Read some great stories, and couldn't help but think up one of my own.
And realize their mistake a little too late.
Gee thanks Pinkie.
NOTICE!!!
*Ignore the dislikes on this story. They're the result of self-promotion in the comments of other short comedy stories, for the most part.
*PEOPLE HAVE FOUND THIS STORY FUNNY!!!!! Check the comments.
*It's a slow-burn comedy which means the main joke is at the end, so pay attention to the vague yet specific and/or odd things in it and you may get a laugh when the time comes.
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And of course, Pinkie gets no blame whatsoever... any chance we can get a sequel? Or epilogue?
8098728
Naaa, twas just for fun, hope you got a laugh out of it. Seemed like a funny idea to me at the time, and there's not many other videos I can use to the effect I was going for, which was comedy. I almost wanted to put Random as a tag just to say that it's not meant to be taken seriously at all, but it's technically not random in order of events.
I guess, I'll consider making an epilogue.
8098753
That being said, if there is a epilogue, Pinkie needs to be punished in some humorous fashion, if only for the catharsis factor.
Unfortunately for Pinkie, RD had managed to get her hooves on a certain video centered around her thanks to Discord (who owed Fluttershy a favor)...
derpicdn.net/img/view/2015/2/22/835179.png
derpicdn.net/img/view/2015/4/25/882309.png
RD: "I'm ready for you this time Pinkie..."
Hm...this was...interesting.
The grammar's a little clunky, but I can tell what's going on for the most part so I really don't mind. Some of the dialogue comes across as a bit cringy, so I didn't really laugh much...at the first half of the story. Surprisingly, unlike The Attempted Assassinations of Twilight Sparkle, which is where I learned about this fic, the strongest part of the story was at the ending, when the entire audience had their own expected, and unexpected, reactions. Other than that, I feel like this has more potential to be a longer one-shot; it feels a little rushed at the beginning, with how they seemed to discover technology. And the way they figured out the names just seemed a little strange to me. I'm more used to pony pun names in stuff like this, so this is more so a personal nitpick as well as it is a little problem in the canon universe. Like, instead of Finding Nemo, perhaps you should've called it...Finding Neighmo, or something more pony related.
But you know what? This has a lot of potential. Why stop with a one-shot? Why not have this be an ongoing series where different ponies react to these new devices: Twilight could be attempting to ban these horrid creations after seeing what kind of scarring damage they could bring to society (mainly because she can't get that music video out of her head), Fluttershy could post videos on animal care on MooTube (YouTube), Applejack trying to help Granny Smith use the iPad only to have her utterly destroy it, the CMC could help this filly/colt with getting their cutiemark in hacking without reading into the consequences all while Scootaloo is trying to avoid the humiliation of the music video that's gonna haunt her for the reeeeeest of her life probably. Heck, you could probably include humans in the universe eventually; some who act normal, and others who are weird stalker-ish fans, or just a bunch of jerks, etc. There's just a lot you can do with this idea.
Over all, this was...alright. Not the best I've read, but most definitely not the worst. Keep writing, man. And don't worry; one day one of your fics will be featured. Just keep writing and improving your craft. That's all anyone can do.
...Okay, that was pretty good.
The grammar's as decent as the last fic, though a tiny bit more rushed. I feel like there could've been more arrays of overreactions on the passerbys parts; like, instead of everyone just laughing at the fact that they had pretty much watched a display of pedophilia a mere moments back, some of them could act a bit disgusted at them? Like, in a hilarious way and not in a "feel sorry for me" kind of way.
Pinkie pretty much taking the narrator out and taking over...though I wish you did something to the font to indicate that someone else was in control (you can change the color of the letters, btw), it was totally something she would do.
You were being kinda rude over in comments to The Attempted Assassinations of Twilight Sparkle, slamming that story and asking people to read yours instead. I don't want to reward that rudeness. However, you did ask what you were doing wrong with this, and in the interests of helping a newer author improve, I'm willing to offer some quick reading impressions and a compare-and-contrast.
Assassinations starts with this paragraph:
It's arguable whether the cuddling session was intended as a joke or not, but even if we call that played-straight fanservice, it opens with recognizably humorous wording and imagery. Twilight is "thoroughly uncuddled" in front of the throne, and dealing with the comedically exaggerated "torture" of lemon-scented cologne.
Are those things funny? Maybe. That's not the point. The point is that that story recognizably tries, early and often. Not every joke lands, but even if those early jokes didn't work, it only took five (short) paragraphs to get to the line about court-mandated community service hours, which I couldn't help but grin at. The story did its job as a comedy: it told jokes.
