Master Of Order And Balance
By grey mane

Reviewed by Rinnaul

I was going to keep the Hubert gag going this time because a case of that Hubert’s “lemonade” was on clearance, but by the time I got around to going and getting it, it was gone. And that shit is in the Organic department, so it’s like $3 a bottle, and I just can’t bring myself to drop that much on a random stupid gag. I can just buy a bottle of Calypso for half that much and know I’ll actually enjoy it.

But I was going to be like “I bought a case of it. I don’t know why. I wasn’t planning on it but… oh god, I can’t stop myself from drinking them…” or whatever, maybe go all-out on the description and be all Lovecraftian with it. You know, like that one time I wrote a story where Sweetie Belle had tea with a shapeless abomination that dwelt beyond the void between the stars, a soul-scarring horror that mortal minds not only could not comprehend, but suffered endlessly for the mere attempt.

Except Sweetie Belle. She was fine.

And then I was going to do it in-character as my very blunt and dimwitted dwarf fighter from D&D because it was April 1st, and it would have been like: “After my ancestral home fell to the orcs, my family were forced to flee, and settle a new home, Koganusan, or ‘Boatmurdered’ in your language. It's the mightiest and most profitable lead mine the world has ever known. 's why I'm so strong. Pots and pans were lead. Plates and cups were lead. Spoons and forks were lead. Beds were lead. I even slept under a lead blanket. Good for building muscles, lifting lead all day like that.”

But it was really annoying writing it that like that and I hate April Fools anyway.

Also, I clearly didn’t get it done on the First.

Moving on; oh, hey, look, a story.

Yeah, gonna be up front on this. That description does not have me enthused for this.

Quick Recommendation: OC origin stories are a difficult thing to pull off successfully in fanfiction even at the best of times, and this is unfortunately one of the failures. Constant telling, poor grammar, uninteresting characters, and no ties to established canon lead this one to fall particularly flat.

Let’s start with that long description that turned me off of this so much.

Often referred to by Greymane as his equal counterpart, Sabien the current head to the Order of Balance has seen him self as the superior pony in all aspects even though he has never once bested Grey in anything. Having gained a weaker form of immortality from obtaining an artifact he as survived over a thousand years by possessing the bodies of others. Come read along as we look into what made him turn from a young stallion full of potential to help guide the world into a better and brighter future, and into the blood thirsty power hungry tyrant he has become.

...it’s a bit of a mess. Let’s take it piece by piece.

Often referred to by Greymane

Who? Beyond your personal OC, I guess, judging from the user name.

as his equal counterpart, Sabien

Who?

the current head to the Order of Balance

That what?

has seen him self

“Himself” is one word.

as the superior pony in all aspects even though he has never once bested Grey in anything.

Then how does he justify thinking that way?

Having gained a weaker form of immortality from obtaining an artifact

…feels a little Sue-ish, but it also kinda sounds like he’s the antagonist, so that might be okay. Also, you want a comma after “artifact”. Wait, doesn’t this imply that Greymane, your apparent personal OC, is also immortal? That’s a bit worse.

he as survived over a thousand years by possessing the bodies of others.

has*

Come read along as we

Bad story setup. This feels juvenile — like I should be hearing it from Mister Rogers or Elmo or something.

look into what made him turn from a young stallion full of potential to help guide the world into a better and brighter future, and into the blood thirsty power hungry tyrant he has become.

Laying that on a little thick, there.

The problem here is… Well, the biggest problem, really, is that “follow along” introduction that makes it sound like a children’s story, and the generally unpolished grammar. But, the most fundamental problem with this introduction is that we have no association with these characters, and they have no grounding in the world we know — just each other.

Raising questions in the description for the narrative to answer is fine. The problem is, you’ve raised too many questions, and given us no reason to care about the answers yet.

And we open the story on an epigraph. I talked about epigraphs in my last review, how they really need to add something to the story to work, and should fit with the theme. I don’t think this really adds anything beyond “the author would like to sound profound”, and as for the theme… well, I haven’t gone far enough in to be sure, but I’m pretty sure “It’s the crazy ones that push the boundaries” won’t really fit all that well, on top of being a fairly pretentious sentiment regardless.

I… have no idea what Greymane’s relationship with the Order is meant to be, here. Or the Order’s to… who are they raiding, again? A “guard outpost”? Whose guards? What are they guarding? Either way, they seem to be enemies. But Greymane’s statements imply that the Order would hand him over to the outpost. Which would be an abysmally stupid thing to do, honestly. But anyway, despite him acting like this is an “enemy of my enemy” situation (And I would remind you of Maxim 29), the Order are practically (and sometimes literally) falling on their knees for the guy.

Also, the telling. This almost doesn’t actually feel like a story itself, but instead the author just explaining how the story he’s thinking of would go. It’s fairly tedious to read.

