The Midnight Chapter Review:

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I got smoke in my soul and pistols on the drawer. Let's do this.


The opening feels weird. At a guess, this is going to be a bit that makes way more sense to people familiar with your source material. I'm not able to get much from it, but it didn't turn me off.

Twilight wound the scroll closed, feeling utterly dejected. The unicorn hated to question the judgment of somepony she respected so much (Twilight had made no attempt to avoid her move to Ponyville),
Sentence is awkward. The bracketed information is kind of too important to gloss over; does this imply she'd normally attempt to avoid it? What would this involve?

The train arrived at Ponyville Station in the early evening. As soon as she got off the train, she was greeted by a cheerful voice.
I feel like this section was begging for a longer descriptive scene. Those long slow moments in life where you just look around and drink it all in.

Twilight twisted her face into a scowl. “I hate it. As far as I’m concerned, the sooner I get to bed, the sooner it will be over and I can see the sun.”

Artemis’s eyes shone with tears, and her lower lip quivered. “W-why would you say that?”

“AHA!” Twilight cried triumphantly. “I knew it! You’re Princess Luna!
This... feels really, really weird and cruel for Twilight. I'm kinda thrown by this scene; I'm currently drifting in between assuming you're using a noncanon, dream version of Twilight or you just wrote it really weird.

“I felt it was high time a certain nephew of mine learned about the responsibilities of the title he seems so eager to flaunt.”

Disregarding his breeding and inborn telekinesis,
You absolutely need a scene break here. A extra paragraph line with a few *'s. Possibly even ending the previous sentence and italicising the BB scene. That would let you snap back to Celestia's dialogue without the reintroduction.

I also feel really sympathetic for Blueblood in this, and that Celestia's been needlessly cruel. He's a nice guy in these paragraphs, even going so far as to thank somepony, so I sympathise with him. I feel like a moment to establish he's still a jerkwad, such as a brief scheme of taking over, would make the comedy funnier.

Far away, in a place shrouded by thick fog, something was watching the three ponies. It laughed, delighted that not even Celestia suspected anything was wrong with their present situation. To trot out an old cliché, everything was moving along as exactly as planned.
I feel like this is one of the most nonthreatening ways to introduce a villain of all time.


Overall p1 thoughts: I'm not convinced this story stands on it's own. You buy yourself a lot of slack by invoking creepy dream logic but you haven't fully capitalised on it. If it's reality, Celestia and Luna's actions don't make sense. If it's a dream, a cut to something as mundane as Blueblood abuse doesn't make sense.

P2:

The rest of the evening passed quickly. Tomorrow would be the first day of school, and Celestia wanted Twilight to get to bed early (wishing no offense to her little sister). Dinner, a simple affair of take out from a local restaurant, was interrupted by a message for the princess. The scroll, which teleported into the room, came from the Ponyville Police Department. Through means unknown to Twilight, Celestia obtained a post as one of their detectives. Evidently, during her stint as the town’s librarian, she had fallen in love with mystery novels and resolved to try her hand at this profession. Besides, this job presented an opportunity for a more hands on approach to maintaining peace within the borders of the nation.
You used the word 'hands' in a pony story, ten points from Ravenor.

I'm also really, really thrown by this paragraph. You've glossed over a lot of important stuff and conversations really fast. Again, I'm forced to conclude that this makes sense with the Persona setup but you haven't successfully applied ponies to the Persona setup here.

“Where am I?” Except for the red blocks beneath her hooves, all she could see was endless fog. Lacking any other options, Twilight decided to walk in a direction which felt “right”. Hours seemed to pass before she reached some sort of portal standing where the blocks ended. Plunged into the ground before it was a sword.
This is the moment which cold, hard broke immersion. That's nowhere near descriptive enough for a dream like this. I could write an entire page to flesh out this paragraph.

Dreams are complex things. Parts of your mind which don't normally work together function in tandem. Emotion blends into senses, senses blend into thoughts. There's no way to just have fog in a dream; it's tangled with fear, isolation, the desire to scream and being unable to. There's no way to have 'some sort of portal' in a dream. Some parts of it will be freakishly focused and some parts, like the monster emerging from it, utterly irrelevant even as they eat you alive.

