Daylight hour lost
“Spring forward,” says the Princess
Twilight: “Lost a bet.”

This drew a chuckle out of me.

Cool, wet, and mucky
April showers have their fans
Worm and toad parade

Yeah, but not the Native Americans.

After all, April showers bring May flowers, and Mayflowers bring fucking white people.

The sweet song of birds
Melodious, but also…
A little risqué!

Poor Fluttershy knows all too well.

Passion for the marks
Shifts focus, now they notice
The flanks underneath

Oh my!

Anyway, this was cute enough; some of the little haikus are better than others (and I was amused by the deviation partway through; that worked well).

My biggest problem here is that with so many, I was hoping for more of an arc, but it doesn't feel like it has any real resolution. There seemed to be an underlying theme of Fluttershy possibly having a crush on Rarity - April 1, 3, 11, 15, maybe 16, maybe 17, sort of 22, 24, 27, 28, and 30 all sort of hint at this, but there isn't any actual payoff there, and I'm not even sure if it is real or of I'm just making up an arc because my shipping goggles got stuck on my face again.

That being said, I did enjoy this one on the whole, which always brings points. But I feel like weaving some sort of arc in here might have made it stronger, and given me more of a push to keep reading.

>>TitaniumDragon
You're missing the context that this is copying a premise someone else already did, so it's losing quite a bit on the originality front.

Genre: Crouching Flutter, Hidden Shipfic

Thoughts: WOW. Not a bad piece to open with. I’ll spare my usual disclaimer about trying to judge poetry and praise the story for making two simultaneous uses of the text: it’s both a nice bunch of poems that we get to enjoy, and it’s the text of an opening move in a ship (or a crush). The ship doesn’t do much for me in and of itself, but this is intriguing in the way it sets things up and keeps them building.

I try not to TC on the first story, but in this case it’d be hard to justify not doing it.

Tier: Top Contender

Fog winds through forest
The poetry of the haze
Transcending my own

I see what you did there, Writer. ^^

As for the rest, I like that there's hints at a through-line of longing, and perhaps unrequited desire. There are notes of loneliness as well, independent from that desire, to help round out Fluttershy's feelings, which I think is a nice touch.

Still, I agree with TD that a bit more of an arc, rather than just a building of explicitness in feelings, would help add weight to this piece. This would also help differentiate it from its predecessor, as you explicitly called out above. As it stands, this was a lovely, breezy collection of haikus, and I smiled through most of it, but I don't think it's going to top my slate.

This is only the second story I've read, though, so we'll see. Best of luck, Writer!

Let's hop on this bandwagon, shall we? Actually, I mean that in two ways.

Normally, I'd prefer to comment on the stories getting the least attention, but there are a ton right now with only one comment, and I'm going to try reviewing all of them anyway.

Honestly, this story rubs me the wrong way, but it's not going to bother everyone. My issue is that it's a pretty blatant lifting of what Haze did a few events ago. Homages are fine within most contexts, and had this just been something posted to FiMFic for fun, I wouldn't care, but this is something you want to put forward for earning potential accolades. And part of what you're doing it with isn't yours. You even used the same idea of a Discord gag. Even if Haze doesn't mind, I still see this as a pretty big lack of originality. There's some history for this: I remember Casca winning the very first write-off with a story using a child narrator, and then Filler earning silver in the second write-off with a story using a child narrator. Cassius, who didn't know Filler was the author at the time, commented in the thread that he'd really prefer not to see what he perceived as calculated coattail-riding. It's entirely expected that some stories will end up being similar by chance, but that isn't what's happening here.

Anyway, how good is this? To me, it suffers from a lot of the same problems as Haze's version (which I still voted high on my ballot), but they're problems worth discussing. A lot of these stanzas don't contribute to an overall arc. As others have said, it would have been nice to see a more concrete arc. That way, there aren't numerous stanzas that feel detached from the rest. Why does that matter?

In a coherent story, if you read one chapter that doesn't quite measure up to the rest, it can still be a good story overall that has some weak points in it. When things feel more discrete, it's closer to an anthology. Then the strength of the whole takes on a different character. There are entire entities that are weak, and it rests on the quality of the worst entry rather than the best ones mitigating the worst. The same is true of collaborations: they often live and die by their worst members. So it would have come across as a stronger entry if it was a coherent thing with some weak spots instead of a collection of disparate elements, some strong and others not. The more loosely related they are, the better all of them need to be.

