History is a vast topic and all of it was founded from either truth or lies, history is written by the victor more often than not. But what is most intriguing about the past is that it can do so much now, it can enlighten the younger and thus should be told. But at the same time it can corrupt and in fact ruin some ponies. It can found glorious empires, or destroy them. The sad thing is that none of this matters now, history will always be the same. Some of it will never see the light of day, and will be unable to warn the future generations of our failures.
Equestrian history is large and unbounded, it spans over five hundred volumes and we still continue to write what we saw thousands of years ago. So one footnote will surely be ignored, a tiny collection of facts. Nopony will ever know of our existence, or know of our mysteries. They will only know what they are told, and in this ignorance, they will be saved.
A nice little story, I liked it. It was quaint and could in fact be expanded upon, but I liked the concept and for a simple 1000+ words you did well. Your description however left me in a state of doubt, so in reading I'm happy to say I was wrong. If you want I could draft up a more in depth description for you.. perhaps find an image? All authors must stick together! I will only help if you want, of course.
~Edward
1931631
If I'm bad at anything(besides writing in general, XD yay self-depreciation!) it's desctiptions. If you have any good ideas, I'd be glad to hear them. Though the idea of History as a force is something I'd like to still focus on.
And yeah, I think I'm just gonna grab an image of the Windigos.
Also, the idea is that it can be expanded on, but isn't. It's world building- it gives you background, but not details. The details are for you to fill in. I know what the creatures focused on for most of the fic are(the forebears), but I'll never tell you that, because that stops you from getting your own ideas about it.
1931644
I see.. that's kind of like what I do in the Monoverse.. my own universe of Equestria. I got a feature for it.. so you know, guess we're good eh?
New description:
Hope that's what you wanted my fellow.
~Edward
1931669
Oh, that is good. You captured basically all the themes of the story perfectly. BROHOOF
/]
1931754
Hey thanks man, it's what I do best. I indeed looked to include what your fiction incorporated, a sense of mystery and ages old. The knowledge of the past and it's sheer greatness. In both the ability to create goodness, and corrupt all people.
Now.. warning.
SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION
Would you kindly read my work? I mean... if you liked that, you'll like my 11000 or so words of mindset and world building.
~Edward
Seems legit. Giving it a read.
Really interesting idea, and well written.
That read quite a bit like a history book. And you did well on writing it as such, so nicely done, overall.
1934255
Thanks, I was going for a combination history book/ fairy tale feel. I'm still disapointed I couldn't make it longer, but to be honest I struggled to get it this long. It just wanted to be short.
1934280
It is perfectly fine at being short. Descriptions and everything is just enough.
I was happy someone posted this story somewhere (I forgot where).
I don't know why, but it feels perfectly fine at being short.
Nothing more and nothing less should be said. That feel.
Let's see if I can be constructive with this.
I think that you came up with an amazing history for the Windigos. I enjoyed reading it, but there were a couple little things I noticed.
First off, grammar time!
Replace it's with its.
Early on, you mention that there are no images or fossils remaining of the 'first' species. Yet they either froze or starved to death, correct? I'm pretty sure that freezing a body allows it to stay intact for great lengths of time, certainly long enough for dragons or griffons to come along and find them.
I feel you had some sentences that, while they make sense now, could be described as run-ons. At some points, I felt overwhelmed by the number of commas and had some difficulty following along. For example;
This sentence makes sense, but could easily be turned into this:
Small things like this go a long way toward helping the story flow.
I think that's all I have to offer in terms of constructive criticism. Once again, this is a very well done story. Short, easy to read, but it provides an amazing backstory to a rather one-dimensional species. Thank you.
-Quylaa
P.S. Did I do good for my first official-sounding review?
1937627
They froze to death, but they didn't live in cold locals, and the world went back to as it was when the Windigos hibernated. It is not particularly kind to maintaining corpses for them to freeze, and then thaw. Add to that the fact that the cities presumably didn't contain a ton of vegetation and soft mud to allow fossils, and any that died outside the cities wouldn't necessarily be connected with the mysterious species, and you have a recipe no knowledge of what they look like.
