Hold My Life

A story that takes a relatively vanilla AiE concept and aims to add levels of texture & depth to the narrative.; expect things to unfold rather slowly. The plot will extend beyond SoL pleasantries.

Chapters (2)

Comments ( 4 )

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Drawdex

Drawdex #1 · Mar 3rd, 2013 · · · Asking Me Lies ·

Well let's begin shall we.

This was refreshing, for second person narrative it really was.

The way of thinking of anonymous is creative, in Pinkie Pie style it tangents enough to stay in the flow and bring comical thoughts, but not enough to drive too far away from the story progression (at least for me).

The first arrival wasn't as common because of the narrative style and the way of thinking stated before. Annons logical reasoning are very well placed, as any person that thought himself to be dead not a couple of minutes ago, one could say 'your guess is as good as mine' type of logic, which didn't make me scream in agony by lack of intelligence, which never came to be.

The first meeting was very well done (good choice of pony by the way), and logic seems to still be present in the characters, including annon, which is very new to me in a AIE-2nd person-comedy. The fact that no one would believe Big Mac about his sudden disappearance in the middle of the day is usually over looked, which is why it was so nice for my brain to see.

But it would have been nice to see some distrust, like Applejack had coming from Twilight,(Unless you'll do it later, but by the mayor 'acknowledging scene' I'm not quite sure).

But there's still the main issues that suffer most of the HIE or in your case AIE have:

'Trust, trust everywhere', this is really the main issue that until now doesn't appear to go away. The pony extreme trust thing is usually in character if it was from pony to pony, if it's a pony to another creature they have never seen before, you can really not say for sure that trust is immediate, Zecora is a good example. But of course this could be for now (there's only two chapters), so this is posible to go away easily.

'Imposible Relationships' not imposible relations because of species but impossibly fast relations. The relationship of Annon and Twilight seems too fast to be true, the way Annon speaks to Twilight could be because of who he is, but Twilight's character(which everyone knows very well) is rather different from the one portrayed here, 'but it could be because of the 2nd person perspective the we can't see what she's thinking' would have been a good excuse which doesn't work if in a part of the story Twiligh get's to think of her situation (which was used to tell which moment in canon are we at), furthering the impossibility of their way of speech to each other.

Remember he's aperantly a new speacies, who aperently appeard from nowhere for no reason, who aperently doesn't want to be known by the 'kindest and best ruler of all of Equestria'(that's Twilight's opinion by the way). But of course these problems could be nothing if in the next chapters ponies opinions get shown, distrust becomes a fact not a 'ponytale' and Annon becomes more in touch with reality after a couple of chapters; remember that he lost everything he once had and knew a couple of days ago, the 'being crazy' or 'after life' theories stopped working after the moment HE HIMSELF told so.

So yeah, this is my constructive criticism of the day, I'll leave untill late at night where I check my emails and Fimfictions.

Good luck.

Take my comment in mind unless you're going for senseless illogical comedy, instead of slice of life comedy (which is in your tag).

*Tracked*

keflexxx

keflexxx #2 · Mar 3rd, 2013 · · · Asking Me Lies ·

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Thanks for the in-depth reply Drawdex, I appreciate it. I guess the issue re: ease of integration stems from the fact that because we never see a new species introduced in FiM (Draconequus notwithstanding because you know, he wanted to rule the world) you can take a lot of poetic license as to just how accepting the townsfolk will be. And as a result, we probably all tend to write the townsfolk in a way that makes the story easier for us to utilise (it probably also stems from the fact that Ponyville is some sort of idyllic fantasy world for some and there's always some Mary Sue going on).

Rest assured that while Anon has had it easy up until now, he won't have it easy forever. That said, from my perspective if everyone in Ponyville can get used to a baby dragon being in their town, they can get used to a newcomer who can't breathe fire.

As for Twilight, I'm probably intentionally toning down everyones characters somewhat for the purposes of the story (Should have been immediately obvious with AJ; I'm not a fan of the common colloquialisms found in her written language). The reason for this is because in a long-form narrative having such over-the-top characters becomes tiresome and gives them fewer dimensions. I hope that the monologue about Twilight at the end of Chapter 1 gives you an idea of how I'm trying to position her character, and I'm hoping to do similar things for other members of the party as well. That doesn't mean I'll always get it right though, so if ever anyone sees me getting a bit off-track let me know.

Again, thanks for the feedback; really do appreciate it. I think you'll be happy with how Chapters 3 & 4 play out, although again it's worth remembering that this is going to be a bit of a slow burn; because time is unfolding slowly here your criticisms might not be addressed right away.

Drawdex

Drawdex #3 · Mar 3rd, 2013 · · · Asking Me Lies ·

2208352

I Really do appreciate that the characterization was in fact on purpose, instead of unintentional (that changes a lot, and says a lot of the writer) and the writing of how they react is truly up to the author, based on his thoughts and interpretation of the canon ponies, the point of taking in the unknown creature better than the known baby fire breathing creature is understandable up to a point, but understandable none the less.