4693695
I agree that's unfortunate. I try to always give the author something to go on. Unfortunately, reading is difficult for me so there's a limit to how many of these I can digest and return.

4692417

>> Alaborn could you be more specific? I didn’t understand what you meant

I left the comment vague so as not to spoil it. But I wanted to see the changelings do something more than just kill them. Something like they had been monitoring the humans for centuries, waiting for the day they would arrive. And now, with their technology and the knowledge siphoned from the captured humans, the changelings will head to the stars, looking to steal all the love in the galaxy.

4693731 Hey, I always appreciate criticism of that depth. That's rare in and of itself, but people feel like it doesn't apply to me for some reason (possibly due to my follower count deceiving them into thinking I can write) so I get it even less often. Thank you for giving it such attention.

4693838 I feel like regret over not learning it is a good way to go, since the aforementioned issue with Fluttershy's brother and the fact that Porcelina never intended on revealing her name anyway.

4693455
I think a part of the issue may simply be that A Customer for Life is simply a rather difficult story to review. It's a style-driven mood piece that places emphasis on a twist ending, which are all elements that can be rather hit-or-miss with your audience.

When it works, it's easy to credit the strength of the prose and tone. When it doesn't, it's often hard to pinpoint a specific and concrete reason. Personally, I used to have this problem a lot, when I didn't like a story but couldn't put my finger on specifically why. Without being able to give concrete and specific reasons for saying "I don't like this story," I think it's a lot easier to just say "the story was generally okay." It has a lot to do with what 4693702 says about non-committal responses.

Glancing through the reviews Customer has gotten, I've noticed that almost all of them mention the setting of the story, but often without concrete feedback about it. This makes me think that some of these reviewers might have had trouble trying to come up with something meaningful and specific to say.

It's not the reviewers' fault for finding themselves in this corner, and it's certainly not your fault for writing a multi-layered and complex entry. I think it's just a matter of honesty coming into conflict with perceived social expectations—nobody likes it when a reviewer bags on a story seemingly without a concrete or "objective" reason.

To our reviewers, I'd like to just say that it is always better, for both the reviewer and the author, if you prioritize honesty over courtesy. It's okay to be blunt when you have to, and it's okay to simply say "I don't know why I disliked this entry." This is far more valuable to the author than the politeness of a token review. The vast majority of Writeoff participants came here to improve their writing skills. This cannot happen if they are not told if they are doing something wrong.

Yes, being courteous is important, but don't let it get in the way of saying what's on your mind. It will do more harm than good.

Thanks to everyone who reviewed Sometimes Maps Are Dumb! I greatly appreciate all the feedback.

Genre: Lost City

The land of Far Kobresia is far beyond even the land where the Yaks live, beyond the mountains to end all mountains. It might as well be off the edge of the world. The wind does not blow there, and this is very important, because it speaks lies…

This is something of a subversion of a Lost Cities story, given that it is actually a sales pitch for a travel package being sold by Moondancer. And this rather amused me, given that such descriptions are exactly the sort of lies people told to get people to buy travel packages. And it is a fun little pack of lies.

If I had a complaint, it is that the story ends up feeling like it meanders a bit too much in the middle, jumping back and forth between the Yaks and Far Kobresia, and while it makes sense, and the story of the prince is actually quite clever, the whole thing doesn’t feel like it flows quite right.

So, for...
Of Hopes and Dreams

First, if you were replied to here, you can ctrl+f your name as everyone is in parenthesis to make replies easy to ID. Also I would ask anyone interested to read at least the opening/closing bits, everything but direct replies really, as I have some queries to add to the end.

Well, in short, this started off as a simple idea : I had an image in my mind of Twilight, alone in a cockpit, sailing between the stars. I wanted to do something playing up on the isolation of sailing in general, then pan back to the reveal she's in space, yadda yadda.

Except, well, someone's already written that fic. Now, they didn't hide the space part, but I didn't really think I had something sufficient to go with on that alone. So then I mulled it over and the idea that Twilight wasn't alone, but rather controlling the vast City-Ship that consisted of the last remnants of Ponykind came about. And around here is where High Tide entered the picture, as a filly totally wanting to be like the 'Great Navigator, Princess Twilight' and how the two would meet. High Tide originally wanted to see the Ocean, and everypony else would have told her it wasn't possible, and so she'd set off to find Twilight to ask her what the ocean was like, or something of the sort. I'd pictured High Tide as having had a beloved children's book heavily featuring drawings of the ocean, and her wanting to meet the Great Navigator and so on. It would also have added to the misdirection, so I intend to bring that back.

And that's the core, and I still like that core, but I fell in the execution for reasons I will get into soon. For now, as written...

4680972 (Trick Question)
Trixie here came the closest to picking up on exactly what was going on.

Essentially, the story in its current form is 'Equestria is destroyed. Twilight ripped a huge chunk out of Canterlot mountain and took it and the city into space. Doing so requires huge amounts of magic, so to keep everypony from dying, Celestia/Luna/et all began transferring her their magic as in Twilight's Kingdom. Twilight in turn is maintaining a giant shared Magic Sheep style dream for them all, where as the city voyages, all the ponies can live their lives awaiting their new home.'

Marigold is less than perky because she's learned her life is a lie and getting your Cutie Mark drained isn't exactly pleasant. High Tide goes through the same at the end, but I didn't really make that clear. Basically I was working off the idea the voyage is so long, ponies live, age, and die in the dream, and something like 'When they die, the gifted magic fades' - so Twilight's doing something where when they fall in love and try to have little ponies she basically, uh, ensures it happens in real life too; their kid is their actual kid, and if they ever found a new home the family would wake up together. But the net result is when each foal gets their Cutie Mark, their magic is ready, and Twilight has to drain them otherwise Everything What Will Explode.

As Trixie noted, Celestia/Luna are in deep hibernation so that they don't age and die because Twilight isn't willing to lose them and also their magic is kind of way way way more potent than any other ponies are. Hence their absence in the Dream.

4691959 (Titanium Dragon)
I think this answers most of your questions, but at the same time I'm also probably going to rework much of the lives of ordinary ponies, noting that later.

4679092 (Alaborn)
To clarify, only pre-Cutie Mark foals don't know what's going on. The rest are in the Dream because it's easier to keep them alive that way while Twilight uses their magic.

4685719 (Baal Bunny)
Thanks on the feedback on the clumsy opening; this is what happens when I have the idea on Day 1, but I can't seem to figure out how to tie it together and thus don't get writing till Day 3.

4678874 (Bachiavellian)
It definitely needs to be longer to explore things more. One thing that hurt it was trying to cram too much into not enough space. But like most of my stories, it's meant to be a 'Something more is going on here, can the reader figure out what?'. I wanted to make my reveal more obvious this time, but had too much going on at once so nothing elegant like 'Changelings!' like last time.

4689679 (Fan of Most Everything)
Pretty much same to you as previous comment! Thanks for review :)

4678895 (Horizon)
The main blurb above answers all your questions, but yea. The solitude bit as-is didn't quite work because I think I went too far in 'Twilight must be ALONE' and it became contrived. So...

Now to everything, here : I had several ways I saw this going, really - basically 3 reasons Twilight is alone, and 3 ways ponies are living, and am curious what the reception to each is :

For Twilight :
1. Everypony else is asleep - What's in the story; in this she keeps them in stasis because it's less resource intensive, magic isn't super abundant, and so she has to be alone so she can keep everything going.
2. Twilight is dangerous - In this, she's probably not vamping Cutie Marks, but she's channeling so much magic at once that nopony can get safely near her. Here, I see her as either far up in the tallest tower in Canterlot, or else deep in the core of the mountain. She's a living magical reactor and to go near her is to risk magical radiation poisoning. Hence her loneliness.
3. Twilight must focus - For here, she's alone because, holy hay, she's channeling a shield spell, a propulsion spell, and whatever else she needs to channel to keep the giant floating city-rock together, and she has to do this nonstop every day of every month of every year until they find a new home. In this she's alone because disturbing Twilight risks her losing her concentration and poof, goodbye air.

For everypony else :
1. The Dream - Works best with #1, but doable for #2 or #3 as well, really. Ponies are in a shared Dream to live their lives, Twilight is draining their magic to keep things going, and Canterlot is a ghostly, empty city that High Tide will tour. Easiest to execute, but one I'm least fond of - other than the idea of a deserted, empty Canterlot serving as a creepy introduction to the climax.
2. Canterlot itself - Possibly with magic draining, possibly without. Ponies still live in the city proper (Though they've made a considerable tunnel-system too by now), the city is surrounded by a high wall to avoid them being creeped out by the world just -ending-, and everypony tries to go about their lives as normal. Twilight maintains a faux day-night cycle to help with that. High Tide here just doesn't understand 'There is no ocean, we're in space'
3. The Caverns - Probably the one I like best. Canterlot remains deserted as everypony has built an undercity in the former Crystal Caverns. The advantage here is it can be sealed off, so if the shield spell fails they have airlocks and so forth. The main reason to keep the shield on the old city is to keep everything as cohesive as possible and Twilight doesn't want to let go of her old home. For this, radioactive Twilight likely works best, explaining why she is still in the Old City - and also further making the Undercity necessary, to stay safe from Twilight. High Tide in this finally goes Outside, and learns the truth.

I think, when I go through this again, I will probably rewrite it akin to 'Dangerous Twilight / Canterlot Undercity', and expand from there. Then I can have the scene of High Tide walking through empty Canterlot until a projection of Twilight finds her and eventually guides her home.

Anyway! Lots of words. Thanks to anyone who read them all and feedback on the thoughts greatly appreciated

4694870

I'm sorry I didn't get to read this in the prelims. It sounds like a fascinating idea, and It sounds amazingly atmospheric. I love stories like that.

The Family Trap
This has been a troubling entry for me, not my worst, but still problematic. A few things conspired against it, the main issue among them was probably that his time I didn’t have already an exact development of the story in mind when I began to write. This caused some hints to purged scenes and an uneven tone.

I wanted to tell a story about commitment, and about the whole family baggage you often acquire when you enter a serious relationship (here in the form of three slightly dysfunctional alicorns). The protagonist is also a bit of a coward, full of doubts and a scared of the larger implications of his of his relationship with Celestia.

I will have to fix a lot of minor issues before this can be published, but the main complaints, with which I agree by the way, are:
-The protagonist lacks a defined personality, at the moment he is a voice without much of a character to back it.
-Confusing sentences, wonky grammar and a lot of rewriting needed.
-Master Record’s relationship with Celestia is too vague, it needs more defining characteristics.

