ENight Mares and Daydreams

• MLP: FiM
• Slice of Life

It's been months since Nightmare Moon was banished, and things have started to settle down. Yet, mysterious things were still ahoof, when one night a stranger happens upon my door with something that will change my life forever.

• Celestia
• OC
• Bat Pony

Dreams of Ponies · 28k words  ·  104  3 · 1.6k views

Night Mares and Daydreams

by Dreams of Ponies

Summary

It's been months since Nightmare Moon was banished, and things have started to settle down. Yet, mysterious things were still ahoof, when one night a stranger happens upon my door with something that will change my life forever.

Initial Thoughts

I’m always a fan of stories that look into the early days of Equestria and its history. Stuff involving the Hearth’s Warming founders, Starswirl, or even just the Princesses when Celestia and Luna were younger always excites me, and this looks to be no different. And we might get to see something about the disappearance of batponies in Equestria. Cool!

Overview

I really do hate it when I forget what unfinished means…

This story is a bit tricky to talk about. Partly because it’s still being written (as of November of 2020), and partly because it has a bad habit of switching point of view without warning. Or, at least, without stating who the point of view is every chapter. There’s a number of issues due to this, but I’ll talk about them more as we go along. Suffice it to say, deciding who the main character actually is, isn’t that easy.

Things start off with an earth pony living in the Everfree Forest right around the time Nightmare Moon was defeated. Nightshade is basically Zecora before Zecora, and he’s immediately tasked with delivering a baby. Said baby appears to be from a noble, unicorn family of some sort, but since the mother abandons the filly with Nightshade moments after she recovers enough to leave, there’s really not a lot to say about them. Aside from a vague sense of dread that things aren’t okay for batponies in this Equestria.

The first few chapters seem to then run through Nightshade’s life raising that poor abandoned batfilly, whom he names Moon Flower. We get a speedrun of her early childhood, seeing her learn her first words and make her first friend in an Ursa Minor.

And then the narration jumps from Nightshade’s first-person view to Moon Flower’s when she hits about seven years old. This is a jarring moment, and it took me several seconds to realize what happened. Now, I think most can recover and learn to roll with that sort of narrative shift over time. You just have to. But despite the relative smoothness of the grammar and narration style themselves, this shift reveals a bit of an issue I’m sure will fly over 99% of readers’ heads:

Dreams, the author, is clearly more comfortable writing in third-person. Some examples

He poked and prodded me, but stopped as he saw my eyes glaze over.

How precisely can you see your own eyes glaze over? And how do you know what he sees?

As he started speaking again, I puffed out my cheeks like a bat eating a mango two sizes too big.

Again, it just feels like the story was conceptualized in a third-person perspective before the author decided he wanted to practice writing in first. The narration is still good, minus some grammatical mistakes here and there, but this quirk of the writing becomes very noticeable if you’re looking for it.

This is not the story’s largest flaw, of course. And neither is the aforementioned number of grammatical mistakes (most are missing quotation marks and similar punctuation), though that can be a nuisance.

No, the largest flaw, in my opinion, is that the characters in this story are so good, so very well realized that the fact that the story is incomplete and barely into its own narrative just hurts. Nightshade feels fairly realistic, as far as single dads go. I would have liked to see more of his “prickly” personality survive past the initial chapter, but he’s a fun, goofball of a father-figure to the story’s real star: Moon Flower.

Moony, as she’s known, is just about the most stereotypical “thestral” character out there. Like, take whatever image just popped into your mind when I said “thestral”, and call it Moon Flower. Cuz that’s it. Dark fur, dark mane, mangos, screeeeee-ing, a venomous hatred for the sun… all the works.

And yet, she’s cute. Very cute. And I’m not particularly annoyed by all the old batpony tropes, so it never felt oppressive to me. She’s an incredible silly filly who is still in that incredibly naïve state of being all Disney princesses start out in. And if the story would continue, I’m sure we’d see her grow out of that naivete in time, as she slowly learns more about the world she’s in and whatever’s going on with the other thestrals.

If there’s one downside to her I’m actually a bit more concerned about, it’s how Moon gets along with her next friend, a unicorn colt named Starbright. There’s an uncomfortable amount of sexual innuendo from this seven-year-old’s father’s internal monologue whenever she and Starbright hang out, and the amount of blushing and such (again) seven-year-olds get up to is… kinda weird. Not gonna lie.

Still. If the author ever continues this work, I’d say it’s worth at least a look.

If.

IF, Dreams. Hint-Flipping-Hint.

Grammar

4/5 – First-Person Does Not Work Like That
A few missing punctuation marks and the logical issues of describing things in first person you couldn’t possibly see hold this section back from perfect marks.

Story

3/5 – Shows great promise in the construction of a classic narrative
Despite being incomplete (some might say un-started due to how early into the plot arc everything appears to be), I can only give this a 3 on the grounds that it’s not done yet and I don’t know what the author is aiming for. I can guess that it’s a take on the hero’s journey, though how literal that goes might change in the story’s later (unpublished) events. But I can already see shades of Romeo and Juliet, Harry Potter, and possibly some more haunting works thrown in there.

Characters

4/5 – Solid OCs written compellingly
This might be subjective to each reader, but I found all the main characters to be incredibly compelling to read. Strong, clear personalities that clash in such ways as to encourage change and growth in each other over the course of the narrative. It’s all the best foundations for good characters.

Final

Night Mares and Daydreams is the cute beginnings of a story I would very much love to read. There isn’t much here yet, but assuming the author continues with this, it certainly could become something of a classic. I believe that.

To the author: Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it! Finish it NOW!

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<For Archive Purposes:7.2/10>