Epilogue
Their house was on a hill, miles out from the village. The house had seen a lot of love over the years as they raised their family. Now, however, only two elderly ponies lived there. Their children had all moved on to their own lives, and were raising children of their own. An elderly brown unicorn sat with his wife, a blue unicorn, watching the moonrise together. It had been their tradition for many, many years. They were thought of as eccentrics, even amongst their children, for wanting to go and stare at the Mare in the Moon. They didn't care. The moon was precious to them.
Edge Glimmer and Meanderly, knowing what the Mare in the Moon was, could never bring themselves to fear it, like so many ponies had begun to. The legend had begun to spread soon after the events at Whinnychester Castle. For the two of them, who had been there for those events, the moon was a thing of bittersweet sadness, not fear.
Their moon watching was interrupted by a sound. A sound the two of them had heard only once in their lives, so very, very long ago. A wheezing sound that heralded the arrival of one special pony.
Both ponies looked around them frantically, searching for the tall blue box with the words “Police Barn” on that would soon appear out of thin air. It appeared, fading in and out, directly behind where they sat. The door opened and out strode an earth pony with an off-white coat, wearing a dark brown jacket with a paisley scarf and an umbrella tucked into the pocket for easy carrying.
“Hello, friends,” the pony greeted them, tipping his hat to them as he did. “I hope I am not intrrruding.”
“Doctor, what are you doing here?” Edge Glimmer asked. He recognized the very pony who had tried to save his Princess so many years before, looking the same now as he did then.
“Well, I was leaving Whinnychester about fifty or so years ago and a thought occurred to me,” the Doctor began. “It occurred to me that, yes, you have your parts to play. Your rrroles to fulfill. But then, I realized, eventually your part would be done. It would be up to your next generations to continue your oh so important legacy. I assume Twilight Moon and her siblings have gone forth and begun their own families?”
The ponies nodded with some uncertainty.
“Wonderful. That should be in order then. That in mind, I decided it would be safe now to come back and make you an offer. A retirement package, of sorts. A thousand years into the future, perhaps?”
Edge Glimmer and Meanderly’s eyes went wide as they realized what the Doctor was offering.
“So, what do you say?” the Doctor asked.
THE END
Also LikedSimilarAuthor
- RobotFox · 105k words · 57 8 · 2.3k views
- Thrawn1800 · 32k words · 103 19 · 3.4k views
- Trouble-Shooter · 29k words · 53 0 · 2.3k views
- Doctor Perseus · 19k words · 114 3 · 6.1k views
- Maximille De Lis · 11k words · 56 14 · 3k views
- Infinite Carnage · 81k words · 194 7 · 2.7k views
- JeckParadox · 81k words · 40 9 · 2.8k views
- Silent Whisper · 8.7k words · 162 2 · 1.2k views
Stats
Page generated in 0.09 seconds
Total duration
944 users online
98,269 hits today, 2,314,256 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
Hey, how come your first Doctor Whooves Story isn't on this site?
4018486 Got pulled for being TOO close to the original episodes.
Brilliant. It was an absolute joy to proofread, and it fully deserves my favorite. Keep up the good work!
Hello, sir, this is ChromeMyriad here with your requested WRITE review! For those about to read, beware of SPOILERS!
I’ll go ahead and preface this review by saying I’m not a massive fan of Doctor Who. I like the show and have watched several of its recent incarnations, but it didn’t leave a deep impression on me. I say this to inform you I won’t get many of the references being made in this fic. Take the following as criticism from a relative newbie to the Doctor.
Before I dive into the actual story, I should note the usage of ‘night guard’ in the synopsis here:
If Luna’s Night Guard is the name of the unit, it should be capitalized. The way it’s currently written implies that there is also a segment of Luna’s guard active during the day, otherwise mentioning the ‘night’ part is meaningless. In the latter case, a hyphen between the words should be included.
Forgot a capital on that second ‘our’.