Here? You open with an entire scene which is literally nothing but exposition. Five (long) paragraphs into your comedy, we have the backstory for why the Mane Six have iPads, but I'm waiting to see what joke you're setting up with it. Two thousand words later, I'm still waiting to see what joke you're setting up with it. And then your punchline is a video which you didn't even make. :\
Up until that punchline, I was going to argue that your primary mistake was that you tagged this [Comedy] instead of [Slice of Life], but now I suspect that the issue here is that you didn't have a firm idea when you were writing of what you wanted this story to be. You set up a dramatic backstory exploring ancient ruins (along with a helping of nuclear war and genocide), you've got a lot of light banter between friends as they assemble a video, and then you bank all of your comedy on a single joke at the end. You're essentially telling three separate stories. And while each of those stories could be cool looked at in isolation, you're trying to mash them together, and that makes it stumble tonally. Your serious and epic backstory of ponies-in-the-ruins-of-human-society dissipates when you grab a few pieces of technology from it and then proceed to ignore the setup. Your Slice of Life gets derailed by your punchline. Your punchline is diluted by needing to sit through over 2,000 non-funny words first.
So how do you fix that? For this story, a lot of scrapping and rewriting — reading through your story looking for opportunities to be funny, and then taking them where you can. For example:
This feels like such a missed opportunity. You just casually tell us that humans all died "in a tragic nuclear war". (Actually, Pinkie tells us that — and, come on, you can't seriously believe that Pinkie would deliver that quote like she was giving a lecture.) If you're going to have nuclear genocide in the backstory of your comedy, at least make it something to laugh about! Exaggerate it, or make it absurd, or have the ponies not understand what "war" is so you can crack some jokes based on their ignorance, or … there's a million ways to do it, but try for a laugh!
If I were writing this — you're under no obligation to do it this way; I'm just illustrating:
Again, this isn't about whether that particular joke is funny or not: that's gonna be up to personal taste. The point is that you take what could otherwise be a weirdly sobering background fact, and crack a joke with it.
Goal number one of your comedy story should be to make the reader laugh, so you should look at every single line as an opportunity to do that — not just one big punchline at the end.
8168356 Thanks for that suggestion with color, I'm totally gonna use it.
I've already considered continuing this story and I may.
The first half was supposed to be dry and humorless but hopefully interesting enough to keep reading, until the video, when everything comes into perspective, and everything you've read up till now makes since, at least that's what I was going for. Like Twilight wanting to incinerate Scootaloo's garments, the three dots after Rainbow was excited, and some other little things I put out there that'd only hopefully be funny after knowing the video.
You'd be right this was kind of rushed, there's defiantly some places that could be improved upon to which you gave me one which I'll use gladly :)
8168436 You're right about comedy not being throughout this story but also wrong kind(I explain this near the end of this paragraph). You're also right about me banking pretty much everything on that one punchline of the video. That really was what I was going for, getting people to laugh as soon as they saw Rainbow and Scootaloo and how they looked in the video and all the little hints I left leading up to that point making since in one hopefully humor full moment. The hints I left are supposed to be the humor of the story, just you wouldn't realize it until you got to the video, but for the most part you're right.
The example of nuclear war was supposed to be stand alone humor, but I see what you mean that it can be improved upon in many different ways, along with some other stuff like the Canterlot researchers.
As far as me being rude. I'm not the best communicator and what I typed was more of an attack against my own story than the other story and/or potential audience. Which is not to say any "attack" was meant for the other story and/or audience b/c there was none meant for it or them, but that's how it came across unfortunately.
Anyways thanks for the advice :)
Hitting you up with a downvote just for your overly indignant complaining and shameless self-promotion on someone else's story.
8169349 Wow, I don't down vote anyone.
As far as complaining and self promoting well I guess I'm guilty of that, but can you blame me?
They say bad press is better than no press at all, and I feel I wasn't being entirely unreasonable. I voiced my opinion about the story.
People are taking what I typed and putting their own negative spin on it. That's my fault for not being clear the first time but I did clarify myself with a second post. I guess some people didn't read that one, so I felt the need to post a third time.
Sorry you feel like self promotion and complaining/defense/clarifying earns a story, I'm going to assume you didn't even read, a down vote.
8169340
Thanks for taking the feedback gracefully. I appreciate the return explanations.
For the record, I never got a notification of your reply — there's a long-standing FIMFiction bug where it only sends out notifications if you reply while you're looking at the same chapter the original commenter was in. Since I responded to Chapter 1 and your own reply attached to Chapter 2, I wouldn't have noticed it if I hadn't manually checked the story again. :P
I accidentally posted another's story on a more popular story.
Never again; I didn't know that people were so against self-promotion. We're all readers here, and sharing our own and other people's stories is how you find new things that you might possibly like, and new authors.
8184396 I understand why, asking people to read a story you wrote is almost paramount to wasting their time reading your message.
