TDear Celestia, How Do I Put Out A Fire?!

• MLP: FiM
• Comedy
• Random

Princess Twilight doesn't know how to put out a fire, so she asks Spike to write a letter to Celestia. Spike is baffled, Celestia is an unintentional war prepper, and Luna is worried about her sister's health.

• Profanity
• Twilight
• Spike
• Celestia
• Luna

Soaring · 4.9k words  ·  107  6 · 2.3k views

Warning there are spoilers ahead. Like this one.

Initial Impressions:
This one I believe they call a crack fic. I could be wrong as I am new to the terminology. But it was wacky. It had the feel of one of those overly ridiculous cartoons. But I assume that was the intent. This is like an artist trying to critique ‘new school’ art. The form is intentionally distorted so it’s hard to judge. I’ll give it a whirl nonetheless.

Summary:

Twilight and Spike have the exciting job of balancing the budget. Then Princess Twilight accidentally blasts a hole in the ceiling and starts a fire. After some debate with Spike she determines the best course of action was to send Celestia a message asking for help then waits. 

Celestia receives the message and is equally flustered. She sets about pacing and creates a trench with her fretting. After advice from Luna, she responds with, put it out with a fire extinguisher and sing a magic chant. 

Spike follows the advice and the fire goes out. Twilight is told to go to a fire safety class.

Story (8/10)

Well it was an interesting tale. I really couldn’t find much story wise. There were a few places where it felt confusing. The scene with Celestia being confused and pacing a hole in the ground was a little over the top. From a time perspective I think it would have taken her longer than 20 minutes to do so. Unless she got really fat. In which case that should have been mentioned. Still as tangenty as it got it still was able to refocus later on the initial problem.  The beginning with the Spike sneezenado felt completely unnecessary. It didn’t really add much other than another cartoony moment. If it was used later to spread or put out the fire it would have made sense. But a strange tornado like sneeze that does nothing but knock Twilight over seems overkill.

Characters (8/10)

Twilight .. er Princess Twilight was the protagonist of the story. She was depicted as highly organized but panics in the face of a situation she has never had to deal with before. She’s shown her to be completely dependent on guidance from Celestia and not good with common sense. In the premise and tone of the story this Twilight works but it’s a far cry from Twilight herself. 

Spike is shown to have more practical knowledge but no will to implement it on his own. He finally takes action at the end but seems content to let Twilight lead despite not agreeing with her. He simply accepts her judgement though she explicitly tells him she has none. 

Celestia is the one character that got away from the caricature that it started as. Rather than being a voice of reason she simply waffles over her decisions and freaks out. She seems to rely on Luna to make her decisions for her. 

Luna is portrayed as the smarter of the two. She is the only one close to her actual portrayal. Though her need for violence is increased. She’s smart, capable, but leads Celestia by the nose.. snout.

The flow (7/10)

I got a little lost and frustrated in the Celestia and Luna scene. It felt like Celestia was really scatterbrained and there were a lot of tangents. The focal point was the fire and they didn’t decide fast enough. Unless the intent was to build tension by Celestia stalling and getting distracted by Luna. You could have cut back and forth between Celestia/Luna and Spike/Twilight to show the spreading fire and increase the tension further. 

In summation 

The story works for what it is. A silly cartoony piece where the characters are dim or at least absurdly flawed. You have a section or two in there where the wording is a bit confusing. 

Such as : “Why are you wanting to tell Celestia about this? Doesn’t that do nothing but let the fire spread?”

Probably would be better as : “Why would you want to tell Princess Celestia about this?”

But that was minimal. I can’t think of much to add. 

Total score:7.6666 aww heck just make it 8/10 

<For archive purposes:8/10>

7608342
Thanks for the review!

Lot of the issues you have with it are valid. Main reason why these issues exist is because of how I wrote it, and to be honest, I didn't have much wiggle room to work with since I was using a real event as a basis, so I didn't want any detail of that event missing. I applied the event mostly to the characters, and when things didn't look exactly 'in-line' with their actual characters, I decided to go for a more wacky approach. Thanks for the criticism and I'm definitely using what you said and applying those fixes to my future works. Oh, and that line you mentioned at the end of your review, that is a total grammar error. Will fix when I'm off work. Thanks again!