Sort of starting off on the wrong foot with the mixed and awkward image of the simile here. I would never say that comprehension "crashed" into someone, and I wouldn't also use that verb to describe the action of being bucked in the face. The beginning and ending thoughts of the opening paragraph seem to be at odds with one another as well, where understanding dawns on Celestia, but her thoughts fail. I assume the description is going for some more vague emotion of uncertainty rather than comprehension of the her fear, which she verbalizes, but the manner in which it is presented is ripe for confusion.

The essence of the conflict is not presented exactly clear enough to completely understand the Celestia's interior motivation or the external factors causing her to behave the way she does. The audience can get a vague understanding of something from the past involving children affecting Celestia, likely with death given how it is described, but it could be entirely possible that these are just romanticized memories of a student transitioning from childhood to adulthood. There are few scant details that could shift the interpretation either way, but I think it is important that the backstory of this event not be vague or up to debate to understand how this affects Celestia.

It is difficult to understand what Celestia is not ready to acknowledge and why it takes the form of writing a goodbye in a book. Perhaps there is a significance to the book I am unaware of due to not being caught up in the show, but the whole situation is hard to deconstruct. Is she writing for her own benefit? Is she writing a letter that is going to be shown to someone else? Why is she not ready?

I can maybe assume in regard to that last sentence that because of the prompt, that this happened the day before, but even so, that element should be in the text proper instead of relying on the prompt relation to tell the story.

I'm missing a lot of the more specific "whys" to this story that allow me to understand the characters, which makes the whole ordeal seem more of a method to convey an emotional state to the reader than to convey a working story. The body language and description tell us that Celestia is feeling guilt, nostalgic, depressed, and anxious, but doesn't offer much insight as to how or why this came about aside from the very vague notion of missing some unspecified person, who maybe is Luna (my first inclination was to say it was Twilight, but she doesn't have blue eyes), but could just as easily refer to a group of unspecified people.

I figure that this is some take on the whole "being immortal sucks", Celestia banishing Luna, or Celestia dealing with her students growing up, but I honestly can't say for certain. And I shouldn't be uncertain about this sort of detail that is crucial to understanding how the events unfold in universe. I can't have an empathetic reaction to someone experiencing sadness without really comprehending what they're going through.

>>Cassius

I believe she is pining for Sunset Shimmer, who apparently hasn’t written a friendship report in a while. I agree that this is perhaps presented too subtly, particularly if (like me) one hasn’t seen EQG, instead relying on secondhand fandom references to grok things. I might get more from this story if so. As it stands, I can tell what the author is doing to build emotion, and that it seems competently done, but I can’t connect to it.

>>GroaningGreyAgony

Ah, that does fit with the blue eyes description, but I still don't think knowing this dramatically improves my overall comprehension of the piece as a whole.

The Great

Uses the limited space quite well. It focuses on a single core emotion and explores it with very little in the way of fat. Just a very tight concept.

The Rough

I also needed to see GGA's comment to fully grok the subject of this story. It's obvious now that I know, but yeah, I think this might just be a little too subtle.

The emotional flow is a bit... odd. I get the impression that this is some time after Sunset has left based on comments about the book. At the same time, the earlier paragraphs imply this is a pretty fresh wound. Both ideas are fully functional, but it does need to be a bit clearer, I think.

Too much heart imagery. You return to it a lot in the story. 4 times, I think? Which is really noticeable in 6-700 words.

I’m afraid I’m just echoing the others, here. The story itself is a nice idea; however, awkward opening paragraph aside, the language itself can get a little overbearing. Showing rather than telling is great; however, repetition of the same form of language over, and over, and over ceases to convey emotion, and just becomes fatiguing for the reader. In this case, you lean far too heavily on physical descriptions of Celestia to evoke pathos, to the point where they instead evoke irritation.

Don’t believe me?

Instead, her fetlock pressed against her trembling lips.

Slowly, her breathing leveled

Yet a barrage of thoughts turned riotous in her skull

Her rebellious eyes drifted back

she staggered back into her chambers.

