3724332
I'm sorry if I came off as accusatory. But I do think that one should stow all personal headcanon when reading others' stories. The example you used with AJ being a compulsive liar. Yeah, sure. That clashes with official show canon and detracts from a story. (Unless they come up with a damn good explanation. I feel like anything can be altered with a sufficiently good explanation.) But if it's not show canon, then I think anything is fair game and personal theories need to be shelved. Even widely accepted fanon isn't protected in my opinion. For example, Derpy. Everyone knows she's a muffin loving mailmare with a daughter named dinky, right? Nope. She has no official name (after the dreaded Derpygate incident), and no concrete characterization. We accept some things about her as fact, but if someone decides to call her Ditzy Do, make her Daring Do's sister, and throw out the bulk of the fanon, I don't hold it against them. And even less so for personal headcanons. When someone inevitably portrays my beloved Gilda as something different from my complex history I made up for her, I don't discount it. Because how could they know what I like and what I thought?

3725450

The thing about grey bubblebutt being Daring's sister actually happened in a story on this site :-P

3725668
I know. That why I mentioned that in particular. That's a story that clashes spectacularly with not only what I personally believe as Derpy fact, but the widely held fanon for her. But it was still a good story. That's why I used it as an example.

3724761

But that doesn't stop her from lecturing about planetary physics (at a parent-teacher conference?) and then lamenting "the gulf".

Well, Twilight explaining something in an overcomplicated way (and then having Spike give a more down to earth explanation) is a running gag in the series, so it didn't strike me as odd.

(And now I want to write about a pony named Running Gag. I've been watching too much Darkwing Duck )

With the context of the Short Cut scene, this feels sincere yet ignorantly offensive. Kinda like that cliche "I'm not racist! I have tons of black friends!", Twilight's going out of her way to inform the reader "No no, I don't think they're nincompoops. It's not their fault that I am truly alone as an intellectual in this backwater town."

If it was I (the person, not the author) speaking in a similar situation I would have used a different word than "smart", but nevertheless I didn't see Twilight being offensive at all. She is portrayed in the show as having a far wider array of knowledge than just about anypony else in town, so she was just being realistic, though misguided in unintentionally rubbing her knowledge in her attempt to help others across the divide.

3725450
Oh, I completely agree that readers should approach stories with an open mind. The issue is that headcanon isn't something with an easy to reach on-off switch, so it can be a legitimate issue, and one that authors should be aware of.

But if it's not show canon, then I think anything is fair game and personal theories need to be shelved. Even widely accepted fanon isn't protected in my opinion.

I don't think anything is sacred. I just think that anything that isn't show canon — including both headcanon and deviations from canon — needs to be explained and justified in the story in order to not unintentionally drive readers with differing opinions away.

3725811
Yeah, that story is good. It doesn't quite make into my favorites due to a few preference issues that don't exactly have to do with headcanon (mainly the gore, how irritating as a character Daring Do was, the drunken scene, and the reference to Background Pony), but I actually liked Derpy as shown in it.

3725879
I agree. It's a good story, but not really one of my favorites. And yeah, Daring was annooooying.

3725847
>implying one can ever watch too much Darkwing Duck

3727333
And people wonder why I liked MMDW. The costume alone made my day

Perhaps someday I should make a crossover between Gosalyn, Donald's nephews, and the CMC. With Discord tasked with keeping them all out of trouble until Twilight can find a way to send the ducks back home

3696677

Hi! I wanted to ask you why

The fact that

“So, a spell can get stuck thinking that it's got the right move, when it's actually going to make a huge error!”

Was its own paragraph confused me.

that paragraph spacing confused you; I'm...not very good at paragraph spacing, and knowing what error I made would be tremendously helpful.

3699001

Chasing Your Own Tail: Well, this is familiar. A much happier ending than my version of the story, though. An amusing character study. Headcanon considered.

I was actually inspired by you!

Although I wanted to portray a somewhat nicer Sonata, and the fact that Sunset and the Dazzlings have a lot in common just jumped out at me.

3715770

And the award for fanfic I laughed at for the longest, goes to "In Front of You." Seriously, I laughed for a good minute and a half there.

I've managed to stretch my entry out to 1030 words and have submitted it to the site. Maybe it'll manage to say what I wanted it to say now!

3729384
I can't speak on TD's behalf, but for me it's odd because when you start a new paragraph within quotes, you aren't supposed to close the preceding paragraph's quotes. Here's an example:

"First paragraph. Guy is talking for a while.

"New paragraph. Same guy is still talking."

Additionally, making a single sentence a paragraph outside of call-and-response dialogue can be feel awkward, especially if this single sentence is so closely related to the subject of the previous paragraph.

Hope that helps!

3730038

It does! thanks! :-)

3729384
3730038

In that specific place, the sentence that TD pointed is also something that could be reasonably said by Spike (the speech patterns match, and he is insightful like that sometimes); it only becomes apparent that it was Twilight continuing her speech afterwards, reading the following two paragraphs. This created some unneeded (and likely unwanted) confusion.

Did you break the sentence apart to imply a dramatic pause between the previous paragraph and it? IMHO that sentence, to be kept apart, would need to either be rewritten as something clearly Twilight and not Spike, or to receive a tag to clarify the speaker. If your intent was to show the dramatic pause, an action tag could have helped portrait the pause too, doing double duty.

(BTW, your fic did catch my attention, in a negative way, due to the absence of action tags. If that were due to not wanting to interrupt the dialog with action I could understand, but at the same time your fic has an abundance of loose action sentences as their own paragraphs between dialog paragraphs. I'm adding this here because, had the following paragraph — the one about Spike scratching his chin — been an action tag instead, the one sentence TD pointed wouldn't have been half as confusing to me.)

3729384
It was the same speaker speaking as in the previous paragraph (I'm pretty sure); I'd recommend sticking it all in one paragraph, rather than breaking up their speech across multiple paragraphs.

3731146
3730729

Thanks for the advice!

I have published one of the stories from this competition in my Assorted Short Stories collection.

Virgin Green Fields

The earth ponies, after weeks of arduous travel to escape endless winter, have finally come to the verdant new land which will one day be named Equestria. Smart Cookie dreams about what the virgin green fields here mean for him and his people, but will he recognize his dreams when he sees them?

3752682
I think I'll put this in the "disappointed it's not being expanded for a solo release" category with Slow Fall. D:

3753057
It was never really intended to be any longer than it was, I'm afraid. Some stories are bigger - Dusk, for instance, is probably going to end up 2-3x as long as "Moving Heaven and Earth" was. My other story from this competition was already 50% over the word limit, and is going to be longer than that and much more filled in.