I love time travel in stories. There’s something that’s always immediately interesting about sending a character back into the past, especially when the story is smart about it.

Which brings us, naturally, to today’s story:

TLaughter Died

• MLP: FiM
• Dark
• Mystery

Twilight goes back in time to prevent a catastrophe that could very well mean the end of everything

• Twilight
• Main 6

Leafdoggy · 25k words  ·  43  1 · 1.5k views

Okay, so, disclosure time: I’ve been following Leaf’s writing on this site for a while, and I’ve edited some of her stories in the past. As usual, that’s not gonna impact the scoring in this review, though it does give me a better idea of how Leaf writes her stories than for usual reviews

Anyway, back to the story!

Oh, and spoilers ahead, as usual for these types of longer stories.

Laughter Died follows Twilight as she travels back in time to stop a disaster from occurring. The specifics of this disaster are explained quite fully in the first chapter — there’s an unknown magical phenomenon that’s spreading across Equestria, causing ponies to lose their connection to the Elements: some become cruel, some become compulsive liars, and Celestia herself takes Cloudsdale and flees Equestria after losing her loyalty to the nation. It spreads from pony to pony whenever they speak to each other, though strangely enough it seems the Main 6 are immune to this symptom of the infection.

And, y’know, something about a wildly spreading infection sounds um, eerily familiar

Anyways. Following this prologue, Twilight finds herself in the past, in Ponyville. The rest of the story is about Twilight’s attempts to stop the disaster, with the help of her past self and her friends.

We begin with Twilight and co. heading to the apparent source of the disaster: Starlight’s village. In an effort to catch the culprit, or to at least find Patient Zero, our team locks down the town and sets up patrols around it, monitoring for anything suspicious. In the end though, this proves to be pretty ineffective as Fluttershy collapses mid-flight, and Starlight flees and tells the team not to follow, seemingly having been afflicted by the infection.

Twilight of the past decides to follow Starlight, chasing her through the mountains. Future Twi eventually catches up to see them arguing, but before she can get close, Starlight and Past Twi cast a magical barrier around them, blocking themselves off. Then a note slides through that basically says Past Twi got infected by Starlight.

I left out a few details in this summary, but this first scene sets the trend for how the rest of the story will flow: Future Twi, for all her years of studying the phenomenon, has absolutely no idea of what it i and who or what’s causing it, let alone how she can stop it. Travelling to the past was an act of desperation, and it shows — basically nothing she does throughout the story works. In all respects, this is an incredibly bleak, depressing story.

Here we come to one of my initial barriers from fully enjoying this story. Because my earlier summary of the story as a whole (The rest of the story is about Twilight’s attempts to stop the disaster, with the help of her past self and her friends.”) is... actually quite inaccurate.

From the way the story’s description and prologue package it, you might be — or at least, I was — tempted to think that it’d follow the Adventure story formula (and I know it’s not tagged Adventure, but I don’t read tags ). A story mainly focusing on the extra-personal conflict of the disaster, and on how Twilight and her friends try to prevent it — but that’s not what’s going on here.

Instead, this feels more like watching Twilight fail, almost inevitably. If you accept that, the story has some pretty nice moments. There are several very emotional and well-written scenes, and there’s a palpable tension in the later parts of the story as Twilight comes to the realisation that she can no longer rely on her friends as much as she wants to.

As a whole, though, this story has quite the odd progression! I mentioned above that Twilight basically doesn’t succeed, not even once, throughout the entire story. This is central to my problem with the story. Twilight’s actions don’t really seem to have a big impact on the story for the majority of it, which makes it difficult to get behind anything she does. I felt this one especially in the middle section of the story, when Leaf tries to raise the tension — I felt that I wasn’t that invested in what was happening, because Twilight hadn’t succeeded in anything, and didn’t look like she would anytime soon.

I also had some problems with the pacing in the story — it felt slightly too fast. Not like, blisteringly fast to the point of ruining the story, but just fast enough to have a noticeable effect on the experience. I think a lot of this comes from the story's sparse narration, which has quite little in the way of descriptions. 

Other than that, some characters didn’t quite feel exactly in character. Now, who’s in character and who’s not is quite a difficult question to answer, given the plot of the story. But I definitely found the (SPOILER: major spoilers for the ending of the story and the reason for the Mystery tag!) explanation of Fluttershy’s betrayal quite unconvincing. Like, I’d think that she’d be comfortable enough with all the lessons of friendship and such to approach her friends to solve the problem together. In general, after the team heads to Starlight’s village, the characters seem to transform into cynical versions of themselves. I can’t put a finger on what it is, exactly, but they all seem less… bright than they usually do. Flat.

And this error is especially egregious because, like I said, this story is not about Twilight grappling with an extra-personal conflict. Instead, it's closer to a character study as they fall victim to the infection. The characters are where all the interest lies, and if they aren’t interesting, the story loses much of its grip.

And while we’re on this topic, this story is also technically a Mystery story. Twilight is trying to figure out who the culprit is, so there’s the main mystery. The conclusion of the Mystery, though, when everything is revealed, isn’t all that cathartic. The main reason is that most of the story isn’t structured as a Mystery story — there aren’t any build up of clues, and Twilight just stumbles into the truth in the final chapter. And even then, the explanation of the events in the story is vague at best.

