Here we have a look at Sombra: The Pony, The Myth, The Legend
Chapters (3)
- Member Since 25th Dec, 2013
- offline last seen 9 hours ago
Majin Syeekoh
We’ve got dents and we’ve got quirks, but it’s our flaws that make us work.
Majin Syeekoh
Joined 25th Dec, 2013 ·
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Celestia loves bananas and you added it in. I am affixed to this story
lovin it so far
I am
this now
Oh dear.... poor political pull....
In think that was an epic story. I love how you woven sombra and nightmare moon into one story. Altogether itnis a great book and it can give theorys on how sombra and luna became truly evil.
well done
This is so AWESOME
Love the princesses!
Woah, cool... Love how you put in that Sombra was responsible for Nightmare Moon, too...
Hmm. Not bad. I like how you put a lot of effort into Gaelican text and the like. I like this story, so it gets an upvote.
3893608 Thank you for noticing.
I need to know who your shipping Sombra with first....
3939393 You would know if you read the story.
3939393 Fine. It's Luna
3946581 fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!
3946864 Why so fu?
Kalash93 of WRITE here with your review after the longest delay since Duke Nukem Forever. I apologize sincerely for the holdup. Now, let's begin!
Initial impressions were mixed. From looking the upvote-downvote ratio, and at a previous WRITE review on another story of yours, I was wary of this story. However, it wasn't as bad as I feared until I got to the very last chapter.
Let me get it out of the way and tell you that whatever advice you got on your last WRITE review still applies, as it is good advice.
Criticism sledgehammer inbound!
I would say that this story is underwritten.
The thing which got my attention first in this fic was your obsessive focus on dialogue. You get the idea of dialogue and what its role is in a story. However, you do not seem to understand how to integrate dialogue as a tool into the rest of your story. You write dialogue. You write a lot of dialogue. You write dialogue with character. However, dialogue seems to be the only thing you write. You use way too much of it. It displaces everything else in the story, rather like filling a soda with ice cubes. An example of this can be found early on in the very first chapter.
Can you see the problem? The problem is that there is dialogue in just about every single paragraph of this fic. It gets tiring. It reminds me of reading a stage play which got drunk, lost its directions, and then tried to impersonate a novel. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with using dialogue, but it is never a good sign when one core element of narrative, narration, dialogue, action, goes rogue and forces the other two out of the narrative. Now, it is possible to compose a good story with just two of them, but it is more of a deliberate choice and an artistic challenge. You need to reduce the dominance of dialogue in the story by either using other means to tell the story, or by cutting the amount of dialogue. I understand the appeal of using a lot of dialogue. After all, it is a major step up from narrating that w said x to y, which made them z. And it also makes that page count seem to rocket exhillaratingly upwards. However, dialogue is only one tool a writer has, and no tool, or even a few tools, can stand on their own. Dialogue is a very effective took to make a detailed frame for a story, but it has serious shortcomings in terms of adding substance. Think of it as being like a sandwich made up of nothing more than just two slices of bread stacked on top of each other.
Another problem obvious from the quoted lines is said bookism. To be succinct, said bookism is when you use an overabundance of synoyms for said, such as "replied, answered, responded, retorted, countered, ejaculated, sputtered, burst, chided, stated, proposed, continued..." I am not saying to cut them all, but the basic "said, asked, replied, continued, yelled," can cover >85% of dialogue.
What you need to do for your story is add a lot more substance, that being narration and action. Your story is built with a lot of dialogue to give it structure, but you have almost nothing filling in or covering the wireframe outline of your story. From seeing your other works, you have a very heavy focus on dialogue and have an ability to keep conversations going. Therefore, what you should try is to use your dialogue as the framework for developing your story. Here are some things you can use to add substance to your stories:
* Choreography, which is how characters move and speak and gesture and what expressions they make. You can use choreography to add subtlety and context for what characters say. For example, compare the following four. sentences:
The first can be understood in many ways, but the most likely interpretation is either indifference or annoyance.
The second is indisputably annoyance because growled is used to describe her manner of speech.
The third can be understood to be either surprise or fondness, given that she has a reaction and approaches.
The fourth is overtly seductive due to enthusiasm of speech and gesture, especially the erotic motion of hips.
