Ross Ricardo Ramirez-Martinez and Takiji Shinkai are on a camping trip when they meet a mysterious fox. From there they find themselves in the town of Ponyville. They discover that some of Ponyville's residents have gone mad, and that cracks and crystals have grown.
Twilight Sparkle meanwhile is studying Clover the Clever's last spells when she finds a warning. It talks of beings that eat and create and destroy. Twilight starts investigating the words, discovering that all of Equestria is in great danger.
Rainbow Dash broke her wing, and so is in the hospital. While there she starts seeing cracks in reality. A fight with a deranged pony leads her to investigate the cracks, finding nothing but distortion beyond them
A 1970's real life/MLP crossover, based on a recent unfinished GURPS campaign I ran for my cousins.
You are missing a question mark. Other than that, this has good potential and I am excited to see where it goes!
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Thanks! Glad that you want to see more ! I went and fixed that typo (is typo the right word here?) please point out more if you notice them.
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. I believe typo is the right word.
Will do
Well, you asked for it, so I'm afraid I'm going to go pretty heavy on this story. Apologies in advance!
I will say, however, that I do love escapist stories of this kind and I think the premise is absolutely fine. I just feel the execution needs a lot of work.
The narrator doesn't usually announce their story in this way, unless they are actually intended to be a character in themselves. That doesn't appear to be the case in this story.
Is it important to know that Ross is nearsighted at this point? It seems an odd thing to be the very first thing we learn about Ross.
Such a detail is also nicer to show rather than tell. Perhaps he wears glasses. If the reader doesn't need to know this detail right away, it's something you can save for later to add some descriptive weight.
It is unusual for a narrative to give an exact date in this manner. Is it important we know exactly what the date is?
This treats Taki as if we already know who she is, but this is the first time her name is given in the story. She needs to be introduced first.
In dialogue, while it is true that you don't need to attribute speech if it's obvious who is talking, here it was not obvious to me. This could be either character speaking - I know so little about them at this point that I cannot distinguish them.
You're skipping dialogue! This is a conversation we need to hear, so that we can understand how Ross feels about what he saw. We don't even know, for example, what Ross thinks he saw. Does he think it's an animal? Logically that makes sense, but we don't actually know that because we haven't heard Ross say anything about it.
Do they not like each other or something? They're both clearly excited about investigating a purple something, why aren't they talking about that?
Well that was easy. The dialogue feels rather flat overall. Here, for example, Ross is making an exclamation ("It's over there!") so you can use an exclamation mark.
Maybe it's me being dumb, but I didn't understand that at all. Was one of them swearing? Who said it?
How do they know it's female?
I mean, it's okay to say that they named it, but maybe it would be nice to know who gave it that name? Was it Ross or Taki?
This tree is nearly as tall as the Empire State Building. Since they had a view of the entire forest from above earlier, they should have seen it from miles away. Even if it's magically hidden somehow, this is still going to be the largest living thing they have ever seen in their lives. I feel like they might have more of a reaction to this?
This is a question, so it needs a question mark.
They've been climbing for hours? Why? I don't think that it would take that long (imagine walking up the stairs to the top of the Empire State Building - it would take a while, but not hours) - but even if it did - wouldn't they get tired? What is motivating them to continue? Are neither of them concerned about being so high up, in a place they've never been, on a ladder that they don't even know is secure?
I'm not saying that they wouldn't do this - but I have no reason to believe that they would. I'm not saying that things have to be "realistic" - this is escapist fantasy, after all, some suspension of disbelief is required - but it's a lot easier to accept if we understand a character's motivation for doing what they do.
Questions need question marks. Also, Taki has very strange priorities.
This is a peculiar sequence of events. Can Ross and Taki see any of this stuff? I assume that they can't, because the narrator is describing it all to us and they didn't react to it.
In fact, we do not see them react to their surroundings at all, which is odd, because they are clearly in an impossible, extradimensional place. One would think they would be a bit troubled by that.
Also, are you telling me they climbed a thousand foot ladder with all of their camping gear? Why? They couldn't possibly have known they'd be camping up there.
