Main Reviews #9: Sunshine and Fire (part of the Million Words in January) (spoiler warning) · 3:52pm Jan 7th, 2015
I did it. I actually did it. Finally, I forced myself to sit down and actually read a story I promised I would about seven months ago. I knew this Million Words idea was a goer! 
Now let’s get our faces melted off in the light of an eternal day. A story begun back in 2011, and still ongoing.
Fillies and gentlecolts, I give you my long-overdue review of Sunshine and Fire.
Author: BornIn1142
Synopsis:
Twilight Sparkle, Celestia and Luna are transported into a strange alternate Equestria, the Land of Always Summer, where the day lasts forever and a terrible queen rules with an iron hoof.
Current Length: 148,871 words over 17 chapters, averaging 8,757 words per chapter
Status: Incomplete
Review: I’m always interested in exploring alternate universes where things are depicted as playing out in vastly different ways. The Reflections comic arc has so far been my favourite for this reason; in it, the Mane Six and Spike travel to a literal parallel universe where everything is backward to what they know. Sombra is a good King, and the Royal Sisters are flat out evil. How can you not want to read something like that?
One particular idea that has stuck out to me since I joined the fandom back in early 2013 (I’ve been watching since S2 in late 2011, I never did anything fandom-related though) was the idea of Celestia being the one who fell into evil. Of course the idea of how exactly she would do so—given the reasons for Luna’s downfall was jealousy toward her sister, something Celestia has never been shown to have—have always eluded me. Nevertheless, the Multiverse Theory states that there are an infinite amount of potential alternate/parallel universes/dimensions apart from the one we inhabit, so it must have happened somehow, right? And as long as the story explains how and why, that should be good enough.
With that in mind, I delved head-first into Sunshine and Fire. First things first: Canterlot is the setting, and we see Twilight and Spike staring out over to the west from near the palace. She, he, and their friends have been invited to sit with Celestia and Luna to watch a demonstration of some kind of device that allows interdimensional travel. Of course, none of them suspect a single thing about the imminent treachery of the inventor...
Okay, let’s just cut to it here. Yes, the author did in fact inb4 the series with a mirror to an alternate universe, about 2.5 years before the Reflections comic arc.
Dear Celestia, it’s Antipodes all over again...
As much as I adored exploring this story’s concept, I have to be honest. There were lots of things I found to pick on quite viciously, most notably the poor grammar—the worst offender being the consistently incorrect dialogue punctuation—and odd, inconsistent sentence structuring. It has a lot of persistent telling, and is filled with quite an excessive amount of description to portray things we already know the appearance of. From its opening chapter I was filled with a sense of foreboding about it, like I could tell it was going to be this way through the entire time.
Mercifully, I was wrong. From as soon as chapter two onward, I saw the immediate lift in storytelling quality. Having just been transported to a completely different universe, the world descriptions are actually welcomed; I want to know as much about this new, alien place as possible. The Sun beats down upon the desert wasteland that Twilight and Spike find themselves appearing in… hundreds of metres above ground. Only some quick thinking during an intense moment of freefall saves Twilight and Spike from a rather messy fate upon the golden sand dunes below.
Celestia and Luna, while faring a lot better—on account of the author writing them as the equivalent of Gods (forgivable, considering SaF was begun in September 2011)—are still very much lost and alienated as well, although they certainly handle it a lot better. Able to survive in the upper atmosphere, resistant to the searing temperature that only an eternal daytime could bring, and barely having to eat or drink, both Sisters are less fazed about the conditions and moreso about their situation. Meanwhile, Twilight and Spike are struggling to survive in a different area of the planet. Both are fighting heat exhaustion, dehydration, and masses of giant mutated scorpions.
We get a few more chapters in, and it is then we start discovering similarities between this world of eternal day and their own Equestria. For one, all of Twilight’s friends appear to exist in this world too. Applejack is a resistance leader standing up against the Tyrant, Daymare Sun—
Hold on. Just, hold on. Daymare Sun? Are you kidding me? That was the best name you could come up with for Corrupted Celestia? What about Solar Flare? Super Nova? Star Blaze? Would none of these sound way better and be just a little more imaginative?
Well, I’m done with that. I suppose the seemingly invincible Villain Sue has to be nerfed some way. May as well give her a cringeworthy name, right?
Okay. Moving on. While Celestia takes on a disguise as a small pink unicorn called ‘Twinkle’ and infiltrates Everfree City for information on both this world’s Celestia, and her own student and sister, Luna experiences her Crowning Moment of Awesome when she liberates an entire township from its oppressors. An entire platoon (over one thousand ponies) stands no chance against her at all, and she even has to hold herself back so as not to kill any of her attackers. Of course, by sparing everypony’s lives, Luna has gone and compromised her anonymity. Surely the queen will have heard of her great feat shortly after.
