For every bright and shining thing, there is a shadow. Equestria was never an exception. The peaceful land still bears the marks of the moon’s descent into madness and the legacy of stalking chaos. Not even love has proven beyond corruption.
Yet nothing the ponies have faced could prepare them for this: an invasion from another world. Strange creatures, soaked in the blood of a bitter, dangerous land swarm Ponyville, meaning to devour it entirely. As the ponies’ desperation grows, Twilight and her friends find themselves reliant on a strange new ally who seems more than a little monstrous himself.
Crossover: World of Darkness (Magical Transport), prior knowledge not required.
Rating and Genre Subject to change.
Coauthored with Talon88.1.
Chapters (5)
Hm, interesting story. You have my attention.
Wow! Hell of a great fic here! The fight scenes are really well done, and the characters are a lot of fun. Some minor spelling errors here and there, but nothing that detracts from the stories flow. A few sentences also feel a bit off, but again, nothing that breaks the flow. I cannot wait to see where you take this, but I want MORE. Please keep this up!
Review: What the sun can’t see, FFFX, 14/10/2013
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/60131/what-the-sun-cant-see
Ah, what a great morning it is! The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and world of Fimfic is bustling with activity. Well, maybe not. In truth it’s dark and rainy over here, but we want to start off with the right mood, right?
This is how the layout of my review would go: First, we’d go through the mechanics, looking at bits that aren’t quite grammatically right, and fishing out any strange and quirky sentences that managed to escape the editor’s comb. After that we’d probably zoom out to the writing style itself, and the tools and tricks you could use to have the impact that you want. In the next section, we think about the plot itself, as well the characters. We want a plot to make sense, and characters to be interesting.
But before all that, let’s take a quick look at the synopsis, which I think is much too vague to do its job well. What I mean by that is that it doesn’t give me a good sense of what the story is about. Is it about a war going on? Are the characters even ponies?
Imagine that you pick up a book, wondering if it’s worth reading or not. You’d take a look at the back cover, trying to gauge if the story suits your tastes, and if it isn’t clear, then well, maybe you’d simply toss it aside and look for another book. The synopsis has to either give a rough idea of what the plot of the story is, or create a hook strong enough to get people interested.
Now, you might think that you somewhat managed to achieve the hook, by mentioning that somewhere along there that “he was followed”, but that hardly has any impact. You see, because we don’t have any idea on what sort of danger you’re talking about, it doesn’t give rise to the menacing, ominous sort of feel that you're aiming for.
Another thing is that the first sentence (which also happens to be the first paragraph) was rather convoluted, especially the last clause at the end:
Adding an “and” in front and a few helping words along the way to smoothen then sentence would help.
With that, let’s venture into the meat of the fic.I’m jumping into this without prior background knowledge of the game, which would be a good test to see if your story really can function without it.
Main story.
Mechanics and writing
It’s a good attempt at an engaging intro, although blemished by that monstrous paragraph of a sentence. Your sentences are too long, and many of them are in fact run-on sentences. A run on sentence is one that doesn’t end when it’s supposed to, instead continuing on and on using commas instead of periods. The technical definition for it is when a sentence contains two or more independent clauses joined together without proper punctuation, but let’s not go into that, because you can read up on it yourself. It basically means that you are using commas in place of periods.
So, how to we get rid of those pesky long sentences? A useful trick is to read them aloud to yourself, and if you find yourself running out of breath, it’s likely that something is wrong with the punctuation somewhere.
Ready? Let’s go. Try reading this aloud:
Especially this part. Remember: no pauses if there isn’t any comma or period.
One last example:
Your sentences are too long, even occupying entire paragraphs and forming walls of text. It’s tempting to just skim over it all, and that’s not what you want. Your sentences are too long. Cut them up into bite sized pieces, make them easy to manage and digest. Oh, such long, long sentences, all over the place!
The next thing I want to point out is shifting perspectives between characters. While writing in an omniscient (as if you’re looking at the scene from above) viewpoint allows you to switch perspectives from one character to another, you must, MUST remember to do the transition smoothly.
