EApple Moon

• MLP: FiM
• Adventure
• Mystery
• Sad

Apple Bloom gets banished to the moon by accident.

• Apple Bloom

JPHyperX · 4.1k words  ·  49  3 · 1.2k views

Description

Suddenly Apple Bloom finds herself on the moon. She was banished, accidentally. Now she has to deal with it somehow.

Initial Thoughts

I’ll be honest; when I first read the story title and then its description, I thought this would be some sort of comedy. Of course the tags determine that this isn’t the case, but I can’t help but think that, inherently, Apple Bloom being sent to the moon is rich for potential comedic effect. 

So, she’s on the moon. Does this mean she’s going to stay there? Hard to say. I hope not. But this is a Sad story, so… 

Anyway, on with the reading and review. Spoilers lie ahead.

Summary

Apple Bloom, in the midst of watching a brief battle against some sort of monster, gets accidentally sent to the moon. The moon, however, is not quite so hostile as one might expect, as Bloom sees her long-dead parents wandering across a rich and fresh orchard (cue warning signs). She also meets an alicorn named Selene, who reveals that Bloom has essentially been hallucinating the whole time. The nature of the illusion seems to stem from a fragment of Nightmare Moon left behind; Selene and Apple Bloom manage to defeat her, Bloom gets sent back to Equestria, and Selene remains behind on the moon.

Plot

It’s short, and simple, but… well, it’s not quite sweet. 

I’d like to say that this seems to be a quick romp through speculative fiction writing, if that is what the author intended. Certainly, it has elements of that genre: namely, a character being sent to a strange new world. However, these elements, and the elements of the story in general, suffer from one major problem: a lack of development. 

This story moves way too quickly, even for what appears to be just a quick romp. Very little time is actually spent exploring the, well, ramifications of being sent to this new world. How is that the case? Like so:

After she had finished crying, she got up again and wiped her face. That made it even dirtier. She saw her world before her with her big, beady eyes; a big blue ball with a white atmosphere and green spots that she recognized as continents.

“My world is really beautiful,” she thought. The light in her eyes trembled at this view. When she realized that she was just a little pony born on this planet, she had to shed another tear.

She looked back again at the bleak landscape. Stones and rocks were lying all around. If she could only give a sign that she was here. Maybe the others knew that and were looking for ways to save her. Apple Bloom saw no reason for this banishment. She just stood by; it was an accident. But how did that even happen?

Apple Bloom trotted ahead with lowered eyes. It didn't matter where she went. The Trabant was big, and all the rocks were scattered far into the horizon. She saw round and square formations, others with different colours. The moon rock shone under Celestia's sun.

The little foal decided to build something from these rocks. She had always been creative, because that proved her Cutie-Mark. She stacked stones on top of each other, built walls and thought hard about how she could move a heavy boulder. She dug some sand out from under this boulder and so it moved a little.

These are among the first few paragraphs in the story, but you’ll notice that the focus is all over the place. In the first two paragraphs, we get a moment of introspection for Apple Bloom. That would be a nice touch, but the problem is, it ignores the fact that Apple Bloom is on the moon. I don’t care how hardened you are, that’s gotta be enough to send a filly at least into hysterics. 

From such introspection, the story transitions into action: Apple Bloom does something. I interpreted this act of building stones into shapes as an attempt at communication, though that’s left a bit vague. As a premise, that’s fine, and heck, it makes sense (though unrealistic, since I think Bloom would need to cover a large portion of the moon’s planet-facing surface to achieve a properly proportionate sign), but, again, the issue is the underdevelopment of it. And I think I know why that’s a prevalent problem.

It just… happens. 

In one instant: Apple Bloom is shouting back to Equestria, asking what she was doing up on the moon, why, and all that. In the next: she’s looking at Equestria with a measure of sentiment that seems ill-fitting the occasion. In the next: she’s building rocks. 

The space between these narrative moments is small, and therefore the pacing suffers. There’s no padding, no time for cementing the reader in the setting and in the problems presented, and while the fluidity of the story could be commended, what ends up happening is that it feels like the story is rushing through the many questions and issues of its plot. 

