TMy Little Pony: The Pyres of Friendship

• MLP: FiM
• Adventure
• Comedy
• Drama

A crossover fic between MLP and Pyre, by Supergiant Games

• Crossover
• Twilight
• Spike
• Main 6
• Starlight Glimmer

Scribe of the Nightwings · 159k words  ·  32  3 · 1.7k views

When Twilight awakes in a land that is completely unfamiliar to her, she meets three strangers that will help her if she help them to their freedom. Along the way, Twilight will come across new friends and enemies and eventually find that her other friends made it to this strange land as well. Will Twilight and her friends be able to find their way back to Equestria, or will they be forever doom to the Downside.
Let the Rites begin!

Oh, dear, a crossover. There’s nothing bad about that! I just get very iffy around them In my personal experience, there are many ways for them to go wrong, very few for them to go right.

Setting and Plot

Okay, so, prior to this story, I had never heard of the game Pyre and I think that really coloured my view on how the story was going to play out. I started reading it with no knowledge of the game and its mechanics, and I’ll be completely honest: it was really easy to see where Scribe was describing the game mechanics early on and I got incredibly bored halfway through them and skipped the rest until Twilight and co. were back in the real world.

Speaking of the real world, the setting of the story itself, namely the world of Pyre, is interesting; as someone who didn’t know what the Downside or the Commonwealth was, I was really intrigued by the lore behind why the Downside is essentially the Commonwealth’s dumping grounds, but I got little to no answer. Maybe that’s how it was portrayed in the game, but it felt very lacking. In addition to that, there was little to no explanation or hint towards what might’ve caused the Pyre-native characters to end up in the Downside, although it is very well possible that there was some explanation why and I merely skipped over it That’s what happens when stories bore you.

Now the rites as trials for Twilight and the Nightwings to overcome were interesting at first, but by the third rite, I was pretty much over it. Judging from the fact that there are 8 Scribes within the Pyre universe, it’s not hard to guess that Twilight would have to guide the Nightwings through 8 rites, and at some point, it becomes very repetitive and I was skipping full paragraphs to get past the rites themselves. This could be the fault of trying to translate the game design into writing, but it doesn’t mesh well, especially since the story takes a very “hands-off” approach to describing Twilight’s journey and struggles. Again, it could be a side-effect of trying to convert a game into a story where presumably the player also has a hands-off attitude towards the main characters and controlling them during the rites, but overall it can bore a reader pretty fast if they had little interest in the story or game mechanics themselves I’ll talk more about the detachment in the next section, since it’s very closely tied to how the characters were written in the story.

Rating: 5.5/10

Character Exploration

Oh boy, where do I start? There are many things I can say about how Scribe wrote the characters in Pyres of Friendship, and unfortunately, not a lot of them are very positive. I do fully admit that it’s very likely that a lot of my opinions towards this story was soured by how it wasn’t my cup of tea. Alright, let’s get this over with

So, most of my grievances settle with Twilight, or rather, how she’s portrayed and written in the story. She comes off as pretty flat because of the whole “hands-off” approach in the writing style. Take this example from The Rite of the Withdrawn Mystics:

“AND LOOK AT THAT! ANOTHER ONE FROM YOUR WORLD HAS BEEN DUMPED HERE IN THESE FORSAKEN LANDS. QUITE THE “UNIQUE” LOOK SHE HAS THERE.”

“Hey, what’s that suppose to mean?” Rainbow angrily yelled at the sky. “I’m probably look twenty percent cooler than you’ll ever look like, you weird…invisible, voice in the sky!”

“HMPH. ONLY TWENTY PERCENT? HOW QUAINT.”

Rainbow was about counter the Voice’s condescending remark, but Twilight stopped her and told her friend that it wasn’t worth it. The pegasus grumbled and looked down to the ground.

Twilight is essentially one of the core mediators in the Main 6, and Scribe does sort of show that in their portrayal of her in their story. Emphasis on “sort of.” In the example above, we don’t even see how Twilight tells Rainbow to knock it off, only that she does. Wording is a very important part in dialogue, because how a character says an idea or gets a point across can tell the reader (no pun intended) what the character is like. But here, Scribe just tells it how it is, that Twilight did something and that something worked, but that has a side-effect of Twilight having little to no personality, and they do this repeatedly throughout the entire story so far. The writer in me who loves to focus on and read about how characters feel about certain things or situations is crying in agony at the missed opportunities to share Twilight’s thoughts

Not only that, but at some point, Scribe introduces things or parts of Twilight’s character just because it’s convenient to the plot at that very moment, which can make things really jarring for the reader. One example of this is Twilight’s sudden inability to act under pressure, seen in The Rite of Dissenting Attitudes:

After the field reset, Twilight moved Ti’zo ahead in hopes that she could banish all of the adversaries at once just as before. However, it appeared that Barker was expecting this and maneuvered around the Imp and banished him with an aura cast. With Ti’zo banished and Hedwyn out for the round, Mae was the only Nightwing out to stand against the three Dissidents. Twilight panicked for a moment and tried to come with a strategy for the moon-touched girl until Ti’zo returned from the temporary banishment. In this moment of hesitation, one of the Cur adversaries had picked up the orb and now was rushing the Nightwings’ pyre. Twilight tried to have Mae cast her aura in defense, but the Cur quickly passed the orb to Barker, who then rushed around the girl and jumped into the blue flames. Twilight stamped her hoof in frustration for falling for such a simple trick.

. . .

