Last She-Ra writeoff before season 5! Good luck everyone 😃

Unless we decide to have, like, a special hype writeoff... A hypeoff.

I thought the Shakespeare round was meant to be on the 23rd...

Actually popping in again, because I haven't really looked at other comments before making mine this round, but I wanna provide some balance and a different perspective here.

>>Pascoite talks about importing relationships wholesale from canon (e.g. Hordak and Entrapta, Mermista and Sea Hawk) as if that's a bad thing, but imo this is one of the strongest things about fanfiction. Even in an AU as distant as this one, fanfic allows us to know that our readers will make certain assumptions and connections, because we can assume a knowledge of canon (otherwise, why would you read the fic?) I think this piece does a fantastic job of delineating between the things which can't be assumed in context of a she-ra writeoff and things that can - the author knows to go ham on the anime exposition, not just because it suits the anime genre but also because the audience may be unfamiliar, but gracefully steps back from any and all she-ra exposition beyond "here's how to translate from canon to AU".

Every fanfic I have ever praised for pushing the boundaries of the medium and being generally amazing art has known this. Every single one uses assumed reader knowledge in incredible ways. It's the greatest strength of the medium! So while I can understand the criticism from a general writing improvement perspective, I did feel the need to drop in and gently disagree on that front - I think it's one of the things this fic did really well.

This fic is pure, unadulterated anime. Whether that's a good thing or not will probably vary by reader, but I don't think I've ever read a story that so faithfully recreates the experience of anime for a reader: from varied, interesting fight sequences, to slow exposition of world rules that seem to constantly shift in service of the need for tension and drama, I can safely say that this is the second most anime writeoff entry I have ever read.

Even though I could vaguely recognise the title as a reference to an anime I haven't seen, I never felt like I was lost in the crossover - okay, I did, but in that "anime logic doesn't make sense" kinda way rather than feeling like I was missing a reference, which was Good, Actually. The constant twists and turns kept me on my toes as a reader, and the AU changes were absolutely fantastic. We don't get enough AUs in the writeoff, imo. We should have more.

I wanna criticise the ending for pulling a "it was just a dream" style twist, but actually:
a) it was signposted
b) it was well-written and cute
c) it made me laugh
d) adora is an anime nerd lmao

So I won't do that. Instead I'll just say that I think this fic could work just as well with a serious ending (despite being an affectionate parody? of anime tropes, it stands alone really well and could carry on strength of writing alone) as it could with the funny one, and I trust the author to have picked the one they like the most. Because when two things work just as well as each other, that's really the only decision that matters.

I liked this piece a lot: really well done, author. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go and have a small breakdown over trying to rank this round, because all of the stories were amazing and I don't know how to judge them aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

In this house, we love and respect Mr Bones ☠

This was a cute entry. Kinda feels like a little dig at the fandom ("hey, remember all those theories that Kyle was He-Man back in S1?") but if it is, it doesn't come across as mean-spirited at all.

I do think this story needs more unity - I can kinda see how the last two scenes link, but beyond setting up the Skeletor joke I'm not quite sure why the first scene is there (though don't get me wrong - just as a standalone scene, I kinda love it. Bit messy, but cute and fun). The timeskips are relatively buried, too, which isn't a bad thing but it does make the story's structure a little murkier.

All in all, though, a decent entry with a solid idea behind it. I enjoyed it!

This is gorgeous.

You know, I had real doubts during the opening scene of this story. And I'll be honest, author: if I were reading this elsewhere, I likely wouldn't have made it past that scene - between the run-on sentences of the opening paragraphs lacking any punch and the "we killed Bow" joke not quite landing (I blame the medium - it would have worked great in an actual episode, imo, but feels off in fic), I really struggled to get into this one.

But oh my god, am I glad I did.

The conversation with Varnish was an absolute delight to read. Soft, caring, and fleshing out Best Boy with just the right level of detail? I love it. Really solid work there, author. I'd quite my favourite bits, but... I'm just gonna gesture wildly at the last dozen paragraphs or so instead. They're pretty great.

It took me slightly too long to realise this was in AU territory, which I will attribute to sleepiness, and which absolutely made the ending hurt more.

