- Member Since 4th Jul, 2014
- offline last seen 8 hours ago
KatieBreeze
I'm katie! I'm a young trans mare who loves to write, coming back after a years long hiatus ((And transforming)) To get back into my reading and writting of pony fanfiction! I'm glad to be back <3
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Amen to that, Specter knows his stuff!
11076169
Yeah, guys been around the block a few times he knows what's up
I love this little reference!!! <3
11084269
I'm glad, it made me very happy XD
If the main OCs in this story were voiced, what would they sound like?
11148011
That's a difficult question... I imagine Aellas voice as being kinda high and excited? Like Silver Stream but a bit more mature? I based Scarlet off the Nuka Break character of the same name, but generally she's more soft spoken then that. Free I hadn't really thought about honestly. Usually pretty monotone and to the point, but occasionally has a bit of a country accent like Calamity.
11148179
I meant in terms of voice actors.
11166538
Ohhh! I don't really know, then. I don't know enough voice actors to be able to really figure that out
Loving it so far cant wait for more
11241582
Aww yay! Thank you <3
A really neat hometown and backstory. I am suprised the zebra wasn't a companion. And I hope this isn't too rude; a draught is a thing you drink, a draft is wind blowing through cracks in a wall.
Now, on to the next chapter.
11256539
Oof, good catch. I'll fix that
And nab, the zebra is off kinda doing her own thing. She will probably come up again at some point. Likely when we get to explore Hippogriffia more
So far I've only read a smidgeon of the first chapter and you've given a decent little amount of world building and I like it. To be honest, I honestly think this the first Fallout Equestria Story I've found that has a hippoburb as the protagonist and from maybe the 500ish words I've read you've garnered a like already:
11274913
Aww thanks so much!!! I'm glad you're enjoying it ^.^ the world building has probably been the most fun part of the project so far, and I plan to expand a lot more on it in the later chapters
Read up to half of it and have to say it looks nice, though the pacing is much slower than I usually prefer but that's more of a me thing :/.
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
So I finished through the whole chapter. I like the opening part, we get an introduction of who Aella is as a character and learn how she handles a threatening situation.
Then we have a series of slow burn scenes where we get exposition about where Aella lives and her position within it. I'll confess that I struggled to get through it since ADD brain and what not, but I thought it was building up to something: Why did Aella get removed from her mission, what's the deal with superiors getting more and fresher food than everyone else, what is Aqua's position in this society, who is Karma?
But then R2-D2 shows up to project a hologram to Aella that has a message for her to travel to Equestria to find a cure for a plague running loose in Hippogriffia, and it sorta threw me off for a bit, since outside of mention of a settlement baring Aella entry due to 'ponypox', we don't really get much set up for this plague. We don't see Aella's community having notable members suffering from the plague, in fact from what we saw everything looks (on the surface) to be alright.
Aella's response at this also confused me since the first two scenes had clearly established that she's not that comfortable being an explorer and we also get this line during her debrief:
And now after being tasked with finding this cure she's suddenly gung-ho about exploring? She doesn't even attempt to argue against it with her superiors at the very least since I assume this has to happen to make the story go forward. It unfortunately also makes Aella be a 'reactionary' protag where instead of her happening to the story, the story happens to her, and protags that happen to the plot like LittlePip are interesting since their actions often inform readers of who they are as people.
What weirded me out more was... suddenly going to third person in the next scene? It's... not something advised to do since that can confuse your readers (at least in the same chapter). But the rest of the scene and the next one deal with a zebra character who... I assume is part of some grand scheme for the story cause otherwise why she be here? Why would a scene be wasted showing Aella talking and expositioning to Corva if Corva doesn't become relevant to the plot later? It's... really bizarre scene placing to me.
Anyway, I hope you found this critique to be helpful. I'll probably give other chapters a read but I'll prob be slow due to ADD and having other stuff I need to get work done on :/
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.
The third person scenes are here again and they're disorienting. I won't bring it up again in future chapters since I'd be a broken record about it.
Anyway, there's some nice setup for Aella's first companion Count Specter (who for shits and giggles I'm just going to refer to as THE COUNT from here on). This story is obviously trying to emulate the 'fish out of water' sort of story the original FoE story here, so it's nice seeing a twist where the first companion isn't someone who has a moral compass and instead a cynical and jaded resident of The Land Friendship Forgot who comes across like they are hiding their full nature from Aella.
I have a feeling the 'girl' he's looking for is actively avoiding him.
The Stable is the weakest part of the chapter, basically just repeating Stable 24, except instead of the Stable being a story about how an enforced culture of toxic masculinity and sexism isn't capable of solving an unexpected crisis, here it's a story about ponies taking drugs that turn them into mindless working drones... and then monsters...
It's not really engaging.
