What's a cliche, common mistake, or just general awful thing that makes you put a story down immediately that you hope to avoid like the plague? O_O

In the Fo:e setting, a peeve for me is when stories don't really try to convey how dangerous, inhospitable and desolate the wasteland setting should be to the MC(s), such as being able to get into engage in and win multiple different fights with raiders and etc before maybe suffering a minor injury or two which would always quickly be healed with the somehow still very abundant healing potions

7807797
40,000 word chapters.

7807797
Humans. I came here for ponies. If I wanted stories about people, I'd go to my local library.

There was a weekly thread about this a while back.

My response.

Another thing I greatly dislike is when someone tries to copy super mutants by having giant/jumbo/roided psycho ponies. We already have IMP alicorns as a parallel to FEV super mutants, and they make for far more interesting adversaries than a big troll pony.

7807797
A grand, heroic plot that's about saving the world/wasteland. I know it's ironic, considering that's what the OG does, but now that I've read other stories, I really like it more when the scales are smaller. Personal.

7807855
You might like mine. Main character is mostly adjacent to the big happenings, and wants to avoid them as much as possible.

7807859
Same thing for mine. Well, mine's set some time before them, even.
>Bellenast
Oh hey, it's been on my RiL forever. Think you're close to finishing it?

for me, and not only in FoE it is when there are no stakes. Somehow immortal or unkillable hero
or hero that, despite his adventures, is unable to grow, progress and learn things, because that makes me stop caring about said hero

7807863
Sent a PM

Dialogue.

Well, every story on this site, really. As long as the story doesn't have some kind of dialogue, internally or otherwise, the fic is a bore fest.

I am looking specifically at the struggles of the character. Not at what they are doing and how they do it. Example is when the story just tells you where the character is, what they discover and do, and how they got out of that situation.

It is missing out on how the character is doing with maybe a sprinkle of why, if at all.

If the story is able to make the character resonate with the reader on some level, it will be on track to be one of the good FoE to read

7807797
Too many stories that do Stable Dwellers, to me people born in the Wasteland should be the norm because leads to both natural world-building and a character whose point of view is very different from our own. Stable Dwellers are often chosen because a) it's what the games do, B) so characters can explain the universe in text dumps rather then if the character already knew.

Since I've gotten so many great responses already, I guess I'll ask a follow up question (as a super new person) do you guys think these days the majority of readers would prefer the first person perspective, with the main focus being entirely on that one character, a third person POV, or first person, but switching between character perspectives? Such as showing the main character for a few chapters, and then doing a brief switch to show what the villain is doing?

7808018
Ask yourself instead which one is better suited to your writing, in terms of style and narrative flow. For my part, my story is almost entirely in first-person limited perspective, with a couple short segments in third-person limited. Those brief segments are for events that occur beyond the main character's ability to observe, but contain crucial details for the story. Otherwise, the entire story is told from the perspective of a character with almost no internal monologue; in other words, I rarely write any narration of the character self-analyzing or being introspective, because the character doesn't do that much. The narration is hyper-focused on what she experiences, says, and observes, but not on her internal thought processes. This works for the style of story I'm telling, but it wouldn't work for many others. You might need a lot more internal monologue to explain your character's thinking or observations.

If you're telling a story that involves many characters and events in different places, such as factional politics and interactions, then I'd recommend doing it in third-person limited or omniscient.

lotta writers i've found seem to use only the pony species. it'd be neat to see more stories with the other races. I'm writing my own because of this.

Not enough robots

7807797
For the first question, besides normal triggers for all kind of stories, not just F:E fanfics, like being full of grammar and spelling mistakes, human/displaced/crossover characters from another franchise, I have a couple of pet peeves specifically for F:E fanfics. I won't say I would just throw a story down whenever I see one of these things; I'd still give a story a chance and see how it straightens that out. That said, there are times I found myself rolling my eyes and sighing, especially if these things keep going on for chapters long without any sign of improvement.

First and most significantly is a protagonist with too much self-hate, especially if this becomes the drive for their actions. I saw this in several prominent stories, like Project Horizons, Heroes, etc. Yes, Little Pip made a lot of mistakes and had a lot of regrets, but the drive for her actions was not to punish or torture herself, but to save others. She acknowledged the bad part of her, and she hated it, but not once did she think of punishing herself for it. She threw herself in pains and dangers because she wanted to help, not because she hated herself or thought she deserved suffering. It was sacrifice, not masochism. But a lot of stories falsely copied Little Pip's self-destructive tendency and made a perversion out of it, creating protagonists who did things because they wanted to punish themselves, not out of an urge to create a better world, at least not until after a loooong and agonizing process, both for them and for the readers who have to read through that.

