• Member Since 21st Feb, 2014
  • offline last seen Jul 5th, 2018

BlndDog


A veritable suppository of knowledge on the accurate use of words

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Diamond dogs are primarily carnivorous, which is probably a problem when they try to open diplomatic relations with Equestria. But Twilight is willing to give them a chance. Unfortunately when the living, breathing pig arrive in Ponyville on the eve of the banquet for the King of Diamondia, his first stop is Fluttershy's cottage.

Surely things can't get any worse?

[img]https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/J_9um-6O_qUT-XVdBdIjgLbxxpobcShztvMGqbinsoUspxLD3uwVn5RIhtxG5nGoEDYWQdU4TwG9OsUtDB3urUVTC-_A5PEzFCNLLJ20nHE3Cxe2qAXORV-H7LOSshJLCVbPT8r0Ag=w1342-h547[/img]

Chapters (2)
Comments ( 4 )

I came to give your story a review/comment/critique that you requested, when I saw that your story would include diamond dogs, I was delighted due to my love for the race. However, upon reading your story, I must say I have come to regret my decision. Reading through this story was a painful experience akin to dragging hundreds of pounds of gear through mud on a rainy day, I wanted to stop reading on eight separate occasions and only stopped myself because I knew I would not be able to make myself finish if I did stop. There were numerous reasons for this reaction, your story lacks a hook, most, if not all, of the shows characters feel out of character to some degree, your comedy fell flat, your story lacked description, and it had a very disjointed feel that made things even harder to follow.

I'll start with your lack of a hook, since a hook is the single most important part of any story. The hook of a story, if you don't know is something that happens early on to get the reader interested enough to continue reading the story. In your case the best hook for the story would be the presence of diamond dog royalty showing up to Twilight's house. There are two ways you could go about doing this, one is to start at the end with the king looking in at Twilight's castle seeing the mess as the pig went running out, or with Twilight reading the letter (which I strongly recommend you alter to not include typos seeing as these were distracting and not funny) and then proceeding with trying to procure a chief among the other party preparations.

As for your characters, the one you did the most disservice too is undoubtedly Spike, as his very first appearance you have him go into traumatic fainting spells and panic attacks over a little mud. This instantly kicked me out of the story in part due to the fact we rarely see Spike show such levels of panic, and when we do it is never over such minor maters as a big of mud being tracked in the house. The worse such events have ever done to Spike is cause him to grumble and wander off to get cleaning supplies. Frankly it's even a bit out of character for pigs and boars in general too, seeing as they only roll in mud when they are hot and Fluttershy would make an effort to keep him cool and comfortable. Even though Gustav has not been characterized much, what I remember of him is very different from what you portrayed, while he was haughty and full of himself, he was very neat, calm, and professional. He would not simply take an ax and attempt to decapitate a pig, he would be be professional and use much more traditional methods. As for Twilight, I found her far to easily panicked and panicking oddly. I could understand if you had her cracking under stress such as when she was charged with greeting the yaks recently, but she seemed to completely forget her own magical abilities and never stop to think about anything. Even your scene of her spiraling to the worst possible outcome scenario felt off.

I can't offer you much help on how to make this story funny as I don't tend to wright comedy pieces, but your comedy felt forced and was almost always painfully predictable down to your final "twist". Comedy should never feel forced, it should feel natural, coming from the scene and the characters. This felt like wooden cut outs trying to reenact a Three Stooges scene when they'd only ever heard of the comedians. I know I'm probably not explaining this part well, but that's because what makes good and bad comedy is very very hard to explain and even harder to do. There is a very good reason why the phrase, "Dying is easy, comedy is hard." was coined.

Lastly comes your general lack of descriptions, I think you only ever really described one thing in this entire story to satisfactory detail, the pig. Any time it came around for you to try and describe something, it seems you mostly just skipped doing so assuming that we'd know exactly what everything in the scene looked like. While it is true that we sort of do, you should still work on the principal that none of us have seen the show or know what anypony looks like or their homes. This serves two purposes, it helps slow you down to describe scenes, helping you better tie the story into a single smooth narrative, and it helps us as readers see the break down and changes of characters as they continue to experience the stress and fatigue of the events of your story.

I'm very sorry to have to give such a harsh review of your story, but if I lied and wrote a gushing flowery critique full of lies and about how much I loved it, you would not be able to progress as a writer. I hope you won't look at this as an attack, but as chance to learn and improve yourself as a writer.

The pig especially felt spot on for porcine behaviour, but the idea that Fluttershy is so insecure about carnivores feels a bit off. I mean she's fed fish and then fed fish to other animals.

This is a cute idea, but it does feel a bit flat. I'm sorry I can't really articulate why though.

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