I mean, it doesn’t even feel like there is time spent simply getting in Apple Bloom’s head and, well, seeing her perspective. How she feels, what she’s thinking, her struggle to cope—if it’s there, then it’s in a rather barebones fashion, or done too quickly to provide impact. 

And considering the speculative nature of that plot, I think that’s a rather weak decision.

But that’s just talking about the initial presentation of the plot. When we go through the rest of its execution, a similar problem of “things just happening way too quickly” occurs. Case in point: the appearance of Selene and Nightmare Moon. They just… happen. They just appear. Almost conveniently, which is a bit alarming.

I have no problem with coincidences bringing characters further into the plot development, especially if the coincidences cause problems for the characters in dealing with the plot, but as a rule it’s generally frowned upon to have coincidences help take characters out of the conflict. The presence of Selene, most certainly, feels like coincidental plot progression rather than natural or character-driven on the part of Apple Bloom. And Nightmare Moon’s appearance at the last chapter as a pseudo-final boss, while interesting, suffers a similar fate.

Regarding Nightmare Moon: there’s this section from Chapter 3 that I want to share, which struck me as interesting, but enormously underdeveloped:

“Not really!” croaked the mare and walked towards the foal. “You see what she left behind, an echo of her past.”

Apple Bloom stared at the dark mare with big, horrified eyes. Nightmare Moon bent over her like a predator and bared her long fangs. “I am her wrath! A nightmare of nightmares! Nightmare Moon had to release a part of it; otherwise, she might have destroyed herself!”

Just the idea that Nightmare Moon hasn’t really been defeated, that some shred of her essence remains trapped on the moon, is enough to get me interested. But here, it just… doesn’t really lead anywhere. It’s a cool idea, but it doesn’t really do much else. 

To summarize: the ideas are good, but the execution is not. The story’s pacing is far too quick for the speculative nature to achieve a desirable effect, and the story beats come off as underdeveloped and thrown in. It’s all so cool—but, it just doesn’t pay off as well as the author might have intended.

Score - 5 / 10

Characterization

Characterization was… well, it had the same problems as the plot, honestly. 

As mentioned briefly before, very little time is spent initially in getting into Apple Bloom’s mind. Considering how her motivations and actions change so suddenly within the span of six or so paragraphs, this is a bit jarring. 

The illusion of an orchard and Apple Bloom’s perception of her family was definitely interesting, and could have led to some big traumatic reveal, but there’s not really a sense of Apple Bloom being there in the moment. Forgive me, this is a bit harder to explain. 

Imagine, if you will, a stage, and you have one character reciting a soliloquy. If done well, you’re able to hear their words and understand them, and understand the emotions underneath them, and understand the emotional and mental context behind why such a thing is being said. And you’re able to do so while becoming completely ingrained with the character, in a way that is incredibly intimate and perhaps even disturbing. That’s the ideal scenario.

If done poorly, however, what ends up happening is that you just view a person reciting a long speech. The character of the character never emerges. Even if they recite it perfectly, the necessary, critical ethos of their representation doesn’t become… well, real. There’s a sense of distance between the character in the script and the character being acted out. 

Apple Bloom may not have need of a soliloquy, but my point is that her character isn’t all there. She may have the mannerisms down, the drawl, and certainly, I grant, the stubbornness to persist, but what else is there?

By far it comes down to the fact that Apple Bloom’s initial reaction was so underplayed, it left me confused. It seems that a lot was missed with at least exploring her feelings on being sent to the moon, however accidental that was. Again, the issue of underdevelopment persists.

And of the other characters, the same can be said. Nightmare Moon may be a necessarily flat character, even a flat plot point to some extent, but considering Selene’s importance by the middle and end of the story, the fact that very little is said about her, and the fact that little time is spent developing her, ended up hurting her representation. I found it hard to care that she showed up. Certainly that was a curiosity, but beyond that… she didn’t feel real. 

I hate to use that term, too: “feel real.” I’m unsure of what that really means, but I can say that it applies here as necessary criticism. In other words, something was lacking in these characters that would have sparked them up, made them glow, as it were. Perhaps it was motivation, perhaps it was conflict, perhaps it was just not getting as close to them—mentally and intrinsically—as could have been possible. 

