With the importance of destiny in Equestria, Fleetfoot questions whether she even has free will. And with her revelation that flight is connected to magic, she wonders if her special talent of flying is nothing to be proud of. These thoughts swirl in her mind as she desires the answers to her questions. When an opportunity to find out arises in a dream, it then becomes a question of whether Fleetfoot will regret seeking these answers or not.
Thanks to Howling Wolves for proofreading this story.
Chapters (1)
The only thing I thought was really off was Luna calling Fleetfoot my little pony the whole time. I know Celestia does it, but I can't remember Luna doing it. Besides that I don't even know what you could be so worried about? I browsed about four fics tonight before reading this, and this was easily the best.
You shouldn't doubt yourself so much, you're really talented at writing compared to many other writers on this site. 
A fine fic is what you got here. I really liked the story-within-a-story method that you used during the dream sequence with Luna. Fleetfoot is a very distinct character here as she works through her problems. It was easy to see and understand where she was coming from. I find it interesting that Fleetfoot would start doubting herself because of Tirek and her own actions at the Games. She really saw her training as proof of her flight and speed than any innate magic she might have been born with. I wonder what her thoughts on it has to say about pegsai culture but I'm getting from the point.
Someone really needs to tell her that being Fleetfoot is okay and magic isn't all that there is.
And this story shows that process perfectly. Keep up the great work.
5372879 Thanks for commenting. I'm glad that you enjoyed reading it and I'll keep on writing.
What a sweet ending
Aww, I love it how Fleetfoot felt hopeless and down but at the end she realized that she has a purpose and a future
Stories like this just make me feel better after a rough week 
Really gave me hope 
5374692 Thank you. I'm glad that you enjoyed the story and that it cheered you up.
YES! This is NOT a Luna's a Prick fanfic. Thank you so much! I hate those! Have you ever considered submitting this story to Equestria Daily? You can find out how to do so here.
5378884 You're welcome. I haven't encountered many fics that portray Luna in a negative light, unless I'm not looking in the right places, but I'm glad that you liked how I used her character.
Also, while I think I did a good job with this story and consider it my best work at the moment, I don't think I'm talented enough to get a story of mine submitted to Equestria Daily. I'll need some more practice first, but the fact that you and many others enjoyed it shows that I am on the right track. Anyway, I'm glad you enjoyed the story.
You don't have to answer if you don't want, but I'm curious as to whether you lost your nerve or decided you wanted to put some more work into it first, as far as Equestria Daily goes.
This whole cutie Mark Destiny thing is probably my favorite topic in MLP and just by the description you got my thoughts exactly! Good job dude.
5494449 Thank you! I'm glad that you enjoyed it!
This story was recently chosen for review by the School for New Reviewers. Though I read the story, and liked the premise; I neither liked nor disliked its execution. There were several places I felt it could be improved. You can find the review thread here which detail my, and other reviewers thoughts on the matter.
This review, brought to you as part of the School for New Reviewers practice program.
A little disclaimer before we start: the following review is worded to be fact when, really, it’s just my opinion. I don’t take myself to be fanfic gospel truth, and neither should you; I’d invite you to try and see the thoughts behind the reaction, like a reflection of your work. You’re free to do with it as you wish.
I’ll happily admit that I’m not your target audience - it took me some time to remember who Fleetfoot was, and the only brushing up I’ve done is checking the Wiki for plot involvement. You may want to take a larger pinch of salt than usual.
tl;dr: Theme of opening statement doesn’t quite match up with the proceeding development; Fleetfoot being a passive character in a story revolving around her pathos weakens the experience; paragraph traits being similar make the tone of the story taste plain.
Let’s talk about your opener.
Your opener does something remarkable in that it sets the tone and conflict up very clearly - I haven’t read a lot of fics with such upfront clarity. While it’s appreciated, the problem is that it’s clear in the same way a school essay is clear: you literally have Fleetfoot spill out, in verbal monologue, her problems. It’s very textbook-like, y’know, it’s effective at what it does, if that were its only goal.
Because of that, the whole thing feels kinda overwraught - “ah, I sound dramatic to let you know that this is what the story is about”, rather than “ah, I’ve got a conflict. This is a problem that I must solve”.
1) After mulling over this a while, I figured out why I couldn’t get myself to immerse: there’s an awfully heavy reliance on B.Y.O. (bring your own) investment.
Character-wise: this isn’t the deal-breaker, but still worth mentioning.
Like, are we supposed to care just because she’s sad? Or because she’s Fleetfoot?
So far the Fleetfoot you paint, as a character, is the same sad sack as every outcast teenage brony in those HiEs. What makes people different from each other is the sum of their experiences, and that needs to show. You’ve got to show us at least a glimpse of Fleetfoot’s pride, that hunger to achieve - for her being broken to feel like she’s been broken, and not that she’s been like that forever. Show us what should be in conjunction with what currently is - that way, we get a glimpse of what we’re rooting for.