4678885
Confused action should be fixable. I want to try to develop the protagonist in a more indirect way, but you are right, I didn’t really set the stakes and why we should care.

4680621
Awkward sentence structure seems to be the crux of my writing. I need to improve a lot there.

4676918
The CMC are a wonderful gift to throw some cataclysmic devastation in the mix every now and then. I will also need to integrate the comedy with the narration.

4677359
I really need to find a better hook than that “we” to move the thing forward. And, as already said, I really need to give more context to the protagonist and why one should care about him.

4679286
I am not really sure a more expanded look on the CMC shenanigans would work inside the story, but I probably need to insert those glimpses a bit more gracefully.

4680821
Cadance’s (this spelling somehow irks me, but your are right) outfit was a leftover from a cut scene that was pointless and unfunny, but slipped through to the submitted version somehow.

Thanks for the reviews, I really appreciated them.

4693404

So, The Wealth of the World wasn't on my slate, which is unfortunate. I would have ranked it highly.

Early 20th Century Utopian Cautionary Tales aren't a common fixture of the Writeoff. In fact, I think it's safe to say they aren't a fixture of any organized writing effort, and I don't recall ever reading any on Fimfiction. So, very trustworthy rodent, I hope you publish this soon so we can get started fixing that dearth.

I have to admit, it wasn't anything by Nathaniel Hawthorne that came to mind when reading Wealth, but something more recent. A touch of Lord of the Flies, with its island and backwards march toward a state of nature, but mostly that good-old standby of George Orwell's, Animal Farm. Scarlet Flame struck me as a somewhat more earnest version of Napoleon, and the earth ponies under his thrall so very closely resembled the dobermans who destroyed whichever animal insufficiently supported the Farm.

As for why Wealth didn't proceed to the finals, I think it was held back (doomed, probably) by its style. We can't avoid the fact that writing has evolved from the exposition-heavy style of the 19th Century and before, to the vastly more narrative focus of modern writing. That old chestnut, "Show don't Tell," in other words.

In fact, the story Wealth put me in mind of, during the first paragraph when poor Scarlet Letter is explaining the nature of his missive, was something by Edgar Allen Poe: Manuscript Found in a Bottle. This same style exists today, though for somewhat less exalted forms of entertainment: the "found footage" genre of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity.

Ha. Bet you didn't think I could work that comparison in there, did you?

Anyway, in line with the whole "four-legs good show good, tell bad" concept, a story like Wealth is simply going to have trouble with modern readers. They expect faster pacing, more varied paragraphs, and more action. Action! Things happening! Visceral descriptions of hooves meeting flesh and blood spraying out on the beach. No time here for lengthy soliloquies or prose-heavy descriptions of the straight line that exists between burning books and burning ponies.

Which is sad, because I really enjoyed reading those things. But at the same time I'm a modern writer, and I have no choice but to worship at the "show don't tell" altar. I can't blame the voters who decided not to pass Wealth onto the finals.

I think it's a fine story, but it's not the kind of story that could do well in a MLP fanfiction competition.

4692320
So when you said that you didn't write "A Once and Future Darkness," you actually meant that Noble Thought didn't write it, but Dreamt a Dream did.

4692540
I thought you might have written that one. My general impression while reading it was that it seemed like something you would write, but not quite as good. So when I saw some comment you made about not having enough time to write a good enough story, I decided that there was a good chance that one was yours. I'm not sure that it helps you very much or anything, but I thought you might be interested to know that you have a distinctive enough style for me to pick up on.

4693803
I didn't have anything specific in mind, just Irish or Scottish, though I don't know any regional dialects and usage to where I could do anything more than generic British.

4693702
I already noted those comments, and I still don't understand what the second one means yet. It's so vague that I'd rather not make assumptions about it.

/me puts on his TD hat, by which he must apply "I think" to the beginning of every sentence.

"There isn't anything really wrong with it" and "I really liked it". It is okay, but nothing really special.

Except that several people did say they rather liked it, which kind of negates a lot of what you're saying as a blanket statement. I mean, I can add another data point here for your opinion, but you're asserting a lot of things as fact which simply aren't and trying to insinuate that other people must have felt this way, which is as likely false as true. I get that people might rather give a vague compliment than say something bad (or put some thought into it, maybe), but that's not enlightening as to what their actual issues might be. And this is a problem if we want feedback to be a selling point for participation, but Bachiavellian has already covered that.

I just don't think it is ever going to be an amazing story

This is a pretty bad thing to say to anyone, and I can at least excuse it as you knowing that I've been around long enough to take what I need from a piece of criticism, but I really. really hope you'd never, ever say this while authorship was still anonymous. I don't think it's true, especially not if The Most Dangerous Game has taught us anything, but we also have enough people around the write-off who are self-conscious about their writing. Yes, they need to learn to take criticism. No, they don't need to be told that their idea is inherently doomed to mediocrity, because it probably isn't, and I've never seen a write-off entry I'd say that about.

4695131

I felt that Customer's problem was that it's missing a conflict. Right now the story is heavy on an idea: an old mobster is deluded and believe's he still runs his city, while in reality he rots in a jail with only occasional visits by his unloving family. I would say that's a great setting for a story, but there still needs to be another dimension to it, another conflict that runs parallel to the setting.

I'm not describing that very well, so let's use an example. I could describe Yann Martel's Life of Pi as a story about a young boy who is adrift in a life raft with a man-eating tiger. And that's true! But that's only the setting of the real story, which is Pi's attempts to come to grips with the deaths of his family and the terrible acts he has to carry out in order to survive.

I think every story that rides on its concept also needs a more concrete personal story to accompany it. It's hard for me to really pinpoint such a story in Customer, because it seems to focus entirely on the decaying mobster, who doesn't come across as interesting or sympathetic to me. I would much rather read about his son's trials, growing up the shadow of such a wreck, and how he overcomes/fails to overcome some challenge.

But that's just me.

Knot’s Nautical Chronicles
First of all, I’d like to thank everyone who reviewed this story. Based on the reviews I got, I think that it’s probably my most successful writeoff story so far. I’m pretty sure that it’s also the longest story I’ve ever written, and it probably would have been a few thousand words longer if I hadn’t run out of time.
I wrote this story in the last seven hours before the deadline, after scrapping an idea I had spent the previous 2.5 days working on because I realized that what I was writing was really bad (but I still think the idea is good, so maybe it will come back someday) and deciding that I had no idea what to do with the other brilliant idea I had (coincidentally, someone else had the same brilliant idea and wrote “Distant Shores” with it). So I went with this idea because I knew that I could at least make a passable story out of it.

In the end, I just didn’t have enough time to write everything that I would have liked to, and the story was just too short. If I had decided to write this story at the beginning and had the full three days to work on it, then I think that a lot of the problems people had with it would have been taken care of. Then again, I probably would have introduced plenty of new problems.

The one thing that I wouldn’t have changed if I had more time is the ending. I decided very early on in my planning process that the story would end how it did. I like how it’s mysterious and ambiguous, and I thought that you people would too. You all normally seem to like that sort of thing, but I did get a few complaints about it. I am curious about one thing though: did any of you who read my story notice that there is a line of barely-visible white text at the end?
Of course, the ending might not work as well if/when I expand and publish this to fimfiction, since I’m sure that many readers are like me and do not use the white background to read. But I’ll figure out that problem when I come to it.

My biggest disappointment with this story is that no one realized (or at least mentioned) that my largest inspiration was The Martian, which you should all read, and then you should all watch the movie next month. I put a few references to the book in there too. For example, Marked Knots is named after Mark Watney, the main character of the book, and I named the ship Enyalius, which is sometimes used as another name for Ares, which was the name of the missions to Mars in the book.
(As a side note, this also means that there were at least three stories this round based on science fiction stories about Mars.)

There were a few other less-important references too. The Seadates were an obvious referrence to the Stardates in Star Trek, and Dragonfire was a reference to this April Fools’ Day video from the Hub last year, though I just treated it as Equestria’s version of Star Trek, because I couldn’t think of a decent pony pun to use instead.

And if anyone is curious, I was using this version of the map of Equrestria as my reference.

Now for replies to specific people.

4676834 (Regidar)

This is a recording of a pony lost at sea, and despite starting off a little dry, it's actually intriguing as you go further into it. Overall, it's not very impressing, but it utilizes a really neat text gimmick at the end that really enhance the story and makes up for essentially nothing happening for half the fic

Well, I can’t say I disagree with any of this. Thanks.

4679868 (FanOfMostEverything)

I’m all for nerdy references, but ones that I have no hope of understanding don’t make for a strong first impression.

I believe I covered those above, but based on your username, if anyone was going to understand them, I'd expect it to be you.

Huh. This seems to be set a fair stretch into the future, given that Twilight’s been combining different tribes’ magic to invent new items. Nice touch.

Thanks. I never really bothered to figure out just how far in the future the story takes place, because it doesn’t really matter for anything except that bit.

The log goes from Seadate 14.35 to Seadate 14.7. Maybe it’s a Dragonfire inside joke.

No, that was just me making a stupid mistake. The second one should have been 15.7, and everything after that should have been increased by one. I thought I checked all of my dates, but I guess not. I didn’t exactly have much time for editing.

Knots’s estimations of his speed don’t take ocean currents into account. I suppose his talent would tell him if he were in a particularly quick current, but the story seems to be assuming that the oceans are just a static salt water puddle.

Clearly, I am not much of a sailor. I did mention something about him possibly drifting around in his sleep, but I completely forgot to take into account the currents while travelling. I’ll definitely fix this if/when I rewrite it.

In any case, the story tries for a suspenseful ending, but given the days of boredom, it feels more like it peters out. The mysterious shadow would’ve been more interesting if it hadn’t been introduced so soon before the end. Let it build up in the reader’s mind, the possibilities mashing against one another in the anxiety of the unknown. As it is, the story just kind of exists.

This is one of those things that wouldn’t have been an issue if I had had more time. I would have liked to bring the shadow back, but there just wasn’t enough time for me to do anything more with it. I also would have had to decide what it actually was…
And perhaps adding a few days of nothing happening was a mistake, even if it might be a bit more realistic.

Good fundamentals, but ironically enough, nothing to write home about.

Heh. Fair enough.

4681081 (dunerat)

Okay, i really have to figure out how to add things like colour and such to my entries, ‘cause i’m flat jelly of how you faded out the dying ink. i also like the ambiguous ending, because it works really well here. Well done.

I’m glad you liked it!
Formatting is explained on the FAQ page. Color is done with [color=nameofCSScolor] tags.

