(This time I noticed the question right away; it’s just taken me ages to respond.
)
I think what attracted me to
Rise of Storm Tide was the fact that it’s set during/after the TV series, with Ruby as a prominent character. (Furthermore you gave an explanation as to how Ruby and Chomper met each other in the first place.) You don’t find a lot of fanfics like that. Also, I liked that it was similar in tone to the original
The Land Before Time: darker and more suspenseful than most recent LBT installments, but not packed to the brim with deaths and anachronistic curses (no offense to fanfiction authors who write stories like that, but they just aren’t my cup of tea
). It honestly felt like it could be made into an LBT movie, perhaps a conclusion to the TV series.
Far Away Home contains several more elements that I appreciate in a story. I really like the convoluted, enigmatic schemes of characters like Eybron (and cruel as they are, I find Tyron’s cunning and inescapable blackmailing methods irresistibly fascinating as well.) And despite your occasional lapses of secrecy,
you’re very good at surprising me with plot twists, and lots of them. I get a lot of enjoyment out of a story where I can’t see what’s coming, and with
Far Away Home, I almost never know what to expect.
Also, In respect to both stories, it’s probably worth noting that you are very proficient at creating interesting, three-dimensional original characters with distinct personalities and (where applicable) realistic goals and motives, however dramatic and ambitious they may be.
As for what I would change about
Far Away Home...if you’re asking for a suggestion on how to improve the story in terms of where it is going, I can’t help you. As much as I love it, this is not a story I would, or could, write myself, and if I were to change anything major about the plot or characters, it would probably interfere with what you had planned for the rest of the story. Does that make sense? To use an analogy, if I were given the opportunity to visit the site of an incomplete building, without knowing what the finished product would look like, I would not want to change the placement of a beam to better correspond to my sense of aesthetics, for fear of the entire structure collapsing later on.
If what you mean is, if I had written the story so far, in exactly the same way as you except for one detail, what that detail would be, I
can give you an answer for that. I have to say, as a nostalgic (one might even say die-hard) fan of the original “
The Land Before Time”, I’m rather enamored with the idea that the Great Valley was the last (or, at least, one of the last), largest, grandest, and lushest green land left in the world at the time of the film, and that when the gang saw it for the first time, it was the most majestic and awe-inspiring sight they had ever experienced. In
Far Away Home, however, the valley’s greatness is severely undermined (as early as Act 1, Part I) by the revelation that there are “far greater” ones out there. This comes to a head in Act 3, Part IVb, where the gang (Petrie, Littlefoot, Ducky, and Spike, anyway) sees the Verdant Valley for the first time. Seeing as I prefer the exalted status of the Great Valley from the first movie, I didn’t like it.
