"Princess Trinity" Reformatted · 9:04pm Jun 11th, 2012
Got my review back on Princess Trinity and my reviewer did a fine job of pointing out its weaknesses, so, even though it's on hiatus while I'm working on Assassinate Princess Celestia!, I'll begin editing the three existing chapters when I can find the time and/or am too lazy to do anything else.
I've already fixed two basic issues: when I started writing pony fics, I wasn't sure whether or not to capitalize "pegasus," "unicorn," and "earth pony." I capitalized them because Pegasus is actually the proper name of a specific flying horse and looks funny to me in lowercase. I capitalized it and then capitalized the names of the other pony types for consistency. The fandom has decided against me, however, so I have put these in lowercase to conform with custom.
Also, took out the double spaces between sentences. Back in my day, I learned always to put a double space between sentences, but that's apparently not a thing anymore. I resisted the change for as long as I could, but now that I actually get occasional complaints about my double spaces, I've decided I'll just do a global find and replace when I'm finished to get rid of them. I doubt if I can actually get in the habit of not double spacing after sentences, though. It's ingrained in me.
You will, however, get my ellipsis with a space after each period . . . when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
On a more humorous note, my excellent reviewer thought "dastard," a word I placed in the mouth of Inkie Pie, might be a typo or my attempt at euphemism. In fact, it's a real insult. It means a base, despicable, or cowardly person. To my mind, at least, it sounds more at home in the mouth of Inkie, at least as I write her, than do any of our less colorful and more coarse modern insults. Besides that, in the actual show, "hay," "darn," and "feather," along with the occasional taking of Celestia's name in vain, are the strongest pony cuss words, so I decided to reflect that in Princess Trinity. I have another, earlier fic that I'll sooner or later improve upon and move over here, in which I have a character occasionally say "damn," but it just doesn't sound right, so I'll switch it to "darn" when I edit.
I note that, twice now, "cur" has appeared in the show, so I don't see why the ponies couldn't haul out other archaic insults such as churl, knave, varlet, or dastard, as the situation required.
Besides that, I do have Colonel Ironsides calling his enemies "dam-covering sons of witches," which is pretty vulgar if you parse out what it means.
On another note, two editors now have told me to lay off the equine anatomical terms. Maybe I better heed that advice.
Speaking of advice, my reviewer also warned me that the content is quite grisly. He suggested that I add a content warning. It is rather violent, the villains do some disturbing stuff, rape has already been mentioned, and I am planning two mostly non-graphic seduction scenes . . . I want to hand that out to readers and ask what they think. Does Princess Trinity need a content warning?
"Does Princess Trinity need a content warning?"
Yes, yes it does, DGD. I find your lack of Derpy in PT disturbing...
4.bp.blogspot.com/-CU0tstwRs74/T09NDB6sYfI/AAAAAAAAhFs/6IcfIWDZNoQ/s320/12BQC.png
Seriously, though, if you're thinking of sending PT to EqD, might want to play it safe and add the warning.
On a slightly less serious note, a minimum amount of equine anatomical terms are needed in a MLP story to establish that we're dealing with horses here, even ones so anthropomorphic. Maybe you are overdoing it, but perhaps we might have a new story category, the "hard" MLP fan fic (or "hard" fantasy), with precise anatomical details that separate pegasi from unicorns and earth ponies. It ain’t magic, after all, that allows Pegasi to fly…
In "Shadow of the Dragon Lords," without saying so explicitly, I was trying to depict an alternate version of MLP in which the ponies were mostly anatomically like real horses, and I think I sort of stayed in that mode in everything I've written since.
Does Princess Trinity need a content warning? I'm going to say probably, although perhaps not for the reason such a rating is normally given. You do "dark" stories very, very well. Perhaps too well for a T rating. Your stories are pretty tame on the gore, violence and very mild on the sex aspect. However, to say I was "creeped out" when I read The Chronicles of Fone Bone Oathbreaker, is such an understatement I'm forced to turn to a thesaurus in search of a better word. Even that was a failure though as perturbed, disquieted, and disturbed don't quite seem emphatic enough. I literally could not stop thinking about the story for days. That's not to say it's bad, in fact it is amazingly good. I recommend it to everyone I'm not too embarrassed to recommend fan fiction to. But it's dark, man, really dark. I don't think I would recommend anyone under 18 reading it.
You could lighten up Princess Trinity and avoid the issue. I cannot recommend doing that though. I loved Oathbreaker and I like the direction Princess Trinity is going. Don't saw on the reins when the pony muse has the bit between its teeth
170925
Wow. Somepony here actually knows Oathbreaker. My life is complete, so I'm just gonna go die now.
Believe it or not, Princess Trinity, when I finally manage to get back to it
, is not going to be as dark as Oathbreaker, or, at least, I'm not going to eviscerate the entire cast by the end. It will have content that's probably more intense, though.
It's strange. All my fiction ends up this way. I'm on the second draft of a novel right now, but when I say "second" draft, I mean this is something like the twentieth version of a story I've written time and again, just trying to tone it down to the point where it didn't make even me queasy while re-reading it.
I've already slapped a little warning label on Princess Trinity and revised the synopsis. We'll see how that does.