4681690 (Alaborn)

An unsatisfying story. It feels unfinished, because we don't see any resolution.

And here we have someone saying the exact opposite of the last review. You can’t please everyone, I guess. Hopefully the expanded version will please you more, if I ever get around to writing it.

4686805 (Baal Bunny)

This is nice enough, but it isn't really a story with a whole "beginning, middle, and end" thing. It's hard to write characters who are bored, too, because they tend to get boring for the reader as well...

As I mentioned above, it might have been a mistake to include a few days of nothing happening. Or I should have had Marked Knots react to them differently.

4686861 (Grand_Moff_Pony)

The premise made sense for the prompt, so the setup was no big surprise. I got a 'Castaway if Tom Hanks had been stuck on a boat the whole time' vibe from this, and I think it was pretty well executed.

That’s more or less what I was going for, but considering the source material, Matt Damon might be more accurate.

My only big complaint is that it felt too short. Mainly, I was hoping I'd see him get a couple of possible lifelines, only to have them peter out. Or perhaps come across some of the wreckage again. In other words, it felt like he hit the water, rowed around, and died far too quickly. Otherwise, it read fine to me. No huge technical stuff jumped out at me.

I don’t disagree with any of that. I definitely would have given him more challenges, false hopes, and near-death experiences if I had had more time.

4689617 (horizon)

Starts with a Star Trek/geek joke, except the main character's geekiness never becomes a factor beyond the first paragraph. Don't get me wrong, I like to see little bits of color like that, but not in the first precious moments when you're trying to set the tone and expectations for the rest of your story. You're establishing the narrator as a pony with technical knowledge/interests and one prone to digressions — and both of these are things which should profoundly affect the story, given that you've got a monologue about a castaway trying to survive by his wits — but except for an odd choice about the narrator's special talent that leads to a paragraph of math, neither of those things happens.

Again, these are things that probably would have happened if I had had more time.

Unfortunately, author, the story similarly left me mostly frustrated. There are a lot of "nothing happened today" entries (which might be realistic but are poor storytelling form) — these are absolutely wasted opportunities, because if your story is nothing but monologues from a guy trying to kill time, we should be digging deeply into his head. He has plenty of motive AND time to talk about himself, and in order for this story to succeed, we need to make a connection with him. What are his fears? Regrets? What sort of things does he think about when alone with his thoughts? What does he want to tell the world if he never returns, beyond the current "I exist"? (That's a good start, but gives us no reason to care.)
The ending, too, is a giant cop-out; again, there's a big divide between "realistic" and "good storytelling", and running out of ink was not the latter to me, since it destroyed any sense of closure. That's an effect worth consciously going for if a connection's been made and the story is designed to provoke a sense of tragedy, but we don't even get so much as a "tell my mom I love her"; he's just thinking of himself, and not even in an I'm-scared way but in a mildly reflective way, and that doesn't make me inclined to feel the feels. Basically, there's no complete plot arc here and no character development, so this doesn't really feel like a story yet. The premise has a lot of room to grow; first, get to work on deciding what tale you're telling here (adventure? tragedy? mystery?) and then decide how every single entry is going to contribute to that story. If it doesn't, cut it.

These are probably the most helpful comments I got from any review. If I expand the story, I will definitely be keeping all of this in mind. Thanks!

HHHOOOOOORRRRRRSEEEE
Tier: Needs Work

I think this is the first time I’ve ever had a story reviewed with this system of yours. Thanks for yelling “HORSE” at me! (Although with only one “S” in there, it might sound a bit like a different word…)

4691720 (Titanium Dragon)

Genre: Adventure?
Marked Knots barely survives a storm; everypony else on his ship managed to escape thanks to the pegasi, but he was knocked unconscious and left adrift on the ocean in a lifeboat.
Unfortunately, this story doesn’t have an ending; while the ending is kind of cutesy, the reality is that most of the middle of the story isn’t very interesting, so all there is a start and then some bland stuff until it peters out, save for his concerns about a big shadow under his boat he sees at one point.
The ending of this just wasn’t very satisfying; running out of ink is kind of funny, but it doesn’t really leave us with any sort of satisfying conclusion, and his concern didn’t really leak over to me over the course of the story – in fact, he seems relatively blaze about his possible death, which makes it hard to empathize with him that much. It would have been better if he had written more logs about what he’d do when he got back, what he’d do when he was living the big life publishing it, and then gradually started worrying about other people potentially finding the log and thinking about that.

These are also helpful comments. Some of these problems would have been taken care of if I had had more time, but I can’t blame you for complaining about how the story is now. Thanks!

4692203 (Everyday)

Which of them are real? Are any of them?

Are sharks real?!

Well, this is the only shark I can think of that we’ve seen in the show, so maybe they’re just myths in Equestria. And I am now considering adjusting the story so that it takes place before season 2, just so I can say that that stallion was actually dressed as Marked Knots.

…The ending makes me sad.
I enjoyed this. The narrative voice was amusing and earned multiple smiles. I’m also reminded of Life of Pi. (Okay, when I first typed that, I typed Life of Pie, and now I want a story about Pinkie Pie drifting through the sea on a lifeboat.)

As I mentioned above, The Martian was actually my main inspiration, but I’m sure a bit of Life of Pi snuck in there too. Actually, the first idea I came up with for the prompt was a retelling of Life of Pi with Pinkie (or possibly Maud) as Pi and Angel as Richard Parker. But that idea didn’t last very long.

I would’ve liked this to be longer. I hadn’t grown tired of the voicing, and I don’t suspect that I would have, either. I also would’ve liked to see what the dark shadow beneath the surface was, but that’s simply out of curiosity. I’d also appreciate an explanation on the specifics of how “Seadates” are catalogued, if you’re willing to share.
Nice work.

I would have liked it to be longer too. I never actually decided what the shadow was, because by the time I got to that point, I was so close to the deadline that I knew I wouldn’t be able to do anything else with it.
The Seadates are actually very straightforward (unlike the Stardates they’re based on). The first number is just the day of the voyage. So the ship left Los Pegasus on Seadate 1 (or maybe 0, I don’t think I ever really decided which it should be), and it wrecked a bit less than two weeks later, on Seadate 12. The second number is just a normal decimal representing the time of day. So midnight is X.0, noon is X.5, and 9PM is X.875, for example.
I should also mention that the system of “Seadates” isn’t an official thing that any ships use, it’s just something that Marked Knots made up as a reference to Dragonfire, which as I mentioned above, I’m using as Equestria’s version of Star Trek. Because he’s a nerd.

Again, thank you everyone who read and reviewed my story. I really would like to expand this story for publication, but it would take a lot of work, so I’m not sure if I will or not. If I do, it probably won’t happen for a while, and I’ll probably fix my story from the last writeoff first. But I am very happy with how this story turned out and how well most people liked it, considering that I wrote it in just a few hours before the deadline.

4695115 Thanks! :D It's cool to hear I have style, even if it's just with words.

4695131

I don't think it's true, especially not if The Most Dangerous Game has taught us anything, but we also have enough people around the write-off who are self-conscious about their writing.

What I meant when I said that a story cannot be amazing is "the story as presently envisioned is intrinsically flawed in a way that prevents it from being great."

The Most Dangerous Game was about proving that there are no bad ideas, not that there are no bad stories. In fact, the vast, vast, vast majority of stories are utter garbage. Some can be decent. A few can be amazing.

But the peak for any given story is not the same; there are stories which have much lower peaks than others. Just because stories are similar doesn't mean they're the same story; Eragon and Star Wars might have a lot in common, but they're not actually the same story.

From my own stories, the peak value of Lunch and the peak value of Forever and Again and Again aren't even close. No matter how much I revised Lunch, it would never be as good as Forever and Again and Again could be. Even if I executed Lunch as well as it could possibly be executed, it would still be inferior to even a decent rendition of Forever and Again and Again. That's not to say that Lunch is bad, but it is never going to be an amazing story. It is, at best, going to be an amusing jokefic, but it is never going to say anything profound, never really move anyone in the way that Forever and Again and Again will, nor will it ever be as comedically inspiring as, say, something like HoofBiting's Spring is Dumb.

On the other hand, the original version of Through Glass was not as good of a story as the final version of Through Glass; in the original version, it was about Rarity imagining seducing Applejack in the form of her reflection. In the final version, the sequence was about characterizing Rarity, showing us how she thought and what she thought of others and how she would approach the problem. These aren't actually the same story; the basic idea (Rarity is making eyes at herself in the mirror and get caught by somepony she has a crush on) is the same, but the actual STORY isn't, because what I am doing with the second version is fundamentally different from the first one - the first is a relatively shallow gag/twist, the second is much more focused on characterization, and has a lot more "meat". The original version of Through Glass could never be as good as the new version.

This is more what I'm talking about here.

The problem I see is:

1) The twist is the main character thinks he's still running his crime operation when he's really in jail.
2) The main character is an intentionally awful, unsympathetic person who is an unrepetent criminal.
3) The twist in the story requires that the story be told from the unsympathetic character's point of view.

These three things combine to create the situation where I don't actually care about the characters in the story, because the character I follow is unsympathetic and no one else is on screen in the right way to make them very sympathetic. The only thing left for me, then, is the twist, which is potentially given away as soon as the sign in the start of the story.

The way you've set up the story has made it so I'm unable to sympathize with the characters in the story. I don't think that the central twist you've got here combined with the characterization you have here works for an amazing story. You could tell the story from another point of view, which could give us more space to care about the characters, but it would lose the twist (or would change the story in another fundamental way, tricking the reader in a different way or presenting it in a "through the eyes of children" way); you could keep the twist, but if you wanted us to feel sympathy for the main character, you'd need to change his character to be more sympathetic, which would make for a different scenario and would change the story in many fundamental ways. You might be able to write a story with the same basic story idea (a man is in jail, but thinks he's still running his criminal empire, and is awful to his family), but it wouldn't be the "same story".

4695158 is right in that the conflict in this story (he doesn't live in reality, thus making his family situation even worse) doesn't really have much meaning, because we don't care about him.