Besides formatting/editing nitpicks, I have no real complaints here. Maybe I'm still emotionally stabilising myself, but that ending threw every worry I had about this story being nothing more than fluff* out the window. Really good job, author!


*which isn't even a complaint. I like fluff!

>>Miller Minus
Alternative caption:
"I am feel uncomfortable when we are not about me?"

I'm gonna chime in to disagree with the other commenters here: I love that this piece tones down the emotions of the scene, and that the resolution is boiled down to "We can talk about it tomorrow"—the conversation George and Lance have in this piece is not an easy one, and I think the decision not to address it through to a resolution was a sensible one, given the format restrictions. I also like that the piece feels sleepy. It's a lovely tone, imo, and the sort of creative decision that works well for minifics.

Other than that, I'm in agreement with >>No_Raisin and >>LoftyWithers on the strengths of this piece. It's a lovely moment between two characters who I'm glad are getting much-deserved attention and a really fun take on the prompt. My own personal gripe is that the prose doesn't quite match up to the strength of the dialogue—I don't really get any sense that the prose changes pace at all, here, and the pace you've set is a pretty slow one! I like the choice of pace, don't get me wrong, but I'd love to see a little bit of variety here and there to spice it up and keep interest going.

Overall, though, this is a solid entry and a genuinely lovely bit of fanfiction. Shout out to the decision to repeat the "Lance waited" motif—I think it could be tidier, but that was a really good choice and one that I thoroughly enjoyed.

What a great piece. Lonnie makes a fantastic foil to Catra, as this piece makes perfectly clear, and this piece manages to combine a lovely framing of Catra's mindset with an emotional character piece about two of the best horde soldiers. Like >>No_Raisin, I think this piece feels confined by the word limit, but I think that's because this piece reads more as a proof of concept for the idea of "Lonnie as Catra-foil" than as a full piece in its own right. And I don't really want to discourage that—minific rounds have always been events that welcome experimentation, and this is by all accounts a successful experiment. That the conclusion is "yeah, this idea works and could be a good long-form story idea" shouldn't take away from this piece's strengths.

My only concern, then, is that the piece seems a little too focused on exploring that idea. You know the old addage "show, don't tell?" It's not a bit of advice I'm a fan of, but I think that the more general idea of standing back and letting things speak for themselves is a useful one. In this piece, I'd love to see you step a little bit back from that idea of Lonnie and Catra's similarities: you straight-up have Lonnie say "I think about Adora a lot too, which doesn't make me and Catra so different," after all! The similarities are there; just show them to us, and let them do the talking instead.

Honestly, though, that's nitpicking. This one's top of my slate, after all 😉

Ok so I'm gonna dive right into the thing that I both adore and loathe in this entry: the lack of context. Look, I get it—the whole point of this piece is that it doesn't matter where Catra is or what she's stealing, and you make that abundantly clear (both implicitly, by saying nothing, and explicitly, when you describe objects of past heists as "shiny things"). It's not often I see a piece that manages to use not saying something to such good effect, and that is admirable and fantastic and excellently done and...

... arrrrrrgh. It frustrates me. Every fibre of my being wants to know the context of this story, even as I write a review that praises the story for knowing that adding that context would take away from the piece's primary focus. It feels like this story is actively taunting me, author: the cat wordplay certainly adds to that impression. I really like this piece after reading it, but I can't say that the act of reading it was the most fun I've had.

Overall? Solid entry. Frustrating, yes... but solid.

Author, let me be frank: I really like all of your paragraphs individually, but I am absolutely not sold on the order you've put them in. There are a couple of places where the flow of the narration jumps from subject to subject (and in a piece like this, which reads almost like a meditation on a single theme, that really feels like a poor decision), and I don't really see how they're connected. Particularly weird moment: the shift out of the parentheses. I actually really like the parentheses, for the record—they add this sense of distance to the only paragraph that opens with Adora and Bow, which says so much—and my gut instinct is that the single-line paragraph that follows is meant to be a thematic bridge, but instead it's more like a door slamming shut as a new theme opens up.

