A pair of adventurers slay the last living dragon.
A Grim entry in the A Thousand Words Contest ( group | blog ).
Thanks to Compass the Pegasus for pre-reading!
Chapters (1)
- Member Since 8th Feb, 2012
- offline last seen 4 hours ago
PseudoBob Delightus
How hard can writing novels be, anyway?
PseudoBob Delightus
Joined 8th Feb, 2012 ·
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Ok, I guess. It's fine. Not remarkable, but not bad. I suppose it's difficult to do very much in only 1000 words, and the ending does communicate what I think you're trying to say, but overall this feels a little undeveloped.
One thing that stands out though:
Ponies don't have wrists. I think the word you're looking for is fetlock.
11205851
Thanks for the feedback, and good catch on the anatomy. That's fixed.
I mostly avoid thinking too hard about pony anatomy because MLP ponies are clearly not anatomical equivalents to actual horses/ponies, even disregarding the horns and wings, but that can lead to cases like this where I'm simply missing the proper vocabulary.
As for the lack of development, well, that's not very useful, but I get it. A 1000 word limit is as stifling as it is stimulating. Maybe in the future I'll give this idea the wordcount it deserves.
Damn, Spike barely cared that he was about to be culled. Guess he missed Rarity so much that no amount of gold or treasure could be worth more than her memory and her horn. Which is understandable.
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Personally, I once tried using "pastern", but my editor suggested changing it to something simpler and more instantly recognizable like "wrist" or "fetlock". I wound up choosing the latter, but in the end, I reckon it's just one of those things where it comes down to the author's preference more than anything.
As for the story itself, I enjoyed it! To echo Bucket's concerns, I do believe it would've been better off with a larger wordcount and some additional development therein — disregarding the contest requirements, that is — but I still found plenty to like. Kudos!
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Thank you! And it may seem a bit trivial, but I'll definitely keep this anatomy stuff in mind for future projects.
I intend to submit a story to all 5 categories of the Thousand Words Contest, so maybe I'll get better at selecting and condensing story ideas into the format as I do more of them.
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I imagine, with this version of Spike, something awful happened to Rarity that meant he could never get over her. So basically hfw no mares
i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/002/297/373/9b2.gif
Eh.
The next day, an immense ball of flaming gas appeared over the horizon.
And there was no more magic.
In the story two random ponies kill a random dragon. It's probably due the the word limit, but the characters are complete strangers here. They may live, they may die, it is the same. I only got from the comments that the dragon is Spike. And as he is the last dragon it probably doesn't matter will he die now or later.
The word limit was definitely working against you this time. No relics of his life among ponies? No attempts to communicate? No rumination by the ponies on the significance of slaying the last dragon? I mean, yeah, no one's at their best so soon after being woken up, and they may not have realized they were rendering the species extinct at the time, but still. There's a strong idea here, but not enough space to explore it adequately.
Still, thank you for it. Best of luck in the judging.
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Hahaha, I'll be honest, I didn't think about whether Spike would try to speak, or what he would say if he did. And any theoretical justification I could give would be unsupported by the story, light as it is on details. Woe and alas. A full exploration of this idea is certainly somewhere on my glacial to-do list.
Anyway, thanks for the kind words.
ah, love this introduction! i mean, if a pony story is about a singular dragon, it's easy to guess which one it would be about, but still! very cool to imagine the wyrm that Spike eventually becomes, though the fic's title and Spike's status as something to be hunted raises a lot of questions
there is just so much mileage to get out of manipulating pony magic with a bit of cleverness. unicorns can really become overpowered really quick!
oof! and a twisted irony there, in Rarity's horn taking the place of the dragon's hoarded gems that she coveted in life
definitely a haunting image of what Spike's last days could have been, with the fact of dragons having been a sapient and equal species to ponies long lost to the mists of time. so many questions about how the world got to this point! and of course, to the dragon hunters this is just another job, with none of these details resonating with them as they do with us, who know who Spike and Rarity and all the other dragon characters are or once were.
the prose here is solid, executing its action and tension well, and i love the premise! and the idea of Spike, old and alone, being resigned to his fate and all dragons' fates is powerful, especially since it has to be filled in the gaps in the viewpoint character's perspective. agh, there's just so much potential here for more story beyond the one thousand words that we got, i am really feeling the pain of that limitation!
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Thank you for all the thoughtful feedback! This type of long-form comment is really the best sort of feedback I could ask for.
At the same time, it kinda makes me feel bad, since you note that you have so many unanswered questions and are feeling the pain of the 1k word limit... I desperately want to fully explore this concept with a multi-chapter story, but I've got so much other stuff that's higher priority and it all takes so long to write as it is!!! Ahhh!
Oh well. Maybe I'll have something done by the time G6 comes out.
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aww, it was still fun to ponder the unanswered questions, and the fic had a great vibe. glad you liked the comment!