The Sandbox

Never dismiss a prevalence of downvotes as just "haters" or "people being jerks". It's not particularly common in this community, unless you're one of those users who manages to attract a hatedom, or you're writing in a genre (like, say, Displaced) that has its own hatedom. You might be blinding yourself to the flaws of your work by doing this.

Now, as to the actual story... let's start with just the description.

Moondacer comes home one night after another attempt by her her friends to re-reintergrate her into society depressed and once she's home a human appears out of nowhere! What will she do? What will the human do? The human has no time to react properly before being thrown for a loop by Moondancer's recent happenings. And he won't be the only one thrown for a loop.

This story takes place during the events of Pinkie's Guardian Angel. So expect some references to It

"re-reintergrate" sounds redundant, and isn't the kind of word you want to be inventing here, never mind you misspelled "integrate".

"into society depressed" doesn't make any grammatical sense. I assume you mean Moondancer is depressed, but the wording makes this unclear.

"a human appears out of nowhere!" — This smacks of the worst kind of cliche HiE self-insert badfic. Even if the plot doesn't give any more reason for his appearance than that (and it really should), your description should try to indicate what makes your story different from or even better than that cliche.

As others have mentioned, the barrage of questions isn't the best way to introduce the story.

"thrown for a loop" is a rather lighthearted turn of phrase, and not the kind of description I associate with a dramatic tale. The second use just makes it severely repetitive.

"recent happenings" is another bit of odd phrasing.

Getting into the story itself, I'm not going to do this line-by-line, though I will call out some things in particular if they seem to need it. First up, the fact that this is a sequel means that readers coming in on this point won’t understand the full story. However, it’s never good for the story to be completely beyond the grasp of someone who skipped the earlier entries. As an example, let me go through my Favorites and pull up the first sequel I see:

Trinkets, by Pen Stroke, a sequel to Past Sins.

Now, Past Sins is a huge story, clocking in at about 200,000 words, and a lot of shit happened in it. You might think any reader coming in on Trinkets would be utterly lost without the context of Past Sins, but Pen Stroke includes enough details to give a new reader a rough idea of prior events that they can follow the shorter story.

Also, spoilers, but Past Sins is over three years old now, and has 120,000 views. There’s got to be some kind of statute of limitations on spoilers.

We see Ponyville rebuilding from an attack. They’re emptying out the castle, and references are made to it being the castle of Nightmare Moon. There’s a line about it belonging to Nyx. We meet Nyx and there’s a line about Luna taking back her magic.

Clearly, this is a story where Nightmare Moon returned, and was only recently defeated. We can further infer that Nyx was, in some fashion, Nightmare Moon in another form. There are more details, but I don’t want to linger overlong on this comparison. The point is, you can pick up enough casual details from the narrative to understand the sequel.

Now, granted, that isn’t always the case. There are different kinds of sequels.

Going to “real” literature as it offers me quicker examples, we have these, with most falling into the second category:

The Direct Sequel: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien. In a direct sequel, events proceed directly from one story to the next, and the story is most likely broken up as a convenience for the readers. However, one can’t understand the later books if they skip the former, because the action proceeds directly from one to the next. Nothing in The Two Towers will make sense to someone who skipped The Fellowship of the Ring.

The Serial Sequel: The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. In serial sequels, events take place in a defined chronological order, and the story builds on itself over time. However, the immediate conflict of each book is self-contained, and they may be read — up to a point — out of order. In this case, you can come in during the first five books or so easily enough. You might even be able to make sense of the first ten. But after Changes, the 12th book, simply too much has happened for a new reader to understand the plot.

The Series: Discworld by Terry Pratchett. In a series, events may be inter-related, and stories may take place in a defined order, but beyond a handful of references and character appearances (such as certain books about the Ankh-Morpork City Watch will take place before Sergeant Angua joined, and certain books will take place after), each plot is fully self-contained, and they may be read in virtually any order without any difficulty to the reader.

But I digress. The point is, a reader shouldn’t be at a loss within the first 300 words as to who your characters are and what they’re doing.

Moving on, your descriptions are vague yet repetitive, telling me nothing but “the usual” multiple times, and you have some major grammar issues in your dialogue. The action we open on, with Moondancer scaring Dash out of her wits (which itself feels out-of-character for both, and highly exaggerated) once again conflicts with the stated Drama/Romance tones of the story. In fact, Moondancer feels very off—far too comfortable with other ponies. I can only imagine this is a consequence of the previous story (again with be lost from the get-go), or you’re trying to do an in media res opening, with these events taking place after the story proper. I’m going to strongly recommend against that, as it’s confusing when paired with the sequel transition.

You have a bad habit of emotional telling:

Rainbow groaned aloud, bored out of her skull because of waiting.

Rainbow confessed rather loudly and annoyed.

feeling bad because she jumped to conclusions

It’s almost always better to let the character act out the feeling than explain it with your narration, though in some of these lines you’d be better off adding a bit more dialogue where the character just complains of waiting in Dash’s case, or starts to apologize for jumping to conclusions in Twilight’s.

"*sigh* Fine, yes I was scared only because I didn't expect it!"

Youtube Video

This isn’t an AIM Chat RP (or whatever you kids are using these days). Put actions in the narrative, not in action bubbles.

There are more problems with the first paragraph, but I won’t point them all out. They mostly focus on improper dialogue tagging, unfamiliar characters (presumably from the previous story), and known characters generally feeling OOC, though the dialogue is also a bit repetitive, almost always taking the form:

”Words words words.” Character said taking some action.

For the record, the grammar there is pretty off. Here’s how it should look:

”Words words words,” Character said, taking some action.

But on top of that, a bit of variety in structure would really help.

Going into the second chapter, I didn’t want to focus on things line by line, but…