* Imagery: Using the senses to describe something vividly.
*Action: Intersperse the dialogue with small asides describing something going on.
The second big problem with your story is the characters. You put yourself in a difficult spot by deciding to work on a prequel using canon characters who do not have very much official material to characterize them. I can be lenient on you for Sombra, given his lack of characterization beyond being evil, but the princesses have definite characters and personalities.
While you get some leniency for writing about them long ago, your characters do not behave like they do in canon. Princess Luna is the worst offender in this regard. She does not have any of the dignity or grace one would expect of a princess on formal business. Indeed, in the first chapter, she behaves more like a preteen girl with a slight attitude. In the second chapter, she hardly even behaves like a princess at all. Instead, she's skipping around, fawning over Sombra, and being annoyingly cutesy. Luna, in canon, has never been cutesy. She has always been outmoded in speech in behavior, rather like she crawled out of The Age of Innocence. She behaved very courtly in the episode, Luna Eclipsed, when she was trying to make friends after her banishment. She would behave more refined during formal summits, such as those she and Celestia attend with Sombra. In the second chapter, she greets Sombra thusly, ""Hey, Sombry!" Luna piped up, "I trust you've been getting our letters, dear?"". Can you honestly tell me that is how a princess of Equestria greets another head of state while on official diplomatic business? I'm not buying that, even if you're paying me.
Celestia seems more like her canon self, but something is off about her dialogue. Canon Celestia often has a warmth to her words. She speaks very plainly and clearly. She avoid contractions, and idioms. Also, she has a tendency to put her direct addresses, author, early in sentences, whereas you write her as putting them often at the end of sentences, like I am now, author. Her dialogue in this fic lacks warmth,
King Sombra is your protagonist in this tragedy. The problem is that he is the weakest character of the three royals. He doesn't have any personality on the show, and you give him very little here. The one thing I can divine about him is that he apparently really likes to cook and he likes Princess Luna. Those are not character trait. He's bland, and he seems immature and whiny in the earlier parts of the story. He is not interesting, because he has no goals. We have no idea what he wants to achieve or what he has to do. Conflict is the essence of interest. Your story has none. Sombra has no character. As a result, we just spend the story waiting for him to turn evil so that something happens. It does not engender the sort of attachment or involvement necessary for the story to work as a tragedy.
I appreciate you showing that his change to evil was gradual and not glaringly obvious. However, nothing seemed especially tragic about it. What is his tragic flaw? How did he destroy himself? Where was the crucial mistake? The closest thing I can find is that he develops a lust for power and becomes cruel, but I can't tell why. He was a monarchist throughout; it would have been tragic if he ascended the throne as a reformer for small government and for humane justice. King Lear is tragic, because Lear would rather be flattered than hear the truth. Achilles is a tragic figure, because he chooses war, which he knew would destroy him. Lucifer is a tragic figure, because pride caused him to rebel against God. Annakin Skywalker is a tragic figure, because his drive to become powerful enough to save those he cares about leads to him becoming very powerful and destroying everything he loves. Sombra, in your story, is self-destructive, but he is not tragic. He gradually seems to come into evil instead of accidentally becoming evil as an ironic consequence to his attempts to be good. You tried in chapter 2 to illustrate his reasoning behind becoming a harsh ruler, and it makes sense. However, extrapolating that to him becoming a supernatural megalomaniac in the next chapter makes no sense. Sombra has no tragic flaw which undoes him. There is no reason to feel sorry for him. The fact that he is framed entirely in his relationships to the princesses means that we see him only at a few moments, which does not give the reader enough time to appreciate him or observe what is making him change. The story needed to be longer and spend much more time focusing on him and following him through the transitional period.
The final chapter of your story is by far the weakest, which is very bad, because it is the climax and conclusion to your story. In this chapter, you rushed everything to the end in one big, confusing clusterfuck. The previous two chapters had not been brilliant, but they were not painful. This, on the other hand, was painful. Do away with this ending chapter. Replace it with at least two more character development chapters for Sombra.
Pacing was an issue in your fic, but it only became problematic in the awful final chapter. I advise you to slow down and pack more meaty characterization into your story through actions and dialogue, giving the audience plenty of space to come to understand Sombra and why he becomes a tyrant.
