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The Picture In the Back Room
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That was... odd. Kinda confusing. You did make a good effort, but some more time really woulda made this shine.
Genre: Cover-Up
Thoughts: All right, let me just open with a spoiler: I'm going to KD-tier this. But I have a lot of respect for what you're trying to do here, Author, and you deserve props for aiming high. The genre of a character being held against what would be their will if they yet retained it, and slowly gaining a sense of things being wrong with their surroundings, is HARD TO WRITE WELL. And I say that from the experience of having written something like this before in a past minific round.
Right now this succeeds at conveying the requisite sense of wrongness and a bit of the horror of the character remaining trapped. But I feel like it's missing a couple of key things that hold it back a lot.
First of all, who is this character? Right now it sounds like it might be an OC. Now OCs are fine if they have a good introduction, interesting characterization, et cetera. But by the nature of this kind of story, the focal character tends to be robbed of such things. That's where it's important to either work some of that in despite the difficulty, or to simply make them be a canon character. Which dovetails with my second point:
Right now there isn't a great sense of the stakes involved here. Yeah, it's bad if a character is being mind controlled and held against their will; but what does it mean to the world? What are the visceral ripple effects of having them be under this kind of control? Who's benefiting, and how? All sorts of questions, any of which could've helped inject some more resonant conflict here.
Tier: Keep Developing
Thoughts: All right, let me just open with a spoiler: I'm going to KD-tier this. But I have a lot of respect for what you're trying to do here, Author, and you deserve props for aiming high. The genre of a character being held against what would be their will if they yet retained it, and slowly gaining a sense of things being wrong with their surroundings, is HARD TO WRITE WELL. And I say that from the experience of having written something like this before in a past minific round.
Right now this succeeds at conveying the requisite sense of wrongness and a bit of the horror of the character remaining trapped. But I feel like it's missing a couple of key things that hold it back a lot.
First of all, who is this character? Right now it sounds like it might be an OC. Now OCs are fine if they have a good introduction, interesting characterization, et cetera. But by the nature of this kind of story, the focal character tends to be robbed of such things. That's where it's important to either work some of that in despite the difficulty, or to simply make them be a canon character. Which dovetails with my second point:
Right now there isn't a great sense of the stakes involved here. Yeah, it's bad if a character is being mind controlled and held against their will; but what does it mean to the world? What are the visceral ripple effects of having them be under this kind of control? Who's benefiting, and how? All sorts of questions, any of which could've helped inject some more resonant conflict here.
Tier: Keep Developing
I'm going to have to start by echoing both >>CoffeeMinion's critique and encouragement.
You've clearly got a rich, detailed plot inside your head that was very difficult to get fully out within 750 words, author. The narrator Silvertail is apparently the sister ofthe princesses ... correction: an unnamed pony who pals around with princesses ... and she's married to a mare who's actually dead, but who wants to heal Silvertail because she's got a fatal sickness? Except maybe this is all in the past? So many weighty problems, so many questions ... so few answers.
There's just so much going on, honestly, that having read it twice I am completely unable to identify the primary conflict here. Is it Silvertail's health problems? Is it Cirrus' apparent sabotage? Is none of this real and Silvertail is stuck in Cirrus' dream or something? The story, in other words, is way too ambitious for the 750-word space. Any one of the aforementioned twists/revelations could have carried the story by itself; as it is, with all of them crowding in, I don't know which is/are important. I'm pretty sure from context that the ending is a bad/tragic one, but I can't say for sure why.
I guess my best advice, author, is to reread the story and ask yourself at each moment: what are the stakes here? How have I communicated that to the reader? Us poor ignorant souls are coming in blind, especially since your named cast is 100% OCs; if you haven't explicitly explained something on the page, we don't know it. (A minor but hopefully illuminating example of that: when Silvertail refers to Cirrus as "my wife" early on, I made the incorrect assumption that S was a stallion. S is never once gendered by the text — except for, much later on, responding to the dialogue about "sister" in a way that strongly implies she's the one being talked about — so when I first reached Cirrus' dialogue about healing "her", I started wondering whether they had a filly together who was also sick, or something, and it wasn't until Silvertail broke in on the conversation that I figured it out and had to stop and re-read the entire section.)
Another example: why are the princesses involved?
As you rewrite this, also make sure that you get all your verb tenses lined up — but really, that's a matter of final polish, much easier to run past an external editor, so spend your own editing time on the bigger picture.
Anyway, thanks for entering! With the expansive construction of this story, you've clearly got vision that will take you places. I look forward to the text itself being smoothed out and expanded to match that ambition!
Tier: Keep Developing
You've clearly got a rich, detailed plot inside your head that was very difficult to get fully out within 750 words, author. The narrator Silvertail is apparently the sister of
There's just so much going on, honestly, that having read it twice I am completely unable to identify the primary conflict here. Is it Silvertail's health problems? Is it Cirrus' apparent sabotage? Is none of this real and Silvertail is stuck in Cirrus' dream or something? The story, in other words, is way too ambitious for the 750-word space. Any one of the aforementioned twists/revelations could have carried the story by itself; as it is, with all of them crowding in, I don't know which is/are important. I'm pretty sure from context that the ending is a bad/tragic one, but I can't say for sure why.
I guess my best advice, author, is to reread the story and ask yourself at each moment: what are the stakes here? How have I communicated that to the reader? Us poor ignorant souls are coming in blind, especially since your named cast is 100% OCs; if you haven't explicitly explained something on the page, we don't know it. (A minor but hopefully illuminating example of that: when Silvertail refers to Cirrus as "my wife" early on, I made the incorrect assumption that S was a stallion. S is never once gendered by the text — except for, much later on, responding to the dialogue about "sister" in a way that strongly implies she's the one being talked about — so when I first reached Cirrus' dialogue about healing "her", I started wondering whether they had a filly together who was also sick, or something, and it wasn't until Silvertail broke in on the conversation that I figured it out and had to stop and re-read the entire section.)
Another example: why are the princesses involved?
As you rewrite this, also make sure that you get all your verb tenses lined up — but really, that's a matter of final polish, much easier to run past an external editor, so spend your own editing time on the bigger picture.
Anyway, thanks for entering! With the expansive construction of this story, you've clearly got vision that will take you places. I look forward to the text itself being smoothed out and expanded to match that ambition!
Tier: Keep Developing