It continues.

she nearly tripped in an effort not to step on her
She stepped passed her bed, trying not to look
Her heart had gone back to abusing her ribcage.
Forcing her eyes open
Her head turned slowly, answering the call
Swallowing to moisten her throat
She sat and raised her shaking hooves
She licked her lips, closed her eyes
Celestia’s hoof whipped up
At the sight of it, the air left Celestia’s lungs
She sagged over the empty page
Pursing her lips,
Celestia gritted her teeth.
Trembling, the quill lowered
Celestia stared at the word

Keeping a single scene with a single character fixated in a single idea coherent for 750 words is quite a challenge, author – in the future, consider breaking it up; have other characters, for the persona to interact with, or instead of foregrounding the idea the entire time, instead show how the burden she’s feeling paints her day-to-day life. If you’re not married to the idea of a single scene, consider breaking the story up into smaller fragments; CiG’s The Destruction of the Self, or Not_A_Hat’s recent Sorrow’s Council are excellent examples of stories that could have been told in a single scene, but would have been far poorer for it.

Keep practicing – you’ll get there!

This is the second Emotionally Vulnerable Celestia Deals With Post-Sunset/Pre-Twilight Anxiety story that I've read for this contest. I guess sun-themed characters lend themselves well to a prompt like "morning after."

I'd agree with Foehn about having other characters interact with Celestia. Specifically, maybe working Filly!Twilight into the story instead of just having her be a foreboding offscreen presence for Celestia to panic about whilst scrubbing her horse-chompers.Maybe Twilight says and does adorable precocious pony things which remind her of Sunset and trigger italicized flashback moments? I dunno.

I didn't dislike this! The prose is a little bouncy, heavy with the physicality, like others have said, but it's not actually bad. Just... overladen. Like a well-dressed salad that has a surplus of bacon bits. It's not bad; it could just do with fewer bacon bits.

Most of the commenters have the correct interpretation: this takes place right after Twilight's acceptance as Celestia's personal student, and the conflict is she still isn't able to say goodbye to Sunset Shimmer after they left on bad terms, and Sunset has not contacted her since then.

The story is good. The only problem is the emotion here is turned up past 11. It's overdone to a point where it becomes eye-rolling. I feel for these characters, and so I feel the emotions, but you just went a little too far with the descriptions. It sounds like Celestia is having a dozen seizures and pining the death of everypony she's ever known and loved.

Dial it back a notch. Give the audience more subtle cues to Celestia's emotional state, and let us figure some of it out by ourselves rather than rub it in our faces like this. If you do that, this can be an excellent story.

I’m afraid this only managed a glancing blow to the feels. I couldn’t help but feel some sympathetic anxiety given the lavish prose, but it did wear thin after a while. As the others have said, tone it down to where it doesn’t lose its impact through overexposure and you’ll be golden. That or provide some contrast with moments of hope and optimism regarding the student-to-be. An internal debate will be a lot more engaging than Celestia tormenting herself for over seven hundred words.

I didn't get it and I still don't. I'm unable to say if this is a post-Nightmare Moon fic or post-Sunset or whatever.

And yes, she wasn't prepared for what exactly.

Somehow, I must agree with the other reviewers: by focusing mainly on Celestia’s physical reactions, you ticked me off: I wanted to know what had happened, but you let insufficient evidence for me to cotton on to the answer.

Frustrating.

>>Monokeras
Based on the flashbacks to a young pony trotting through Celestia's legs, the plans to find a replacement goldfish student feeling like murder, the scowling face not seen in months, and treating a written goodbye in a private journal as though someone else would read it, I'd say that this is post-Sunset, with Celestia unprepared to take on a new protege. That said, I'm not sure whether it's before or after Twilight's entrance exam.

>>Monokeras
>>FanOfMostEverything
This story is clearly set the morning after Twilight's exam. Celestia looks at the still-fresh hole in the school building's ceiling (caused by Spike). She has to think about saying goodbye to Sunset now, because she has a new student and needs to move on. That seems to be the entire point of the story. (But I've been wrong before.)

The reason it's Sunset is she's using the magic book that she used to communicate with her (the one that ends up in Twi's library after she gets her action playset designed to ruin her old, perfectly-serviceable home new castle).

>>Trick_Question
Thanks.
I get worse and worse in pony lore, another reason why I'll be skipping pony short story rounds.

>>Monokeras
I don't think you need to skip rounds just because you don't know lore. You don't need to understand everything about a story to tell whether or not it's well-written, and that's one of the reasons we have these comment threads (to fill in the gaps when more information is required).

