Write-Off Reviews - Behind Closed Doors · 4:27am Dec 9th, 2014
Judging is open on the latest Write-off competition! We had 30 entries, with over 100,000 words worth of pony fiction being written and submitted in a three-day timespan! As is tradition, I have written a review of every story in the write-off because I am, apparently, utterly insane.
If you're interested, the stories can be found here, and the voting form can be found here. There is nothing in my post that I have not posted in the Discussion Thread, but I usually create a post like this for good measure every write-off.
If any of you are participants, good luck, and if I didn't enjoy your story, don't take it too harshly - as everyone is wont to say, TD hates everything. If you have any questions after the competition about my thoughts, feel free to ask - and of course, if you notice any mistakes I've made, any critical errors, anything I overlooked about the stories, please let me know.
Creativity Unbound
I wasn’t exactly thrilled with this story; we had Rarity rambling about stuff the whole time, but the story didn’t seem to have much of a point other than Rarity locking herself out of her boutique. This is one of those cases where I wonder why the story exists; I’m not sure what I was supposed to get out of the story, and it seems like a kind of weak punchline for 2,000 words.
What We Wanted To Do
The speech excerpts don’t sound like the Cutie Mark Crusaders at all, which hurts them a great deal as they’re the very first thing we’re exposed to, and make up a lot of the story.
On the whole, the story is clearly a comedy, but I think its delivery didn’t quite make it; while the idea behind the story was funny, the punchline was kind of too obvious, and I think that the story may have gone on either too long, or didn’t get ridiculous enough – the bit about the particular apology to the Cakes was good, but it didn’t feel like the story was escalating through the mid-parts, with Rarity, Applejack, and Twilight all basically being repeats of the same joke. It either needed to get much worse much sooner, or it needed to end earlier than it did.
Editing Stuff
Sweetie jumped back as Apple Bloom pulled herself in, followed by Scootaloo. They brushed their coats to dislodge some more leaves and dirt and even a slug or two, which Sweetie swept up with her weak magic and tossed back out the window, except for the slugs, which she saved in case they needed them for tomorrow morning. She put them under her pillow so she wouldn’t forget them.
This paragraph has a big problem in that its middle sentence is a run-on sentence. This paragraph should have had at least one more sentence in it.
Also, I’m not really sure that Sweetie Belle is the type to think that putting slugs under her pillow is a reasonable thing to do at all, and really, a lot of the behavior by the CMC feels just a little bit off to me, with them being a bit more naïve than we should expect given their behavior on the show.
Unlocked Emotions
I really have no idea what to make of this story. It is a gay romance story about two OCs, but while I got the whole “human caring” bit, it still ended up feeling pretty sudden to me that they were together afterwards. I only ever really got much of a grasp on one character, and even he felt a bit ephemeral to me, and consequently, the whole thing felt a bit weird to me as I didn’t really get why the characters were doing what they were doing, or why I should care about them.
Audit
This is only barely a story. Really, the story is a mystery of sorts, with Spike figuring out the purpose of various rooms of the castle, with the revelation of what a number of the strange rooms were for at the end, but… the payoff isn’t worth it, at all, and honestly isn’t much of a payoff at all. And it certainly wasn’t something which took 5,000 words to deliver.
I’m sure that the idea for this story came from the listing, but frankly, the lists were very boring and the story on the whole didn’t really have anything happen in it. When you’re writing a story, the goal is to at least entertain and engage, and frankly, I would have stopped reading very early on – around the time of the first list – when I realized that I had no idea what the story was about. And in the end, while I get what the purpose of the story was, I really can’t indentify a hook of any sort. I don’t know why I would want to read this.
There wasn’t anything wrong with the writing itself, it is just that the story felt like it was sorely lacking in engaging content.
The Arena
Look, The Lady or the Tiger is a pretty good story, but I’ve already read it. Everyone read that thing in English class, or so I assume, at least. So I’m not sure what value there is in retelling that story here, with griffins instead of humans.
Editing notes
I believe to found me an amusing novelty, and would often ask me what a pony would think of one “sentence” or another.
The “to” should be a “he”.
The Star Chamber
Just a random side note: this and the story after it are nearly 8k words long each.
This was a strong story. It is, I think, somewhat dependent on knowing about Fall of Equestria or whatever that story is called, because it alludes to it, and what they do to their slaves. That being said, I don’t think the dependency on it is very heavy, and I think it worked well.
