Solitair Reads The Immortal Game: Epilogue · 6:12am Sep 16th, 2014
Before I started writing this post, I decided to read all of the blog entries that AestheticB made on fimfiction.net, the site where I read his big story in the first place. In his most recent entry, he explained that the reason it took so long to write an epilogue is because he got conflicting expectations of what the epilogue should be and he didn’t know what to put down. In the end, he decided to forgo tying up every single loose end he’d been asked about and concentrated on a few scenes that I assume he felt good about. He made the right decision, since trying to please everyone is a fool’s errand, and it seems like the biggest priority is writing something that the writer would want to read. I didn’t mind that there were loose ends that weren’t explicitly tied up, but I have an imagination and I could come to my own conclusions about what ponies like Rainbow Dash were doing during the construction of New Canterlot. Above all, I got the sense that things were going to be alright, even in the case of Terra, who still displays resistance to the idea of reforming, but is swiftly being broken down by Fluttershy. If there’s a better way to end this story, I can’t think of one at the moment. Bravo.
Right, now that I got that out of the way, I feel like I should try to summarize my opinion on the story I spent weeks writing about on this blog. Part of this is because I want to give a proper conclusion to all of this, and part of it is because I want to share this with AestheticB himself and summarize it all in the likely even that he’s too busy to trawl through the archives. I’ll start out on a critical note, since he seeks out constructive criticism as any aspiring writer should, but since I’m not as good at it as he probably is my list of gripes will be short.
I hate to say this, but as was the case with Fallout Equestria, the action scenes ended up being the weakest aspect of the story. Maybe you don’t agree. Maybe it’s just me, but at around the halfway point I’d had enough of them. There were so many action scenes that went on for so long that I was doing the mental, literary equivalent of hitting the fast-forward button, skimming past them so that I could get to the dialogue, character-building, and plot advancement. The hard part about this is that I can tell by reading these action scenes that there was some hard work put into them. Even at this stage in his development AestheticB knows more about choreography than I ever did, and he had some neat ideas like bladecasting and Pinkie Pie’s arsenal. But as the author himself noted, writing action in a non-visual medium is difficult, and I’m starting to wonder if it can be done well at all. One commenter expressed the idea that someone should make a comic page adaptation of The Immortal Game, and I would love to see it happen if only because the action would translate so much better when illustrated. Shame that’ll never actually happen.
This also may be something that only bothers me, but I also got burned by how many times a chapter would either imply that a protagonist was dead or end with a character receiving what seems like a fatal wound, only for them to live on in future chapters. Barring occasions where the death tease is resolved in the same chapter, and especially cases in which a healing factor undoes fatal wounds in an instant, there are five times where the plot jerked me around like this: Celestia, Fluttershy, Twilight, Spike, and Celestia again. I honestly hadn’t minded this until it happened to Spike, at which point I raged about how callously and disrespectfully he was killed off until the friend who recommended this story to me spoiled his survival in order to calm me down. By the fifth time, I realized that the returns on this trick had diminished to the point where it only provoked fatigue from me. Tip for future stories: teasing the death of a protagonist like this works a lot better if it’s only done once or twice in a given story. You might be able to get away with doing it three times, but that’s it. Any more and you’ll seem like the boy who cried wolf.
My last grievance is pretty minor compared to the first two, but I still feel like it bears mentioning anyway. I’m going to get heat for saying this, but I never thought that Unimpressive fit in with the story. He felt out of place, like the protagonist of some other story who’s making a cameo or a crossover, and that’s leaving aside the fact that he was based on a real person. Was it fun to read about him adjusting to the quirkiness of the mane six and getting shown up when they surpass his expectations? Yes, but it didn’t serve the narrative any and his own subplot was the most pointless one in the story. It took me a while to realize that he’d just vanished from the plot after the Battle of Canterlot, and I didn’t miss him. The only reason I can figure that he was ever included was because AestheticB wanted to find a special way of thanking Vimbert for helping him polish the story. I can only imagine how Vimbert felt when he found out about it.
