>>Morning Sun I'm sad this one didn't go on, it was my favorite TZ episode reworking.

Okay, so... this was obviously a complete and total flop. Exactly one person seemed to understand what I'd been trying to do, and they presented that understanding as a criticism. So... back to the drawing board, I guess?

I think the real problem here is this story is static

<--the thing in question.

The idea was basically The Twilight Will Last Forever, and I was trying to get that across (to the point of using up precious words repeating things, just to show that nothing had changed and nothing would ever change!) But I guess the nuke thing which was just the first idea I came up with for something with enough whammy to get both Celestia and Luna was too distracting, and then the line where Twilight was trying to remember how she'd moved the sun and moon way back when made everybody somehow think Tirek was relevant now and it was just obviously way too confusing. I should apparently stick to stories where there's mostly text and not subtext. :P

I honestly thought it would be super obvious what was going on, I was concentrating more on how to make that sense of static sameness come across.

So yeah. Big fat belly flop there.

Okay, so insomniac me is going back over some of these, looking at other people's comments, etc. and this one in particular keeps niggling at me. I'm seeing all these "expand, expand, expand" comments, and I just put my finger on why those haven't sat right with me.

I think people have actually missed the genre of this story entirely. It's not a Friendship Problem story, it's a comedy. The "resolution" is a punch line, and a punch line should have punch. Expanding on a punch line doesn't make it punchier, it makes it less funny. And there's the thing I think is the actual flaw. I smiled at the end of this, but I didn't laugh out loud. The punch line needs to be more punchy, not less. I feel that if anything including cake, and sheepish Celestia, and the weekly appointments could be cut down? It's like three little joke hits in a row there, and that may actually be diluting the humor a bit. (I actually laughed more at the "anxious wing" than at the ending, which is part of why I thought maybe it should be in-line not in footnotes? Though really, having footnote jokes that are funnier than the main text jokes is only following in the grand tradition of writers like Terry Pratchett, so maybe that's not a problem after all. The throne room one I'm still not so sure about, it's not really doing much for me, but it does keep the anxious wing one from being all alone, so maybe it serves a purpose.)

Anyhow. Comedy is really not my genre, so maybe somebody who writes more of it than I do can give a more concrete suggestion, but I really feel like all the folks asking for more detail about the conflict are missing the fact that it exists solely to set up the last few lines as punch lines, and expanding on that would probably be a mistake.

>>Xepher
Comments like this kinda baffle me. No offense. I've seen several so far on different stories, and it's like... "but there were 750 words to use, was this author supposed to just give up and write nothing, when it became obvious they'd have to rush it?"

>>Zaid Val'Roa
>>Posh
Huh. I was about to say that the story specifically said that magic hadn't done it, so it couldn't be Twilight's doing, it had to be some other party who'd invented the atom bomb. But actually on re-reading it says no magic except the alicorn's could have done it, so I guess it could be Twi! It certainly changes the story if it's her fault rather than something some other random enemy did. Though in that case (i.e. if Twi did it with alicorn magic) I'm not sure what the reference to the strange energy that wasn't magic is?

This... wow. Okay. This either needs to be VERY re-worked, or a heck of a lot longer, because I am having a hard time making heads or tails of it. So much of it makes no sense. Why are Twi and Daring partners? What is the artifact? Normally I could let that slide, but what it is seems to matter here! It's obviously vital to... somepony somehow. And yet if it's that vital, why did Twilight give it up? If it's not that vital, why go to all the effort of becoming partners for a double cross on both sides in order to get it? It's just... so many questions! No answers! Halp!

This one just made me go "aww".

This is a nicely Twilight Zone premise, but I personally feel that Spike is a little out of character. Unless repeatedly provoked he's not usually short with Twilight or ungrateful to her, and he is both right from the beginning of this story. It's also a bit jerky and rushed feeling, though I know that's just due to the length constraints.

Yeah, this one does nothing for me. It's a cute play on the mix between the Paranoia setting and the pony fandom's hatred of edgy red and black OCs, but that's all it's got and I feel like I'm missing something about the ending.

I have to say that I personally don't like the SCP format that much, and the censoring kind of drives me bananas. I know that's me as a reader, not any fault of this as a story.

It's not actually a story as such, though, so I don't feel hugely guilty for not loving it. It feels like the intro to an actual story, more than anything else.

Best OC I've seen this whole contest. (Almost the only OC, admittedly, but still.) I found this very fun to read, Rod and Silver Spoon bouncing off each other works very well.

I was waiting for the sign this wasn't the Equestria I knew, and the author delivered! The twist may have been predictable, but it was exactly what the story required, and there's nothing wrong with a solidly-written story that delivers exactly what the reader expects, so nicely done.

