Before I begin today's review, I have… a confession to make. 

I don't know anything about superhero movies or comics

Okay, so that's not entirely true, I do know some stuff through osmosis and the Internet and that one time my friends dragged me with them to watch Doctor Strange with them; but the point still stands, I know very little about superhero movies and superheros in general.

Which brings us to today’s story!

TOld Mare Luna

• MLP: FiM
• Dark
• Adventure
• Drama

In an alternate universe where the villains won, Luna is busy living a quiet life in a land far away from Equestria. But one day an old friend shows up to ask a favor of her.

• Gore
• Violence
• Death
• Alt. Universe
• Luna
• Discord
• Chrysalis
• King Sombra
• Tirek

Leondude · 35k words  ·  72  13 · 2.6k views

Those of you keyed in to superhero comics can probably catch the reference in the title. For those equally clueless as I, though, this story is um, heavily inspired by a comic called Old Man Logan. Which some of you might recognise through the movie Logan which followed similar beats, but I digress. Let’s talk about this fic, Old Mare Luna.

CONTENT WARNINGS!!!

Gore, Violence, Death - This story features some explicit descriptions of gore, including blood, very detailed murder and death scenes, etc.

Spoilers! - This review will be spoiling some plot points. If you’re uncomfortable with that, go read the story first before coming back to this review.

Proceed at your own risk!

If you’ve ever read Old Man Logan, a lot of the story beats here will feel familiar to you. It’s not a play-by-play copy, but there are enough similarities in the major plot points that you could probably guess where the story is going at any time.

The story follows Luna through a world where the villains managed to defeat the entirety of Equestria. 500 years after this, Equestria and its surrounding countries have been carved up into territories ruled by different villains. Luna currently lives in Tirek’s territory with her family, where only Tirek knows that Luna is alive, and he’s keeping her as a ’trump card’ against the other villains. Tirek constantly harrasses Luna for rent, for… some reason, and the story begins on one particular day when Luna and her family don’t have enough to pay up.

In response to this, Tirek’s goons beat up Luna in the first scene of violence we get in this story. It’s here that we learn that Luna has taken a vow of pacifism, and doesn’t raise a hoof to retaliate against the beating.

Our inciting incident comes that night, in the form of Discord, who persuades Luna to accompany him to deliver a mysterious package to someone. The rest of the story follows them as they attempt to make this journey.

A winding plot

Trying to keep track of the plot in this story is like trying to fight a 1v3 with your friends in Smash. You’re so busy dealing with the Lucina that you completely lose track of the Kirby, and then there’s always that one guy playing Dedede swinging his hammer everywhere —

...ahem. Anyway, the point is, there are so many plot points introduced seemingly at random in this story that trying to tell where the story is going next is quite impossible without being familiar with the plot of the comic. As the story progresses, it feels like just plot twist after unsignalled plot twist. 

Like, they get tasked to rescue someone, then they do, but then oh, that guy was actually possessed all along, then they betray our heroes. Or when they help some ponies with some errands, but then the story’s like, hey, those ponies have actually been working for the villains the whole time! Or my favourite one, when it’s revealed that the antagonist was actually another antagonist in disguise the whole time! Le gasp!!

Right, that was probably too sarcastic, sorry I can feel Azure’s death glare at me from here

The point I was trying to make is that this story really, really suffers from a lack of foreshadowing of, well, anything. It’s probably impossible to speak about this subject clearly without spoiling anything, so spoiler alert!

In the last few chapters, some stuff happens. And in the middle of that stuff happening, there’s this scene of Discord just committing suicide. Without any warning, or really any relevance to the rest of the story at that point. It just felt like Leondude throwing out a random shocker, because Discord dying at that point really doesn’t affect anything at all.

This pattern is similar for most of the plot points in this story, even the more story-essential ones. All these things happening without any build-up to them contribute to a feeling of “stuff just happens”. And what you get from that is a messy, incoherent plot.

Nonexistent transitions

On a related note, how would you conduct a transition from one scene to the next? Maybe a scene break? Or a quick description of the new scene?

Well I think this story very often picks the worst choice for this, which is to have no transition at all. It’s not so major a problem, but it does make things pretty confusing when we change locations on the drop of a hat.

As Maelstrom was about to blast Discord into oblivion, Luna flew into Maelstrom as fast as she could, catching her off-balance and making her miss Discord and Settler. When Discord and Settler noticed they were still in one piece, Discord quickly snapped his fingers to teleport Settler, Luna and himself out of the arena and into the Badlands.

Uh.