The dreams weren't important, then? They haven't been described (I don't even know what a "dream of infinite worlds" is, or why someone would dream it) so I assume they're not important.
As far as I know, they didn't notice anything last night.
That is an odd statement. Are Asian women not usually attractive in their experience? Why are they startled by this?
Is Taki not remotely surprised that the fox they followed up here is actually a human?
When? They barely said anything the whole time.
Sure you can. There's two of you and she can't chase both of you at once, as far as you know. You can both run in different directions, or one of you can run back to the trapdoor and the other can try to hold Fuchsia back. Sure, we the reader knows it isn't going to work, but they don't, and it would be interesting to see what the result would be. Would Fuchsia be angry? Amused? Whatever happens, we'd get to know more about her.
Oh there are ponies in this story. I was starting to wonder.
Not sure what a "ladder of a bookshelf" is. Also, are Ross and Taki not angry that they've been kidnapped?
Pastels are a kind of art medium. I think you mean "pastel colors" - this is a term that's traditionally used to describe the bright-but-not-oversaturated coloration of Equestrian ponies.
Also, just "a bunch of ponies"? No detail? How many is a bunch? What are they doing? Did they notice the humans? Did they react to Ross and Taki?
Why would seeing ponies shock them? They've already met a brightly colored animal which turned out to be sentient.
Overall, the main problem in this fic is characterization. We know next to nothing about what drives Ross or Taki, or what to expect from them. The way to build their characters is to explore them. Show them interacting, show how they respond - particularly to perspective-shattering events like those they are currently experiencing. Characters are our vehicles in the world that you create.
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Thanks for the critique! I applied your advice in the story, rewriting a few sections as I went. The version you first read I wrote last night, transcribing my rough memory of a GURPS campaign I ran for my cousins. This version, post critique, is significantly better than the original.
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It does read a bit better now :)
By the way, you mention cover art, but I don't see any?
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I made some of my own, but it did not fit the story I wanted to tell (escapist fantasy meets cosmic horror). It was the title in magenta, over a sky and with magenta mountains in the foreground. I've decided that I would rather find or assemble a different one than use it.
Here's a link to it: Cover Image Mark 0.1
Interesting. Good work
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Kozilek the Butcher. Nice
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Thanks!
Seeing Rainbow Dash on a Kozilek, Butcher of Truth artwork makes my day.
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Thanks!
Interesting stuff—I'm an easy sell when MtG crossovers are involved—but you really need to throttle back the pacing. This goes from zero to sixty way too fast. Twilight going from "nose in book" to "Oh Celestia, I just killed something" to "Wait, zombie ponies!?" in two thousand words is frankly absurd. Give scenes some time to breathe before you move on. Let the characters and audience appreciate what's happening before you rush to the next cool thing you want to show us. It's okay. We'll get there in time.
This is especially true with Dash's horrific experience in the hospital. There's something to be said for the disorientation of everything going wrong at once, but it feels like you wanted to go for more of a slow, building dread as everything got steadily more horrific. You, uh, didn't quite manage that. Also, retelling the same part of the story through different perspectives can work, but the way you handled here, it might have been better to just use a midchapter perspective shift to transition from Twilight to Dash rather than effectively write the same scene twice.
Finally, the human OCs don't seem to serve any purpose. I assume they'll contribute something to the plot eventually, but right now, they just feel like you threw them in with no plan for what they'd actually add to the story.
There's promise here, but it feels like you're rushing to get to "the good parts," which leaves the whole story feeling like a brief summary of something much more interesting.
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Thanks for the critique!
I agree with your criticisms. The OCs are in this story because I wanted to transcribe a version of a GURPS session with my cousins (The OCs being my cousin's PCs). Pacing is an issue I need to fix: it popped up in this story because I was writing more of a series of short scenes, and each chapter was written in bursts of inspiration with no proofreading nor editing. I never expected this much of a response to it.
My main question is thus: should I go back and edit these three chapters, or should I just keep on going?
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Retreading old ground can often kill enthusiasm for a project. There's not much here, but I would still recommend pressing forward and remastering the early stuff later.