Main Reviews #11: The Elements of Harmony and the Savior of Worlds (part of the Million Words in January) (spoiler alert) · 3:02am Jan 27th, 2015
Having decided to keep my word in regards to giving a friend a solid review, I bumped this story up ahead of a few others to give it some critical feedback. That’s not to say I wasn’t already intrigued by the idea of it. A story about crossing the boundaries of time and space is always going to go down well with me...if it’s done properly. So I had a glance at the cover of this one, and I thought, “I’ve never heard of something quite like this before.”
Get my review of The Elements of Harmony and the Savior of Worlds below!
Author: RK_Striker_JK_5
Synopsis:
Megan Richards is a normal, everyday wife and published author of 'My Little Horsey'... however the tales she writes about aren't fiction, but stories from her past. She thought she put the world of ponies behind her, but sometimes the past has a habit of catching up with you...
G1 meets G4 in a hopefully epic tale of the past, the present and the future.
Current Length: 181,914 words over 37 chapters, averaging 4,917 words per chapter
Status: Complete
Review: I’ve never seen Generation One of My Little Pony before, except for the movie with the witches and the Smooze. So while I was fairly excited to head into uncharted waters, I couldn’t help but feel more than a little apprehension heading in. After all, a good crossover should be able to appeal to all readers and explain all elements of the source material without leaving the reader lost. Who is that? Why is this important? What the hell is a (insert story element here)?
Thankfully, Savior of Worlds covers this pretty well. We have have our first chapter, in which our plot device a dragon is rampaging from within the Everfree and the Mane Six have gone off to quell its wrath. Cue an (admittedly quite clever) elaborate accidental magical mishap later, we have Twilight, Spike, and Rainbow smashing into another universe... where they meet her.
Megan Richards, the human protagonist of My Little Pony Generation One.
Most decent writers are iffy about humans and their involvement in Equestria when they see amateurs attempt it. Many, many fanfics have been downvoted simply for daring to have a human inside it. Human-in-Equestria stories have a pretty bad reputation, many of them being attempts at self-insertion to play out some fantasy of the author. This is not one of them.
From the get-go, Megan has a distinct personality. She’s getting a little on in years, but’s to be expected. After all, it was twenty human years worth of time since she visited Equestria and helped slay a multitude of terrible foes besieging Equestria and Dream Valley. If it’s not evident enough yet, we’ve crossed into G1 territory here. Anyway, Megan is shown to be a kind and gentle woman, though still a strong one at that. Since leaving Dream Valley two decades earlier, she has aged into a respectable wife and mother, just making a living in the real world as a ranch hand and an author. Her books: a series called My Little Horsey in which she’s basically the equivalent of Daring Do writing her adventures as if they were real (which of course, they were).
Everything changes when the Fire Nation attacks Twilight, Spike, and Rainbow come crashing back into her life. Suddenly she’s like that little girl again, excited to see her beloved ponies one more time. It’s at this point you might be expecting either the ponies or Megan to start freaking out, or asking a tonne of questions, but we manage to avoid this for the most part because Megan already knows what they are.
Megan’s family—her husband, Mike, and her two daughters, Michelle and Danielle—are the nicest bunch of people, but they’re not portrayed as anything special. Indeed, the family as a whole (including Megan herself) exude an air of “normal” about them. None of them have any sort of weird magical powers, or hidden secrets, or any of that jazz. Megan’s siblings also arrive, at her request: Danny and Molly, who were both with her on the original adventure. While the ponies and Spike are still trying to figure out what’s going on, everyone else is just in awe of seeing living examples of their wife/mother’s written work.
But the story must move on. Introductions are quick, and Twilight must return herself and her friends through the rip in space: the newly recreated “rainbow bridge.” This dimensional rip hangs above Megan’s house in the suburbs, just casually sitting there, not fluctuating or doing any weird stuff—you know, besides being a gateway to another dimension. After arming herself to the teeth with twin pistols and a rifle—you can’t be too careful in Dream Valley and Ponyland; apparently it was quite a dangerous place to be back in her day—she joins Twilight and makes her long-awaited return to Equestria.
World-building is huge. There are mentions of the dragon clans, the flutter ponies, the original princess ponies, ancient scripts and legend surrounding one “Mag’ne,” the “bringer of light,” the “founder of Equestria” (yada, yada), a whole bunch of lore and a huge amount of throwbacks to the previous generation.
I have to commend the author for the way he’s inserted these characters as elements in the story. Their lore and presence is explained very well, and with the most minimal of introductions, they feel like they belong. There’s just something magical about the way it all worked out.