4695112
Ah ha, Poe! Poe was basically the Hawthorne of his day, so that's good enough.

But yes, Hawthorne isn't exactly in-vogue as dead authors go; as you say, the Hemingway theory seems to prevail among most writers. It's odd, since Hawthorne established a tradition of fussy American Gothic prose that survived in Poe and, in a pulpier form, Lovecraft, yet seems to have died there in the popular consciousness. Not that there isn't any ponderous writing that prevailed post-1950 (e.g. Paul Auster, Richard Yates, Vladimir Nabokov, even Don DeLillo to an extent) but fussiness is almost entirely out the window—well, perhaps not for Nabokov. A lot of writers seem obsessed with immediacy and the diffuse, fragmentary nature of experience, and as a modernist sympathizer, I wouldn't necessarily fault them for it—but obsession with immediacy can mean D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf or it can mean Zadie Smith, and I much prefer the former (to be fair, I've never managed to actually get through a Zadie Smith novel). It's only when you read widely that you actually realize how awfully arbitrary the idea of "good writing" is. Nothing gets this across more than Hawthorne—all those creeping saidisms, deeply entrenched purple prose practices, and long-winded expositional adventures in moral purpose! It's the antithesis of Hemingway's iceberg. Honestly, I think that the only consistent factor across great literature is stylistic beauty, so that's always my first priority.

I certainly didn't expect Wealth to get anywhere in this contest! It was just the story I wanted to write. I'd never participated in the writeoff, but I saw the prompt just as the contest started and I'd reread Earth's Holocaust that same day. It was pure good fortune that this prompt quite literally did its job at that moment and prompted me to write The Wealth of the World. I can't expect that kind of luck if I participate again, which may result in a more cynical winning strategy!

Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm occurred to me when writing. It's a well-worn genre alright, and I thought it was high time someone tackled it with ponies. I actually have a whole fic in the works that focuses on the political landscape of Equestria, with particular emphasis on unicorn exceptionalism, but I want to make sure it actually can be completed before I submit—the perhaps justified fear of becoming another Equestria: Total War/Night's Favored Child. I guess we'll see how that goes.

At any rate, The Wealth of the World has been posted to FiMFiction. I cleaned up a couple typos, and I may revise or expand it, but I think it stands well enough for now.

incidentally, found footage horror is a guilty pleasure of mine. i love the blair witch project, although it's not my favorite example of the genre

A few more reviews:

Far Kobresia
Interesting. More of a vignette than a story, but elegantly executed with a sly sense of humor. A little bit rambling for a sales pitch, though. Advertizing demands economy. My recommendation is to introduce a stronger point-of-view to give it a cornerstone of focus, like the journey a hypothetical tourist might have and what he might see, and use that to jump into the worldbuilding.

Summer Island
I like the idea of detailing so much about the airship in theory, but it sometimes felt a bit disconnected from the characters—you know how some postmodern writers think it's a great idea to express the diffuse and meaningless nature of contemporary consumer lifestyles by listing out miscellaneous branded products, ornaments, pharmaceuticals, &c. for a whole paragraph? Like that. In other words, I don't know if the descriptions really service the themes or characters as they currently stand, but I think they could if there was a greater sense of personal perspective. The present tense wasn't necessarily a bad move, but the thing to remember about it is that it conveys an intense sense of immediacy. This is why I'm sceptical of novels written entirely in the present tense; do I want to feel like someone's being punched in the face when the narrator's just tripping around his kitchen? During the emotional scenes, the present tense really shines here, but be careful to avoid what I call the Wolf Hall problem; I refer here to a novel in which ponderous conversations between aristocrats are made to feel like an assault on the senses for over 600 pages.

Odyssey
I feel much the same about this as I do about The Ten Second Game, but it's not quite as succinct. I think the minimum word limit was the problem here—this could've been done in 1000-1500 words, perhaps less. Like The Ten Second Game, it's not ambitious, but it makes the most of its limitations. The writing is unadorned but sharp, the premise is sound, and Twilight is cute; there are no attempts here to turn a limerick into the Odyssey. The largest issue is that the whole first part of the story is totally unnecessary since it really only gets to the meat of the thing once Shining Armor says that the floor is lava.

4693404

It must firstly be remembered that this population is almost fully made up of earth pony labourers.

I got that pretty well. But, although you can always argue it is incidental, this specific arrangement feels artificial. Since the Equestrian population appears to be composed of earth ponies, unicorns and pegasi in about the same proportion, there is really little chance that a party of explorers, especially when prodded by political motives, does not include an equal share of the three races (excluding small statistical variations). Besides, pegasi can be of great help to seafaring, since they can act as super-sentries, flying high above the ship to spot land or enemy vessels.

Magic is a slightly different matter. Scarlet Flame certainly would swear off magic, but given the very low number of unicorns, it's not something he would be able to moralize about to the populace. […] I don't like this notion of unicorn horns as superpowered whatevers that have no limitations or require no training to use as offensive tools. For one thing, it undermines Twilight's talent just a tad if spoiled unicorn brats know how to hurl ball lightning at their enemies. The narrator does use magic to seal away his belongings, which seems an acceptable use of magic for a character of his background.

Point well taken. However, the canon view of unicorn magic lends towards a semi-instinctive, semi-acquired ability. While I agree complex spells must be memorised and rehearsed before being mastered, the example of the baby Cakes points out that even toddler unicorns can cast simple spells, such as grabbing objects, a spell that could have been fruitfully used in the context of your fiction to fend off the attack.

4693864
Ok. That’s something I will add to the final version, so rest assured your suggestion has been taken into account!
Thanks for the clarification!

4695263

It struck me while I was writing a quick blog post about your story that you must've been motivated, to some degree at least, by Heinrich Heine's famous quote, "That was only a prelude; where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people." Which got me thinking a bit about Heine and another quote of his: “Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.”

A key part of Wealth is that the ponies under Scarlet Flame are steadily marching backward into a state of nature. In fact, Wealth seems to indirectly extol the virtues of the civilization from which Distant Shores and her band escape. So which of Heine's quotes do you feel more attracted to: the one warning against burning books, or the one (of many) that demonstrate a belief in nature's higher virtue than man's?

4694870
Dangerous Twilight definitely seems like the best option. It presents a nice, tragic figure of one who wants to be close to her people but who literally can't be. I could go either way on the mass dream or undercity options. Or the dreamers' bodies are all in the undercity.

4695183
In hindsight, the Star Trek references were pretty dang obvious.

4694870

Of Hopes and Dreams wasn't on my starting ballot, so I didn't write a review for it, but it was one of my favorites once I did read it.

It could be a bit clearer and be polished up in a few places, but I loved the core idea. It's a shame it didn't make the finals, but I hope to see a refined version someday.

Personally, I interpreted the writeoff draft as options 1/1, but the finished story could easily take a different path and still be great.

4693404

the whole notion that humans can invent new values, as C.S. Lewis points out, is no more possible than placing a new sun in the sky.

A tangent: Placing a new sun in the sky is possible. It would take a great deal of time and energy, and it would be a very bad idea, but it is conceptually a simple matter of gathering enough hydrogen and helium and dumping them in the same place.

The ontology of values is complex, and still not understood well enough to make such pronouncements. Certainly no one living before the 1990s, when we began to have a lot of functional imaging studies of the brain, and some computational understanding of how senses, memory, and cognition work, was in a position to make such conclusive statements about values.

I'm also pretty sure the Equestrian populace, at least (and certainly Twilight in this story), buy into the mythological distortions that lend political legitimacy to the princesses, so Luna simply comes off as duplicitous in this: "Hey there, poors, we have a divine right to rule! (Actually, Twilight, we're fundamentally the same as everypony else, but don't tell the plebs!)" Those implications actually could get pretty interesting—there's actually a cynically convincing argument in there for the legitimacy of power on a purely de facto basis, which might make it a necessity for Luna or Celestia to send out the Guard against insurgent peasantry if any of Luna's private thoughts here became public knowledge.

You're right, if we want to be realistic, but part of the appeal of Equestria is that it is unrealistic in just these matters.

(I think we can also cut Luna some slack here; that caveat about "except for experience" covers a lot of ground, even to the point of making the statement that they're the same (except for experience) irrelevant. The purpose of the statement is not to convey a fact and construct an equation, but more a way for the rulers to fool themselves and keep themselves humble.)

But the question is: are you navigating within the Symbolic order of the capitalist network according to true individual prescriptions and so on and so on or is capitalist network itself reproducing its order until it appears extra-moral and there are "no alternatives," like some sort of pornographic scenario and so on? sniffsniff

Aaaah!

Just finished voting on all of our finalists. For those of you who are interested, my top scorers this month were:

Red Apples
The Pony's Dictionary
Far Kobresia

I look forward to seeing the results. Good luck, everyone!

4693404
4695507

But the question is: are you navigating within the Symbolic order of the capitalist network according to true individual prescriptions and so on and so on or is capitalist network itself reproducing its order until it appears extra-moral and there are "no alternatives," like some sort of pornographic scenario and so on? sniffsniff

Aaaah!

Geez. You managed to kill BH. I can’t believe it. Kudos!

Finalist Thoughts #1 (Not related to order): Balloons

No spoilers here, because it's been long enough, I think.

Sentence long Synop: Pinkie lets balloons go in remembrance of friends left behind.

Edit: Small change in format... I didn't feel like Liked/didn't like was working for me. So I went with click and didn't. I might try going with Horizon's HORSE system later... I just need to automate that creation thingie... this will take some programming. Hooray!

What clicked for me:
The symbolism. Letting balloons go = letting friends go. Pinkie can't just let them go once. She has to keep letting them go, because she can't really let them go. I liked that. The symbolism was really strong, and I feel like this is something Pinkie would do that she hasn't done in the show. She can't let her friends go. This is as close as she can get.

What didn't click for me:
This piece didn't really do a whole lot for me. Pinkie isn't my favorite character to read a story from the perspective of, and that's a personal quibble. Let me think about that... apologies for rambling. It doesn't feel like a Pinkie piece. The prose is rather too staid and solid for her. Most of what I've read of her, and enjoyed, tended to be more lively with action. Granted, this is an introspective piece, but introspection isn't something I think Pinkie is very good at. This is a personal view, of course, but I think she would handle introspection differently. I suppose that's it. The writing feels more like a Twilight piece, rather than a Pinkie one. Things don't do things, like I would expect in a Pinkie piece. I'll explain further down below. [1]

Why the Whitetail Woods specifically? It feels like the setting was chosen for a purpose, but darned if I can find it. Is there some special significance of the woods that Pinkie holds? Did something happen there? Perhaps include a significant moment, or hint more strongly at why the woods are the best place to do it.

Thoughts:
I got the feeling, somehow, that Mr. Olive was dead, and that feeling never really let go, despite all the evidence contrariwise. Maybe it was the theme of letting go. This is a personal hang up, though, and in my reading of it that just wouldn't let go. I kept expecting it to turn out he was a ghost. A way to diffuse that would be to blurt "I thought you were a ghost!" Or something. Again, this is just me, and probably mostly because with the theme of letting go, I expected there to be at least one dead pony she had to let go, but refused to discount. Although, perhaps Mustangia is a metaphor for the afterlife? I can't quite place its pony pun-ness and connect it to a real world place...

