Heyo, everyone! It's me, Cyo, back with another review. So, as promised, this is the story I’m going to be looking at today:

TThe Black Sheep

• MLP: FiM
• Random
• Slice of Life

How far are four Guards willing to go to ensure the safety of the Kingdom and the Crown?

• Alt. Universe
• Celestia
• Luna
• OC
• Shining Armor
• Royal Guard

Irrespective · 33k words  ·  47  0 · 1.3k views

Longer than the previous fics I've reviewed (though I guess that's not saying much considering I've only reviewed three), but I'll try my best to adapt! ...meaning this is probably going to be a long one. Hope you don’t mind!

Also...

Some light spoilers ahead! If you want to read the story first, please do so, because it's pretty good!

A quick summary…

Every year, during their military exercises, the Royal Guard assigns one squadron to the task of attempting to foalnap Princess Celestia to test their preparedness in the event of something like this happening. Sorta like pen-testing, if anyone's familiar with that concept. For the past four hundred years, no pony has been able to, and the exercise has become a running joke to the Guard — known as the Black Sheep. Most of the squadrons assigned to the task each year don’t even bother to try anymore.

This year, though, the squadron assigned to the Black Sheep, driven by resentment at the complacency and unprofessionalism in the Guard, attempt to and successfully foalnap the Princess, sending the Guard into a frenzy. 

From this point on, we're presented with various scenes showing both the efforts of the Guard and Luna trying to find Celestia, and Celestia's conversations with each of the members of the squadron who foalnapped her. 

Review

Dangit, this story did not deserve to be tagged 'Random'.

I'm not saying that the tag isn't correct, but there were so many missed opportunities to make this story something more than what it is! Instead, what we end up with is a story that feels like it could have been much more satisfying. 

Anyway, I'll save that for later. For now, I'll judge the story on what it is. 

And what it is is… actually pretty enjoyable!

First off, the writing is solid. Irrespective writes with confidence, and the prose flows very naturally, with no awkward sentences or mistimed paragraphs that I saw. There are very few mechanical errors in the story, and almost all of those are minor enough to be unnoticeable on a regular reading. I won't go into specific recurring mistakes, because this fic is like, two years old now and I'm not quite sure how much good that's going to do. Overall, though, it's very pleasant to read.

Although, speaking of the use of words, there's quite a few military slang terms that are explained only in a glossary at the end of the first chapter. When I was reading it I had no idea what some of those terms meant — it was like gibberish, but eh, that's the military, I guess? It maybe could have been handled a little more gracefully, but it's not that big of an issue, really. 

Secondly, Irrespective's characterisation of their OC characters here is delightful. They each have distinct personalities from each other. Each of the main four is vibrant, and they rarely feel flat. Honestly, a big part of how much I enjoyed the story comes from how much I enjoyed the characters and their interactions throughout the story. This is very much a character-driven story, and the characterisation of these ponies makes it all the more compelling.

Celestia stood and crossed over to the icebox but became distracted by a letter on the floor. She picked it up, looked at the envelope, then held it up.

“Is this yours?”

“OhhorsefeathershowdidIlosethat!” Clover’s face went beet red. She was up and swiped it away from Celestia in half a second.

“What was that?” Celestia’s smirk turned mischievous. “Perhaps a love letter to a special somepony?”

“It’s…I mean, it’s not…well, it’s kind of…” Clover stammered, and the red spread to her whole head.

That's so adorable, eeeee

Though, and I’m gonna sound kinda contradictory here, the characters themselves seem kinda… lacking. They all have personalities, but, at least for some characters, there’s not much to imply that they have a deeper character underneath them. As a result, they’re enjoyable, but we don’t get to know them intimately enough to appreciate them as actual characters. Additionally, the way that Irrespective has decided to structure their arcs makes their change feel a little… disingenuous. Or at least, a little less believable.

Hope that made sense?

Also... some of the non-original characters in the story seem a little iffy. Sure, I'd believe that the Guard has gotten soft (they certainly don't seem very useful in the show). But to believe that Shining Armour would be angry at his ponies for trying to fix the problems in the Guard, considering how he got his cutie mark from wanting to protect ponies, or that both he and Luna would threaten the soldiers with punishment for following orders? Significantly more difficult. Shining Armour is a sticking point in my thoughts, actually — by the end of the story he seems almost comically villainous, and his behaviour really doesn't make much sense, in my opinion. 

In fact, there're several things in the story that don't quite make sense. Like how the Black Sheep basically takes the Princess — y'know, the one who rules all of Equestria on a day to day basis — away from her duties for an extended period of time, with no solid time limit. Can't imagine that'd be good for the country. All these plot points that don't really make sense, and characters whose actions are unjustified, all made me feel like I was reading an AU story rather than one that takes place in the Equestria of the show.

Scores

Grammar and Use of Language
Generally, good writing! There's nothing really much in the writing to distract from reading.

...good/10

Story Structure and Plot
The story has a solid idea of what it wants to do, but it has too many plotlines and too little time to explore them properly. It ends up fumbling with a poorly planned structure and messy, underdeveloped plot threads. Still, the base structure is more or less there, and it's still enjoyable.

