Link to the Clown Mare story structure review here.

TClown Mare

• MLP: FiM
• Romance
• Mystery
• Sad

Rane Shackleton is a mare that is a pegasus slave, her parents couldn't have her while they were in debt to the high society. No matter how they wanted to do this. So, a pony sold her to a royal family at the Black Market..

• Violence
• Sex
• OC

Flora Blossom · 31k words  ·  37  7 · 800 views

Title: Clown Mare

Summary: Based on Flora Blossom’s OC(the author) set in the Gen 2 universe where, at a young age is sold into servitude to pay her family’s debts. She lives as a maid in the castle all of her life until her life changes one day when the young prince tells her something world shattering. The story acts as a ‘retrospective’ of Rane Shackleton’s life leading up to that point

Analysis: This review will be different then the first review because looking back, I didn’t really review the story itself, but its structure. To make up for this, I’m going to continue reading the story until completion so I may properly give the story a review. 

Starting where I left off in the first review, I stand by my review on the story’s structure, and the pacing. Second, I will backtrack on a few comments I made about the story being difficult to read now that I’ve learned the author isn’t a native english speaker explaining some of the word usage and structuring. Having said that, let's start with our review of the story!

Trying to keep with my self imposed standard, I will try to not spoil everything about this story. 

After finishing the story, while the start was rough it did improve over the course of the story until its conclusion minus some of my previous complaints of the structure, but that’s been explained. Most of my confusion from sudden and jarring POV shifts, or flashback scenes gradually faded as the author discovered the wonderful [ hr ] which elevated the writing and alleviated most of my confusion. This is a sign of someone learning and growing with their work, and the story becomes a sort of journal by tracking their progress over the course of the story’s life. 

But I digress…

Rane is a pegasus that lost the functions of her wings at a very young age, and was sold as a slave to her host family at Moon Crest, where she remained with them to the start of the story. The story is written (or its how I took it) that slavery is frowned upon, but ignored as long as it’s not constantly in the open. Even then, its known who buys slaves, but nothing is ever said to them about it, but I could be wrong and would love some clarification. 

As the story moves forward, I’m left wondering why everypony feels the need for Rane’s wings to be fixed, even if they have no real reason then for feeling sorry. My first impression was that Rane might be some important pony that doesn’t know her past, and is being hidden until a certain age- that was wrong. So I thought maybe it was related to her magic and overall health, but I was wrong again. In the end, none of my assumptions were correct, and I won’t spoil what it appeared to be so we’ll continue on.

Rane's involvement in this incident is well circulated by this point in time with many ponies having mixed views on her situation- some agree with it while others feel it's too lenient. This becomes a constant plot device as the story progresses with many ponies being offered a chance to voice their position through a POV, and this causes the story to become bloated. There are a lot of characters in this story, and many will get at least one scene before the conclusion.

Many of their names escaped me, and left me feeling uninvested because their introduction was often too quick. I would suggest the story expanding to allow these brief characters a chance to flourish, but the author has stated she’s going to make a sequel so this might solve some of the problems in the future. As a potential reader, be warned there are a lot of characters to keep track of. 

Does this mean the story is bad? No. Far from it. While there are some plot points that are never brought up again or left me confused why they’re even in the story, there’s a complexity here that hints at something more. Stories I’ve read in the past, both one shots, or multi chapter stories, were a hit miss with me with many being well liked by myself, or left me feeling drained. Clown Mare didn’t do that, and sure there are the mentioned problems in my last review post, I can say the hinted complexity was enough to tell me there is reason for these characters being here then to show up and take up word count. 

While mention of a possible sequel coming helps, it prevents me from getting fully invested with this story as I’m left with many questions, or wondering why do these ponies even care. Hopefully, once the sequel story drops it’ll explain a lot of the questions, but until then we are left looking for answers to questions that might not have any. 

Rating: 6/10

Moving forward, what killed a lot of my investment wasn’t me complaining about sudden POV shifts or too many characters, but how short the chapters were. For the sequel, I really hope the story will have longer chapters even if they only reach a word count of 1k. This will give the author more time to develop these many characters, and provide us readers with a greater understanding of their motives. 

I know I said I wouldn’t spoil anything, this is an example of I feel I was under developed and wasted potential. 

We’re introduced to this stallion that buys slaves and tortures them for what seems to be his sick pleasure, but in the same breath states its to find a cure for something. What it is, and how torturing ponies will bring us closer to this goal we don’t know because after that appearance he’s gone! For me, that was an interesting inclusion for the story, but is never visited again. I feel cheated, and once more can only hope this gets corrected in the future sequel. XD

yeap good work I like this one more than the other one... you finally finished it... this is what a review is like... just remember as a reviewer you can't skip chapters... :3 it could be different... Also, you can always decline if it's too much to handle as well.

7818913
It was never too much to handle, but the structure really threw me off and I felt needed to be addressed before doing an actual review. I was going to leave it like that, but after thought and talking to you I did skimp out on a proper review so I sought to correct it. Now, I still stand by the first review as it really was jarring, but as this one mentioned a lot of that left by the end of the story.

Left us know when you decide to drop the sequel alright?

7818966
6 years from now?