Imagine if one day, while walking along the street, you found the entire world dissolving around you, to be replaced with an alien landscape in which you were utterly, terrifyingly alone.

Well, that’s the premise of today’s story.

TWorlds Reset

• MLP: FiM
• Adventure
• Sci-Fi

The world she once knew is gone, replaced by an infinite canvas.

• Death
• Alt. Universe
• OC
• Other

TheMajorTechie · 11k words  ·  29  4 · 611 views

This story is, as of the time of writing, incomplete. In fact, there’s little of substance as of now beyond the opening sequence — the story hasn’t progressed far beyond the first major plot point. There’s still stuff to talk about here, though, so buckle up and let’s get started!

The premise of Worlds Reset is this story’s strongest suit. It’s hardly a new or original one, but there’s something about such a grand and existential opening that really captures the imagination. In that respect, the introduction of the story is great — beginnings need to draw interest, and this one draws a heck of a lot of that!

In fact, I feel like a big part of why I’m so intrigued by this story is because of that opening, and the setting that this story presents. The sheer alienness of the world here and the mystery that surrounds it make for a really interesting draw!

Beyond this wild opening, things take a turn for the weirder. It’s actually surreal enough that explaining things in a short summary would be pretty difficult, but I’ll try.

Amber, our protagonist of this story, finds herself in a universe of white, blank nothingness. She constantly feels like her whole body is getting burned, until she instinctively manages to conjure a protective shield around herself. As she begins to explore her hostile new world, she finds another pony, charred and burnt beyond recognition, but still alive. She takes the pony into her care, teaching the pony about the mechanics of magic in this place as they continue to explore the new world.

After some time, they come across another similar bubble to the shield that Amber conjured, except that this one is, as the story says, “not a bubble, but somepony’s mind”. After befriending the host of the bubble, Minty Chips, Amber finds a menacing, dark bubble expanding in close proximity to the one she’s in. After some panic, the burnt pony reveals herself to be one of Amber’s rivals from the past and unleashes a spell that manages to shrink the dark bubble down to a harmless, marble-sized ball. She then leaves Amber with Minty, conjuring her own bubble and walking away.

In the most recent chapter, Amber and Minty come across a huge, looming bubble. They are greeted by a screaming, burning pony who dies in front of their eyes. Resolving to find out more about the situation, Amber decides to enter the huge bubble with Minty, where they find a scene of a crowd of ponies committing various acts of self-harm. This is the point where the updates have ended, as of now.

That’s one heck of a surreal story.

I’ve done my best to keep things descriptive while still being brief, but it’s… quite difficult to do so for this story, as you can probably see. Now, following this summary, those of you sufficiently familiar with my writing style in these reviews can probably tell what I’m gonna say next.

Rapid pacing and flow of information

The pacing of this story thus far is fast. It barely lets one bit of information sink in before introducing the next three! From the event in the beginning of the story — Amber’s world dissolving before her eyes — to her discovering how magic works in this place, to her creating her bubble, to her finding Ruby, there is only the short span of roughly 1.6k words.

The problem with this is that it becomes very hard to get invested in anything when the story doesn’t sit still for more than a few hundred words at a time. Things just happen, but they don’t seem to mean very much to Amber — or at least, it doesn’t feel that way. Amber’s world as she’s known it for years disappears from right under her, and she should feel some grief, fear and loss; but we barely see that before she begins experimenting with the new magic of this world and creating her bubble. At this point, she presumably should feel victorious and hopeful; but again, we barely see that before she finds Ruby knocking outside her bubble.

This problem exists throughout the entire story, to quite harmful effect. The most direct issue is that it’s difficult to absorb everything that’s happening in the story, because new information is thrown at us so quickly. For me, it got difficult to both absorb everything that’s happening, and incorporate those events into my understanding of the new world that TheMajorTechie presents, which made the worldbuilding much less effective, and less believable.

A less obvious problem is that it gets difficult to care about what happens in the story as a whole, because of all the processing time that the fast pace of information needs. When I was reading, I spent a lot of the time trying to understand what was going on, and less of the time figuring out how I actually felt about what was going on.

That’s one of the more obvious problems with the story, and a large part of why I didn’t enjoy it as much as I could have. But there’s also another problem that might become more important in the future, though it’s not quite as obvious at this moment.

Shallowness of character exploration

Amber, our main character in this story, is a young schoolfilly. She’s adventurous and rebellious, prideful and competitive. But she’s also capable of kindness, willing to help those obviously in need of help.

Beyond that, though, I know nothing about her.

Now, this is a problem that’s not so important at the present progression of the story. We don’t need to know a character intimately at the beginning of the story, where we’re still getting introduced to the world and everything that’s happening. It’ll get much more important down the line, though, hear me out on this.

When I was reading through the story, I found it really difficult to get behind Amber and anything she was doing. Sure, the world interested me, but I found that I didn’t really get invested in her, or what was happening to her. I thought about it for quite a while, and this is what I think it is.

Take a look at the character summary above. What do you see?

Well, what I see is that it’s short. And not only that, it’s very general, surface-level stuff. She’s prideful and competitive, but there’s no indication of to what extent. She’s adventurous and rebellious, but these are traits which are cliches for characters of this age and upbringing. The last sentence is the only indication of deeper character, taken from the scene where she enters Minty’s bubble to help her. But even this is non-specific, because so little time is spent on that event that it’s difficult to really tell what that says about her.

It’s really a shame, because the story that’s being presented here seems great!

Final Score: 5/10
The setting and plot are really interesting! But, at the same time, the story fails on some fundamentals that made it really difficult for me to enjoy it. If you don’t mind those stuff, and the description of the premise interests you, go ahead and give it a read! It promises to be quite a wild ride

Here’s a shorter review after last week’s ultra long one. But it’s also a shorter story, so I guess it’s warranted. Also I did kinda rush this one out after realising that my weekly deadline is today, so that might have something to do with it too

Anyways, hope y’all have a great week ahead, everyone!

7179109
Thanks for the review! I've honestly found Worlds Reset to be one of the hardest stories to write out of my current lineup, just because of how different it is from what I normally write. It's still more or less a writing experiment, and updates have (and still are going to be) really slow until I figure out how the heck I even write what I want to write next.