I liked the idea behind the Star Chamber, and I felt like the story did a good job on its delivery and punchiness overall. The matters discussed were reasonably interesting, and the dialogue and interplay between the characters worked pretty well. I think this is a very strong entry, but I’m not sure what of value I have to add to it; the story’s flow is pretty solid, it obeys the rule of three with ever more interesting matters coming up, and the final debate is presaged by the Tirek debate.
If there is a weakness to the story, it is that the Tirek debate and the debate about the caribou was too similar; both are existential threats. The caribou may be worse, but in the end the debates were similar in substance, but different in scale to some extent – but only to the extent of how far-reaching the impact of their decision was.
Hearth Swarming Eve
Whoever wrote this hit the 8,000 word limit exactly. Not that I’m naming names, Present Perfect.
Also, I’m predicting up front from that look in the mirror that Rarity is a changeling.
I chuckled a bit at this:
The Friendship Palace, as it turned out, did have a dungeon. I tried not to think too hard about that.
This is such a brilliantly wonderful observation that I am sad I didn’t make it first. Happy fun time dungeons are fun. And it made me think of the friendship gulag and various communistic euphamisms.
Anyway… I liked this. The story did what it was trying to do and was a good changeling redemption story. That being said, it was obvious that it was trimmed down, and I felt that the denouement with Chrysalis was unfortunate. I also felt like the trick at the conclusion of the story felt a bit undercooked and too sudden; I think it needed more setup. Rarity figuring out what happened at the last moment felt far too abrupt and confusing, and while I CAN buy that it is possible that Rarity would come up with that idea right then, it feels narratively dissatisfying as, ultimately, most of the story felt kind of like cruft because the climax came pretty much entirely self-contained.
Still, this story had some nice warm fuzzies to it in the end, and worked pretty well as a Christmas story. I just felt like there needed to be more of it.
Ill-Gotten Gains
Okay, I laughed at the ending of this. That being said, this was no Little Deceptions, though, if you enjoyed this story, you would definitely enjoy that one as well.
The main problem here, I think, is that I didn’t feel the same sense of satisfying resolution for the thief at the end of the story. The conclusion was still quite funny, and I thought that the story’s various components were all solid, but I don’t feel like the whole piece came together as a single unit, and the ending really didn’t have anything to do with the rest of the story.
I did pick up on the fact that Celestia was the one feeding the thief information to begin with, but I wasn’t expecting the real ill-gotten gains. I think it might have done good things for the story if you had slipped in the fact that it was Celestia’s birthday tomorrow earlier in the story, as it came out of nowhere at the end.
Amara
Alright, I’m going to assume this was a crossover story. I think this is a safe assumption, because I have the feeling that you knew who these characters were.
I, however, had no idea who these human characters were. This confused me terribly.
So, like, half the story made no sense. The old man fighting at the start worked just fine, but the rest of the characters had no place in the story and contributed nothing to it.
And indeed, I do mean this – there really was no reason for their presence. Really, the story felt disconnected; the idea of a bunch of dimension-hopping thieves being hunted down by people from two realities is a good enough idea for a story, and if the guy had come to them because one of the thieves had tried to sell him a unicorn – a creature which probably doesn’t exist in his world – that would have tied together the whole story without it being weird and without needing to throw in a whole bunch of other characters.
The conclusion, too, was dissatisfying because it didn’t really feel “earned” in any way, and we never found out what happened to Zecora, or who these people were, or… anything, really. It all felt kind of pointless as a result.
I liked the underlying idea behind this, and the actual writing was fine, but it just didn’t ever come together and far too much was left unexplained or simply existed to confuse the reader. The plot structure needed to be pared down and reshaped to avoid unnecessarily introducing elements which had no real bearing on the central story you were telling.
The Millenial Vault
The good: we had our everyman hero get introduced, have a bit of a chat, have Twilight show up, the vault open, all that stuff.
The bad: the climax was confusing and we were robbed of the ability to really know what it was and understand what happened.
The idea of them burning the photographs was fine. Things man was not meant to see and all that rot. And that’s fun and all, but…
I don’t feel like it really ended up, you know. Lovecraftian horrors and Things Man Was Not Meant to Know/See/ect. are all fun enough, but this story didn’t really instill in me the amount of dread necessary for them to work properly, and thus, it ended up falling flat for me emotionally. The story needed more tension, more of a growing sense of dread; instead it felt like a pale imitation of what a story like this is supposed to be like.