Personally, I try not to write stories which require too much knowledge of the show to understand and interpret. I tend not to be as implicit as this author or the Three Unicorn Tail Hairs author (both of which it should be clear from my hyper-criticality I almost certainly did not write). I think it's a dockable flaw if the story would be nearly meaningless to a non-fan. I think this story is okay in that regard because we see enough from Celie's imagination to be able to interpret the drama, and it's to the author's credit that they realized the necessity of those mental flashbacks. (I like this story, I just think the emotion is too strong and overt.)

But it is a problem if the story is so implicit that fans of the show who aren't up-to-date on everything can't tell who the ponies are. I wouldn't have thought that this story (or Three Unicorn Tail Hairs, after a third read-through) had that problem, but when commenters are confused that tells you that you either didn't leave enough clues, or just need to be more explicit about the facts.

In this case, one of the needed clues comes from the middle of Season 1, and the other comes from one of the EQG movies. The former might be easy to forget details of (although it's one of the most canonically-important episodes in the series), but for the latter it's definitely true that not everypony has seen it.

>>Posh I'd agree, except that this:

Like a well-dressed salad that has a surplus of bacon bits.

Is totally impossible. :P

Anyways, story thoughts:

Other people have already pointed out what are probably the two main flaws in this story: it's not clear enough initially who/what Celestia is reacting to, and the physicality of her emotions is more distracting than effective.

Instead of re-hashing those, I'm going to try and give my thoughts on why that's so, and perhaps how to change that.

Firstly, the Sunset/Twilight thing. I didn't realize that this was a story about leaving Sunset behind in favor of Twilight until I read the reviews, because when you do the flashbacky bits with Sunset running around and what, I thought that was Twilight. This is a problem of proximity, I think; because it's Student + Celestia without enough context, I'm going to default to Twilight, because that's the student that's closest to Celestia in my brainspace. Likely everyone else who missed that did the same.

There's enough information in here to counter that, barely, but not without reading more closely than I normally do while also being willing to throw out previous assumptions. The blue eyes and the hole in the tower are, I think, the only two things that explicitly challenge my assumption. Unfortunately, neither of them are presented very strongly; they're almost tacked on to other things, in the middle of the sections they're in.

What this sets up, I think, is the situation where if I jump to the obvious conclusion, I need to either break my 'flow' in the story and grab these pieces, or I ignore them and end up totally lost. Neither of those outcomes are really very good. One requires unnecessary re-framing (I don't think you were going for a surprise twist?) and the other completely misses the meaning.

How to fix? Well, it just needs to be really obvious, from the get-go, who's in the 'student' section. That'll cut the whole thing off at the root. Add something that's unequivocally Sunset Shimmery, such as a description of a red-gold mane, preferably at the beginning of a line so it's unavoidable. Because you're dealing with proximity, you need to be proactive, or people will jump to the wrong conclusion before you realize it.

Secondly, on Celestia's physicality.

I'd say that what's going on here is a dissociation between amount of emphasis and amount of meaning.

People often toss around the idea of show/tell. I've never really liked using those labels, because I think they're somewhat misleading. Everything in writing is telling; if such a thing as 'showing' exists, it has to work alongside telling somehow. They're not opposing, but complimentary.

Still, I think there's an important concept there. At a certain information density, we understand more from a sentence than any one word says. Meaning happens on a deeper level. The statement 'Celestia gritted her teeth' is simple enough, but its meaning can change from story to story, characterization to characterization. Uncertainty, determination, pain, rage, etc... all of that comes in at a deeper level than physical action, and attention should be paid to that.

I think what's going on here is a disassociation between the emphasis Celestia's physical reactions are given and the amount of meaning they convey. The more something is drawn to the reader's attention, the more weight it's mentally assigned. I think people are reading these descriptions with a certain expectation for how much they mean, but not feeling like they mean as much as they should.

For me, what she actually feels is sometimes unclear. For example, the 'heart abusing her ribs' thing. A fast-beating heart can signal many things, just like gritted teeth, but I don't know which emotion she's feeling... although I'd guess it's negative. Panic? Resentment? Uncertainty? Rage? Some mix? I'm not really sure. I don't have enough meaning to draw a strong conclusion, but I feel like I should be drawing one, because of how it's presented.

