Among the festivities of the Graduation After Party, Silvestream notices that Gallus is nowhere to be found. She has a gut feeling where he is, but she has no idea why. So, she visits the cave, knowing Gallus often goes there when he wants to be alone. The problem is, what problem could be so dire to make him abandon his friends on their last official day together?
And what is really in the cave, and what does it take to find the way out?
Allright gang, acknowledgement time: First of all, I want to thank both Mr. Minus and Mr. The Army Guy since their writing contests both inspired me to write this fic.
Then I have to extend my gratitude to my old friend Shiron, who created the wonderful cover art. (And by ‘create’ I mean he put the vector I found, over the background I chose. But since I can find pictures on the internet, but I can’t put them together, he did everything I needed of him flawlessly.)
Allright who else? Oh yes, my paid unpaid editor slave Ninjadeadbreadbeard. I love the dude. He not only whipped my random assortments of words into actual English sentences, he refused to accept any sort of monetary compensation for it. And just to make you really appreciate his work I didn’t ask him to edit this part of the description, so you have an idea about the enormity of the work he has done. I don’t think mere words would ever be enough to repay him in kind for his time and effort, but alas that is all I have right now.
I got featured quite possibly on 9th of february 2020. Except if you're from the western hemisphere then it was on the 8th.
Heh, your bio lied, I don’t see RD anywhere.
10075491
I dont know what you're talking about. Who do you think did the Rainboom if not her?
Very good so far. Cant wait to see what happens next.
also there is a "SHE" that's missing its "S" somewhere in there I lost it while reading.
10075899
Yeah oh sorry, I did an oopsie there. This is all there is to it. I forgot to change the status from incomplete to complete. May bad, sorry.
Well that doesn't seem like the problem I can fix. The gender pronouns are already the bane of my existence since they don't exist in my language, so I suck at them harder than a ten dollar who... so I suck at them hard.
Finding these is why I paid Ninja, but he didn't accept the money, so he was under-incentivised to do a good job. And now I can't even fire him. Capitalism is hard. :(
I quite enjoyed this one
This was a very sweet and emotional story. Great job!
10075904
Ah okay. That's understandable. Good luck on your next story.
10076068
That's all I can ask for.
10076070
Thank you.
well done. Nice story and good emotional impact.
I coulda gone for heavier shipping, but it’s still working as it is and cute enough.
Worth the read
10077321
This is never meant to be a Romantic story. This is a story about faith, belief and the strength of the archetypal female character. Romance is nothing more than a natural consequence of the story, not the point of it.
I relate to Silverstream so much
10079032
In what ways?
10079386
That breach of her worldview in the middle of the story is something I've gone through. It ain't fun
10079624
That's rough man. I hope you're allright now. But to qoute myself "Faith is born in doubt not in certainty." So keep on keeping on man, you're doing great.
10080035
Thanx, man. I'm pretty much recovered now. Appreciate the kind words.
Does this world even have offshore oil rigs? It does have plastics... Ah, schizotech.
In all, some interesting ideas, but it's weighed down by a lot of awkward and overly grandiose prose. Plus, Gallus often comes across as whiny. Yes, horrible things happen to him, but his attitude doesn't exactly inspire sympathy. And the reasoning behind his parents abandoning him comes completely out of left field.
Still, a good message beneath the melodrama. Best of luck in the judging.
10096254
Well admittedly this story is mostly about the message, that much was never really in question, so I'm glad you liked that. And I see what you mean by overly dramatic prose that's definitely one of my weaknesses as a writer.
That being said I don't think Gallus is overly whiny. I mean in a normal setting I could definitely agree but this is essentially his place to come to sulk so that he doesn't have to whine about his life. This cycle was interrupted and in fact it had to be interrupted because it wasn't a healthy way of dealing with things, but a price had to be paid for it. Gallus' complaints was part of this payment, and Silver understood that. I emphasised multiple times that these are topics Gallus usually doesn't say anything about.
After meaning to get around to it for ages, I finally sat down and read this.