Greymane himself is getting tiring on his own, too. He’s an immortal genius master thief of such power he could face an alicorn in single combat and possibly challenge a god, but he’s humble and sincere and willing to help these guys… He’d feel like a Gary Stu even in a better-written story, but with all of it being laid out with telling, it’s just overwhelming.

"I am serious and don't call me Shirley..."

It was only funny when Leslie Nielsen did it. Nobody else has made it funny since then. Well, okay, Harry pulled a good variation of it on Sirius in Harry Potter and the Nightmare of Futures Past, but that’s the only other one. Still, how does that joke even play in a setting with names like Rarity, Rainbow Dash, and Twilight Sparkle?

(And here the review was put on hold for a couple days while Rinnaul re-read one of his favorite fics ever, even if it is still incomplete after 11 years.

I’m not quoting the rest of the “break-in” scene, but the constant telling is becoming an ever-greater problem. Not only is telling unengaging to the reader, it prevents us from gaining a closer understanding of the characters. By this point, I should really have some idea of, and questions about, Greymane and Sabien’s characters. But Greymane is never explored deeply, just brief snippets of discussion while the narrative exposits on his actions and thoughts. But telling me what someone is thinking isn’t the same thing as helping me connect to or understand them.

As for Sabien, he’s worse off, in a way. Greymane may feel like a pile of overpowered skills buried under a layer of vaguely-heroic platitudes, but Sabien has done so little that he feels like a total blank slate.

Okay, now Sabien is a blank slate willing to slit a child’s throat. For… no good reason at all, really. I mean, heroics aside, Greymane was doing the smart thing. Let a potential witness vacate the area and leave that much less evidence of your passing, and that much less reason for you to be targeted. The filly was leaving. Sabien had absolutely no reason to attack her.

This also raises the question of what a filly would be doing there, regardless of its true nature as a training ground, guard outpost, or secret research facility into the recreation of forbidden magics.

And wasn’t this supposed to be about Sabien’s fall? So far, it doesn’t seem like he fell from grace so much as went from a cold bastard to a cold bastard with power.

Oh, and Sabien is racist, to boot.

And so far, we have an invocation of an aztec deity, and casting a spell in the language from The Fifth Element. Is Greymane’s magic all going to be based on references to random things?

So… Greymane just has more and more power as the story goes on. Apparently he really is basically an alicorn who happens to look like an earth pony.

Also, Sabien has already been reduced to a screaming psychopath. I kinda thought this story would be building him up for all the good he could possibly do, and then having him not just fall short, but be turned to darkness by his own failings and destroy everything he should have worked to protect.

You know, like Anakin in the Star Wars prequels.

I’m sure there’s a more literary comparison to make there, but I don’t feel like working that out.

And more telling. And more Greymane being perfect. And more Sabien being a sociopath.

and Greymane appeared before them shrouded in white aura that nearly blinded them.

This guy is starting to sound literally angelic.

And no, I don’t mean “literally” in the sense of “figuratively but also really intensely”.

I mean “And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.” (Luke 2:9, KJV) literally.

Okay, okay, I’ll grant that Greymane is probably just heavily inspired by Gandalf. But even then… Tolkien’s wizards were more properly called the maiar. The maiar were angels themselves. It’s not really a big improvement.

And we were trained by the Order of Balance and this organization has been at this for nearly twelve thousand years

Well, looks like it’s time for Writers Have No Sense Of Scale again. I don’t even remember the last time I brought this one up.

And I’m pretty sure nobody is willing to go back through all of my old reviews to be sure I actually have done it before.

Anyway. 12,000 years isn’t terribly long on geologic scales, but when you’re talking about basically anything smaller than planets? 12,000 years ago, humans were only just figuring out how farming works, and Sabien implies that the stated age is an estimate, and the group might be even older. Even Greymane’s stated age of 5,000 years is extreme. Again referencing human development, Greymane would be older than writing, making him literally prehistoric.

So… we spend a lot of time listening to what’s apparently a magic ring in the form of its previous wielder as it exposits on what amounts to its own history.

It also confirms that Sabien is black and red, a fact I somehow don’t find surprising in the least.

Other highlights of the massive blocks of infodump are claims that the… magic ring things… are twenty thousand years old, and suggestions that Greymane is of a similar age. In Earth history, that far back humans were only just working out using pottery for storage. Also, we’re told (outright, yet again) that the artifact is lying about the consequences of using it.

I don’t know why the story is bothering to give Sabien a Body Snatcher plot device excuse, since he’s more than enough of a bastard on his own.