There's clearly meant to be some commentary on how awful work ethic culture is under capitalism, but the fact that the residents of the Stable are only working because a drug is turning them into mindless jobber grunts to get gunned down in the future it just falls flat. There's also some parallel made between the residents of the Stable and Aella continuing to drug herself to keep performing tasks, but it doesn't really go anywhere (maybe in a future chapter, but not here. And even then: the parallel doesn't work well since Aella is just working herself to a self-destructive end... while the residents of the Stable just lose all their agency and become zombies).
The scene where Aella and THE COUNT argue over the water talisman is kinda neat, clearly showing that Aella isn't experienced enough to have a backbone to fight back against someone else having selfish motivations. I say kinda neat because if the story doesn't acknowledge later on Aella has this issue and she doesn't work toward growing her own spine it, then the scene is instead just an ill omen that we have a really passive protagonist.
Anyway, I hope this feedback helps you.
...A what, now?
11422048
Griff! Short for griffon, or in this case hippogriff!
In all seriousness though, I did remove that part of the description though. I decided it puts forward a lot of information that I kind of built to in the story itself, and didn't wanna spoil that.
Now that I'm all caught up on this.
So first off I think your greatest strength in this story is characterization, Aella in particular is very compelling as a character (And I'm sure the fact that I'm also a neurodivergent trans girl with a complex relationship with alcohol and a less than happy home life as a child has nothing to do with why I find her compelling /s) but so far the entire cast has been well written and distinctive.
Plotbuster brought up points that having so much trauma in a character's backstory can tip the scale from sympathetic to misery porn but I think you've kept it pretty well on the sympathy side of it (see again why I find her so compelling) but they are right in that it sets up a lot of plot points that people will expect a payoff from. Though I suspect you'll pull that off quite well
As my friend TheWanderingZebra has said, your early chapters do suffer from inconsistent pacing as well as what is, in my own opinion, an over reliance on references to other FoE fics, especially ones that seem a little forced while having no clear place in the story. but your pacing does definitely improve as the story goes on. though the perspective shifts definitely threw me for a loop, especially Scarlet and Free's side adventure where they meet Sky intersperced with Aella's fever dreams.
Overall I'd say you had a rocky start but are settling into a good thing here and I look forward to the next chapter.
11474020
I do see the issue with the perspective changes being kinda confusing, and I'll likely remove most of them entirely. But I do love the chapter with Scarlet and Free. I loved being able to explore their characters and have them bond a bit on their own. I have no idea how I could frame it to be easier to read at this point, but I have time to think about it. I'll brainstorm as I go through editing older chapters and trying to write new ones for things I can adjust. I appreciate the feedback ^^
11327449
The feedback is super helpful and appreciated. I fully admit I was to anxious and overwhelmed with other things when you left it to respond and properly make use of it, so I am sorry about that.
I'm working on fixing up my older chapters to fit the style and quality I've found myself able to do for the later ones, so naturally feedback in possible ways to improve them are invaluable.
11303120
I didn't reply to your feedback either, and I really should have. It have me a lot to think about, combined with the style of another fic I've been reading, made me realize I need to try and balance the emotional chaos as I go through the story. So light hearted scenes and chapters are a lot more important then I originally thought, and something I'm very excited to include.
a big part of including the ableism in Aellas backstory is actually as much for character as it is for plot element. As the story develops it takes on some of those themes, and has Aella fight against them. So I wanted to include it a bit through the earlier story so it didn't come out of nowhere. [Spoiler/]
11474150
It's always fun to give the secondary characters their moment in the sun, and like I said before your characterization is one of your greatest strengths so getting more of it in there with Scarlet and Free does a lot for the story. Just the way it's done becomes confusing.
Perspective shifts can add a lot of power to a story in a lot of ways but they're a tricky tool to get right. The best suggestion I can give on it, and this is what I've done in my own writing, is to give the characters a chapter of their own and stick with them for that chapter.
11474153
That's fair. I've also been juggling with my own anxieties and other stuff that's kept me occupied from reading more of EH (as well as getting my own writing done).
How many of the early chapters are you planning on rewriting? And if you want, I could give them a pre-read.
11474910
I'm not even sure, honestly. I've done a decent amount of work editing through chapter one. Mostly small changes.
Originally my plan was to comb through one chapter at a time to make adjustments for grammar, clarity, and expand on some of the descriptions, but it turned into more changes then I expected. I haven't been able to get even close to the pace for writing or editing as I could when I started the project, which hasn't helped with the speed either.
It's a work in progress, much like my characters and myself xD
11479234
I feel like grammar and small edits for chapter 1 aren't too nessisary. Really, the big issue from my perspective (and my memory of that chapter, so I could be wrong) stemed from how much exposition is dumped about Aella's home, only to do a sudden gear shift in the later half and more or less made all that exposition rather pointless.
