TWhere the Cold Comes From

• MLP: FiM
• Dark
• Mystery
• Sad

Heavy snowstorm catches a group of ponies away from civilization, and while the adults are doing their best to fend away the elements, the foals decide to figure it out on their own. But only one is destined to discover where the cold comes from.

• OC

Motorbreath · 12k words  ·  15  0 · 392 views

Howdy, howdy! Summer’s right around the corner, isn’t it? So what better way to ease right into the festivities than with a story about snow and winter! That’s right, today we’re going to be having a look at Motorbreath’s Where the Cold Comes From, a chilling tale about survival in the most brutal circumstances.

I guess I should put a content warning to be safe and say that the story deals with intense cold and hypothermia, so if that’s not your jam I’d say bail out while you can. But if it doesn’t bother you, stick around, and let’s dive right in. 

Let’s kick things off with a good old fashioned plot analysis, but be warned: spoilers lie ahead.

The plot of the story is, unfortunately, a bit confusing, and after reading I had to take a bit to try put the pieces together. Now, the author has tagged this as a mystery story, so this much is to be expected. However, I’m a bit concerned that almost too much is left unanswered, to the point where I’m not really sure what happened.

The story is told through a typical flashback style, in that we have two concurrent storylines: one in the present and one in the past. The first story thread shows our main character, an unnamed colt, struggling to escape some sort of village (we later find out it’s a resort at the end of the story) in a brutal snowstorm. The second story thread shows him interacting with another group of ponies as they try to figure out how they’ll escape the oncoming storm.

Flashback writing is a tricky beast, but I think this story has a good enough rhythm that it wasn’t all that disconcerting to have a scene change every time. I did have one problem here that I’ll tackle in prose, though, as it’s a more technical thing than anything.

Both storylines do a fantastic job of posing questions that keep the reader interested and engaged… however at the story’s end it really doesn’t feel like we have any of these questions answered.

Let’s digress. So we know that a sudden snowstorm has trapped all of these characters in their respective homes, and we know that the main character, for whatever reason, is alone. We see the colt head into another house where he is rather quickly accepted, for reasons again unknown.

Now at the end of the story we find out that the colt’s parents went to the store before the storm hit, but this raises even more questions. Why wasn’t any concern raised by the other characters? At no point was the question “where are your parents?” raised, and this is quite odd as all of the adults in the household are parents. We can fill in some blanks here and assume he was told to go there beforehand should anything happen, but it is still quite strange to think about.

I also have trouble understanding the character motivations in the story. At the halfway point the colt is kicked out by the ‘owner’ of the household, Mister Glider, who instructs the other adults not to help or feed him. This action occurs after the main character is caught ‘eavesdropping’ on their plans and feels like an extreme action that doesn’t really carry much justification.

Further there’s the plot device of the sled. The colt hears the adults discuss building one and asks about it, only for the adults to later deny even planning on making one and the colts say that they gave up building it. I’m not really sure why exactly the sled carries such weight to it, and I don’t really understand the scene where Mister Wind denies even building the sled and then casts him out because “Mister Glider said so.”

Evidently Glider carries power in the story… I’m just at a loss for why. But either way, he shapes up to be the antagonist in the story as he kicks the main character out of their house and leaves him to fend for himself.

Before we tackle the ending of the story, I have one great question that isn’t really addressed anywhere: if the adults are pegasi, why can’t they just clear out the storm manually instead of waiting for it to bowl over? Why not use their weather control capabilities to churn it down? In fact, if this is traditional Equestria, why is there a random snowstorm in the first place?

I guess there are several reasons the author could employ to justify this, but none of them are really used. And yeah, I guess it’s not that big of a thing, but it does feel like a plothole that isn’t really explained.

Anyways, the ending. The ending of the story left me… confused. Because at the last quarter of the story we are shifted from this brutal, realistic tale of survival and are suddenly introduced to a supernatural element that before this point hasn’t been hinted at.

I’m still not sure where this mysterious frost-covered stallion comes into play or why he’s even here. The violet stallion appears to have some sort of connection to this colt in the lines

Your place is here – don’t you see?..

But again, I don’t know how or why. It really does feel like a strange, out of place twist, because much like the snowstorm of the story, it comes out of nowhere and blindsides the reader.

I have a few problems with the ending itself, namely it feels like a “hey, it was just a dream!” cop-out. Yes, these types of endings can work well, but in this case it takes all the suspense the story has been building and just kind of tosses it away. 

