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Solace is a good pony: kind and caring, but now he must face his past or be consumed in the flames of it.
Written because sometimes the grit of something wrong and painful gets lodged in a writer's mind, and the only way to deal with it is to make it a pearl. There is nothing beautiful or poetic in tragedy, only pain and loss.
This story is that pearl: Inspired by a real event, and the scumbag newspaper who thought to portray it as something beautiful and tragic.
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This makes me feel. What it is, I don't know. But it runs strong and deep. Well done, my friend.
"“Yes,” Soul sad sadly. “It’s time I moved on.”"
should be
said sadly.
I like this. Very deep, made me think. Considered EQD?
I don't get it. There's something here, but I can't seem to see it.
714616
Thank you for the kind words--im glad you found it worth your while.
714662
I was sadly sad to see this error - its been corrected, thanks for pointing it out. Have not been considering EQD...maybe if more people read and like this, I dunno. I mostly just wrote it so that it'd be out there and not in here.
714918
That's alright, I can be very (too?) deep at times. Enough so that the fish down here wear lights on their heads. Deep isn't better, it's just different. It's okay to not understand.
Well, this was an interestingly crafted story.
You set up an atmosphere for your story that is much unlike any other story I have seen on the site here.
However, I found a few flaws in the story, namely how several spots had errors that could have been caught in editing, such as how you once said "person" instead of pony at one point, or how a word was read as 'the' when in context it should have been read as 'they' (don't recall where I saw that one exactly, but I believe I saw it).
A couple other problems I found were how in a few instances you were being cliche, i.e. tears that stream down the face. You should explore other methods of trying to get the point accross.
Yet the characterization is definitive in this piece, my only exception would have to be of Princess Celestia, which, for whatever reason, has never seemed accurately portrayed in fictions for me.
But again, you create an incredible atmosphere here, especially in the beginning.
717050
Thank you for your consideration and input - I'll make sure to scan through it more (I'm very bad at spotting the grammatical errors) when I'm not so tired. Any and all errors are entirely my fault. As for my use of 'person' that was intentional and I did it knowingly--I'm using it in the understanding that ponies are people: a person does not exactly have to be a human, and that 'pony' didn't quite have the weight as a word I was looking for. Its for much the same reason I stayed with calling them 'hands' of poker when 'hooves' might have made more sense inverse.
>> "Solace was, he well knew, so mediocre in appearance that on a scale of one to ten of averageness he’d get a five."
I love this line.
This was good. So very good.
Howdy. I took up the task of writing your review. It'll be up some time in the next 24 hours. Just letting you know that I haven't jumped ship.
This is the review you requested from WRITE, written by Kalash93. I apologize for the delays.
Initial impresions were positive. This is a work that which I could reasonably argue as being literature. It's not something I enjoy, but I appreciate it.
Criticism sledgehammer inbound!
There actually is not all that much to fault your story on. The only thing I can reasonably bitch about is that the narrative seems indecisive. It's not a proper drama, but neither is it a dedicated examination of character psychology. Both halves were handled well enough, although I feel that more time should have been spent on either one or the other. You had three overarching plots occuring simultaneously, which proved to be distracting. You have the mystery of Discord. You have the fallout of Discord's rampage. You have the suffering of your protagonist. Pick one. I ought to be more precise, since you did gradually chose to elevate the suffering of Solace to the core of your narrative. My point is that the other two recurring ideas recurred too frequently; they got in the way. You tried to play the other two plotlines for contrast against the third for irony that a healer who received few wounds is the most deeply hurt, but that didn't work with your characterization of Solace. You get bonus points for what is literally titular and nominal irony.