Personal opinion: the scene where they get to talking about how the hippogriffs view the gender spectrum and how that compares with the views of other species--while this is an interesting bit of lore and world-building, I don't feel like it really adds anything to the story and more just serves as an unnecessary distraction from the greater plot. Not a bad one, but it does disrupt the flow, emotions, and overall mood of that moment in the story with not enough payoff to have been worth it. Had it been me, I probably would've just skipped over that conversation and kept going with Gallus explaining the hows and whys he was abandoned as already written. But, again, personal opinion.
Beyond that though, the story's great. I don't know if its quite emotional enough to merit that tragedy tag (a simple sad tag probably would've worked just as well) especially since the story ends on a higher note than it started, but I loved the overall message of faith it conveys, and conveys very well. The overall discussion about it is well portrayed, with the personal stances of both characters being logical and mesh together well, leaving the end conclusion satisfactory and believable. And it's a message I overall approve of, particularly since some of my own worldviews aren't so different at times.
10112586
Yeah I was heavily considering the merits of leaving that part out. But there were a bunch of reason why I decided to keep it in.
0th: it's worldbuilding and worldbuilding is important for another contest I entered with this fic. For several reasons it was already light on it and I felt like it might have disqualified it from the contest id it didn't involve this scene.
0,5th: This is the closest we got to actually give Silver a fault. This is not an outright fault but still something that's alien by nature and that makes her a bit less perfect. Her character is an idealised version of a female hero (in fact one of me admitted goal was to make her a real strong female protagonist, whose strength doesn't come from an infinity stone but her own feminine qualities.) and this is a very short story so I'm okay-ish with not giving her a real fault but this is better than nothing.
1st: Being the standard open minded liberal on the LGBT issues, (which, I feel, in the mlp world is the standard assumption until proven otherwise.) makes her harder to relate to people who hate Gays. Which becomes really important after Gallus' rant. I felt it would have been really cliched if she just knew Homophobia as this fringe thing from home or from Equestria, (where we've seen no signs of such thing) and then accepted them as not evil people.
I also could have made her entire race homophobic, but than that just would have elevated her moral stance to unreasonably Mary Sue levels. In that hypothetical situation would not only have been able to ascend above the faults her own culture, but then based on her own experiences she could also forgive others who made the same mistake as her kind.
And this point Silver stops being a character and just becomes a moral guideline.
2nd: I really wanted make the mutual alienation between Silver and Gallus palpable for the next sceene. I wanted the readers to feel the separation between the two friends when Gallus starts telling his woes. Of course that needed to happen both ways but I figured that was automatic in the case of Silver. I mean no matter how understanding someone may be, no one can feel someone else’s pain. So when we see someone in that much pain even if we feel it with them to a degree we can’t help but feel unable to help. We feel like we don’t belong there with them yet don’t know if we can leave. Or at least that is my experience. But for optimal effect I also wanted to make Gallus feel alienated from Silver and this seemed like a good tool because it makes the reader feel the exact same feelings Gallus was supposed to feel.
And yes the tragedy tag is misleading, the only reason I put it there because I was under the impression the site wanted me to put at least 3 blue tags on the story. I misread a sentence somewhere in the posting process. I can't recall exactly but knowing myself I might have posted this in the middle of the night or some other awful brain-dead time.
Otherwise I'm really glad you enjoyed my story.
BTW my world veiws are quite a bit different from the fic's the other reason I wanted to write this fic to "argue" for a world view that is not my own. Which is a really fun, everyone should try it sometimes. But I admit that while I'm no longer religous, my moral stance on most questions does bear very strong influence of the Catholic values I was raised in.
10076477
Oh by the way I forgot to tell you:
In Gallus' first anger outburst you accidentally refer to him as her. And Silverstream calls him a good "person" which is weird considering he's a griffin lol.
Story is still great though.
Well, contest is over, and I'm the judge who judged your story -- so here's the review you requested! Sorry for the latency; IRL got in the way, hard, and I'm running late on these reviews. Here's hoping I find the time to wrap them up between today and tomorrow.