How to fix?

I'd say simply dialing it back is the simple solution. If it's not signaled as being as meaningful, people won't care if it doesn't mean as much. With more space, you could also fill in around it, increase the amount of context. Or, with careful word-choice, perhaps you could re-work your existing context to be stronger.

What I think is currently going unanswered, and what might tie everything together, is the question of why she's so upset. Is she afraid of being betrayed again? Will teaching Twilight distract her from pining after Sunset? Does she feel she's betraying Sunset by taking Twilight in? Has she realized that Twilight's cutie mark means her sister is returning, and that's going to be crazy and maybe catastrophic? Some mixture? Something else? I can't really tell.

If the audience understands what Celestia feels and why she feels that way, they'll empathize with her better. She's upset in a certain way over the idea of taking a new student after Sunset Shimmer? Well, maybe she's a soft-hearted teacher and someone to be pitied.

Wow, I spent longer on that then I intended. Hopefully this is useful or at least entertaining to someone.

>>Not_A_Hat

...when you do the flashbacky bits with Foo running around and what, I thought that was Bar...

I did too, but when the flashbacks grew somber it was obviously not her—and as soon as she mentioned the hole, I knew it was the previous student, which almost certainly had to be Foo. All of that happens in the first half of the story, so I wasn't scratching my head for long.

(The book confirms it beyond any doubt, provided you've seen the second movie.)

>>Trick_Question Right, the pieces are there, and a closer reader than me can definitely pick them up midway through.

The point is that it's currently somewhat bait/switchy, which seems to detract from the story as-is, and undoing that is simply a matter of stronger emphasis sooner.

>>Not_A_Hat
OH JOY LET'S DISCUSS THIS SINGLE BUCKING STORY FOREVER :V

I don't mind a bait/switch unless it confuses me or detracts from the story. I agree it's a little distracting here, and the author should do something to clarify when the story takes place sooner.

It could be as simple as opening with Celestia pondering that NMM is due to return in thirteen years, or something like that.

But it didn't bother me because I guess I didn't firmly decide that the foal was Twilight at the beginning. I was waiting for more data.

That said, and I might be repeating myself, but it's clearly at least a minor flaw if several readers are confused.

(Also, I was busy being distracted more than anything by the overwrought emotion. I still think that's the biggest flaw here, and in my read at least, the only major one.)

>>Trick_Question Fair enough! Maybe I am simply outside the audience for this; that's totally fine, too.

>>Not_A_Hat
No, it's a flaw—it's not you. Several readers are feeling this confusion, and in a competition, that isn't the readers' fault. The subtlety on whichapone needs to be turned down a notch, and the subtlety on emotion needs to be jacked way up.

>>Trick_Question
Thanks for all this Trick.

As a matter of fact, I think I never ventured past season 4 in my settings.

The true reason why I intend to skip the pony rounds is that I happen to have dried up on ideas. The last ones I pulled out were obnoxious, so I don’t want to inflict that over and again to the readers.

>>Monokeras

The last ones I pulled out were obnoxious, so I don’t want to inflict that over and again to the readers.

You have a mental disorder. It's one that I share. I hope you seek treatment, because you deserve to be happy.

Your stories are not obnoxious or an affliction on your readers. I am an obnoxious reviewer (which I try to make peace with because I know my reviews often help ponies).

Even the story I put out my most scathing review on (the one with Gem in it) was a story whose premise I really enjoyed, and I derived pleasure from reading and reviewing and then thinking more about it (and then Baal Bunny came up with a great twist that would make sense of the story).

I might bitch like mad when I feel strongly about something, but I enjoy reading all of these fics, and I like reading what you have to write. It's fine not to write when you don't have ideas, sure. But you should never restrain your creativity because you think it "hurts" people to read your stories. That is... well, it's just completely fucking insane.

EDIT: We love you and appreciate your involvement here. I'm sure I don't speak just for myself when I say that.

>>Trick_Question
<3
Off to bed.

Well, this has been talked to death I think, so I'll keep my review short.