That period needs to be a comma. Here’s a link to a decent resource for grammar rules. The mechanical errors in this fic seem to mostly be small oversights rather than consistent problems. A thorough review by an experienced editor should catch them if you want to clean them all up.
Infodumps are used in the first chapter to describe the characters’ appearances:
Infodumps slow down your story and disrupt its flow. Audience immersion hinges on how well the information in a story is paced with the development of the plot or character interaction. It is far more immersive to mention physical character traits only when they become relevant to the story. In this particular case, the same fan recognition of the Doctor (as well as his trademark eccentricity) would have a great deal more impact if other ponies’ reactions to him were shown rather than implied through telling. The infodump for Celestia is particularly grating due to the fact that your audience already knows exactly what she looks like. That small paragraph about Celestia’s appearance is one of those that readers skip.
Let me talk about telling, actually. Telling is when the narrator informs the audience of what’s happening baldly as opposed to showing what’s going on. Showing is when thoughts and ideas are implied through description of storyline events. Allow me to give a few examples:
These are examples of telling. The narrator is informing the audience what opinion they are meant to have rather than allowing the audience to develop their opinion based on descriptions of the actions or characters involved.
It would be more interesting to show the guards actually being better than other guards or showing us how the Doctor’s feat was impressive or to describe him swaggering, sauntering, or striding past the guards. For instance, the garb of ponies who visit this location could be described as the Doctor passes a few by. These same ponies could comment on the strangeness of his dress or even just throw him unsure or haughty looks. This would be far more immersive than simply telling us his feat was impressive.
Individually, these instances of telling are not seriously damaging to your story, but niggling errors become overwhelming difficulties as they grow in number. Telling is one of the biggest problems in this story.
Is he meant to be rolling his ‘r’s here? It’s unclear.
Ah, so he does. I’m not sure if this is a trait of the Doctor carried over from the show, but I feel like this particular act might be one of those things that’s funny to hear, but kind of weird to read. Unless this becomes important to the plot, it’s more distracting than it’s worth.
I mentioned earlier that small, isolated incidents of telling were not seriously degrading to the story. Giving Celestia’s entire history with the Doctor in the form of a block of telling makes it seem like the history doesn’t matter, as indeed it doesn’t. The implication of giving the Doctor a free pass to private time with Celestia is that they have significant history. The emotions felt during that history can’t really be felt by the audience here because the actions implying them aren’t shown to us. The heavy implication of history coupled with the rising threat to Equestrians is more than enough motivation for the Doctor and Celestia to go on their next adventure, rendering this infodump of history completely unnecessary and disruptive to the story’s flow.
Another dubious piece of the story is the Doctor showing telltale signs of being a Gary Stu. A Gary Stu is a character who is essentially perfect. They are smart, strong, competent in myriad ways, and have no flaws. The Doctor has thus far been shown to have special privilege, be a mentor to the leader of a country, have the admiration of a beautiful female, etcetera. His flaws so far are restricted to his arguably eccentric fashion sense, and even that could be seen as a virtuous rebellion against unreasonably elitist expectations. Gary Stus are generally uninteresting characters due to their flawlessness and are to be avoided by giving your characters believable flaws.
Having said this, I remember the Doctor from the show I watched not having many flaws either, but that was forgivable because the strangeness of his character gave him a lot of comedic interactions with his more relatable sidekick. The same logic applies here. The Doctor described in this tale has almost no character at all outside of being merely competent. Rolling his ‘r’s and dressing out of the ordinary do not give him character and, without an accompanying reason or an apparent difference in the way he thinks, seem gimmicky. Again, these are probably attributes the show’s Doctor has, but his character isn’t well-established here and those attributes only serve to distract.
An important piece missing from this story’s dialogue is body language and description of facial expression. It’s important to include small tidbits of this sort to help immersion and character development through interaction. This is the perfect place to insert the comedic elements I mentioned before that saved the Doctor’s character in the show and made him interesting. The same can be said of Celestia’s and Edge Glimmer’s dialogue. The characters seem made of cardboard most of the time because their body language isn’t shown.
