• Member Since 11th Oct, 2011
  • offline last seen 1 hour ago

Pascoite


I'm older than your average brony, but then I've always enjoyed cartoons. I'm an experienced reviewer, EqD pre-reader, and occasional author.

T
Source

The nightmares started… Twilight can’t remember just when. But they’ve gotten worse and worse, and why won’t Luna help? Now they’ve even stopped bothering her! That scares her more than any nightmare ever did, but that strange voice in her head helps. It makes sense of the dreams, explains to her how the magic can do anything.

If Luna did start all this… she’ll soon regret it.

Cover art by Ruirik

Thanks to GaPJaxie, Corejo, and PresentPerfect, who read over various portions and incarnations of previous drafts. And to Vimbert the Unimpressive, a big reason I wrote this story.

Chapters (7)
Comments ( 27 )
PresentPerfect
Author Interviewer

Pascoite i don't recommend putting dates down for your next chapter because both life and sh*t happens and bada bing bada boom and you cant keep the date you posted

7961130 The whole thing's written already. I'm just posting the chapters one per week.

When in the world did I proofread for this? Oh, well. Guess that just means I get to read it fresh. Onward and Upward!

7961282 Finaly someone who gets it

7962158 I went back in the original draft of chapter 1 and see comments you left in August 2013. I'd only put up the first 2 chapters for review by that point, since I wanted Vimbert to have first cut at it.

Finally out i see. You wanted to release it mid-january so it's kinda late, but that's fine, you probably just wanted it to be polished to perfection.

And you even went back and replied to my post under the cover art. Post from NOVEMBER. Only to let me know that the story is out. Thank you, if THAT'S not artist commitment, i don't know what is.

Thank you, for your telling of Fluttershy. For remembering what others forget about her. Meekness is not weakness.

7981582 Oh, definitely. Fluttershy is very strong when she has the proper motivation to be. And Twilight means more to her than her fears do.

She considered herself such a prize, but the real rarity was a pony with Twilight’s talent.

I almost missed that joke.

Dammit! Such a good story!
Have to wait a whole week for the next one though...:fluttercry:

You know, when I first saw this story I thought it'd be longer.

This isn't the ending I wanted, but it's the ending the narrative needed. Maybe the one I needed too.

Honestly, I didn't quite get it. So despite "liking" magic, Twilight was trying to fight/banish a part of this magic(not Dawn Ember part, I mean)?

8067140
I'm sorry I didn't respond sooner, as this completely slipped my mind.

I'm not sure where your confusion lies, but based on your question, I'm guessing it's one of two things. Either you're wondering why Twilight originally cast out Ember as a filly, or you're wondering why Twilight's battling her magic in the present. To the first one, Twilight didn't do it intentionally. Her magic acted of its own volition because it saw Ember as a threat to it attaining its full power, so it got rid of her. To the second, Twilight does love magic, but she realizes it's taking control of her, and she's losing her ability to do anything about it, so she'd rather neutralize it than let it become a danger to everyone. But through Ember, she has the possibility of regaining her ability to control it.

I have given up reading halfway through this chapter, and I feel like explaining why.

The first two chapters were... I'm out of superlatives here. Near darn perfect in their portrayal of Twilight's perspective shift. The dreams indistinguishable from reality not only by Twilight but also by the reader. Cold but logical and clearly motivated reaction to the outside world. It's... evocative. Excellent. Engrossing. Exemplary.

I was disappointed to learn that the explanation for what's happening is literally "it's magic". You could have used the Nightmare, but went for the literal epitome of non-explanations? Seriously?!

Then Chapter 3 happened and accomplished very little in its 6.5k words. The same consequences and character development could have been accomplished in 1.5k, without even leaving Canterlot. Now I'm halfway through chapter 4 and we're learning about a prodigious filly with a very special kind of magic... at which point the story starts to look increasingly like "Eternal" - an emotional romp without any underpinning logic or a point to make, weighted down by subplots and characters that should have been cut for time.

Which is not to say the story is bad - there is audience for stuff like "Eternal". It's just not for me.

8871948
Interesting that you wanted it to be the Nightmare. because the people pre-reading it for me were prepared to be very angry if it did turn out to be the Nightmare, since they would have considered that a cop-out.

Damn... this fic is AMAZING.

PresentPerfect
Author Interviewer

There's something to be said for getting to read a story again for the first time, but there's also something to be said for memorability, and I'm finally starting to remember this one. :)

11070006
I had lots of fun writing this. Wish I still found writing fun, but that mostly eludes me anymore. Oddly enough, I rarely come back to read this one, mostly because of the time investment in doing so. I do enjoy it whenever I have time.