Score - 5 / 10

Syntax

I’m aware that English isn’t the author’s first language, so there’s really no point in being a stickler for finer grammar. That being said, I honestly didn’t detect anything wrong with the grammar of the story. Tenses were consistent, conjugation was clear, and bar a few pronouns without proper antecedents, it all ran smoothly.

One issue that I will bring to light comes back to that underdevelopment. Because of the way the sentences formed, the paragraphs all ended up being relatively short. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but short paragraphs generate a quicker pacing, and as stated, that quick pacing really ended up hurting this story. The quick pacing also meant a lot less time spent describing the environment or Apple Bloom’s emotions—but these have already been discussed nigh ad nauseum. 

Longer paragraphs, then, may be in store; though I confess that I have no real solid standard for what constitutes a properly “long” paragraph from an improper one. It is a general rule of thumb (less of a rule, really, and more like a silent agreement), that the length of a paragraph is determined by the willing breadth of the author: how much time they want to spend on a paragraph. Some of the longest paragraphs I’ve read were your standard descriptions: a rolling eye over distant green hills that take into account the interconnected nature of the world and the people in it. Some others were just long speeches. Some were straightforward narration, dealing heavily with the character’s mental anguish and wonderings. Each sang a certain length that worked because of the intent behind them. 

Longer sentences, too, might help. As a whole, the story read, and was written, with mostly short- to medium-length sentences. That works, but sometimes the story came off as sounding a bit bland. Varying sentence length can spice up the effect sentences have on a reader, getting their minds to sing rather than simply read along. And if it sounds good to a reader, you can bet they’ll keep reading.

I’d take some time to spruce up some of the thinner descriptions, not necessarily to improve that particular aspect of the story, but to experiment with length. You may find that upon a second or third viewing, you do not think a sufficient amount of space was allotted to, say, the particular color of the moon’s horizon, and so would want to extend it just a bit further. 

It’s a minor issue, though, and strictly speaking the story doesn’t suffer too terribly from it.

Score - 7.5 / 10

Final Score - ( 5 + 5 + 7.5) / 3 = 5.83 / 10

Final Thoughts

There’s a lot that could go for this story. It has a shocking but interesting premise that could lend itself to some equally interesting world-building. There’s a lot of room for quite literal discovery, as it were, as Apple Bloom has the whole moon to explore. And the inclusion of a weirdly hallucinogenic dream-like reality for Bloom, broken by the enigmatic but also pragmatic Selene, strikes me as being the climactic moment for the story, the part where all the pieces fall together and we realize where this whole thing was heading.

As it stands, though, it’s so short and so underplayed and underhanded, that such ideas don’t come across as strongly as they could have. Again I bring up the issue of pacing and underdevelopment: it felt like a very rough first sketch of a story. Almost akin to an outline, which, while able to orient the direction of the story, does not account for the necessity of expansion. 

My main advice is this: spend some time in this world. Get into Apple Bloom’s head, primarily, and see how she would really react. Expand on that. Dramatize it, if you really have to. Then when that’s done, go back and see what can be removed to keep that sentiment, that emotional appeal, there, without going overboard on what is kept and what is cut. Above all, slow down a bit. I don’t want to necessarily say “enjoy the world you’ve built,” since, well, Apple Bloom got banished there, but… well, enjoy it. Take in the scenery. Live a little, struggle a little. And then you can send her home. 

7307083
Thank you for the feedback. This helps me a lot.

I think I see the problem with why the story's moving so fast. I had made the rash decision to write each chapter in just a thousand words. This of course made the story suffer and I'm glad you pointed that out.

I'm probably not a short story writer, that' s for sure, and wanted a small project alongside my long-fic, Starlight Glimmer and the Runekeepers, in which I spend much more time.

But I got new ideas again, all thanks to the feedback, which makes me take it easy next time.

With kind regards, JP

7307194
I'm glad you found the review helpful! There's a bit of a writing adage that I'm fond of: Let the narrative determine length. Constraining yourself to a thousand or so words may be good practice for, say, flash fiction, but sometimes it's better to let the full scope of the story spill out in the first draft. Then you can shorten it to the essentials.