I like the concept a lot. I feel like it hasn't really been realized, though. We've just gotten an info-dump from Lyra, and Lyra inviting herself along on an unspecified adventure. It makes me wonder why Moon Dancer is even there at all, except I guess as somepony for Lyra to tell all this to. I can't exactly put my finger on how you'd fix that, but it just feels (perhaps ironically) like Moon Dancer is a bit of a background pony in her own story here.

So... the Narrator is a mysterious pony inside Twilight's castle? Except the first part seems to make it clear she's hearing a disembodied voice, so the embodyment of the voice in the later part seems odd. Or is that meant to be something else entirely? I really don't know what to make of this. Twilight seems to wildly over-react to hearing a strange voice saying things that aren't terribly threatening, so it comes across not so much as a horror story as a "Twilight is being neurotic" story, except the physical pony somehow in the locked room suggests maybe the danger is real, but there's no sense of danger as we read up until that point, so it feels very sudden and maybe a little too ambiguous.

Hmm. I want to like this one, but I feel like Applejack is out of character. She's been shown to be kind of ruthless when it comes to the prosperity of her farm. It seems really odd for her to not be willing to accept a rescuing hoof in time of need. I could see a little reluctance, but needing to be tricked into it felt like a bit much. Maybe it's just me.

It's a cute little slice of life. I feel like the connection to the prompt is preeeeeeeeeeetty tenuous here, since it's the made up name of a made up game, but hey, at least it's not another fic centering entirely on Twilight Sparkle for its connection to the prompt, so good for that.

Trying to find the stories I forgot to leave comments on earlier and catch 'em all. Anyhow, I disagree with the above that it needs to explain what happened. To me what happened is pretty clear, (somebody nuked Canterlot, obv. I guess I should spoiler that?) and "who" and "why" feel pretty irrelevant. Like, some digression about how it was the gryphons or whatever wouldn't add anything meaningful to what Twilight's feeling?

Also, poor Twi. The discovery of atomic radiation, and she can't properly enjoy it!

This is... wow. I've read a symmetrical poem before, but it was really gimmicky. This isn't. It manages to actually tell a story, (a little indirectly, but that's poetry for you) and it works amazingly well. How the heck did the author write this! HOW? So good.

>>Morning Sun I actually feel like the author meant it to have been a few billion years or so, and just didn't make that clear enough. I had to re-read the beginning a second time, and it made a ton more sense once I went "Oooooooh, this is basically after the end of the world and the sun is probably a red giant and everything's long since over with. Got it!" and suddenly it was a much better story.

And no, it's not an imitation of any single episode I'm aware of, just it has that "this could be an episode" feel to it.

...well. I've read them all! And commented on most of them, I know I missed a few. I need to go back and catch all those later, just sometimes I can't think of anything to say.

Now the problem of getting my voting properly arranged. It's really frustrating that so many of them are good, actually! I look at the list as it's ordered now, and there are things I thoroughly enjoyed that are well under 50% and so I'm not really voting for them to go on to the next round, yet I think they should. But if only the ones that weren't a good read got cut, the voting wouldn't eliminate much at all! Aieeeee. I guess the middle of the pack doesn't really matter as much as what ones I put all the way at the top, and my choices there are pretty clear.

Nice! This was inspired by Asimov's The Last Question, wasn't it? It's a good pony-fied sendup, if so. I think this is another one that could use a good copy-editing, it has some technical flaws in the writing, but the idea is absolutely solid and overall the execution is nicely done. Get yourself a good editor to catch your little grammatical errors and you have a real gem of a story here.

I think the idea here is a little stronger than the execution. There's some technical issues with the dialogue and it could stand a good copy-editing, I think there are a few minor grammatical errors. (I spotted at least one past tense/present tense problem, and a few lines just seem awkward and clunky.) I do think it does a good job of conveying the mood and feeling of Celestia and Luna, how they feel, how they misunderstand each other.

Ha ha ha. Okay, this is amazing. Seriously. Here I thought the punchline would be that Spike ate all of "mommy's" jewelry, but this is even funnier.

I think I've missed something. The setup is pretty clear, Twilight didn't go to Ponyville, because she never wrote Celestia a letter about finding the old prophecy, and then she used dark magic to... do something?

And the celebration was cancelled, and somehow that... what, exactly? Stopped Nightmare Moon from coming back? How? Why? Or was she somehow never banished at all, if there weren't spots on the moon, now there are. So... Twilight banished herself to the moon somehow? Or the original spots were there and now there are more because... who else got banished? Why? And the sun isn't coming up? But if the sun hasn't come up, why are the guards acting like that's normal? I'm afraid this leaves me really confused.