Exposition is admittably tricky since the audience needs to have some context for the setting, but having too much of it and for stuff that won't be relevant again can cause an audience to more or less just skim thru it all just to get back to the plot advancing.
My general rule of thumb when it comes to exposition is to only exposit stuff that is relevant for the story now, and to try and be as brief about it as possible so that the pacing won't get bogged down.
I hope that advice was helpful. And like I said before, if you're looking for pre-reading on those rewrites I can give them a look and provide feedback, if that's okay with you.
It liiiives loving this one of my favorite fics
11481539
I appreciate the offer, and will gladly take you up on it at some point ^.^ I do see what you mean about all the extra details that aren't really needed, and how fixing that will help pace it up.
...still kinda wish my inciting incident wasn't the same as Star Wars >.>
11500957
I'm glad you're enjoying it <3
"I got a rum and cola, a blue rare brahmin steak, and a heaping pile of salty, buttery mashed potatoes."
Uhhhh... Aren't Brahmin sentient in the Fallout Equestria universe?
11681037
They are, and I forgot about that... Ops 0.0 Thank you, I will fix that!
I wasn't expecting a Junkrat reference.
11684325
I was playing a lot of Overwatch at the time, and it just seemed silly! ^.^
I'm curious how our groups of characters would interact if they met.
With Rosewood, I feel it depends entirely on whether it is before or after he gets the empathy implant. Aella would probably find pre-implant Rosewood disturbingly cold. Even post-implant Rosewood has his moments of ruthlessness.
With Knight, it depends on how fast they look past her weaponized metal exterior and see the caring cinnamon roll underneath.
Some drama may occur with Scarlet if she learns that Gritt is from Fillydelphia and was born into Red Eye's army. A lot of drama would occur between her and Crimson, since he was one of Stern's lieutenants. I imagine spears would be thrown.
11689486
For whether or not Aella liked Knight right away would depend on how much of a pony she feels like to Aella. If she doesn't feel empty or unstable to the hippogriff, then the hen would be very sweet! But probably at least a little on guard. You know her believes on people with too much metal. For her and Rosewood, well... Aella can find a way to befriend almost anyone. She doesn't really hold grudges or anything. That being said, more often then not Aella will take a person at face value, so if he acts like an asshat, she won't be a happy bird until he apologizes.
Heheheh... Scarlet would try and kill Gritts and Crimson, especially if she recognized either of them from her own, less consensual time in Filly. At least until Aella and Sky made her stop fighting. Scar would do about anything for those two. THEN Scarlet would go through all of Gritts and Crimsons things to see if they had any intention of trying to enslave her, or return her to one of her previous masters. Maybe bug Midnight Skies to see if he can find anything with mind magic
It would be interesting XD
11689742
The "Soul Dissonance" thing doesn't apply to Knight, since no part of her was ever organic. She's a machine that developed her own soul, much to her creator's chagrin, who wanted an obedient killing machine. If Aella allowed herself to enter Knight's mindscape, she could meet her soul directly. The biggest issue is the anti-Zebra IFF hardwired in her inaccessible core, which Knight would be very forward about warning her about.
Rosewood knows how to behave and avoid saying out-of-pocket things, and apologize if he slips up. Worst case scenario his inner "Commodore" starts wondering why a "peasant" is socializing with him, though he'd never say anything out loud. Honestly, with the number of manipulative schemes and sometimes violent intrusive thoughts that go through his head when meeting new people, Sky would by far be the most suspicious of him due to their telepathy.
Gritt's age may be a major factor for how Scarlet treats him. She could do the math and realize he was just a fledgling when the Lightbringer did her thing. That and the fact he's been a freelance merc mostly doing anti-raider/anti-slaver work for the NCR and Tenpony and other communities ever since he got out of Fillydelphia. Though if he learned about her before she learned about him, he'd keep his beak shut. His time in Filly isn't something he openly discusses, anyway.
Crimson has such a low opinion of himself and is in such constant pain from Doc Slaughter's intentionally haphazard cybernetics, he might just sit there and let Scarlet attack him, secretly hoping she can kill him faster than his repair talismans can fix him. Of course, Aella would just see her friend attacking someone who wasn't fighting back and intervene.
They took it from Harkness’ security budget.
Activate A3-21 Recall Code Violet.
Al have to admit, I figured there'd be something Weird about that factory.
11690359
Hah! You were correct xP
11689947
Yeah, I thought that'd be a fun little reference XP
11684367
I'm curious what heroes Aella would main.
Washout would be fangirling hard if she met Lightning Dust. She admired her stunt devil crew so much, she renamed herself after them when she left the Enclave.
I bet Lightning would be pleased her team of Wonderbolt Academy dropouts still had fans two centuries later.
"Aella Wheeze"
Lmfao, Scarlet with the sick burns
New chapter!
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