You have issues with writing action. You write too much of it like "X did Y to Z". This works for chronicles, but not for active, dynamic scenes like descending the stairs or the battle between royals. This is because you move these scenes too quickly without setting up the new scenery or environments. Slow down a bit; the imagination for these is slower than the script.
Your fic needed to have more content and chapters for it to properly convey the slide of Sombra into evil. I think that he also needs some chapters where he is just at work managing his realm, gradually taking the morally ambiguous option for one reason or another, gradually finding it easier and easier to do, and self-justifying it as being for the good of the people, even as the citizenry is visibly being harmed by his ill governance. That could make it a true tragedy.
I have no idea why you included a romance with Luna. Perhaps it was to show him gradually drifting away from her? Perhaps it was to contrast him against the idealistic equestrians? Perhaps you were fishing for views? Either way, it adds little other than a distraction. A look at the relationship between himself and Political Pull would have been far more interesting and effective for portraying his development and downfall.
Deserved praise inbound!
Your scene construction was fine in the first two chapters in parts where you got more detailed. You understand the idea of scenes, but you do not seem to know how to properly do it for yourself. This is good. You are good with stationary situations and with conversations. I admittedly found myself actually paying attention to the dialogue. However, you have problems with displaying action. Work more on that by reading fics by The Descendant. He has very strong grasp of scene, especially in his slice of life pieces. Zenith would be a very good piece for you to look at.
Your style seems to favor dialogue heavily. That is fine, provided that you do not neglect the other parts of writing prose. You have a tendency to forget that you are writing prose rather than script.
You know how to show and tell. You do things to make implications, like Sombra being awkward about Political Pull at the end of chapter 2. I am glad that you chose to use dialogue to display character. However, effective statements could have been made just by showing Sombra governing at different points in his story, gradually turning into a worse despot over time. Prose is a medium of action, which has to be described. When something really matters, get vivid and use a lot of imagery. Your prose is dry because it is so utilitarian. Sometimes, have your characters stop talking and start doing.
You have a good grip of grammar, which is commendable.
Your story has some unique flair with the Galician and Basque language lines. I appreciate a bit of good uniqueness, especially when it compliments the story to make the fic feel like it has a flavour all its own. You also gave the idea of a sort of counter elements of harmony. You can do something expanding on these basic concepts. You would work better with OC's than canon characters.
The concept was not wholly original, being a fic about the downfall of King Sombra, but it was tolerably executed for the first two chapters, even if it did skip between them like a bionic rabbit on a pogo stick. Remember the other WRITE review you got and apply those points to this one, too.
Your fic would have been just okay apart from the ending, but the facts remain that it failed as a tragedy, the characters were poorly done, and you use way too much dialogue. The story has some good points, but still has many deep flaws.
You win 3/10 flutteryays. There is promise, but you need a lot of refinement.
:fluttershyouch
I hope you continue to write, practice, and improve. You have potential, but a lot of learning to do.
Kalash93, not an actual Russian.
rs606.pbsrc.com/albums/tt146/mortablunt/WRITEReviewerLogo1_zpsbcabf6df.png~c200
4235620 Thank you for the review. For Luna, I was trying to give the impression that she was younger, although I fear I may have gone too far as you pointed out. As for Celestia, I was trying to give the impression that she wasn't meeting with one of her little ponies, but rather a foreign head of state. And I did try to hint at his displays of evil through his hiding of the Crystal Heart and his doing away with Political Pull, but as you have pointed out, they were clearly not enough.
I have no excuse for Sombra. He was written poorly. I believe I did a much better job with him in my Rarity on DXM fic. Although, for his immaturity, I would like to point out that his did just take the throne.
All in all, I accept your review of my fic wholeheartedly. It points out some issues I need to work on, and some strengths that I have, I also learned what makes a tragedy a tragedy. I also appreciate that you've read some of my other works.
Once again, I fully accept your review of The Tragedy of Sombra.
This was weirdly cute in some ways.
8282931
I'm pretty embarrassed that you read this, to be honest, but I'm glad you got some enjoyment out of it.
They should have had Bananas Foster from Neigh Orleans. OOOO....YUM !!!!