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My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
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10233542
As a long time Battletech fan, I'm gonna have my eye on this piece. I'm in the middle of reading another series right now, but this definitely has my attention, just for the premise, and I'll be reading it as soon as I finish my current series.
Hey, this got featured! Its about time.
10763430
It’s a pretty great story so far. I definitely think you’ll enjoy it.
10763430
Thanks! I look forward to hearing what you think!
10763519
Featured?! Oh crap, it really was!
*sweats profusely*
10763591
Congratulations dude. Well deserved. Keep up the good work.
Dang didn't expect so much death
Damn, did not expect those losses.
10766057
...Oh shit...I've become that which I hate! Suddenly I'm more empathetic towards the directors of the latest Star Wars movies...
You're not wrong with a lot of those points. A lot of rewrites have transpired as I've weighed the narrative costs/benefits. There is certainly a fine line between using a character's plot armor and abusing it. But, at the end of the day, I'm not doing it just to get out a cheap dramatic thrill. Which is not to say that I'm not still using it in a cheap way.
It lets me fast-track various character/plot revelations that would otherwise likely take a great many more chapters to have come to light without feeling even more forced somehow. On Capensis, with the Disciples/Clanners, Twilight does seem to almost completely forget about her previous growth after witnessing the destruction of the civilian convoy; because she believes that she'd finally found 'her people'. She found the creatures that escaped Chrysalis and surely have continued to espouse the ideals of Friendship and Harmony and whatever. They're led by the daughter of her oldest and dearest friend! How could they not be her kind of 'civilized'?!
Well, I could have spent a half dozen chapters spoon-feeding little hints about the rot that truly laid at the core of even the 'noble' Disciples, until Twilight was forced to accept that even creatures led by her niece had managed to 'fall', even without help from Chrysalis. Wax philosophical about the innate nature of ponies vs Harmony, and so forth. That's a whole 200k+ story in and of itself with a lot of real promise!
But...I'm trying to blitz a series of events that spans generations in the novels into something that (hopefully) comes out to less than a million words. We're at 300k right now, and only at the cusp of the Clan Invasion! If I can skip five chapters of revealing to Twilight how the Clans aren't any better than the other groups that exist, by bluntly rubbing it in her face after just one scene with Slipshod's mangled body...well, sorry, Slip!
As for Twilight, it's not that I'm trying to give her the idiot ball, per se; but there is more to her character in the show than being smart and competent. She's also idealistic and prone to distraction. She sees a scarred, oddly-dressed, Mad-Maxed, version of herself appear in her library who is explicitly there to 'warn her about the future'...and all she can focus on is that there's time-travel spells and where to find them. At one point she apparently gets so distracted with her life in general that she forgets about her weekly letter to the pony she pretty much worships as a god! It'd be like an evangelical forgetting that church was on Sunday; but Twilight did it...
It (sadly, perhaps) is actually not out of character, no matter how competent she may be and no matter how pressing the immediate issue may be, for her to get side-tracked by something that is fascinating to her in the moment. Now, there's all kinds of room for arguments about the show's various writers writing the character different for plot reasons, or them giving her the idiot ball, or what-have-you. But the fact is that those attributes are canonically supported...and they do kind of make Twilight part of who she is; because we see them repeatedly in the show.
As for why I use moments of 'not actually dead' as cliffhangers: well, they serve as a convenient chapter transition; and not exclusively because of whatever dramatic tension they might create. I mean, there's not a lot of places that I could have split the narrative in chapter 23 or 25 that wouldn't have made it just seem even more awkward. Do I cut 23 off when he's being dragged towards the airlock? Debatably, I could have ended 23 after Dee drugged Slip; but finally resolving the issue with Dee on their ship was kind of the whole point of that chapter. Otherwise, it's just a conversation between Slip and Squelch and nothing else happens.
I'm pretty sure I'm done abusing Slip like this though, because there isn't any more character development centered around him that can be gained through doing so. Squelch's was the last Slip-related revelation that was left to be had.
There's quite a bit of editing I'll need to do around the dialogue; and no, GDocs isn't catching any of that, which is what I use exclusively to write these days.
I do hope to see you come back to this story, and that it doesn't end up offending your sensibilities too badly in the future!
10766441
Nah, you're not some corporate bastard.
Like I said, at this point it's best to just consider Twilight to be furniture, since we can't depend on her not to get saddled with the idiot ball again in the future, or abuse her character for the sake of cutting wordcount. What's the point of looking at her as a competent and intelligent character when you can handwave it away at any moment for the sake of convenience? I can understand trying to expedite the story, but I dislike that you did it at expense to her as a character. I don't even think you would have needed to spend an extra few chapters revealing the Disciples to be cruel, you could easily have done it in one with an overzealous Disciple character ignoring or willfully misinterpreting Twilight's commands. There were ways to get to the same result without playing the bastard lovechild of a miscommunication plot and an idiot ball. At the end of the day, it's your story and up to you whether to trade on your characters for convenience.
My objection lies in that you had a variety of options and alternatives that DIDN'T require Twilight being a moron for the same outcome to occur. She isn't the same quirky little librarian from season one, she's had hundreds of years of experience under her belt and you REPEATEDLY demonstrated that she is an intelligent, competent character. She may be a little slow on the uptake after 500 years of stasis, but she's an idealist and that follows. However, she's still able to pick out Slipshod being a changeling almost immediately. She's an incredibly skilled pilot. So on, so forth. YOU billed her as a competent character, with idealism/hypocrisy being her flaw, NOT forgetfulness and stupidity. YOU showed her as being competent and intelligent, if idealistic. Turning around and making her forget something extremely relevant and potentially life-threatening to an ally who is specifically vulnerable is. Well. You know my opinion on that.
Point is, she DOESN'T need to be given an idiot ball like this. Perhaps she mentions that there's a friendly changeling on-board, but that information doesn't get relayed to the Disciples' capture team in time? Perhaps it does, but someone involved is maliciously biased and ignores it, while others go along? Perhaps she mentions it, and they capture Slipshod and begin interrogation processes while the Princess is ignorant. "Oh hey, there's a Changeling collaborator on board, just to let you know." could be interpreted as "Catch him, follow the usual procedure." All you'd really need to change is mentioning that he's being interrogated and have Twilight go down to stop the interrogation because for goodness's sakes, they're on the same side, and THEN discover the whole bit with the torture and such. Squelch can get mixed in just the same easily enough. You don't need another 200k words to slowly reveal things, you just need to not turn Twilight into a lobotomized twit. ALL that you'd have to do is have Twilight's mentioning the friendly changeling be waylaid or ignored, and suddenly she's no longer a moron and a simple tool to avoid 200k words of extra effort. You still get the horror and the revelation, but she doesn't go from a competent character to a piece of furniture. Hell, you could even play on her pointing out Slipshod being a changeling as being interpreted as a go ahead for his interrogation. She doesn't need to be made out to be an idiot in complete reversal to a revelation she went through not even a chapter ago.
Shame about google docs, but I'm glad to hear you're done abusing Slip with BS. Shame it came so late, but what's done is done. See you when it's over, I guess.
Mission failed. Totaly in the red numbers in personal and anything.
No matter how this end the Crew is gone one way or another by the end of the campaign...
Let's hope that this isn't a pyhrric victory and gives the clans some much needed intel.
Shouldn't have hesitated to put 2 into into every creature in that room, you knew they were all changelings and now you cost the crew 2 invaluable mechanics.
Oh no, not Tig!
Not Tig!
Fusilier, on the other hand, had "mauve short" written all over him.
11736967
Yeah, losing Tig even hurt me :(