The alicorn then decided to offer her congratulations to the triumvirate, and a few apologies as well. “Great work, you guys,” she began. “They almost had us there in the end, but we showed them what for!” Twilight’s cheery mood then began to dower a little. “I’m sorry if I sort of…hesitated a bit during the middle. Sometimes I have a bit of an issue when working under tense circumstances. I promise to work on that for next time.”

Okay, so Twilight is insecure and freezes up when really stressed. That’s a part of Twilight’s character that could be great in terms of story-telling because that has so many implications on when it could pop up and the possible ways that she could overcome this hurdle of hers, but, that made me think: Where was this hesitation in her very first rite? Twilight would’ve been under way more stress since she had little to no prior experience of working through a rite with actual stakes at hand, yet she’s able to do it without a nervous breakdown in sight. It took me so far out of the story’s immersion that I don’t think I was able to properly re-immerse myself again And unfortunately, that kind of immersion is what authors want to happen. As far as I can tell, Pyre is a very niche game with a niche fandom, so hooking the reader’s attention and holding fast to it would be even more important. Actions such as introducing character traits just for the sake of the current plot can shatter the atmosphere in second

Also, Twilight is remarkably bad at remembering the fact that she not only has magic but seemingly still has all her magic. She was freaking out over Pinkie Pie falling at breakneck speeds and forgets that she has magic to use to slow the party pony down, magic that she used on one of her other friends to a relatively high degree of success! Twilight, you have a brain, please use it

Rating: 3/10

Grammar, Formatting, and Consistency

I’m going to tackle consistency first; Scribe did pretty well in this category! As far as I can tell, they have remained consistent in their formatting, capitalization, proper nouns, etc. Formatting was also done well, although it irked me slightly to see the Voice’s lines centred instead of aligned to the left, but it does mimic an overhead text box in a game. It was a little bit jarring to have the musical cues, but I understand how they can give more depth to the atmosphere; personally, I didn’t listen to them because I was often in situations where I couldn’t listen to the musical cues at the same time as I read.

And here comes the grammar I’m not sure exactly what was going on, but every once in a while, it’d just feel like there was a word missing from a sentence. My best guess is that the story was being written down via voice-to-text and these little errors were skimmed over during edits. While I can’t find an example right away to demonstrate this, they do appear several times in the story

Some spelling also needs to be checked over, like in the blurb:

When Twilight awakes in a land that is completely unfamiliar to her, she meets three strangers that will help her if she help them to their freedom. Along the way, Twilight will come across new friends and enemies and eventually find that her other friends made it to this strange land as well. Will Twilight and her friends be able to find their way back to Equestria, or will they be forever doom to the Downside.
Let the Rites begin!

There’s some corrections that need to be made, mostly just changing some punctuation and making sure that verbs are spelled correctly to go along with their subjects.

When Twilight awakes in a land that is completely unfamiliar to her, she meets three strangers that will help her if she helps them to their freedom. Along the way, Twilight will come across new friends and enemies and eventually find that her other friends made it to this strange land as well. Will Twilight and her friends be able to find their way back to Equestria, or will they be forever doom to the Downside?
Let the Rites begin!

Consistency: 10/10
Formatting: 8.5/10
Grammar: 6.5/10
Overall: (10+8.5+6.5/3)/10 = (25/3)/10 = 8.3/10

My Little Nitpicks

Magical Mystery Mare
Twiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiilight, you have magic! Use it!

It’s rite, right?
Oh boy, another rite. Here we go again I wonder what trials Twilight will face next... and when it’ll finally start feeling like there are stakes.

Kindness Ex Machina
Yay, Fluttershy?

Mae the Moontouched
The Moontouched sound like a very interesting bit of lore! It’d be great to see how the discrimination towards them affected Mae in her upbringing and mentality

Final Thoughts

A good story with a great setting, but ultimately couldn’t keep me hooked Some things just aren’t my cup of tea, and Pyres of Friendship is one of them.

Final rating: (5.5+3+8.3/3)/10 = (16.8/3)/10 = 5.6/10

Hmm, okay then.

First, I would like to thank you for taking the time to review my story and writing a good in-depth review of it.

Overall, I think your review has good criticisms of the story, and where I can start looking into first for improvement. I think the biggest eye opener for me was the Character section. Twilight is one of my favorite characters of the show and the hypothetical thought of her going through something like the game's plot was one of the inspirations for this fic. The last thing I would want to do would to write her as flat, because we all know that she's much more than that. So in the future, I'm going to try and keep Twilight in a more solidified state of being and try not to have her act a certain way for the sole sake of the plot.

Aside from that, the other points you've made I think will help with the foundation of the story. I'll try to make the Rites a bit more dynamic and less hands off from Twilight. I am aware that I'm translating game mechanics to writing and I think that's definitely a work in progress for me. (I will say though that I think I am slowly improving with it, compared to my earlier chapters.) It's also nice to know that I'm doing okay with grammar, aside from the occasional slip-ups.

With all that said, I thank you again for an honest critique of my fic. I'm definitely going to continue with it in hopes that it improve as it progresses, and maybe go back and make a few edits to my previous chapters. It is going to be rather long based on my plans, so I want to make sure that it goes uphill from here. It is slowly gaining traction with views, likes and comments, so I think that's a good sign that the story has potential. Every comment, good or bad, helps me in creating a story that a can feel proud about writing.

It may have not been your cup of tea, but I still thank you for taking a sip anyway so that I can improve on the recipe!