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When a community theater production of Gilhoof and Sullivan's 'The Ponies of Penzance' takes an odd turn, it's up to Twilight to get to the bottom of things. But when her investigation forces Luna to reveal the link between the Elements and her descent into madness as Nightmare Moon, Twilight is left facing a heartbreaking question of ethics.
Strong advisory: Pervasively dark, unsettling content!
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My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
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I don't know how you do it...
It takes a true wordsmith to craft such a tale to unify both canon and fan fiction in this manner. This tale truly rewards those that follow stories of the fandom, yet still entertains those who are not so well read.
I could easily see the lighter side of this story as being a large segment from an actual episode.
Beautiful and terrifying. Pinkie's whole performance was worth the read. And every pony felt so true to their character, too. Bravo!
Wait, did all of that actually happen then or was it all Pinkies hyperactive imagination? So the whole narrative was the nightmare, with the bad bit being how realistic it all seemed with the believable backstory? I want to believe this but I need closure! (On a more serious note fuck Luna and her justification. Torture is very different to zapped into another dimension).
You're right; it IS thought-provoking and creepy...
In answer to your question as to why I liked this story and have favourited it was firstly to do with Pirates. I am a huge fan of pirates and I love mlp so any story that combines the two is always a worthy read. Plus I have a soft spot for the CMC fillies and for school plays and Pip.
Secondly I like dark fanfiction (just forgot to mention it on my bio on my userpage) I am always a fan of stories that even though there are mainly light elements and could be pictured in an episode, I live for the unpredictable creepy 'didn't expect to see that kind of thing that totally doesnt mess with my own mind and now want to question everything...'
Thirdly and most importantly it has to do with Pinkamena...I love the darker counterpart of our dear party pony and simply anything that involves her again I shall gladly read...
-Frost
God. Make my job difficult, why don't you? I figured this would be an easy review, but then midway through you pull that twist on us and all the dark shit starts happening.
So, I'm going to be frank. I didn't like this. Mostly. It had good points. Quite a lot of good points, in fact. Just not enough to save it. But I'm going to start with the positives before I start the thrashing, so I'll begin by saying that the prose is excellent. I'm not sure how you do it, but the writing style is fluid and easy to read, and even though reading for several thousand words about ponies performing a play didn't sound all that interesting to me (particularly a play which is a ponification of one I've never seen before), I found the story very engrossing and it drew me in immediately.
For some more minor positive points, I'll say that I love how you incorporated the comics canon (holy shit, I didn't even notice that Luna's mane changed in that story!), and that Asylum reference was perfect.
And one last thing that I wanted to also comment on was how the transitioning was done. The fact that the story got so motherfucking dark by the end wasn't actually an issue in and of itself, because of the way we got there. You began with a lighthearted, almost show-like scenario and tone, and we transitioned gradually to that point, starting with a creepy skull prop, getting creepier as we learn the prop's origin, getting into the actually dark territory as we learn it's not a prop, things get really bad when we discover the deal with Pinkamena, and by the time we're seeing the actual murders it's no longer really out of place. The tone-shift was handled in perhaps the best way it ever possibly could have been.
And now that that's out of the way, this whole premise is horribly contrived. I get it, right? Fanfiction is all about what-if scenarios. It doesn't have to adhere to canon. I get that. But this is still really not true to anything we've seen.
The Elements of Harmony inducing a split personality because they also contain darkness is totally antithetical to everything actually stated about them, and even just the lore and themes of the show. Luna's turn to darkness here is blamed on such an occurence, but the comics explicitly lay the blame at the feet of some kind of race of nightmare spirits, and you referenced the comics earlier. I guess a case can be made for the Elements of Harmony having a dark side if we go by Equestria Girls, but trying to blame whatever force in them made Sunset Shimmer into a succubus for Nightmare Moon, Nightmare Rarity, and apparently turning Pinkie into a crazy murderer isn't congruent with the canon explanation for the former two.
Then there's the mirror pool stuff. Dear God, have I heard the "Twilight's a murderer" line way, WAY more than I have any tolerance for. But I'm not going to get down on that, irritating as that may be, because that's just a peeve of mine and it's never actually stated that the clones aren't actually living things, even if it's also never stated that they are. Stupid as I think it may be, others are free to interpret Twilight as the kind of pony who would just start killing the clones without being sure that they're not real if they really want to. Whatever. I personally think that that's being dark and cynical just for the sake of trying to inject darkness and cynicism in a setting that doesn't have it, but fine. Whatever. I'll let it slide.
