Page generated in 0.018 seconds
Total duration
1,025 users online
1,898,608 hits today, 2,782,760 yesterday
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
11300725
I appreciate the input!
I definitely could have done better pacing at a few points in the story, but I'm learning a lot about writing as I continue the project. So far it's more fun then stressful, so still positive on the fun front at least XD
Pretty good premise so far. The world building's better than most of your average F:OE stories. Good characters for the most part.
That being said, Aella's backstory is getting very... Busy. Not only being a former/current chem addict who's parents mysteriously died/disappeared at a young age followed by her girlfriend's unexplained suicide, but now she's a controversial survivor of her countries' eugenics program due to an up in the air 'brain issue'? Possibly linked to her being transgender, but hopefully not. To top it off they 'just' neutered her instead of euthenizing her.
There's such a thing as overplaying your hand when trying to make a character sympathetic. She's straddling the border between 'oh no, not more' and 'ugh, there's more?' from my perspective. Saddling a character with a tragic backstory isn't a bad story device by any means, but sometimes there's a limit. By example, Aella's girlfriend is either a permanently loose plot thread or a bomb waiting to go off further down the road. In the latter case, intentionally or not, you may be setting up an expectation that hippogriff society's far from idealic and deserves what it's getting. If on the other hand that's your intention, kudos.
I guess all I'm trying to say is that an overcomplicated backstory can set up a lot of expectations that, if they aren't met or subverted well, can seriously hamper a reader's enjoyment of a story. It gets even worse when the character outright refuses do deal with any of the issues, internally or externally.
It's as much a pacing issue as anything. It's easy to forget that it's been less than two weeks since Aella entered the wasteland. It's not really reasonable to expect her to be dealing with all these issues, but from a reader's perspective it's all just piling on without any modicum of catharsis to break up the pity party. The current timeline of the story's well paced, with plenty of triumphs and setbacks to keep the reader engaged, but if every flashback is just more tragedy and heartbreak it seriously bogs the story down. It also calls into question Aella's motivations for even caring about saving her people. If her whole life was a series of terrible circumstances and crushing tragedies interspersed with bouts of self-isolation and neglect, why does she want to save the society that almost killed her at birth?
Tldr: Aella's a sad, hope she gets better kbai
11303120
Aella's back story is definitely a bit busy, and that was never really my intention? But there were a few things I needed to set up about the state of hippogriffia that I needed to set up to use later, and the most reasonable way was to do so through her backstory. They won't really be significant again until Aella has started to figure some of her shit out, so hopefully, that will help level things out a bit? The reasoning for a lot of this to come up in this chapter is because she kind of needed a kick in the ass to realize she needs to focus on herself? I did dump a lot on her and reveal a lot of that recently which I didn't really mean to do, but I didn't want these aspects to just come out of nowhere down the road and feel inorganic? So I suppose I overcompensated
The thing with why she keeps trying to help her people despite all of the shit her childhood put her through is because she hasn't realized yet that some of the things about her home are problematic, and/or that she was told her entire life that it was her fault things sucked for her. She's trying to redeem herself for something she never did, to people who aren't there anymore.
Don't worry, her 'brain issue' isn't related to her being trans. Well... No I can't say that, they have found a correlation between people with her neurotype and being gender diverse, but it isn't directly related in the way you may be thinking.
I'm glad you're enjoying it so far, I've been having fun doing it. World building is one of my favourite aspects of storytelling, so I've put a lot of thought and time into that part! ((I was actually planning to do this fic for years before I got around to it, with some parts to come inspired by the older fallout titles that I haven't seen touched on in other fics. I'm super excited!!!!)) I just wish I could get chapters out faster so I could expand on the world more and reveal more of the things I wanna shooooow
11301241
Ok, this made me laugh XD I don't know why I found it so funny, but it was great
This bit isn't really explained well until later, and then more a lot later... The idea of her exploring Equestria is different for her because she's romanticized it. She grew up with stories about what it was like before the war. While she understands it isn't like that anymore, she still holds it in much higher regard than she should.
You're right about there not being much of a setup to the outbreak that happened, I definitely could have done that better. Most of it does happen mostly while Aella is hyper-fixated on getting her work done, so she doesn't see anything. But I could have at least set up a conversation with one of the towns creatures about them having family under the weather or something. I appreciate the note.
She does come up again, but it'll be a while before that scene pays off, and I don't think the payoff is as big as you're expecting...? But it is important
Thanks for your feedback ^.^
11303146
The scene legit had reminded me of the 'Help me, Obi Wan' scene from A New Hope, so I just thought it'd be funny to call that robot R2-D2.
I think the problem I had is that the first few scenes gave me the impression that the story was going to be about Aella and other characters within a setting that had never really been explored before in the FoE universe (mainly because hippogriffs weren't introduced to FiM by the time FoE was written), and that Aella arc would be about her struggle to connect with others and well as having some sort of PTSD that she's trying to avoid having the audience see... but then R2-D2 shows up and the whole story does a gear shift into becoming sorta the story of Fallout 1 where the protag is sent off into the Wasteland to recover stuff to save their home (only, instead of a Stable, it's a whole country.
Aella has this romanization of Equestria but before R2-D2 shows up none of that ever gets explored (least, I don't remember, ADD can cause me to lose sight of details sometimes) until after the gear shift happens. Before that most of the chapter it is spent on Aella getting debriefed, exploring a bit in her town, and going into exposition dumps about stuff I thought was happening because it would all be relevant to the story (that's on me though and how I handle worldbuilding), but now with the gear shift now it kinda feels redundant (as far I know from where I am reading the story) and just wasted my time which is what I would attribute to the chapter having slow pacing...
But after the gear shift the pacing just hits the acceleration pedal and oh Aella is now in the sky, and now she's at a dessert, and now she's having a convo with Corva.
The whole planning of the chapter feels disorganized, if that makes sense. Which since you're a new writer, that's understandable. Writing is hard, I should know that first hand.
Anyway, I hope my feedback hasn't been demoralizing you, you're certainly putting in effort.