Well, it's that time of the year--time for the final results of this week's (month's (season's)) Fan Fic contest, as judged by me, TheAverageFan.
I asked for a story about a battle against impossible odds, requesting Good Writing, Original Scenarios, Clever Tactics, Impressive Feats, and Wow Factor. I got two pretty good stories detailing such requests. But which one is the best? Despite the low number of entries, this one was really hard to judge.
Second and First Place:
Spoiler Alert!
2nd Place: TheGrimReaper'sFriend: This was a pretty good read, more or less giving me what I was looking for (except for Original Scenarios). The writing was as good as you'd expect from TGRF, with only a few errors throughout. There was plenty of good tact to be had, ranging from an oil trap to using elementals to slow an advancing force, to (my personal favorite) Morsbane using Negation to take away Grimnak's teeth--a clever way of imagining how that power would work in real life. There were plenty of impressive feats as well. That being said, there were a few issues. There were plenty of characters, but a lot of them seemingly vanish without a trace. The scene with Concan and Saylind is pretty pointless, and Taelord's backstory with Thared seems rushed and sudden. A lot of the minor characters disappear.
To be clear, this is a fine story, and it was really hard to give it 2nd place. But it did have some issues that held it back a bit.
1st Place: Marro_Warlord: I don't like poetry. I'm not even indifferent towards it--I flat out dislike it. But the Tale of the Flooded Citadel certainly wowed me in how much i ended up liking it for a poetic entry to my prompt. So maybe I'm more lenient towards it than I thought. The story about a small skirmish at a ruin that ends up becoming a tale pretty much fit the prompt perfectly. There weren't many clever tactics or impressive feats, but the writing and simplicity of it certainly wowed me. It's short, to-the-point, and delivers what it needed to. I liked it.
I can't say much for the specifics of the poetry itself--I'm not that well-versed in how many syllables need to be in each line and so on, but it rhymed well enough and often enough to please and still managed to tell the story as it needed to. Again, it was hard to choose one over the other since they both did certain things better and others worse (they both had good writing--one had better tactics and impressiveness; the other had a better scenario and wow factor). But all in all, if I had to choose between the two (which I did), I did like this one a bit more.
So yeah, that's it. Hopefully next time is much more short and sweet (I actually came up with this prompt because I thought it'd be basic enough to not take too long--oh, the irony!) The dumb thing about all this is that I actually came up with a pretty good idea for a prompt shortly after I issued this one. Maybe next time... I'm still not so good at this whole Judging thing...
Anyway, congratulations to Marro_Warlord
(and my condolences to TGRF). I look forward to your next prompt, and happy judging!
~TAF, relieved of his post (thank God)