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My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
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Aww, sad ending, but awesome update nonetheless.
Ember and Exe seem like they would get along, I wonder where you're going with that.
2999996
I am far too excited to get this comment I haven't had one like this in so long what is wrong with me
Will our fiesty filly and uber ursa take a trip on the shipping... uh, ship?
Who knows!? Inter-species is plausible, right?
Hello. Aquillo of WRITE here with the promised review.
Before I move onto the review in question, I’d just like to say it was nice to read a story for review that didn’t have me making angry hand spiders at the screen through terrible use of language.
Brief Grammar Niggles
That being said, you do have one problem with your use of modifiers when stacked in a list. You have a tendency to place a comma before the final item in a list of adjectives. Or this: “adjective, adjective, noun.” That’s not needed: there is no Oxford Comma variant for modifier lists.
I counted at least three going through and would’ve marked them off if I’d had a keyboard handy (read the story on tablet whilst in a house with no internet.) As it stands, they’re not really a hindrance given the rarity, but they are something to pay attention to.
There’s also a few other instances where you don’t treat your adjectives hierarchically – as in, you have adjectives modifying adjectives rather than the noun, but place a comma between them. It doesn’t always happen, so I’d call it a typo instead of a mechanical error, but you should watch out for it.
You should also be aware that interruptions in dialogue are shown through em dashes, not hyphens.
Still, for a one-hundred K fic, you had pretty clean grammar and no real clunkers for sentences. I could split hairs and say that’s probably because you mainly stick to the comma and period basics, but that’d be beside the point: the language worked here. Good job.
The Prologue
I think the prologue needs work. I can see what you’re trying to do with it – opening with a heavily action based scene to draw the readers’ attention – but I can tell you it did the opposite for me. I’ll explain why below.
The first problem I have with it is that the Seer is overpowered. Ridiculously overpowered, to the point where I was starting to root for the griffons after the third died because they at least gave the appearance of trying.
The setup of introducing a character being chased by a group works by playing off the underdog sympathy feel, but the way it worked out here, it felt like the group chasing her were the underdogs. They were certainly getting slaughtered fast enough, and then there’s the bit at the end when she teleports away. That bit invalidates the chase scene entirely and left me with the impression that she was letting them chase her simply for the hell of it, as if she was never really in any danger whatsoever.
Adding on to that, the sparsity with which you described the kills was a problem – one that gets refrained later on with pacing. Griffons die in a single line, often between sentences. That’s where the appearance of trying part comes from: there’s inventiveness at play describing how the griffons hunt her, but little to none describing how she beats them. You need more words here; leaving it to the imagination doesn’t work when done frequently, and especially won’t work when you’re in the process of feeding it.
So, yeah, I don’t think I came out of the prologue thinking what you wanted me to think. I came out of it hankering for pony blood. This is not the cool.
I’d recommend either rewriting the prologue with the Seer crippled or injured – not necessarily on-screen; you could easily start off with her limping into the action – and making the griffons die a little less easy. Hell, just have her knock out or sneak round some; as long as it gives the scene the tension it really needs by making the griffons a viable threat.
I’d also pull out some of the telling you’ve got in there: “She heard wingbeats to her right. They were herding her. She was certain of it.” could easily be two paragraphs in its own right detailing how she knows this.
The Protagonist
You know he’s spineless. I know he’s spineless. I know you know he’s spineless. And so, whilst it annoyed me to all hells whilst reading, I can’t really fault you for it.
Just, y’know, hurry up the character arc. It was getting old by the time I reached the latest chapter.
My problem with him being spineless is this: it feels way too much like this is his only character trait. I can’t really think of any others besides “tries to be kind”, but I’m half convinced that’s more just him helping others because he’s too spineless to say no when asked. His drive to be a ship's captain seems to be pride in his ancestry, but that also seems limited only to when it’s relevant to ships. I’d expect him to be a lot more hostile to the recusants after the dissing of his pony heritage if this was the case.
Combine the two of these, and the story feels directionless. The protagonist wanders from group to group with a different aim in his head each time; it very much feels like he’s not in control of what’s happening in his life at all. He reacts rather than acts.
I don’t really have a handle on why he does anything, is what I’m saying. And, more worryingly, I don’t get the impression that you do either.
