Main Reviews #19: Monsters (spoiler warning) · 6:52pm Nov 21st, 2015
We’ve all done things that we’re not proud of. Some things might be as minor as a few little white lies every now and then. You might have stolen food or stationery from your place of employment. You might have damaged someone’s car in a parking lot, or their property when backing out the driveway, and simply fled hoping to evade their wrath and resulting expenses. You might be the sort of person who always promises to be somewhere and never shows up.
You might have killed someone. You might have raped someone. So might’ve anyone you know.
The point is that nobody is truly innocent. There are only varying degrees of guilt. Even if what you’re doing might be good for someone else in your own mind, they might not see it the same way. They might hate you for it. The dynamic between many parents and children demonstrates this especially well. Our opinions and perceptions are all unique from one another. In fact you might say it would be dangerous if everybody shared the same mindset about everything.
Our experiences mold us into our present form. From the day of your birth, indoctrination, discrimination, and education all play their parts in creating the unique individual that you are. You could be a saintly butterfly in the eyes of many, preaching and dancing to a tune of peace and love. You could be a hardened recluse who hates the world and everything in it. Or you could be someone decidedly regular, with strengths and weaknesses of your own, likes and dislikes. Perceptions of your own.
On an average basis, the individual has little to no impact overall on how society functions. And so, unless they commit some heinous crime that makes international news, or perform an act of bravery or generosity that aids thousands, Average Joe’s actions have little to no effect on the world at large. A drop in an ocean.
But what of world leaders? History has had its fair share of bad eggs: Genghis Khan, Nero, Elizabeth Bathory, Vlad the Impaler, Adolf Hitler, and Saddam Hussein to name a few. While Average Joe’s monstrosities—whether great or small—will likely make little impact even while they live, and certainly once they’re gone… it’s when our leaders are the rotten ones that the world remembers.
Monsters come in all forms. They can be outwardly frightening and imposing. They can use their silver tongues and radiant smiles to deceive. They can openly threaten or attack, or subtly manipulate and set people against each other.
When it comes to having monsters in a position of power, sometimes it really is just a case of “Better the devil you know.”
We’re about to see some devils. Warriors. Scholars. Spies. Tyrants. Princesses.
Ladies and gentlemen: JawJoe’s final contribution to the world of My Little Pony fanfiction. We’re off the edge of the map, mates. Here, there be Monsters.
Story: Monsters
Author: JawJoe
Synopsis:
Two decades after the banishment of Nightmare Moon, her shadow still lingers. Princess Celestia has been left to tend the Twin Thrones alone and protect us all from those who would see Equestria crumble. Our enemies take many forms: some would tear the world down with their claws, others with their smiles. They are monsters all the same.
I have had many names, and I have been many things. Today I am Swift Sweep, and I work for the Equestrian Bureau for State Security.
Length: 115,226 words over 14 chapters, averaging 8,230 words per chapter
Status: Complete
Review: I was actually fortunate enough to have preread this long before it launched here. My co-conspirator good friend PaulAsaran pointed me in JawJoe’s direction, saying he thought I would be up to the task. I’m not gonna lie: I was a little nervous, as I knew about this guy’s reputation for good quality and well-received stories. In fact, when I heard that Monsters was intended to be a prequel to his most popular story, Twilight Sparkle: Night Shift, I had to stop and think about what I was getting myself into. That story has a plethora of accolades, which is saying the least about it, and I knew he’d even been featured by the Royal Canterlot Library for Queen of Queens.
Eventually I worked up the courage to first speak to JJ, and then click on chapter one. It took me a while—life and what have you—but I read the entire thing, of course offering no small amount of my own little critiques and suggestions along the way. Even so, for a first draft, I knew I had come across something special.
Unfortunately… uh, let’s just say a situation arose, and I felt unable to continue on as a full editor for the story. Sometimes it just happens, y’know? This life thing, I mean. Some less-than-stellar decisions. Not worth going into detail about.
So, although I knew the general gist of the story, I’d yet to see the polished product until now. And hot damn, it’s every bit as good as I remember—and then some!
Writing the first chapter of a lengthy story can be hard. Writing the first word of the first chapter can be hard. But every story needs a beginning. It’s imperative that you have a great hook, show off the world you want to create, introduce a character(s), exposit just a little about what’s happening, throw in some conflict and consequences… bingo! You have a first chapter. Hopefully the mix of everything in your first showing magnetises the reader.