On the other hand, if it had stayed frozen(perhaps a far north city? *shrug*) then they don't have the technology to find and excavate it to discover what they looked like. Ice and snow in the levels that Windigos create would make it nigh-on impossible to see what was down there. Why do you think so many people try to argue that Atlantis was in Antarctica? (And yes, they have magic, but the same problems apply- how would anyone know how to find something they don't know exists?)
And I made a few changes based on your concerns. I couldn't get rid of all the run-ons(half of them the second half wouldn't work on it's own, or such things), but I found a few and fixed them as I could.
It was good, and helpful! seeing what confuses people, and mistakes(god the it's-es always get me somehow. I guess my mind just latched onto the "add 's to add ownership bit, huh?) is the important thing too. Just remember- most writers think critically about the content of what they write. It's best to assume they had a reason for something that seems unusual, then try to figure it out for yourself, hmm?
1938256
I can follow that logic. Thanks for clarifying.
Whenever it comes to contractions, I mentally substitute that word for the words it combines, to see if the sentence still makes sense. So "it's" would become "it is". The sentence "I had it's tail in my hand" would become "I had it is tail in my hand", which makes no sense at all. But I agree, it gets annoying and confusing at times.
I'm glad I could be of some assistance. I'm trying to be more helpful to writers, instead of just saying something like "I loved this story!" or "That part was hilarious!" Not that there's anything wrong with those types of comments, but they don't really provide much helpful feedback.
1938762
Heh, noone's hurt by people misunderstanding my story but me.
Yeah, those are the most annoying comments to recieve short of trolling, and people who just say "this sucks." Give me something to look at, you know? People on this one have been commenting on the length, the way I made it sound like a story, etc. and those are so much better than if they all just told me it was good.
Nice little story. Deserves more attention.
1957821
I promise that in my mind they weren't humans. I just let the reader insert what they want into the role.
Alrighty. Bear in mind that this comment has little-to-no relation to whatever rating I award this in the competition
With that in mind...
IT'S REVIEWIN' TIME
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Technical stuff and things
Spelling seems to be spot-on, so far as I can tell. Grammar is also pretty good, though a couple things could be improved upon:
First, it's unusual to indent the first paragraph. Hardly something that'd scuttle your ship, but EqD pre-readers would send you to the moon for something like that.
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Secondly, there are a couple of oddly placed commas dotted around too. For example, the sentence "For the creatures they created, and then loosed upon the world, froze their surroundings, feeding on the warmth and life around them, and were drawn to those whose hearts were filled with hatred, and whose lips allowed pure anger to pass" is much longer than it should be. Could do with some breaking up instead of the commas. But again, this is nothing really major.
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The big thing with this story is the prose is almost beyond purple. Like "Their legacy was so great, their achievements so self-evident, that they would be venerated by races not to live for untold ages, and seen as gods", for example. At times it's like I'm drowning in a sea of lavender.
Speaking of which, there's the slightest hint of Lavender Unicorn Syndrome when you talk about these mysterious creatures which bear absolutely no resemblance to humanity at all. Nope, none. Nuh-uh.
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The bit with the story and stuff
Alright, let's just get this out of the way. I know it's never mentioned in the story (plausible deniability and all that), but you'd have to be blind to ignore the similarities between the Forebears and humanity. The story plays out like a parallel Cold War if
Harry actually was a Wizardmagic really existed.That aside, it's not all that bad. I love the idea of Windigoes being living WMDs. Seriously. If it wasn't for the disturbing relationship mentioned above, I'd be happy to try and fit this in my headcanon somewhere (maybe something about a rebellion, or maybe Discord/NMM released them? Meh)
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General Doohickeys
The style of writing was rather interesting. Reminds me of a fireside story or something similar. Whatever it was, I enjoyed it.
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Overall hoojamaflips
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A fun one-shot with some interesting ideas, tarnished ever so slightly by an over-abundance of adjectives.
I would've written more, but there's not a lot you can say about a 1150 word story.
Still, not bad at all.