I really dislike dull, blunt description for dreams like this. It kills the mood for me instantly. I recommend the Sandman comics, and the Mage: The Awakening sourcebook Astral Realms for a better understanding of writing dreams.

I'm utterly disengaged moving on as a result of this. I find the villainous voice the most nonthreatening thing. I said as much to Deadly, but there is literally nothing as nonthreatening as a monologue. Fluffy kittens are more threatening than a monologue. By having your villain monologue you've placed him firmly in the category of ineffectual Inspector Gadget villains.

“Teehee, no problem. It happens a lot, actually. I’m a little clumsy.”
I have an intense dislike for 'teehee' as a word. This line is bad in general. It feels like video game writing.

Inside the classroom, her hopes for a teacher as kind and patient as Princess Celestia were dashed.
You're doing this thing again, like you did with the "Celestia is actually a secret detective", of telling us a whole bunch of information and leaving me baffled about how Twilight got it. That sounds like a cool exposition scene. Let's hear it in full.

“swooning over each other like love-struck baboons”,
Come on, that's begging for a pony pun.

“I’m not here to comment on her politics, but if you’re the best she can dump into our laps, Her Majesty would be better off teaching kindergarten!”

Twilight glared at her. “Don’t talk about the princess that way.” It took quite a bit of effort on her part to avoid referring to Celestia as “my teacher”. But the unicorn knew she couldn’t risk anyone finding out the royal family had taken up residence in town.

Everypony fell silent as the two locked eyes in an impromptu staring contest. The sneer on Tongue Lashing’s face deepened. “Hmph. That’s it. You’re on my list, effective immediately.”
This does not follow. None of this follows.

Her suitor did not handle rejection gracefully. “…Fine!” He stomped off, leaving the four ponies dumbfounded. One of the spectators added a tally to the halfway filled board he carried around. He then contemplated the piece of chalk in his hand and his cutie mark (a broken heart behind the yellow pegasus’s silhouette). What would happen to him if Fluttershy started dating? When she started dating? A terrible thought entered his head. If she never found love, his life’s purpose would main secure, wouldn’t it? But…could he do something so cruel?
I'm completely lost.

“…Hi.” Twilight wasn’t about to complain about her new friends. But if Carrot Top suddenly declared herself one as well, she would have no choice but to subject herself to some tests and learn whether she had some innate friend attracting aura. “I’m Twilight Sparkle.”
Heh. Good line.

Following Applejack’s example, Twilight chose Harry Trotter and the Philosopony’s Stone. The moment the clock struck midnight, she opened the book and began reading. Sure enough, the first chapter was not entitled “The Colt Who Lived”, but “Unrequited Enmity”.
It's like I'm watching you matrix dodge having to write long description scenes. Moments like this, where weird dream magic stuff is happening, that's your cue to build atmosphere. If you skip over it in such little detail it gets the same mental filing reaction as 'twilight goes to school'. I just skimmed a paragraph where Twilight opens a book at midnight and enters a strange world of magic and adventure and that's terrible.


Overall: Despite all my critiques, I can tell that you're a reasonably skilled writer. There's a lot of stuff here that's okay and passable, but I hold everything I read to the standards I hold myself to - which is the highest standard I can possibly imagine.

And above all, what you do wrong is description. You avoid it with an almost unsettling determination. I keep not knowing which scenes are important because they all kind of get glossed over until ponies start talking at which point they slow down and I'm forced to scroll back up to remember where we actually are. Don't be afraid of description. You need description. Long moments of description are where you draw the reader in, get them focused, and the short paragraph timeslip gloss deliberately forces them out so you can communicate less intense long term information and give them a chance to breathe.

I'm planning on really exploring the reality distorting effects of dreams sometime soon, so it's a topic I feel quite strongly about. As always, this is something you can practise - you've just got to be sure you've got the right source material to study from. Again, the books I recommended before are worth reading (even if you don't know Mage at all, Astral Realms is still a fantastic resource). Do some practise long form descriptions; focus on images that are important. Little drops of poetry in amongst the sentences.