Anyway -- I have to admit, I was halfway through the start of this story and I had to pause and hit up the judge chat to see if anyone else had looked at this story, because I was like, is Silverstream quoting Tomas Aquinas? Is Silverstream quoting Thomas Aquinas' proof of God or am I reading too much into it. I mean surely I'm reading too much into it.
Wow holy shit no this is like. Very blatantly Thomas Aquinas. The first motor thing? The five proofs of God's existence stuff? I studied this in Highschool. Can't believe that proved itself useful.
So! You got the one judge who had a Catholic enough upbringing to catch this on the fly. I guess that counts as luck? I've no idea. Hippogriffs are clearly coded as -- I don't know if necessarily Christian? But definitely Abrahamic, that much I can see. Interesting choice, though neither good nor bad by itself, just A Thing I wanted to point out. I'll prolly come back to it later.
Anyway -- I did very much like that this story had a point to it, a clear message it wanted to convey, and it did so effectively enough. This sorta structure (two characters talk to each other, then a thesis, then a twist, then an emotional resolution) is a classic for a reason -- it works, it gets the job done, and pacing-wise at a macro level this is absolutely competent.
Micro-wise (as in, when it comes to the individual sentences, the paragraphs, the word choice) it isn't that clean, I'm afraid. More than once a paragraph changes topic so many times it becomes clear it should've been split into two or three smaller paragarphs; certain words are needlessly obscure ("nyctalopic", used within the first few paragraphs of the story, easily comes to mind) and muddle the point and make the story harder to parse.
Likewise, sometimes a same point is reiterated two, three times in a row -- and this, plus the dense wording here and there, make the story drag a little (some tense slips, too, though those are a matter of proofreading and not really that important). Here's an example of what I mean:
(Some sentences deleted to make the quote smaller, more than anything).
Like, if you read this, the fact that it's dark and Silverstream can't see is said a million times or so in the span of four paragraphs. The effect is that this comes off as slow, as boring, and the reader tends to skip it. "We get it, we get it, it's dark, move along," that sorta thing.
So, that needs a bit of polish. An exercise I always recommend when it comes to this thing is to mentally substitute every sentence with its thesis, with the point that is' trying to drive forward. If two or more sentences in a row have the same thesis together, that's a big problem. Here's how that'd look:
It works wonders for me -- I really recommend it!
Anyway, character-wise, the story is fine, though sometimes the character's voices are a bit weird. Gallus comes off as extremely emotional and whiny, and while I get that the story is literally about him being in that state of mine, having a more gradual escalation, or a more natural transmission from his usual voice to the more heightened state would've helped selling the reader on the fact that this is, in fact, Gallus speaking.
And here we come to the weird bit.
Hippogriffs are very clearly coded as Abrahamic -- Silverstream makes this clear with some very blatant allusions to faith. That's fine; we don't know anything about the spiritual lives of these characters, so you're free to do whatever with them. But the thing about there being no gay hippogriffs? Eeeeeh.
Like, reading the comments, you mention that you wanted SIlverstream to have a flaw. If that was your purpose, that really didn't work. The story isn't framed as "Silverstream is flawed", or even "Silverstream is homophobic". The story's framed in a way that seems to imply that there are, in fact, no gay hippogriffs, and so the concept is alien to her.
Which comes off as oddly homophobic by itself, I'm not going to lie. Grounding the hippogriffs with the clear Abrahamic paralels and then saying that homosexuality doesn't exist in its species sort of implies homosexuality isn't natural, that it's some kind of... I don't know, societal construct or some shit? Like, I suppose you can say it's a species thing, but the way these characters communicate and reason with each other implies that there isn't that much of a difference in the way their brains are wired.
So SIlverstream doesn't come off as flawed, and the story comes off as strangely dismissive towards gay people, and as some kind of like, indictment of it. I am very much hoping this was accidental, and I can see how that accident would happen, but this is 100% the vibe I got here, to be entirely honest.
