I thought that you already couldn't write for your own art because "Participants may not submit works explicitly connected to another work of theirs" and a story submission must be explicitly connected to an art submission.

hey I like this one!

I had to google "Anapa" and so I guess it is Anubis and we are in Egypt. Still in my mind this is Skyrim and the sentinel is a draugr... this makes me think it is cool to see the motivation of the faceless undead mooks.

It is well paced and all that stuff, a good job all round. Nice diction and no pretentiousness

if you force me to complain about something I will suggest that this one has no "larger theme" i.e. statement about life, but I mean come on, who cares. Ain't nobody got time for that, and the story is a fun and immersive time.

this one left me disoriented, which is not necessarily a bad thing

I feel like it's an anti-capitalism screed? I'm pretty sure? There's a joke here that I'm feeling left out of.

It is decently funny, but, mmm, with a pissed-off edge. It's... hmm. An unsubtle satire and farce.

I mean look there is an inherent tension if you are going to write a political minific: it's best in political stories if you don't strawman, but it's not really feasible not to strawman in 750 or less. So I just don't think this kind of story can really hit hard in a minific format except maybe with readers who also want to rail against the system?

On the other hand, I'm not even completely sure that there is an intended political meaning. This could just as easily be a satire of politically-motivated stories. So I'm just kind of thinking with my chin in my hand for now...

Not even going to try to say anything intelligent about this one.

...Actually, I will, if only to countersignal AndrewRogue.

Perfectly regular meter is overrated and nerdy. The unrhymed couplets are entirely appropriate for the purposes you've put them to. "We dance the world away" gives a feeling of finality that breaks each section of the story (twice at the end, for more finality). "ay" is also a cleaner sound to end on than "air" is: "air" just sounds incomplete. The "disruptive" line 22 that contains a pause immediately precedes the girl looking back at the narrator, so the pause gives the effect of a "my heart skipped a beat" kind of feeling which meshes very nicely with the content.

Much better than I was expecting—I never expect much from poems. A pleasant surprise.

Can't improve upon what's been said, but chiming in to say I liked it.

Plus, you've given me a new appreciation of how powerful repetition can be in a very short story. The unifying power of repetition should not be overlooked!

Really, really good in my opinion.

I see nothing wrong with this story and I feel strongly that it deserves to medal. It's a puzzle, a paradox, and a horror scenario all in one. Really engaging.

Not a terribly helpful comment but it's all I can say.

ok first of all castle in the clouds was a big joke. I thought up the ending first and then made up half a story to slap it onto. any parallelism is accidental/subconscious. I was imagining about the yugioh card "Sanctuary in the Sky" while I wrote it. I wanted it to sound like a children's fairy tale for maximum tone dissonance with the ending.

I didn't actually run out of time but fun fact I did procrastinate around and waste time all night/morning until I had fifteen minutes left to write the ending so it wouldn't be entirely a lie

I usually write about Hatsune Miku but for Pain in Paradise I switched it up a little and went with Madoka this time so my authorship wouldn't be overwhelming + totally obvious to anyone who visits my fimfic userpage. I am trying to perfect this sub-sub-genre ok I call it the "Miku story".

In a proper "miku story" there is a first person protag who has delusions of an anime girlfriend. A part of him recognizes his delusion but he is unwilling or unable to admit it to himself. So he becomes numbed and selectively disjointed from reality. He has an encounter with his anime girlfriend, which is written with a straight face, as if it were really happening. Then he encounters some kind of psychological event, whether guilt, shame, painful memories, self-awareness, anxiety, or whatever, and this event causes him to be unable to take any pleasure in the delusion. In the end the protag is worse off than he was in the beginning.

Some said that this story felt mean. I cannot deny it but that is not all it was meant to be. It is a fine line between pity and contempt and I feel both for the protagonist of a miku story. I try to lay out the case both for and against my protagonists and leave judgment to the reader. As well as being contemptible there is also a strain of the noble and the idealistic in him. He is not humping a body pillow ok he is just getting a hug from a plushie. Not sex but love. This is why there were not "more hints that it was a comedy"—if I was going to write a story just making fun of someone I would pick a less helpless target. Picking on the waifu-obsessed NEETS seems like kicking a puppy.

some wondered if seeing the Madoka anime would enhance the story: the only thing I took from the anime was the character of Madoka, the Ave Maria, and the strange non-spatial dimension in which the main scene takes place. I do have a lot of hate for a crossover that requires knowledge of source material so I definitely did not want to make the anime necessary for a reader to understand my story.

Why the line with the checks and the dead family? In my mind it sets the deluded protag into a larger world which he is actively ignoring. He can blithely talk of large sums of money and his dead family without expression because he feels nothing about either. Plus I wanted to blame him a little: with that kind of money he can be doing anything but he is playing videogames and cuddling plushies. Otherwise the story runs the risk of just being about some guy's daydream without a larger significance.

Two or three criticisms landed in my mind, the first was that of the Titanium Dragon who suggested that there are many stories out there like this one. I thought I was being really original ok so now I am really curious about where all these stories are that are just like mine

I also never noticed the continuous "I was X" sentences before. When I write this kind of story I typically whisper the words out loud to myself and if they have a certain hard to describe, off-balance cadence I write them down. The use of these sentences was unconscious and therefore uncontrolled so I think it is fair to criticize them.

Finally the Not_A_Hat said that the protag should have tried and failed rather than not trying... given the way that I wrote the scene, as opposed to how it was going in my mind, this is true. It was a big mistake on my part.

I wouldn't have thrown on that ending "eight years later" part, myself.

My reaction is "this is very cute!" and nothing else. I have physically cracked a smile, so there's that. The characters are rough and exaggerated, and the parallelisms are unsubtle. Also, there is no suspense. I think those factors weaken the idea, which should be a strong one (and is very prompt-relevant).

Grammar Nazi factors also detracted from the readability. Big speech in the middle felt clumpy, then a hard change of tone. Eh, it's just predictable, you know? Like I said, very cute. But still a missed opportunity, in my opinion.

it is a bold venture to make a story with almost nothing concrete.

my first and strongest impression upon reading is that I would like to figure out the symbolism. It is a feeling of curiosity and smug intellectualism. "Wow, I can tell that this story has symbolic meanings! I am so smart!" It is that feeling.

in the end however this is only a Nietzschean ramble. I do not come away convicted of, or even tempted by, the worldview encapsulated, and I put this down to the lack of concreteness.

The opening is unfortunate in that there is the misspelled word in the first sentence and then also the archaisms stick out more strongly in the opening.