~ScreenedPlum, WRITE’s Drunk Demoman
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1970070
humm. I'll have to go through and try to fix those minor errors. Where I can(some of the really long sentences are so long because I couldn't seem to split them up)
Yeah, I considered explaining who the "forebears" were (among ideas that I considered was Draqueni, an ancient race of ponies, possibly alicorns, deer(because there's that whole wierd elf thing going on there in the fandom) and horrible monstrosities that, when I wrote up a description of them, quickly turned disturbing and made me root for the Windigoes) but it ruined part of the feel I was going for. Which is unfortunate, because I swear to GOD the "well geez this is basically the cold war" thing is incidental. I got the idea of them being intentionally created by an ancient civilization for use in a war and then they just sort of destroyed EVERYTHING, and I got half way through and went "fuck. Everyone's going to think it's humans." But I'd written half of it, and I loved the idea too much to just drop it. Like you said- it's a great idea, but the resemblance to the cold war+magic is rather unfortunate.
And the purple prose was intentional, specifically because it was designed to be a sort of fireside story thing. Seriously, go read some ancient mythology- when they describe things, they get pretty damned flowery. Either that, or we get the opposite problem of only a single descriptive phrase, when we're dealing with an oral tradition(see- Le Morte de Arthur. it's all "he smote him" and "he was smote by" and "he was greatly affeared of being smote")
1970824
Aye, I've got to agree that it would. Their mystery is part of their charm
Hmm...
If you're willing to go that far, then there should be a fairly simple (yet time-consuming) way to play down the parallels with humanity.
Edit the references to their great technology to yet more magical things.
Because, lets face it, whenever someone mentions cars/planes/whatever in fics, our minds are drawn to the only species we know to have invented them.
But if you were to put down such miraculous apparatus to their earth-bending magical prowess, then there's less of a connection between these creatures and us.
Fair enough, I suppose
Also, it's always nice to have an author respond to comments like these. Cheers
1971032
Any comment longer than three lines just feels like it DESERVES a response. I'm writing to try and spread some joy and happiness
(Seriously, my life goal is to make people happy. I'm like Pinkie, but a touch more serious
), so the only "important" thing is that my readers enjoy it. If someone spends the time to say something about the story, i should take the time to listen and respond.
And that's a really good idea! I think I'll go try and edit that around... maybe talk about floating cities and the like..
The only real problem is that it's rather harder to come up with amazing magical things that people won't just go "so it's an x" than it is to just say "they made an X!"
Well thought out and really well written. Precise, concise, perfect pacing and revealing just enough to leave it all in a sense of mystery. Wonderful.
I found this simultaneously fascinating and frustrating: it felt like the (really interesting) prologue to a really beefy Windigo-focused story, in the same way that the storybook bit in S1E01 is to the show itself. As such, it did feel very short as a standalone story. I don't particularly mind the purplish prose, since that suits epic mythology rather well. I still have very mixed feelings about "foalishness", though: I don't hate the term, but I don't know that it entirely works here.
4924809
It was written for a short-story contest, and the intent was to be an almost campfire-style story, the kind of thing that you tell to kids late at night. And, unfortunately, the end is fairly definitively the end of the Windegos, so even if I wanted to, I'd find it hard to find any longer story to link to this that wasn't just treading the same ground again
4926850 More than fair response, and my analogy with S1E01 was a rather poor one. I guess what I meant is that it would be a "this is what happened" prologue, then a bigger story going into more detail about aspects of what happened. Sort of like Columbo, in that you'd know the ending from very early in the "episode".
I enjoyed the story as it is, let me stress. It's all a case of personal preference. Odd, when my preference is usually for short fics, but there's no accounting for (my) taste! :P
But on reflection, I don't think my initial comment was really fair. My apologies for that.
4927859
I didn't mean to come off as standoffish, I found your comment to be quite well-worded! I actually spent some time considering what you said about length, hence the comment about how it's closed off, and re-treading the same ground.
Criticism is good, and yours was well done- you started by saying what you found good, while explaining what frustrated you.
And I can kinda get what you meant- that your primary concern was in wanting more, tells a lot about how much you enjoyed it. I might consider coming up with something to build on the foundation this thing sets up. Hee hee, tempted to use it to craft a story not dissimilar to the kind JRPGs tend to build off of- it fits almost a little too perfectly, doesn't it?
4928533 Oh, no offence taken at all. And yes, I would have been interested to read more -- which considering that the Windigoes are not really my favourite Equestrian creatures, tells a story of its own.