(There's a conversation to be had about Silverstream being flawed or not in the source material, and to be honest, another about if she even needs to be flawed that way in this story at all, but I suppose it's irrelevant. You want her to be flawed, absolutely go hogwild, but weird homophobic undertones aren't going to do that; they're just going to make the audience uncomfortable).
All in all, this review seems to come off as overly negative, which I suppose is inevitable when you focus on criticism. The prose, at the micro level, needs a bit of work? But I feel it's the kind of thing that comes with practice, rather than any particular advice I can give you (look up rules for paragraphs, and when to break them into smaller chunks -- ideally every paragraph only has one big idea or piece of information that it gives to the reader, and changes in topics are signified by paragraph breaks).
The general, structural macro level was fine, though, as well as the way the story was constructed as a whole. Some missteps in characterization but nothing particularly deal-breaking --it's more a "death of a thousand cuts" sort of thing.
So, overall, that's my general opinion. This was fun! And the random Thomas Aquinas thing made me feel very smug for catching it on the fly, so hey, that was a cool Easter egg sorta deal. Thanks for joining the contest, and best of luck next time!
10167611
Okay if you felt smug I'm gonna have to burst your bubble Silver was not quoting Thomas Aquinas, she was quoting Aristotle. From whom Thomas Aquinas got a lot of his thoughts, so yes in a way Silver was quoting him but you managed to think the one thing I didn't want.
That this religion is in any way, shape or form Abrahamic. It's not. I purposely chose not to include any part of any religion that was divinely inspired. I wanted to create an argument that if you forget all the things that people believe make people religious, they still end up having a faith, and more importantly, it can still make sense.
It's a monotheistic belief yes, but if you can point to one thing that connects the hyppogriffs' beliefs to the Abrahamic religion I'm gonna tip my hat to you. (Of course T. A. doesn't count because as I just pointed out a Philosopher from a polytheistic background, a millennium and a half before him already formulated these thoughts.) I think that's why you had so much trouble pinpointing what religious group the Hyppogriffs are supposed to represent. The answer is none of them. This is a faith without religion, purely based on logic and the observation of the world around them.
Thank you! I'm so peeved how many stories don't have this. Even those you rated highly. I get that one of them tries to be funny, and one of them... Wants to show that a barfing changeling is cute? Is that even a purpose? Iunno. (Make no mistake I don't think my fic is better than those because those were actually written by people who have an affinity to writing, but still. They are so pointless. The third honourable mention is really cool though. And I haven't read the three winners)
That's gonna be a fun obstacle to overcome. Mostly because I'm a second language English speaker. All English words to me are in a sense "needlessly obscure". Some more than others but still. Usually I can just count on the fact that I speak English worse than my reader and any word I know they know as well. Maybe I reached the point at my journey in studying English that I can assume that if I think a word is obscure it probably is. Not that it would have helped in that situation because I wouldn't have ever thought nyctalopic is an obscure word. I've known since I'm eight years old because it exists in my native tongue. Though it means the opposite, strangely enough.
On the other hand "parse", a word you used, is something I had to look up. Why? Because I learnt 6th grade grammar in a non-English school, but I see why would everyone with a native English background know that. Anyhow, I don't necessarily want to bore you with my personal problems.
I don't necessarily disagree with that. All I can say in my defence is that it all had a purpose. That being said I will certainly try the technique you said. (Though I already coming up with excuses as to why they don't work on the paragraph you used as an example. Fuck, I'm being uncoachable.)
Well the problem I faced with there, is that by the time the reader meets with Gallus he had several hours contemplating on the letter. Which gave him a lot of time to contemplate on everything Silver later asked him. Which meant he was like house with a really old plaster work. One touch and it all come down.
That being said Gallus mood was a progression (albeit a fast one). He went through the five stages of grief. At first he denied the letter was real, then he got angry with his late grandfather, then he started to bargain with the world to have the chance to see him one last time.
The problem was that in the time alone, he already convinced himself that:
And this let us and Silver stuck on the wall under the plaster, Gallus' depression. I'm really not sure what else could I have done to slow this down. I could have maybe lengthen the introductory period, before Silver finds the letter, where Gallus thin mask of civility wasn't broken yet, but it already had plenty of stuff in it. (I mean everything in there is ultimately pointless in terms of telling the story.)