Further thoughts:
1; When I think of Pinkie seeing things around her, I see her seeing them in an active way. The balloons dance and squeak with laughter as they rub together. Or instead of "The sun was on its way down..." "The sun slumped its sleepy way down..." is closer to what I mean. Things do things, and things aren't so much things as objects with personality and thoughts of their own, that can do things as much as any other character in her world could.

I was expecting:

That I'd need to apply my new philosophical outlook to the finals when I got back from Equestria LA--learning how much it shook Lauren Faust's self-esteem when she left FiM has just boggled my mind. I mean, the woman's success as a writer, an artist, an animator, and a show-runner is undoubted, and yet she's still wracked with doubts about how things ended for her with the show all these years later. It's given me a new perspective on my own self-doubts, and I was ready when I logged into the Writeoff site Saturday night to deal with my story once again not making it into the finals.

And then I saw that it had. Now I don't know what to think!

Still, here's a first batch of comments on the finalists that I haven't commented on yet.

Mike

25. "The Last Dreams of Pony Island" - I was hoping for something along the lines of "Coney Island but for ponies," but, alas, that was not to be. Still, the blank verse format is quite well-handled, I thought, but one small thing: when the minotaur takes his turn as narrator, his lines are in angle brackets to signify they're in another language, if I'm recalling comic book conventions correctly. And yet, we get a couple of untranslated words inside them: "manyekyaungg" and "dharat sattu". If you don't want to translate them, leave them outside the brackets. As for the rest, I like how everybody's got their own agendas and are misinterpreting everybody else's actions because of those agendas, but I got too tangled in all the characters and all their mutually exclusive theories to have any idea of what actually happened to Peridot. I'm terrible with murder mysteries, though, and from the other reviews it sounds like people are piecing it together just fine. So maybe somebody could tell me who dunnit?

42. "May Those Who Step Through This Door Know What It Means To Rule" - "the tiny pools of water below" - you've already talked about the water at the beginning of this sentence, so I'd recommend cutting the "of water" here. I'm not quite sure where this cavern is located, either. Maybe just a suggestion in the first paragraph's narration that Twilight had to fly for quite a while before she got there. Overall, though, this seems to be two stories mooshed into one: the "true history of Unicornia" part, and then the "no secret ingredient" part. Maybe introducing the idea of the portal at the beginning would help tie things together. That would also let you introduce a further element of tension into Twilight's POV: she loves this history stuff, but she's also "nervicited" to get down to the portal and see what that's all about.

47. "Like Silver Glass" - "Rainbow tried to hold back a grin" - she just laughed in the previous sentence, so I don't see how a grin could make things any worse. Then for her first assignment, Dash has to keep Thundercrash out of trouble and clean up the mess he's made. But Thundercrash has just left the building, and the mess is right there in the office or wherever it is that the scene is taking place--Dash looks back to see Thundercrash leave the building which makes me think Dash has walked through the front door and is inside, but then Quick Quill's shout, we're told, "came from inside." So where exactly are they all during that scene? Dash should at least ask how she can both follow Crash and stay behind to clean up, and that should get Quill even more upset. "She snorted a laugh, shaking her head. Thundercrash gave her an odd look, as if he could read her thoughts. 'What?'" - I'm not certain whether Dash or Crash says "What?" here. If it's Dash, asking "Why?" would make more sense after what Crash has just said, and if it's Crash, it'd be better to put it into another paragraph so literal-minded fogies like me don't get confused as to who's talking. "A wallowing cog could fly faster than you!" Crash says, and Dash replies, "Ships don’t fly like this!" I'm guessing that a cog is a sort of ship, then, though I'm not familiar with the term and have to wonder how Rainbow Dash would know it. "Beyond here lay my fondest memories." - the present tense "lie" would make more sense. "rewrote half a dozen times" - should be "rewritten".

At the beginning of the story, Dash is complaining as if she doesn't think she needs to be punished, but then it turns out that she feels so guilty about what she's done that the point of the story seems to be Crash telling her to get over it. Maybe introduce that idea at the beginning so Dash doesn't sound so petty--have her acknowledge that she needs to do community service but that she doesn't think watching over old folks is the best use of her talents or something like that.

Really, though, I'm not quite sure what the final point of the story is supposed to be. Like Thudercrash himself, the story's trying to do too many things at once. I mean, look at the chronology of Crash's life: he had a career with the Wonderbolts, took part in a race that nearly killed two of his teammates and got him kicked off the team, then went to sea for reasons that are never made clear where he met his wife; she convinced him to take an office job that the Wonderbolts then offered him--again, I'm not sure why--and he not only got his wings back eventually but then made captain before an attempt to prank Celestia apparently gave him the feather flu so badly that he never flew again except at sea with his wife. And after all that, he tells Dash he was still young? If all that stuff happened in the course of, say, ten years, I'd like Rainbow to be impressed. 'Cause I sure am...

But if the lesson he's trying to teach Dash is about getting knocked down and getting back up, it really gets diluted with all the other stuff going on, and I'm not sure that the funeral scene shows me that Dash has learned that lesson. Most everything here is good, but it wants to burst beyond the 8,000 word limit, looks like to me.

21. "Balloons" - "They were, and Pinkie nodded." - Maybe "She did" instead of "They were"? I'm not sure how five balloons would mess up the sky so badly that the weather ponies would complain. Maybe give us a cascading cavalcade of calamity: a balloon popping and frightening a pegasus into kicking a cloud in such a way that it blasts a lightning blot into another pegasus, et cetera, et cetera. Just a sentence or two to make it into a silly scene. "I have three hundred and sixty-six balloons tied to this wagon." - in a cartoon world, wouldn't that be more than enough to carry the wagon away? Heck, that might be enough in a non-cartoon world. I think I'd prefer Pinkie to have some special sort of cartoony structure she's brought with her, something that she needs the wagon to carry and that she puts together there in the clearing specifically to tie her balloons to. And maybe you could foreshadow Mr. Olive leaving town back in that paragraph where Pinkie thinks about him--add something about how his younger partner had taken over most of the day-to-day running of the place or something like that.

Still, I both agree and disagree with Noble Thought above about the Pinkie-ness of the story. Like I said, making things a little more cartoony sure wouldn't hurt, but the sweetness and poignancy I always associate with the introspective Pinkie that we sometimes see in the show are all here. Some of her dialogue hits my ear wrong, though--I can't quite hear Pinkie saying, "Well, that’s unfortunate", for instance--but I quite enjoyed this.

4696073

I'm right there with you on not being sure what to think. I've been struggling with self-doubt all week, but I feel better today.

I think my mindset hasn't been quite right to attempt objectively viewing stories. And trying to rank so many good stories on a 0-100 ballot hurts. I don't want any of them to be zero because there aren't any that I dislike. Balloons was good, and I did enjoy it. I maybe should make that clearer. I think I'm still in a bit of shock and dazed about the whole thing.

Still, I both agree and disagree with Noble Thought above about the Pinkie-ness of the story. Like I said, making things a little more cartoony sure wouldn't hurt, but the sweetness and poignancy I always associate with the introspective Pinkie that we sometimes see in the show are all here. Some of her dialogue hits my ear wrong, though--I can't quite hear Pinkie saying, "Well, that’s unfortunate", for instance--but I quite enjoyed this.

I suppose it's a fault in how I view Pinkie Pie. Which is odd, because I've written her from an introspective, sad viewpoint before, too. I have a hard time seeing her, given recent episodes, as anything but a pony focused on fun. It's easy to forget that she's a complex character with a complex internal working.

4695656 Part of the credit goes to Slavoj Zizek.

4695388

The Writeoff Draft is 1/1. What I was asking was the thoughts of everyone on which pairing work well with the core idea.

I'm personally inclined towards 'Twilight is unsafe to be around, ponies live in the Undercity' because then I can do everything I wanted. I can have Twilight going about her day above, which gives me freedom to make her segments more interesting. I have a better arc for High Tide too, in she has a dream - and in doing so, does something really dangerous - but in the end meets her hero and learns the truth before succumbing to magical radiation poisoning to make the story tragic. Not actually doing the struckthrough part but couldn't resist tossing it in there.

It also lets me keep Celestia/Luna around and active; but bereft of their magic (That part is staying, though normal ponies probably can keep their Cutie Marks), they're far more invalid. They don't directly run things because doing so is exhausting, yet they're still nominally in charge - I think they'd kind of occupy some sort of Royal Supreme Court role, while the rest of the time they are left to rest and sleep and so on.

4695290
It wasn't incidental or artificial. It's deliberate and political. The significance of the unequal distribution of races in The Wealth of the World is that earth ponies are generally of a lower economic class compared to unicorns and pegasi—hence why they were more eager for reform and came to The Island in larger numbers. This is not necessarily supported by the canon because the matter of an Equestrian class system more or less goes undiscussed, but it's also entirely possible and I think it's more interesting to assume it in some form.

I suppose the level of strength you're willing to afford to magic in any given story is your decision. I don't think that the ability to grab objects (of what size? with how much force?) would necessarily make the narrator any stronger or quicker in his particular circumstances but obviously there are no hard and fast rules on this matter. I imagined Scarlet Letter to be the sort of unicorn whose magic was employed mostly to flip open his snuff box until he left Equestria.

4695317
I absolutely favor the quotation about burning books. It's my personal conviction that the idea of man as virtuous in his state of nature is one of the less helpful ideas we've collectively come up with. Thanks, Rousseau, I guess. One thing that strikes you if you read Middle or Old English poetry is how terrifying the idea of exile was to these people—how terrifying it was to be outside of civilization. Nature was a brute force of disease and disaster. That's what Grendel represents—the absence of civilization. It's only since the 18th century or so that it became popular to think of nature in a sentimental way. Distance has a way of doing that, I suppose. In a sense, Heine is right—we do invent our indecencies—but there is depth and reason to those inventions. I adore good Romantic poetry as much as anyone, and I love the countryside, daffodils, inward bliss, &c. but I think nature is generally to be respected rather than emulated. Funny that Zizek's been mentioned in this thread—one of the more agreeable things he's said is that, for us, nature is really just a series of catastrophes.

4695507

You're right, if we want to be realistic, but part of the appeal of Equestria is that it is unrealistic in just these matters.

I guuuueeeess, and I'll accept that maybe this isn't a popular viewpoint, but I want to see these questions explored rather than just have our modern sensibilities satisfied.