Here you were initially in the wolf’s head, reading his thoughts, and then suddenly the POV shifts like a scene cut straight out of a movie to Applejacks POV as she opens the door. You can’t do this in writing. It throws people off when you jump from being in one character’s to another’s.
In this example, the only reason I can think of why you shifted POVs was so that you could squeeze in a description of the wolf from Applejack’s POV, which isn’t a good reason. You should be describing Applejack’s appearance, facial expression, shock, etc. as how the wolf would see it. Then you can further build on that with more thoughts from the wolf.
Another problem of shifting perspective is that sometimes, you have a stray thought dialogue somewhere, and it isn’t clearly attributed to any character.
Whose thought is it anyway?
Next, I’m a little confused by the tags you give to the shadow alicorn beast thing. I think at one point you were calling it Mock-Alicorn, and then next you were calling it That-Which-is-Darkness, and perhaps even before that you were calling it something else. You have to be careful when switching names around like that, especially when it becomes confusing.
Bold and underlined words should be used sparingly, or never at all. This is because they make the writing look amateurish, and sometimes they look as if they belong to a comic book. All that’s missing up there is a jagged speech bubble and a drawing of the character.
Great! I think that’s all I have to say about the writing. Now let’s talk a little about the plot and characters. Ready? Go!
Plot, Characters:
The story opens up with the main character himself running away from an unknown danger, fleeing to sweet apple acres and frightening the fur off of everypony there. I thought Granny Smith’s section was remarkably well done, this is because you captured her character accurately. Granny Smith really is a little on the strange side, talking to powerful beasts as if he’s a friendly neighbour dropping by for a glass of lemonade.
The wolf seemed to be able to pull off some serious magic there, with the teleporting spell thing. I’m not quite sure what it was exactly, but I can’t help but feel it was a little overpowered. That sort of magic would put Twilight Sparkle to shame, even taking her fancy new wings into account.
As the story progresses and the tide of battle comes in, the ponies seem to be somewhat reduced into damsels in distress. They seem too weak to fight off the army of undead alicorns, well, until the part where Rainbow Dash came in, and I had to check again that is really was her, because it was as though she received a dose of mythical hyper-potion or something.
I mean, how come she can plough through the baddies like a hot knife through butter, while the other ponies have to flee for their lives? Sure, she may be Equestria’s fastest flier, but that doesn’t put her on a tier much further above the other ordinary ponies.
So in short, if Rainbow Dash can do it, so can you. Stop running and start fighting, ol’ ponyfolk of Ponyville!
Speaking of character, I have issues with three of them: Big Mac, Howls, and Celestia. In that order, with the first being the most severe.
I’m going to start off with a piece dialogue quoted from the story, and to whoever else is reading this review, your job is to tell me who’s line it is. No cheating.
The answer is Big Mac. Did you get it right? I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t. Big Mac doesn’t speak like this. He rarely even speaks to begin with, and when he does, it’s with much less vigour and enthusiasm. To hear (or read) him shout out a line like that makes him seem awfully out of character. Big Mac doesn’t bare his teeth and narrow his eyes at unaggressive strangers. Maybe Applejack will, but not this quiet red giant.
There’s something quite off about the way the Howls speaks too. So, visualize this huge wolf with inch long canines as sharp as knives, and then imagine him saying this:
A little comical, don’t you think? It’s like one of those cartoon wolves always trying to eat the birds.
Ah, and I also just had to pick this out.
I also believe that it should be “to get as many (ponies) as you can up”. Notice the placement of the ‘up’ is different.
Celestia is the least problematic of the three, speaking in a much more informal than I’d expect her to be. The princesses speak a little differently from the ordinary pony folk.
Do have a look at some transcripts of the show to get a better grasp of the way canon characters speak. And here’s a useful link for you: http://mlp.wikia.com/wiki/Transcripts
That concludes the second section of my review. I’ve read the entire first chapter and about half of the second one, so my review is based off that. Earlier on, I mentioned that reading this would be a test to see if background information was required, and it isn’t. I think you’ve managed to keep things simple and easy to understand thus far. Nice job on that
Ah, and this is WRITE’s underground lurker, signing out. Hope the review’s been useful.
--cheezesauce, WRITE’s perpetual underground lurker.
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