PresentPerfect
Author Interviewer

So glad you didn't take the obvious, tragic, bittersweet choice for an ending. What's the point in saving a life if you end another? Why not save both? :)

I liked this story. I could spend a lot of time complaining about details until that statement seems hollow, so I won't.
But two things irritated me a bit too much to not point them out.
This Princess Twiggles has no wings. Not a single mention of them until the end of the last chapter.
No description of them as part of her body language or anything. You even had her flee from Canterlot back to Ponyville on hoof. WTH?
And because they were completely non-existent it took over 10k words until somewhere in ch.2 it finally became clear that she was actually an alicorn and even had a castle. (something that seems to have gone widely unnoticed in this world, why else would Luna ask her student if she was familiar with the name Twilight Sparkle - who's merely a crown princess of EQ ... but since the answer was just as baffling as the question it justified the question I guess?)

11528503
I really don't know how to answer that. Those things are in there. I don't know how you missed them. Early in chapter 1, Twilight notes the crystal decor of her bedroom, and shortly after that directly calls her place a castle. That would already make her a princess. In the chapter where she's running away on hoof, she explicitly says she's not going to fly and gives her reason why. And Luna doesn't ask Dawn Ember if she knows who Twilight Sparkle is. She asks whether Dawn Ember has ever met her. I think you were reading too quickly and missed a lot of things.

11528524
Ok, I found those two lines. The "crystal" motif, hidden in literally hundreds of filler words hinting at Twi's inability to get a decent night's sleep as moonlight and shadow dance across her furniture...
And the "Castle" library at the beginning of a loong paragraph describing all of her work as a librarian. And probably something related to coffee. Lots of coffee in this fic.
So at this point I was most likely skimming the pages trying to find the lines where you actually started telling the story.
While re-reading some parts to make this comment a bit more concise, I think I found the main problem with this whole princess-castle-no-wings deal. This Twilight not only doesn't have wings, she's not an alicorn princess.
She doesn't do princessing of any kind, and if you replace the single instance of "Castle Library" with "Library", let Rarity enter through the front door of the library instead of the made-up back door of the castle's living quarters... there's practically no castle either.
At no point in the story is it used as a princess's seat of power, it's just a big house with shiny walls and wooden furniture because it's too shiny.
And since no character other than Dawn even refers to her as Princess Twilight, that entire part of her identity becomes completely meaningless to the story. Dawn is also a Twily fangirl because she's a hero and said to be approachable despite being one of the mightiest spellcasters ever, not because she's a princess.
Twi's mental/magical issues are unrelated to her alicornhood. She would have developed the same symptoms as a unicorn, just a little later due to her slower magical growth.
TBH I would have preferred the unicorn version. It would be the same story, just w/o the frustrating bits.
Some off camera adventure and personal drama that resulted in a good amount of personal and magical growth and eventually ... ascension.
__________
Yes, she decided against flying or levitation as a means to get out of the palace. Canterlot-Ponyville is a distance canonically traveled by train or Pegasus carriage. What eyesight do these guards have? And it's not like she was a prisoner, nobody was specifically looking for her. She wanted to remain undetected. A black dot in the sky several miles away - hardly worth a second glance in a world where about one in three citizens can fly. Especially when that dot gets smaller. A more "advanced" option would also have been available: low-level flight. Flying over the castle wall would have made her visible in the moonlight to guards looking up from below, sure, but flying down the mountain, between/above the treetops once she's gotten a few hundred yards away? Dark coat against a dark forest when nobody even knew where or what to look for?
The whole "don't fly/levitate/teleport" thing is a single self-contained paragraph that looks so very much like an excuse that was added during editing. I mean, did she also trot from Ponyville to the old castle until she was exhausted and hungry because - despite her observation that the whole town was asleep - ponies that aren't even looking for her might see a silhouette in the sky? At least she was back in full unicorn mode by the time she reached the old castle, that fall would have pretty much ruined her wing. Not to mention those nasty bindings.
____
I may have misremembered the dialogue, but the actual wording is no less odd.
She hasn't met her, but knows the name? Why would you/Dawn put it that way? Twi is an effing princess of EQ, one third of the crown. Every living soul in Horseland knows her name and face.

11528754
TL;DR
You're the only person ever to express confusion over this. It doesn't rise to the level of something I think needs to be changed. If that means you don't like it, I can live with that. It's also consistent with how Twilight was portrayed at the time the story was written, what with her not really having any duties yet and nobody regarding her as a celebrity, with the exception of Cheerilee's students. And Dawn Ember's response is something real people say.

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