I feel like the response to this fic would be greater if the telling problems in the first chapter were fixed. The hook is very important to capture an audience’s attention and the telling creates a rather long slog to get to the good parts.
In your message, you mentioned some criticism regarding ‘clunky’ dialogue. I would describe the dialogue as more ‘incomplete’ than ‘clunky’. A great deal of character development is dependent on interaction between characters and the lack of clarifying emotion, reactionary facial expressions, and body language is absolutely crippling. Let me give an example:
Now, in the author’s mind, this exchange is probably pictured with accompanying raised eyebrows, pursed lips, coy glances, the frustrated ruffling of feathers, and maybe a snort or two. From the reader’s perspective, however, the only cue we’re given that either character moves or shows any emotion at all is the word ‘unhappily’. Did her gaze drop to the floor? Did her ears droop? Perhaps she also got a faraway look in her eyes as bitter memories rose, unbidden, to the forefront of her mind?
The Doctor here is even worse. Not knowing anything about the seventh Doctor, I had no character to go on for this exchange. In my mind’s eye, a ponified version of the Riddler sips tea with a dead-eyed expression as his monotone drones the dialogue like an actor who completely stopped caring. Is he a cold, unassailably logical analyzer? Is he a jovial imp having a little good-natured fun at Celestia’s expense? Is he a thoughtful creature, pondering life’s mysteries with his chin resting on a hoof?
And the rrrrrrrrr’s. Oh, the rrrrrr’s. Vernacular, or a character’s dialect, has a place in some stories because it helps readers recognize some important aspect about the character. That is, vernacular helps a reader understand a character’s origins or helps identify when a character is speaking. Vernacular can even help explain why two characters interact poorly if it’s thick enough to be confusing. The trilling ‘r’s, though, seem to hold no purpose. If they’re an aspect of the seventh Doctor’s character, I can see at least why they’re here. However, anyone fan enough to recognize it as a trait of the seventh Doctor knows what he sounds like and is already reading his dialogue in his voice. Considering this, actually writing in the rolling ‘r’s is just distracting to non-fans like myself. It would be easy to simply acknowledge this quirk of the Doctor’s character in one of the lines of dialogue without constantly reminding us it’s there. This would allow the fans’ immersion to remain without throwing in roadbumps for the non-fans. As a suggestion, you could leave this in:
and leave out all the extra ‘r’s. I think the fic would be a lot stronger for it.
On the Doctor’s character in particular, I think amending the dialogue would go a long way toward helping give him a little depth and relatability. The short explanations in the Author’s Notes are nice for us non-Whovians, so I wouldn’t change those. The Doctor’s history doesn’t need to be gone over in-depth, but he does need to be interesting. Like I said, I have no idea what his character might be and the story didn’t really tell me much other than slight eccentricities and being a bit of a presumptuous prick sometimes.
In conclusion, this fic has good and bad points. The telling is painful in the beginning, but more showing is available later on. The pacing in the beginning feels a little rushed, but it’s not terribly distracting and would likely be solved if it were revised to show more than tell. The characterization of Celestia, Luna, and Edge is passable despite the Doctor’s criminal lack of interesting character. The plot is coherent and fairly intriguing. The dreamscape in particular seems to have had the most thought put into it. I enjoyed the silhouettes, as they lent the dreamscape a particularly sinister feel.
Now, I didn’t read the entire thing. I will if you’d like me to, but I read far enough to justify my feelings about the Doctor and the dialogue in particular.
As an addendum, I want to mention the little introductions at the start of each chapter. While not strictly necessary and a little distracting, I didn’t find them to be all that bad. They lent the chapters an episodic feel that makes up for the slight distraction, in my opinion.
Enjoy your review! If you wish to ask questions or discuss the content of this review, feel free to PM me or reply to this comment.
~ChromeMyriad, WRITE’s Nanite Construct