Contains spoilers for the movie.
You have been warned, interlopers.
Featured 10/17/2017
Following the events of the Storm King's invasion of Canterlot, peace returns to Equestria. Apologetic and disheartened from their failed offense, all of the shattered king's servants and soldiers collect themselves, pack their things up and return to their homeland from whence they came.
All except one.
The unicorn mare, who formerly called herself commander of the Storm King's army, decides to stay with the people she had once abandoned so very long ago. And with this decision, she finds not only forgiveness, friendship and long-lost belonging, but something more. And that something lays in someone who not only showed her all these things, but forever changed her life for the better.
However, just as the dust begins to settle, it seems as though a tremendous, if subtle problem starts to loom over Canterlot no sooner than had it averted disaster...
I see great potential. Keep it up.
This looks really cool. Not a fan of Temptest going by her real name though. I can understand that in personal company but come on temptest shadow will definitely be taken more seriously.
I like him, but I hope the voice in the end wasn't papyrus
Hey hey!
I've been doing my best to keep up with the Tempest stories around the site, especially those involving Tempest x Twilight. Not only are they super interesting, but I like staying informed on common tropes / ideas for my own story. It was only fair that I'd get around to yours eventually. ;)
First things first, your title and long description. They're not bad! They do a good job at briefly over-viewing the plot and main characters, as well as the initial conflict. I do admit, I have seen better long descriptions. And personally I'm not a fan of the, "vague threat looming over the characters" line. It not only comes off cliché to me, but also a half-hearted attempt at garnering reader interest. "And there's this super bad, no-good, scary problem too, but I won't tell you what it is..."
Personally, I like detail. I like surmising information for myself. I don't like being told there are scary problems, but rather, deduce it from the details and in-between the lines. It possibly would've been stronger to say that there was a pixie that 'threatened to unravel the relationships Tempest is trying to desperately to build', but that's just me.
Onto the story itself. Once again, it's not bad as well! The grammar and spelling (minus one major flaw which I'll talk about later) is mostly correct. Most of it didn't hinder my experience of reading it, and came off decently natural. It feels like you have a strong sense of the mechanics of writing, so good job at that.
One of the major problems though is a swath of pseudo-run-on sentences and over-detail. It feels like you're trying to cram so many words and details while also severely holding back your period and semi-colon use. Most, if not all of your story reads very clunky, like it was weighed down by all these tiny, inconsequential features that's either a) implied via context, or b) adding very little, such as adverbs.
There are a couple of noteworthy examples, one being from your prologue, with the other from your first chapter.
So you have two phrases here: the sounds of the Friendship Festival in the night, and how the festival was put on from the victory after the Storm King. My biggest question is: why do you need this latter phrase so quickly? What grave, important detail in that phrase can't wait for a sentence or two after this one? This makes your writing sound incredibly wordy, which personally isn't a good thing. It makes it incredibly laborious to read, and I find myself surfing through your writing because so much of it is just redundant.
Something that would read much clearer to me would be:
Here's another line that drove me absolutely crazy:
Length and detail does not mean quality. You could've gotten across the exact same idea by writing:
Here's another example from a dialogue scene:
With your time behind the scenes, I'm sure you could come up with far better optimizations than me in this review.
Now of course, there is a balance between brevity and detail that all writers must find for themselves. Some include more detail. Others like me leave it more to the imagination. Your story shouldn't just be, "She did this. She did that", but at the same time, I feel like I'm wasting my time when I have to read 29 words to get the same idea across as 10. Multiply this for nearly every single sentence in your story, and you can understand my frustration.
Something really important for a writer to master is subtext and context. This is my opinion, but I don't feel engaged when I'm spoonfed every single detail or emotion or stage direction. I want to piece things together myself, pay attention to more subtle cues than all the adverbs and tones throughout.
Like I said before though, this is all about writing style, and all writers must develop their own. I don't want to push my own style on you if that's now how you write. At the same time, I encourage you to look at some text of some of your favorite writers, see how they craft their stories. More often than not, established writers not only mastered brevity and painting the broad strokes for their reader, but also subtext and context to fill those details they don't include. A masterful example of subtext in dialogue is this:
Now, you could fill this exchange up with tones. Throw in adverbs to enunciate Twilight's concern and Tempest's stubbornness, her insecurities, and what have you. But these two lines do the exact same thing, if not better, as it forces the reader to think to understand. And having my reader thinking and analyzing instead of being spoon-fed everything in my opinion engages them more as I'm presenting them something to take apart, like a puzzle. It's a combined effort between the reader and the writer, instead of just being all one or the other.
A side note to this is dialogue tags, stuff like "questioned", "spoke", "exclaimed". You're far from the worst offender of this, as your choices make far more sense and aren't overused like some writers do. "Said" is extremely powerful because of it's capability to be invisible. You don't 'read' every period or comma you see in a sentence. It's present, and it serves a purpose definitely, but it doesn't stand out or jarr the reader's attention. The synonyms of "said" however can, if improperly used.
Tl;dr: Decent title, long description, and grammar / spelling, but reading comes off very clunky and awkward due to too many details. I'd highly recommend cutting them down to make your writing more comprehensible and less repetitious and redundant. Use subtext and context.
Thanks for the read! I'll be tracking this.
It is actually quite harmless, but I'm not always fond of Twilight wanting to teach other, probably because that means those characters might get "healed" changed and get ther "personality fixed". I honestly prefer it if they learn to accept Tempest and she just get's some advice and not some kind of shedule like Starlight.
NOt my favourite tempest story out there, but I give it a chance.
The prologue was not much and I'm not sure if it was even needed, but I might be wary if I like Discords whatever.
This story is really underrated, good start
I am excited to see where this goes
Congrats you're on the featured page.
I watched the movie yesterday, and thought, yeah, I totally ship it. I wonder if that's the ship I'll find here? Can't wait to read.
I like it.
Very well written! <3
Interesting and all but... Where's the comedy? Is the tag wrong?
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Our mistake...
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What about the other two?
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She does that too? Well Waluigig would be nice too, even if I hope it still takes it time or it is something out of the same universe.
The other one isn'T exactly bad even if I forgot her name, but I'm not the biggest fan of that show yet.
On the one hand, it seems a bit quick to ask the pony who conquered Equestria just the other day to be in charge of the country's military. On the other hand, given that she conquered Equestria the other day, she's actually perfect for the job since she's already shown herself to be better than the piss-poor excuse Equestria has for a military...
Nice one! I know it'll take some time, as it should, but I can't wait for that Romance tag to rear it's head.
Only problem I had was the overstating of 'formerly known as Tempest Shadow'. Other than that, it was great.
Nice. Like another commenter said, I can't wait for the romance tag to rear its head.
I don’t see what’s wrong with this story. It’s great I think. I hope you’ll continue it!
from a personal point of view I found it very long to start
Discord really just pulled a Metal Gear on us.
i love it