Hello, friends! Cyo here, back for my weekly review. Today’s story I think is the least viewed of all the stories I’ve reviewed on this group, with 52 views at the point of writing.

[Unpublished stories cannot be embedded]

Pretty big contrast from last week, which is the most viewed story I’ve ever reviewed. Soo… let’s find out why!

The Marshal's Office of Equestria used to be a highly respected, highly reputable, and highly acclaimed agency. However, over the years, their influence and power has been greatly diminished, to the point where their very name draws angry rants and glares.

Deputy Marshals Braeburn Apple and Daring Do are all too aware of this. They were there back then, but they're still there now. They know what they've seen and they know what they've lost. But most importantly, they both know that they can't ever get back everything they lost.

When agents from the Royal Investigative Service arrive and start asking questions, Braeburn and Daring find themselves reopening old wounds and uncovering memories better left forgotten.

The golden days may be gone, but reliving them isn't as hard as it may seem.

So, as I said, the first thing you’ll notice upon clicking on this story is that it has incredibly few views. Or at least, fewer views than you'd expect for a relatively well-written story like this one. Why is this happening? 

Three reasons.

Cover Art
There is none of it

This is slightly forgivable, as it’s pretty difficult to find good stuff that fits particularly specific AUs without commissioning something. Still, something is usually better than nothing; probably can Google something out, or use Derpibooru or something.

But just between you and me, I know I’d hate looking for cover art too, despite being an artist.

If, uh, y’know, I still wrote stuff

Post Timing
Or the lack thereof

This story has a total of fifteen chapters. But all of them were posted at the exact same time.

Now, I can’t say for sure how much of this is because this was supposed to be your last story on this site (though I did notice you have a new story posted recently which Nailah reviewed). But a general rule is, when working with multi-chapter stories, space the chapter releases out. Fimfiction has a section devoted entirely to story updates on its front page, so spacing out releases gets your story the chance to pop up there each time.

Also I’m obligated to link this blog post here: When is the best time to post a story? -- Answered with SCIENCE!

Short Description
And this one’s the most important!

Historically, the Royal Investigative Service and the Marshal's Office of Equestria hasn't gotten along. Deputy Marshals Braeburn Apple and Daring Do are all too aware of this. So why are there two RIS agents poking around their past?

Probably the most important job of the short description is to generate interest. That’s something that this one just doesn’t really do. After all, there’s hardly anything interesting implied by the ‘two RIS agents poking around’; doubly so because the whole thing is filled with terms that people wouldn’t be familiar with.

Unfortunately writing good short descriptions is not really my area of expertise seeing as I have a total of zero stories on this site, so I can’t really give any practical advice here. You could always try asking around, though.

Anyway, on to more familiar grounds!

This story is firmly an AU story. It mainly focuses on two major police agencies in the world it’s created: the Royal Investigative Society, and the Marshal’s Office of Equestria. It seems like there’s some additional backstory in the other stories that the author has written, but since it doesn’t say that this is a sequel or anything, I didn’t go read any of them

Anyway, all you really need to know about these two organisations is that the RIS is highly respected, but the Marshal’s Office is not. Basically, everything that’s said in the story description. The story explores the reason why this is, in a method that I can only describe as horribly convoluted.

How so? Well...

The main plot of this story begins when Special Agents Bon Bon and Lyra (yeah, it’s AU) get an opportunity to find out exactly what happened to make the Marshal’s Office have such low public opinion. They head to the Appleloosan branch, and meet their counterparts, Deputy Marshals Daring Do and Braeburn.

At this point, we’re promptly hit with the way that the main portion of the plot is going to be told from now on.

...flashbacks.

“You and Daring seem pretty close. How long have you worked together?”

“I’d say comin’ on ten years now. She didn’t start out here, you know. In the beginning it was just me.”

---

The hot desert sun shone high above them, beating down furiously on the workers milling about the orchard. A farmhouse sat in the center, spanning two stories tall. Two ponies were seated on the front porch, pouring over numbers and figures.