The second issue I have, which could be a somewhat more personal nitpicked, is your protagonist. I'm not exactly sure what you attempted to do with him. If your goal was to starkly show his suffering through an almost detatched perspective, then you succeeded in conveying the idea that his world really is pain and misery. I understand Solace, but I found it difficult to find him sympathetic. He just isn't an engaging character. Part of that comes from how you tried to do too much in this story. There was inadequate buildup to the moment when he broke. There really isn't all that much about him that gives the impression that he's in that much pain. A stronger focus on his inner turmoil would have remedied this problem to a degree. Emotional torque doesn't appear to be one of your strong points either. The storytelling is good, but you don't put enough effort into making the audience feel for Solace. That's the catch; this fic is labeled SAD & TRAGEDY. You get the tragedy part down perfectly, but the sad is underwhelming. If anything, I'd say that this more feels like a dark or slice of life than a sad. I felt for Solace, but nothing really made me want to hug him or cry. That's a big problem, because this story ought to be really sad. It ought to make the heart deflate. It ought to make one sit and stare blankly at the monitor with tears streaming down their face. But it does not. It's also not all that memorable. Yes, it actually hit me fairly hard, but in more of a cerebral sort of way than in anything that provoked pathos.
Deserved praise inbound!
You actually managed to use the tragedy tag correctly. This is the story of a good pony brought down because of his inability to care about himself. This is the deconstruction of the empath -- of the endlessly kind, caring, nurturing soul. It's really a great idea and I loved reading about it. The story was melancholly, but not depressing enough to be called properly sad. It was not an enjoyable story. It was not an enjoyable story, even though I would say that this is an underpolished and uncut gem. It has a message and an impact that actually made me stop reading for a few minutes and think. It actually works in your favour that this is not an enjoyable story, because derriving too much pleasure from it would have undercut the message.
Regardless, your mastery of atmosphere, mood, and tone, were exemplary. Your sentence structures and your diction created a constant air of sadness and despair. As I was reading your story, my mental image of everything was tinged with a blue-grey filter. Every single sentence is coated with dysphoria and a growing sense of defeat. I felt as if I were actually in the story. I like your usage of recuring imagery and lines. I'd dare say that you managed to use some pretty nice symbolism that was not only actually symbolism done on purpose, but also done well by sticking in the consciousness without seeming trivial or feeling like it was being clumsily hammered in. Even if it wasn't intentional, it's still quite an admirable feat.
Pacing was hit and miss. It was fairly consistent across everything, but some parts needed to shorter while some parts needed to be longer. For example, the part with the poker twins felt like it was too long, and the part where he had his breakdown felt like it was too short. The story never felt rushed or dragged, which is good. It almost seemed to melt away before my eyes due to the uniformity of pacing. The ending was a pretty big disappointment and distracted from the otherwise gritty and grounded narrative. Readers generally come to a tragedy expecting to see characters burn and die. You did the burn part admirably, but you grabbed the fire extinguisher and now the story just got out of burn ward and has a very disfigured lower half of its face. It also feels slightly cheap to suddenly force in a strange mostly happy endling that comes from right out of nowhere. As nice as it was of Discord to help Solace, it clashed with the rest of the story hard enough to actually made me recoil, cock an eyebrow, and then reread the passage several times. Finally, it's not nice to mess with your readers' heads by suddenly confronting them with a walking puddle of strangeness in an otherwise very serious and very concrete story.
You did a very good job of characterization, especially for your protagonist. You never resorted to just telling us about him. Instead, his actions and words and thoughts gave us all the information necessary. You avoided the mistake of focusing too much on the past, and instead focused on the unhappy present. Solace is a believable character, but he's not necessarily a great or even a good character. He is honestly dull, although your storytelling was more than enough to not only make that forgivable, but actually make it seem like that was an intentional aspect of the character. He really is internally sterile and impotent, while makes him seem almost like a zombie -- dead but still moving. Your dips into his backstory and psychology were executed perfectly. He was entirely understandable. Your demonstration of his final downward spiral into the abyss was a macabre marvel. He gradually broke over the course of the story, dropping little hints here and there. We all knew that he was going to break, even if he wouldn't admit it to himself. Suddenly, his reserve shatters and he just lets it all out. Your other characters were alright and necessary plot devices, but I found that they got in the way. Just Solace undergoing sanity slippage is enough to make this a brilliant story.
This is a good story. It's not great, but it's certainly above average and deserves much more attention and praise than it does. You win a respectable 7/10 flutteryays.
This has been Kalash93, WRITE's sarcastic gunman. I hope that you enjoyed your review.