You've got some sentence problems that hinder the story... Most notably, there's a lot of sentence fragments and periods where there should be commas, and that makes the story feel very herky-jerky. Sometimes that's what you want in prose, but you also seem to be aiming for a very flowing, artistic style with the vocabulary, and so it kind of hits at cross purposes.

I also had a hard time following the ovearching plot. If the magic's in Sunset, couldn't she just leave and go back and take it with her? I guess she already kind of does that in the end. That brings up a bigger point though... I honestly don't know what a lot of this is. You're kind of at a disadvantage writing a pretty specific pony story for a general fiction competition.

All that being said, I think writing this much is a good achievement, and I encourage you to keep trying. Writing isn't something that a person's just naturally good at. It takes practice, and effort. So keep at it!

9 – Of Suns and Moons

Eeee. Missing word error in the first sentence. Not an auspicious start, author. Also, this looks to be an Equestria Girls fic. That actually doesn't bother me much, though I expect it'll bother other readers. The big takeaway from the hook, though, is that you're not involving me in the story. This is a standard weather report opening, which is the literary equivalent of an establishing shot. It can work okay in episodic television storytelling, but in a situation like this where we come in expecting new characters and an original plot, it's very low on information content. The description is fairly nice, so I'm not really turned off by any of this—but you've pretty much just squandered your best chance to hook me on your story, one paragraph in.

There's a real weight of description here slowing down the story and killing any momentum it might accumulate. The number of verbless sentence fragments isn't helping a lot either. My general rule on description (and every investment of words, if possible) is that it should serve more than one purpose in the story if you're going to be taking up space and reader attention with it. The description here seems like it's primarily there for its own sake. It's doing a little lifting establishing the setting (though not a whole lot, since this appears to be EqG fanfiction, which means the setting is already known). It might be doing a little lifting on establishing a tone, but I can't quite figure that out—there doesn't seem to be much consistent tone information getting conveyed, other than the lack of tension in the scene (which is a valid use of tone, just not one that's generally going to be compelling). There doesn't seem to be a lot of character, plot, or theme content in the descriptions, either. The overall effect is that you're using an awful lot of words here that aren't giving me any story content I care about—and especially given that this is one of the longer stories in the competition, that's a big problem.

I'm just going to go ahead and read to the end now. I think it's fair to say that the description issue will be your #1 issue to work on here. Honestly, this has reached a point where the plot, characters, themes, setting, etc. just don't matter. You've given me two very long paragraphs about what Celestia and Luna are wearing—and aside from the fact that these passages suggest these are Equestria Celly and Lulu (which could be inferred simply from them leaving the statue), there appears to be no information content. Nothing else you do or don't do is likely to overshadow the description problem. Based on content so far, I'd guess you've got a 2000-or-less word story buried inside this heap of words. You need to cut, cut, cut.

Getting towards the end, and honestly I think the best advice I can give you is just to go read a good writing guide like the one by Ezn hosted on Fimfiction. I could give more detailed pointers here, but I honestly don't think they'd help much. There's too much basic-level stuff you need to be working on before you really try to master character, plot, setting, tone, and theme. That's the sort of stuff writing guides are good for. Once you can figure out how to get your words out of the way of your story, it'll be a lot easier to help you.

One last thing. If Sunset's magic being present in the Equestria Girls world is the reason for all this damage, why doesn't Sunset just go home to Equestria. You made it clear that she still thinks about Equestria as home. I kind of feel like the titular suns and moons are carrying a huge idiot ball through the climax here.

Oh wait. I guess that wasn't the last thing, since Sunset gets to go home with the princesses. Which seems to (1) solve the problem as you had described it without traumatizing / crippling her, and (2) would have always been an option for the princesses anyway even if (3) they had actually banished her from Equestria, which they never did—remember, that was the sirens, not Sunset.

<sigh> Okay, well, like I said—this story isn't at a level where I can really help you with it anyway. You spent the weekend writing, which is awesome and way more productive than most people spend their weekends. Please, though, go grab a good writing guide. Sit down with it and read it closely. In the long run, It's going to help you a lot.

HORSE: ▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉
TIER: Needs Work

It looks like if I reply to Remedyfortheheart's post directly, it's going to categorize it under a different story (the one he/she was reviewing when he/she wrote the comment), so let me respond here where it's relevant and then link back:

Blantly just saying "read a writing guide" doesn't help anyone. If you know the basics of writing than please point it out. Because going straight to this very same phrase can be highly insulting.

Yeah, I get that—but I say that when I literally hit a point where I don't know what else to say. It's not meant as an insult, it's meant as: "I'm going to need a very large number of words to go into detail on the issues I'm seeing that are keeping this story from flying, and other people have already written those words, and they can probably do a better job than me because they were really focusing on delivering this information well when they wrote those words."