Some of those spots are good, though. There's nice imagery to be had. There's just not much of it that's memorable, and that gets back to the cohesiveness: it's easier to have a lasting impression from an overall arc than from a bunch of tiny things.

It starts with some nice slice-of-lifey ones that are cute but not too memorable. I do like #4, but I'm of a mixed mind about it. It took me a minute to realize this would be from the perspective of Fluttershy listening to Twilight. At first, I thought it made more sense to have Luna say it.

The more I read in, the more I can say why Haze's version worked better. Haze had more of a progression going. Even though the events were semi-related, they still occurred by degrees, to where it made sense in terms of fall changing to winter that the events happened in the order they did, and I get less of a feel of that here.

There are definite shipping notes wound in, but they're scattershot. It removes some of the earnestness of it that such casual thoughts get interspersed, like it's not enough of a big deal to be on her mind constantly.

While some of the individual haiku were nice, there weren't really any that stood out and wowed me like Haze's did (this is why I only felt moved to comment on one individually), and the lack of a coherent narrative makes the weaker parts weigh it down instead of having a "greater than the sum of its parts" effect. That and the unoriginality are going to pull it down my ballot, if I vote. I mean, there's definite skill here. I just wish you'd used it on your own idea.

>>Pascoite

The more I read in, the more I can say why Haze's version worked better. Haze had more of a progression going. Even though the events were semi-related, they still occurred by degrees, to where it made sense in terms of fall changing to winter that the events happened in the order they did, and I get less of a feel of that here.

While Haze did the progression of the season, that doesn't really have much in the way of deeper meaning. Here, the arc actually involves character progression, as Fluttershy apparently gets more open about her feelings, so there's an actual story rather than just "nature turns on". I rather bounced off of Haze's entry as a result, as there wasn't anything to hook me.

The hints at shipping and Fluttershy's feelings here did a much better job of hooking me than Haze's entry did, as there was a possibility of something happening that I was looking for. Also, the fact that the fourth poem made me actually laugh out loud made me feel more favorably disposed towards them as a whole, which helped tide me over until April 11 (combined with April 10) made me think there was something more significant coming.

I agree that this needed a stronger arc, though, and in particular, a climax and resolution.

Author, if you are planning on putting this on FIMFiction as a "full story", I suppose you could add in May and maybe June, but I'm not sure how long you want this to be - most people aren't willing to navigate too many poems. But I'd encourage you to work on actually including an arc.

I was planning on writing a joke review to confuse everyone, but I think by now everyone's figured out that this is different from my writing style. or is it?

I don't mind this at all, but others might. just a warning if others want to try this themselves, readers will get annoyed at seeing it too much. (exactly this happened once before, when Dubs did a sequel/homage to one of my fics)

I enjoy these. It's a different approach from how I would do them, but seeing that difference is part of the fun for me.

I'm not going to critique or review these.... partially to avoid coloring everyone else's opinions as if I'm some «voice of authority» (from writing the original, not on poetry itself). but there's just one I wanted to point out:

April 6:
Five-syllable yawn!
Bear friend is a sleepyhead
Honey perks him up

yes! this is it. this is the one. that first line alone is so perfect, I wish I'd thought of it myself.

>>Haze

I'm some «voice of authority»

Since when do you use French quotes « »?

>>Monokeras
I borrowed the idea from a Russian writer a few years ago. For those times in English where regular quotation marks can be misleading for a phrase that no one actually said.

>>Haze
Fair enough! :) It was funny to see those in the middle of an English sentence!
Good job Haze, carry on :P

>>TitaniumDragon
Ideally, you'd like both. In this one, the fact that the spring imagery just felt samey, such that you could interchange any two of them without altering what made sense chronologically, made the whole thing feel scattershot rather than organized.

What a title... and seeing this is, in fact, poetry. "Author has selected HARD MODE!!!"

"Five-syllable yawn!" That's cheating. "Welcome back, Ms. Goose!" is only four syllabyles. Discord's verse having 4 lines is a good, intentional break with form.

Ultimately this series of haikus doesn't do much for me. None really stand out as great, and taken in a block of 30, all with a similar theme, it feels redundant and, frankly, a bit lazy.

Having said that, I'm sure I'll read the comments or author's reply later and find I missed some super-convoluted hidden message or meaning where if you read first word of each line upside down on a tuesday in the mirror while its raining there's some impossibly clever structure. But that's not a story. As a story, this is just some vaguely warm feelings, though (with one exception) well constructed ones.