CCC: cleverpun's Critique Corner #36 — Pony Peace is Dragon War (Diplomatic Dragon Noises Included) · 9:32am Jan 5th, 2020
I’m continuing my critiques of the entrants into the Imposing Sovereigns II contest. I’ve covered the winners: the stories that received the most points from the judges. Now I’d like to move on to the more important category; the stories that I thought were personally the best. There were twelve “finalists” in my personal rankings, and while there is heavy overlap with the actual finalists and honorable mentions, they are hardly mutually inclusive.
Today’s story is the one that I placed in my top spot, the best story I read in the entire contest.
Title: Pony Peace is Dragon War (Diplomatic Dragon Noises Included)
Author: HapHazred
Found via: That contest what I judged.
Short summary: To any culture, war is something to be avoided. It is a last resort, a hell on earth. To dragons, whose everyday life is full of fighting and combat, their idea of war is quite different from ours. Dragon war is sitting around, talking and doing paperwork. As dragonlord, Ember must endure something that no dragon ever has before; the position of ambassador.
Genre(s): Slice of Life, Culture Clash, Dramedy, Character Piece
The Title/Description: I initially balked at the title; that parenthetical clause isn’t particularly funny, and there’s no other reason for it to be there.
The description is also a bit too long-winded for its own good. The last few sentences don’t need to be there, and in general it is a bit too informal to be properly informative. The short description is better for this reason.
Overall, the title, description, and even cover art don’t really represent the story very well.
What does this story do well?: This story does an excellent job of balancing its comedy and its drama. I could name countless comedic moments that had me chuckling or laughing, or dramatic moments that made me genuinely concerned for the characters. Not only is the comedy funny, and the drama engaging, neither gets in the others’ way. This is a balancing act that very few dramedies get right.
The story even pulls the hat trick that fewer dramedies perform successfully; the comedy and drama serve to enhance each other. A comedic moment early in the story, concerning the breaking of plates to let off steam, becomes a genuine moment of drama later. Then the ending of that scene pivots cleanly to reference the original context, making it light-hearted again. This is just a single example among many.
Ember’s character is portrayed excellently. So is everyone else, come to that. Ember’s internal monologue and external behavior both do a great job of portraying her major conflict; her upbringing as a dragon and her desire to be a successful ambassador to ponies. This multifaceted portrayal extends to every other character as well. The confrontation between Thorax and Ember illustrates all this wonderfully.
Even Ember’s bodyguard—initially not important enough to get a name—gets several interesting moments to himself. His grammar and speaking style characterize him well, and he even is shown reading a book and discussing its ideas. But when Ember summons him and he is required to act as her bodyguard again, it takes only a few simples sentences for him to play the role again.
Further, this characterization extends to the worldbuilding. The title is an apt one; pony peace and dragon war are in fact the same thing. This contrast is an excellent metaphor for the central theme of the story. What one culture values might be what another fears. The culture shock and clashing values make for an excellent source of conflict, and they all feel quite believable and grounded. The worldbuilding is subtle, but spot-on.
Where could this story improve?: The story has some issues where it does not make clear delineation between narration and internal monologue. There are spots where Ember’s internal thoughts are not italicized, for example. Her inner instincts are always italicized, and yet other parts are confined to narration. It happens with other characters as well, at some points.
The story spends almost its entire length in Ember’s perspective, and it’s a great perspective. At a few points, however, it jumps into the perspective of another character and back, without an appropriate reason or signal to the audience (like a chapter break or horizontal rule). This is commonly referred to as “head-hopping”. It doesn’t happen often, which only makes it stand out more.
There’s also some minor typos; a tense shift here or there, a few un-hyphenated compound adjectives, etc.
In a single sentence: An excellent character piece about Ember, that weaves its comedy and drama together excellently.
Verdict: Upvote. This story was so good, it actually coerced me into watching an episode of the show. I chose it as my honorable mention in the contest because, when it comes right down to it, there was nothing I could find major fault in. I almost wrote “this space intentionally left blank” in the Areas of Improvement section above.
For having great characters, worldbuilding, comedy, and drama, I can’t recommend this more highly.
Eyo, cheers for the review. Was expecting more negativity, actually, but that's perhaps because there are a lot of flaws I can see that I simply didn't find creative ways to fix both in time for the end of the contest and also within the word count. There's some stuff that bugs me about the ending, but that's stuff for my own brain to come to terms with, I think.