One thing I noted about Celestia and Luna in this story: they seem much more “G1-like” than their G4 selves. I put this down to being reunited with their long-lost mother-figure and co-benefactor who helped teach them their initial life skills. They’re just so excited to see her again after so long. They are very much more casual and not entirely like their canon selves, although this in itself is not a bad thing. There are a few moments where one might be tempted to call “OoC!” on both of them, but something important to remember is that this story was begun before season two debuted. We didn’t even know about Discord at the time. Not only that, but the passage of time is far more warped than Megan realises.
When I say “so long” about the time, I mean it. 20 years have passed since Megan left Ponyland and returned home… but… it’s been 1500 years of Equestrian time for our princesses. Holy crap. Is it any wonder they’re so excited to see their old friend again? Of course, when Megan first finds out, she’s distraught at knowing she’ll never see any of her other, original friends ever again, although she does gain closure from it in the following chapters. So that’s nice.
As a fan of lore and world building, I can say I enjoyed most of what went on. There were a lot of characters and olden-day aspects of the story to take in, but I never felt lost in all the detail. Exposition is handled pretty well in this story: it’s hardly ever flatly put across as blatant information.
Eventually, the rest of Megan’s family join them in Equestria too, where, far from Megan’s expectations, it’s all sunshine and rainbows (and in some of their cases, lots of tree sap). Equestria is no longer the place that Megan remembers, the place that needs defending by external forces. As a result, the family traveling to Equestria feels more like a holiday than anything.
As they all look around at and explore Ponyville and meet everyone, though, the story starts to really slow down. So far we’ve only been shown minor conflicts in the dragon at the start, one of the flutter ponies being stricken with a mystery illness, and the family’s own wonderment at their situation. There’s never anything really threatening about the place they’re in. While it may be a somewhat realistic portrayal of pre-season two Equestria, it really doesn’t make for truly exciting, engaging reading. I understand that the characters all need to be clued in and have things like the history of Equestria explained to them (and the Princesses and Megan are all too happy to be their tour guides), but there’s just so much of it. A good 75% of the story passes with minimal cause for concern about anything. While past dangers definitely come up in conversation, it never feels like there’s any reason for alarm until we get to about chapter 27/28.
I think the best way to describe the feeling I got from reading Savior of Worlds is that of a leisurely stroll through the Canterlot Gardens. It’s gorgeous, it’s rich with history, everyone is friendly, past relationships are repaired and restored. I particularly like how Megan repeatedly insists that everyone not think she’s some amazing, special deity that needs to be bowed to and have respects paid, even though ponies everywhere continue to do so at every turn. She’s a very humble and grounded character, who just wants to help her friends.
It’s at this point the story finally seemed to catch on to the one thing I wanted 20 chapters earlier. “Hey!” it shouts. “You wanted conflict? Well, you’ve got it! BLAM! The evil Lord Tirac (not Tirek, Tirac [get your G1 hat back on]) returns to take over Equestria, just as relations between dimensions are looking rather promising. Of course. And who does he most want to wreak his terrible vengeance upon? I’ll give you a hint: they walk on two legs.
From seemingly out of nowhere, Tirac summons literally thousands of shadowbolts (in this AU, his own machinations of darkness powered by his will alone)... Wait a minute. This feels familiar… I seem to recall another character from the 80's fantasy era that wielded a similar power. Oh, and Tirac can summon Ursa Majors, too. Yep. Clicks his fingers and summons six of them to fall from the sky. Seems legit.
The next seven chapters are all about the war between the forces of darkness (Shadowbolts, Ursas) and the forces of harmony (pretty much every pony in the show so far, Flutter ponies, dragons led by Megan’s old friend Spike-now-King-Spykoran, a sudden cameo of two characters called Catrina and Rep from the further distant past, the Princess Ponies, and finally the Elements of Harmony themselves). Many characters are given personalities beyond or different from the show during this great war. Fancy Pants, Shining, Cadance—even Blueblood and Flash Sentry prove themselves to be far deeper and more likeable characters than how they’ve been portrayed so far in the show.
Despite all the wonderful character interactions (this story’s greatest strength) this is where the story fell a bit flat to me. After waiting so long for the meat of the story, it was over far too quickly. The battles were intense, the stakes high, Tirac’s power leaning on the side of preposterously high, graphic scenes with a decent amount of light gore thrown in, a little bit too much “military porn” for my liking… Yet Tirac’s forces never felt threatening. In fact, the way that Equestria’s army fought off the shadowbolts is nothing more than laughable. Regular citizens of Ponyville, for example, holding their own against malicious Shadowbolts of all races? Without weapons/with improvised weaponry as opposed to the highly out of place Equestrian Military tanks, guns, and hardware of all things? Seriously, the Shadowbolts never felt more threatening than TMNT’s foot soldiers. Even Megan was able to take out ten Shadowbolts by herself, because Tirac was too naive to relieve her of her weapons after capturing her (on account of himself being still being technically dead, he figured they were useless to her anyway).