Plot-wise: You raise a mildly interesting question given Fleetfoot’s canon story. It’s a pretty good catch, and believable that she’d ask the question. Unfortunately, it’s not interesting enough to hook. It may resonate with people who believe in that kinda thing. I’ll admit I’m not one of them, which could be why it just ended up falling flat for me.
Seemingly reaching a threshold, inadequacy, comparing to others - these are all potent themes. Yet they have no build-up, no fleshing out - you tell us she has this but all there is to show for it is her moaning. It’s just empty tags floating around.
We’ll come back to this too. For now, we’ll remain on your opening scene, before Luna comes to sweep her up.
2) Here’s the one thing that I will strongly insist you change. At the beginning, I had a serious problem with how drab everything was, and I blame it on:
I’m fairly sure that if you hadn’t used that, I’d be feeling in a better disposition for what followed.
You have one first impression, the splash of the colour of your breath on to a blank sheet, that you can’t change. Tone is what sets expectations and, equally vital, the mindset to handle the information you want to convey. Opening with your main character being bored and depressed leaves us feeling the same thing, or at least expecting drab and dreary things. So we put on our grey-tinted glasses and suddenly what could have been compelling conflict becomes weak flailing.
B-but that’s what the story is about!
Yes, but that’s not what your opener has to be.
We come back to the execution. Consider your conflict - Fleetfoot being unable to do jack against Tirek because Drain Magic. While how she feels about it, and the resolution thereof, is the theme of your story, your conflict gives you ample excitement to exploit.
Give me the nightmare flashback, the cold sweat, the falling feeling mixed with the dread of impeding death. Give me the fear and the visceral, not
because that just ain’t intriguing.
3) I suspect that, for some cases,the drab issue is as simple as paragraphing - your sentences, they mush together with vanilla scenery and end up like store-bought cupcake mix.
Perhaps if you let some sentences stand on their own...
You might have noticed a shift in your ability to process what you’ve just read. Doesn’t it seem like the suggestion has more weight? It’s an almost magical way that aesthetics can fine-tune how your reader perceives. One-sentence paragraphs are risky. Too many of them, the whole thing feels disjointed. But play with them right, and you’ve got a limited amount of sections that you can really grab the reader. Think of it like a revolver - you’ve got only six bullets in the barrel, but that’s six bullets that you’ve got.
I’d suggest that you give some of Fl.’s thoughts regarding her feelings their own paragraph. You wanna look at what I’ll call compounded paragraphs, because of the mixed types of sentences you’ve got in there:
This is one such example.
I mean, seriously, look at that - I understand the writing philosophy behind it. I practice it sometimes myself. But you want to show Fl. being huddled up, not your sentences. I’ll go as far to even say that it results in a very boring tempo - the reading experience isn’t “build the scene line by line in my head”, but more of “digest this multivitamin”.
This is what I mean by sentence traits being similar make the tone of the story taste plain. It’s okay to let a paragraph be action only, and another to be dialogue. You’re probably subscribed to the idea of no-talking-heads, which you’ve got pat-down, kinda - but see, there’s just Fl. here. You can afford to space it out a bit. Really breathe.
Make us feel that chill of the night. To hear nothing but her breathing. How awkward yet empty it is when it’s just her voice, slightly cracking, in the air. That kind of painful restless non-sleep.
5) And it’s a pity, because you do write good sentences:
When I was skimming through your work, these were the sentences that made me realize you know more instinctively than you realize, although they are a bit too melodramatic for my tastes (which, again, actually contributes to setup clarity). I strikethrough’d the parts that I felt you should reconsider, by the way - stare at it and ask if you really need to hammer the one point that hard. There are more like it, but this should give you a key to get started with.
6) Another thing I was thinking about is if you could have been more nuanced with the opener - less of outright telling us Fl. was feeling X, and more of the effects of it, and in doing so, allows us to piece together what she feels.
What do depressed people do that normal people don’t? You could replace some of that reflection of inner thoughts with a reflection of the day that passed, activities, portrayals that hint at instead of, well, say outright.
I’m going to devote this section for you to take a break. Go for a walk, or a drink of water. Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere. Really, go.
You’re back? Good.
I think I’ve managed to put my thumb down on why it is I found your story hard to review. You do a lot of things the correct way: the balance of action to dialogue is good, your plot structure is reasonable, the core idea of it is believable and sound. You have little bits of scene that I personally like in my reading. You even strike me as the kind of author who’d study published material, and noticed certain patterns to utilize - because you do those aspects decently. In short, your technicals are fine.
However, you can do better by a long shot with the elements you’re playing with. It needs more... life to it, and I’m not talking about the opener any more. We’re getting to that now.
7) By the by: yet another reason for the review being difficult is because what follows after the opener was rather different from what your summary said.
I was expecting some sort of dream adventure and issues of free will and destiny... what I ended up getting was behind-the-scenes Rainbow and Twilight. As a result, my expectations were skewed, and these are kinda hard to wind back for objectivity and all. Not that I didn’t - it just took some time is all.
Look at that. You wrote that. That was what sold me into buying into your work. The implication that there’s something dangerous, something that Fl. might regret.
