EThe Greatest Spell I know

• MLP: FiM
• Slice of Life

After being shown Friendship by Twilight and her friends, Luster Dawn had quit the School of Magic and moved to Ponyville to stay with her friends. However, Twilight still wants to hear about her best student's lessons from time to time.

• Twilight
• Luster Dawn

Lil Penpusher · 2.9k words  ·  91  5 · 2.7k views

Summary: For most of her life, Luster Dawn had ignored friendship. After all, it was nothing but a waste of time, right? You'd make friends, spend a lot of time together and eventually it would all fall apart again. It was for the best to stay alone.

That was before Princess Twilight herself showed her real friendship. She and her friends were the living examples of true, everlasting friendship. And sure enough, as they brought Luster to Ponyville, she quickly met new creatures and made friends.

That was all months ago though. By now, she had quit the School of Magic, with the blessing of the Princess, so she could move to Ponyville and attend the School of Friendship instead. After all, the most powerful magic there is was friendship, right? But most importantly, of course, moving to Ponyville meant staying together with her new group of friends, and even attending classes together!

However... there was a catch. Princess Twilight didn't just let her quit the School of Magic and move away, she demanded something in return. She demanded of Luster to come visit her four times a year in Canterlot and tell her of all her new discoveries in the field of friendship.

This was the first time she had to go and report on her experiences, and she wasn't quite sure how it would go.

Initial thoughts: First of all, this summary is way too long, and basicially you already know what the story is going to be about. The summary is meant to hook you into reading the story, not tell you the story before you read it. I think the summary as a whole could be condensed into "Luster Dawn goes to report her findings about the Magic of Friendship and discovers much more than she ever knew." and that's all you'd need. All this explanation will either have the effect of making those curious enough to continue or just going "meh" and pass on the story as a whole. Try to remember this. As for the story itself, it's a good quality slice of life about Twilight and Luster Dawn in a calm and peaceful setting, but there are a few issues with it overall, which I will get into. 7/10.

What I liked: The bond forming between Twilight and Luster. I never really felt like Celestia was really that close to Twilight, so the fact Twilight is doing her best to ensure her student doesn't fall down the path she could've is heartwarming. The execution is well done, and written with feelings, which is what this kind of story really needs.

What I didn't like: Luster Dawn's scroll. Why would she write this? Luster Dawn was very blunt about her feelings in the final episode so her writing out the scroll seems unnecessary exposition. Also there really was no point for the inclusion of the scroll Twilight reads for it doesn't provide anything to the story and is just filler.

Grammar: The grammar is written well from what I can tell. There's nothing major that stuck out to me. 9/10.

Characterzation: Twilight is written well, and Luster is written fairly well, there's just this feeling that Luster would speak out her feelings rather than confining it to a letter, so to me this feels just a bit "ooc" but since this is a character we only really see once, I can see why Lil Punisher might have saw reason to have her write out it instead of saying it. 9/10.

Story/Concept: It's a simple, and enjoyable quaint slice of life. There's no "weight" to the story like a giant dragon attacking the village, but the story has a lot of feelings to it. It's the emotions that captivate you and make you feel all warm and fuzzy by the end of it. 9/10

Overall thoughts: I enjoyed this story, however like I said there are a few things, mainly the scrolls that could have been done just a bit better. It doesn't make this a bad story, just holds it back from being a "masterpiece" of a slice of life you could reread and never tire of. This is a story I think you read once and go "aww" so sweet, but then move on to more interesting things. 8/10

Final score: 7+9+9+9+8=42/50
8.5/10

To Lil Punisher: Be sure to leave the story open for your readers. Giving away the whole story in the description is not a good thing. You want to have that as a "hook" to get them to read it, so for the next one make it short, and let your reader imagine what might happen. Which often can lead to an even more enjoyable experience. Also, I really like the emotional feeling in this story and that is something I give kudos for. Keep being awesome.

Thanks for taking your time to review! I'll make sure to take your advice into account for my future endeavours. While I can definitely see your point with Luster and the scroll, I personally think both points of view work here. You could make her into someone who isn't afraid to speak up, or someone who is really afraid of speaking in public, which is what I decided to go with. In the story, I tried to be reasonable with why she would be like this, such as becoming timid due to having isolated herself from others for a long time. The Scroll itself was a way for me to enable a believing end to the story with the character I decided to paint for Luster, while also being a very nice throwback to the early days of the Show, with Twilight being the Student and whatnot.

Keep being awesome.

Hah, ya betcha.