Fanfic postmortem: The Enchanted Library
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What is it?
The Enchanted Library by Monochromatic is an adventure mystery story set in an alternate Equestria. Celestia, Luna, Cadance, and Twilight are simply figures of legend; fairy tales from the distant past that no-one believes. That is, until Rarity accidentally stumbles upon the ghostly Princess Twilight Sparkle, trapped for eternity in an enchanted library beneath the Everfree Forest, and determines to set her free.
The story is divided about equally between between uncovering the secrets of the ghostly princess's past (mystery/drama), Rarity's adventures trying to break the curse (action/adventure), and the growing relationship between the two (romance/slice of life). It's a fairly lengthy fic, around 350k words.
What I liked
The characters start off pretty similar to their shows counterparts, but grow and change in slightly different ways as the story progresses. Rarity is handled particularly well in this regard. She's still the wonderfully charming, creative, and witty seamstress - the writer really nails her characterisztion - but her role as protagonist forces her to become more adventerous and driven. By the end of the book, she's still 100% Rarity, but an interestingly different take on Rarity: a confident, clever, and charismatic leader, fighting ancient curses while still maintaining her passion for fashion.
This AU actually makes quite a few changes to the lore and setting. They start small and are introduced slowly, but still they pile up, and the story does a good job of keeping things internally consistent. Several times throughout the story some small, seemingly trivial change to the world will turn be a logical and necessary side effect of some other, more significant change not yet revealed. These serve as both foreshadowing of the larger changes, and are satisfying little mysteries in their own right.
I'm not especially interested in Raritwi, but this ship had me grinning. The author does a great job of making their interactions mostly cute and funny, and also making the more emotional moments quite sweet and heartfelt.
What I disliked
I'm hesitant to say this, as I generally enjoyed the slow pace, but overall I think the story was too long. It wasn't boring, almost the opposite: I was so interested in what happened next that I wanted the scene or chapter to be over so the next one could begin. Some parts stretched out just a liiittle too long, while I was impatiently thinking "Yes, yes, I get it, could we hurry along?" Similarly, a number of lesser plot twists were pretty easy to guess a chapter or two early, leaving me wishing the characters would hurry up and connect the dots. I should stress that this was a pretty mild problem, but also a frequent one.
Oddly enough, the last act seemed to suffer the opposite problem. A couple of long term problems are suddenly resolved with relatively little effort, and just as suddenly some new complications are introduced. There's this big emotional climax near the end, and it feels like a great way to start wrapping up the story... and then it goes and throws another finale at the reader. While the odd pacing doesn't ruin the ending, it definitely undermines it.
Most of the story is relatively light-hearted slice-of-life/adventure, with a few darker moments of drama or mystery sprinkled throughout. Halfway through the story, the tone suddenly gets much darker, and never entirely recovers. This may be my personal bias showing, but I felt the extreme change was a bit too much - while it made the drama that much more impactful, I'm not convinced it was worth it.
Mixed feelings
As mentioned above, the characters aren't quite the same as their show counterparts. In some cases this worked well - Rarity and Rainbow I thought were both interestingly different - but in other cases it felt a bit jarring. Overall, a mixed bag.
A lot of things were left unresolved for the sequel(s?) to deal with. This is good if you liked the story and want more, but bad if you're hoping for a standalone tale that wraps everything up neatly.
Final thoughts
The Enchanted Library was mildly frustrating to read and made a number of questionable decisions, but overall I definitely enjoyed it. The core character interactions and general moment-to-moment writing were just really solid and consistently enjoyable, a tough feat to keep up for 350k words. If this sounds like your cup of tea, give it a try and let me know how you go. If you're anything like me, you might end up being unable to put it down for a week.
Submitted August 23, 2018 at 07:49AM by stphven
via reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/mylittlepony/comments/99njbt/fanfic_postmortem_the_enchanted_library/?utm_source=ifttt
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