I’ll say it more clearly: your summary is downright tantalizing. I do Seattle’s Angels scouting. I literally flip through authors’ pages, glance at summaries, and hope for flashes in the pan, and this is one of those flashes.
I was also expecting something more nuanced, from the softer words “wonders” and “these thoughts swirl...” - which could be why the straight-played stuff put me off a bit.
But, well - the theme of opening statement doesn’t quite match up with the proceeding development. It moves from questions of destiny and free will to the EQ Games tryouts, which was more about being a decent friend/not being a crappy teammate.
Your lesson, the resolution, is about being a decent friend/not being a crappy teammate, and how everyone sometimes makes mistakes but it’s okay.
What on earth does this have to do with destiny and free will?
Recall also the part about potent themes. Feeling inadequate as a flyer, reaching a threshold - you revisit none of those. It’s mostly devoted to backstory closure for the EQ Games tryouts.
I think the question speaks for itself. I won’t bug you any more about it. The solution is also very simple - just rephrase your conflict and your summary. Take the source of your pathos (emotions) out of Tirek’s big dooey and put it into something to do with Soarin, or the rest of the Wonderbolts.
8) Here’s the issue with your dialogue: everyone sounds the same. RD sounds like Twilight sounds like Luna sounds like Fl. There’s little of Rainbow’s fighting against her pride to be vulnerable, little too of Fl.’s probably-similar pride. I’m no good with Luna’s voice, and I think Twilight’s is fine, but they’re all very similar - if you reversed the roles but kept the characters they’d end up saying the same things the same way.
Fl. goes through some very basic apprehension-overdrived relief (bursting into tears for an issue (not caring about Soarin) that she actually already came to peace with in the episode itself?), and has no self-initiated actions, only reactions. Fleetfoot being a passive character in a story revolving around her pathos weakens the experience.
For this, there’s nothing but to reassess your dialogue and how X says Y. Deciding where you want to take your conflict - whether it be Tirek-based or the EQ Games tryouts - will determine the direction of your rewriting, with neither being lighter than the other.
We’re more or less at the end. It’s been awfully lengthy - thank you for making it this far - a lot of it is trying to quantify why I felt what I felt, and justifying it with coherent albeit awkwardly-flowing arguments.
I’m sorry, also, if you felt crushed at any point. I make little effort to be polite. Being polite gets in the way of caring, for me - you are a writer who’s picked up some good tools and a pretty novel angle, but in other areas you are lacking. And that’s why I will fluster about and emphasize my words and write reviews half as long as the work itself - while I might not care about Fl., I care about how she was executed, and the author who’s doing the execution.
Don’t tell me your stories are no good. I’ve only read one. And that, hopefully, will not be the last. Don’t bother trying to apply all of this, it’ll just get in the way of your writing.
But - I hope - you can mull over the points I’m making, from the angle I stand, and find something helpful to aid you in your journey.
More than likely, I’ll see you when you get there - until then, keep writing.
Sincerely,
Casca
Reviewing this for this reviewing thingy right here.
Work and life have cut my time short on this one, so I’m going to skip all the silly bits I usually lead off with and get with down to the key points. And probably post it a bit late anyway.
While you’ve got an interesting subject here — putting a spotlight on a pony with almost no fandom or show presence — have a good conflict for her, and raise a couple good questions about how things work in Equestria, the story just kind of falls flat. Why is that?
Well, first, you don’t seem to trust yourself to express your thoughts succinctly, as so you write more than is needed. You overexplain, belabor the point, or repeat yourself. But that just drags things out, when you’d really be better off cutting back and getting a faster pace.
The story really needs more action, too. This is really the same problem as the previous point, but a different part of the solution. Anyway, it’s not that we need some big action-adventure plot to make it interesting. After all, AbsoluteAnonymous one wrote a fascinating character piece where Pinkie Pie has an existential crisis while watching paint dry. But Fleetfoot here is very passive. If she were actually doing things, even if those things were more trying to pass the time when she can’t sleep, it would be something.
The next issue is that it just feels disjointed. How was what Luna showed her relevant to her problem? Or what Dash tells her at the end? Fleetfoot seems to be afraid that Hard Work Hardly Works, and she’ll always lag behind fliers who simply have a more powerful Talent than her, no matter how much she tries.
But she sees a lesson about how being a friend is more important than winning, and a lesson about humility.
Neither of those feel particularly relevant.
Maybe she could have learned that it’s okay to be second- (or third- or fourth-) -best, but that wouldn’t have been very satisfying. Better than that, maybe the story could have built towards a different moral. One that seems particularly fitting to her dilemma might be:
Do not be discouraged that others have a seeming natural advantage over you. Through hard work, you can equal or outshine those gifted individuals. That you worked harder for it than they did doesn’t lessen the worth of what you have done.
That feels like where you were headed to begin with, and could have come right off of the show, to boot. It wouldn’t be a bad message for a lot of people on here, either.
So there you go. Those two issues may color the story as a whole, but they’re still really the only two problems. Your spelling and grammar are fine, and that puts you ahead of about half the things I review for right off the bat. Just tighten it up and consider your focus, and this would be a perfectly fine story.