4695656
Haghgsnort! It is merely the obscenity that is the obverse of the capitalist superstructure. Welcome to the desert of the Real. *spits in your lap*

4692790 I think, if you want the MC to seem less sad at the end, giving him some real gain from what happened might be useful. I don't know what that would look like - a clearer view of his own life? A driving force, even if he may never regain what he's missing? A new perspective on the world around him? Something to redeem the experience a little, so it's not a complete loss. He may not enjoy being sane any longer, but there could be advantages to having tasted insanity.

Oh, and the change in his character seemed fine to me. Also, I enjoyed this story quite a bit, although it never came up on my ballot.

4693404 Man, I've read Earth's Holocaust, and even thought of it when reading this, but I couldn't remember the name! I googled for 'the bonfire at the end of the world' and came up with something entirely different.

I didn't mind the style, personally, but I still think your story would be strengthened by cutting some or all of the first paragraph - it gives entirely too much away.

4696887
I never thought ten days ago when this started that I should end up discussing anthropology here, but eh! crazy things happen every now and then.

earth ponies are generally of a lower economic class compared to unicorns and pegasi

Hmmm… I don’t see any factual evidence to support this opinion. While it is true that unicorns are depicted as posher and generally smugger than the other races, I’m not sure that Rainbow Dash or Fluttershy are higher on the social scale than Applejack, for example. It is true that Equestria can somehow be described as a pharmarchy in the sense that social status seems to be tied to magic prowess, with princesses being the undisputed masters; however, for the races deprived of (at least conventional) magic, the facts are much more confused.

Thanks, Rousseau, I guess.

Well, I suppose you allude to the Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes. Rousseau was by no means a pioneer in the myth of the “good savage“. Roots can be tracked back all the way down to Old Greece, and specifically in the Cynical philosophy of Diogenes, who held that society is corrupt. In defence of Rousseau, one must agree that paleontological evidence points to some form of altruism as early as Homo neanderthalis and certainly way before (by evidence, I mean the discovery of mended broken bones, which entails immobilisation and therefore voluntary feeding by other members of the tribe). At that time, population density was so low anyway that conflicts were unlikely—food resources were more than sufficient. However, it is clear that we have a violent heritage, and, in this, we are somehow situated midway between the chimps—whose alpha-males sometimes kill the young that may later threaten their dominion—and the bonobos, whose steamy conduct to solve conflicts has been profusely commented.

One thing that strikes you if you read Middle or Old English poetry is how terrifying the idea of exile was to these people—how terrifying it was to be outside of civilisation. Nature was a brute force of disease and disaster.

You’re right, but you’re biased. As a rule of thumb, man’s approach to nature varies greatly according to the environment they live in. Germanic myths are clearly tainted by sombreness, but this is to be expected of people living in places where agriculture was a challenge on end, where their lives were threatened every day by packs of wolves, stray bears or other beasts, and where, during three or four months, the Sun was nothing more than a pale star hardly dispensing any heat. No wonder they imagined that final catastrophe called Ragnarök, and the disparition of the Sun. In contrast, Latin or Greek approach is radically different, with an emphasis on the sweetness and charm of rustic life, well away from the various social conventions citizens must abide by (see, e.g. Lingus’s Daphnis and Chloe and Theocritus’s (later adapted by Virgil) Bucolics).

It is merely the obscenity that is the obverse of the capitalist superstructure.

Crikey! “Effete”, “obverse”? Watch out your words: others have been burnt at the WriteOff’s stake for less!

EDIT: Kudos for hitting the feature box!

Y'all done messed up and didn't vote me to win. "Princess of Mares" is the best fic you have or haven't read yet. I hear people saying "oh geez though I am satisfied with the status of my story reviews and shall take your advice into account in the future" because they don't exude the confidence of Magello.

Listen up though, I'm the bomb diggity. Yo though, for real. My story words are like winged angels of crushed velvet prancing over the naked flesh of your eye spheres. I know why you didn't make me your rightful king. You were scared, frightened of my perennial majesty. I don't even know what 'perennial' means but I knew it was the right one for that sentence, in the same way I know "P-cess, The Mares Conspiracy" is right for you.

Shh, no words now. Don't even reply to this, just be satisfied I descended from the highest mountains of Greece in a ball of liquid gold to spit sick truths into your aural valleys. You were looking into the mirror, your flesh gone saggy, drooping deep ways of the old and fraudulent kind, and suddenly I came bursting through the silvered portal to punch you right in the brain dome with my radical space skills. "Is this the hit fic 'Princess Mares: 2 Hot 2 Trot', which was wrongly barred from the writeoff finals due to malfeasance on the part of the united conspiracy of the so-called Fimfiction Elite?"

Yes.

Yes it is.

Listen, I get these people saying that "Oh it's rife with spelling errors", "Oh it's obviously unfinished", and I'm reading you, shipwreck, we got the mental communique facilitated with the psychic waves, dig, we rolling on the same tune. But my fics are basically crack, and you don't just let the smoke a whole eight ball right off. You gotta tease them into it, a slight gesture toward turgid girth made manifest within the confines of my word space. "And Bad Cess to Mares: Pringles Edition" is the tar heroin being injected into your tear ducts right now.

That's not a metaphor.

That is what I'm proposing.

Right into the tear ducts.

So what I want you to do, is grab yourself by the lapels of your shirt and pull yourself to your feet and give yourself a stern dressing down about what you've done to wrong me. Because oh, you've wronged me. You think you know pain? Jesus on the cross, maybe. What do you know of suffering?

Listen, I forgive you.

But you're dead to me.

But please get excite for the rewritten "Shorely Mare, Princess Fair: An Erotic Textbook" done with my sincere thanks to those who reviewed it.

But no though, you're dead to me.

Decided to do some more reviews for a few randomly selected finalists. Have them below!

Balloons: I have a bit of a weak spot for cute little character studies like this. I think it was a good choice to have Pinkie engage in something that's obviously symbolic—it's just far enough outside of her character's comfort zone to force the reader to really think about what's going on. Unfortunately, this doesn't really make full use of this potential because there simply isn't that much to think about. I was reading this, expecting some kind of reveal that adds depth to the situation, but I never really got one. I was almost convinced that this was actually a middle-aged or relatively old Pinkie Pie who was commemorating friends/family who have passed on, but it ended up being exactly what it looked like, which is something you decidedly want to avoid when being symbolic. Also, I'm not sure what Mr. Olive is supposed to add to the story; he kinda just shows up, gets introduced, and leaves. I guess he uses up that one balloon? Anyways, the last thing I wanted to touch on was the tone. The narrative voicing doesn't exactly feel like Pinkie as we know her, but that's okay if you're trying to use it to build on her character. What I had an issue with, though, was how the mood was almost cloyingly sad, despite there not being much to be particularly sad about. I mean, if anypony could see the upside to change/loss in one's life, I'd expect it to be Pinkie. So unless you're trying to say something even more with the somber tone, you might want to consider touching it up to be more in line with the story's themes.

Odyssey: Let me be upfront: I found this the tinniest bit annoying to read. It was mostly just cute ponies doing cute things for the sake of doing cute things, which can certainly be entertaining, but it's going to inevitably come across as thin to some of your readers. I guess I happened to be one of them. I think you're also dealing with some pacing issues here. While the first few scenes do have some entertaining moments (like Shinny immediately having to try out a candlelit dinner after he gets the advice), it all undeniably feels like set-up. When we finally get to the meat and potatoes of the lava game, it mostly plays out as expected. The only real surprise and subsequent giggle for me was Smarty Pants' heroic sacrifice. When we got to the end, I was kinda expecting a lesson to be learned (maybe for Shining, at least), but the ending just plays the cuteness card again. When all is said and done, I felt like this story fits the definition of a fluff-fic to a tee: fun and humorous, but ultimately insubstantial.

Doll Judgement: I enjoyed the suspenseful build-up in the beginning. An issue, though, is how it seems to evaporate mid-way through without a proper dramatic reveal or the like. Twi and Rarity are brought in front of the villain, and then all is explained in an almost James Bond Bad Guy sequence. It's almost as if the story forgot about the suspenseful mood it was keeping when it goes and reveals everything at once like this. I'm sorry, but I'm also going to have to be a bit nitpicky regarding the dolls (pun completely intended ). The exact nature of how the dolls worked is never very clear; I think it would have been a good idea at the very least to mention how the dolls look like ponies while Mari is controlling them. That would help tie things in with the whole staging Rarity's death thing. I'm also not sure why it is that Rarity can see/cut the dolls' magical strings, but Twilight can't. I mean, it definitely can't be an issue of magical skill/prowess, so the implication is that there's something special about Rarity specifically. The fact that this isn't really addressed makes it feel like a dangling plot point. In the end, I liked a lot of the execution, and the climax was undeniably powerful. Still, some of these plot issues makes it hard for the piece as a whole to stick together in my head.

I'll try to do a few more before voting closes, but I can't make any promises.

The last three finalists:

That I hadn't read in the preliminaries. And I think that'll do it for me commenting on stories this round. Twenty-four hours left till the unveiling!

Mike

11. "Odyssey" - I'm having a POV problem right from the beginning, largely because this seems to be trying for something omniscient. All I'm getting from it, though, is insufficient information to let me figure out what's going on inside the characters' heads. Shining in the first scene, for instance, when he's "staring at the door with an odd look on his face": I don't know if he's surprised that Ms. Starseeker has just abandoned her post and left Twilight in his care, or if he's still thinking about Cadance. If we're in his POV--and we seem to be in this first section--go ahead and let us know what's what. The second section, though, wobbles back and forth between Shining and Twilight before settling quite nicely into Twilight's POV, so I'd recommend making the whole story just as firmly set inside Twilight. That way, she can look at the expression on his face in the first part and wonder what he's thinking the same way we are.

"while she started mixing the dough as he directed" - they're making their own pasta? Doesn't that take an hour or so to put together before you can even start cooking it? "He paused for a few minutes" - that seems like an awfully long time: a few seconds maybe? Still, this is really cute and a nice illustration of the relationship between the three characters.

24. "Summer Island" - "Sweetie Belle see her through the bustling crowd." - from the context, I'm guessing this should be "can't see her". The verb tenses are mostly present throughout, but they do lapse into past here and there, like the four paragraphs after "Sweetie Belle’s eyes darted from side to side." Something to watch for in the rewrite. "Scootaloo glances up and around for other ships, but they’re clear." - it just seems to me that they'd need a bit more of an air traffic control system than that: isn't the story's opening all about how busy the docks are? Also, does Scootaloo just let the ship sail all night while she sleeps? That seems more than a little dangerous to me, especially when the next scene shows us that she's got a drift anchor aboard. "It’s a bit bigger than she made it out to be on the ground" - maybe "from the deck" instead of "on the ground"? Since they're still aloft and all...