It’s interesting to note also that about a third of the way through the story, the authorities in the human world become aware of the rainbow bridge. This is normally the part where one might think “Oh, no, the humans are gonna mess everything up!” Fortunately, this didn’t happen… although it would have made for more interesting conflict. It was certainly the conflict I’d be most expecting from a story like this—Megan having to protect her precious ponies from being discovered/overrun by the human population at large.
Now, because I didn’t check the story description properly when I started reading, I totally failed to notice the advance warning of there being cameos from not only G1, but Transformers as well as G.I. Joe. Huh. Wish I had checked the description properly, because this caught me totally off guard. I entered this story thinking it would be just about Megan in Equestria, but suddenly we have mentions of autobots and cobra.
Unlike the G1 pony stuff, unfortunately, while adventurous, these cameos come off as nothing more than forced appearances. It feels like the author was determined to squeeze every last drop of the Hasbro-based portion of his childhood into the story. The cameos and references start coming more and more, but while it’s understandable to mix multiple generations of the same show, I actually think turning the story into a ‘Hasbroverse’ hurt its overall execution. Such is the danger with crossovers; you cannot expect everyone to know the source material. It’s as if the author realised this, but decided that since they were only cameos, that external hyperlinks would suffice for explanations of who the characters and their backgrounds were.
Gah. No, you can’t just do that. It’s lazy storytelling. What are you doing? Why bother having cameos from multiple franchises if the fact that they are from multiple franchises has no overall bearing on the story? Chip and Minerva being out of Transformers, and Abernathy being out of G.I. Joe… To me, these added nothing to the overall story that a perfectly good human OC wouldn’t have achieved. It actually made me more desensitised as I read, especially in the last couple chapters and the epilogue, where the references and hyperlinks started getting thrown around left right and centre.
Two references I will commend is the appearance of both Zacherle and Faust to Megan in a dream. The Creator and the Scribe, together, surrounded by all of Megan’s long-dead friends that she never said goodbye to. This was actually an incredibly touching scene, handled so delicately and so well that, even as I remember it and type these words, I can feel my eyes burning.
(For those unaware of who Bonnie Zacherle is, she's the original creator of My Pretty Pony, renamed My Little Pony when Hasbro accepted her pitch back in 1980)
Before the conflict arrived, there were quite a few little things that were either hit or miss for me. I’ll list them below.
• Sideplot with Star Swirl and Spellion in regards to the crafting of Megan, Danny, and Molly’s ‘legacy’ of the past, to turn them into vastly exaggerated legends
• Irregular asides to Trixie and what she’s doing in Hoofington, as well as her interactions with Ditzy
• Big Mac and Fluttershy shipping (also, Big Mac was a royal guard, a commander of a tank corps, and quite a good soldier back in the day)
• Constant travels back and forth between the rainbow bridge, at great cost to Twilight’s stamina (being the one who has to teleport the humans back and forth)
• Danielle and Molly joining the CMC and getting into all sorts of shenanigans
• Occasional moments featuring “The Doctor” (yes, that Doctor)
• History of the Flutter Ponies
• Old relics from the past, like VCRs and VHS tapes being restored and watched by many characters
• Talk of peace and possible trade negotiations between human and pony leaders
So much going on, all at once.
At the end of the day, this story ended up coming off to me as just an exercise to see if multiple universes and generations could be melded seamlessly. You know what? I think it does. Largely, things don’t need extra exposition, and events do flow fairly naturally. What does hurt this story the most is its glacial pacing and a quick climax that felt like it was over too fast, particularly with how easy the main villain and all of his minions were defeated. I suppose you can put it down to being similar to the show in that regard, but in the end, I wasn’t overly satisfied with the payoff for such a long time investment reading up to it.
Repetition is a major enemy of the story.
Megan, Mike, Danny, Molly, Danielle and Michelle
Serena, Primrose, Sparkle, Tiffany, Royal Blue and Starburst
Big Mac, Fluttershy, Cadance and Shining Armor
crops up quite a lot. In basically every few chapters, we get long lists of characters like this depicting the characters as meeting other characters (also mentioned in long lists), or walking somewhere, or preparing to go home/come back. Lists like that really wear out their welcome fast. So does the same list of the same amount of characters walking around and meeting other lists of characters. Our humans had to quite often introduce themselves to new characters as they met them.