No, what I am going to get down on is the Twilight clone whose perspective we took throughout this story. This whole premise completely ignores the fact that the clones, even if we are taking the "they were totally real living beings, you guys" route, did not share their original's memories. Pinkie had to teach her clones the others' names in the episode. Here, this Twilight clone seemingly remembers everything her original experienced up until the mirror pool, except for the mirror pool itself, and with the only explanation being that Pinkamena SOMEHOW modified the mirror pool's effects and properties.
THAT is some SERIOUS bullshit. The idea of an earth pony being able to do magic if they can tear a horn off a unicorn is pretty iffy by itself, but I'd be able to accept it if that were all (and it had a purpose besides justifying the bizarre narrative decision to suddenly make the mirror pool clones intelligent). It's not like I've never seen the concept before. Discorded Whooves used it too. Except that I'm expected to buy that she is not only able to do magic now, but she's so amazing with her magic that she can somehow alter the spell properties of the mirror pool.
Admittedly, I'm basing this on guesswork here, but I'm going to go ahead and say that the fact that the mirror pool is a big-ass magical lake that induces an effect when stepped into, rather than a simple spell found in a book, means that however it came about, it must be some pretty fucking powerful and/or complex magic. The mere idea that Pinkamena could screw with it like that is incomprehensible to me. Twilight, MAYBE, but most unicorns we see on the show have only shown a capability for basic telekinesis at best, and unicorns are goddamn born with their magic.
Pinkamena though has only been even able to use magic for, how long? A few years at most? And yet she's already able to modify complex spells like some kind of magical savant. I meant what I said with that earlier "MAYBE"; I'm still not even sure I'd believe it if Twilight did that. Well, pre-ascension Twilight anyway.
It gets even worse somehow when Pinkamena seems to imply that her changes would be enough to make a clone be able to wield the element of magic, but I don't even want to get into that...
Of course, this is all moot if she maybe had help from Luna or something. The easiest fix to this issue IMO would be to cut the whole "Pinkamena doing magic" bullshit and just attribute it to Luna if we really MUST bring the mirror pool into this. Except that that ALSO has a plethora of problems, not least of which is how much more hypocritical and unlikeable it makes Luna (not that she isn't already both of these things) to chastise Twilight for killing the clones with her spell, when she would herself be altering the clones to make them even closer to real ponies, which makes it even less okay to kill them.
Even discounting the possibility that Luna had responsibility for the mirror pool alteration, I think I DO have an easy answer for your little question at the end there. Luna is unquestionably the worse one. I'm going to ignore motivations here, because Luna had good reason to do what she did and Twilight didn't know she was doing a bad thing in the first place. Neither of them were malevolent. So when we compare the two, we can really only compare by the suffering they've caused. And while Twilight apparently killed dozens by reducing them to nothing with a spell (EUGH, I hate this interpretation so much!), Luna sentenced her five to be tortured to death by a sadist, and the ones that she was responsible for killing were specially modified so that they all thought they were real and all suffered and died like real ponies, begging for their lives while Twilight's victims stared unblinkingly at a wall like animals and died without pain or fear. So yes. This does have an easy answer. FUCK Luna.
Especially fuck her for even allowing the possibility that the original Twilight might die. It's fucking bad enough that she put the clone through all that shit just to draw out her suffering before she even gave her to Pinkamena, and guilt-tripped her for killing the clones when, if this Twilight was herself a clone as Luna believed, she held neither the responsibility for that nor the karmic need to suffer the guilt for it. But to have possibly actually condemned the original Twilight to death? I bet her sister will be real happy about that.
On a more minor and less serious note, I'll also bring up Twilight's lack of reaction to the grandma skull story, and how she considered it cute. I couldn't say for sure that that's out of character for her, as nothing similarly macabre has yet happened in canon for me to judge, but I still find it utterly baffling. I don't think I expected her to be massively grossed out and dropping it on the floor or anything, but still, come on.
And just to round out my complaints, the editing here was atrocious. I actually didn't have all that much of a problem with it in Frozen West, but here, it was just terrible. Rather than berate you for mistakes without telling you how to correct them though, I think I'll list off exactly what you did wrong and be constructive.
1. Titles of most works, whether it be books, movies, TV series, albums, or yes, plays, are italicized, not put in quotes.
2. Commas at the end of a bracketed statement go outside the brackets.
3. There is no real "rule" about how thoughts are displayed in text as opposed to actual speech, but most people prefer to write thoughts in italics and without quotation marks.
4. Apostrophes are frequently used in place of quotation marks in this fic. This is acceptable when speech marks have already been used to denote dialogue and the characters are actually quoting something themselves, but in all other instances, just use quotation marks. Apostrophes are not actually meant to be used like that.
5. You've on at least once occasion used a hyphen in place of an em dash. I'd go into detail explaining the difference, but it is some complicated bullshit and I'd urge you to research them instead.