That aside, I felt really good about this comedy story I had made. It seemed like a brilliantly funny idea to me, and when it went up it was like no one cared. So I decided to self promote it. I realized later it was a little too dry of humor before it made it to the punchline, and I'm still on the fence about making it a Teen rating, but the mods seemed okay with it as Everyone. Anyways, my first attempt at self promotion went horrible, b/c of unclear words and not outright claiming the self promotion as a self promotion.
At least one person down voted this story without even giving it a chance, and told me as such, so I might as well continue self promoting it, since not many people are gonna read it without the promotion now.
I only made this for laughs, the fact you commented in this chapter tells me that perhaps what you read in the first chapter and it was at least amusing to you and you wanted to see what the next part was about. Perhaps I presume too much? I don't know.
Anyways, thanks for the concern/advice.
8185219
I did. I'll go ahead and give a general idea of my opinion of this story.
It has no glaring grammar issues that I could notice; however, the way some things are put together are a bit strange.
I think that's a pretty good example. It just feels awkward to me, and I'd reword it to something like this:
Also, I'm really confused why they let you post this with an everyone rating. I mean, jeez, that video isn't exactly something that everyone would enjoy. I would, if I were you, still change the rating to teen. It doesn't show anything, but it's pretty suggestive.
Now, Comedy is subjective. so not everyone will get a kick out of what you personally find funny; it's not nearly as dry as you think. With a low viewer count, you have a very small amount of people coming here, and an even small amount actually reading what you have. So, what I'd do, is join the group called Those Feeling Left Out or Unpopular and post your story there in an appropriate place.
Just so ya know, I laughed. You got a like from me.
It is really hard to praise this. I checked this out, read both chapters, and looked at comments. I see the potential, but as it is now, it is difficult to find good in all the bad.
Having said that, I will start with the good:
-This story has a lot of potential. If you developed the story, added a few details, and lengthened the story a bit, if done correctly, it will be much more enjoyable to read. Also, I didn't even watch the video, but the part about their reactions to the video, especially Twilight's, brought a short, gentle one-time laugh from my lips. You can just get rid of the video itself and just elaborate on the reactions, and this would be so much better. As far as grammar, spelling, et cetera goes, it could be better, but it is not bad at all.
Everything else needs some help. The pacing feels a bit rushed. The details are never explained upon. The question of history and discovery of the humans and their belongings is never answered, not really. The fact Pinkie Pie seemed slightly out of character. I mean, She has stated herself that she would never prank somepony with something he/she can't handle. And it kinda seemed a little mean (totally unlike her) that she would proceed to publicly present a video making fun of RD, knowing full well that it will result in harassment/bullying/teasing from other ponies, even if she specifically told them to not spread false rumors. Also, everything seems a little unanswered; you only raised questions, not deter them.
Having said that, The parts I did enjoy were pretty good.
Signing out,
VShuffler42
8715364
Please tell me you at least watched the video enough to know what it is?
It's kind of the point. In fact, this comedy wouldn't exist without that video, from the first chapter. I understand if you didn't/won't want to watch the video in its entirety, but if you didn't watch it at all or up to like the first 30 seconds then you've completely missed the point of the comedy, and things wouldn't make sense.
As far as the world building and the rushing, well you'd be right. I didn't make this super long. This was intended for a laugh, nothing else.
As nice as it would be to read about the stuff I added to the world with the bunkers and what not, I only built that up as much as I did so people could get an idea of why ponies suddenly had new technology and access to videos from a long dead civilization that happened to be us.
As far as me rushing, well it's a short comedy story who's main punchline was at the end. I felt dragging out the time before the punchline with boring stuff to read, or stuff to read that might be interesting but also distract from the main purpose of the story which is comedy wouldn't be good. I suppose both those things could actually help with the punchline, the problem however I know for a fact reading boring stuff as a quick way to lose a reader especially if said reader was intending on reading something funny. Reading something interesting could work but that can quickly get into random territory which was not a tag I really wanted on this story. I ended up needing it anyways thx to the 2nd chapter I added as an ending, upon someone's request.
The punchline BTW is the video, so you're really missing out if you haven't seen any of it. It's basically a somewhat cannon like way in which such a video could be made by the characters, given the videos nature the characters being completely in character is simple not possible, my failure to right them as such aside, which I did try to do, which is to say I acknowledge your point about Pinkie and agree.
8715540
... ... ... After I wrote that comment, I watched it, and ultimately had the same reaction as Twilight did. Except I didn't have to watch it all. I watched 5 seconds of it, and I couldn't watch anymore. I heard that song play and I cringed. As soon as I actually watched part of it, I couldn't watch any further.
Yeah,
I still think you could've implied something heavily without the video, and cause a larger laugh. But then again that's just me. In any case, for how absolutely stomach-wrenching and disgusting that video is, you still implemented it well into the story. Well, I got to go.
Signing out and going to bed,
VShuffler42