What just happened? Imagine if my reviews were full of sudden transitions like that, it’d be impossible to follow. This story introduces several OCs. Problem is, they don’t exactly stand out in any way to make them memorable. Every character has the same manner of speaking, and I honestly couldn’t tell you who’s speaking at any time if you took away the dialogue tags.

Forgettable characters

Just as a quick tangent to expand on this, here are some lines from Discord and Luna. See if you can tell who’s who!

1. "Just somepony who helped me through a tough time. Then I helped her through a tough time."

2. "Regarding that 'certain encounter', if you were so powerful, explain how Tirek managed to take your magic away?"

3. "Well, since they're apparently so important that you gave me Tartarus for nearly letting it slip into the hands of the lava demons, I thought I might satisfy my own personal curiosity while waiting for your acquaintances."

4. "Hmm, that's odd. I was supposed to meet up with Settler and Flurry Heart, but they're nowhere to be found. Judging by our location, I'm guessing Chrysalis must have rebuilt her throne."

Luna: 2 and 3
Discord: 1 and 4

Good job if you guys managed to get those, but even if you did, I’m sure you see what I mean, right? Everyone kinda speaks the same way. Which is, mind you, especially bad in this case, because, well… Discord. Y’know, Discord.

Don’t think I need to say much more than that.

Now, I was originally talking about OCs here, so let’s go back to the topic. I honestly had a difficult time remembering even something so basic as the OCs’ names, because they really don’t contribute much to the story, I feel. Like, I remember the Flibbertygibbert twins, some guy named Settler, and not a whole lot else. I know there was Settler’s wife or someone? And Luna had a husband and children too? But honestly they don’t really show up much, and when they do they’re not particularly interesting. They don’t have a particular behaviour or style of speech to make them stand out at all.

And that’s not to mention the villains in this story. It feels like they’re based on every trite cliche that supervillains fall into. World domination, monologues, evil cackling, you name it, they have it. And it doesn’t really fit the tone of the rest of the story, which is very very dark.

Oh! Speaking of tone…

Tonal shifts and inconsistency

The tone in this story changes so fast that I got whiplash. Example; Chapter 16. For some context, the previous chapter was a particularly dark one, with a gorey death scene and also ending with our heroes getting captured and sentenced to execution. And what does Chapter 16 begin with?

Well, Discord singing Giggle at the Ghosties, with Luna and Settler filling in the lines of Twilight and Rainbow. Because of course it does.

And for a further illustration, literally the moment Discord stops singing, they’re transported to the guillotine. I’m not exaggerating on this either:

...Just laugh to make them disappear.”

When Discord was singing that last note, he, Luna and Settler were quickly whisked away from the cell by some luminescent magic before being transported to separate guillotine frames placed on a tower in front of a crowd of ponies.

As a whole the management of tone and atmosphere in this story is terrible enough that I had no idea what I was supposed to be feeling at any given moment.

Unrealistic situations and behaviour

This was another big problem for me. Many of the situations we see in this story just don’t seem realistic. Like, why does Tirek need money from Luna if he rules his entire territory with an iron fist? Is it just a way of tormenting Luna? But then why does no one comment about it? Why does Luna comment that Tirek is punishing her because he can’t look weak in front of Chrysalis and Grogar, even though they ostensibly don’t know that she’s alive? How does every single thing Luna and Discord meet know what the package they’re delivering is? Isn’t this supposed to be a secret operation?

And of course, the most damning thing of them all…

BrayStation

What? How? Did pony society somehow progress so far even under the villains’ rule? Are there actual game companies making games for these consoles? Why are video games the only marker of advanced technology we see in the story?

Also on a related note, many of the characters don’t behave realistically at all. For example, I mentioned Luna and Discord getting sent to rescue someone above; that someone is Flurry Heart, who turns out to be possessed by the Nightmare because… I dunno, something about Discord being a bad parent or something. Which is technically possible, I suppose, but it all comes so far out of left field that whatever suspension of disbelief I had left after… BrayStation… was completely wiped out.

Many, many things don’t make sense in this story.

Writing and tense errors

This story has many of them. The tense errors in particular are so numerous that they actively make the story harder to read. I’d say they account for about 80% of the grammar errors here.

Other than that, there are many awkward sentences and phrases. One odd habit I noticed is this tendency to use “alternatively” in weird places.

"Took you long enough," Discord said "I was starting to get a cramp. Alternatively, was that was a result of my long travel to your house? Anyway, allons-y!".