Those are really all the problems I could find with the work as a whole. All of the other things I bitched about in the previous posts would either be resolved later or are personal preferences of mine that AestheticB couldn’t help. The origins of Celestia and Luna as presented here had me concerned that instead of being equine and capable of reader empathy, they would be cold and distant like the villains here, Luna in Romance Reports, or both sisters in Chatoyance’s Conversion Bureau stories, but that didn’t happen. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach at one point that Twilight’s power creep would marginalize her friends and have her hog the spotlight, but that didn’t happen. I came to realize that killing Spike off-page to add more grief to Twilight’s plate was pretty much the worst way to kill off a beloved supporting character, but thank Christ that didn’t actually happen.
As for the strengths, The Immortal Game excels in taking one question (What if Celestia and Luna had parents that were also gods?) and creating an alternate universe that explored the answer to a depth sufficient enough to create a rousing epic and character study. Nearly every development in the plot made sense, and more than once I was stymied by something that wasn’t explained only to come to a brilliant realization about what had just happened. For instance, I didn’t get how the Elements of Harmony could recover from the inert state Titan had forced them into simply by being used in the same circumstances they had been in before, until I remembered that the Elements were similarly inert at the beginning of the show and had been reformed from being destroyed once their new hosts reached an emotional high. I’m honestly pretty jealous about how Aesthetic put so much thought into the magical systems of the story, from bladecasting to cuffling to the Elements themselves.
The motivations of the characters made sense, given the circumstances thrust upon them in the story. The villains’ motivations and personalities also ended up checking out, though the story took its sweet time getting them there. Up until I got the last pieces of the puzzle, Titan and his lieutenants came across as the kind of villain designed to get the audience to hate them, and that kind of villain doesn’t come across as great to me, merely good enough. AestheticB said he’d work on that issue if he were ever inclined to rewrite The Immortal Game, though.
The decision of the author’s to not include full coverage of scenes like Esteem freeing Titan and the latter half of Astor’s journal puzzled me at first, until I was basically told that AestheticB was keeping pacing in mind, sacrificing or condensing extended scenes he may have been tempted to write and leaving much to the reader’s imagination. I didn’t understand what he was doing when I first read this chapter, but now I admire him for resisting the temptation to expand the story to suit his muse. Some of my favorite stories have succumbed to this peril themselves.
As for the prose, well, this is where my critical abilities fail me, because I still haven’t trained myself to notice that when I read. I can’t tell most prose styles apart, and it’s a skill that I’d like to develop somehow, though the only way I know how is just reading and writing more until something clicks for me.
Would I recommend The Immortal Game? I absolutely would. Those readers who sound interested in a hard-hitting adventure reminiscent of Preacher or Sandman with lots and lots of over-the-top action probably won’t regret reading it. I know I didn’t, though I’m still not sure if I regret blogging about it or not. Is it my favorite piece of fanfiction? Sadly not. I haven’t bothered organizing a top ten list of fic, but I know at the very least that Fallout Equestria holds a more significant place in my heart. It’s a moot point, since there’s room for more than one fic in my life. Is it good enough to be published? Ehhh, I’m still not sure. As it stands right now, it could probably use some ironing out, even if it was somehow altered to contain nothing but original characters and settings. I think sometimes fans get a little too enthusiastic, though I do agree that I’ve read actual books that work less well than The Immortal Game.
AestheticB’s most recent blog post mentions that he almost gave up on The Immortal Game a few times. He’s glad he didn’t, and so am I. It’s only fitting that he’s working on an original fantasy story now. Hopefully he gets a book deal sometime, and he finds a way to let his fans on fimfiction know when it happens.
Good review series, it's been fun thinking about this story again as I've read these posts.
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Thanks. Now I'm not sure what to blog about next. Progress reports of what I accomplish when I can find time to write? Short reviews of stories as I read them? Beats me.
I've mostly made up my mind to build a new fantasy world with the seed being a character like Titan from the end of the TIG, though of course I'll be changing the backstory and details around enough so that it doesn't feel like I'm just regurgitating parts of this fic.
I also got a message from AestheticB himself complimenting me on my insight regarding the story. That was nice of him.