While a truly irritating amount of over-telling persists throughout the narrative, the descriptions at least slowly become more dynamic, with every new place examined through the ponies’ eyes rather than just a voiceless narrator spitting out exposition over every character’s heads. While the inconsistent paragraph formatting has been largely fixed by chapter seven onward, it still slips every now and then, particularly when it comes to dialogue. For some reason, the author appears to believe that you don’t need a double space when switching between two characters’ dialogue, even though he applies the double spacing to regular narrative. It’s annoying and eye-catching, diverting my attention, and that is never a good thing.
Something BornIn1142 does do well is establishing each character. The alternate mane six are all similar in the most fundamental ways to the regular mane six, however their everyday personalities are far from what we’re used to. Applejack, while remaining headstrong about things and acting like a natural leader, is actually far less stubborn and immobile than her regular counterpart. She’s intelligent, quick-thinking, has common sense abound, and leads the pony resistance against the Tyrant. Everypony looks up to her, and she doesn’t ever lead them astray.
Rarity is interesting in that she’s still very much her generous soul, but she has absolutely no care for fashion or the arts. She runs a gem-mining empire and uses her wealth to live fairly comfortably in Everfree City while aiding the resistance on the side with monetary and relocation support. She’s a pampered thing, but knows how to handle herself in a pinch.
Rainbow Dash is probably my favourite; she’s effectively the Robin Hood(f) of this universe in that she’s a wanted outlaw who repeatedly steals from the richest of the rich to supply the less fortunate with easier lives. Despite her life of crime being at odds with her honest job in the regular world, Rainbow is probably the closest in character to her canon self. Fun fact: it was by getting caught while robbing Rarity’s mansion that they met and unexpectedly became friends.
Fluttershy… Fluttershy… she’s really something else. While she remains shy and timid, it’s mostly out of apathy for everything beyond herself and her animals, of which she has very few of because the perpetually intense daylight tends to shorten their lifespans a lot. Seeing the Element of Kindness just not care for anything beyond her immediate existence hits me particularly hard. That said, she does have quite a few surprises up her metaphorical sleeve, and is a particularly good negotiator. There is one thing that gives her a good reason to join Twilight in her rounding up of the bearers though… and it makes me squee.
Daylight Sparkle (...really?), as Queen Celestia’s right hoof pony and faithful student, is pretty much a dead ringer for regular Twilight, excepting the fact that she cares only about her experiments and being praised by the queen for it. Perhaps there’s something we don’t know about, something behind the obvious love of her position and her work.
From deserts to hidden underground sanctuaries; from elaborate, densely populated cities to dried up swampland; from a Griffon kingdom with a city that would put Minas Tirith to same, to a mountain populated by dragons that flows backward in time against the rest of the land around it; the world building in this story is some of the most vast I’ve read about since finishing Imploding Colon’s Austraeoh. While the details of each place do occasionally take multiple paragraphs to describe—the Griffon kingdom is a particularly bad offender—it’s not too much of a drawback for the sake of painting truly vivid imagery in the mind. You get a real idea of the scope of the world, all beneath the ever-oppressive Sun that the queen has pulled twice as close to the land as Equestria’s is.
Speaking of the queen…
The enigma that is Daymare Sun (although she refers to herself as Celestia and wishes for others to do the same) remains shrouded in mystery. Everypony talks about either loving her or moving against her, having seen her and lived, etc… but not until the very end chapter published (as of now 01/07/15) do we even get a glimpse of her. Boy, was it worth the wait. Her description takes a whopping three paragraphs, during which time I’m sure the author used one hand to place their overly reverent words upon the screen while using the other to achieve multiple orgasms.
Seriously, I have never seen a being written about with such worship behind the description. Queen Celestia is painted as a perfect, flawless, utterly terrifying goddess, and after seventeen chapters of wondering who she is, what her character is like, and how she interacts with those around her, I couldn’t help but shake a little with her… shit, I don’t even know how to truly describe her myself. Perhaps like Galadriel from Lord of the Rings, I suppose… if she possessed every ring of power ever made.
Wait… I’m forgetting someone. I’m sure of it.
“Pinkie Pie? Who is Pinkie Pie? Oh well. Guess we’ll have to keep looking for her—”
Diane couldn't remember the last time she'd left the inner sanctum.
“—ahhh, that’s going to complicate things.” 
Well, enough content spoiled. Let’s wrap this up.
Sunshine and Fire receives top marks for a fantastic premise, amazing world-building, surprising twists, compelling and memorable characters, intense battles, and the threat of a Big Bad who could bring the entire planet to its knees for its own amusement if it chose to. Descriptions, while often over the top, paint a desolate yet gorgeous series of images in my mind. Seeing how our native Equestrians mesh with their AU counterparts makes for great debates on things like grey moral lines, race and supremacy, and hopeless centuries passing without end.
Of course, all of these fantastic points are weighed down rather heavily by fancy prose that draws attention to itself more often than it should, overly telly segments where the narrator explains how a character is feeling, or how their thought processes work, instead of the character doing so themselves. It regularly fails basic dialogue punctuation, overuses annoying saidisms, sports inconsistent paragraph formatting, drops occasional Lavender Unicorn Syndrome, utilises way too much passive voice, and suffers from unfortunately frequent Talking Heads Syndrome as well. And Oh Dear Lord do I want to punch our Celestia in the face sometimes; her dialogue in particular is far from accurately depicting the motherly, kind, patient mare we know from the show. Celestia’s argument with Luna during a resistance meeting was painful to read, both of them coming across as ridiculously OoC.