I'll echo several other comments about how a lot gets introduced here but not a lot gets resolved. I'd love to see this expanded to deal with all the issues it raises about Sweetie and Scootaloo's lives now that they've left Ponyville, but right now, this is just a tasty, tasty introduction to that potential story.

29. "The Adultery of Princess Twilight Sparkle" - "the mood of the princesses were reflected" - the singular subject is "mood," so the verb should be singular, too: "was reflected". "Sometimes, I would awaken on the floor of the observatory with the taste of chicory on my lips and wonder if perhaps we had gone too far in our debauchery." - this is the greatest line of prose I've read in hours. Minutes, even. And as much as I despise tea in all its forms--hot, iced, or otherwise--I quite enjoyed this. Maybe it's because I don't get out very often, but I've not read a lot of stories like this, so it wasn't going over well-trod ground for me. I do agree with horizon that the final Luna/Twilight exchange should be the ending. Since we're in Celestia's viewpoint, maybe we could follow her out of the tea scene into her own room for her scene with Bucephalus, then cut back to Twilight and Luna for the kicker. Nicely done, though.

Two last reviews. I didn’t have time to read all the stories on my slate, so I’ll abstain from the final vote.

May Those Who Step Through This Door Know What It Means To Rule

Pros: I’ll be a bit blunt but I really didn’t see anything outstanding in this story.

Cons: First off, the English is very choppy at times. There are a lot of repetitions (§1: clinging twice. Wait, where’s sPrincess Celestia?: typo.), and the descriptions do not flow well. This § is a good example (I have emphasised the use of the verbs ‘step’ and ‘stride’ and of ‘stone’):

Luna strode forward as the tunnel opened up into a great cavern, her horn burning with blue light as she strode forward. Natural stone walls sloped up and away into the darkness, and a cozy warmth began to fill the room as the alicorn stepped over a thick line carved into the stone floor and stepped up onto a stone pedestal. Her metal-shod hooves clicked loudly on the granite as she strode towards its center, the dim light of her horn illuminating a stone arch in the shape of a doorway, tall enough for even Princess Celestia to step through without ducking.

Note also that all sentences are built on the model: “Clause + as + subordinate clause”.

Other example:

“No,” Twilight said as she trotted after her, peering at the walls as they moved towards the back of the cavernous space.

Letting alone the two ‘as’, with the sentence written like this, I understand the walls are moving.

QUIBUS PER HANC PORTAM CONFUSUS IGNORO QUID VIDERIM INGREDIAMUR IN REGULA

– What do you mean? I read: To those who through this portal I, confused, don’t know what I’ll see we enter in rule.

On the contents, I have little to say. I don’t understand why Luna had to lure Twilight into that cave for such a mundane lesson, and I’m really not sure it shall be efficient. The end is rather anticlimactic, although I understand it is meant to be so, it comes across as an additional let-down. In other words, since I didn’t find the historical background really breathtaking (why was the first city gradually abandoned?), to me that story looks like a simple idea heavily padded to reach the 2,000 words, without any real meat to chomp on.

tl;dr: Style to improve, story is shallow. Not Good+.

The Ten Seconds Game

Pros: The story is a cute slice-of-life, and the dialogue between the various characters comes off pretty well. Good jokes.

Cons: There is an evident lack of originality here. I mean, the ponies are just echoing what human beliefs about afterlife are/have been. I would expect ponies to develop other theories regarding the immortality of the soul, not just copycats of ours (especially with immortal beings such as alicorns). It may not be easy to figure out, but it would have given extra spice to the story which, in its present form, feels a bit shallow philosophically.

tl;dr: Amusing skit, but we fail to learn something interesting on ponies’ beliefs. Average+.

Finished reading the finalists, now I shall juggle them a bit. I won't review them because lack of time and because I don't think I can deliver any useful insight without thinking about them a lot more.

But...

One long spoiler for "A Once and Future Darkness" ahead, but I think I was the last one to read it anyway.
Fashionably late to the party, I finally read the story (it was the last story coming to my slate), and while it is a wonderful piece which I can't even fathom writing in only three days, it was a horrible and fear inducing vision for me because of griffins. I would probably see it as something potentially bright (the future will tell if it still exists) if the ponies were the only sapient species in that world, but we know they aren't. Luna explicitly talks only about ponies, which means that at the end we have a world where omnipotent predators roam and do whatever they feel while the other species run and cover and probably try to use cold iron to ward their homes and pray in the darkness.

The blood, cannibalism and other elements didn't really disturb me. Once you transcend flesh and physics these things become irrelevant.

Okay, I'm away from home and writing on a mobile device is a pain, so these reviews will need to be short.

Red Apples: Most fics seem to assume that Luna and Celestia were at least a thousand years old before Luna's banishment. It's interesting to see one where both were fairly young before their falling out. I actually feel quite bad for Luna. It actually seems cruel to parade her around a party right after her return. I'm a bit iffy on the ending, what with one (rather rude) prank seeming to resolve so many underlying issues. But aside from that minor issue, I very much enjoyed this story.

The Adultery Of Princesses Twilight: Oh man, the innuendo! The terrible, terrible innuendo! Now keep in mind, I don't DO tea. But I still followed along just fine. From a brief skim of other reviews, it seems some people think this should have ended with Twilight and Luna's scene. Personally, I loved the existing ending with Celestia. In summation, you wrote a story centered on a substance I have no love for, yet still managed to make me laugh out loud. So good job!

Summer Island: I think this is an excellent opening for a longer story. I rather enjoyed it, but it never quite goes anywhere. It raises tons of very interesting questions, but doesn't actually answer any of them. I also find it a bit strange that Scootaloo is driving an airship all on her own. It seems like the sort of job you'd need a crew for, even on a small ship. All in all I liked it, but it feels incomplete. If this were on fimfiction I'd give it a thumbs up and put it on my watch list to wait for chapter two.

OK:

One more. I thought I'd read Pascoite's "A Customer for Life" in the hopes that I could come up with something that might help him revise it. I ended up writing the following, but I don't know if it'll be at all useful. Here it is, though.

Mike

35. "A Customer for Life" - This story crystallized in my mind exactly what I mean when I say something isn't Pony enough, a charge I also leveled at another excellently-written story this round, "The Wealth of the World." It keys off something Bad Horse said in passing about how settings can be out-of-character and something Titanium Dragon said in a comment I can't seem to find anymore about how being an atheist in a world where gods actually exist isn't perhaps the best choice.

The thing about My Little Pony is that, in the show's universe, friendship is quite literally magic. Getting together with people whose company you enjoy will generate a force, an energy as real as electromagnetism that can be channeled and focused by the conscious or unconscious mind. This is demonstrated everywhere throughout the series, but the season four finale is the biggest example. Twilight gives up all her existing magic in exchange for her friends, and the depths of the friendship this displays allows them to generate an even stronger sort of magic that they use to defeat Tirek.

Would this happen in our world? No, it would not. But My Little Pony doesn't take place in our world. And to write a My Little Pony story that doesn't take into account the natural force of friendship that exists in Equestria would be like writing Dune fanfiction where the characters ignore the desert that surrounds them.

In the case of "The Wealth of the World," it would've helped me to see Scarlet and his followers explicitly reject the magic of friendship the same way they explicitly reject money and writing--I'm imagining him describing friendship the way the characters in Arthur Miller's The Crucible describe the Devil. This would then give a more "in universe" explanation for the stuff that happens at the end: explicitly rejecting the whole idea of trust and tolerance in a Pony world gives you the village from the season five premiere and also gives you the collapse we see in the story here. I just needed that one extra element, I guess, to make the story feel more Pony to me.

I also need a little of that in your story, Pasco, a sense that Shamrock has spent his life being an atheist in a world with gods: he has rejected friendship and embraced control as a substitute. This has left him the hollow figure we meet here, and the question of the story then becomes what lesson Greenbriar is going to take away from it all. Is there a glimmer of hope in that his love for his father might lead him to attempt to become friends with him? Or might it go the opposite way and lead Briar to embrace his father's doomed lifestyle? You don't have to answer the question, but I'd like to see that underlying theme strengthened.

So, I've talked a little bit about what I think about reading and reviewing Writeoff stories, and I've also said some words in the Skype chat about how learning to review is simply learning how to express your thoughts better. To make good on these claims (and as an exercise to demonstrate that you can give meaningful feedback about any story), I've decided to put some thoughts up about a very high caliber story, IMHO. So get some thoughts about Red Apples down below!

Red Apples: I've mentioned elsethread that this is basically my favorite Writeoff story ever. There's so much thought put into Luna's character, and it's revealed and executed in a stunningly graceful manner. Great prose, great use of first person voicing. The best part, though, is how the author finds ways to break some implicit assumptions the reader has about Luna by using concrete examples of ways life has changed during her absence. Both the titular apple and the use of classical music were splendid. Casting Luna as the backdoor politician and Celestia as the warrior delves a bit into headcannon, but likewise does a good job of turning things around on the reader, which lets us sympathize with Luna even more. This is brilliant, how the author makes Luna's emotions feel more real by putting the reader in a similar state of mind.

But as much as I liked this story, there is still room for improvement. More specifically, the ending is definitely the most problematic part of the story, and it's a bit of a disappointment to see things close on a weaker note. Up until the end, the author did a great job of making no assumptions, and showing how things that the reader and the fandom might take for granted about Luna might not be what they seem. This makes the last two paragraphs feel really out of place. Not only have they lost a lot of the brilliant first-person narration in favor for what's basically a summary of the next hour, they also feel like a pretty stereotypical fandom "two best sisters letting loose with pranks" scene. While I understand that this bit of familiarity is meant to be comforting to both Luna and the reader, it's simply not given as much thought or time to be explored as the other concrete reasons why Luna might feel out of place. The ending, then, feels less satisfying, because in the back of our minds, the central conflict of the story was much better developed than the resolution. I'd suggest either expanding this scene out so it's less of a summary, or adding a endcap scene that touches on how Luna feels after everything is said and done. Because, I'd expect her to definitely be happier than how she was before the prank, but at the same time, both Luna and the reader are smart enough to know that her problems are nowhere close to being fixed yet. At least acknowledging this continuation of the conflict might be a good idea.

Last set of reviews!

