Pony-Me™ by TheMajorTechie

I've been meaning to read this story since I made my review of the side story to this story. This story tells the story of Twilight/Lisa Garnet waking up from a simulation of Equestria. Something I found that was nice was that each chapter early on was a bite-sized little chunk of a story. While I tend to write rather verbosely and would never even conceive of having a chapter of a story, let alone a story be under 5K words I can see the appeal of this because the length of the chapters entice further reading in a “just one more chapter” kind of way due to them being so short. (I can’t put this as a criticism due to this being unrelated to the actual content of the story but going by the release schedule the chapters start to get farther apart in publishing so if this story continues for a while longer the bite-sized appeal will start to go away as this is a story that is best binged on) Lets get into some meat and potatoes of this review. Starting about halfway through the story things start to take a dark turn, and it's right up my alley. One thing that made me happy was the mental problems that came with Twilight trying to figure out just what she wants to do, live in the real world or return to the simulation. The inability to differentiate between the person outside of the simulation and the one in it was fairly reminiscent of the Assassins Creed bleeding effect where the simulated past begins to affect the present. Something else I found to be a nice aspect of the story was the use of “the girl” instead of Twilight or Lisa at certain times during the story. If this was done intentionally to convey a fractured sense of self-identity, this is an example of good writing.

Now time for the criticisms. Anyone that gets to know me will quickly learn I love me my realism, so the food shortage at the beginning was at best an interesting concept seeing as people would need to be logged off to get help with making food, and at worst it was a total contrivance on the authors part to add conflict/intrigue. What makes it worse is this; several entire towns are starting to starve, there isn't enough food, there aren't even crops in the ground. This sounds like this will be fairly important and be the start of an entire sub plot. NOPE! This plot thread doesn’t really go anywhere and is “technically” resolved but it was done so very hand wavey and unsatisfyingly. The second critique I have would be that the Profesor doesn't seem to be that invested in Lisa. I know he loves her but he always seems to keep her at arms reach. Every situation I keep reading where they interact doesn't come across as father-daughter but more like work partners/colleagues. While this might be what the author might be trying to do it feels off given the bedroom scene and then the flashback in the car. Continuing on, the Samantha/Pinkie conflict seemed to have resolved a little too fast. It went from “I hate you!” to “friends” a little too fast for my taste. The transition just didn't feel organic. Mentioning thing happening too fast, let's talk about the pacing. This story is written in a way that isn’t my go-to reading/writing style. It's well paced, just a little fast for my liking, let me explain. The stories I tend to write take tens of thousands of words to say what happened in one day, many of my favorate stories do similar things. This one takes place over the course of a few weeks in around the same amount of words. This isn’t a bad thing, just that my tastes are for more long-haul stories that take the time to really sit down and examine things; eg. bring the story to an almost grinding halt to go over some things.

Now, let’s have some fun talking about endings. Ending 1: good idea, to short. I know TheMajorTechie, your old enemy come back to haunt you. Here's the thing, this ending probably needed a few thousand more words for a good satisfying ending, in my opinion, because as it stands, all this ending does is serve as an introduction to a premise and not as a satisfying conclusion to the story. All we are given is “Twilight is having trouble reconnecting with the word, recognizes it's a simulation now, and Pinkie is no more.” No exploration on what this means, no look into the future and the consequences the disconnect and realization of the simulation have on her, nothing. It feels like I watched one of those animated youtube movies by TheCGBros, A nice story to be sure, but leaving me desperately wanting more. [FYI, that's not what a good ending does.]

As an aside, I now have a better understanding of what the heck happened in Fog On The Window and why it all mattered. I will say, I was disappointed to find out that a fairly significant portion of Fog On The Window was just straight ripped from this story.

I saw Guest chapter slots were still open according to an author’s note at the end of a chapter. This got me thinking, perhaps I should try my hand at it. Single-handedly be responsible for about a sixth of the story in one chapter.

Final score:

Plot: 8/10 this is a well written story that knows exactly where it wants to go. if you can look past some of the issues I have mentioned I figure that you will have a good read on your hands.

Characters: 9/10, while The individuals in the story aren't perfect they are exactly what I expect to see from the cannon cast with the new characters are well written. I would have prefered to have seen more written on them but the author has their own style of writing, and as I have established I like long, slow stories.

Concept: 8/10, the premise was well implemented, besides the fast pacing preventing a deep dive on the world and the one oddplot thread that goes nowhere, this was done very well

Binge-ability: 10/10, this is the type of story You want to read in one sitting due to how short the chapters are and how it keeps up a quick pace.

Total 35/40 or 8.75/10. There is a reason this story has a higher rating than my best one at time of review. This story shows the care and love that goes into a story that an author is passionate about. Hope to more work like this in the future.

6706748
Thanks for the review!

If you noticed, many of the more recent chapters have become considerably longer, but in exchange often use multiple scene transitions to keep the same pacing as the original chapters. That way, there's more for the reader each time, but in a way that's a bit more satisfying.

6706751
I did. just make sure you don't start venturing into my length of chapters too fast. You have a good thing going with the smaller chapter sizes. Only write the chapter length you want. I subscribe to the philosophy that every chapter of a story should be its own mini story; with a rising action, climax, falling action, and conclusion, you don't have to do that. Write the length you want to tell.

6706772
Yup. I'm currently comfortable in the 2-4k word chapter lengths I have going.