Second is a world setting that doesn't feel like the Wasteland from the original. In kkat's F:E, the Wasteland was truly a desolated place. Yes, there were places like Tenpony Tower and Fillydelphia with a lot of ponies and some resemblance of societies, but even there you can still feel the desolation and withering of a civilization post apocalypse, with cutthroat rules, isolation and anxiety. Outside of those, the Wasteland was truly a wasteland, with communities small, scattered, pitiful and scarce of resources, clutching for survival in the wild. But a lot of stories I read do not give such feeling. In them, the Wasteland was nothing worse than a wild wild west, with towns, communities, societies plentiful and thriving, so much so they could expand, establish sophisticated trade network, do politics and wage large-scale wars. It doesn't give off the right atmosphere.

For the second question, it entirely depends on what you're planning to write. A F:E fanfic doesn't mean it has to be a protagonist exploring the Wasteland. The stories could deal with the old war and the situation before the balefire bombs dropped, following different characters like the mane 6, Celestia/Luna, or some canon background characters, or the plot could revolve around some political conflict among a community like the Enclave or Red Eye's force, for example. In such stories, 3PPOV is actually preferable. But if you're writing a standard "a protagonist exploring the Wasteland", then either 1PPOV or a "single perspective" 3PPOV that only follows a single character would fit.

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But a lot of stories I read do not give such feeling. In them, the Wasteland was nothing worse than a wild wild west, with towns, communities, societies plentiful and thriving, so much so they could expand, establish sophisticated trade network, do politics and wage large-scale wars. It doesn't give off the right atmosphere.

You should play Fallout 2 and New Vegas. The NCR had a population of about 700,000 citizens by 2241, about 80 years after its founding. While the area Littlepip explores in FoE is very much a blasted, ruined waste modeled after Fallout 3's urban areas, in particular, it is only a snapshot of Equestria as a whole. Additionally, while the Enclave's cloud curtain significantly affects the tenability and arability of farmland, that extends only over Equestria, not beyond it. Most of the world would not be so limited and hindered in its ability to grow.

In other words, not all of the "wasteland" is, in fact, a wasteland.

7807840
Seriously, it's like the author is being paid by the word like they're writing for some victorian aristocrat. An average American novel usually runs about three to four thousand words but folks around here feel they need to fit an entire volume into one chapter.

7808861
Exactly!

7808861
This has come up several times in the past, so I still have the numbers saved:

An analysis of fantasy novels gave an overall average of about 6k words per chapter, while individual novels had an average running from a little under 3k to over 11k. Most of them had at least one chapter over 10k, and a small number had at least one chapter over 20k. And that's not counting outliers like Good Omens, which is about 110k divided into seven days (chapters), which would be 16k average, but the amount of stuff that happens on a given day is so different that the size of each chapter varies wildly (it wouldn't surprise me if the longest one gets close to 30k). Or even more extreme outliers like the Diskworld books that frequently don't have chapters at all.

Chapter size is far from a standardized thing. And honestly, it's one of the least important things for a story.

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7808879

An inexperienced writer will try to adhere to a preset wordcount, and the narrative flow may suffer for it.
A more experienced writer will write until the chapter has told what it needs to tell.

A good writer will captivate you such that you cease to care.

If the number of words in the book is what first catches your attention, then you aren't reading good books.

7808953
What a mediocre way to sum up every experience.

7808974
I never claim to be anything other than what I am.

7809000
I'm glad you got the humor of my statement. You're right, though.

7808936
I would honestly disagree with you on this one. A long chapter length on FiMfic often means a really really long "scene" since a lot of writers on here think that "1 uploaded chapter equals 1 small part of the overarching story". Just as how purple prose can ruin a sentence can extremely long chapters ruin a good story.

I can personally not read Tolkien because he uses too many details The Lord of the Rings, and I can't stomach Steven Kings written word (or at least not the books that I got my hands on where he uses like 1½ page to describe an evil characters master plan to kill a king... just to scrap that plan right after with a 1/4th of a page long description of how only the evil character is so evil to do such a thing, so everyone would know it was him that did it)

The art of a precise and short story that actually gets its point across is a rather rare one (I mean look at the word counter on some of our stories in this group), as the famous quote goes "If I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter."