Or… maybe they merge, and this whole thing was just a way to make him immortal?

he had died defending the northern wall about half a years trip from the village

Ah, we have problems with scale, as well as time. Here’s the thing. Horses can travel 30-60 miles per day, depending on breed, conditioning, loads, etc. I know, ponies aren’t exactly horses, but at the low end, the numbers work out about the same for humans, so we’ll go with that. Now, with the various ways one can slice things and call it “half a year”, you generally get about 5,400 miles covered.

5,400 miles is a long way.

That’s about the distance from Athens, West Virginia to Athens, Greece.

Now that is a big country. YOU WERE SAYING, CANADA?

There are literally no good videos for this song.

And not much more happens beyond Sabien being even more of a bastard for… reasons.

And his name being spelled Sabine sometimes.

I’d pick the story apart a bit more, but it’s over.

I’m going to admit, this one was a slog. If it were a longer entry, I’m certain I’d have quit reading at precisely the 10,000th word. I know this is harsh, author, but I’m saying it this way to stress something very important:

Your story must engage the readers.

Telling is not engaging.

Flat and static characters are not engaging.

Perfect characters are not engaging.

You show very little, and tell nearly everything. All three major characters — Sabien, Greymane, and the Artifact — are very flat and static. And Greymane is so perfect Cassandra would tell him to take it down a notch.

(Also it feels so weird writing that because one of my favorite characters from my own writing is named Cassandra, but that’s just a weird coincidence. I’m sorry, I know I don’t usually do these stupid digressions in the review section, but it stuck out to me.)

Here’s the thing with telling and showing. Telling isn’t all bad. Sometimes you need to skim some bits. Sometimes Twilight’s just dithering around the tower/tree/castle (pick whichever one’s currently relevant to your interests) until heading off to do plot-relevant things with her friends (or relevant plot things with her friends, for the clop authors), and her dithering around the (INSERT CURRENT PURPLESMART RESIDENCE HERE) doesn’t add anything. It generally, won’t unless you’ve got some kind of absurdist Waiting For Godot thing going on for your story.

In those cases, it’s perfectly fine to just Tell the reader that Twilight spent the next two hours compulsively organizing her books by the average character value of the titles divided by the average character values of the author names, because alphabetical order is too mainstream. Then she was hungry and had a sandwich. I can only pray that none of that was relevant to the plot, because I’m not sure I could handle that. But the point is, there’s no reason to spend 500 words on that sort of thing by Showing it unless, Shelyn forbid, it adds something.

(Is it at all sacrilegious to quote the Christian Bible in one part of the review, and then swear by my favorite Golarion deity in a later part? I ask for purely academic interest.)

I mean, would you really want to sit through half a chapter of this?

Twilight studied the title of the tome before her. Hexes and Hauntings, it read, by one Weather Wax. She glanced over the title, her mind performing the calculations easily. It added to 194, divided by 19 letters… 10.21. She nodded and considered the author’s name. 125, which averages out to… 11.36. Which made for a final score of… 0.8985. She allowed a hint of a smile to cross her face as she slid the book into place with a slip of paper noting it’s score. She shivered with excitement at the mental math her new system would require, but her morning had just begun — an entire morning of needlessly complex arithmetic and organization. She suppressed another excited shudder and pulled Expeditious Retreat by Rides Winds from the nearest stack, but couldn’t help one as she caught sight of the next title after that — Advanced Arithmetical Thaumaturgy by Ponder Stabling. 34 characters. This was her best idea ever.

...Okay, maybe you would. But not if it was distracting you from a larger, and more important, narrative. Also, sorry if Twilight’s reactions started getting a bit strange, there. It’s just… clop is so easy to parody.

Wait, we’re on another digression. Fuck. Sorry, I shouldn’t do these at 2 AM with a wholly unreasonable amount of caffeine in my system.

My point is, or was at one point, Telling allows you to gloss over unimportant details. It doesn’t require any thought from the reader, because it just lays it all out. So it’s fine to do when Showing would be a needless distraction or bog down the pace of the work. However, when a story is nothing but telling, you run into a serious problem. Because the story just lays everything out for the reader, they don’t have to really think about it. And if they’re not thinking about your story… well, it starts becoming very, very dull, and loses impact.

As for the characters, you may wonder, how are they flat or static?

Well, some places say the two are the same, but I learned it differently. A flat character is one who is very simple, and really just shows a single character trait. I generally find that if a character can be described in a single statement, it’s probably flat.

Sabien is vicious, power-hungry, and carries a grudge against Greymane.

Greymane is Gandalf Elminster The Doctor an immortal wizard-thief who uses magic despite being an earth pony, and is a nigh-perfectly moral (and moralizing) meddler.

The Artifact is a device which grants parasitic immortality and seeks to corrupt its bearers.

I mean… as far as I saw them in this story, those statements pretty much sum up the characters. Compare them to some of the much rounder show cast.