Chapter One: Vivisect contains all these elements. Right off the bat, an atmosphere is set with great imagery: the rumble of carriages, dancing shadows and swinging lanterns, and the final preparations of a secret (in name only) organisation on their way to intercept illegal activity. The pictures are vivid as they enact their plan, only to have it go completely pear-shaped. The resulting actions are thrilling and set a tone of high stakes that will remain prevalent throughout the story. How the organisation’s quarry manages to escape takes everyone by surprise, including the escaping cult leader herself. It’s done in such a way, using a particular relic that helps to imply a tonne of lore. It’s quite clever, really.
JawJoe’s not shy about showing the gore, either. This is a story about monsters after all. It doesn’t head quite into “Mature” territory but it still might be squeamish to some readers. Personally, I’m not put off at all by gore, but there still comes a point where you can over-describe things. Thankfully, the descriptions do only exactly what they need to and nothing more.
Not once through my reading did I have any trouble visualising the scenes presented to me. For the most part, Past Canterlot looked largely similar to how it does now, if only with more dark alleyways and the castle and other buildings still under construction. Seedy bars, apartments, graveyards, libraries, creepy mansions, hidden chambers… it’s all so lifelike and full on. When a written story begins to feel like it’s actually a visual movie in disguise, you know the writing itself is doing its job well.
Cue post-action exposition about the general state of things, some brief history, a little more detail about our PoV character Swift Sweep and his scribe, and chapter one has set everything up accordingly. A fun and informative prologue. That said, it is perhaps a little too expository with the information, at least at first. This is mitigated throughout the rest of the story though, so it really depends on whether or not you’re the sort of person who minds being spoonfed just a little. Most of it I found was necessary anyway, because this story really does not paint Celestia in a good light, and a bunch of the exposition is about why things are how they are. You sort of need to know these things, lest you just throw your hands up and say, “Bleh, Tyrantlestia, no thanks.” She really isn’t, but at the same time she’s still a ‘young’ ruler, prone to making questionable calls in judgement tainted by unfairly devastating personal experiences. She’s far from the wise and gentle being she would be shown to be a millennium into the future, which is only to be expected.
Speaking of Celestia, some readers might take issue with the way that she prefaces each chapter as if speaking in the present about the past. If the focus of the story is meant to be on Swift Sweep and the EBSS, what place does Celestia have just speaking over the top of everything like this? Perhaps it’s something that the story could have done without, but this is a point that can be debated to no real conclusion. What Celestia says can either be dismissed as unimportant, a distraction from the story we thought we were reading, or can be seen as valuable insight to upcoming events.
That said, there’s a recurring problem with the structure of these chapter prefaces: after a few paragraphs that work just fine, Celestia goes on to narrate about more specific events from the past (before The Longest Night) once her general statements end, in such a way that she might as well have been physically present, even though there is never any reason she would have been. There’s far too much detail in these sections, and no line break or anything similar to show that the narration has shifted between coming from her mouth to an omniscient one. It feels more than a little jarring, especially when the narration style reverts to her more general speech within the same chapter overview, as if she’s suddenly decided she’s not there anymore. I’ll admit, I’m not entirely sure how to rectify this myself. I don’t think simple line breaks will cut it. The only real solution I can think of is to completely cut out these sections, but even they serve their own purpose, providing wham moments to tie story threads together.
Whether you’re on the side of these princessly chapter introductions or not, there is at least one place where Celestia’s final words are appreciated.
It was, perhaps, because of Swift Sweep – and a young mare named New Page – that I did not become a monster myself.
This pseudo-introduction to a new, previously unmentioned character helps with the transition between Swift Sweep’s point of view in the previous chapter and the different perspective of one New Page: a central, vital character to this story. And it’s Celestia’s final words at the beginning of chapter two that subtly hammer home the importance of her existence.
New Page. Mysterious name, isn’t it? So what does it say about her? Is she a blank slate? The beginning of something? Does she have an ever-changing lifestyle or career path? Is she a writer, or a scribe, or a librarian? Who is this New Page character? Without Celestia’s ‘intro’, we’d be thrust into the mind of a new character without knowing a single thing about her. As it is, we don’t learn too much for a while… but we do know she’s important. It’s all we know, but even knowing one thing about someone is better than knowing nothing and subsequently not feeling a reason to care about them.
So what [is] the first thing we learn about her?
I've always been a night pony.
BAM. This is perhaps the most foreshadow-heavy line in the entire story. It doesn’t seem like much at first, by itself, but then you consider who has already been shown in the story before her. And if your imagination has not already made a connection between Page and Priestess Nichts, the EBSS, or the Children of the Night as a whole, then something has gone wrong with your comprehension skills. There are lots of powerful lines and sentences in the story, but this is one of the most important.
