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TThe Amulet of Shades

• MLP: FiM
• Drama
• Thriller

Unfortunately, the Nightmare Moon Incident had one further complication...

• Celestia
• Luna
• OC
• Discord
• Main 6

Sparkle Cola · 144k words  ·  274  12 · 6.7k views

Long story today! Hopefully I haven’t lost my touch?

Today’s review will be going into some detail on the plot of the story so far. If you don’t wish to be spoiled, please go and read the story first before continuing!

Alternatively, I will be putting another one of these spoiler warnings before the spoiler content, so if you want to get an idea of what the story is like, read on ahead till then!

For posterity's sake: as of the time of writing, this story is only updated up to Chapter 15.

The Amulet of Shades is an Adventure story which follows Tempest (no, not that Tempest), an ancient unicorn from before Luna’s banishment. It’s about her quest to take revenge on Celestia for the aforementioned banishment, and the modern Equestria’s efforts to subdue her.

It also has very good art in it.

Thoughts, in general

Let’s begin with some generalities!

This story is your classic adventure story. It has much of what you’d want from a good adventure epic — plots spanning centuries, a sprawling world, and many, uh, epic, fight scenes. And amazing art, of course, because good stories always have those.

It is also incomplete at the moment, a little detail which is pretty disappointing to me.

Characters are a strength in any well-written story, and this has character in spades. From Meadow Lark, a hyper-friendly earth pony researcher, to Narcisse, a, well, aptly named investigator, to more familiar canon characters like Twilight, Starlight and Spike, characterisation of everyone in this story is very well-handled. Most if not all the dialogue scenes are lively and compelling, and the characters definitely feel alive.

Something that I’m not too sure that the story did well, though, is the handling of the plot progression, and the ordering of some plot points, especially at the beginning. 

Now, that’s quite a technical sentence, but basically my experience with this was that there were some segments of the story where I felt like the events happening were going nowhere, some where I felt there were a few too many things happening, and some where I was just kinda confused. A specific effect of this, for example, is that I couldn’t tell you the details of some of the characters’ backstories and their relevance to the story, although I’ve read through the story in its entirety already.

Other than that, though, the plot is actually quite compelling, any ordering issues notwithstanding. There’s a sense of mystery behind the events happening that is actually pretty well-handled, and definitely made me want to read more, especially after a little bit more about what’s happening is revealed!

And that’s a summary of my thoughts about this story! But enough generalisations, it’s time to get into the specifics.

Spoilers begin from this point onwards! If the previous section convinced you that you don’t want to be spoiled for this story, please go and give the story a read before continuing!

I’m always at a loss for where to begin with these long stories. There are just too many things to talk about, and too few words to talk about them in. 

For the purposes of today, though, I guess we can begin with something I enjoyed!

Intrigue

Beginning with the broadest strokes: the plot as a whole is actually really interesting! Contrary to what the huge exposition dumps (which I’ll get to later) in the beginning few chapters might suggest, there is a lot of mystery to uncover about what is actually happening with the story. Even reading up to the point where the story currently is written up to (that's Chapter 15, again ), there’s still the sense that there’s a lot more to uncover.

A lot of this is because of the way that Sparkle Cola has decided to reveal some key information regarding the main antagonist, with some of those coming with pretty well-executed plot twists and re-contextualising the story progression. 

It also helps that the story brings in many factions, many unique characters, and many different locations. They give the story the feeling of taking place on a massive scale

I don’t think going into specifics here will necessarily be a great idea, since we’re talking about the plot, and detailing stuff about it will almost definitely be pointless spoilers. So let’s go ahead and talk about something else that I can actually break down in unnecessarily long, detailed analyses!

The Art of the Duel

Fight scenes (or action scenes, to be more general) are quite notoriously difficult for beginning writers. A lot has to be managed to keep an action sequence making sense, and the focus laser sharp, while still crafting a compelling and engaging sequence.

What's so great about how Sparkle Cola handles fight scenes is that rather than just treating it as an opportunity for characters to throw some punches, or run around chasing each other, his sequences are a series of far more interesting actions and responses. It also helps that they usually also have an actual purpose in the plot or story as a whole beyond simply being there for the spectacle.

Now when I say “actions and responses”, that’s a framework that could be used to think about fight scenes. Fight scenes, at their core, can be thought of as a series of “challenges” and “responses”, where the goal of each character is to pose a challenge which the other cannot respond to. Usually this takes the form of, well, fights, but this can also be applied to battles of wit, or tense conversations, or any form of competitive interaction between two characters.

What Sparkle does so well with their fight scenes is making these actions specific to both the character and the world at large. This means that most, if not all, of their fight scenes are compelling and fit snugly into the story as a whole.

Here's an example, from relatively early in the story so that I'm not just spouting generalities! In a scene in Chapter 4 and 5, Tempest is chased across Manehattan. 

