Bradel Writes Reviews #5 · 8:22pm Dec 8th, 2014
This week:
"Apotheosis" by Daetrin
"Apotheosis" by Daetrin
[Romance] [Adventure]
When Twilight is sent with Luna on a diplomatic mission to Draconia, they quickly find themselves somewhere that doesn't appear on any map, and Luna is lost in more than one way...
Technical
Hook – This story is a sequel to "Off the Edge of the Map" which, full disclosure, I haven't read. A small chunk of the first chapter gets used reacquainting the reader with the events of that story—and this part is, honestly, handled quite well. Not a lot of words are wasted on this, but I feel like I'm pretty much on the same page with continuing readers even so. This is an advantage of fanfiction. Sequel or no, I only need to be introduced to a couple new characters, since I already know most of the cast well.
Other than the recap, though, "Apotheosis" does a pretty terrible job hooking my interest. The first chapter is over 6000 words long, but it plods along with minimal conflict and very low stakes until the last few hundred words. Compare this to something like Horizon's "Fugue State" which tells a fully-formed multi-act story in 7000 words. Daetrin doesn't seem to have worried much about catching reader interest with this piece.
1/5
Prose – Serviceable, but prone to a few bits of weirdness. Ponies spend a lot of time repeating the same basic actions, like giggling, which stood out to me. Daetrin also has a tendency to drop in some OED-Extended words from time to time, including a few I've never seen before. It's not problematic, but it does feel a little odd when they're dropped in, since they feel like slices of a different style of prose than what's generally on display here. The story is very readable, however, and the prose very rarely threatens to drop the reader out of the story, so all in all this is pretty solid.
3/5
Voice – Generally, voice issues didn't stand out to me positively or negatively through most of this story. Twilight and Luna, the two characters the reader is most attached to, were differentiable and in character, but their voices never felt particularly compelling. Some of this might have resulted from some early self-sabotage in the first chapter, where Daetrin flips between Twilignt perspective and Luna perspective, and makes a point of showing that Luna is hiding her true feelings and reactions from Twilight. But this doesn't get hinted at much in Twilight's perspective, so it winds up feeling like two separate and non-overlapping portrayals of Luna. (This is one of the reasons I started to really take note of the over-use of giggling in "Apotheosis".)
The original characters have much more interesting voices, though. In fact, the voices on Twilight and Luna are about as boring as you get in this piece, because other canon characters also come out well. But back to the OC's, Daetrin has put together some interesting ways of portraying speech for non-standard characters here, and while that makes this sort of like voicing easy-mode, it's still fun to read. In particular, the passages from the hungry wind should be read out of the Google document Daetrin links in the relevant chapter for correct effect. Fimfiction formatting really murders them, but they're quite beautiful the way they were originally constructed.
3.5/5
Structure and Pacing – Although the first chapter feels almost like wasted space, things begin to pick up once there's a story to tell. Each chapter provides a new set of pieces for the characters to interact with, and their journey (and the relationship between Twilight and Luna) builds well in a technical sense. Although the story doesn't seem to be doing much in the way of three-act or try-fail cycles, the structure is fairly well laid out.
Pacing remains a problem, though. I expected to be able to get through this story in one day, two at the worst. The write-off did interfere with my ability to get through it, but even when time wasn't a big constraint, in the last couple days, getting through the last few chapters felt like a slow plod. That doesn't mean I didn't enjoy the story, but like Device Heretic's "Eternal", this just has a lot more words than it needs to have. Pacing is definitely a problem here.
2/5
Creative
Narrative and Scene Selection – The narrative structure in "Apotheosis" is pretty standard. Luna needs to recover from the whole Nightmare Moon affair, and she's got a thing for Twilight. Stir in some complications and a bit of melodrama, and we've got a TwiLuna worldbuilding story. And a few scenes—like the "I hate you, and I'm running away!" scene and the "I'll defend the pony I love!" scene—are pretty cliched.
That said, I mention more below about the worldbuilding Daetrin does here, and the sheer power of that work is enough to raise the level of scene selection here considerably. We get some good opportunities for Twilight and Luna character development by watching them interact with these very novel world elements. The overarching structure here is nothing to write home about, but its particular execution in "Apotheosis" is interesting and enjoyable, because of all the new bits Daetrin puts into play.