6. Typos here:
7. Frequent issues with missing line breaks. A new characters speaking always, always gets a new line. It's not put at the end of a line of narration. Lines were also missing between the beginning or end of dialogue and the narration coming before or after, so we'd get instances where there was a line break, but only one instead of two, so instead of a blank line between lines, two separate lines would be mushed together.
8. Unnecessary capitalisations here:
9. Company names don't need to be quoted every time. Song names do, but that's a different story altogether.
10. Dialogue can be broken up in the middle with dialogue tags, but there are rules to follow. Take this example:
There are several issues here. To begin with, the first dialogue segment has a period at the end when it should have a comma. It should always have a comma if you're using a dialogue tag like this. In the same vein, the end of the dialogue tag needs punctuation as well. A period if the previous dialogue segment was self-contained and ended with the end of a sentence, as in this case, or a comma if the dialogue tag interrupted the sentence in the middle and it continues in the second part. Also, later dialogue tags did this, but the beginning of a dialogue tag shouldn't be capitalised if it's not a proper noun, as it's not its own sentence (e.g. "said Twilight" rather than "Said Twilight").
11. Then there's this here, which is what we call a comma splice; look it up.
12. The use of three left-aligned periods as a scene break looks weird. Use something better, like the horizontal rule. Personally, I'm partial to a centred triple asterisk (***). Whatever you do, at least centre your scene breaks.
13. There are multiple instances where you have used several question or exclamation marks to end a sentence. This is always wrong and should never be done. One exclaimation mark only. One question mark only. If it's both a question and an exclamation, you can use one of both, and even that is technically wrong and frowned upon by some grammatical purists, but it's generally considered a legitimate use of punctuation. Plus, the alternative is to use an interrobang, which is a stupid-looking symbol with no key on a standard QWERTY keyboard.
14. Please, no capitalising the beginning of bracketed sentences unless it starts with a proper noun.
15. I feel like the letter from the proprieter should have been italicised rather than quoted, but that's probably just me. In any case, it shouldn't have used apostrophes as quotes even if it did use quotes.
16. Missing capitalisation:
17. Bad comma placement:
And finally:
18. When dialogue spans multiple paragraphs, as it does with Luna's speech, begin each paragraph with an opening quotation mark, but withhold adding a closing one until the last paragraph of dialogue.
I think I'm done now. Even by my standards, this is a fucking long comment, but I had a lot of thoughts to put down about this story that I felt needed to be said.
It's got problems. A lot of them. And yes, I did dislike the story overall because of them. I assure you however that despite how vehement my dislike might seem from all the swearing, capital letters and italics, that's just because it's how I comes across in text. I'm not legitimately angry at this fic or at you as an author. It's just how I express my frustration and disappointment.
But as I mentioned at the start, the fic also has a number of positives, and for that reason, I don't want you to be too disheartened by how negative this comment has been. If anything, Frozen West proved that you have a lot of potential as a writer. I just think that this fic in particular was a bit of a flop. But by all means experiment. I certainly can't say that this fic was lacking for vision, ambition or originality.
Take my demented ramblings and ravings for what you will, but I only hope that I've been of some help to you as a writer by being so critical, and I hope that you have a thick enough skin to tolerate it. As a writer myself, I know how demotivating it is to have someone completely tear down something you worked on, and I hate to be that guy.
In any case, I wish you well, and good luck with all your future endeavours.
DannyJ - Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed review! I believe I've fixed most of the issues you spotlighted, and I really appreciate the help with plotline and editing.
This was a really good story and I liked it for multiple reasons.
1. It addresses the 'nothing is good or evil but everythings in shades of gray' view
2. The description of how everything has a opposite reaction was a pretty nice topic to use in explaining Pinkamenas existence.
3. I love how it started out innocent enough and then became a horror show plot-twist.
4. The fact that skull Twilight had in her home was HERS is a psycological twist I saw coming but was good none the less.
5. Pinkie having magic makes sense because as we know ponies have been interbreeding for over 1000 years, all of them have the ability to use magic and some magic just comes naturally to some races but it should be possible to use other races magic with enough practice.
6. Lunas actions make sense to me since if I was in her position I would sacrifice the few to save the many.
These are just some of the reason I like this and I have read literally thousands of fanfics so to see one in use such a unique style that is cliche AND realistic in approch is refreshing since ive seen WAY to many 'gary stus' and unrealistic cliches. The only problem with the overall story I have is the mirror pool Pinkie has access to, it was modified but you didn't touch on how she creates the clones. I would imagine they didn't just form at her command so maybe if you made it so she need something like a piece of the pony she's cloning, like a hair or something? That would cover that issue with the mirror pools clone production not having the cloned pony present.
With how many fanfictions I have read I pride myself in being a good judge of how good a story is so I can honestly say good job!