I’d try adding in more traits or expanding on the ones you have. At the moment, he’s just very bland and somewhat forgettable as a character, lead by a single trait as he is.
The Plot
This ties in a bit to the aimlessness of the protagonist, but is a bit more connected with why I struggle to really form an emotional bond with the characters.
You cycle through groups and character aims far too quickly in this. The plot goes a bit like this after the slavery arc: Dissero’s just broken in to the Outer World & freed himself from slavery; he’s now struggling to find/get a place in the Recursant clan; he’s now travelling by hoof to the New city with a bear called Exe; he’s now helping stage a robbery against the Baron; he’s now back with his old crew.
Each and every single one of those starts off with chance. There’s no clear flow in the narrative from one event to the next, no real “this happens and that caused this to happen which caused this to happen”. Dissero gets found by the Recursant Clan, which was luck; he meets up with Exe out of chance; he is hoodwinked into the robbery without really progressing into it. It too often feels like a plot thread gets dropped in favour of another, shinier one.
This makes me uncertain as to what twist the narrative will take next. This can work in some stories, but combined with the groups of characters being sketched into being and then removed without being fleshed out a few chapters on, it caused a lack of interest in me. Why should I emotionally invest in these characters if they could get pulled out of being as soon as they start to get interesting?
At its most ridiculous was Moon Beam. I’d cut him right out: the scene with Ironside carried all the emotional impact you wanted Moon Beam’s to have even with it being a sadly rushed thing – seriously, you could have dragged that one out a bit more, made us guess that little bit longer before revealing the truth. It wasn’t that it didn’t work, it’s more that it would’ve worked better. Moon Beam, on the other hand, was a character who popped into existence, built up a rapport with the protagonist that we never really see and then died. He felt like a mixture of fat in need of cutting and a sign thrust into the audience's face saying "tears please".
Moving back onto the plot, the finding the Seer arc you introduce at the end seems annoyingly easy for me, both with how Dissero gets given it and how he and everyone else seems to act like it’s a sane thing to do. It’s partially the “arising from the ether” aspect that a lot of the other plot threads have and partially curiosity over why he’s so damned set on this one given his dithering elsewhere. Ember’s right: traipsing off to go see a Seer based on a hunch is a remarkably insane thing to do, and yet his crew seems to accept it without much protest.
I didn’t buy it. I’m glad that the plot has got some focus and a general direction in which it’s heading for the future, but I’m not sure I can buy into why this is the dominant thread.
I’d recommend rewriting some of Dissero’s thoughts back in the chapters between him leaving the clan and him rejoining his crew so that his thoughts are wholly focused on getting back to his crew – it’s there, yes, but it never really feels like the dominant drive to why he does things in that section. As it is, in that part he seems to be going to New because someone told him to go to New. I’d also have a few of the characters repeatedly questioning Dissero over why he’s so dead set on going to see this Seer. Don’t just do it once, but have it brought up continually: reinforce it in the reader’s mind that the decision isn’t one done purely for the sake of plot convenience, that the character has reasons for why he does things and that these reasons are worth caring about.
You’ve used third person on more than one occasion to reveal details to the audience that the protagonist doesn’t know. This is risky, very risky, because it then stops me from building up any concern for what’s happening off screen. Any wonderings I had over what was happening with Dissero’s crew were sated when you showed them to me; a better approach would have been to build up concern through having a few legitimate scenes with Dissero wondering and thus making me wonder and worry and then let it build until it gets released all at once.
Your approach at the moment is akin to the “having your cake and eating it” problem: you want us to build up concern over what’s happening but then dissipate any of that concern immediately. It works equally with the Baron: the mystique to his character of being an omnipotent and omnipresent name vanished when we saw him in a scene, and what replaced it just wasn’t as good.
I’d cut down on the number of times you use third person this way, and don’t use it at all to reveal crucial details to the audience. That’s not good exposition: that the ship was a prototype could have been revealed to us through character interactions told whilst Dissero was still on-board, and it would have been more interesting because I wouldn’t have known everything about it.