I'm gonna sound really condescending here, but you're so fundamentally wrong I can hardly argue with you at this point.
Few things that came to my mind about this whole thing that works even from your premises. (That hippogriffs are Abrahamic)
Gay people are not particularly important to Abrahamic religions. Take out all the anti-gay passages from the bible and I don't think it's gonna be a page shorter. So a race with no gay people could just as well be Abrahamic as one with gay people. I simply don't get why would the existence of Abrahamic religion with the absence of homosexuality would be a proof that homosexuality is a social construct.
Similarly I don't see how you can say anything other than a species thing. I just said it was, These are all imaginary biological facts about imaginary creatures. You said the way they communicate shows their brain aren't wired that differently. I mean it's literally a question of taste. I don't think a difference in taste is indicative of fundamental differences between how two people operate. If it was I wouldn't be able to communicate with gay people. And I can. And I don't think I'm less straight because I have other people in my species who aren't.
Silver is straight. Every other hippogriff is straight. Which means that when she hears about gay people she's gonna be surprised there are such things. Like imagine the first European seeing a Giraffe. It looks completely alien from all the animal they've seen. They literally couldn't have seen anything like it. Doesn't mean the concept of different species is a social construct.
It will mean however that Silver won't know all the custom's that are connected to gay people. For example that you're not supposed to ask how a race manages to keep up it's population level with gay people around. Or that you're not supposed to mention that gay sex seems impractical. Which by the way pretty impractical when you have hooked carnivorous beak half the time, and no mammalian genitalia the other. And anal hurts. (Though I guess fish have cloacas so they can only have anal? Except they don't have sex because most of them have external fertilisation. But what the fuck am I arguing for at this point?)
Also love between any two creature irrespective of size, species, sex, or reproductive biology is cute, but the lack of love between any two creatures is homophobic? How does that even work? And don't tell me homosexual love between a Dragon and Changeling has anything to do with biology. So does that mean love is a social construct? But then what is the problem with gay love being a social construct?
Sorry I got a bit carried away.
That was one of my purpose though I wanted to achieve through different means. In retrospect it might not have been the best idea either way.
Well, I guess better luck next time. Honestly for me it was so obvious that anyone who manages to catch the Thomas Aquinas thing will know it's from Aristotle originally. So you caught me completely off guard. I guess it's my mistake.
I thought I was gonna be able to put my little explanation about my use of the symbolism of light (of which I'm very proud of but I couldn't find the right place.) You may have caught it but I feel you would have mentioned it at least once.
So originally Silver wants to save his friend from the darkness. This darkness is of course have always been present in Gallus' life but for some reason it reached a point where Gallus rather spent his last day when he's amongst his friends there than with said friends. So clearly something happened. Silver wants to investigate, but for her that darkness is completely uninhabitable. Yet despite this she will go in because that's how much her friend means for her.
For Gallus the darkness is not inhabitable but obviously means a strictly inferior state of being. He can get out of it of course but in the end he would always go back.
Then they meet and Gallus lights the fire. Gallus is a very capable individual, who can turn the darkness into light but because he doesn't understand the darkness hurts him (because he can live with it indefinitely) doesn't realise the enormity of his potential. So the fireplace is lit and for the moment it looks quite comfortable even for Silver (Showing how much Gallus can do once he realises his potential)
Than as Gallus tells his tale and his mood gets ever so darker, the fire slowly starts to burn down. Silver has absolutely no control over anything, she doesn't even know how much time she has left while she can still see. She is dependent on Gallus in the cave completely. Yet when she is faced with the choice to leave the cave or not she stays because she has immense faith in Gallus.
The flame throughout Gallus depressive sulking burns down almost completely there's naught but embers giving barely any light. And just like that with his hope running dangerously low, Gallus asks Silver, how can she still have hope. Silver answeres and for a moment hope almost comes back to the place.
