Shattered Rainbow by TheMajorTechie

Overall Rating: 5/10
Needs Work

First Impressions
I like the synopsis. Short. Sweet. And it paints a wonderful picture of what sad feels lie within without revealing anything specific about the contents. And the picture it paints is… familiar. If I were to guess, I would say you’re going to have Rainbow Dash wake up from the matrix at some point. That’s a well traveled road you’re taking, so you’ll need to do a bit of work to make this yours. Let’s dive in and see if you’re up to the challenge.

Diving in, we open with a very Morpheus-esque breakdown of a few otherwise unrelated items, which seem to be leading toward the idea that Rainbow Dash has been in the matrix her whole life, if she can even call it that. And then it just ends there. Very brief, not the cleanest of prologues. More of a second synopsis than anything else. This is shaping up to be a very average story, indicative of a fledgling with dreams of soaring high, but who hasn’t grown in his flying feathers yet.

The Good
After Celestia and Gadget both seperately make themselves known, things start to actually get interesting. I was able to ignore the fast pacing because I wanted to see what was next. You’ve got a really tasty looking mystery on your hands here. It’s not unique in its design, but so far ambiguity is on your side. This could shape up to be a wonderful story if you polish up the first half.

The Bad
Alright, there’s a lot wrong with this, so I’ll try to highlight just the biggest issues. As usual my first prediction is correct, in that you’re clearly new at this, despite having great ideas. As Jim Butcher plainly put it “A good author can make a bad idea into a good story. Likewise, a bad author can make a good idea into a bad story.” Though in this case I think you’d prefer the term “inexperienced. And I see from one of your author’s notes that you’re also new to this genre.

Your first issue is pacing. While comedies are often quick paced and energetic, sad and/or mysteries need a much slower approach. You’re dealing with very subtle, yet potent emotions here. You need to slow down, let them settle, and pay attention to the little details. A lot of these scenes feel very rushed, like you couldn’t wait to get to the point. I’m going to offer you a challenge: Whatever payoff or punchline you’re waiting to drop, wait, for the opportune moment.
Try to put as much detail, thought, emotion, reaction, rash action, confusion, puzzling, imagining and deliberating as you can between the setup, and the delivery. You need to slow down your story. It’s moving too fast.

Another issue you have is showing vs telling. This goes hand in hand with pacing, and if you fix this you’ll likely fix the pacing. Too many times you simply tell the reader that Rainbow Dash is being cocky, or that the audience is enjoying themselves, or that Rainbow Dash is excited or has a dream. Or that she’s horrified or scared. You need to let the reader understand this more fully by showing the response to those reactions, and allowing the collective clues point to the answer you want them to find. This will also add more detail, and more words, and slow the story down so that things can resolve inside the reader’s mind. You can always trim the fat later. Right now you’re looking very skinny.

Proofreading. They weren’t as frequent as some I’ve seen, but you’ve got many, many misspellings, punctuation errors, and missing… stuff, littered throughout this story. I see you’ve had plenty of prereaders. Find an editor this time. Clean this up.

During the hospital scene you briefly stumble into an omniscient narration, and a sloppy one at that. You opened with third person limited. It would be good to stick to that until you understand better how to use third person omniscient.

Your character interactions feel less like real characters talking to other characters, and more like stand in narrators taking turns explaining what’s happened to the reader. People are complicated. Do some research, read some books, learn how medical facilities operate, watch some movies where people wake up from a coma, learn about the way people often react to life overturning events like this. Probably the closest scene to reality is the one where Rainbow and Spectrum land on Sweet Apple Acres, and Apple Bloom shoots at them, but that one’s easy because it’s a stereotypical southern farmer thing to do. Research. Learn. Grow.

Nitpicks
Don’t use the author’s note to ask if you’re doing this right. It’s distracting and does nothing for the reader. That’s what people like me are for. And if you fixed something then delete the bloody author’s note!

One does not “soar” vertically. Soaring is the act of riding on high altitude windcurrents without the use of flapping, and is limited to birds with special soaring feathers like eagles, hawks, condors, cranes, ravens, albatross, ospreys, and gulls. But that’s just the bird brain in me talking.

Rainbooms are like exclamation points. They’re awesome and expressive, but lining up more than one is just silly. I get that it’s a dream, but it still just feels like you’re taking Hasbro’s marketing approach of “They like x, so quadrupling the amount of x will make them like it four times more”. This works great for children, but it’s unimaginative, and lazy writing. You’re trying to claim that Rainbow’s “dream” was the show, so stick to what’s possible in the show.

I hope this helped. Feel free to respond here or PM me if you have any questions, though at the moment I can't guarantee a swift response. Good luck on fixing up and completing this and as always: Never Stop Writing.