Yes, I too was confused. I realized it was Sunset in the story itself though (at the end) without commentary. But just barely. That left me reframing the story after reading though, as it had been Twilight pictured in my mind until that point. I was also never quite sure if we were in an AU setting where more things could be off. The "Goodbye" line almost felt like a suicide note, so I thought maybe this is the future, where a student offed herself and Celestia had to begin again.

Overall, not a bad introspective, and the physicality of the emotions didn't bother me as it did others. But I wanted a clearer picture of her thoughts, so I knew what was occurring.

I Wasn’t Prepared For This — B+ — I’m torn. If you were going for the flip-flop reveal, having the reader think the missing student was Twilight instead of Sunset, it didn’t work. If you were wanting the reader to twig to the missing student being Sunset from the start, that didn’t work either. It kinda-sorta fell in the no-man’s land between. I’m going to have to go with a suggestion instead of a critique. Why not *start* her with the book, blank page and all, unwilling to admit to her obvious failure with Sunset but she *has* to in order to open a new chapter with her new student, and mentally berate herself about not making the same mistakes despite her insecurity, close with writing something positive like “Until we meet again. --Celestia”

For what it's all worth I got it. The blue eyes clearly make the memory-filly not Twilight (and obviously Sunset if you pay close enough attention to that sort of thing), the hole in the school pins us to a very specific time just after Twilight's exam, and expecting new words in the journal again hearkens back to Sunset Shimmer.

And I liked it. Celestia pained with something other than Luna business is a rare(ish) choice in the greater scope of things, in my experience.

I really like this one. Celestia's grief is well described, and filly Sunset is adorable (although it doesn't feel right when she apparently learned to read quickly before learning to be afraid of monsters under her bed.)

Also, a couple of rougher sentences:

a familiar talon tightening over a heart that had slipped down into her hooves

The sentence reads weird when you have two different metaphors happening to her heart at the same time.

Celestia flipped through page after page of old, familiar messages as more images danced on her retinae.

The word "retinae" tripped me up a bit because of how scientific it sounds. It doesn't really fit the rest of the story.

>>Cassius
>>GroaningGreyAgony
>>AndrewRogue
>>Foehn
>>Posh
>>Trick_Question
>>FanOfMostEverything
>>Monokeras
>>Not_A_Hat
>>Xepher
>>georg
>>Rao
>>JudgeDeadd

I dare say this has been my most successful entry in the Writeoffs yet! Sure, I didn't score all that highly, but the feedback has been phenomenal. I don't know if I've ever had a Writeoff entry so heavily discussed as this one.

When I entered this contest, I was in the middle of a mental crisis that had practically stopped all my literary productivity. I'd recently been hit with some scathing criticisms by people I respect and was struggling to find a way to meet their interests. So backwards was my thinking that I'd come to believe I needed to get rid of all my long-established tools and try to learn an entirely new style from scratch. The result was a style that even I considered bland, and in a way this entry was a test run.

The responses to this fic have taught me otherwise. I realize that I don't need to change a style of writing that most people liked and I enjoyed using, I just need to tweak some things after the fact to fit the perceived error. In a way, it was dumb of me to think that my old methods were wrong or naturally flawed. It also reminded me that I don't have to accept everything my editors say. I think I'd just gone so long without having a proper, opinionated, aggressive editor that I'd forgotten the need to stand up for myself.

So thank you, all of you. This contest and your feedback has gotten me back into the spirit of things, and maybe next time I'll be able to produce something worthwhile.

Having said all that, to the underlying issue that most hurt this story: subtlety. I can't deny that being subtle is an important point for me in writing; I tend to prefer forcing my readers to think and be observant rather than throwing everything in their face, which assumes them to be too stupid to see the clues. The downside to that, as so many have pointed out, is that often times I can be too subtle and/or neglect to give away the things that not everybody knows.

I had assumed that everyone would recognize the tower damaged by Spike's rapid growth during Twilight's exam, or the book through which Sunset Shimmer could write to Celestia. Most troubling, I actually anticipated people recognizing Sunset's last line, which was taken directly from her background story in the comics – when I myself had to look up the quote. Really, Paul, what were you thinking?

So the lesson learned: know what calls for subtlety and what does not. Now the only real question is whether I can keep that lesson in my head.

...

This contest reminded me why I enjoy the Writeoffs so much. Can't believe this is my first entry since June.