7809102
I dunno, when I see extremely large chapters, it's very rarely a single scene. It's usually a whole bunch of scenes. It's maybe one event, but often not even that.

I'd agree that excessive wordcount can ruin a story (or more accurately, wordcount spent poorly; I don't care for The Lord of the Rings largely because it spends so much time on pointless details, but I've enjoyed stories that are even longer because they didn't). But I don't agree that chapter length is the problem. If you take a story and divide it into 40k-word chapters, it's not going to be significantly different from dividing it into 1k-word chapters. Both probably miss good points where a chapter break could be used to good narrative effect (though scene breaks can have similar effect). And I think the Diskworld books are a great example of it; the few I've read (I'm slowly working on more!) have felt very concise and well-constructed, using exactly the right amount of words and no more, despite having a "chapter length" of the entire book.

For reference, The Lord of the Rings has an average chapter length of about 7500, which isn't much greater than the average fantasy novel. Chapter length isn't why it feels so long and drawn out.

7808804
I know a lot of people feel the need to fix other Fallout games into their F:E fanfics. Honestly I don't really understand this thinking. While kkat's F:E does parody Fallout 3 here and there, the story, the setting, the lore are all of its own. I care about F:E and MLP, I don't care about some games I'm not gonna play any time soon. Why do I need my F:E universe to adhere to those games, which I remind you are also only loosely connected to each other?

In the original, kkat clearly indicated that the Wasteland, or the entire Equestria in general, were desolated, and places like Fillydelphia and Tenpony Tower were the only places left with resemblances of society. Flipping that up not only goes against the lore of F:E, it goes against the theme of the story. There was a reason kkat chose Fallout 3 to parody, and set the Wasteland up to be so ruined and segregated. It underlines the lack of resources (which was the source of most conflicts from the Great War with the zebras to the Enclave's attack on the ground), the distrust among ponies, and the consequences of war, from there highlighting the struggle to rebuild peace and trust, to overcome your selfishness, to be better. Making a corner of Equestria still brimming with life and trade not only makes all those conflicts silly (because, why wouldn't ponies or the Enclave just flock to those more habitable areas instead of fighting over this piece of hostile land?), it undermines the theme of the entire story. If I want to read about some petty gang quarrels over trade routes, I'd rather read it in another setting entirely.

7809188

I know a lot of people feel the need to fix other Fallout games into their F:E fanfics. Honestly I don't really understand this thinking.

Fallout: Equestria does not parody Fallout 3, per se, but rather takes inspiration from all the Fallout games (as of 2011).
I pointed to Fallout 1/2 and NV because they are examples of how the world grows and recovers, whereas Fallout 3 is a poorly-thought-out, stagnant snapshot of what the world would have been immediately after armageddon. Kkat's vision of Equestria is vastly superior to the Fallout 3 wasteland in execution and plausibility, while also taking inspiration from it; many of the events and set pieces of Fallout: Equestria, however, are thematic parallels of Fallout 1, 2, 3, and New Vegas. Fillydelphia is the Pitt, Canterlot is the Sierra Madre, Celestia One (the space-based weapon controlled from the MAS megaspell room in Tenpony Tower) is Helios One, Maripony is the Mariposa Military Base, the Impelled Metamorphosis Potion that creates the alicorns is the Forced Evolutionary Virus that created the first generation of super mutants... the list goes on.

Making a corner of Equestria still brimming with life and trade not only makes all those conflicts silly (because, why wouldn't ponies or the Enclave just flock to those more habitable areas instead of fighting over this piece of hostile land?), it undermines the theme of the entire story.

That's why I wrote a story set beyond Equestria. Equestria is only one nation among many. The SPP network and the Enclave's cloud curtain, and the deleterious effects that they have on agriculture, are the primary reasons that Equestria has not recovered to a significant degree, but that curtain covers Equestria. It does not cover the entire continent, or the rest of the world.

Some of us want to write stories in bombed-out ruins of a concrete jungle. Some of us, however, would rather venture beyond that dark, cloying box and see the sunshine and green fields beyond the mountains, to which some survivors would have fled after fire rained from the heavens. There are still dangers leftover from the megaspells, of course--they are prickly and hard to eradicate, after all--but life goes on, and thrives.

7807848
Wait someone actually used Zigger and it was 100% serious and not in a 4chan/troll thing?

7809299
Sent a PM.

7809188

In the original, kkat clearly indicated that the Wasteland, or the entire Equestria in general, were desolated, and places like Fillydelphia and Tenpony Tower were the only places left with resemblances of society.