The writing was fine, but the dread didn’t make it, and consequently, the story didn’t end up impacting me at all.
Disappearance of Chaos
This story felt too expository and telly; beyond the introduction, this also stuck out to me:
Twilight winced at the last statement which normally meant that Murphy’s law was about to take effect, but since she was in a hurry she did not feel like arguing. She grabbed her saddlebag packed specifically for emergencies and ran out the door to find Fluttershy.
And not in a good way. This is very telly and it doesn’t tell me anything all that useful. The Murphy’s law bit in particular felt very fourth-wall breaking for no good reason. And ultimately, this persisted throughout the story.
Now, I do understand that the story on the whole was a shaggy dog story, but an essential part of a shaggy dog story, as with all stories, is keeping the reader hooked. The story rambled and felt like it wandered all over the place, and while this is common in shaggy dog stories, it also commonly results in people ceasing to read the story altogether. I think that it is important for a reader to actually read through a shaggy dog story so that they realize that they, like Twilight Sparkle, have been had. A lot of the “challenges” they overcame, like flying up the mountain, felt perfunctory and not really challenging so much as just a waste of time to read about, because nothing really happened and no characterization was really revealed. The story could have been half its length and still done what it was trying to do, and that’s never really a good sign.
A Pale Horse
I liked the ending of this story. I knew it was coming the moment he spoke to the beggar.
The biggest problem with this story is that, as with The Lady and the Tiger, I think I’ve read very nearly this exact same story before. I do not remember its name, but I seem to recall it. And thus, unfortunately, it lost a lot of its impact on me because I already knew how it would go.
If there was something I felt could be improved here, it was the middle bits of the story. I didn’t feel the stalking and oppression well enough; I didn’t get enough glimpses of the thing to suit me.
All the World’s a Stage
The story never goes beyond the premise. “What if all the world is a set-up, and everyone is an actor?” is an idea, not a story, and all we ever see throughout the whole story is that “all the world’s a stage”. We already got that from the very start of the story, and it never goes beyond that. We get no explanation, no great revelations, we just… know.
Extreme Princess Tension (E.P.T.)
AKA Twilight Sparkle buys a pregnancy test.
I actually liked this story fairly well, despite its fairly minimal premise; it was very slice-of-life, and it had Twilight freaking out in a cute kind of way. The random presence of Derpy felt somewhat unnecessary, though.
If there was anything wrong with this story, it was that I didn’t really have any background on why Twilight would need a pregnancy test in the first place; while I do get why mechanically, it just felt a bit odd. Still, that aside, it doesn’t really matter who her coltfriend is or much of anything else, really.
Burning Bridges
Hey look, an Equestria Girls story!
And I still haven’t watched Equestria Girls 2.
I need to do that at some point.
Anyway, I thought that this was a decent idea – indeed, I myself have mulled over the exact same idea, that the mirror world isn’t a real place at all and is some sort of magitech prison. I like that idea a lot, really, though I personally gave it a different origin.
That being said, the story felt incomplete. We got an explanation, we got what was going on… but then it didn’t really have a satisfying conclusion. It just kind of ended. I think it could have been a lot more than it was; the idea, I think, was solid enough, but the execution just didn’t really have it pan out, and the ending, thusly, felt dissatisfying – but I think the real problem was that there wasn’t enough lead-up to the pay-off. We are told the answer to the central question and there is no real exploration or struggle – just the question of trust. It feels like the writer had the idea, but didn’t know what to do with it, and in the end, all they had to do to escape was write a letter to Twilight.
Some Doors Aren’t Meant For You
Ah, man, a reference to one of my favorite monsters from the AD&D Second Edition Monster Manual!
This story is about the mane six (plus Spike) speculating about where a locked door in the palace leads to. In the end, we find out from Celestia that it is where she goes to relax with her memories.
I preferred the stained-glass windows, myself.
I didn’t feel like the theories were really interesting enough; half the fun of stories like this is wild speculation, and more to the point, wild speculation which casts additional light on the character who is doing the speculation. Instead, we got kind of bland conversation; some of it was funny, but a lot of it just kind of was there. I think that they needed to go further with the speculation, ALA MMMystery on the Friendship Express; as-is, it falls kind of flat, and the mundane revelation at the end isn’t nearly as interesting by contrast because it hasn’t been built up nearly enough.