Onto technical and grammatical aspects: I’ll list the main offenders below
• Saidisms
• hyphen and dash confusion
• Repetition
• Lavender Unicorn Syndrome
Admittedly, the vast majority of these instances didn’t actually bother me that much. An attention-grabbing saidism might have occasionally given me cause for gripe, and the Lavender Unicorn Syndrome was particularly bad in one specific instance but most of the time it was pretty bearable. Also, most of these issues tended to clean themselves up with the passage of time and supposed author development, for as chapters went on, I started noticing fewer and fewer occurrences of these errors. Paragraph formatting was clear and consistent, grammar for the most part was exceptional (minus the hyphen-dash confusion, there were only a tiny amount of slip ups in the whole story), and the overall structure made reading quite smooth. There weren’t many points that I actually had to stop and wonder about things, even though they did still happen slightly more often than I would like. Immersion’s an important thing, you see, but it was more certain story elements that damaged that for me than any particularly bad objective errors.
Honestly, I think the story was about as good as I expected it to be from the start, all things considered. I was skeptical about how such a thing could be pulled off, but there’s so much in this story that screams, “Remember me? No? Oh, well come and discover a lost world full of wonders.” And if you are by chance more than familiar with Generation One, this story will be right up your alley. That’s another thing I missed when I started reading: an Adventure tag. I guess I just expected a grand adventure when I saw the word count and had semi-unrealistic expectations of the story as a whole. Then again, would adding the adventure tag be a bad thing? I think it should have one, for we have a bunch of humans entering and exploring a new world in a parallel universe. If that’s not an adventure, I don’t know what is. It’s worth a read if you want something mostly light-hearted, with a tendency to make you switch between smiling, d’awwing, and laughing.
Final Score: 6/10
Next Review: multiple one-shots
Words read so far this January: 636,102
Okay, again, thanks for the review. :) Quite a nice one, too. I know I went over some of this stuff on skype, but...
There's some foreshadowing of Tirac. Maybe not as much as I could've put, but some. Final Prophecy of the Moochik, some mentions of him here and there, the Nightmare that tempted Luna... And there is an explanation for how he's so strong here. Sucking power from the Heart of Ponyland through Luna's connection to it is the evil overlord of 'eating your Wheaties'. ;)
Eh... a quarter of the story was devoted to the big fight with Tirac. I wouldn't call that 'too quickly'. And the meat of the story, at least what I wanted it to be, were the character interactions and G1 meeting G4.
Cliched, maybe. ;) But in all seriousness, one thing I HATE is 'humans are the real monsters!' and they'd cut you up and so on and so forth. It's boring, been done a hundred times before and way too dark for me.
Oh, not even close to every last drop. :p ;)
Well, my readers liked it and I felt it fleshed out the universe a bit more. I liked these characters, too. The hyperlinks were there for people who wanted to learn a bit more about them.
I am bad at crafting OCs, and for me, if there's a character that can be used, it's far better to use them. Abernathy was there and available to use, so I used him. Again, this is YMMV, but for me they added a bit of depth and were cool Easter eggs to most of my readers. It's fair if they didn't add anything for you, but they added something positive to a lot of others. And if I did an OC, then a lot of readers would be wondering why humanity's so accepting. I did not want to do humans vs. ponies. So, how would they be accepting? What if they encountered aliens beforehand. And it went from there.
Admittedly a comment on space Battles pushed me to Abernathy as president. ;) But I still feel he's a good choice.
Actually Tank Corps is separate from the Royal Guard. ;) Think army/navy/air force divisions.
Still a little iffy on 'too fast' considering, again, about a quarter of the story. I'll cop to the glacial pacing.
Tirac was ready for war against ponies 1500 years ago, not the modern-day Equestria.
Okay, if I do seem a little 'too' defensive and argumentative, legit apologies. I do appreciate this review and I'll cop to most of the technical problems that I do plan on clearing up. And thanks for the notes on that, too. :) Most of the above stuff does seem to be personal taste. And if not to yours, then all right. But... I do like my Hasbroverse, and I am proud of what I've done with it so far. It's giving happy endings to a lot of characters that brought me happiness in my youth and through some troubled times.
I think that's about it. Again, thank you. :)
And... I'm sorry, but I have to ask. The original rating for this was 7.5/10. Why was it changed to 6/10?
2821669
Well, there's a good reason.
I went through my review again and compared it to others that I've done. I've also seen a lot of reviews lately for stories that I myself have read, and I've come to notice a few people that hand out nines and tens willy-nilly. I don't want to become one of those reviewers that grades everything high based mostly on enjoyment. While I did enjoy the story, it does have its share of problems. When I grade a story highly, I want that high grade to actually mean something. 7.5 just felt a little too high in the end when I consider how often I had to stop-start the story. 6 I feel is more appropriate.
Don't be discouraged though. 6/10 is still a great overall score. Take it from someone who has had fics graded as 4.7 and 2.5 out of 10 before, and they are on EqD.
2821820 I see. Sorry, just after another review gave it one star out of five it was a bit... disheartening, to be honest.