sweet spot between going not-so-slow as to bore the reader and not-so-fast as to confuse them.
as for OC character development, i'd say have a firm grip on who that character is and why they need to be in the story. if it's just to move the plot forward, then they're a plot device. if they're trying to reach a goal, they're a character. every character that wasn't Rainbow Dash felt like a plot device. flesh out the ones that you think are important and that the audience should care about and leave the others alone.
here's some helpful videos:
happy writing!
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I could have sworn I let you know...
Well, either it slipped my mind or was never sent. Sorry about that.
This story seems like a mix of October Sky and a NASA first-person documentary. It's a mix of boringness and excitement that makes me neutral with this story, though that's probably because of how the story doesn't really convey the feelings.
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First of all: Wow, it was nice to read a review of yours again. I just love it and I wish I was not as incompetent with the layout of this site to a point, where I have no idea how to follow someone's posts on stories. No. Idea.
As I also have recently found out that it is actually quite funny how I have always cluttered my sentences with commas - speaking in the past here although I probably shouldn't - while you are a non-punctuation reviewer. I guess my slow mind just needed a small coffee break while reading through that page-long review. And before I forget, here, is the daily, dose of, unpleasantly, placed, commas for, you all out, there who, are annoyed, by commas.
Yay, I was mentioned
That would be awesome!
As to quote a certain pegasus of a certain show you all might very well know. And if the glaring smiley face right up there is not a hint enough, I can tell you that she has a lot to do with rainbows.
Who needs to write good stories if they are famous?
Ah, and before cluttering the whole text here with these ridiculous pony-head-smileys, I should start cluttering it with commas instead. Anywhoosers, I was bursting out in laughter as I first read that part and I still am chuckling, although that is something I can't really show through the means of my keyboard, so let me use another one of these pony-head-smileys just to brighten up your day or worsen your mood, depending on your affection to these things 
Well, I hope that if your coffee-driven, sleepless body has the time in the far future to review a newer story of mine and be blown away how pathetically low my improvement is
At least it is not banished on the moon for another thousand years!
You! YOU! You forgot the 'h', kind sir and I am in the belief that for that a horde of crazy pinkamena pies is coming to get you when you sleep this night. (If you can sleep with your insomniac disorder, that is)
Dat metaphor
Well I hope you read through these thoughts of mine, raw and unformulated but at least formatted in a readable manner. Although I may not be as a great reviewer as you are ( I certainly think that is a goal I will never reach, so screw goals and let the commas commence ) I certainly hope you found it at least interesting or read-worthy and if not: "MUHAHAHAHAHAHA I stole your time !"
And, yes, before I forget, about it, here, are the, commas, I promised, earlier,