[REMEMBER THIS IS ALL FICTION]
During Part 2 of the Season 5 Finale, Twilight Sparkle reenters the past the confront Starlight Glimmer once more after escaping from a changeling-infested future. Twilight then proceeds to try to beat Starlight in a magic battle.
What viewers witnessed were roughly 45 seconds of action that ended with Twilight and Starlight landing back on a cloud, exhausted and out of breath, before hearing an excited cry from filly Rainbow Dash and the other two colts who were watching in excitement, having been distracted from the race.
However, things don't add up at all here. After fighting Tirek in the Season 4 Finale for about the same amount of time and quadruple the magic power, neither were exhausted in any way. Because of this, there should be no way that Starlight and Twilight, two of the most powerful ponies in Equestria, can run out of power in less than a minute. Also, how could all the other fillies be acting excited over watching less than a minute of action?T he answer is simple. They fought for almost an hour, but (thanks to Sweetie Belle's reminder of friendship problems being over in half an hour or so) it had to be shortened to fit the air time. The full fight is available to all to watch....I mean, read...
Note: Twilight and Starlight are really the dominant characters in this...
Alright! Cool! A thing that kinda sorta did the same thing I did in my own fanfic--expanded on the S5 finale episode. Let's give it a look.
Very well. That's why I'm here.
Sorry to bring this up since you said English is your least favorite subject, but passive voice is typically not your friend. There are specific instances where it can be used effectively (did you notice what I did there?), but you can almost always write more dynamic action sequences by switching to active voice. You might try "Spike flinched away slightly as a quiet boom resonated around them the moment the beam impacted the shield." Or perhaps you could go for "Spike flinched away slightly, a quiet boom reverberating all around them the moment the beam impacted the shield." The second example carries the added bonus of shifting the sentence's emphasis and heightening the tension.
Not to say that passive voice is wrong; it's merely situational.
Yeah! Someone else who understands pegasus body language! (well, alicorn in this case, but wing body language in any case.) Brohoof. /)
Perhaps a touch nitpicky here, but you might consider flipping those two phrases around. You've got a lot going on in this sentence, and it would seem to flow better if the more important bits were in the middle, flanked by supporting clauses and phrases. (Again, you see what I did there? Doing this to demonstrate, not to show off.)
I love magicy, lore-building lines like the paragraph this excerpt came from. There's another pretty good example a few paragraphs down from there.
Dangit. You got me. I still love the lore-building lines of course, but dang! You made it sound so convincing!
Just a particularly well-delivered bit of humor I wanted to highlight. Made me laugh.
Based on everything else you've written, I think it is safe to label this a typo rather than an actual misuse of parallelism.
All right, so that's a wrap. It certainly was an intriguing bit of headcanon mixed with a smattering of lore-building, both of which I'm more than willing to get behind when done well. I feel that it built on the way magic works at least as much as it built on the extension of the battle. (But perhaps take that with a grain of salt; that criticism is coming from an author who just finished a 65K word fanfic creating and detailing the fall of a hypothetical eighth bad timeline from the S5 finale.)
Mechanically, you've got a solid start here. I'm seeing a lot of good stuff in the structures of your sentences and paragraphs. There were a few typos, mostly words that were standing in for the wrong word (e.g. on-->one). Most of these could be caught during a thorough proofing session.
Perhaps the best thing you're doing, author, is seeking advice to better your craft. If you're really interested and have some free time this weekend (and have a thick skin in regards to honest critiques of your work), then I would recommend the Writeoff contest this weekend. The Writeoff page explains its purpose and mechanics better than I'm going to here, but basically it's a tri-weekly, anonymous-until-the-end, 3-day-writing-period, prompt-based writing challenge where everyone has opportunity to blindly review everyone else's stories. This particular Writeoff has the added benefit of featuring our first art prompt rather than the standard word/phrase prompt. This group has fast-tracked my writing progress for sure. The criticisms I received were quite honest, but it was what I needed to become better at writing.
Hope this helped!
Holly F*** THIS IS AWESOME!!!! And sorry ,but I suck with Grammer and Punctuation.
>>Silver Butcher thanks!
this took me FOREVER to make, no thanks to school work XD. I'm in almost all honors classes, so i'm more used to formal writing...despite my failing in English this year.... but yeah I wrote this for those who were all like "Oh COme ON is that all the fight scene we're going to see?!" in the S5 finale. the first half was written over the course of a week, then the last half was blitzed in one final night for the sake of me seeing it published so i could study for a test
8081483 wow, makes me happy I have no life.
8081490 lol dont say that about yourself XD everyone has a life of their own, it just depends on how they see it :D
8081490 also how the f do you reply like that lol
8081496 I'm simple. I wrought my Spike Pie because I was bored and had nothing to do
Wow! this story had me hooked, it was action packed, had good descriptors and pacing, some nice humor from time to time, etc.. My only regrets are that I didn't read this earlier and that it wasn't longer.
Gasp, a cloud cloud? That's a very rare type of cloud! It's so rare that it only happens when someone accidentally writes the word cloud twice in a row!
A good experiment in action scenes. I liked the swapping perspectives conceptually - it helps keep longer fight scenes from becoming stale, but you do (or did?) need to work on pacing.
To my understanding, it's better to use shorter paragraphs and less words during an action scene. It also helps to focus on a character's sensations in a way that adds to the fight without getting bogged down with details.
Otherwise, nice idea and it fits well where you squeeze it in storywise.