Hello, all! Cyo here, hope everyone's been doing well!

Today's story is an older one — written in 2018, which is pretty old at this point It’s another one of those atmospheric, dark stories with a sorta surreal feel to it.

TDon't Look at the Fog

• MLP: FiM
• Horror
• Mystery

Twilight wakes up one day to find that things are different. Everypony is gone, and there's a persistent sheet of fog dominating all of Ponyville. But that's the least of her worries. It only escalates from there.

• Twilight

SpitFlame · 13k words  ·  71  5 · 2.6k views

Oh! Before I forget, there’s already been a review for this story by PaulAsaran. Go read that one if you’d like another opinion.

A quick summary…

The story begins innocently enough. In a scene in Sugarcube Corner, Twilight appears to be forgetting things — things like what happened an hour ago, or what she was just talking about, things like that. After some concerned questions from her friends, the story goes on to the next scene, and immediately gets weird.

The room was ponderously dark. So ominously dark, in fact, that it seemed to represent the vanquishing of all light. The heads of the pillars faded into shadows up above. Twilight had to come close to even remotely make out the dim outlines of the front double-door.

Twilight wakes up in her room in the castle, alone. The rest of the story takes place here, with her wandering around an empty Ponyville, searching for clues about what happened to everyone. These ‘clues’ come in the form of flashbacks, which slowly reveal the truth of what happened. That’s all I’m going to say for the summary — more would probably be spoilers.

Some thoughts

I have to say, this doesn’t quite feel like the usual horror fare. Nothing here is explicitly scary, it’s more just a sense of never quite knowing what’s going on. In this respect, it’s much more a Mystery story than a Horror one.

Treating it like this, it’s definitely enjoyable! It’s been a while since I’ve read a horror story where there’s an actual, solid(ish) explanation to the supernatural events happening — or at least, an explanation that has any depth to it. Be warned, though, even though I’ve said this, there is very little explanation that’s actually given — I’ve just set my bar pretty low for this.

Reading through the story, I was definitely engaged in it. Reading about Twilight trying to find out the reason for her plight, about her slowly piecing together the events that happened, had me at — well, not quite at the edge of my seat, but it certainly was suspenseful and entertaining enough that it didn’t feel like the thirteen thousand-word fic that it is.

There were a few things that stood out to me, though. 

One has to do with writing — and this issue’s also been brought up in PaulAsaran’s review of this story. Namely, there’s some very weird choices of words in this fic, which I’m not quite sure whether are intentional or not, considering the nature of the story…?

The buildings of Ponyville, previously indistinct in their own charming way, were now distinguished, each somehow individually, by an extreme sullenness. The sky looked dead in its defining features: no stars, no clouds, and neither sun nor moon. The expressive entirety of the town—strangled within the edifice of the endless fog—faded away the further one stared.

What’s “expressive entirety”? Or the buildings being distinguished by an “extreme sullenness”?

I feel like this is experimentation here — there’s enough nonsense description in this fic to be indicative of the author doing this intentionally. Still, these little descriptions are more distracting than anything, as they really draw attention to themselves. Good writing is (in my opinion, at least!) best when it goes unnoticed, or at least draws minimal attention to itself where that attention isn’t required.

The next thing has to do with the plot and the way the story progresses. If you couldn’t tell from my summary, the majority of the story comes from Twilight discovering what happened to bring her to her current situation, all of which is told in the form of flashbacks interspersed throughout the slices of present time. It’s a sort of backwards story-telling.

I’m… not a fan of this sort of story. I’ll elaborate more in the Feedback section, though. On to the scores, for now!

Scores

Quality of Writing: 7/10

Things flow nicely with few outright errors — though the weird choice of descriptions and diction in general makes things slightly awkward to read.

Story Structure: 5/10

I don’t really like how this one’s handled. It’s not really that the whole story is told through flashbacks, at least not directly — it’s that other than those flashbacks, nothing much is really happening, storywise, in the present time. More on this in Feedback, again.

Suspense and General Atmosphere: 8/10

I mentioned that this story felt more like a mystery than a horror story, which should be a good indicator that the suspense that SpitFlame managed to evoke here is pretty strong. I found myself really getting invested in finding out what happened to Twilight!

Her isolation in the abandoned Ponyville was also done very well. The sense of loneliness pervades through the entire story, and really manages to convey the hopelessness of Twi’s situation.

The reason why this one isn’t a full score, though, is that the bits with Twilight wandering around Ponyville get a little boring at times, which kinda brings the strength of tension down.

Final Score: 7.5/10

Pretty well-written story — I did enjoy reading it! Kudos for experimenting with new things, and for writing a horror story like this that actually has some semblance of plot direction. Still, the story has certain elements that don’t quite make sense to me, and kind of detract from the story at times.

Feedback for SpitFlame

So, about the mode of storytelling.

The problem here is really that everything that’s interesting and meaningful takes place in the flashbacks. Take away that, and the story doesn’t have much to offer, other than Twilight wandering around in a foggy, deserted Ponyville. It’s not quite that bad of a thing here, as it allowed you to control the sequence that we saw the events happening in. Still, I think you could have done a little more with Twilight than you did in the fic as it is.

I suppose I should get into specifics. Look at the Twilight side of the story, taking away all the flashbacks. What happens in this part of the story?

Well, for the most part, Twilight wanders around the town searching for answers. That’s the external side. On the internal side of the story, things are a little more interesting — she suffers a small little period of insane hopelessness where she blames her friends for her predicament — before discovering the truth of what happened, at which point she again accepts the power of friendship. Or, well, love, I guess, in the story’s words.

Now, look at the ending of the story, where the theme of “love transcends all boundaries” is expressed. Doesn’t it seem very weak to you? It certainly does to me, and here’s the problem — the theme is a revelation that Past Twilight had, and not Present Twilight.

In essence, Past Twilight had that revelation, and that led her to the decision that she ultimately made in the story. Present Twilight, viewing that through a flashback, could certainly have the same realisation — but it’s far less meaningful, because the circumstances that led to Past Twilight learning the theme didn’t happen to Present Twilight. It’s sorta like we’re watching Present Twi watch a movie about what happened to Past Twi.

If this doesn’t make sense to you please feel free to clarify with me about it. I get the feeling that the way I’m explaining this is far more complicated than it needs to be, but I’m not coming up with any better way to express it.

Anyway, the way to fix this issue is in the internal side of Present Twi’s story, where she’s suffering from the lack of her friends — or anypony, that is — by her side. The idea is to have her own struggle result in her learning the theme, and not simply from her watching some flashbacks. 

If the theme of the story isn’t echoed in some way in Present Twi’s journey through the abandoned Ponyville (the way it is currently), then the things that happen in that journey aren’t meaningful. In this case, the story of Past Twilight would be far more interesting than the story of Present Twilight, and you’d be better off just telling that story instead.

And that’s all, I think. I feel like my explanation of things is a little muddled today — so please do clarify if you don’t understand my gibberish at any point

No, I definitely understood your explanation. I agree that the present scenes were pretty boring and should have matched, at least thematically, the intrigue of the past scenes.

Thanks for the feedback! This was definitely an experimental one on my part, and I had no idea how it’d turn out. Hopefully I’ll keep improving.