Full disclosure, one of the very first things I did after joining the Friendship is Magic fanfiction community was to find three or four in-fandom writing guides (Ezn's that I listed above, the old Equestria Daily guide, and a couple others I don't remember and that aren't well linked) and read through them in detail. A lot of the material was well-known to me, but I find that it's usually helpful to refresh the basics every once in a while. I definitely feel like I learned good stuff doing that.

I guess telling you there's a helpful link you can look at may be a bit scattershot, though, so here in particular are the sections I think it'd be helpful for you to read. Fixing these issues is not going to fix this story, though. It's going to move this story to a place where it's easier to discuss the underlying issues. But until these sorts of issues get fixed, the larger issues don't really matter in my opinion. It's like a car. Say you've got a broken sparkplug that's making your engine misfire from time to time, and you've also got two flat tires. Your car could function with the broken sparkplug, but that's still a problem you should get fixed. Until you get some new tires, though, worrying about the sparkplug is pointless.

Anyway, I promised a more thorough list of where I thought you should be focusing your attention. Here are some more links to Ezn's writing guide, based on particular subsections:

Said tags and action tags – Ways to make your dialogue flow better.

Ways to deal with your sentence fragments

Being laconic – One way to cut down your word chaff

Lavender Unicorn Syndrome (and more generally purple prose)– A problem that distracts your reader for no purpose and clutters your prose, and that's very common in this story.

Showing vs. telling – This isn't pervasive, but it's frequent. I think it comes up most often when you show the reader something (say through dialogue) and then proceed to waste a sentence telling the reader the same thing you just showed them.

Pacing – This is a 6800-word story with very little plot or characterization in it. All the things that happen here can be summed up as: Celestia and Luna arrive from Equestria, they go looking for their EqG counterparts, they discover the students are weird, Sunset helps them find their goal, they all talk offscreen, they take Sunset's magic away, they go back to Equestria with Sunset.. Now, that could totally get blown up into a detailed story at this length, but you're investing very few words on the critical elements there, as opposed to things like descriptions that aren't carrying their weight. The whole section with Celestia and Luna interacting with Canterlot High students also doesn't connect up to the main story anywhere, even in terms of establishing a tone, and it takes a big chunk of words here. Point is, the pacing here doesn't work and you need to be focusing in on your core story and seeing how best to lead the reader through that.

Plot – Like I said above, you need to be focusing on this more as you write. It's the backbone of your story, and the central conflict (the reason Celestia and Luna are coming to Canterlot High) isn't even discussed until Sunset shows up, about halfway through the story. You might also want to look at what Ezn says about the Sad genre because the climax of your story is running into the sorts of problems described there.

I think reading the whole thing would be useful, and I think reading Winston's more abstract discussion of writing (which wasn't around when I got into this stuff) would be good too. But when I said "I think the best advice I can give you is just to go read a good writing guide," I meant it. They cover a lot, especially the basics. It doesn't matter how much I talk about multitasking with your dialogue and description, or approaches to establishing sympathy for your characters—until you deal with the basic issues, none of that will matter or improve this story in the least. I wasn't trying to be flippant, I was trying to give you the best advice I could.

Hmm, a pony story? Well, as you will, Author.

I wrote this review without reading what other people have said. I see that a lot of what I bring up below has been addressed, and you'll likely find better and more complete advice in the writing guides linked, but I'll post it anyways in hopes it'll be useful.

This could use a touch of proofreading; some of the sentences seem stilted. I'm going to do a fairly long section here, purely on the mechanics. Hopefully it will be useful to you.

Firstly, there's a bit of near-word repetition going on. Two 'along's in the first paragraph stood out to me.

One thing that might help with repetition is considering how to simplify your sentences; you've got other sorts of repetition going on as well, and it kinda fluffs out your narrative, making it a bit more difficult to read than it ought to be. Consider:

"The lone man stopped in place and wiped his brow, to free it of the gathering sweat that seemed to pool right over his eye lids."

You could cut the whole second half of the sentence here, which adds very little information. You'd have:

"The lone man stopped in place and wiped his brow, to free it of the gathering sweat."

Which is much simpler and, by consequence, easier to read. You could even go farther, since 'in place' is implied in stopping, the man has already been mentioned and it's been said that he's alone, and 'the' is unnecessary, unless you're trying to specifically draw attention to 'the sweat'.

"The man stopped and wiped his brow, freeing it of gathering sweat."

This is something like half the length of the previous sentence, but contains nearly all the meaning. The more meaning you can pack into fewer words, the more powerfully it will be conveyed to your reader; it heightens immersion and draws people in more easily, as long as the flow is maintained. I won't continue in this vein, but there are other instances like this.

I don't know if/how much time you had for proofreading, but if you've got some next time, it might be worth dedicating a round of editing to cutting out unnecessary words and descriptions as you can.

For some reason, I feel like your dialogue flows much better than your narrative? That's a good thing, and perhaps you could use this to improve your narrative somehow… dictate parts of your story? Write a story with an actual narrator? I dunno, but it might be worth considering/trying.

