ugh i hate it when my quiet place gets haunted by spooks and spectres

I think we are in Equestria Girls here between the reference to teachers and the "walls of humanity"

I can imagine Pinkie behaving like in the opening just as a normal adolescent angst type of thing, i know i would always go to nature and cry about things when i was younger

the opening has little to do with the rest, in fact let me enumerate the things about this story that do not make sense

- Pinkie's angst has no impact on the rest of the story and acts as a major red herring
- Why say you are dead if you are not? What's the state of mind there? Guilt? I don't understand
- Why hide if your friend has fallen injured or dead and days later ask someone who chances to wander to where you are, personally to contact your parents? Why not call the police and ambulance yourself?

overall the feeling is definitely that there is some vital information being withheld here

I would try to make sense of it and say that Shea and Amaranth are schizoid manifestations of different aspects of Pinkie's personality and that they are a delusion. The black haired girl and the red haired girl you know... however the seemingly very real parents and police and corpse stop me from saying this. Are the police and the parents a delusion too?

actually yes why not i will go with that. it is a psychodrama with "characters" reifying aspects of Pinkie. Shea is not a ghost, Shea is Pinkie. Amaranth is Pinkie. something has broken under the weight

everything suddenly clicks and makes sense! hey, YOU WIN!!

CONGRATS!!

your award is: OBTUSE HIPSTER AWARD

I wish "the scientist is an amoral utilitarian" was not a trope. Where are the scientists with strong backbone who would never think of committing such intrinsically immoral acts as cat borrowing and butterstrapping?

Cold in Gardez scolded us all on the discord most viciously, screaming and slapping everyone, saying that we should not just leave glowing praise on even a good story because then the author does not improve. therefore for each of my reviews I am going to jam the stick a few inches further up my butt and see if I can find any criticism to give

ok here i go

...the title is lame. step it up bby

hmm I really like the feeling of transition on the "I accept the full moral and ethical culpability" line. it is like a car shifting into gear, like you know you're about to go someplace. feels like a massage

no real jokey-jokes so it's hard to find a moment to actually laugh out loud despite how funny the story is overall

yes everything is solid, the story was fun to read and not a waste of time at all. that is the baseline standard so YOU WIN!!

CONGRATS!!

your award is: FASTEST SPINNING CAT AWARD

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.

no retrospective

only thing I will say is...

someone somewhere ranked this entry above another entry.

this is deeply frightening.

oh my god this was a riot

actual out loud belly laughs, not even joking

much of the same that I said about Pain in Paradise applies to this one

I like Chad ok he is a nice guy. His problem is that he is so obsessed with his flaws that he isn't relating well with others. If he were secure in his beliefs he would not feel threatened by the doctor even despite the fact that the doctor is being rather unprofessional.

In my opinion, Chad has made himself ridiculous, not me... he is the one who sees thunder and rain, drama and conspiracy in everyday flawed people. I'm not going to hate him or laugh at him for living in that melodramatic world. But I'm still going to convey that melodrama honestly. If that makes you laugh... well I guess that's your business.

by the way I am not arguing in this story either for or against "relaxed sexual mores"... I would not use a story to make an argument that would alienate half my readers whichever side I took. I guess I succeeded here because different readers found opposite intentions in it.

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.

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

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.

Clearly a policeman. I don't understand the cause of the fight, though.

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!

Here's the thing. There was no point at which you had me questioning what happened. Meaning no mystery.

At first it seems completely as if Howard has done away with Beauregard, and there is no hint that it might be otherwise. Then, in a heel-face turn, we find out that it was otherwise. Cool! But there's no suspense there. I shift immediately from being totally convinced of one proposition to being totally convinced of its opposite.

No suspense, no tension. No tension, dull story. Simple as that.

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.

cute angel/demon love-hate business relationship with Mother Teresa and Trump(maybe?) stand-ins

gone back over it two or three times and I still don't understand what the codicil exactly states or whose opinions are important (why?) in the matter of salvation or damnation. I'm probably just stupid though

started slow but picked up once the dialogue hit

the last line isn't landing for me. I don't understand why they hate it? It seems like they're having fun.

so the surface meaning is trees, of course, a small one in the shadow of a larger one.

However some of the language suggests that we aren't really talking about trees here, or at least the language wouldn't make sense if it was just trees and nothing else.

Like "How you’ve grown from the cornucopia of my mind!" is an enigmatic line and ya know trees aren't known for growing from one another's minds so I'm sitting here thinking what the hell is this about?

I thought I had it for a minute, thinking that the small tree was a person's mind and the large one was his body, and the outracing referred to growing up outwardly without maturing inwardly... but that doesn't really work.

Add to that the "faithful student" and "twilight" mentions and other lines such as "Heaven does not answer the cries of the damned" and I am well and truly stumped.

Best I can figure is that we are looking at someone who watched a close friend achieve great success while he himself became a failure, and now he is jealous and desires that success for himself, thinking he deserves it...

on the other hand if it is really just trees after all then I think a lot of the lines are too melodramatic for that and also don't fit (I mean trees don't typically cut one another down to my knowledge)

A little disorienting because it has to move so quickly. I mostly followed it though.

I think everything here is in the reveals. It gives a feeling of "Hey, that's pretty cool, I wouldn't have thought of that." Beyond that, I'm looking for something else to like but I'm finding it a bit thin. It impresses at first but then the flash fades and it's just kind of meh. Like, "okay, whatever, I'm not really feeling any strong emotions about the characters, but that was a neat trick."

I am given to understand that the characters are an in-joke, okay then. I don't know who Pallada represents.

overall it's disjointed and both the jokes and the feels have trouble landing correctly because the timings are all off.

plus I never was a fan of the "child-lectures-adult-on-the-really-important-things-in-life" subgenre of feelsy-fics. Overall I'm just not feeling this one.

I may steal this concept for a pony story in the future.

The biggest thing I have is, the narrator does not sound sincere, she sounds rationalizing. She is speaking as if to a strange audience instead of from the heart, speaking in a "quirky-girl-finds-joy-in-the-little-things-essay" type of voice. That really undermines it I think because I don't get any visceral sense of her feelings for the sun goddess. I don't see the motive emotions that connect the sun goddess to sobriety. For all I know she might not have any—she could just be perfunctorily saying whatever she thinks will sound good, whatever she thinks are the "right things" to say on a checklist.

I mean, sobriety is a big deal, right? It's hard work. The motive emotions must be incredibly strong, right?

I don't have any other issues with the story but I think that one problem cuts at the essence of the story so it's a decently big one.

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...

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.

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.

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.