Applejack is a loyal and hard-working farmer who worries about her family and tends to let her pride blind her to her own needs. She also has a bit of a blind spot when it comes to others’ feelings, and a tendency to try to be a caretaker whether they want it or not. She also habitually takes on far more than they can handle.

Pinkie Pie is a hyperactive and friendly party planner who just wants to make the lives of those around her a bit brighter. She’s also far more intelligent than she tends to let on, and rather insecure under her excitable exterior. She can be a bit codependent, possibly on account of leaving her family despite loving them dearly, as she realized she wasn’t really compatible with the life they lived.

I’d do more, but I think you get my point. There’s just more to the mane cast, and it helps them feel more real and be more interesting characters to follow.

Static characters, though, are defined by a lack of change. Sometimes this is fine. Sometimes a character is just a catalyst, or serves a simple role, and they don’t need to change for purposes of the plot. Sometimes they can’t change and still perform their role. The problem, like with telling, comes when this starts to dominate a story. A protagonist needs to change for a traditional story arc to work. Something about them, somehow, needs to change. This is never more true than in an origin story. The description set this up as a fall from grace, but — what fall?

Sabien was a right prick from the moment he started actually doing things. He stayed a prick through the end. Just like Greymane stayed perfect, and the Artifact stayed a plot device.

Finally, perfect characters. I keep calling Greymane perfect, and part of it is how he seems to have no foibles like the rest of the mortals, what with always giving the others moral guidance, but the majority of that is his general Mary Sue-ness. Now, Mary Sue tends to be a pretty inflammatory term to use, I think in great part due to clear definitions being rather hard to settle on. The one I like to personally use — and I think this really encapsulates the core of the problem — is that it’s the character who is important because of their capabilities, rather than their actions, particularly when those capabilities or that importance are told to use rather than shown.

Notice how, in the character summaries I wrote up when talking about flat vs round characters, AJ and Pinkie, and even Sabien and the Artifact, are defined by characteristics like their wants, their drives, and their flaws. Sabien’s is brief because he’s rather flat, while the Artifact’s is because it has so little screen time and is also fairly flat. Greymane, however, is defined by his power, because that’s what gets brought up constantly in the story. His power. His skill. His immortality. His use of hornless magic.

I suppose that’s another thing to add to my Mary Sue checklist, because it’s pretty consistent — the character who breaks the setting’s rules without good cause or justification.

Pretty much the only time things came up about Greymane that weren’t just extolling his power, they were extolling his virtue.

By the time I’ve worked out Greymane is perfect and good and will remain so, Sabien is a bastard and will remain so, the Artifact will serve to make him worse at best, and everything’s just going to be told to me straight-up… I’m left with very little drive to read further.

I covered all the major issues in my confused rambling in the Review section. My only other advice is to find an editor or proofreader to clean up the grammar and spelling, once you have a handle on the other issues.

This needs some major rework to make it more engaging, with the biggest weak points being excessive telling and poor characterization. As it stands, it:

Needs Work.

Thanks for the review, as for it being written in the way it was (and yes I do need to go back and fix things up a lot). The story itself is a side story to my main fic that I am still writing, and looking at the long description once again I do understand that I need to fix that and make it look better, while also mentioning that it is a side story. Over all I rushed in putting that out simply because I was bringing Sabien in on the main fic, and though I had mentioned him and his group a few times. I felt that I needed to bring some reason as to why Sabien acts as he does, as for the occasional misspelling of his name that is my own fault when I was looking it over.

As for reading clumped paragraphs it's not something I would read if I don't have to. Now as for the main character seeming over powered, its the creature that is with him most of the time that does this. It's an illusion to make it seem like he's not what he appears to be, he is in fact an earth pony. And him using the language from The Fifth Element, it is used to help him conceal requests and possible conversations between him and the creature.

Now I will take your advice and I'll go back over it and see what I can do about cleaning it up, as for an editor... ya call me stubborn about that. I kinda like to do my projects on my own, it's a personal flaw I need to work on severely. But again thank you for the review.

On a side note the blinding light was him using the artifact he took, as for a connection to the bible that was something I did not plan on doing. The main story I'm working on shows far more flaw with the main than Master Of Order And Balance does.

Master Of Order And Balance

Shall we call him Cygnus?

5154600 Could "Hubert" just be the bottom rating for this group? It could be used for stories that are irredeemably bad, such as the story in which Hubert appears. There is no "Needs Work" about it. It's just "Hubert."

Is it wrong that I now want to sort my own bookshelves by that numeric metric, just to see which authors fall next to each other?

5154732

Quit encouraging him!!

5160101 There is nothing encouraging when it comes to Hubert. There is only the grim determination to keep him contained and away for an innocent, impressionable public. We must have a united front against the force that is Hubert, and constant derision is the vanguard the force marches behind.