3/5
Character Development – I'm torn on this one. Daetrin is putting a lot of effort into character development, and both Luna and Twilight change visibly over the course of the story. Well, of course Twilight changes visibly, but that's not what I mean. But the central point of development for the pair, and perhaps the central point of the whole story, is the budding romantic relationship between them. From the story tags, I assumed this was coming, but I had to make a conscious effort to suspend disbelief when Daetrin started bringing it to the fore. I just had no impression of romantic chemistry between the two leads here.
If you buy into the romance, I think the development based on it is fine. I'm not interested in disliking stories, so I did make an effort to get on board with it, and I did enjoy it by the last few chapters. But I never quite recovered from the fact that I had to try to make myself believe it, and that "Apotheosis" didn't feel like it was doing its job showing chemistry between the pair in the early chapters.
3.5/5
World-Building – Probably the strongest part of "Apotheosis". The Draconia stuff at the beginning and the end is a bit middling, but I get the impression that Daetrin's work here is better developed in other stories. The place where Twilight and Luna spend most of their time, however, is just one humongous world-building exercise on the author's part, and I felt that it played well. Each chapter revolves around some new piece of world-building, and nearly all of them are excellent. The only one that didn't do a lot for me was Chapter 3, but all the other bits were wonderful: the basilisk, the hungry wind, the Everfree Castle memories, the ouroboros, and the Everfree itself. Any one of those bits could have carried a story on its own, and in fact probably deserve to. If anything, they're chained down by the narrative, which is a shame. But they're excellent ideas, and worth reading.
5/5
Satisfaction
Reader Engagement – I mentioned this with respect to pacing, but "Apotheosis" really should have been tightened up further. It's 46,000 words, but it should almost certainly be under 40,000 and perhaps even under 30,000. I found myself checking the progress bar frequently as I read, hoping I'd hit the end of a chapter so I could take a break and do something else for a while.
I need to make an important point here, though: I did want to keep reading. "Apotheosis" is a fun story, and I can see why so many people have recommended it. I'm glad to have read it, and I'd happily recommend it to others, but it definitely doesn't put much focus on trying to pull you along. Unless you want to be reading this, it's pretty put-down-able.
2/5
Promises Made / Kept – Well, the biggest promise here is in the title, and Daetrin kept that one, thank goodness. It'd be tough to write a story called "Apotheosis" and not have somebody wind up with godlike powers. The tags also promise romance and adventure, and the story delivers on both counts (modulo your ability to buy the start of the relationship, as previously mentioned). So three for three there.
Within the story, a couple things do go wanting. Spike is treated as a big deal in the first chapter, but the payoff at the end is pretty minimal. I don't know if this is setup for further work, since I know there's a chain of stories here, but here it's a plotline that never gets out of the wading pool. Similarly, Luna and Twilight are supposed to be engaged in some sort of diplomatic mission, and no mention of this is made in the story's resolution. It's vaguely hinted that the whole thing was a setup by Our Favorite Chessmaster, but Luna and Twilight are still thinking about it near the end of their journey through the Heart of Equestria, and then it just evaporates at the end. Those are fairly small bits of this story, though, and the narrative really does focus on the three promises made by title and tags, all of which get paid off to my satisfaction by the end.
4/5
Overall
At over 2100 upvotes and 18,000 views, this story is a big deal in pony fiction, and I can imagine that it's influenced a lot of writers. The worldbuilding here is a definite highlight, and by the end Daetrin is playing with high stakes and the reader is having fun. But strap yourself in for a long ride, because this'll take a while to get through, unfortunately.
Recommended for: pre-existing TwiLuna fans, readers who can deal with some meandering, and pony fiction completists.
I agree with the lack romance. I had a lot of trouble reconciling it. At no point did I feel that the characters were actually attracted to one another until Luna was forced to admit it.
Agreed almost across the board: wonderful world-building but romance coming almost out of the blue (pun intended). Still one of my favorites, though my TwiLuna bias * might be gifting it a point or two.
The full (and squicky) extent of Celestia's meddling is revealed in the second chapter of the sequel Triptych, which follows both Twilight learning to control her powers and accept her newfound role, and Celestia as she consults ancient powers about redemption and forgiveness.