Appleloosa, Ponyville, Baltimare, and Fillydelphia all belonging to Cozy Glow, and the Crystal Empire, Canterlot, Cloudsdale, and Yakyakistan all belonging to King Sombra. Alternatively, all of Sombra's territory did belong to him before he decided to challenge Grogar's authority.

Use “or”, or  “rather” in these cases. That’s not how you use “alternatively”.

...and it might pay off to pay attention when your word processor of choice tells you there’s an error in your sentence. And if you use Fimfiction to write… don’t. Use Google docs or something, it’s free and it’s good for editing.

In summary, the flaws with this story are numerous and deep, which leads me to give this story…

Final Score: 2/10

It seems like this story is an attempt to mash together two different things — ponies and the comic Old Man Logan — with not much success. Little thought is given to how the ponies of the show would actually behave in the setting of the comic, and it feels like Leondude just put various ponies into the roles of the characters in the comic with some minor alterations. Add to this the general errors in plot, character and writing, and you get a story that I really didn’t enjoy reading all the way through.

But I still did, because that’s how I roll

Feedback for Leondude

Okay. I brought up a few points in the review, and I’m honestly not very sure of which one to focus on for the feedback section. So here’s what I’m gonna do. I talked about these problems above:

1. Directionless plot and unforeshadowed plot twists
2. Lacking transitions
3. Forgettable characters
4. Inconsistent tone
5. Illogical situations and characters
6. Writing errors

If you want, you can pick one and I’ll focus on that one in a follow-up comment. For now though, this will be the end of the review. Have a good day, everyone!

Oh and I know I said I’d have a new format out for this review, but it turns out this story isn’t very suited to it. If you don’t see any new format come out by, say, the review after next, I’ll just say what my idea was and maybe someone else can put it to good use

7216365
Ah...

Suddenly, it makes a whole lot more sense as to how this story got rejected from Equestria Daily. But in my defence regarding the unforeshadowed plot twists, Old Man Logan had at least two of them, if memory serves, and Grogar being Cosmos was inspired by the canonical reveal of Discord being Grogar in season 9.

Anyway, I'd like some feedback on the writing errors, please.

7216380
Yep! I went to read the synopsis of the comic for this review, and I came to the conclusion that I don't understand superhero stories Too many characters with too many backstories. Also the Discord being Grogar thing is more justified than what happened in your story, because we know who Discord is, while your character doesn't appear in the story until that point.

Anyway, writing errors! Let's see here...

I mentioned past-present tense errors. Those are the most common type of error that you have in your story, by far.

But before he can finish his sentence, Flurry Heart electrocuted him again before throwing him into a wall.

Luna and Chrysalis have been fighting for what felt like twenty minutes.

And in that moment, he let out his last breath. Or that's what he assumed was his last breath.

Tips for this? Just don't use present tense in the narration. Like, ever. There might be the occasional niche situations where present tense could be justified, but those are rare and past tense is pretty much always correct.

Moving on to the bigger topic, awkward sentences. Your story also has several of these. If you read through your story again, you might find certain sentences that just sound a little weird, or awkward. They'll especially stand out if you read them out loud. A lot of the time, there's something which is technically wrong with the sentence -- maybe the construction is slightly off, or there's some slight grammar error in it.

I was starting to get a cramp. Alternatively, was that was a result of my long travel to your house?

A sharp crystal erupted from the ground and pierced Sunburst's stomach and went straight through his back.

More insidious are those sentences which have nothing technically wrong with them, but still sound weird. For these kinds of sentences, you might have used a particularly uncommon word without a reason, or maybe you have some repetition of certain words, or maybe your sentence is just too long.

Shining Armor cried out in agony as the crystal tore through his leg, falling to the floor in the process.

And with a quick snap of his fingers, everything became the way it was before Discord smashed everything up.

In your story, though, the most important error might be timing. You use the same sentence to narrate things which should take some time to happen, which makes it very awkward to read. This is especially true for the fight scenes, where cramming actions together makes the whole scene incoherent.

She kept attacking him in rage before Sombra decided to forego her attempts at wounding him and just made a crystal form straight from the ground and into her chest.

But just when they thought they could escape, a dark crystal formed out of the ground and impaled Shining Armor through his left hind leg.

For fight scenes, separate distinct actions into different sentences. In general, these scenes should also have shorter sentences.

For more and better advice on awkward sentences, here are some links I've found.

In general, it's pretty difficult to give advice on writing errors. The most practical advice would be to try reading out your story aloud, because your ears are generally better at picking out those pesky errors. The more helpful advice in the long term is to read more, because you can't avoid making writing errors if you aren't familiar with the grammar rules on an instinctive level.

Hope this helps!