>>284789
Unfortunately, though the author starts off on a decent foot, with his next step he immediately faceplants into the mud. I'll quote the opening line again:
>If I’m going to tell you about the adventure of my life -- explain how I got to this place with these people, and why I did what I’m going to do next -- I should probably start by explaining a little bit about PipBucks.
Opening lines are important in any story, but when the story is told in the first person it's doubly important. This is our first time meeting a character with whom we are about to spend roughly half a million words seriously. We know literally nothing about this character yet; we don't know their name, their gender, their occupation, their personality, or anything. If it wasn't for the fact that this is an MLP fic, we wouldn't even know that this character is a pony.
In and of itself, this is fine; we shouldn't know everything about this character yet. However, our first meeting with the character should at least tell us something important about them. So considering this, let's look at the last part of the opener:
>I should probably start by explaining a little bit about PipBucks.
Is this really the first thing we need to know here? I understand that this is probably going to be a rather technology-heavy story, and I don't doubt that PipBucks are going to be rather central to the plot. So, we are ultimately going to need some detailed information about what these things are and how they work. However, is it so important that the author needs us to read a whole technical manual about it before we can move on to the story itself?
The first couple of lines should give us at least a general sense of who we are talking to, and what he/she is going to be telling us about. Ideally, we should also get an impression of why the character wants to tell us this, and why it might be worth our time to listen.
Essentially, this character has tapped us on the shoulder and said to us: "Hey there, fuckface, stop whatever you're doing and listen up. I've got some important shit I want to tell you about." This is usually enough to grab our attention, but before we spend half a million words with this person pony, whatever they're going to need to convince us that we actually give a shit.
So, what does kkat's protagonist need to get off his/her chest? Well, whatever it is, it's apparently going to have to wait, because first they need to explain to us about some made-up techno-thingamabob.
From here, the text launches into a very dense paragraph explaining a lot of details about the PipBuck: how it is worn, what it's general function is, what it does, how it works. I have to say that we are not even a full two paragraphs into the story yet, and the author is already losing my interest.
To put this into perspective, imagine that you were writing a story set in 2020, but you were going to travel back in time to 1990 in order to publish it. Your story relies heavily on smartphones, which a person from 1990 isn't going to be familiar with. However, does that mean that the literal second paragraph of your novel needs to be a detailed technical spec that covers how a smartphone works and everything it can do? Probably not.
>b-b-but, my protagonist is a smart phone technician, so it's actually really super important that I explain what a smart phone is right away...
Shut up, faggot. No it isn't. All you need to do is tell us that your character is a smart phone technician; you can fill us in on the details later.
No matter when or where it's set or what kind of space-age machinery the setting contains, a story is still a story; it has characters and a plot. What we need right off the bat is essentially a thesis; we need something that introduces us to the character and gives us a sense of what we are about to read. If the literal first paragraph of your story is just a tech manual for an imaginary device, odds are you've already lost about 2/3 of your readers.
Anyway, from what I can gather, the PipBuck is some kind of general-purpose device that keeps track of health, armor, stats, and shit like that, and has a map and a radar function and whatever the fuck else; basically it's the game interface I guess.
>It can even be made to glow like a lamp.
For some reason, the author considered this completely unremarkable statement to be important enough to treat as a single paragraph.
Anyway, it seems that all of this is more or less trying to go somewhere. The narrator goes on to explain that PipBucks are a common device that all ponies own, and that most of the super-neato features that the author just spent an entire dense paragraph detailing aren't even used by most ponies. So, basically, a PipBuck is just some completely unremarkable utilitarian thing that everyone has, and we actually don't need to know that much about it at all.
However, the protagonist apparently has a PipBuck for a cutie mark, and is exceedingly bummed about it, because it's basically the equivalent of a pony living in our world getting a cutie mark of a toaster or a hairdryer or something.
The prologue continues to meander. I'll be honest, this isn't really grabbing me so far. The author paints us a portrait of a generally unremarkable main character who rambles on for several disjointed paragraphs about how unsatisfied she feels over being so unremarkable and dull. We can assume, probably, that this ordinary, average pony will soon be plucked from her unremarkable life and called upon to do extraordinary things, but for now it's mostly a chore to listen to her.
Apart from this, the author drops in a few details that may be central to the story at some point. Someone called The Overmare appears to be in charge, and there is a character, apparently a singer, called Velvet Remedy who is mentioned twice, suggesting that she may be important.
At the absolute end, we are finally informed that the main character's name is LittlePip.