The structural issues are a shame because the tone and mood of this piece are delightfully melancholy. The piece keeps us at an emotional distance, but occasionally lets these heavy blows come in (to quote both previous comments: "oof") without taking a step closer to the reader, which really makes the impact greater ("big oof"). With a bit of spring cleaning and rework, this could be a very good piece; as it is, it's a middle-of-the-pack entry for me.

I'll admit that the opening conceit of this story (namely, that Swift Wind knew and cared about the moral alignment of the Horde prior to S1E1) is an interesting one, and I'm not sure I'm fully sold on it. And it can be a bit difficult to enjoy a story when you're not sold on the premise—that I did enjoy myself while reading this speaks volumes about the story's warm tone and uplifting message.

There are, as >>No_Raisin points out, technical errors that hold this piece back. You kinda expect to see that sort of thing in writeoffs, and especially in minific rounds, where the short writing time leaves little room for editing passes. I reckon this piece would look dramatically better with a bit of careful attention post-contest to tidy those up, and I'd love to see it if you do give it that polish! Despite its faults, this piece has some really strong ideas ("Being able to fly and use magic were both nice, but Swift Wind's favourite power of all of them is the ability to speak his mind" is just lovely) that would be a lot of fun to see if given the proper time and care.

My obscenely long work week is finally over and I am so ready to curl up and write she-ra!

Also I just found out there's a drop down letting me post as a user or as an organiser. Don't let me abuse this power*, folks. It's so tempting.

*I think it just changes the colour of my name tag to green but shush that's a kind of power.

Gonna start with the elephant in the room: as >>Scramblers and Shadows touches on, author's notes aren't really common in writeoff entries. I think this might actually be the third time I've ever seen one, and I’ve been doing this for a while now. I don't actually think they're something we should avoid—there's a lot you can do with author's notes, and they have a long history in fanfiction that I don't think we can so easily brush aside. So let's open with this caveat: author's notes in writeoffs, while unusual, are not a bad thing, and I don't want to discourage anyone from trying them out if they want to. It's up to each of us to decide how we want to use our word count, after all.

That said, I wanted to take a bit of time to talk about the author's note in this story, because it does a couple of things that aren't necessarily for the best.

The first thing your author's note does is to state the premise of the entry. This is not a particularly uncommon thing in fanfiction, and there are a few good reasons for it; most importantly, it gives readers a bit of a heads up for the kind of story they're getting in a very different way than a story description might (and, of course, we are in a setting where story descriptions aren't a thing, so this use makes a bit of sense). That said, this story goes on to try and build a little tension with the build-up to (and revelation of) that premise, and to me that feels like you're trying to have your cake and eat it. By telling us straight-up that this is a story about Catra scratching Adora's eyes—and naming your story Sightless—you rob Adora's panic of a fair amount of its emotional weight, which makes the start of this piece a lot less powerful than it otherwise could be. To your credit, it's clear that you're trying to work around this: the brevity of the opening shows that you're not trying to keep that tension dragged out for a Big Reveal™, but rather to give us that immediate moment of panic. I think there are better ways to achieve this, and I do think your author's note harms the attempt, but it was nice to see that you weren't unaware of this.

This bit of the author's note also plays into the focus issue that Scramblers highlights above. You absolutely highlight to us that Adora's blindness is going to be the focal point of this story, which is hammered home with the title, and that sets me up as a reader to expect a character-driven story about Adora coping with that. This is... not the story we get, to put it mildly. This misdirection doesn't read too well, and left me feeling disoriented throughout this piece as I waited for us to get back to what I thought the plot was supposed to be. I don't think this problem would be nearly so bad without the author's note guiding us to the wrong conclusion.

The other half of your author's note is as time-honoured a tradition as any in fanfiction: acknowledging our own failings as authors. I don't have too much to say on this, because I'm a little bit torn—as a reviewer in a workshop context, it's quite valuable to me to know what your immediate issues with the piece are, as that's absolutely going to help me give better feedback, but as a judge in a competition context we'll shelve it under "not the best first impression in writeoff history". Obviously everyone comes to the writeoffs with different expectations and priorities, so this isn't a criticism, but thought it was worth mentioning regardless.

