Under the ruthless iron fist of an alien occupation, the princesses seek out mysterious powers all but unheard of. Their search draws them to the secrets that lay buried under the Crystal Empire itself.
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I gave chapter 2 a chance but more or less skipped over the middle two thirds of chapter 3.
Because of how you started the story, chapters 2 and 3 are effectively flashbacks and you know what they say about those. (Basically, don't do them unless you're really good as an author, because the events prior to flashing back primed your readers to care more about what happens after the flashback than what happens during it.)
The beginning and end of chapter 3 foreshadowed what would happen when the flashback ended to a sufficient degree to come across as "boring but not quite skippably irrelevant to the events I've been primed to care about" but the middle fell below that threshhold.
6318967 It will help if you consider Chapter - 01 as a flash-forward, rather than the following chapters as flashbacks. A flashback, to me anyway, needs a significant portion of the story to pass before they can be initiated, but in this story the events of Chapter - 01 are not entirely meant to be the actual beginning of the storyline, it's more an event to catch peoples attention. Something it seems to have done quite well. Consider Chapter - 02 and onwards to be the genuine beginning of the story, no further breaks in the story's timeline will occur. If you're skipping over chapters because you want to get to the parts about space marines, firstly: This is not the story for you, and second, if you do stick around through these chapters and the next few, marines won't reappear until Chapter - O6/07. I would request that you please read the chapters that have been released so far with all the above kept in mind, and give your feedback after you have thoroughly assessed the story so far. Thank you for your time
Needs about 40,000% more purging, with additional prayer.
6319072 Wait for Chapter - 06/07 you ravenous pack of heathens! Don't expect much action until another few chapters have passed, can't exactly have space marines just pop out the ground ....Wait, that's exactly what happens....well, crap
6319083 Zealots good sir, not heathens. Also, nobody expects random appearance of demigods, from the ground or otherwise.
images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130110021229/warhammer40k/images/6/63/DropPod001.png
6319107 You gotta admit, subterranean assault makes for a nice change of pace, right?
6319117 Damn straight! Hit 'em with the gurrilla tactics from the inevitable system of sewers/catacombs under the city. Drop caravans and armored vehicles into sinkholes with explosives.
...or they could just punch the walls. These are Astartes after all.
6319049
It doesn't help. I already considered that you probably intended it that way and what you're saying runs counter to both my own observations (a decade and a half of reading (quite literally) gigabytes of fiction (both professional and fan-)) and the various books on writing I've read to see if I could clear out some cognitive blocks I have which limit me to being a mere co-author.
Yes, the authoring books generally say "hook the reader in chapter 1" and/or "start right into the action" (which I've managed to boil down to "finish giving an accurate first impression before the end of chapter 1"), but:
1. Your flash forward "sets the wrong hook" (It provides an answer to the reader's implicit "Why should I care?" that doesn't really apply well to chapters 2 and 3)
2. If I ignore chapter 1, then chapters 2 and 3 simply feel like things are taking too long to get interesting (they don't really have a hook of their own).
Despite that, there's nothing wrong with the pacing, tone, or focus in chapters 2 or 3... it's just out of place, given the hook you chose to set. You started out fast and then jammed on the brakes. If you condensed them, they'd work. If you set a more appropriate hook to give them sufficient reason, in and of themselves, to be engaging despite having started off with a spoiler for future events (which, if anything, weakens the desire to read them), there would be no problem.
As-is, people who are in the mood for the type of slow-build pacing exemplified in chapters 2 and 3 are likely to either be driven off by chapter 1's fast pacing or by realizing that, as a whole, the story has schizophrenic pacing while people who are looking for the kind of fast-start pacing from chapter 1 will be disappointed by chapter 2 and 3 and end up either losing interest or skipping through it.
(Do you start to see why flashing back or forward requires a lot of skill to pull off?)
If you want to keep the flash-forward design, my advice is to rework chapter 2 to introduce the hook for some kind of less action-oriented subplot interesting enough to make up for the "even less interesting when shown in contrast to what came before" effect of such a rapid backstep in time and pace. (I'd suggest something which evokes a blend of curiosity and anticipation, like a mystery, such that readers will be more likely to read deeply for little details you can just trickle out to keep them hooked.)
In case it helps your brainstorming on that front, two questions that occurred to me are "Where is Discord during all of this?" and "The Tree of Harmony seems pretty passive throughout all of this trouble, given the things it's done since it got the Elements back. Is this an 'avalanches start slowly, but move powerfully' situation?"
(In the latter case, you could say that the Magic of Harmony ties Equestria together into a planet-wide meta-organism and the only reason such trouble is being had is that the Ponies are Equestria's immune system and, like HIV, the Federation has been keeping the immune system too busy to muster a defense. Any secondary or tertiary response Equestria might have takes a long time in much the same way that, in a magicless environment, plants move much more slowly than animals and evolution and geology even more slowly still.)
Heck, you've already got a good tie-in for something along those lines given the reveal in Chapter 3 that, after all this time, they barely even know how to detect magic, let alone reliably manipulate it in an environment without Discord throwing a monkey-wrench in the works.
This chapter was interesting. Finding out the motives of the Feds and reading a description on most of the Mane 6 and the Princesses' appearances/personalities/and their role in combating the Feds was entertaining. Keep up the good job.
6319152 This is a much clearer explanation on the mechanics of this story, thanks for taking the time to write it all out Unfortunately I'm actually quite set in stone when considering the buildup of the story, how long it'll run for and how it all ties together, so re-writing anything at this point would mean unraveling and re-writing several more chapters to come, something I absolutely don't have time to do. I'll certainly apply your suggestions to future writing efforts, but for now the readers will have to make do with a handful of chapters that gradually build tension until the action arrives. Thank you again for your response, I really hope you decide to stick around through the chapters to come, but if not I can understand
6319165 Thanks for the good word and for taking the time to read this story
6319174
No worries, I understand. Glad I could help.
I can't promise I'll be able to keep myself from skimming at least parts of the next few chapters, but I'll definitively give it a fair shot.
Im surprised no thought to open the Gates of Tartarus to push back the invaders. Better the evil you know right? ... or would that just be a little too human?
open this
i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj138/Dark_Necro_1/Hell.jpg
and no more aliens.
25.media.tumblr.com/f4c548bc7603c46f1b2fc48f5ea0f351/tumblr_mgn7ewtyIO1ru5991o3_1280.png
6319921 .....
i.imgur.com/d7yY6A5.jpg
In all seriousness, however, thanks for reading
Not going to be enough...
6321607 Shame they don't know that
6321688 Indeed...
6321589 Oh god i love it the lols