First some context, for those unfamiliar with the scene. Tempest has just assaulted a librarian in the Manehattan Library in order to steal a book from the restricted section, and has teleported away from the scene. She is watching events from a nearby building while the Manehattan police investigate the library. In the scene, the police, lead by Rebus Hunter, had of the Crime Investigation Unit, attempt to capture her, and she attempts to flee while giving away as little of her identity as possible. 

In this scene, Tempest faces off against the Manehattan police. Tempest’s skills are strong magic, and quick thinking. The police’s advantages are modern technology, and a well-organised team. Ideally, the set of actions that both sides take should showcase these advantages.

And, as it turns out, they do! Tempest performs a difficult teleportation maneuver, constructs a workable plan within the span of a minute or less, and maintains an elaborate illusion spell. The police (or more specifically Rebus Hunter) track down Tempest with a spell that she doesn’t recognise, and coordinate teams using walkie-talkies to chase her through the city.

That’s the more important part of a fight scene (it’s the fight itself, after all!) but a little extra thing for this scene specifically is that it also introduces the magic system a little bit, tells us what kind of character Tempest is, and also gives us a clearer picture on how little Tempest is actually familiar with the modern Equestria. Now that’s just good scene design!

Honestly I could go on and on about this, but I want to keep this a reasonable length, so we're moving on to the next topic. This time, it's an aspect of the story that I found much less appealing. 

Ordering scenes and revealing information

Okay, I know this is a pretty weird way of phrasing it, but what I’m talking about in this section is the placement of exposition, and the management of attention. Those are two pretty technical-sounding terms, but I promise I’ll explain them.

Exposition is, in simple terms, providing background information about things. Whether that information is the details of the setting, the mechanics of a magic system, or the backstory of a character, they’re all equally mind-numbing if handled poorly. Unfortunately for us, exposition tends to happen at the beginning of a story, where we haven't yet gotten invested in it. Too much early exposition can be an instant turn-off, and make the rest of the story seem boring because of it. 

In this story, Sparkle Cola opens with two chapters of exposition.

Chapter 1 Parts A and B follow Tempest in the past as she travels east to Gryphonia. What these chapters really are is an opportunity for the story to tell us about Tempest, her recent attempt to assassinate Celestia, and her plans to travel to Gryphonia. Also there’s this other character who’s called Mavis Morel, and her entire life story or something is in these chapters? For some reason?

Also there’s this organisation called the Agents of Moonlight. That’s here too.

My point is, the first few chapters have a lot of exposition, little of which is actually relevant to the story at that point. At least for me, the sheer amount of stuff put into these two chapters not only made the story less engaging in the beginning, I also forgot most of the details a few chapters later. 

Really the worst and most emblematic offender is the backstory of Mavis Morel, which is told to us more or less directly in the middle of Chapter 1B. I probably could tell you only about half of her backstory that was covered in that chapter, and I would definitely also tell you that it was hardly the most engaging thing to read.

Ordering scenes, pt. 2

It’s not only about early exposition, though. A more relevant issue that happens throughout the story is a whole lot of cross-cutting. For those unfamiliar with the term, it’s a film term where the movie cuts between two different scenes as they progress simultaneously. I'm using this here to specifically mean when there's a scene break in the middle of a scene, regardless of simultaneity.

This is something that the story does a lot. Most chapters have at least a few cross-cuts between multiple scenes, across multiple settings. Now, cross-cutting is definitely not an objectively bad style of scene management, and I’m not trying to say that it is! The times where the cross-cutting happens, though, especially in the earlier chapters, are… kinda questionable.

In the early chapters, there’s this tendency to cut from an important scene to a less important one when there’s the smallest break in the action, which means the tension that’s built up is kinda lost in the cutting.

For this I’m specifically looking at the Manehattan chase scene in Chapter 5 again, because about halfway through that scene, at a point of pretty thick tension, the story cuts to another scene for a few paragraphs before cutting back to the action. Why this scene is placed here, and not somewhere more appropriate (read: anywhere that’s not in the middle of a suspenseful action scene), I don’t really know?

Also, I'd be remiss to not mention the frequent flashback scenes that just happen at times. Again, this is a bigger problem in the earlier chapters, but the early chapters have so many flashback scenes that it starts to get overwhelming and honestly a little boring. 

Though I'm obliged to admit that I kinda just don't like flashbacks as exposition devices in general, so yeah. Might be biased, a little.

But honestly, is putting a flashback almost immediately after the time skip forward in Chapter 2 really a good idea?

Luckily, the later parts of the story don't really have much of these problems What does affect the later chapters, though, at least for me, is the exploration of Tempest’s backstory, which was done in an odd manner.

Heroes of our own stories

Tempest is not a traditional hero. In fact, she’s much closer to being a conventional villain than being a conventional hero.