The smiley, however, just puts the reader in a good mood. I actually can't fault that, it's a good touch.

Let's move on to the piece itself. The prose could use a little work: your paragraphing in particular stands out, as the piece is almost exclusively formed of sharp, short paragraphs. There are a lot of places where I'm just not sure why you've given us a paragraph break, because the sentences flow on from each other naturally and comfortably. Let's take a look at an example:

Before he could leave, however, Queen Angella landed, She Hawk and all the other princesses paying their respects. Angella acknowledged a few of them, before turning to Glimmer and pulling her into a hug, inviting Swift Wind in.

Swift Wind hesitated. He would never normally turn down a hug from the Queen, but he was worried about Adora.

Bow squealed and ran into the hug, dragging Swift Wind behind him.

Your first paragraph break here is great for so many reasons, and I particularly love that it highlights Swift Wind's hesitancy. As the opening two sentences of a paragraph, you've also got the right idea going here: I love that snappy, three-word sentence, followed by a longer, thoughtful explanation. (That said, and this isn't advice I often give, but I'd love to see you show rather than tell here. You don't need to state "but he was worried about Adora", when you can show us that internal conflict with a something along the lines of a nervous glance around for Adora.) Bow's interruption of Swift Wind's thought process is a great bit of characterisation—although given the relative tragedy of the moment, perhaps "squealed" is not the best choice of word—and I really don't think that a new paragraph is the best place for it. By moving this into the same paragraph, you flow directly from one to the other, and just as Bow interrupts Swift Wind's thoughts so too does this sentence interrupt his bit of the narration.

Also, too many unnecessary paragraph breaks can just be tiring to read. I can justify it all fancy-like till the cows come home, but that's the most important reason to vary paragraph lengths. Everything else is just a bonus.

I've already overstayed my welcome in this review, so I'm going to quickly summarise a few other strengths and weaknesses of this piece:

• Despite issues, there's a lot of promise to the prose. I don't know how much the issues this piece has stem from time constraints, but there are some strong lines here, so either polish or experience (or perhaps both) are going to really make those shine.
• That said, be careful of falling into some of the more easily-avoidable traps of writing. Over-reliance on descriptions of characters instead of just their names, and overuse of saidisms where the word "said" would work just fine, drag this piece down. It's a tiny change that would really make a large difference.
• There are a few things that I rarely see outside of fanfiction that I think are also a detriment to this story. Lines like "~~ONE EXPLANATION LATER~~" feel almost comical in a situation that is anything but, and I think tools like this can make us somewhat lazy as writers. There are always creative ways around avoiding unnecessarily explaining things the audience already knows, or using those explanations for some other purpose so they don't feel wasteful. This story would be much better off with a more creative way of skipping that time.
• Thank you for bringing Swift-Ra into my life. This is a concept I did not think I needed. I was wrong.

I hope this comment is useful to you, author! After the contest is over, if you want to discuss any of the above (or indeed anything else writing related), I'm available in both the Writeoff and the She-Ra discord servers, and (as long as I'm not busy) am usually more than happy to talk about writing in general. I'll also take this moment to second the bulk of what Scramblers and >>salamander have said—their feedback is super great and also far less rambly than mine.

was gonna vote this first but then you had to take a dig at m'boi randall

for shame

(<3)

I'm honestly quite torn about this piece. In the details, it excels: every time I read through, I spot something new that catches my attention and gets a wry smile out of me. It's a fairly strong comedy, with a touching (if understated) character arc. But while this piece is clearly at home in quippy one-liners, which are used well throughout, its longer jokes fell a little flat for me. Let's look at a quick example:

"Did you die?" Entrapta said, standing in the exploded doorway.

"Only on the insi-hi-hi-hi-i-ide!" Scorpia said, bursting into profound, uncontrolled sobs.

"What?" Entrapta said. "I have my earmuffs on, you're gonna have to speak at like... can you do 300 decibels?"

Scorpia continued crying.

"What?"