Friendship City had nearly a thousand people in it. Tenpony Tower had "thousands." Fillydelphia likely had even more. There were many small settlements like New Appleloosa or Arbu, enough that trader caravans were a thing we see multiple times throughout the story (Calamaty's job had been protecting a caravan before meeting Littlepip). There isn't a thriving metropolis, but there's still a significant amount of scattered civilization going on.

7809256
Yeah, as I said, I don't care much about the Fallout franchise to catch every reference. Nevertheless, as you pointed out, F:E is, despite the parody, completely unique and a world of its own, having its own coherent lore, theme and underlying message.

I'm not completely against people making their headcanon, expanding the world of F:E to other places or making the atmosphere in their stories different from the original. However, people have to mind the plausibility and coherent with the original, both in terms of lore and in terms of theme. Even if you write stories about some other countries like Griffonstone or Yakyakistan, Equestria was still the largest country in the continent, and the war was an incontinental war, every country must be heavily affected in some way. The entire world was heavily implied to be pretty much dead, and if your story says otherwise, you have to make it explainable. Even then, you can't just disconnect the setting from the original completely. Not only does it not make sense (like, if Griffonstone wasn't affected much, why wouldn't ponies just flee there en masse instead of staying and dying from the radiation, or why wouldn't the Enclave invade it when they were so desperate about resources), the change in atmosphere and theme if too severe would make it too disconnected from the original, that story would just cease to be a F:E fanfic and you'd better make it an original setting.

7809326
It's not about the number. It's about the settlements being clearly different from normal ones in a functioning civilization. Yes, Fillydelphia could have had hundreds of thousand, but nobody would call it a normal city. Tenpony Tower might be the most "normal", yet you can see the social structure, the isolation policy and strict rules imposed on its citizen, the anxiety clearly give off the atmosphere of a post-apocalyptic world. A few trading caravans among settlements once in a while were far from brimming trade towns and ponies easily going back and forth trading, expanding settlements. The Wasteland in the original F:E was much more grim, much more depressing. Out there, ponies enslaved, murdered and cannibalized each other just to survive. It was not a simple wild wild West with gang-owned towns where ponies cared more about politics and gaining territories than staying alive.

7809900

However, people have to mind the plausibility and [be/remain] coherent with the original, both in terms of lore and in terms of theme.

The entire world was heavily implied to be pretty much dead, and if your story says otherwise, you have to make it explainable.

What we have to mind is up to us, as writers, and I'd like to see a story on your account and a demonstration of greater knowledge of the source material before you lecture me on plausibility, amigo; that said, I like to think I've done both of these well enough with my own story.

That said...

that story would just cease to be a F:E fanfic and you'd better make it an original setting.

Many times, I have considered whether I'd have been better off writing my fic, To Bellenast, as original fiction. There's enough material there in some respects for a good foundation, but, ultimately, the characters I've made are products of events and circumstances that would be difficult to adapt outside the setting. I'm okay with that.

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7809131

I’m gonna have to go to bat for lord of the rings here. It’s fine if you don’t prefer Tolkien’s style, but the detail he went into was by no means “pointless.” The details were crucial for characterizing the world, establishing stakes, and building tension. Without the sections showing the Shire, there’s no reference point against which you can compare Frodo’s perilous journey (and it doesn’t hurt that the opening chapters are charmingly written.)

The details of the landscapes they pass through not only aid the reader in visualizing their journey, but they’re also crucial to the stakes and themes of the story. Contrasted against the desolation of Mordor, and the destruction it’s armies wreak, the descriptions of the scenery serve the purpose of showing what the characters are fighting for.

The long lulls between action scenes are intentional. The fellowship is heavily outmatched by the enemy. They have to do everything in their power to avoid notice, and every altercation they do get into brings them within an inch of letting the ring fall into the hands of Sauron. This is something I think most FO:E writers could learn from. There’s not a single scene in the LoTR trilogy where the main characters just fight a bunch of orcs just because the story needed an action scene to hold the reader’s attention. Every action scene builds tension beforehand, has lasting ramifications for the characters, and moves the story forward. And all the detail Tolkien went into beforehand makes it so much more compelling. This establishment of stakes is what makes it a massive gut punch when Gandalf falls in the mines of Khazad-dûm. You really feel how much more difficult it will be for the fellowship without the aid and guidance of Gandalf. Same thing with Boromir’s death and the subsequent breaking of the fellowship. This element of Tolkien’s writing is what makes the story work, and it would be much worse off without it.