EThe Bike of Aging

• MLP: FiM
• Random
• Slice of Life

Celestia is eight thousand years older than Luna

• Celestia
• Luna

iAmSiNnEr · 1.2k words  ·  145  9 · 1.8k views

Celestia discovers she is eight thousand years older than Luna. Both of the sisters go down to the basement to see if they can discover the cause, and they find something even better.

Cute pictures.

Opening remarks

The Bike of Aging by iAmSiNnEr (Sinner) is a random slice of life fic featuring Celestia and Luna presumably fawning over cute pictures. Seems like a cute fluff piece and I look forward to seeing how the story plays out. 

Note: this is a Random based story which does hit my “no read list”. After discussion with the author, I have accepted reviewing the fic. Due to my inexperience dealing with random fics, note that the review score and personal score may not be reflective of the actual quality of the work. 

Technical

There are a few grammar issues, specifically in the dialogue. Areas in which it’s missed who is speaking, strange places where the dialogue is cut off midway by a dash, and odd placement of ‘um’, and ‘ugh’ that cut into the flow of speech. 

7/10

Character

The two main characters of the piece are Luna and Celestia, which I believe should be talked about together. Both are parodies of their canon counterparts, which is perfectly fine, however I feel there is a small issue of committing to the parody. 

Both characters seem stuck in a middle ground, where on one hand they are keeping in line with canon but on the other they are being pushed towards a flanderized version of themselves. 

With this being random, I would argue that the characters need to be pushed more towards caricature. As it stands, both Celestia and Luna don’t really have personalities and are more stand-ins to exposit the necessary lines to get the story moving. 

I would suggest doubling down on Luna’s sense of duty that contradicts her wants of seeing pictures of a younger Twilight, Celestia and herself. For Celestia, I would push towards regal gremlin. She puts on airs as the elegant older sister, but happily devolves into mischievous tricks and wordplay. 

As it stands, there is an unfortunate lack of definitive character of the two sisters. 

2/10

Concept

The idea and hook is interesting. The idea of an anomalous object causing someone to rapidly age while riding a bike owned by a pony that would be unaffected and unaware then have the whole thing derail into fawning about foal pictures, is peak random. 

The structure of opening on the almost fairytale-like introduction with a narrator and ending on such a flippant note is quite novel. The derailment into something so completely out there while using comedic tones to convey the story works really well. 

Unique concept and an interesting execution. 

10/10

Vibe

Okay, let’s get the obvious part out of the way. The story is random, and, as far as I’m concerned regarding this aspect, it nails it. The disjointedness of the narrative, the off kilterness of the story and the wildly almost manic feel of the story all lend to the randomness of the piece. 

I do have several criticisms of the rest of the story. 

Firstly, pacing is very inconsistent. The story tends to start and stop frequently with long stretches of focusing on one aspect then blazing through another. Dialogue also suffers from this with some patchy back and forth that has some odd stopping points. There are several points where the dialogue seems to end prematurely or be broken up by a strange placement of punctuation. 

The story as a whole needed to be pushed more in one direction or another. Either it needed to be more comedic in tone, doubling down on over the top  characterization and jokes, or lengthen a lot of the major scenes to allow better flow through the story to nail that slice of life feel.

A suggestion to tie up the story that you could potentially do is to involve the narrator more in the story. Italicize the text to indicate when they are speaking and have them sarcastically interject or add random flourishes to simple actions. That would carry the almost fairytale-like feel of the introduction through the text and open for the possibility of meta jokes, comedic readings of actions, and fourth wall breaks.

Overall, though the story is enjoyable and nails the genre it belongs to, the actual execution makes the text harder to read than it should.  

4/10

Closing Thoughts

The Bike of Aging is a short random piece that is enjoyable, but falls short in several aspects on a technical level. The concept is unique and the style of the piece is very interesting, but the execution is fairly inconsistent. A few revisions could really push this piece to be an absolute top quality fic.

However, as is, I still give it a recommendation to be read as a short silly fluff piece.

5.7/10

<For archive purposes: 5.7/10>

Personal Score

I liked it. It’s silly, it’s cute, exactly to my tastes. I recommend a read. 

8/10

thx for the review!