This is where the story thrives: personal focus on individual characters. Monsters may be a tale of old foes, redemption, darkness, and corruption, but at its heart, it’s a deep character study between vastly different ponies. The more I read of it in its draft form, the more I realised this. Perhaps out of my own biases, I began to resent the lack of overall action and the slower pacing. The promises of action such as the escape and the fire in chapter one had me thinking there would be much more of it, at least more periodically than I found anyway. I stopped for a bit and considered my own thoughts on the matter. Had I gone into the story with the wrong initial mindset, or had I been led to believe by the story itself that it was something that it wasn’t?
Back to that later. See this paragraph here.
As I took a few steps back, readying to ram the door, the Mare in the Moon eyed me through a small tear in the tarp above. It felt strange to think that to anypony older than me, the Mare in the Moon was a peculiarity. For thousands of years the Moon had been bare, but I've never known any other Moon.
What a relatable sentence. Think about it for a moment. What do you know in life that has simply always been there, but others that you know can remember a time before such things existed? Depending on your age, it’s probably something like the Playstation 2, the Internet, the cellphone, video games, Terry Pratchett novels… this list goes on and on and on. Personally, it reminded me of Ellie from Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us, a young girl who was literally born and raised in a post-apocalyptic world. She’s never seen movies, or ice-cream trucks, or fashion trends that come and go. One might say that the setting of Monsters, while not as desolate as TLoU’s depiction of Earth, is its own kind of post-apocalyptic, dystopian world, and New Page is the equivalent of a pony Ellie, albeit a more academically intelligent version.
Let’s return to Celestia for a moment. Possibly one of the story’s great points of contention is how her narration comes across. I’ve already mentioned what effect her chapter introductions give, and they in themselves are not such a bad thing. But still, a lot of what she says can be very hard to swallow; if you’re a die-hard fan of the Solar Princess, and think the sun shines out of her nethers, much of what she actually says will probably turn you off. Take this passage for example.
Once upon a time, there lived a noble unicorn. His name doesn't matter.
He hailed from a family who traced their lineage directly to Princess Platinum of old. He was as rich as he was prudish and preferred the company of paintings of long-dead ponies to the company of those who still walked the land. Many mistook his reclusive nature for timidity – perhaps even stoic wisdom – when in fact he was merely disgusted by the world. “Born after his time,” he used to grumble.
When he grew old and his age required him to join the Senate, he would rarely speak – but when he did, the hall would erupt in standing ovation. Not that his views were not controversial; he judged my sister and me, he urged the return of the old Senate without us to guide it, and most of all, he condemned Luna's practice of binding ponies to her soul.
Although his opponents outnumbered his supporters, even they had to admit that his words carried an uncanny charisma, and from his mouth even the most outrageous of claims became reasonable. In his supporters he inspired a fervour the kind of which I have not seen since.
Had they found out that he was not who wrought his own words, their faith may have faltered. He had opinions, to be sure, but his sheltered life had rendered him unable to express himself with the expected eloquence. I knew about it; Luna knew about it; the Night Guard knew about it. We would not reveal his secret, of course, for at the time I did not believe in silencing my opponents.
Remember, this is modern-day Celestia talking about the past. You may find this sort of speak coming from one such as her to be most unlike her. “His / Her name doesn’t matter” is a common occurrence, used to briefly introduce minor characters in many chapters. It has the potential to come across as callous, laziness on the author’s part, or a simple and fair statement of truth, all of which might be valid opinions based on your interpretation / headcanon of her character. Personally, I’m in the latter boat, so that in particular doesn’t bother me. It’s this upcoming line, though, that holds severe implications about not only her character, but her rule from the time of the Longest Night all the way to the present: “for at the time I did not believe in silencing my opponents.”
At the time.
At the time.
Now before you go off about these implications, look back to the title of the story and think about the theme. Now do it again. Now ask yourself if this is really a story you want to read. What do you think about it? Are you offended, or are you intrigued? Because this is just the tip of the iceberg; Celestia’s character, while questionable, is far from the more malicious ones you’ll be reading about.