But then Gallus just slams it down with the fury of a God. And in that moment he really becomes God. First in a material sense because without light the only thing that Silver can do is what Gallus wants her to do. In the philosophical sense because he kills Silver's god with his arguments. While in the metaphisical sense he becomes the antithesis of God as his face becomes the face Silver imagined for the definition of evil. An evil so great, that couldn't (and for Silver didn't) exist in the material word. (Of course, the opposite of God will still be a god)
This shows the potential of the male figure in it's entirety. A male figure is very much capable of both the best and the worst without every being able to tell the difference. It takes the female figure to take his hand and guide him to the truth. A beautiful representation of this is when Aang goes full on avatar mode to absolutely disintegrate the sandbenders who stole Appa. And without saying a single word Katara goes over and reminds him it's not the right thing to do.
And Silver does just that. A strong female archetype's power doesn't lie in her own abilities. (Though Silver, much like Katara, has a lot of skills too.) It's more about her influence through others that can shape the world. And boy can she shape the world.
Because in the moment, when Silver lost it's faith in her god, and when Gallus lost his faith in pretty much everything, Silver can find the strength, not in herself, not in anything on this world or the other, but in her faith in Gallus.
This is what shows Gallus the way. This is what enables him to use his ability to see in the darkness (which used to permanently tie him to the cave) to lead Silver out, and only then, when he is able to utilise his abilities for the good of others, can he actually finally leave the cave for good.
I think this is beautiful. Not my fic, that's the work of a second rate charlatan, but the underlying story about the unity of the male and the female archetype.
What do you think about it?
Anyhow thank you very much for your criticism I hope I can make good use of your advice on the technical things.
P.S. Do you have a problem with your spacebar or something? There are an unreasonable amount of double spaces in your text.
10167992
I'm ESL too, don't worry. Language proficiency comes with practice, so don't sweat it much. (Also, I don't see any double spaces in my message whatsoever. Do you mean my emdashes (--) or something? Because those are supposed to have spaces in there. Admittedly, my eyesight is a bit poor, so I might literally just not see them even if they're there).
As per the light thing, it was fine, I suppose. Bit on the nose, but if you had fun with it, it's all that matters. It served its purpose.
Okay, if you don't mind me being candid, I think implying that a woman's only strength relies in asking the men to do stuff is a horrible way to rob her of any agency whatsoever. I don't know where you got this idea of "the female archetype" but it sounds sexist as fuck, and genuinely offensive. Frankly speaking.
Yes, this is actively terrible. I'm sorry, I don't think there's any beauty in this underlying story you just told me about.
10168052
Even if I had said that every female is incapable of doing something on their own - which I hadn't - I would have also said that every male is incapable of doing anything with others. Which is also sexist as fuck, so I don't know why you would be appalled against one but not the other. Sexist much?
Luckily I didn't say either and I don't think you're sexist. Female and male archetype are dealing with tendencies not with individuals, and even less with specific acts of individuals. Yes the name is no accident biological males and females have a tendency to act like their own archetype but they also do a quite a lot of stuff that is unlike their archetype.
Even in the freest most sexually equal western societies 90+ precent of nursery home teachers will be female, and 90+ percent of carpenters will be male. Does that mean that the other ~ 10% are less of a man/woman? I don't think that, but I acknowledge the tendencies.
For me what's beautiful is that neither of these capable of doing fifty percent of what they are capable together. It is their bond that I wanted to emphasize not their individual capabilities. Yes one of them in this specific situation did have a pussy and the other a dick, and yes in most situations like this the individuals who play these respective roles will have the same genitalia as my characters. But ultimately the doesn't matter A: because in some situation they won't have these specific sexes. (I could have also told this story two asexual blobs who reproduce with mitosis) and B: they are both equally worthless alone.
If that's not equality I don't know what is.
Review is done!
https://www.fimfiction.net/group/213901/my-little-reviews-feedback/thread/447765/review-in-the-light-of-the-dark-by-jnzsblzs
Bumf
11107449
Well, while I can't say I understand what you meant, I hope at least you enjoyed the story.