EMy Faithful Student

• MLP: FiM
• Dark
• Drama
• Random
• Sad
• Tragedy

Princess Celestia and the Mane 5 experience heartbreak as their friend Twilight enters a potentially fatal coma.

• Alt. Universe
• Celestia
• Luna
• Trixie
• Main 6

Darkblaze15 · 13k words  ·  75  9 · 5.4k views

Hey, hey, hey! Back again for another review, I see? Awesome! Today we’ve got a story about sadness and hidden love. We’re talking about JohnDarkblaze15 (wow that is a long name)’s My Faithful Student. The story is fairly straightforward and takes place after the episode Party Pooped. Let’s hit it. 

So the plot as a whole isn’t really complicated: Twilight is badly hurt and in a coma, and nobody knows if she’ll ever wake up again. It’s something that’s been done before, but the author of this story focuses it around Princess Celestia rather than her friends.

There are a lot of implications that Celestia cares for Twilight greatly, to the point where she thinks of her maybe even more than a student. And whew, there are a lot of implications. One of the things I had an issue with in this story is that it really does feel like there’s a lot of repetition going around.

Here’s a passage from Chapter Three:

Princess Celestia could not argue with that, so she notified one of her guards to ready her carriage when suddenly, a scroll appeared in green smoke in front of Celestia, surprising her. Before she left Ponyville, she had asked Spike to notify her of any updates to Twilight's condition, but she certainly hadn't expected anything so soon. She opened it and it simply read, "Twilight being moved to Canterlot Hospital, transport team should be here this afternoon"

Princess Celestia gave a small sigh of relief; the hospital facility in Canterlot was more advanced than the one in Ponyville, as it possessed more technologically-advanced equipment, monitors, and specializes in unicorn injuries. Ponyville Hospital was a very good facility, but she knew Twilight would be receiving the best care possible at Canterlot Hospital. Added to that, they also had highly-appraised transportation services, who took the best of care in moving patients in or out of the hospital. She bade her sister farewell and good luck as she made her way over to the Canterlot Hospital.

So what we have here are three paragraphs that basically just tell us that Twilight is being moved to the Canterlot Hospital, where she will receive better care. But… is this relevant information? Do we need to know exactly why Canterlot has a better hospital than Ponyville?

To me it feels like we don’t. And this type of thing happens a few times throughout the story. For example, Cadence and Shining Armor appear, and it feels like for every instance they do, the author reminds us that they’re married.

This story isn’t so long to the point where characters don’t appear very often, so I’m not sure if this level of repetition is truly necessary. As a whole, it does end up to drag the plot down a little bit, as it feels like I’m being constantly presented with the same information without the story really moving anywhere.

The next point I can make is a classic: show don’t tell. This story is supposed to be emotional, but a lot of the time it just feels factual and neutral. Instead of being in Celestia’s head, we instead have a bunch of neutral statements that do a lot of explaining and justifying, and we don’t really get much from the characters themselves.

So as it stands, the emotionality of this piece is kind of buried, which really does suck since the potential is there. 

The characters here are… interesting. In the early chapters, there is a line where the main six minus Twilight take turns talking, yet each line sounds exactly the same, and there isn’t anything distinguishing the characters apart.

Let’s parse this out. Here’s a story passage, but I’ve spoilered the dialogue tags. Try and figure out which of the main six is talking in each line. 

"Well, it wasn't really an attack, your Highess," Applejack explained, "At least, it wasn't meant to be. The Ursa Major was brought to Ponyville by...Trixie Lulamoon."

Princess Celestia recognized the name; Twilight had told her about her encounters with the deceptive magician in the past. Why Trixie had the idea to try and contain an Ursa Major was beyond the princess' comprehension, so she inquired for more details.

"Trixie brought the beast into Ponyville and bragged that she was so revolutionary for using a Dragon-Binding Collar on the Ursa Major," Rainbow Dash continued. Princess Celestia was also familiar with that item; as the name suggested, Dragon-Binding Collars were used to keep dragons at bay while being transported by poachers or wildlife experts, but only for a few hours at most. To use one of these collars on the Ursa Major for any period of time...Princess Celestia was amazed that Trixie was able to keep it contained at all.

"Fluttershy could sense that it was agitated, so she flew up and tried to calm it down," Pinkie Pie said, "Trixie saw and shot magic at her, but it missed and hit the Ursa Major instead, which went berserk and broke the collar."

"It started advancing on the town, but Twilight conjured up a massive shield spell, which protected Ponyville from that creature," Applejack continued, "But it didn't back down; it started hitting the shield bubble with all of its force, but Twilight remained as steady as she could." Princess Celestia was impressed with Twilight's actions; she had never seen her student try a shield spell similar to that of her brother, but she could only imagine how powerful it must have been.