I'm glad you liked how the drama and comedy worked together; I personally believe that they don't really work as well without the other. To me, one of the most powerful uses of a joke is to continue it until people realise 'that's not funny', or to turn dramatic emotions and stuff into something to laugh at (drama is often quite funny when stepped away from; lots of overreacting and teeth-gnashing over not very much). Even given how much I enjoy playing with it, it's quite tricky to get right, since it's very easy for bits and pieces of both to become superfluous. I feel it wouldn't have taken much for me to have gotten it wrong here...
Ember is also just such a fun character to write, and I love how she balances confidence with awkwardness. She reminds me a lot of my other favourite character, Rainbow Dash. Dragons are fascinating as well, in a different way to pegasi. In other stories I've gone on about the pegasi's relationship with the weather and flying, because that's pretty interesting and alien, and dragons are similarly strange in that they're this big angry HTTYD lizard faction in a world of fluffy friendship. They're just so out-of-place, and I especially liked in the show how they contrast with changelings, who are designed to fit in, but who also don't for different reasons. It's all so cool to think about to me.
One thing I've always struggled to improve is focusing on rigour in my writing; head-hoppery and such is a frequent occurrence with me because I tend to focus on big-picture stuff, like what each action and scene does for the story. It's easy to lose sight of the details, partly because compared to brainstorming different ways to highlight aspects of characters or conflicts or whatever, it's not quite as entertaining. Hopefully this is something to improve in future stories, and you can imagine I've already been taking notes when reading through many of the other entries (particularly the winning one).
Cheers for the review; hope you're having fun with the others as well! : )
5180421 It is a writer's burden to always be our own worst critic. No one can be as intimately familiar with a work as its author, after all. I think this is the first time, however, an author was surprised at how positive my review was, ha ha.
There are some other things that I considered adding into my review. The final confrontation with Ember and Thorax had some awkward emotions and actions in it, for instance. The line
is pretty tell-y, and probably would be better off being more subtle.
The entire section after the last horizontal rule has this problem, to an extent. It has a much more expositional feel and a slower pace, and I wouldn't call that a good thing. It's the only part of the story that I made no positive notes on. It's not particularly witty; dare I say it's forgettable.
Because I stopped watching the show after season five, however, I may have been a little easier on this section in general. I'm not as familiar with Thorax's character, and so perhaps gave this section a bit of a lighter read. This rapid pace could also be justifiable; after all, the story has gone past its climax, and the direction of the falling action and denouement is fairly obvious. I read the story in a single sitting, and so was prepared for it to end around this point. The glossing over/rushing of the ending didn't bother me in that context.
I don't have an issue including more subjective things in reviews on occasion, but some combination of factors prevented all this from making it into my critique. Perhaps it should have, in retrospect. But, well, here it is now.
Let it never be said I don't fulfill expectations!
Rigor is definitely something that takes practice. Every aspect of a story deserves equal care, but as you said, it is often difficult to get equally excited about all those aspects. There's an old quote, "No movie is worth a scene, no scene is worth a movie." That general idea, applied more broadly, is very true of all aspects of fiction. Replace scene and movie with any variety of words—character or theme or line—and it's often still an apt descriptor.
One of the things I love about fanfiction is how it can take the ideas present in the show, and expand on and even improve upon them. The deep-seated dangers of culture shock and the importance of cultural relativism are difficult topics to explore in a 22-minute show for little girls. That's the main reason I watched an episode of the show after reading this story; I wanted to see if those ideas were expansion or addition, and to what extent.
5180427 There were a few reasons why I did the ending that way, and whilst it's pretty much the section I have the most issues with, there were reasons why it panned out that way. Word count was a big one, as the story was already starting to get pretty meaty. I struggled to find a concept to resolve the conflict between Thorax and Ember that would neatly fit within that timeframe without it being even more convoluted or expositionary than it already was. With 1.5K words left, it was going to be a struggle to do the things I wanted to do, which was show off the location that was being negotiated about (which I feel was important), highlight Thorax dealing with the opposite problem as Ember, and then resolve the issue through dialogue.
In hindsight what I'd have liked to do would be delay Ember's outburst until she reached the Solitary Mountain, then have her go through that whole section then, which would let me combine her angry outburst with her viewing Thorax struggling with guilt as he moved his people in. Naturally I came to that conclusion about a week too late, and whilst I'm still fairly satisfied with how I dealt with the constraints at the time, I think that would have been a neater way of doing more than one thing at a time with every scene (which is always necessary when doing a contest with an upper word limit), and that section is my least favourite of the story because of it.
Especially since in a lot of other scenes there's generally about three different things happening at once on a story level, it felt to me rather flimsy that at the end, only one thing at a time was occurring.
As always, every flaw is an opportunity for improvement next time. We will see where the future takes us. : )