I was always different. A failing body and a mind that always felt incompatible. And with my body failing me, I died. Only, I didn't die. Instead, I returned home as the prophecy had foretold a thousand years ago. Where my mind matched my body, and my body matched my mind. But arriving in this new world set into motion an ancient conflict, one which I would be thrown head first into where I would learn who I truly was meant to be.
Please let me know what you think in the comments! Any criticism is greatly appreciated.
The story seems to have a good start
The Everfree spawning system gets real grit in this one. Somepony accidentally put this on hard-mode.
Looks like we've got a self-booper here!
In all seriousness, a fine start! Keep it up!
Followed liked and fav pretty good looking forward to more ;)
The prose is excellent!
Loving this story
This is one of the best beginnings to a human-pony reincarnation story I've seen in a LONG time! Your sense of prose is particularly excellent!
1) As this point in the fandom, these body dysmorphia stories are so overplayed that you may as well have a black and red alicorn OC while you're at it. It's an overused trope. It gets boring reading about the same "I'm not comfortable in my body!" thing over and over, and the reaction from a lot of people is going to be "oh, another one of these, pass."
2) It's shocking how utterly self-focused this story is. A crazy whole lot of it reads like never-ending chains of "I" statements.
Compare the following:
* "The forest was green and vibrant, and taking in its fullness evoked a sense of joy."
* "I was in a forest. I looked around. I saw trees. I felt happy."
Both of those say basically the same thing, but do you see how incredibly awkward the second one is? Much of your story so far reads like the second one. Go to chapter two and do a text search for "I " with a space after the I, and you'll find that there are two hundred thirty nine of them. Now do a search for "my ". There are a hundred thirty four of them.
That's 373 self-references, and meanwhile you only have 323 sentences in the chapter. You have more self-references than sentences. For example:
8 sentences and you say I eleven times. Are you doing that on purpose? The entire story is like this, nonstop and unrelenting. It's so excessive that it goes beyond just distracting grammatical weirdness. it almost reads like he's a ten year old, but then the vocabulary and grammatical complexity don't match that and chapter one specifically tells us that he's 20.
The result of combining intelligent phrasing with such complete and utter self focus is that your character comes across as having mental issues. If he's not a child my first guess is that he's a psychopath. You can't be that self-focused without there being some sort of underlaying issue at play, and reading through that mindset is going to get old very quickly.
If you want your character to be sympathetic, if you want readers to not be annoyed at how childish and selfish and self-focused he is, there needs to be less constant looping of I-statements and more focus on the world around him.
As an experiment, maybe try writing the next chapter without using the words "I" "me" or "my" at all just to get it out of your system. Get out of the protagonist's mind, and show us the world. Give us other characters, and show us how they think and feel. Otherwise, the constant self-focus is going to drag this down into a death spiral fast.
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In some cases he could even just delete my. In other's switching words to present tense and there would be a uptake in pacing. Its why I enjoy using present verbs when I can.
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Thanks, rereading this has made your statement very obvious to me and I can see why it's detrimental to the reading experience. I'll keep all this in mind.
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Yeah, it seems so silly at first, but it's a thing that once you see it you can't unsee it and it goes from invisible to "dude, what's going on?" For a little bit while reading I thought maybe you were doing it on purpose. The chapter starts out with him being "inside his own mind," and it might have been a deliberate style choice to reflect the nature of his internal monologue. But then it kept going after he woke up.
Thanks for taking the feedback gracefully.
Not a clear start ngl
How about an image?
Wish he was a stalion but imma keep reading its really well wrote i can see you took the constructive critism to Heart and came back stronger gg
Very interesting mystery about the character and her connection to Luna!!
This is some very tightly packed world building right here. It reveals a lot about the culture with few words. Well done.
I like the realistic design you’re creating with this story. I hope you delve into it much more!!
I am loving the concept and the execution so far!
Waiting on more :)
Its now January 3rd at 12:43 CST. Waiting for a Update now. Hope to see it updated within this month. Cause this is to intresting to not be updated.
wooo! update!
Interesting so far hope you keep it up.
What is Nova's mane/tail color? Has that been mentioned, looking back I couldn't find it.
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It's important... for later
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👍
… also, what is a ‘Can’t Erp-lots?’ (Canterlot )
I also have no idea what you’re talking about. No memories.
I’m interested how Twilight deduced that Princess Luna was the expert on Nova’s sudden appearance. Plus, the timely arrival of a rock through the window just as the new pony arrived at the castle with a princess: that would require quite a vigilant detective presence.
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You are right, I rewrote this chapter a few times and some must have slipped through. Thanks for the correction. But Twilight did have a clue...
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That's part of learning, isn't it?
That's a very odd answer unless it's a joke. Not "In village Ponyville south from Canterlot" or something like that.
Good start so far, really liking the story, cant wait for the next update (insert Kylo Ren meme of him screaming "more")