Cover Art by Bean.
Pepper Chilly's stay in Ponyville and Canterlot brought her between Elements and Princesses alike. But when her dimension-traveling eye spotted the hourglass running out of sand, Princess Celestia paid the ultimate price. What the regicide didn't know was that her next murder would bring her back to Equestria, alongside Gamine, a guardian in training, just in time to witness the fallout and the unforeseen consequences of Celestia’s disappearance.
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This fanfiction is plot centered around OCs, and is based on my own headcanon. But all characters from the show will be involved.
Chapters (17)
I like it so far!
Review scores.
Writing: 8/10, As I said, functionally, this is a solidly written story, the problem being a function of pacing and information conveyance. Not a whole lot of detail is being presented as it comes up for things that matter or should be elaborated on. A suggestion I would have would just be to slow things down a little and not try to rush or make every single addition matter, add a little extraneous information so that we as the readers can indulge in the word being presented.
Pacing: 7/10, As in writing and what was said earlier, this story is streamlined to an extent that it hurts the enjoyability of reading it. Improving this is simply a matter of resolving issues and conflicts over several chapters rather than paragraphs. You want to make your audience feel like the outcomes, whether positive or negative, are the function of the characters' choices and had to be earned, not because the author needed that to happen. See Rainbowdash as a good example. In one chapter, she goes from avoiding her friends to willing to return to the status quo in the span of a conversation. Again, excellent plot threads keep getting brought up only to be truncated a paragraph later. If you really do want a quick resolution, to make that feel earned, either a great deal of resistance or an extraordinary show of intelligence and skill is required
Characters: 8/10, these are well-written characters. They feel human and have their wonderful idiosyncrasies. The problem I had was just that they either made dumb decisions because what felt like plot, or the way they were handled just lit off every alarm bell in my system to kill this character on sight. Going forward, I would say that the author is doing great with humanizing the characters they have (again, for the most part. Pepper being an exception.) and addressing both their good and bad aspects, but they should just work on getting the characters to just think a little more before committing to an action so it doesn’t feel like they are all just acting on emotion and their first instinct.
Atmosphere: 9/10, This is a well done story when it comes to conveying the theme and maintaining the tone. It is a dark and cruel world being conveyed and it was really enjoyable to watch it unfold. I will say though, around chapter 5 or 6 or so when we are dealing with Chrysalis’ daughter and when addressing Celestia’s murder, the tone shift to hopeful and positive felt a little out of place. It is fine to have hopeful moments and scenes, but I would just say to consider how positive the scenes are and their context. As an example, Celestia posthumously and humorously saying to let go and move on and all these positive thing does not feel like it comes from the same story where a cold war threatening to go hot again is being raged where the amount of suffering is almost Lovecraftian.
Mystery Quality: 8/10, The pacing on the reveals of the questions getting raised is quite good and greatly adds to the quality of the story as important questions don’t look like they will be forgotten and never answered. I just wish that, again, that we weren’t introduced to seven questions in the first five-thousand words, making the introduction far from elegant.
Total Score: 40/50 or 8/10, I can honestly say that I rather enjoyed this story. While I will admit I hold reservations with continuing with it, that is more to do with Pepper’s character rubbing me the wrong way because I enjoy media that handles her primary character trait more morally grey (my preferred handling of the matter) and [[Redacted]].
Follow the link for the full review.
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You know how you should buy gold? You really should, for now have this, a review!
My Little review & Feedback I did your review
Wow. I like this—a very detailed first chapter.
What’s a gamine?
11635090
It's French for "female children"