Come, let's do a quick thought experiment. Imagine you were reading, say, Harry Potter, and were enjoying the creative world that Rowling had made. Then suddenly, when Harry was in the middle of his classes in Hogwarts, we cut to a scene in the future — it turns out that this story was just being told to Harry's kids by Harry himself. 

Heck, imagine if every story you read is intercut by some random old guy saying—

“Then? What comes next, Grandpa?” Generic Child’s eyes were wide, and he’d leaned forward in his seat in a most adorable manner.

Grandpa chuckled. “Well, Child, sit tight and I’ll tell you.” He cleared his throat, leaning back against his chair with the kind of relaxed grace that tends to come with age. Closing his eyes, he began to intone in that deep, storytelling voice that Generic Child loved to hear. “Now, where was I...”

 —“Oh, let me tell you what happened next…” every few paragraphs. Any sense of engagement that's been built up will just be lost immediately, or at least severely lessened. 

I mean, yes, you did tag the story with Anthology, but it really didn’t need to be one. And it’s such a missed opportunity too! The story here is actually pretty delightful, save for the fact that it’s really really disjointed because, y’know, flashbacks. It’s sorta like reading the plot outline for a fic — there’s potential here, it just needs to be approached in the right way.

There’s everything here: a two great protagonists, criminal hunts, political corruption; everything that’d form an awesome story. As it is, though, everything’s just too disjointed to really form a coherent story that I can get invested in.

In the story’s “present-day”, too, things are really just not exciting. I mean yeah, we get to see Bon Bon and Lyra trying to mend things between the Marshal’s Office and the RIS, but this is more or less just listening to Braeburn and Daring talk about their past, and them talking about their own past, then some things that aren’t really built up happening in the last few chapters and boom, problem solved.

After reading that all I got was a deep feeling of wasted opportunity.

Scores, and some feedback

Grammar and Use of Language: 9/10
Not many errors, at least not so many that it seriously affects the flow of reading, other than a few typos here and there. The writing style is more or less inoffensive as well. No real problems here.

Plot and Story Structure: 4/10
I’ve already said most of what I want to with this. The story itself is non-existent outside the flashbacks, and the flashbacks themselves are too disjointed to have any real sense of investment. Overall, not really a good approach to storytelling.

Character and Characterisation: 6/10
Characterisation of the ponies here is actually pretty well done. There’s a cast that feels diverse, and each has their own unique personality. The depths of Braeburn and Daring’s characters are… hinted at, here and there, especially in the flashbacks. Bon Bon and Lyra get less attention from the story, but they’re also… decently characterised, I suppose. That said they’re still forgettable characters. Most of my memory from reading centres around Braeburn and Daring.

Overall, this story felt like a huge missed opportunity to me. If you ever feel like re-writing this story to be more fleshed out, I’m sure it’d go pretty well. As it is now, though, the pretty bungled execution nets this story a total score of 5.5/10.

If there’s one clear lesson to take away from this story, it’s this:

Know the story you’re trying to tell.

Make sure that the most interesting story is the focus of the fic. Sure, it might be easier to tell the story through a series of flashbacks, but it’s never going to be engaging if you don’t take the time to properly tell the story.

I know today’s feedback section’s pretty short, but hey, there’s not much to really go into detail here, without going totally off topic.

And also, I went to poke around with new BBCode to make these reviews look a little more appealing. Hope it looks better! I'll try and use more colours next time, maybe

Have a good week ahead, everyone :)

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Sorry for the necropost, but I'm realizing now I never said thanks, whoops.

But in all seriousness thanks for taking the time to review it. I realize now that the story is very deeply flawed, and I'm not so sure if I'm up to fixing it. There's a lot that needs to change and it'll probably involve restructuring the entire story as a whole. At this point I'm not even sure I want to keep it up on the site. But thanks again for the review.

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Ah, certainly didn't expect this when I woke up this morning! But you're welcome, and there's no need to worry about necroposting with a thank-you message

Happy to have helped a little, and good luck with rewriting, if you decide to do it