When I saw Too Many Pinkies, it horrified me. ¡I hate Too Many Pinkies! It is the worst episode.
We saw the alternate Equus of tidal lock in West.
Okay, so, already you're letting me know that despite walking past the [Teen Rating] and [Dark] tags, I'll probably still find this unsettling, and shouldn't read it. We're off to an excellent start.
And now we've got a run-on sentence, followed by misconjoined, telly fragments. So far, I'm not impressed. At least change it to "Scootaloo was too enamored to avoid the blade, and it swept her feathered cap from her head". And that's not even a strong example. It's still blocky, not to mention telly as all hell.
Alright, let's give you a few pointers. First, go read this. Read all of it. Pay special attention to Show vs tell, commas, and being laconic. Those are your biggest issues. I'll withhold the downthumb for now because you were bold enough to recommend this to me, and it's rare that I get recommendations. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate what this could be, but it needs a lot of work in order to be decent.
K.I.R.A. Review
1. Story Line - There are two stories here, and they seem to be incompatible to the point of being schizophrenic. That's not a problem, as that's the whole point. The two stories represent the two sides of Pinkie's fractured personality, and that's quite of inventive. We begin with a Slice of Life Comedy, it's there for Pink's side of the story, it gives Twilight the hook she needs to discover the horror story that's coming, and it sets up the ending. It does it's job, but it overstays it's welcome much too long. It takes forever to get to the horror story side. 6/10
2. Spelling/Grammar - Another pass for proofreading wouldn't hurt, but there's not enough wrong to take the reader out of the story. 9/10
3. Completion - The story was completed on time. 10/10
4. Proper Length - Not even close, and that's a shame, because a third of the story could be hacked of and it would have been tighter and much better. That is not an exaggeration, The story needs an aggressive editor with a very sharp pencil; or, better yet, a blunt ax. 3/10
5. Horror Story - When you finally get to it, this is the best part. Twilight experiencing Pinkamena's memories is a wonderful bit of horror. If the scene with Mrs. Cake and Pumpkin doesn't move you then you are dead beneath your breastbone. It just takes too much padding to get to the pay-off. 6/10
6. Original - The Pinkie/Pinkamena schism is not original, but some of the author's treatment of the concept is. Unfortunately, much of this comes out in a head canon dump. This takes the form of an argument between Twilight and Luna, and it's better than a wall of text info dump, but it's still a lot all at once. Oh, and if you enjoyed the "Too, Many Pinkies" episode this story will ruin it for you. 6/10
7. The Gore Tag - There isn't a Gore tag, and the gore used is covered by the Teen rating. Gore is effective and not gratuitous, but it skirts the edge. There's a scene with a live head on a desk - if your story has a scene straight out of "Reanimator" then you might need the Gore tag. 6/10
8. Overall Opinion - For all my complaints, I like this story. Punch up the humor, and the Slice of Life part could make a descent stand alone story - but here it's a distraction and it needs to be about a third as long. I like how it ends with Pinkie not Pinkamena, a hopeful ending doesn't ruin a horror story. But this needs work. 20/30
Final Score - 66
Today, I had a conversation with somepony about Too Many Pinkie Pies. I pointed the pony at this story.
You do not know what I have had to do to keep the cost of life to only five
This line. I'm not sure, but it is, somehow shows that from here everything will go downhill. Not just down, but roller coaster down with screaming.
And this finally is the last nail to the coffin of it being similar to Cupcakes. It gets darker in less than 10 paragraphs. Right after "you didn't even leave us anything to bury!"
Reality snapping back around her felt like being dunked in ice water
And that is a very good place for those words to be. The whole section is... I do not have enough vocabulary to describe it.
Okay. Um. So far, half of the fanfic is done and this is very good re-imagining of cupcakes. From here on it is close to "Do not read this book" fanfic.
And Twilight being Twilight. She cares for Equestria more than she cares of herself. And that makes sense. The beginning and the ending tie together wonderfully.
Though, I think I missed the moment when the original loses thoughts about skull. Since she asked Luna to investigate. This means Luna will need to come up with plausible lie later or somehow erase a bit of memory.
Edit.
Added later. I like where and how this is going. How will Pinkie handle things and etc. And the skull in the toybox was a slip-up. Therefore there will be more of them and this will get turn to worse, somehow.
That would be interesting to read too. And if episode where they give back elements is used, I don't know what consequences it will have on Pinkie. But I would like to read that.
7529455
True. Why do you think Luna let her write that letter? This won't be the last time...
Shouldn't this have had a mature rating, or at least a "gore" tag? <_<
It was so brutal and sick I couldn't even bring myself to finish it. Which isn't to say it was written badly. Not at all, just went too far for my preferences.