Days before the new school year begins, Rumble still finds himself struggling with an essay he was given at the beginning of the summer. Now with only two days to solve his dilemma, he's forced to leave his room and seek help from outside.
Hopefully he can find a safe haven to work on it before the world decides to rain on his parade.
Cover art by Mix-Up, who does some phenomenal work.
5/30/2022 Edit: Comments have been deleted due to spambot links. I probably shoulda deleted those a while ago, but I will continue to do so now.
Chapters (2)
adorable.
Alright, that was cute! I've never read a RumblePip story before, so this was interesting to see how that dynamic plays out. Short, sweet, and competently written. Good job, dude!
But I'd be remiss if I didn't drop a couple of critiques. First of all, I plead with you to stop using Lavender Unicorn Syndrome so heavily. I think you were looking to add variety to naming your characters in the prose, so you swapped their names for "the stallion", "The lithe stallion", "the brown stallion", so on and so forth. This comes off as very tacky if you do it more than occasionally. I know it's really good to use variety when choosing your words, but when it comes to identifying which character you're speaking about, their names are exempt from that rule. You can say Rumble five times in a paragraph. It's necessary. Subbing two of those five with "the stallion" draws more attention to it than just saying their names.
I also have a few issues with the general delivery of the story's concept. Most notable was the softly defined relationship between Rumble and Pipsqueak. Pip only comes up as a casual mention in the first chapter, and even then there isn't much indication that Rumble has any feelings for him. He's not really on Rumble's mind until he pops up out of nowhere in the park, and if Rumble was already into him enough to go for a smooch, that absolutely should have been a focus early on. In fact it should have replaced a lot of the lengthy (almost gratuitous) descriptions of writer's block. It would have given a bigger sense of buildup throughout the story and made that final payoff at the end a lot more impactful.
Let me reiterate, this was pretty good. A story of merit told by an author with obvious talents, but it needed a little more oomph to really hit the readers where it counts. Keep at it, you'll be writing bangers in no time! :)
Okay, while this was adorable beyond measure, I'm afraid I have to agree with 10421470 on a few things. Mainly, the bit about not establishing any meaningful connection between Rumble and Pip. Even something little like Rumble blushing and stammering when Thunderlane mentions him, or maybe he has a picture of him and his friends in his room, and he takes just a second longer top look at Pip.
Also, I'm a bit confused at the time frame here. You mention the Cutie Mark Camp, which means its after that, and multiple times you refer to Rumble as "the teenage colt" (LUS in effect) ... but then he's still a blank flank. And it was long enough after the Camp for Mother Nature to hit the Hunk Button on Pip and make his name no longer make sense. So, how old is everyone, and when does this take place?
So yeah, this was a bit rough around the edges, but ti was super sweet, cute, and just the right kind of romantic fluff I wanted. Good job!