I am running from something I'm becoming, but becoming one means I'm running from all I am.
Nightmare Moon won; Celestia is gone. The world is dying. The ponies are dying. Without a sun, hope is fading. In the dark, who can shine? But if they're lucky, there's a light at the end of the tunnel. There has to be.
Author's Note:
Last one. Thanks for reading!Editors: Cerulean Voice, MissingLink, The Ponytrician.
Special thanks to BP for his WRITE review.This is either my single greatest creation, or my single greatest delusion. Enjoy.
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The following review contains spoilers, and it pertains to an older version of the story.
Howdy there, NightWolf. B_P from WRITE here, responding to your request for a review. Sorry about the time it took for me to get this to you; my week off wound up a lot busier than I’d predicted. Let’s get right to it.
Mechanics:
Thing to keep in mind: unless otherwise noted, I’m not listing every instance of an issue that I found. You’re going to want a pre-reader/proofreader/editor or two to give this fic a looking over (or more/better ones if you’ve already had folks do so). That said, you did a decent job, mechanically. Most of the problems have to do with punctuation, which can be pretty high-level stuff. But here we go.
Redundancy/repetition. The first line actually has one of the worst examples, sadly.
You repeat the mention of the moon’s light and actually say that the light is shining upon the world with its light. Really awkward.
In those examples, you’ve just repeated a word. Swapping in an “it” for the second instance of the word would fix the weirdness; you’ve already focused us on the object in question, so there’s no sense repeating it.
In that one, you’re telling the audience something that the dialogue itself just did. Very blunt and unnecessary.
Might not have noticed if the topic of discussion hadn’t been the same thing (money) in each of these instances. If the repetition was purposeful, I don’t much see the point. Was odd to read.
Light hyphen misuse/lack of use. Most of the instances where you used/would have needed to use hyphens were fine and proper (though perhaps a touch numerous), but there were a couple of small issues I might as well cover for the sake of completeness.
In those, a hyphen is not needed. -ly adverbs directly modify their adjectives as a matter of course, so the meaning is perfectly clear without a hyphen present.
This is a situation where you’d just have to look the word up in a dictionary; “childlike” has no hyphen.
There, you needed a hyphen. This felt like a one-off issue, though; you hyphenated the very same compound later in the story.
Weirdness with semicolons.
Now, I can’t go as far as to say that this sort of thing is illegal, but in a court of me, the verdict would be Ugly. When you use a semicolon, it should be when you really want to draw attention to a connection between your clauses; it shouldn’t really be for whenever you want to denote that you’re still talking about the same topic (at least, I’m assuming that’s why you went for it so often). If you do it just to do it, what winds up happening is that the mark loses meaning—you used it 76 times over the course of this story, so it really started to feel worthless after a while. And in the examples above, where you go for it multiple times in quick succession, there’s a further problem: you draw attention to some really choppy pacing. To bring two related sentences together is fine and dandy, but to join as many as five short, repetitively formatted things just looks and reads strangely no matter how I approach it. This just isn’t something you see done much, even if it is technically legal. However, it’s worth noting that there are spots in the fic where you used semicolons outright incorrectly/illegally:
In those examples, you use a semicolon where some other punctuation would be more appropriate. In the first, you want an em dash to cap off the parenthetical phrase and return to the sentence. In the next, you probably just want a comma (while “she knew” works as an independent clause—a prerequisite for semicolon use being that both the clauses it connects are independent—it feels neither related enough for a semicolon nor strong enough to be its own sentence). In the last, you definitely just want a comma, as that “but” is making its clause dependent.
Similarly, though less frequent and pressing, was weirdness with colons.
In spots like these, em dashes would’ve been the better choice. A colon (as you seemed to understand often enough in other parts of the story) is generally for giving a clause (often a fragment) or list that elaborates on the previous clause. What you’ve got in instances like the above isn’t elaboration so much as it is a jump in thought from one fact to a larger, overarching fact. Em dashes were all but made for (among other things) jumps in thought. Also, there are other spots where you seemed to just be using them willy-nilly, in places that aren’t even close to elaboration. The least debatable examples:
Dialogue tag issues. You were just fine in this area for the most part, but there were some occasional slip-ups.