"None of us really saw what happened next," Rainbow Dash said, "Twilight stayed connected to the shield to keep it up, so she wanted us to make sure everypony was indoors, so we didn't pay much attention to her because we were too busy. As Applejack and I were herding the schoolponies inside the schoolhouse, we felt the entire town shudder and saw the shield disappear."

"We knew something was wrong, so the five of us rushed back to the center of town," Rarity, who had just returned from the bathroom with a visibly more calm Fluttershy, explained, "We were lucky that the Royal Guard showed up and forced the Ursa Major out of town. When we saw Twilight . . . well, we weren't sure what to think. She was lying on the ground, unconscious, with her horn a few feet away." Princess Celestia surmised that, since Twilight was connected to the shield bubble, she felt the reverberations of the Ursa Major's fierce pounding on the shield until it the strain combined with the force was eventually too much for her to handle and Twilight's horn broke off. She vowed that if she ever finds the Ursa Major again, she would inflict as much pain and suffering upon it as it did this night to Twilight.

"I took Twilight's horn and Fluttershy, Rarity, and I carried her here, while AJ and Pinkie stayed in Ponyville to make sure everypony was safe," Rainbow Dash finished.

See what I mean? There really isn’t any indication as to who’s who, and there isn’t any action either, just a bunch of dialogue lines. But the weird thing is that this only does seem to happen in this chapter: the next time we see them, Applejack has an accent and Pinkie talks about parties. So I don’t know if this was just an earlier chapter or what, but the characterization is just off.

Celestia herself suffers a bit from this. The story is meant to be detailing her sorrow and sadness, but again it really doesn’t feel like it. Celestia contemplates much of the same things throughout the story and only has one real impactful moment, in which she says ‘freaking’.

I found that odd. Yes, she’s distressed and emotionally traumatized, but the whole scene felt a bit off. It felt like she broke character completely. And… there really wasn’t any consoling done either. Everyone just kind of moved on to the next scene.

Oh and also… I don’t think the author is fan of Trixie. Like, she shows up in the story just to get arrested and ridiculed. The story functions fine without her, but I feel like the author really wanted to rail her.

The author employs a lot of very long sentences that kind of tie into my repetition point. For example:

Princess Celestia flew towards Ponyville faster than any Wonderbolt ever had before and wished they could in their wildest dreams.

The back half of this sentence doesn’t really seem necessary and doesn’t add all the much to the sentence. It instead seems to make it a bit cumbersome and murky, and kind of hard to read through when so many sentences are like this. 

So, overall? I think this story kind of missed its mark. There’s some good stuff going on in here, and I did like the line ‘If ponies pray to me, then who do I pray to?’ But as an emotional piece, it really doesn’t seem to move me that much. And maybe because I’m an emotionless robot (beep boop!), but I really think that this story can go farther than it does. Also, it’s tagged as ‘random,’ and I have no idea why.

So yeah. I think there are quite a few things the author can fix to make this an even more powerful story. On deck is Zontan’s Smooth as Silk, which appears to be a story about spiders. Great, can’t wait. See you there!

Deuces.

If you like Twilestia stories and sad, emotional ones, then you might like this story.

Good start, but I think there’s a lot more you can do to make this even better! I see this story was written around 2016, so it’s pretty old. Maybe you’ve put some distance between it, and if so, it might warrant another read with fresh eyes. 

I do have my reading notes for your fic, if you would like to see them let me know.

Plot: 5
Characterization: 4
Grammar:  6

Average: 5

Thank you very much for reviewing my story, however I cannot take all of the credit for this one. In case the description was unclear, I first came across the original version of this story a while ago, probably a year or so before actually writing this fic. It was one of my instant favorites and read it constantly until, one day, I discovered it had been taken down, either because the original author left or some other reason. I still enjoyed the story and dilemmas presented in the story, so I decided to honor the story and bring this fanfic back to life by rewriting it as it was originally presented (which, considering how many time I had read the original, was not terribly difficult for me ).

As such, I am currently unsure if I should rewrite it or leave it alone. On one hand, I do agree with the points you have made here - I myself recognize that it is not entirely perfect - so I think a rewrite would definitely do it some good. On the other hand, considering it was not really my story to tell, I feel like I would be doing the original author (wherever he/she may be) an injustice by making the fic more of my own doing. I'm curious to hear what you think about all this? Thank you again for your review and I hope you have a good day!

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Oh, never got the notification! I think that you can say you were inspired by an original story but you’re not necessarily forced to abide by everything they did. You’re allowed to exercise your own interpretations should you wish!