Thank goodness for this feature.

TThe Mistakes of an Enterprising Mare

• MLP: FiM
• Romance
• Drama
• Sad

Succesful ponies are known for the things they had created and the hardships they had endured. Mayor Mare's impecable legacy is known to be an exception to that rule... or so most ponies believe, except for Princess Luna.

• Sex
• Narcotics
• Luna
• Mayor Mare
• OC
• Bat Pony

sejox · 15k words · 410 views

Hey... so... it's been a while. Over a year, in fact. To be blunt, I won't dwell on the fact that I post reviews with astounding irregularity (stole that phrase from Soge), so I'll jump right into this one. It's, uh, interesting, to say the least.

This story was a hard call for me to make. There are certain things here that were executed competently enough, and left me feeling more or less satisfied, while others just did not mix well at all. And I'm sorry to say, but there's more bad than good.

This was written for that write-from-the-perspective-of-a-cheater contest, and in this case, our filthy cheater is Mayor Mare. Thirty years ago, while trudging through the early turmoils of her career, she fell in love with her bat pony assistant. He brought home a little foal from a friend of his who died, and together they start a de facto family. But then she meets this other guy, and she hooks up with him, so to speak. There's a whole lot of back-and-forthing, almost like an emotionally masochistic love triangle, which had me thinking who in their right mind would want to go through this. I don't say this as a compliment to the story, but as a hint that it dragged on.

This story does not make a good first impression. The opening scene presents us with Mayor Mare in her house, walking around, going to her fridge, then walking back, reflecting, then to her bed—basically nothing. Nothing happens in the opening scene. I suppose its purpose was to get us up to speed on her mental state in regards to all her past relationships, which is fine, but man did it drag on. Sejox, you won't be getting many readers like this. I wanted to drop your story after the first few paragraphs. Momentum is key, something that this story lacks for the first third or so.

The characterization of both Mayor Mare and the OCs were... fine. Nothing terrible, but unfortunately nothing great. Sejox has this bad habit of trying to make us care about these characters by stacking descriptions upon descriptions of how sad they are, without establishing much of anything to make us care. Here's an example. There's this character called Lucid. I just met him, ergo I don't give a shit about him. And yet there's these long paragraphs early on about how his eyes were filled with sadness and uncertainty, how devastated he is, how his tears dampened his fur, and so on. And I'm like, "Umm, okay?" Before you even consider writing your characters in such a melancholy fashion, you need to have some groundwork. Make me care about him first, and let the prose write itself. Basically show, don't tell, but in this case it applies to storytelling. If the groundwork isn't there, no amount of descriptors will change that fact. For a lot of it I was just wasting my time.

The writing can be pretty bad too, both technical and stylistically. Just to get this out of the way, this story is in desperate need of a proper editing job, because it's positively plagues with errors of all stripes—incorrect capitalization, punctuation use, tense errors—the whole she-bang. This seriously irritated me.

Then there's the writing style itself. Characters often speak with unrealistic and forced diction, word choice can be strange and poorly timed, and in general it's a sloppy process of reading and re-reading, because many things don't add up. Let's go through some examples.

The portrait lying on the nightstand in front of her flashed a white light that didn't look like the reflection of the dim light inside the room.

This is awkwardly worded. Saying "light" twice so close to each other is repetitive.

"Without any doubt," She said, her lungs filling to the brim before expelling their content in the form of a yawn.

First of all, "she" should not be capitalized. Second, this is way too unnecessary. Just say she "stifled a yawn," or something.

There's also some blatant inconsistencies.

A light surrounded the mare, and nothing but her. She whined softly at the sudden change, her hoof rubbing her eyes as she tried to adapt to the obnoxious feeling of being trapped inside a black abyss.

So... is she surrounded by a light or a black abyss? Those two are mutually exclusive.

A lot of the dialogue is just plain stilted and awkward to read.

“It will be a perfect opportunity to show the congress your abilities,” Lucid added, “I have read several books about the issue and thought that we could start the preparation tonight. Let me make some coffee for you first, with all the fun you had you will need something to charge up your energies.”

Charge up your energies? Uh-huh.

And just because:

The sound of hooves clopping desperately through the room echoed through the dreamscape.

This line is hilarious—for all the wrong reasons.

Characters can act pretty dumb as well. Why was Lucid apparently okay when he caught Mayor Mare cheating the first time, but the second time he was like, "Know what? Screw you, I'm leaving." Is he bipolar, of what? And why couldn't Mayor Mare just choose Lucid over Star, if she was clearly happier with Lucid? The whole development felt very artificial, all for the sake of pushing some theme.

With all that said, the best thing about this story is the actual plot itself. Surprising, I know. The first half was very boring—I couldn't care less with that whole subplot involving the Apple and Rich family—but towards the second half (more precisely the last third), I was sort of invested. Several scenes were genuinely compelling in their own right. My favourites were all the scenes with the little kid, because it introduced the whole family dynamic that I'm fond of. I found the kid telling Mayor Mare and Lucid to kiss very charming.

I also liked the little tidbits of lore added, for example, the idea that bat ponies are naturally aloof and stoic, and Luna (or was it Celestia?) teaches them to be more socially integrated. It was even thematically appropriate considering the style of romance this story seemed to be aiming for.

The ending was alright, I guess. I expected it.

The whole story structure here is quite solid. The whole dreamscape device, where they flipped through the different memories like TV channels, was cool. The plot itself becomes much more compelling the further you read, and several scenes stuck out to me. Unfortunately this story is severely bogged down by far too many instances of bad writing. The prose is annoying to read, the dialogue was awkward, the pacing inconsistent, and the filler-y bits, which seemed wholly unnecessary considering the final outcome, did not help.

My advice is as follows: cut back on the wordy prose, focus more on natural characterization over rushed dramatization, and get better editors. I really hate to do this, because I see clear potential in this story, but my final verdict is a 4/10. Tough.

P.S. Sorry if the quality of this review is not up to par with my previous ones. I'm writing this pretty late and I'm tired.

Holly Molly. This is the first time someone makes a proper review of my work, and a good one to be honest.

There were several issues for me while doing this fic Yet all things explained here are the truth. I was aware of the rushed drama and that the start was slow; but I have yet to improve and amend those issues in future stories.

Thanks for your review, I'll make sure to give it a good use and learn from it.

6951725
Happy to help.