In those, you’ve interrupted the dialogue with a tag and picked back up as though you did so in the middle of a sentence, when that wasn’t the case. These two were the only times I saw you making this particular mistake; you rightly had periods/capitalization everywhere else where you cut the dialogue at the end of the sentence (and commas/no capitalization where you didn’t) that I took notice of, so I’m guessing these ones were just typos.
Again, everywhere else you used this structure (dialogue tag -> comma -> dialogue), you did it correctly, and this was the only time I found otherwise. Happy you seem to know what’s what with dialogue tags, but now you just need to be slightly more attentive, I guess.
Occasional one-off typos, but enough to warrant a good proofreading sweep. Some examples:
Final note in regards to mechanics, though it also kind of goes into style: I like that you know when using four dots (period + ellipsis) is appropriate. You’ve got some complex but mostly internally consistent ellipsis rules going (framing spaces when it’s in the middle of a sentence, no framing spaces when it leads into a sentence-in-progress, an additional period and a framing space only on the right when it ends a sentence, etc.), and I appreciate that, but you might want to simplify things a little, because there were definitely parts where you slipped up. And also, why are your ellipses so gigantic? Most folks either just type the dots with no spaces in between (...) or use the actual ellipsis symbol (…), but you seem to be putting full spaces between each dot, and it looks crazy wide. I suppose it’s up to you, but it’s something to consider. Also worth considering is just how often you use them: nearly eighty times throughout this short and narration-heavy piece. Your dialogue felt very slow-paced and, dare I say, stereotypically downtrodden in a lot of places because of it.
Characterization and Style:
Adjective/adverb overabundance.
Eight out of eleven nouns/actions in this two-sentence segment had adjectives/adverbs attached, and all in essentially the same way. Setting aside the potential for information overload, this sort of format gets incredibly repetitive. This is perhaps the most extreme instance of the issue in the story, but there were other spots where that particular sort of description got a little heavy for my liking. Tender’s physical introduction comes to mind, though that had its own, different (yet still repetitive) format to its description.
There wasn’t too much else in the way of consistent stylistic issues. Some less frequent ones include stuff like weird and needless passive voice, like here:
There were some bits where touches of Lavender Unicorn Syndrome (the excessive use of descriptors instead of personal pronouns or names) created a bit of confusion for me, though it wasn’t anywhere near as major as I often see elsewhere. The prime example that comes to mind:
Took me uncomfortably long to connect those to characters. Honestly, I suppose I can’t even call that LUS, since the best fix I can think of would be to replace that “She” with “Tender”. Pronoun confusion would be the term, I suppose, though the descriptor in place of Ditzy’s name certainly didn’t help.
Since other stylistic problems were minor enough that they didn’t strike me or that I don’t recall them, let’s talk about the characters. They were mostly pretty strong. Almost everyone had their own little brand of sadness—appropriately numb and dulled by time, for the most part, which was great. You got across to me that everyone was eking out a day-to-day existence, grabbing what little bits of happiness they could use to keep themselves going (which I don’t hesitate to imagine is why Ditzy makes it sound as though her services have seen pretty widespread use in the town). The outlier was Bright, of course, whose relative ease and happiness troubled me just as it gave Ditzy pause—I’d actually thought he’d wind up being a really twisted guy by the end of the story, but you gave that role to someone else. There’s not a whole lot more to say, I suppose. Good variety, definite believability, and interesting to read about, these characters. Nobody struck me as weakly characterized overall, though perhaps you could’ve explored Bright a little more if only so his black sheep personality might be given a stronger backing.
