Captain Isaac was humanity's last hope, even if they didn't know it. He was captured and has lost everything because of the alien invaders who are attacking his home world, Earth. Will he get back after they transported him to a land of ponies? Or will he choose to stay in the peaceful world of Equestria.
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The grammatical errors in the description alone deterred me.
Have you ever seen the English language written before?
3475879 Sorry I was never really good at grammar. But I'm trying to learn more about the rules.
Review: If You Insist, KalibarxTavi, 6/12/2013
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/144790/if-you-insist
Goood morning! I’m cheezesauce, here to say a few words about your story, and hopefully those are words you’ll find useful. My first impression as I browse across the covers and synopsis is relatively positive. Especially that comedy tag, because from my experience, I’ve noticed HiE fics with general comedic themes fare much better than those focussed on dark on gore. Even for those that include war and combat. Just take a look at ‘Name’s Ellis’ for example.
I have to say though: I got rather confused by the second half of the synopsis. You see, first you talk about a human getting captured by hostile alien invaders, whom I assume are either the ponies, or some other monster things that aren’t. Then we know he was transported to Equestria and has to get back, which at a glance, seems to read as if the aliens were the ponies themselves. It’s only upon scrutinizing the sentences did I go like “Ooh” and realize that you actually had two alien races here—one being ponies, and the other being the monstrous aliens. So yes, you might want to clear that up a bit. Now, let’s move into the story itself.
The first sentence is a nice opener, setting the overall mood and immediately raising issues to be tackled. Starting off with someone being lost and scared is much more interesting than opening with “It was an ordinary day at Ponyville...” Well, unless there’s a special, usually comedic reason for opening like that. I do have one nitpick here, though. Instead of using “most of all”, try “worst of all”. It fits better, and probably sounds nicer too. Next, you’ve almost used ‘most’ quite a number of times just within the first two paragraphs, making it sounds a little repetitive. Further on, there’s a little bit of info-dumping about what has been lost and how he ended up there after that. Info-dumping must not be done in excess.
As I go along, I’ll pick out stuff that doesn’t seem quite right, like this one there.
It’s as if you wrote until ‘protection’, ended off with a period, and then suddenly decided “Oh wait! There’s one more thing I want to say about this guy,” and then proceeded it at the end. One way of correcting it would be to start a new sentence. As in ‘It was his main gift to the world.’
Actually, the more I look at this paragraph, the more I’m picking out odd sentences. Here’s another example:
Well, this one above is technically correct, but it looks strange, doesn’t it? Why do you insist on connecting clauses together with a semicolon, when they aren’t related? You can, if you want to, but why do it? It sits perfectly well if you do it like this: “There were four of us. We formed the elitist group my government formed before the invasion.” You should avoid using ‘formed’ twice too, because it sounds repetitive.
A large part of this massive paragraph is telling. As in, the ‘Show vs Tell’ type of telling. Ideally, instead of giving descriptions of each character, you should let people see them in action and draw the conclusions from there. For example, if I have a character named Mary, and I want to show that Mary was a kickass killer, I would have a scene about her stabbing daggers into the guts of a gang of thugs with one arm tied to her back and not even breaking into a sweat. That’s showing it out. And it’s much more vivid than having the narrator or a character say: “Oh, Mary is this real badass girl...blah blah blah.”
And also, if you have no other choice but to tell it all out, do it in smaller paragraphs. Walls of text are not enjoyable to read, and people have a tendency simply skip past them to the next paragraph.
Yup, the protagonist sounds exceedingly nonchalant. That’s the intended effect, I think, although character wise, this guy doesn’t seem to fit the image of a matured adult. From the way he reacts, talks, and describes things, he seems more like a teenager. Like in the line below, for example.
Hey, I’ve also got very little idea of how the evil aliens look like. Maybe adding some descriptions of them along the way would be good, so that people can imagine them out how you want them to.
You need an ‘and’ here. Or you can change the comma to a period.
Heh, you’d think the aliens had to have more foresight than this. After all, they must have been pretty efficient in order to exterminate the entire human race... right? It’d be nice if he was actually holding the blade, then you can describe how it felt as the blade sliced through flesh like a knife through butter. That’s being descriptive. It makes things vivid, more real, and people will immerse themselves in it. There are many opportunities for you to slot it in, with the kind of action you got.
Instead of saying “After that I just passed out,” for example, try something like ‘the world faded into darkness’. It’s not that hard. Yet, little bits like these count. They add up to the overall quality of the fic. And though, as a reader, you won’t be explicitly point to these bits and explain why you didn’t quite them, you would still feel them in some way.
So, let’s backtrack a little bit. For this section, I’m going to talk a little more about the plot. You’ve got the main character facing total destruction of the human race. Since he has lost everything he has cared for, he has become an indifference shell of himself. I think he could use more despondency in his emotions over there, by the way. Not a single tear has been shed on his part, and no vows to exterminate those monsters that have taken away everything from him, so on and so forth. Still, not that sort of glaring inconsistency you’d notice right off the bat, I think.
After that, we have a scene about Twilight receiving a letter from her beautiful and apparently very lustful princess to investigate a happening at the Everfree forest. Which is probably going to be a dangerous excursion. In the later scene at the entrance to the Everfree Forest, Twilight’s friends feel shallow in terms of characterization in the following scene. It’s as if they’re just paper cut-outs of themselves, saying the same old lines despite the uniqueness of the situation.
As a rule of thumb, spell out all numbers. Meaning you write six instead of 6.
I also notice that you have two short Everfree forest scenes here. These two scenes are from the perspective of the mane 6 should be combined together to improve the story’s flow. Having a whole train of short, chopped up scenes is generally a no-no, even to show breaks in time.
After that, the story swaps back to the protagonist’s perspective. Which is also in the first person perspective, and that means that you can’t have a line that goes like this:
Instead, it should be ‘I said to myself’, because you are writing as if you are Issac.
Also, techni-coloured does not need to be capitalized. It isn’t a name or proper noun. Although it is a rather long word, I guess, but that’s irrelevant.
I’ve come to the end of the plot. Overall, it seems to be rather standard material for this genre. After all, the human has to by some means travel to Equestria. Variations include having the human die and then reborn in Equestria, or mystically teleported there. Most versions end up with the human pulling off some impressive act of bravery and self-sacrifice, often emerging as a hero in the world of Equestria. I’m not sure if this is where this story is heading, but probably somewhere along those lines from my past experiences.
I have one more point share, and this is a positive one. From the comments about the severity of grammar mistakes, I’m guessing that the version of the story I’m reading must have been a much edited one, and I’m happy to say that you’ve done well on that part. There aren’t many basic errors that jump out at me at first glance, and even those that are caught with the editor’s eye are not too many. All in all, it doesn’t matter that your story isn’t top-notch, for many do not start at that level to begin with. What matters most are the improvements made to becoming a better writer, a skill that doesn’t only apply to the world of Friendship is Magic, but to other areas of life. And that is what writing is about. Good luck.
3475879 La Barata, by the way, is also a reviewer of WRITE. :)
--cheezesauce, WRITE’s perpetual underground lurker.
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