* How deep does it run? I think I clicked your Follow button before I'd finished reading Purple Prose.
So you're doing finer-grained reviews to go with longer stories?
This didn't really affect my desire to dip into Daetrin's work either way, but I'll have to remember to come back after I read Apotheosis and see how much our opinions line up.
2641084
That's the idea. Anything that's just too long for me to seriously tackle it and other fics in the same week (I don't know quite what that threshold is), I'm planning to do something more like this.
Apotheosis ended up being more of a character study of Luna than either a romance or adventure in truth. In hindsight there's a lot I could clean up about it, but I don't know that I could compact it much - pretty much everything that happens is important for Luna's growth/change. I'd probably personally rate it a bit higher than you did, but it's still pretty flawed. I hadn't learned how to do endings, and hadn't a solid idea of the framing and themes when I started out.
Triptych works better, but it's a completely different type of story, and still has some pacing issues. Cartography, so far, is coming out far smoother than any of my prior works, but it's a lot simpler and I have a very clear idea of what I'm doing with it, so that's probably why.
2641288
I agree, I don't think I'd want to see this story compacted much (except possibly some of the first chapter). Cleaned, sure—I think you could accomplish a lot there. But I think you've done a good job picking what to show here, and I know from some conversations elsewhere that everybody's pretty much in love with all your worldbuilding.
My comments were more about language tightening: getting rid of unnecessary words, phrases, and sentences. I think that's really my biggest problem with the story; it just wasn't tight enough to pull me through. Losing the worldbuilding elements and the Luna character-building you've got here would be a non-starter. Those things are wonderful. Of course, at this point, changing much anything is kind of pointless—but if you wanted to, I think you could probably get your stories (this and your newer ones, I expect) to work noticeably better / more smoothly by just paring off whatever you didn't think was contributing to what you wanted from your stories (i.e. character, setting, plot, theme, etc). Given how good the worldbuilding already is, I think that'd really make your stuff shine.
Anyway, my 2¢. Thanks for dropping by and giving your own thoughts!
2641350 Yeah, Apotheosis still suffers from LUS, not to mention a variety of structural and grammatical shortcomings. I like to think I'm a looot better on that these days. But I don't think I could go back and fix those things - among other things, I'm still writing and two projects is bad enough!
2641366
True, dat.
I think I'll need to try to take some of your newer stuff for a spin, when I get the chance.
Read OTEOTM and you'll see Draconia in full flush. Scar's a far more important character in that story.
Oh hey, something I've read. I recall being fairly impressed in general with this story, especially the hungry wind section, but while you seem to have had an issue with the build-up of the "romance", I had a
different problem, (scratch that, I had the same problem, I just complained more about the ouroboros scene) in that I thought it was kind of ridiculous when Twilight was basically told "You must hook up with Luna, or it will be literally the end of the world (or at least a significant calamity)" by a god. I mean, you can write romance, and then you can just be like "you two, kiss". I read OtEotM, (admittedly after Apotheosis) and I thought the relationship there flowed a lot better.Divine intervention dating service aside, I thought that the primary characters were portrayed pretty darn well. It's been long enough that I don't think I could really give a lot of justification for that here though. When I commented on the story, I also brought up how Celestia's involvement in the plot was just sort of brushed off, and the response I got was that it would be explained in the sequel, Triptych. And lo, it was. Triptych is a very direct sequel to Apotheosis, and spends a lot of time with Celestia, which I predictably liked. I'm ... not sure about it's plot structure though. It doesn't follow the same conventions as the first two stories, and I seem to recall it seeming a little... unfocused? I'm not sure because I do recall really liking it, but never getting around to commenting on it. I should get back to that, but I seem to be barely capable of responding to things actually directed at me at this point.
Okay, hold the phone, bookplayer just posted this astoundingly relevant blog post about the nature of romance in fiction, and I had to come back to this comment. I notice that the primary thrust of my original criticism of this story was that I didn't like the way it occurred. Which is kind of silly in retrospect. It was technically in service of the plot and Twilight couldn't really have been expected to react differently in the situation. I still feel I'm justified in saying that this story wasn't really a romance though, it was just the story of Luna finding herself again, and Twilight being along for the ride.