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My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
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Damn.... just damn....
Don't know what else to say to be honest, after reading this awesome chapter.
wonder if 'Dee' got its missive off.
Oh yes... I love that
zigg... I mean, Xanax. Please don't die soon.Oh my... Slipshod had to roll another plot armor one... and he is running low on those, let's hope both of them, Squelch and him recover. I want those two shipped across the galaxy in a jumpship full of dropships...
10691453
Hehe.
I mean, I'm sure Valkyrie wouldn't mind hanging out with her old lance-mate again. We'll have to see how many more brushes with death poor Slip has in him...
This is Battletech after all!
Besides, wouldn't a Squelch who is driven to stop Chrysalis by her determination to avenge her lost love be a neat little turnaround for her character, after being mostly passive about the whole changeling-ruled Sphere thing? Think of the character development possibilities!
10691719
Oh, then he can't die, neither of them can until they can make amends and become a couple again... then Slips is toast.
After skipping a couple chapters and ctrl+f'ing "Slipshod" I guess I can keep reading. That said, at this rate it's just not worth it to put up with so much bullshit. The mech battles are neat and some of the politics is intriguing, but the consistent abuse of the idiot ball and fucktarded cliffhangers is just obnoxious. Either kill Slipshod or don't; stop pussyfooting around with it. It's a nice story outside of that, but you're strangling it with so much BS.
10765152
Well, I certainly appreciate you sticking with the story thus far. I fully recognize that it can diminish the impact if a character 'almost dies' too often. I'm pretty sure that Slipshod is done with 'not actually dying' for the remainder of the story.
I hope you find it more appealing if you stick with it!
10765343
It's a decent fic. Hell, it could even be a good one. Just some things irk the hell out of me, because I keep seeing what it could be when I'm stuck with what it is. I care about this story, much though it irritates me. So, bit of a rant.
The fact that you paired "Slipshod dies yet again" + yet another cliffhanger with a follow-up chapter that doesn't even mention his status was BS. Granted, I skipped that by going on to the next chapter, but that's the kind of crap that makes a story worth dropping to me. Cliffhangers are cheap suspense, and you're a good enough writer that you shouldn't be abusing them as much as you have. Slipshod has been offed or almost offed, what, three times now? Four? There was the gambit with the LRM carrier, the gunshots when he was revealed by the zebras, the moment Squelch nearly shot him, and then this showdown with Mimesis/Doc Dee. I'm sure I'm missing one or two in there somewhere. At this point, when you finally kill him off I'm just not going to give a damn outside of throwing up my hands and saying, "FINALLY! I no longer have to deal with this 'Is he or isn't he?'"
The repeated cliffies have just sapped any chance of his death having much impact at this point, and shot down a lot of the stakes for him in whatever battles he participates in. So, either he makes it to the end of the fic (and prolly loses Squelch, let's be honest), he dies and there's no emotional investment or payoff in it, or you somehow give him a death that's meaningful and which is infinitely less effective than it would have been without the four or five or however many times you've pulled a fake-out. It's a shame, because I like Slipshod. He's a decent character, even if the Changeling Angst schtick gets a lil old. He didn't deserve getting saddled with the BS cliffy crap. When this fic is over, I'll prolly remember him more for being frustrating WRT that meta cliffhanger crap than I will for his being a well-written character. It's doubly frustrating because it wasn't necessary. What good do those cliffhangers accomplish, outside some cheap suspense bait? You traded on one of your best characters for that. I don't think it was worth it.
As far as something constructive that isn't me complaining about cliffhanging bullshit, giving Twilight the idiot ball back in chapter 15/16 was pretty awful. There were a number of ways you could have gotten to a similar outcome without making her out to be one of the dumbest characters in the fic. That chapter pretty much killed my investment in her as a character, and like one of your other readers said, almost prompted me to drop the fic entirely. Grimdark and torture and death etc. etc. is fine, giving a character an idiot ball that large is not, especially not when we're talking about one of the smartest, most detail-oriented characters in the whole franchise. You had her pick out Slipshod as a Changeling near-instantly, and she's been shown to be competent and intelligent and NOT STUPID.
But you gave her an idiot ball regardless.