7/10

Characters and Character Development
Charming, cute and strong character personalities make this story great, but development suffers from the same issues as the plot: there's not quite enough time to get truly familiar with them. 

7.5/10

In summary…

This is a solid story! It's a good read, and I definitely would recommend it — there's just a few missed opportunities that made this story less than it could have been. Good job for a first story, nonetheless! This story gets a 7.5/10!

Feedback for Irrespective

Man! I heard you might be rewriting this, and it'd be great if you did, because it has quite a lot of potential.

The biggest issues I have with your story stem from the characters. I know it sounds weird considering how much I praised your handling of them before, but I just feel like they’re somewhat lacking in critical ways.

So, let’s talk a little bit about characters.

A good way to start a character is by first finding their defining characteristics. And among the most important of these characteristics to immediately identify is: What does the character want? This is the most immediately obvious aspect of characters, as it’s the motivation behind almost all of the characters’ behaviours.

For your story: you might say that all of the members in the squadron want the same thing, to improve the discipline of the Guard. That’s only the external goal, though, and because we’re talking about characters, what the character wants is going to be an internal goal.

Pokey and Light Hooves both want to fulfill their ideals of serving the Guard. In regards to the plot, their actions are motivated by this desire. For the other two, though, they don’t really seem to have any particular goal that’s relevant to the plot? They take part in the action, but their actions aren’t driven by any obvious desire.

I’ll skip a few steps here in the interest of time to go to character arcs. Once you’ve established your character, the next step is figuring out how they’re going to change. The key to creating a good character arc is to first figure out the character's fundamental flaw. Or, to steal a term from K.M. Weiland's book 'Creating Character Arcs', this is the Lie Your Character Believes. 

For Pokey and Light Hooves this aspect of their characters is pretty easy to spot. Light Hooves has low confidence: he believes that he is weak, and therefore is unfit to be a Guard. Pokey is arrogant: he believes that he knows best what to do, and consulting with others, especially his superiors, about his issues would be useless. 

For the other two, though, I can’t really find this one again. At this point, well... they don't seem like main characters. Corporal Light Wings, in particular, is especially noticeable (or should it be unnoticeable?) in this case, as she's really only afforded like, one scene where she has a significant role and where her character is shown; other than that, she's kinda like a background pony. Which would be fine if the story treated her like one (though I think it'd be a waste, as you seem to have put quite a bit of effort into her personality), but she plays quite an important role in events.

I realised after thinking about it for a while that the two characters, while they definitely do have personalities (that I really enjoyed reading, no less!), they don't really have much substance to their characters. What do they value? What do they hate? What are their flaws? Their strengths? 

Here's an easy way to provide some of these answers. Just answer this question: why are they in this scheme with Pokey? They have to have some reasons to believe in the cause so strongly that their willing to risk their careers on it, and those reasons are going to be central to their characters. 

Anyway, back to character arcs. Having identified the Lie, the characters should start to accept the Truth gradually over the course of the story, and their actions should change to reflect this. This is just a basic overview of course, but it should be enough to help us find the problems your story has. Looking at the story through this lens, it becomes clear that you're missing quite a few things for the development of the characters.

Both Light Hooves and Pokey do undoubtedly change by the end of the story. The way they do so, though, is very abrupt. Pokey still lives fully under the influence of his Lie right up until the moment Celestia calls him out on it, then he almost immediately accepts this. His character changes in the span of a single conversation. Light Hooves has his change come more gradually in the chapter 'The One Who Needs a Little Help', but even here, we don't see the moment when he accepts the Truth in the gates that he heads through, as our POV is stuck inside Celestia. Because of this, the two characters' developments don't feel as impactful as they could have been.

I mentioned earlier that this story did not deserve to be tagged as Random. I get the feeling that the only reason why it is tagged like this is because of how the scenes in the story don't quite fit together in a convincing way. Luckily, a properly structured character arc produces a properly structured plot almost by extension, especially for a character-driven story like this one. Plan out how you want to develop your characters, and a good story structure will come easily. Well, easy-ish-ly, good writing is probably never going to be easy.

In summary, try to keep in mind what your characters' fundamental characteristics are when planning stories, and be clear what you want to focus on: which characters you want to develop, which plotlines you want to explore and such. There’s a reason why stories usually have only one or two main characters, after all — multiple main characters make things very difficult.

I hope this wasn’t too long or boring, and I really hope this helps! If there’s anything you disagree with, or anything that you think I haven’t explained enough, please feel free to leave a comment!

Also, to Irrespective: if you need me to go into more detail on any of the points I’ve made here, or talk more about certain characters or anything like that, feel free to ask! I’ll send you a PM or reply to the thread or something.

Thank you so much for the review!

Honestly, you nailed all of the flaws (and quite a few more besides) that I saw myself. My main guards need more development for sure, and the story is disjointed, to be blunt. I put the random tag on it for the very reason you said: the story doesn't quite fit together with itself.

And, for the record, I hate what I did to Shining at the end. That's a huge regret of mine.

I am definitely going to take your words to heart, not just for this but for my future stories as well. I I admit that my Bean stories have taken up a lot of my time, but one day I would like to give this one another shot. I may just take you up on that offer to discuss the characters one day.