One thing I do have to mention is the usage of Ditzy herself, as a face from the show: it didn’t really feel necessary/fitting to me. Her eye issues only came up once or twice, and her self-image problems could hit anyone in her world and/or line of work even without something like crossed eyes to be called upon specifically. Her personality was very different from what one might expect from canon, to the point that AU didn’t fully explain it and I just wound up thinking of her as “character-with-Ditzy’s-name-and-appearance-who-isn’t-Ditzy”. You could have gone with most anyone else and I’m sure I wouldn’t have thought the personality strange, really. Not sure any other readers are going to feel that way, but yeah, my two cents is that it was odd.
Lastly, I get the sense that you fell in love with
But I’ve got to say that it felt like a really obvious “powerful”, the-quote-that-they-put-on-the-movie-poster sort of thing. It felt very out of place, especially coming from the main character herself, who never before or since uttered a phrase so carefully measured. It didn’t even seem to fit the tone of the conversation in which it appeared, to me, what with Tender all but glazing over it as though Ditzy had just smiled sadly instead of saying anything at all (something that might have felt more in line with what you’d given of her character).
Plot:
Let me just get out of the way a few bits that felt like plot holes to me: Why did Tender give back all of the money Ditzy offered with no argument from Ditzy, after the talk they had—or, rather, why did Ditzy offer it as though it were permanent when the plan was to go grab some food with it anyway? It came off like an excuse for Tender to see the rock. Why were the foals put to bed, like, twenty minutes before eating? That made the time hard to pin down, which might otherwise be cool in a world where it’s night all the time, but it didn’t really feel purposeful there. What do you mean what is there to be stolen or coveted—what about food or clothes or blankets or anything? Derpy’s looting of Cloth’s house seems to prove that things are worth taking. How, after all these years in the village with Ditzy knowing and/or serving every stallion around, has she seemingly not interacted with Bright previously to the “night” before this story’s beginning? His eccentricities seem totally new to her and she didn’t even seem to know his name, without much explanation.
Okay, getting past all of that, I’ve got to say that I liked much of the world-building present here quite a bit. You invented or adapted some very appropriate, believable concepts—like the cord and the jhonzi and the overcoats—and ingrained them into things very strongly and naturally. You had a sizable side cast that helped paint a rainbow of downtroddenness that rarely felt out of place or excessive. The backstory was delivered a little heavy-handedly (the story to the foals), but I’ve always been the sort that opts not to reveal any backstory that I can’t make come up in a natural, gradual way, so maybe don’t listen to me too much about that—I understand that this is just a one-shot, making it a much more troublesome affair to have backstory come across. Also, I definitely appreciate and approve of the effort of having that song, but it felt pretty flawed to me—it danced weirdly between colloquial and formal language and you seemed to trade meaning/sensible meter for passable rhymes in a lot of it. You might have been able to pack a little more backstory/meaning/non-redundant atmosphere into it if you hadn’t been so concerned with making it rhyme. All in all, though, your story gave a great impression of a failing, unsustainable world, so great work there.
Something that was a big problem for me was the conflicts arising right around the end of the story: Midnight Shield and the Frostwolves (why’s that capitalized, by the way?). Namely the fact that neither had any sort of build-up. I mean, it was made clear that virtually none of Ditzy’s clients were as nice as Bright, but Midnight was a damn one-eighty. Her appointment with the guy—let alone the guy himself—had never been mentioned before the moment she was rushing off to meet him. Similarly, not only had the Frostwolves never come up except paragraphs before they started their attack, but neither had even a general, passing mention that terrible monsters were a thing ponies still had to contend with. Midnight and the Frostwolves essentially came out of left field, greatly shifting the tone and plot right at the end. Please, please add in some build-up (subtle is a preference with me, but even some really blunt build-up would have felt a bit less weird than none).