Not only that, but she's given this idiot ball on the heels of getting a wake-up call as to the grim cruelty of the future she's living in and after having just been exposed to the Disciples' method of detecting Changelings, which should have brought to the fore her erstwhile changeling ally. So suddenly, instead of a Princess 500 years out of her depth and struggling to adapt her principles and ideals to the harsh realities of her current situation with the intelligence and clever mind she possesses... Suddenly, Princess Twilight Sparkle is just furniture. As of that point, she's clearly not a character so much as an automaton with a switch upstairs that you're happy to flick on and off at will. I'll grant you, she's very interactive furniture, but I'm not willing to get invested in her as a character anymore, and haven't really cared about her since then. She abdicates the throne? Okay, so what? Even if she'd kept it, odds are she'd have been given an idiot ball yet again some point in the future when it was convenient or time for another cheap cliffhanger. So, she's furniture that can conveniently pilot a mech with significant skill and resolve some of the interpersonal conflicts the others are having, while also continuing to be oh-so-disappointed the world isn't living up to her ideals.
And it's FRUSTRATING. You clearly know how to write good characters. Great characters, even. The dynamic you have between Slipshod and Squelch and the others is fantastic. But you keep crippling them with this sort of crap. Slipshod has his "Oh noes he's dead! Again!" cliffhangers that neatly remove the stakes for his character, Twilight got turned into furniture for the sake of one of those cliffhangers (I know this is a slight exaggeration, but her being as much of a casualty as Slipshod in that chapter was seriously disappointing. Seriously.). Squelch is kinda cliché at times but at least SHE isn't weighed down with this meta crap. Her growth over the course of the fic and her realization/revelation in the ER to Slipshod was incredible.
You can write characters well.
Stop crippling them with meta garbage.
Another issue is that after a certain point, Slipshod being a mediocre pilot doesn't really seem to matter. If his mech gets shot to hell, it's fine enough by the next battle that it really isn't a problem. It worked early on, because there were financial concerns and equipment shortages, but at this point in the story it's not really holding him back. So his mech gets shot up, the team accomplishes their objectives, and then he gets called mediocre and the cycle repeats. Funding and refits aren't an issue anymore thanks to their new backing, so outside of him getting his mech beat up which is largely a non-issue, how do his mediocre skills as a pilot come into play? We've fallen into a rhythm of:
Slipshod, Twiggles, and Inevitable Redshirt #X go into battle.
Slipshod gets some hits in and gets shot up, Twiggles does badass things, Redshirt also does things.
Mission success, Slipshod's mech gets all fixed up while he's berated for being mediocre, repeat..
Where do the stakes come in? How does his mediocre piloting actually EXIST as a drawback in the story as something that has consequences? How does his middling pilot skills prevent him from getting kills on his own? He's gotten plenty of kills over the course of the fic, and hasn't been downed outside that incident with the LRM launcher early on if I recall correctly. You keep calling him mediocre: Where is it? Why is is still so often standing and with multiple kills under his belt at the end of a mission? What are some consequences? You can't kill him off, you can't really kill off Twilight as a result of his failures, and sure you can kill off Redshirt #X, but then we're getting dangerously close to falling into a pattern. Money isn't an object anymore given the trillions of C-bills getting thrown around by now. Salvage and repairs? Falls into the money pile. Sure, you can cost him his mech, make him cool his heels and force him to do some spying, but they have sufficient backing that finding a replacement isn't really a big deal. Honestly I'm expecting that to be one of the next steps. But at the end of the day, what impact do his middling piloting skills have on the narrative at this point? Maybe something will come up when they finally do something about those Red Reivers, though I expect that campaign will be filler or come during a lull in the main conflict if it happens at all.
Also, you should capitalize your sentences when characters are speaking. You keep leaving new sentences uncapitalized. For instance:
Should be:
Another example:
Should be:
Another example:
Should be:
There's a few typos here and there, but running your fic through Word or Gdocs should catch that. Actually, I'm surprised they haven't been catching that capitalization error, as well, and a lot of your sentences run much, much longer than they need to thanks to your copious use of commas. It's minor stuff, but it's been happening long enough that I figured it was worth a mention. Are you ESL, by any chance? Anyways, the narrative things are more damaging than the typos, but you might as well fix the one that doesn't require rewrites.
There's a lot this fic has going to recommend it. I like the mech battles, the attention to detail, the integration of BattleTech lore and how you've entwined it with MLP. Some of the relationships, while a little predictable by design, are absolutely fantastically written. The dynamic between Slipshod and the rest of the cast is great outside the "Woe is me, I'm a monster, unfeeling changeling blah blah blah" (it got old REAL fast). But the atrocious cliffhangers and the garbage heap that was Chapter 15/16 bring it down from what it could be. I'm prolly not going to pick this up again until it's marked as complete specifically because I doubt you can promise me you won't pull some more cliffies, and the next time it happens I want to be able to skip it as well.
Well at least there spy free i guess?
The hell Changelings can become Urorsor Minor and dont bleed to mutch love?
Noooooo! Slip, you can't die! If you do, how can we have a ship on a DropShip?