Speaking of, not all our characters are even ponies, although some are at first introduced as such. Again, remember the title and theme. For the most part, Monsters deals with the monstrous deeds of its characters. There are certain times, however, where monsters of a more literal sort make their presence felt. These beings are wildly imaginative, more than just your garden-variety vampires, ghouls, or werewolves. There’s one particular creature that manages to do the impossible: make me feel utterly sorry for them. Some monsters are born, others made, but this one is just so tragic that I could feel my heart breaking; I imagine the feelings this character elicits as similar to what you might feel if you saw a baby infected by a zombie virus. Even though we’re given incredibly limited time with this one, it still managed to tug on my heartstrings even after they attempted to kill our “heroes.” Trust me, once you get there, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
It’s honestly very difficult to find many flaws in the story. Everything in Monsters fits together with a resounding *click!*. Not a single plot thread is left to dangle. All the character interactions are deliberate, engaging, and resolved in the end. The Children of the Night’s actions and motives continually butt heads with those of the EBSS, and the way that New Page finds herself caught in both a power struggle and a tug-of-war for her allegiance is absolutely enthralling. Quite often I was left wondering who the real bad guys were, as each side revealed more and more of their monstrosities, growing increasingly desperate to outwit their opponents. This makes for excellent conflict, not only due to the action variety but also in terms of the mental logistics of the ever-changing situation.
About the only truly negative thing I have to say is that reading this story demands suspension of disbelief by the gallons. It’s hard to read Celestia’s sections and take them seriously. It’s also hard to read knowing that this was written well after season four debuted, and yet completely retcons much of established show canon from that point onward (most critically, the depiction of Luna and Celestia’s fight lasts for two weeks and claims hundreds of lives, instead of two casualty-free minutes—your mileage of acceptance there may vary though).
In addition, Nightmare Moon’s mannerisms, the core of her being, is… well, quite frankly terrifying when compared to her appearance in the Pilot, and not at all consistent with her canon portrayal. I understand that shouldn’t get in the way of a good story, but it’s still so extreme to the point where some readers may become squeamish. Basically, she makes Maleficent look like the Fairy Godmother.
There also seems to be a lot of what we would consider “modern-day” technology, like wire taps, surveillance systems, universities, plumbing with hot water on demand, etc. Sure, it’s easy to explain this stuff away with “magic” – and indeed most of it is fairly reasonably – but it makes the world feel inorganic and artificial when you consider that they have all this fancy, sophisticated stuff in the distant past. It gives me a serious impression that there has been minimal progress in terms of technology and/or living conditions in Equestria for the entirety of Celestia’s millennial rule. That in turn says something about the type of rule Celestia must have had, which in turn doesn’t imply much good about her as a character. Don’t forget about that “at the time” snippet, either.
Knowing that this story deliberately doesn’t have an Alternate Universe tag in spite of all these things is highly questionable. This is down to personal feelings and so is subjective, but personally, I cannot in any way accept that the events depicted in Monsters could ever be considered even “plausible” canon to the show’s universe, in spite of how the (brilliant, mind you) ending tries its absolute hardest to present this possibility. It really comes down to your own interpretation of events and if such things worry you.
Whatever you decide, there’s no denying that Monsters is one heck of a story. Massively character-driven, a little lacking in the action department, but rich through and through with well-woven plot threads, and with more twists and turns than a bag of Pretzels, it’ll certainly keep you reading. Although a little excessive on some of the exposition, and with a few scenes you might find ultimately unnecessary, it’s definitely worth the read. And oh, dear Lord, that climax is one to remember. Just try to forget that this is supposed to be a work of fanfiction.
JawJoe left us all with a bang, that’s for sure. Good luck in your future writing career, man.
9/10
Next review: Together Forever
Special thanks to Singularity Dream, Super Trampoline, and Horizon for helping to fund this review post. If you’d like your name here as well, in addition to possible other rewards, please consider supporting me on Patreon. Further details about how your support helps can be found in my previous blog, located here.
I'd like to get into this story—and I know you said it isn't "mature" territory—but I have a great distaste for any gore-related scenes. On a scale from 1 to 10, how bad would you say it is?
3559522
The opening gore scenes from the first chapter aren't too bad, around a 4/10, but the third-last and second-last chapters ramp it up to truly graphic levels. About 9/10.
3559911
9/10! That's nearly on the level of the Saw series!
Eh, screw it; I'll give it a try. It's been a long while since I've read gore anyway, so maybe my opinion might change.
Ha... Jawjoe... get it?
I really like your comparison of New Page to Ellie. It really fits, especially with Joel vs. Swift.
3559983 One thing that I read in a review or comment somewhere is that JawJoe never gives gore for the sole purpose of shock and awe. It always has some sort of lasting impact upon the story, and he really does use it wisely.