I've included the first two lines here for context, and also to praise them: Scorpia's line here in particular is exactly the sort of quip that this piece does well with, and the inclusion of "exploded" here is (beyond merely being an extension of continuity) just a funny bit of description. But after that, this passage trails off a bit: while I kinda get what you were going for, here, I feel like just the line "What?" by itself, even as repetition, doesn't really pack enough punch to be funny. This example stood out for me in particular because it was the end of a scene, which really left a poor impression on me.

That's actually a bit of a trend in this piece—weak scene endings. Your very last line is much stronger (though still felt as if it was missing a little something, to me?), but the other scene endings in this piece all left me feeling a little unsatisfied, in a similar way to the one quoted above. I got the overall impression that they just weren't weighty enough to have the scenes feel like they were ending, rather than simply drifting off.

While I wasn't too keen on some of the nuances of the characterisation here (>>Dubs_Rewatcher has touched on Entrapta's voicing above, and I think I was caught a bit more off-guard by the "babe thing"), there are a handful of great moments here that shine through and elevate this story above the silly comedy. In particular, I adored the sequence where Catra starts to teach Scorpia dancing. It's cute and funny, but also touching in a way that I wasn't expecting at that point in the story, and that's something I have to give a lot of credit to. And the detail in the description of the gymnasium was such a breath of fresh air after the action-and-dialogue-heavy prose we'd gotten so far; I'd like to see you work in occasional snippets of detail like that more, author, not just because it was an absolute delight to read but also because it could do wonders for the flow of the story.

I'm seconding Dubs' thoughts on the friendshipping at the end, by the way. That was 100% the right call here, and it worked very, very well.

Speaking of things Dubs said, we were chatting about this story in DMs when I was informed that Dragstor was, in fact, an obscure classic villain. He was already, in my opinion, the single funniest thing in this entry (I lost it at his introduction), and my enjoyment of this piece was considerably improved by looking him up. To anyone sitting on the fence on this one: go google Dragstor. It'll make your day.

>>scifipony
I've got a number of points about this post, and the posts that came before it. The first is that I think you and I greatly disagree over exactly what an author ought to do to combat disbelief, because I certainly don't think that a statement like "the sky was purple" would come close to breaking mine, as a reader. I would read the line, think "huh, that's different", and recognise that statement as a fact of the imaginary world that I am reading about (as perceived by the narrator). Simple facts that contradict my perception of my own reality are what my imagination is for, after all. Worth noting the disagreement, I feel, as it’ll likely colour a lot of this discussion.

I'm also not 100% sure that you're using the term lampshading correctly. It's not a term I've come across too often before, so (ironically) the first time I really looked into it was reading the very link you posted in your review. My understanding from that is that lampshading explicitly involves not explaining something that seems far-fetched. TvTropes describes the technique as "calling attention to [an implausible plot development or reliance on a trope] and simply moving on", which is in my mind closer to what the story already does than it is to your suggested improvement. Though, naturally, since this is a term I've only recently learned about, I'm happy to be corrected on that one (would appreciate some sources to read along with any corrections!)

A pretty big point of contention here is that I don't think all of your rules are exactly applicable to the writeoff, as a workshop format. You say that it's never useful for an author to justify themselves to a critic: why? If a critic tells me that something I've written has evoked a response that clearly doesn't match what I'm attempting to convey, and I don't explain what I was attempting to do and how I was attempting to do it, how can I open a dialogue in order to get advice that is relevant to my intentions?

The writeoff is a workshop forum, designed around critical conversion—critics can reply to existing responses by design, as this allows helpful and useful discussion to develop. It also allows us to become better critics. When I started out in the writeoff, as anyone who was around at the time would likely tell you, I was a bit of an arrogant asshat whose criticism was more often asinine than it was useful. I'd like to think that I've gotten better since then, and if I have it's entirely because other people replied to what I said and told me "hey Quill, you might want to consider not lecturing people about commas when you absolutely suck at using them"*.

Put simply: dialogue is the cornerstone of forum criticism. The Clarion method is not the only good way to run a workshop, and it's not how we run this one.

I'm surprised that you're astounded to find No Raisin write a comment back to you, as I can see that you have some history in the writeoffs. While it's by no means a universal practice, people writing retrospectives in which they respond to reviews to answer and ask questions, clarify, say thank you, or just share interesting facts about the process of writing the entry is fairly normal behaviour here. No Raisin even alludes to it above.