You've also got some questionable period/comma usage going on. I'm very bad at the actual terminology of grammar and punctuation, so although I'm fairly confident in what I'm saying here, I might be using the wrong words. Anyways, some bits read like sentence fragments: "Celestia said in turn. Tracing Luna's wrists to further examine those bracelets." I don't know if there's a technical term for this, but that period makes the second half a fragment, because the person acting is cut off? Replacing it with a comma would work.

Also, you're putting periods at the end of dialogue sentences, and then using dialogue attributions in places - something like:

"Blah blah." Bill said.

The rule, IIRC, is that if you're using a dialogue tag (someone said, sang, drawled, snorted - a speaking verb and a name) then you end the speaking bit (where the " falls) with a comma, and only capitalize the next word if it's a proper noun. Exclamation and question marks can go in as usual, but the capitalization rule still holds.

Examples, because I'm probably not explaining this very well:

"Blah," he said.
"Blah," Bill said.
"Blah!" he said.
"Blah?" Bill said.

If you're using action tags, where you put in the speaker doing something besides speaking, you punctuate as normal outside dialogue.

"Blah." Bill kicked the ball.

The reasoning behind this, I believe, is that if you're using dialogue tags, the dialogue and the dialogue attribution are considered part of the same sentence, whereas if you're using action tags, they're considered two different sentences.

Erm. Hopefully that's helpful. You can probably find more and better resources out there if you need them.

…anyways, I hope this is useful to you. Onto some less nuts-and-bolts commentary.

Hah. I really like the bit with Luna and Celestia examining each other's hands. That's sweet and intimate, really sells their connection as sisters - as well as being believable. Nice touch.

Hmm. The two asides with the students, although entertaining, don't seem to add much to the actual story.

And the sudden jump to Sunset's perspective is a bit disorienting, when she's not introduced as a character until quite a ways in?

She also seems really upset about losing magic that she's never used, and is pretty well convinced that she doesn't even have.

I'm not sure I'm really following your explanations about magic, either. I haven't watched Friendship Games, though, so perhaps that's part of it.

Hmm… in the end, it's a Sunset Shimmer redemption fic? Well, I can get behind that.

I guess, overall, I feel that what this fic suffers from most is information control; what we need to know about what's going on is introduced a bit too late and a bit too fast. Bringing the important plot points (portals ripping the world apart, Twilight and co. in danger, removing Sunset's magic, pardoning Sunset) don't really come in until the second half of the story, and that gives a rather large disconnect between the first and second halves? You would, I think, be better off introducing that sort of thing at the very beginning, then branching off into your humorous asides, before returning to it for the climax; as it is, the flow of this story is jumpy and bunched, with issues on the flow and plot construction.

Not too bad, with some good spots, but needs some heavy structural work.

>>Not_A_Hat
On average this story idea should have taken about 10,000 to 12,000 words. Scripted of course. Had to cut scenes here and there and eventually came out with this cookiecutter of a story. Which is why you don't see the Princesses talking to the Principles or a scene where Twilight tries to fix things in Equestria. Overall this is an idea popped out of the first hour of writing and continued with on the fly thinking and writing. With a couple of ideas planned. About half of it was planned the other half made up on the spot. Overall I was impressed with it, but never got the chance to proofread it like I wanted to, with only 3 hours left to submit. Had no choice.

My opinion of this story of mine is, that I hate it. It didn't get the love I wanted to give it and got only hate form it's readers. Sigh. Thanks though for trying.

>>Remedyfortheheart
FWIW I didn't hate it, I just don't think I can be much help on it. It's rare for me to hate a story—and when I do, it usually takes something more like Spectrum where it's really obvious that an author has a lot of fantastic skills in their back pocket, and I feel like they're squandering them. (For the record, though, I don't hate Spectrum. But I do dislike it.)

Anyway, I don't think there's much I can say on the story I haven't already said, but I do want to be clear that I'm not throwing hate around on it or anything. It just has, in my considered opinion, a lot of relatively basic issues that I'm less qualified to help with than a lot of other people out there who focus on that sort of stuff.

>>Bradel
Sir, just reread your review and think about your own story being under it. Less guides more soul. No more drama please.

>>Remedyfortheheart

You need thicker skin. I'm sorry that your feelings got hurt, but this only got personal because you made it personal.

>>bats
I'm sorry you had to see this.

>>Remedyfortheheart
I saw your blog, too. You are aware that nobody knew you wrote your story until after you outed yourself, right? How exactly, pray tell, was anybody supposed to know how many followers you have on fimfic to feel snobbish about a story's author if they didn't know who the author was when they read the story?

There's only been one person here making personal attacks, and it wasn't Bradel.

>>bats
Once again I am sorry. Thickier skin and a writing guide. Gotcha. You sir are wonderful just the way you are.