And it also introduces the concept of a windigo, which I’m assuming is what the frost stallion was. But the ending of the story just feels like a weird place to introduce this concept: it feels like it should have been the driving point of the story rather than a “oh, here’s a supernatural monster thingy!” put in at the end.

So yeah. The ending leaves me wondering “what the heck just happened?” which can be a good thing, but in this case it kind of leaves me disappointed. I guess my biggest problem is that the ending just doesn’t seem to match the beginning and middle of the story, which were excellent in terms of pacing and buildup, and just feels more tacked on than anything else. I’d highly recommend the author consider the direction of the story, and if this is the ending they truly desire, to sprinkle in some more clues into the story and foreshadow it a bit more. Because a twist is truly great if the reader can see it coming but doesn’t quite get there. As it stands, it comes out of left field and adds a lot of information at the end, leaving an otherwise great tale on a somewhat awkward note. 

POST NOTE:

As I was putting the links together, I realize now that the title 'Where the Cold Comes From' is most likely a reference to the windigos, but it still feels odd that they're not the driving, central point of the story. If the author's intent was focused on these creatures I would have liked to see some clues or foreshadowing to really hone it in.

There were a fair amount of characters here, and sadly I wasn’t really able to remember all of their names. This is partly due to the narrative style and partly due to the fact that all of these ponies are OC’s.

The style of the story sometimes refers to these characters by their names and other times by details like their coats. Unfortunately this doesn’t play well with the flashback style of the story, and when the author mentions a “blue pegasus stallion,” I have no recollection of who this character is and have to go back and try to identify him.

I’d recommend the author tone back on the physical descriptions or couple them with names so I’m reminded of who these characters are. Usually I’d be saying otherwise, but in this case the bouncing back and forth nature of the story means I constantly have to readjust in regards to setting and time, making it hard for me to remember who’s who.

Let’s talk about the MC. The MC doesn’t have a name here, which is an interesting decision, and other than that we don’t know much about him. He acts throughout the story, sure, and has a few thoughts here and there, but beyond that I have a hard time pegging him with any descriptive words. It just feels like in twelve thousand words, I have no idea who this character is. And maybe this was intentional.

I also would have liked to see just a little bit more distinction between the adults of the story, as they all kind of read similar to each other, especially the stallions. This just adds to the cast confusion as I’m trying to figure out who’s who. But I guess since they’re not central to the story this is excusable. 

There was one major issue I had on the technical side: Italicized text. Yes, italicized text is fantastic for signifying flashback scenes, but when a story is 50% flashbacks, it’s just too much. It got to the point where it was very difficult and somewhat annoying to read the story when I was faced with wall after wall of italic text. There are other ways to signify a flashback, after all.

For example, the linebreak, written as [ hr ] without the spaces and looking like

The author elects to separate scenes with a few lines of spacing, which is technically fine, but line breaks in my view are cleaner and can signify time shifts, scene changes, or altering points of view. Using these can also help alleviate the need for italic text.

Prose wise, the style was very interesting and intriguing, however there were quite a few sentences that are very long and can be either cut or split for easier readability. There were also a few odd words and descriptions that I personally didn’t agree with, but since I’m not the editor for this story I won’t take them into account.

Beyond that there were quite a few syntax errors and a typo here and there. If the author would like, I can gladly point out the errors I noted in my reading notes.

I really did like this story, I just wish the ending had gone a little bit differently. Because we have all of this great tension rising and rising, only for a random supernatural being to appear, before we’re hit with a “it was all a dream… or was it?” style ending that honestly doesn’t fit the story much.

It leaves you with a lot of questions, which is great for a mystery, but as it stands I feel like I’m missing too many answers to fully understand the plotline of the story. But as I said, the first half was really quite enjoyable. The ending just doesn’t do it for me.

And that’s pretty much all I’ve got to say. Next time we’ll be having a look at The Cloptomist’s Away.

Deuces!

If you’re a fan of cold weather stories and mysteries, you might like this story.

Don’t know if I have much to add, but I really did like it. The ending just kind of let me down and I hope you don’t take offense to that. I might understand it better if you explained it to me, but as it stands I don’t have a clear picture of what’s going on and that hinders my enjoyability of this story. 

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

Plot: 6
Characterization: 7
Prose: 6

Average: 6.33