I'm also particularly shocked that you think No Raisin's message rejected your criticism because of ego, of all things. He says (in my opinion, rightly) that he does not have to cater to your worldview in his story, because the statement being made is sufficiently simple and fundamental that it can be expected that readers will suspend their disbelief if they happen to disagree with it. That's a reasoned disagreement, clearly and thoughtfully explained, if a little angrily so. To dismiss that disagreement as mere ego is itself somewhat egotistical—you assume that your suggestion must be valid, and refuse to recognise any argument that disagrees with it as so, because it is backed by your authentic experience of the story.

So let me talk about my own real problem with your initial critique. While I might disagree that the assertion in question is a good reason to lose engagement with a story, I am more than comfortable accepting that you did find it jarring, and I have no real problem with you stating that. Hell, as a physics graduate, if I read a story with a significant physical or mathematical error in it, I would find that jarring, and I would consider mentioning it in a review. The problem comes when you insist that the author accommodates that, because that is when you step out of the bounds of describing your reaction and into the realm of suggesting improvements. One of your rules is to never rewrite a story for someone—good. That's sensible. But proposing changes, even without proposing explicit wordings for them, still steps into this dangerous world where you might not actually know what's best for the story, only what you think might be.

In that world, we have to be humble. As critics, we have to acknowledge that our advice might just run completely counter to the author's intent—indeed, that we might have so fundamentally misunderstood the author's intent as to be proposing a change that makes the story worse. What we can't do, as you have done, is hide behind the shield of "all experiences by readers are useful and valid", because we've deliberately stepped out of the world in which that shield works.

If I read a story where a writer fundamentally misunderstood some principle of quantum physics or relativity, it very well might break me out of my immersion, and I very well might mention it. But you know what? I'd recognise that I was intended to accept their misunderstanding as fact, even if it isn't, and do my best to get back in. And at the end, if it weren't a statement fundamental to the story itself, I might say "by the way, this isn't how that works" (I think Cass did something like that this round with a story's description of law school?), but I certainly wouldn't tell the author "and you absolutely must write it how it works in real life or you might break some people's immersion if they happen to care enough about the subject". That probably isn't something they care much about, and I'd come across as a bit of an asshat. If I just let the author know what’s wrong in their description of a field I am an expert in, they get to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of using that.

There are two differences between that hypothetical situation and this real one. Firstly, in the hypothetical I'm not describing a disagreement with a worldview, but a disagreement with empirical fact, so one could argue that the case for making the change is stronger. And, secondly, the hypothetical change isn't fundamental to the story—I mentioned that for a reason. In this real situation, the assertion that faith died out following some apocalypse is part of the fundamental conceit of the story being told. To say that it needs explaining is no better than me criticising a work of fantasy for not mentioning the evolutionary origins of dragons, or a sci-fi story for not explaining that scientific advancements lead to the apparent limit of the speed of light being overcome. Those assumptions are inherent to the story, and to ask the author to justify them in-text is, in my opinion, refusing to engage with the story in good faith.

I'd like to end by stating my opposition to your position on writeoff entries as practice stories. People use writeoff entries for all sorts of things after the events (I've bought a short story anthology with one in!), and the way you write about them in your comment strikes me as particularly dismissive. You might use the stories you write for writeoffs as throwaway stories, and you might write plenty of other things, but some of us actually do care about (at least some of) our entries in these contests. I would ask you very kindly not to dismiss entries to any workshop as things to be thrown away. Not all of us have the luxury to treat them as such, and some of us have to treasure every little bit of writing we get to do.

---

* these weren't exactly the words used, but in my first ever writeoff I critiqued a story for using commas wrong (because I was young and foolish) when it actually used them right (very foolish). Horizon was kind enough to point out my error, and I've gradually moved toward trying to give more useful criticism as a result. I continue to be absolutely mortified by this story, but I share it because a) it's a useful illustration of my point and b) if I can avoid getting embarrassed by it, it's actually pretty funny.