I’m… not entirely convinced that this is a good thing, or even intended in the first place. At least not to this extent.

Throughout the story, Tempest performs quite a few morally questionable actions. It’s your classic “ends justify the means” anti-hero setup, with Tempest as the gritty, realist anti-hero. 

Except, well, the “ends justify the means” justification doesn’t really work here, because the “ends” is the assassination of Princess Celestia, against the will of pretty much everyone including Princess Luna, whom all of Tempest’s actions are motivated by.

Much of this has to do with the way that Tempest and her motivations are explained. Beginning with the first few chapters, we get very little actual information on her motivations. What we do get, though, is her goal: to kill Celestia. 

Which, I dunno, that might not be the best first impression to give someone? Just saying, y'know.

The flashbacks, though numerous, don't really provide enough to justify this either. We do see the banishment of Luna from Tempest's perspective, but we also see that Tempest had the opportunity to help Celestia in resolving their feud and chose not to. In fact, the root cause of the feud (the kingdom's growing disrespect of Luna and Celestia's apparent encouragement of this) is never directly shown in the flashbacks, only hinted at and spoken of by Luna.

Following the first two exposition chapters, Chapter 2 shows us a character with severe, almost illogical paranoia in regards to Celestia. Her thoughts on how Celestia allegedly did the magic mind controls on Luna on the Nightmare Moon day read like a conspiracy theory. And her personality, while driven, does come off as condescending and close-minded on first blush.

Add all this up, and the result is that I never found myself really rooting for Tempest in any of the situations. In fact I found myself actively rooting against Tempest in most of the scenes. Her actions are just too extreme, and her goals too unjustified, to really get behind her.

Looking beyond Tempest to the rest of the cast, though, things get a lot better. 

Varied characterisation and snappy dialogue

It’s always a good sign when dialogue scenes in a story are long. Usually it means that there’s banter and general non-plot-related interactions going on, which is, usually, a great thing. Dialogue shouldn’t just be another instrument to deliver exposition, and characters should maintain their character when speaking with each other.

Sparkle Cola has a knack for writing natural character interactions. Between all the action and drama, there’s many many moments of the characters just getting together and interacting. Whether it’s in the downtime between story beats, or in the important scenes themselves, there’s always this air of liveliness to their interactions.

Honestly, I’m never sure what to elaborate on for something like this. It’s difficult to really point to something concrete, but it’s also an incredibly important component of a story. It's always clear when a story is missing that spark, because you'll read half of the story and realise you don't remember a third of the introduced cast.

Suffice to say, Sparkle Cola did an amazing job with making the characters unique and the dialogue snappy in this story, and I was loving every second of it.

Last but not least, of course… 

Art

The art in this story is fricking amazing, and I feel I had to make an extra section for it, considering the sheer amount of it in the story. I had seen the occasional image on promotion forums and such before this, but I didn't quite realise the quantity of it, or how good all of it is. Tillie-TMB is an amazing artist, and should be very proud of her work in this story!

And… that’s that! Those are my thoughts on the story. Uh, what comes next after this again…? 

Oh, right, score. 

Final Score: 8/10

Amulet of Shades is a solidly written, excellently told story, brought down only by the odd placement of scenes and the somewhat insufficient exploration of Tempest’s motivations. The early chapters are decidedly more flawed than the later ones, and things look to be getting even more interesting from where the story is currently updated.

Hopefully this wasn’t too boring! If you'd like any specific suggestions on any of the issues that I brought up, feel free to ask; but the review's already pretty long currently and I don't quite feel like making it much longer, haha

Also I actually have many things to say about each topic I brought up in the review so really feel free to ask about any of them. 

Hi, Cyonix

I had meant to reply to this fantastic review you wrote, but I mentally dropped this story for the past year. Didn't think I'd take it up again, but now am seeing if I can't actually finish it.

Thank you for the review. It was well thought out, and I appreciate your reasoning and descriptions, both the positive and the not-so-positive. All of it was good information, and very fairly presented. Again, thank you so much for giving it a read and putting real thought into the review, I appreciate the time taken and your efforts there.

And... I agree with just about all of your criticisms

Honestly, the story suffers from the fact that it stemmed from a conversation I had with my daughter (also the artist for the story) and her character she had created. This was a conversation well before I joined this site in 2017. The inception was a combined effort, of sorts, and overall sort of meanders before we hit upon the direction we really needed to go. Her thoughts about who Tempest was and should be (and she named her character far before Tempest of the mlp movie came into being) have certainly evolved over the years... and Tempest is not who she was back in 2017.

Suffice to say, the story had a messy beginning. Although the greatest fault that should be placed is on me. I was a brand new writer, and had never undertaken to do something like this. It surprised me with how hard it really is.

Again, thank you for your time in that review. Cheers!