One note:
“I’ve heard of The Legend of the Pink Door, the Blue Door, the Yellow Door, the Small Door, the Big Door, and the Door Who Wishes He Was Actually a Sofa or Maybe an Ottoman or Something, but never the Legend of the Locked Door!”
That list made me smile.
Rough in the Diamond
The first rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club.
The second rule of Fight Club is that you don’t’ talk about Fight Club.
This was fundamentally a story about Rainbow Dash and Rarity getting to beat the snot out of each other and find newfound respect for one another in the process.
The story did what it was trying to do well enough, but it felt a little weird to me. I think it more or less worked, and Rainbow Dash totally forgetting about poor Thunderlane at the end was amusing, but it didn’t really feel like it broke new ground relative to the basic idea.
P.T.S.D.
This story was absurd, but it never really ended up working for me. I’m not quite sure why; maybe I’m just too used to psychiatrists doing ridiculous things and giving out ridiculous diagnoses, or maybe the rehashing of things just wasn’t funny enough, but it just didn’t end up making me laugh. I’m not even sure about the ending – the punchline being that Twilight needs to get laid didn’t feel like the proper way to deal with a friendship overdose. How about getting into a fight, or making fun of Scootaloo, or doing something else unfriendly in order to counter the overdose of friendship?
Dressing Room
This was a very low-key story which I think worked quite well as a faux interview with an actor. The little anecdotes were amusing and the take it had on things was quite decent. I don’t really know if I have much to say beyond that; the story worked for what it was, but didn’t really go beyond in any way, just doing what it needed to get done.
I did like at the end that her answer about friendship was actually honest, but because they mistook it for a bit from the show, they made her pretend that it was, possibly to avoid embarrassment.
The Sunset Room
Ah, now here’s a horror fic. We’ve got the thing which must not be seen, behind the door which must not be opened, and hints of dark goings on. The apple farm going to rot. A brother, sick with some unknown disease, so horrifying that no one else can expose themselves to it – not even to bring him food. A room, sealed off. And the possibility of the infection spreading when the directives are, of course, disregarded
Editing Notes
She’d brought with her the cart.
This should be “She’d brought the cart with her.”
Remember
Guy Fawlkes day in Equestria, eh?
The rhyme at the end was kind of amusing, and the idea behind the story was reasonable enough – celebrating the defeat of Discord is a reasonable enough thing to celebrate – but the story never really felt like it did much. It was very much a slice of life thing, a depiction of a moment in time, a moment that Discord was witness to, but ultimately the moment made no difference to Discord from what we could tell in the story. And that’s kind of unfortunate; it kind of pulled the teeth out of the thing.
It wasn’t bad, by any means, but it didn’t really feel like it accomplished much in the end, and it wasn’t especially funny or otherwise entertaining.
Dirty Prancing
I feel trolled here, and yet, totally should have seen it coming. I mean, let’s face it, we all know Chrysalis is evil. And I laughed at the end. Because I am a terrible, terrible person. You got me. You got me good.
All that being said, I’m not sure that this story would have held me all the way through to the end, and I’m not really sure why you decided to make Noble Sway an alicorn. There wasn’t really anything wrong with the main story, but dance lessons and dance competitions just aren’t that engaging to me. The era that the story in also felt kind of wrong; it was a thousand years ago, and yet, somehow, it feels largely like the present – or at most, like a century before the present time.
I also felt like the little story summary thing, set off at the top of the story, while it may have primed us for the rest of the story, felt a bit out of place as part of the narrative.
Editing notes
"Chryssy's been montaging," she said languidly.
Uh, what? This fourth wall break came out of nowhere, and didn’t really feel at all congruent with the rest of the story.
Through Glass
I actually had this idea a long time ago, but I never could figure out how to make it work, as it felt like it was more of an idea than a story. I think writing it this way actually made it work as a story, but it limited its impact; it might have been better as an outright comedy or as something which was kind of sad and wistful.
I think the story may have played its hand too early; in particular, I think the pair swaying towards the glass might have been a bit too much of a giveaway, as it didn’t separate their actions quite enough. It would have been better for the reader’s suspicions only to be confirmed after Applejack showed up.
Still, I had fun reading it, and it was short enough not to overstay its welcome. Nothing particularly memorable, though – just “oh, that was a cute idea”.