What’s perhaps worse is that the shift to an even darker, sadder tone took another, even truer one-eighty literally five paragraphs before the end of the story. You had a full-fledged story, one with pretty darn well-executed characters, believability, and a strong, heavy-on-the-bitter bittersweet tone. If you properly built up to the very dark turns near the end, or possibly had the scene with Midnight occur a bit earlier on, then those, too, could have felt strong and believable. But Celestia’s return right at the end felt like a subversion of everything. Every character but Ditzy is (at least implied to be) dead and her situation has just become even more hopeless and depressing—she is crushed—so it feels like that and everything before it was pointless if Ditzy does not have the final spotlight, you know? Her life as we came to understand it had just crashed and burned, so Celestia’s appearance now and here feels as though it steals meaning from everything else in the— Am I just repeating myself at this point? Sorry, this is just a really sour note to end things on, to me. That I’m getting so worked up probably shows how much I liked most of the story.
Like, I feel incredibly presumptuous, but can I suggest to you a different ending? You have the makings of a decently strong Tragedy here. You had Tender mention ponies in the past giving up and letting the snow take them. You had Ditzy losing everything and even had her thoughts trending towards the fact that she didn’t have the skills to survive alone. I honestly thought you were going to have her allow herself to die just a moment too late to catch Celestia’s return, when you mentioned her missing the “sliver of hope on the horizon” (though I thought that would have been a bit of a blunt way of doing it). Why not do exactly that? Have her curl up in her overcoat and wait for the cold to take her? Have the winds pound against her for hours until she becomes deaf and numb to them, as though they were now no more than a gentle breeze (wink hint nudge reference Tender’s story earlier plus also implies they’ve actually stopped nudge hint wink)? Have one final happy thought enter her mind, bringing a soft smile to her face (another callback nudge nudge wink hint)? Have the final line mention the sliver of light rising over the far hill? There would be meaning in that (though now that I think about it, were you trying to foreshadow Ditzy’s survival with the fact that she’s the only one who bothers with the “warmth” greeting? Clever, but I’m left wondering what her survival actually counts for). Ditzy’s end would be synonymous with the end of an era of sadness and nigh hopelessness, and would cap off the final picture of what the world had come to. With her surviving… what? Her sad but manageable life had just been utterly ruined, so now it’s like she’s just a holdover from a darker time—it’s tough to imagine her actually managing happiness again, even with the Sun back. Bottom line is that I think the current ending is weak and inconsistent with the rest of the piece.
Conclusion:
That certainly turned into a rant, didn’t it? Sorry about that. The final bits just didn’t feel as well thought out as the rest of the story did, to me. Apart from that and the various mechanical flub-ups I mentioned, I thought you did a very good job with this story. Good characters, fine atmosphere, and some very nice world-building. There’s work to be done, but it was well worth my time to read. I’m going to have to have a look at more of your stuff sometime; thanks for giving me a reason to start.
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-- Burraku_Pansa, WRITE's Trainer Admin and Resident Namesmith
4156344
Warning: Spoilers contained within.
5794491
Er, I'll add that to the top, sorry.
If I may, what's the timeline for this fic? Did NMM win 1000 years ago or did she return and then win?
Well, shit. I forgot about a lot of stuff in this story. That final section just blew me away.
The ending's different to what I remember. It's... slightly less horrific, but still carries similar weight.
I'm just glad to finally see it here. That took way too long.
5795038
She won the original fight between the sisters. So instead of Celestia banishing Luna, Luna banished Celestia.
5795325
Yeah. It only took forever and a half.
5794619
Thank you. Hope you enjoyed.
Out of the Derpy Week fics, I think this is my favorite, but that's not too surprising, because I always go for post-apoc stuff. That said, its obvious to me that you need to work on your openings. Most of the stories did not get off to the best start possible, and this one was no different in that respect. It becomes obvious enough what the world is like as the story unfolds, so why not start with the pony instead of the wind? I also felt like the various conflicts she faces don't amount to anything (Pansa covered this well), and the ending wasn't entirely satisfying. I mean, it just sort of drops off with her joining everyone else in death, and then Celestia somehow? I still really liked the world-building and the overall tone. Good job getting me to read seven stories I otherwise wouldn't have.
Eeyup.
5796860 Uh... He just said he didn't. Have you ever considered submitting this story to Equestria Daily? You can find out how to do so here.