For the past six months or so, I’ve been considering joining up with The Royal Guard site-wide review group, to put my editing skills up to a real test. While I’m no high-level reviewer/English graduate, even I would have failed this fic from the first chapter at Tier One grading.
If you can look past all the telling, formatting errors, expansive language, and other basic grammar flaws, you will find a valuable gem inside this story. Just like I offered PK with Antipodes, I suggest cleaning it up with a dedicated team of editors, and while you’re at it, get them to teach you how to tell less and show more. There’s no real problem with BornIn’s ability to show, but even the showy sections do seem plagued by rather unfortunate follow-ups that tell all about what was just described in a “show-y” method.
Overall, I’m giving Sunshine and Fire the tentative score so far of 6.5/10, the same as Antipodes for many similar reasons: incredible world-building, situations, characters and conflict, but a severe lack of precision in too many things that a story fundamentally relies on to hold its audience’s interest. I wanted to get through it to get closer to the concept and the good bits, but it felt ever-so-slightly more like a chore than a thing I was willing to do. And—as with Antipodes—a grammatical and mechanical overhaul would dramatically increase the story’s score.
Next Review: Princess Celestia the Changeling Queen
Words read so far this January: 204,761
I'd love to read the story, but I'd like some sort of assurance that it's going to update again.
2706571
So would I. Unfortunately, there is only this:
Well, that obviously failed. I'll let you know if it does.
2706577
Thanks!
And yeah, I saw that comment. It accounted for most of my concern...
That's why I have a 'incomplete' bookshelf. I just toss them in there and check occasionally to see if anything completed using the handy filters.
2706593
I use email updates too. Always handy, given I probably check my email about 20x a day from force of habit
2706597
That's how often I check this site, seeing if anyone I follow posted reviews. So I don't really need the email updates.
Oh, and a comment about your review. The best reason for Celestia going evil that I have seen is that instead of Luna going crazy with jealously, Celestia goes crazy with over protectiveness. She thinks only she can protect her ponies and goes to more and more extreme lengths against things that might be a threat to Equestria.
2706691
Huh. That's a fair call, I guess.
However, this variant of Celestia seems to relish war, but not to the point where her opponents are ever completely crushed. War is life in this universe, and war she perpetuates. The universe really does seem to be just her plaything.
Thank you! I'll be sure to read this. Someday.
Thank you for your thoughts. It's a rare treat to see someone be this thorough in their assessments, and watching your chapter-to-chapter comments was interesting as well.
I agree with many of your thoughts and observations, both in regards to praise and criticism. Quite a few of the flaws you point out have been on my mind for ages - you could probably see that from my comments accompanying various chapters. All the same, I hope you understand that I started this story ages ago and that I've evolved enough in that time to find many things from the early chapters embarrassing. As to your suggestion of an overhaul... Well, that's an idea I've been struggling with for a while. I posted a blog post debating rewrites here.
I will say that I don't consider elaborate descriptions nearly as masturbatory as you suggest. No, what I pleasure myself to is pretentious subtlety. I think you would be amazed to find out what it was about Queen Celestia's introduction scene that made me splooge.
(Also, I will defend the use of the name "Daymare Sun" to the death. I find it much more organic and sensible than sticking together two random heat-related words that sound cool.)
Thanks again!
2706571
The forthcoming update is moving along. My profile page shows my progress of the current chapter. I update it honestly (meaning it was at 0% for most of the time since May).
2707130
We all as writers love to see detailed comments on our work. I always do so on lengthy fics I intend to review, for this reason as well as because it also helps me remember what happened when so I can structure the review accordingly.
Oh, as I pointed out in my very first comment, I definitely had this under consideration, which is why I didn't score SaF any lower. Your chaptered improvements were quite obvious from the second one onward. For being your first and only story visible to us here (I don't know if you wrote anything else anywhere besides also sticking SaF on ff.net), it's a damn good effort, certainly better than most. I understand why the story has its high hating. It's one of the first more lengthy greats, and they always drew lots of attention simply because they came first and early. Given that you've had years to attune your talent, i'm expecting the next update to be something quite remarkable (unless the opposite is true in which you show off how rusty you've become).
Honestly, neither of these things bother me as much as I may have made out; the quip about Celestia was simply for a bit of unexpected humour on my part. That said, I did show snippets of the fic to other people over Skype as I read, and this was their general reactions to both of those particular instances.
Glad you enjoyed my review. I hope it helps you make some decisions about the story because it really does deserve to shine as bright as it can
2707130
Oh, I didn't even notice the thing on your page. And I even looked for one of those things. Weeeeird.
2707438 YAY I'm next :D. THough I'm seriously worried what score you're going to give me. Still i know you'll be fair.