Closing remarks
Do I have any? I suppose I do:
You need to tighten the plot on this story. At the moment, it’s rambling and incoherent; this is made worse by having a protagonist who’s undriven and seems to change aims like a leaf in the breeze. He doesn’t really seem to care what happens to him beyond the immediate future – he has no real driving light that all his actions are checked against – and this makes it difficult for me to care.
This accelerates problems with trying to form an emotional attachment, which is mainly done through readers caring about characters and how they’ll react to events. At the moment, any time a character or a group of character has been around long enough to get established they then get whisked away again before being rounded out. Your story isn’t plot driven, but character driven, and yet the changes in Dissero’s character are too slow to give it oomph and there’s no group of lackeys around him consistently to help pad it out.
Your writing style – devoid of much imagery and using short sentences which are detail heavy and intended to fade to the foreground – works well with first person. Any problems I have here are to do with you skipping over details or even scenes through having Dissero recount events. Once or twice when it would be boring is fine, but when these events are things like him making recommends for leading his crew into slavery, that stops being okay. That place was ripe for drama to be squeezed out, for you to show me what these characters are made of, and yet you avoided it. That’s shooting yourself in the foot.
The story could work. But at the same time, it’s been around one hundred K’s worth of words with little progression in terms of plot or character. It felt in places like this story wasn’t certain where it wanted to go: it wanted a journey without knowing the destination. And the problem with that is that I don’t like the characters enough to want to join in on the ride.
Anyway, that’s the review done. If you’ve any complaints/objections/things you want clarification on, reply to me and I’ll procrastinate for a few days before working out a response.
3008514
Oh, cool. Thanks bro!
Some of these I think may be matters of opinion (mainly I'm thinking of the third-person and Baron scenes, as I had some readers complain about them having barely any presence), but this is lot's of useful feedback!
I'll be sure to consider it when writing the 3rd edition.
3008819
Well, when you're dealing with stories, most things are a matter of opinion. What makes one set of people like a story will be the reason another set despises it. The best a reviewer can do is to try and get it as general as possible or, failing that, to say what they actually think and try and explain why.
And jesus, third edition? You are dedicated, dude.
3008834
You should've seen the 1st edition!
The first like five chapters of that sucked.
And the rest of it kinda did, too.
So I was all like "Is it not my pen which shall pierce the heavens!?" and rewrote it.
This review proudly brought to you, by the group Authors Helping Authors.
Name of Story: Omega (chapter 17)
Grammar Score (out of ten): 10 (!)
Pros:
1) You seem to have a habit of granting my wishes, friend. First the "ick" family being left behind, then Exe joining the group, now the uber-cannon messing up Ashfall's Alpha Wolf...
2) Your description of the city is about the right level of descriptive, without being too telly.
3) The Omega looks set to get a massive overhaul. Fahrenheit (FFX), anyone?
Cons:
1) Jabari's appearance seems just a little too convenient and out of left field.
2) Once again
3) These elude me
Notes:
Finally, salvation! Alas, it comes with a price, one far too steep for anypony to afford. The crew should consider themselves immensely lucky that the Omega even has a future at all; see seems extremely beaten up. While the price does seem pretty obscene for a hangar rental, one remembers that the Outer World is, first and foremost, out for itself. Interesting how even a "civilised" city has the "I scratched your back, now you scratch mine or I'll make your life hell/kill you" attitude that you've ingrained so well.
Fuck. Yes. Thank you so much for this. Here's what went through my head:
Start at 5:03
Your descriptions of the cities and general locations are definitely descriptive enough. It's great that you've given us a fairly detailed description of Harvest City, without it being too telly. Harvest looks to me in my mind, a much larger version of Canterlot, whereas with New I imagined a sort of setting similar to Babylon, of Prince of Persia fame.
About that zebra... yeah, that just seems too convenient for my tastes. I get that the Seer probably predicted where they'd be, but even so:
If he knew who they were, why did he have to ask them in the first place?
Unfortunate, the fate of the "Ick" family. But in all honestly, they kinda deserved it.
So, I'm pleased to announce that once again, I find no grammar issues! have another perfect ten!
Almost at the end of current events. Soon, I shall join the ranks of the knights who say "Ni" (er, the readers who cry MOAR! )
Adren
Words can not proclaim how upset this chapter made me
So I will just scream as loud as I can instead