Time Off
This felt a bit too referential. Dotted Line, Amaranth, Sunny Skies… wait a second…
Okay, no, no Skywriter here. Though I wouldn't have attributed it to him anyway.
I both liked and disliked this piece. I liked some of the ideas in it – particularly the complaint about the tombstone at the end of it – but I felt like none of it was really quite up to snuff. Dotted Line didn’t do anything funny, and could have been just anyone; he wasn’t really used effectively. Luna’s grief and the trouble with Luna being left in charge and not being able to do it on her own were brought up but never sufficiently addressed. Indeed, the story itself just seems to end without any answers. Was that actually Celestia’s grave? What happened with Luna? What is Twilight going to do now?
Really, it just ended, and felt incomplete.
The Brightest and the Best
I liked this. It was a simple piece which knew exactly what it wanted to do and did it. It didn’t blow my socks off, but I liked the discussion amongst the professors, and the bits and pieces we saw of the foals, though I might have liked to see a little more there.
One problem, though: I’m not really sure if I believe that Twilight was so perfect. It really seemed like Twilight wasn’t that confident in her magic before she hatched Spike, and it seemed like it might have been a little over the top. Still, it was necessary for delivering the ending of the story, namely her being given an impossible test and passing it.
Unto Whom All Doors Are Open
Okay, so… I’m not quite sure what the point of this was. Was it that the ponies/other creatures have come across the Bible/Christianity and some crazy sect up in the mountains was engaging in worship which was based on a half-understanding?
I have to admit my eyes kind of glazed over at the religious invocations in this, so I might have missed something.
Knowledge and Wisdom
I really liked the tests in this. I’ve always enjoyed things like that. And I think that unfairly made me like the story as a whole, even though it really didn’t go any further than that. I think the lesson here was an important and valuable one, but I still felt like the story was a little bit sparse – it might have been nice for Twilight to be shown the sort of lies (or half-truths, or even disputed truths) that she was being kept away from.
On Wings of Ashes
Another Equestria Girls fic! Man, I really need to watch Equestria Girls 2, you folks love these sirens.
Anyway… I thought the idea of Luna having been a prison inmate was an interesting idea, and it lent an interesting meaning to the title of the story. And I felt like the story as a whole worked okay. The main problem was that I never really got much more out of the protagonist than that she liked taco Tuesdays. And while I totally approve of taco Tuesdays, otherwise she sort of felt like she was just kind of swept along by the story rather than being an active participant.
Not a bad story by any means, but the lack of agency shown by the protagonist bothered me a bit.
Easy as Cake
I’m not quite sure whether or not I liked this story; the ending in particular didn’t feel as though it followed the rest of the story quite heavily enough. There were lots of pieces here, lots of setup for various things, and it was obvious that the cake was going end up on Celestia, but I didn’t really see the ending coming, but I don’t know that I should have, either. I’m all for secret tests but this felt too out of the blue, and the ending with the “game” too convoluted.
Editing notes
There was a perspective shift from third person to first person in the first paragraph.
Her own basket balanced on her back, Fluttershy cored. “Uh, I’m just good at following instructions.”
I know what coring is. But I’m not sure if most people are familiar with it.
Terror Incognita
I didn’t feel like Apple Bloom’s dream presented the same sort of challenges or meaning that the other two CMC’s dreams possessed, and thus, it didn’t quite feel congruent with them, and thus the link between all three of them feels weird. I thought that the end of the story was vaguely interesting, but in the end, that’s all I really got out of this story: some vague interest, without much actually being resolved, or even illuminated.
Funatics
I have to say that the narration at the very start of the story felt a bit off-putting to me, maybe a little bit too passive? I’m not quite sure, but it felt a bit loose, dreamy, and disconnected, more so than the rest of the story.
On the whole, the idea of Luna and Celestia one-upping each other every morning by showing some new way of saying that they loved each other was a sweet one, but at the same time, the story felt kind of glurgy. It was so sweet that instead of dawwing I ended up feeling a bit disconnected. The parts that I liked the most were the bits with Pinkie Pie and Twilight, and in the end, while there was sweetness, I didn’t really feel like there was much of a point.
One other note: while calling Celestia “Sunny” is cute, calling Luna “Starry” feels very, very weird to me.
Favorite stories:
The Star Chamber
Hearth Swarming EveIll-Gotten Gains
The Brightest and the Best
The lady or the tiger? Why not both!
That's right, I just discovered how lagers were invented! >_>