Genre: Slice of Life

Rainbow Dash has to do 200 hours of community service in recompense for the damage she did to the weather factory. She gets assigned to deal with Thundercrash, a retired Wonderbolt with a propensity for pranks involving water balloons (I guess that’s what happens when you’re a flightless pegasus and can’t make it rain anymore).

This was one of those “a young person hangs out with an old person and learns an important life lesson in the process” stories, and in this case, the old person was quite vivacious and full of life, and taught Rainbow Dash that even if you don’t get exactly what you want, you should make the best of what you get, and be open to the idea that there’s something else good out there for you.

Also, hitting ponies with water balloons is funny.

Clearly one of these lessons is more important than the other.

While the story was somewhat generically shaped, it was a well-executed example of the type, and worked well enough.

My first complaint about this story would be that Thundercrash was only okay; I never really felt like I knew him that well, and his death, while I saw it coming, didn’t do much for me.

The other thing that niggled at me was the early conversation that Quick Quill had with Rainbow Dash, being worried over Thundercrash hurting himself, didn’t really seem to go anywhere; I’m not really sure what the point of that was, as he didn’t seem very fragile, nor did he seem suicidal, so it never really seemed to pay off.

Genre: Slice of Life, Fluff

Pinkie Pie throws a party for all of her friends that can’t be here anymore, inflating and releasing a single balloon into the sky for every one of them.

This story is as sappy as the Cutie Mark Crusaders after one of their misadventures, but I can’t say that I disliked it. If I had a complaint, it would be that I think the introduction was a bit redundant with the rest of the story – Pinkie Pie pretty much explains what is going on to the audience, then to Mr. Olive, and it feels a bit repetitive in that regard, and I think that the WAFF might be stronger without the repetition.

Genre: Slice of Life

Luna is free of the nightmare, but the whole world is strange to her now. The nobility is not in evidence in Ponyville, Applejack serves perfect-looking apples that taste terrible, music is strange, ponies walk around without clothes on, her ancient home has been left to rot, and Canterlot – once a rude fort on a hill – is now the capital of a nation of 200 million ponies. And there is some High Princess of all Equestria she needs to meet, now…

This was a really nice little piece depicting Luna’s confusion over her new environment. Luna’s distress was entirely reasonable, and her getting overwhelmed by the world around her made sense – she’s been dumped a thousand years into the future, even her immortal sister is half a stranger to her, and she doesn’t know what to make of things. The world-building that went into this felt great, and Celestia served as an excellent guide to the future, with her character playing well throughout the piece as the beneficent but playful ruler we all love.

This will win a recommendation from me when it goes up on FIMFiction.

Genre: Adventure

Ponies are having strange dreams – dreams which seem to be spilling over into reality. Luna is in them, and it seems harmless enough at first under the oppressive summer heat – until a filly is told to paint her eyes in a dream, and goes blind as a result.

It seems that dreams are spilling over into reality, and worse still, Luna doesn’t seem to want to stop it…

This was an interesting story, but I’m not sure if the ending really worked all that well for me; while the good guys can lose on occasion, here it didn’t really feel like it lent the story much purpose. The story was well-crafted, but it didn’t really say anything with Luna’s victory – in fact, it wasn’t really clear why Luna even “won”. The Luna here wasn’t very Luna-ish, much more of a madmare, but maybe that was an indication of her prior nmature?

Still, it is hard to complain about the imagery in the story, but the whole thing didn’t quite feel like it had a purpose in the end – a bit arbitrary, just like the dreams. But I can’t say it wasn’t an interesting ride.

Genre: Footnotes Comedy, Sex

In which Celestia interrupts Twilight Sparkle and Luna’s salacious teatime. Luna and Celestia fight over whose way of taking tea is correct, while Twilight is forced into some truly profound mediation.

Over tea.

The mixture of the comic and the absurd in this piece hit just the right note for me for a good portion of this piece, and the end of the first scene:

"Indeed it did, Twilight Sparkle." Luna took another sip of tea with only a brief longing look at the bowl of sugar cubes. "Shall we continue where we left off."

With another deep sigh, Twilight Sparkle sat her teacup back down on the table. "I don't think so. I'm really not in the mood for tea at the moment."

Luna placed her teacup down next to Twilight's. "Would you like to make out instead?"

"Oh, yes!" said Twilight Sparkle.

This made me laugh so hard I almost cried.

The greatest weakness of this story is the fact that this joke is then more or less repeated in the second scene, to finish the story, and while it was still quite funny, I don’t think it was quite as funny the second time, and I feel like the story might have ended on a stronger note if it didn’t have the second scene at all.

Genre: Romance, Adventure

Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle set sail on Scootaloo’s airship to Summer Island. Sweetie Belle is a singer now – a big name – but she is not content with her work. On the other hand, Scootaloo ships stuff around and seems pretty happy – and is very happy to see Sweetie Belle again.

Of course, the voyage couldn’t be easy – not only is Sweetie Belle running away from herself, but there’s more than a hint of attraction there towards Scootaloo. But when a storm hits while they’re at sea, they must struggle to stay safe…

And then they arrive, and the story just kind of cuts off in an unsatisfying way with no real resolution for Sweetie Belle’s issues, Scootaloo wanting to keep better tabs on Sweetie Belle, or Sweetie Belle’s attraction towards Scootaloo.

This story really felt like it needed resolution that it lacked.

Unfortunately, the writing in this also ended up feeling distracting at times.

The in-depth description of what Scootaloo was doing during the storm before the valve blew felt a bit awkward to me; it felt like it was trying to feed us information, but a lot of it was kind of meaningless to the audience, and it didn’t feel like all of it was necessary.

This story was written in present tense, but I’m not really sure why; the narrative standard is generally past tense, and here, it was just kind of distracting. Setting it in present tense didn’t really add anything to the story.

Then she rolls ‘em up against the mast and ties them in place with rope.

This felt awkwardly informal.

Scootaloo steps around the puddle hugs her as the ship lurches around them.

This was also awkward

Careful not to breath in the fumes escaping from the torn fabric

Should be “breathe”, not “breath”.

All these complaints may seem like I disliked it, but it was more frustrating than anything – there was a story here I was interested in hearing, but it didn’t get there.

Genre: Adventure?

Luna shows Twilight the great secret of rulership.

That there is no great secret of rulership.

This story was very heavy on world-building, and I liked the overall impact of the magical gate and the description of the ancient place. I thought that the lesson was decent enough, and the idea of leadership being a pretty light show when in reality there’s nothing that changes within you from “not being a leader” to “being a leader” was good.

That said, I feel like the story needed to tie together a bit more powerfully; the overall idea was good, but I think that it needed to be introduced more strongly earlier in the piece. The message of hubris – of ponies in the past having forgotten what it meant to rule, as well as the hubris of the people of Unicornia – runs strong through the piece, but I feel like the whole thing could have been tied together a bit more tightly with a stronger introduction and Twilight having more of an idea up front of what she is going to see down below, so there’s more of a sense of built-up anticipation when she finally steps through the gate.

And there we go! Every finalist story reviewed.

4700639

And there we go! Every story reviewed.

Awesome! I can tell you that I (COMPLETELY AGREE WITH / VEHEMENTLY LOATHE) your review of my story, and that you should be (PROUD OF YOURSELF / HEARING FROM MY LAWYERS SOON). (THANK YOU SO MUCH / YOU WILL PAYYYY) for sharing your thoughts with us.

With (WARM REGARDS / MY UNEXTINGUISHABLE HATRED),

Bachiavellian

4700639

And there we go! Every story reviewed.

Not what the spreadsheet says :2

4700720
I either second this or I don't.

Twilight Sparkle vs The Princess of Friendship
4678885 4682170 both bring up that this idea is introduced early in the story, seems significant, and then goes nowhere. It would be nice to see this have some payoff, or to consider whether or not it should be reeled back and given less prominence.

Garbled
4683243 4688412 4696073 bring up that the story feels a bit muddled; I actually, in my original version of my review, wrote:

This was one of those “a young person hangs out with an old person and learns an important life lesson in the process” stories, and in this case, the old person was quite vivacious and full of life, and taught Rainbow Dash... what, exactly?

The story does actually tell you what the story was about, but it is kind of muddled overall, partially because so much is going on - and partially because, as Bad Horse points out, the whole pranking theme has absolutely nothing at all to do with that message. Tying his pranking - which is a big part of the story - into your theme somehow is important, I think, because you give it a lot of prominence and it is a big part of the character we see.

I disagree with Bad Horse that you should make this more depressing, though I do think that his lack of infirmity undercuts his sudden death. Speaking of which...

Death
4682041 noted his death is an obvious ploy to pull at the heartstrings.
4682170 noted the same thing.

And well... it kind of is. And pretty transparently so. And the funeral isn't really that strong (though I was amused by the water balloons). I wouldn't have gotten what the point of your story was without her stating what the point of the story was outright, but that points towards a general garbled weakness.

Conflict
4690142 notes that the story feels like it lacks conflict, possibly because of the dropped plotlines; there's no real payoff with regards to:

1) Twilight Sparkle vs The Princess of Friendship
2) The fact that Thundercrash is related to Thunderlane
3) The fact that Rainbow Dash is doing community service and has to do a good job or else bad stuff might happen

I think that there is conflict here, but that it all gets forgotten when Thundercrash dies.

The Prompt
4680939 noted:

It's a good story, touching on history, and feels like a lesson that would be taught in the series. Another positive is Twilight getting the princess mane. My only complaint is the story is only barely tied to the prompt.

I’m pretty sure the tie was supposed to be the distance between normal ponies and being a leader – the metaphorical distant shores of leadership.

Also, possibly going to a faraway ancient ruined city.

More about the portal, sooner
I agree with 4696073 that the portal needs to be brought up sooner, as it would tie the narrative together more strongly.

Untranslated Latin
4699710 noted that the Latin inscription wasn’t translated (and maybe was mangled?). Putting it through Google Translated yielded “I will walk in through this door to know the dream WHICH THE RULE OF”. Throwing the title of this piece into Google Translate yielded the exact inscription, which I suspect was the origin of the writing. It would probably be wise to translate it - though I’m not sure it is strictly necessary, it will probably bother some people.

The Light of a Thousand Moons
This was poetic, but as 4684205 correctly points out, it creates a bad case of fridge logic. It is like saying “the light of a thousand candles” and acting like that’s bright.

I'm pretty sure that I won't have time to write any more reviews, and there probably isn't much for me to say about them that hasn't been said. So I'll just note that I thought that all of the finalists that I read ranged from "pretty good" to "really good." So congratulations, finalists. You did good.