But I also said at the beginning of this that the story succeeds in some specific moments. There are some scenes which are very nicely done — scenes like Twilight coming back to see Starlight for the first time in years, or Applejack revealing she’s lost her Element at the end of a chapter. I mean, just look at this:

“Mm…” I looked hard at her, tried to discern any irregularities in her movements. In the end, I decided to just ask outright.

“Applejack?”

“Yeah?”

“Have you been lying to me?”

“Yeah.”

End of Chapter

Ooh. What a punch. 

Unfortunately, as I’ve found myself saying on occasion in these reviews, well-written scenes don’t make a good story by themselves. And given the errors in the story, this gets a…

Final Score: 5/10

A story with a very strong opening and some notably well-written moments, this is one I sorta enjoyed reading through. Considering the overall story, though, the problems with structure and character make this story quite a flawed one with several glaring errors.

Feedback for Leaf

Yay, I get to review one of your stories on this group

Ahem. Anyway, back to the review. There are some errors I brought up, but today I think I want to focus on only one of them, in the interest of time. And as with many things, it gets easier to solve with a clear problem statement.

Problem: Twilight’s actions don't affect the story in a significant way. In other words, Twilight lacks meaningful agency.

Let’s track Twilight’s progress against the main problem in this story, the cataclysm.

Major plot points:
Start (Prologue) — Twilight travels back in time to stop the cataclysm
Setback (Ch 4) — Starlight and PastTwi get infected
Possible lead (Ch 7) — Twilight finds Fluttershy with a book that she doesn’t recognise from her own timeline
Setback (Ch 8) — The book goes missing
Minor setback (Ch 9) — RD is infected
Setback (Ch 9) — AJ is revealed to have been infected
Minor setback (Ch 10) — Rarity is infected
End (Ch 11, 12) — Spoilers!

See what I mean when I said that this story really isn’t about Twilight trying to stop the infection? There are no positive developments in this respect, something that would be crucial in a story like that.

Instead, what this feels like is more that Twilight is our passive protagonist, to give us a perspective on the real story that’s happening. And when a story feels like that, it’s usually a sign that you’ve chosen the wrong character to be your protagonist. So with that in mind, we’ve found our new problem statement.

Problem: Twilight is the wrong protagonist.

An important thing to keep in mind about stories is that they are, basically, a series of events. Oftentimes authors will conceive of their stories as only taking place from the perspective of the main character, when there is a much larger world than just that of the protagonist’s. In fact, it’s usually a good exercise, in stories with important side characters, to think of the story in multiple perspectives. Not only does this give some material for worldbuilding, it also helps to other interesting points of view, which will help to prevent the problem that happens in this story.

So, back to the problem at hand. If Twilight is not the main character, then who is? And more broadly, how would we know who makes a good protagonist?

A good yardstick for finding the protagonist in any story is to ask, who is the most interesting character? Usually, the protagonist will be the most fully developed character, and the one which the situation forces to make difficult (and therefore interesting!) choices.

So, in your story, Leaf, who’s the most interesting character, who makes the most interesting choices?

Well, it’s —

Actually before I continue, I’ve been skirting around the ending of the story the whole review, but beyond this point I won’t avoid spoilers any more. If anyone hasn’t read the story and cares about spoilers, do go give it a quick read first!

...

Okay, everyone out who’s gonna be out?

…

Right. The most interesting character in your story is Fluttershy. If you think about the story from her perspective, things suddenly become a lot more interesting. Not only is she central to the whole conflict, she also stands to change the most from the events in the story.

Just for fun, let’s compare Fluttershy and Twilight. This’ll be good to show what makes a protagonist more interesting too, so read along if you want a better explanation than the generalisations in the previous paragraphs.

Twilight makes no decisions which have impact, while Fluttershy makes several impactful decisions. Flutters decides to act on her own, without consulting her friends, and decides to lie to them to protect them. Bonus points because these choices seem to contradict her surface character, which is always a good way to show deeper character.

Twilight doesn’t change throughout the whole story, while Fluttershy changes dramatically. Before the events of the story, Flutters is a kind, loving pony who lives in a rosy world. By the end, her whole world is turned upside down, and she’s been forced to make difficult decisions.

Twilight has little to no internal conflict, while Fluttershy is the site of extremely strong internal conflict. This one is quite self-explanatory. Twilight doesn’t need to confront any conflict within herself throughout the whole story, but Fluttershy, being the one who finds the source of the infection and the one to decide what to do with it, would certainly have the chance for huge internal conflict, which usually makes characters more fleshed-out.

That’s the majority of it. There were some other problems I brought up, but given that this is already at two thousand words I doubt people would be very interested in reading through like, another three thousand words of technical stuff So I’ll stop it here.

And an additional note to Leaf: I dunno how much of this is gonna be useful, considering that most of your stories are unplanned and sorta meandering? It’s difficult to look at the big picture if you don’t have the whole picture, after all. Though I hope you found this slightly useful

Also, I might be trying out a new format for these reviews for my next one, so keep an eye out for that? It’s just an idea, but we’ll see how it goes. Have a good week ahead, everyone! :pinkesmile:

Thanks for the review! ^w^ Great points, as usual. I can definitely see what you mean about Twilight feeling like the wrong main character. It's a shame, really, cuz I still feel like this premise has a lotta potential. Maybe one day I'll rewrite it from a different pov, that could be a fun exercise.

(Also it sounds like I have definitely picked up some bad habits from how I generally write fanfics cuz I actually did have an outline for this one before I wrote it. Gotta work on that.)

But yea, thanks again! I really appreciate the feedback. 💜