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Colour Contagion · Original Minific ·
Organised by RogerDodger
Word limit 400–750
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Those Purple Days, by Lord Fotheringay-Phipps
Scholars have never agreed on which specific word led to the Third World War, but the most popular theory is that the British people finally refused to tolerate any corruption of their native language by “Americanisms” through movies and media overexposure. Indeed, several governmental panels and NGOs formed before the war to ensure the purity of British English, similar to France’s “Académie française”. They’d responded to the national teacher’s strike of ‘32, which according to urban legend began after Sir Jenkins of Oxford University discovered the word “color” in one of his exam papers.

Whatever the cause, the Eastern Seaboard invasion was immediately devastating. American troops responded bravely to the unexpected British forces landing on their beaches. Unfortunately, the lobster trade suffered greatly from the invasion: robbed of their prime means of support, the American forces were quickly overwhelmed, finally retreating to Fort New York and Fort New Jersey. In-fighting between the forts left them unprepared for an S.A.S. raid, which single-handedly impressed the confused army into submission.

Despite this defeat, President McMurdoch’s “Line-in-the-Sand” scheme rallied many of the overseas forces – chiefly those fighting in New Zealand, Antarctica, and Atlantis – to form an overland blockade, preventing further progress. Frantic negotiations were conducted through the United Nations Security Council, but progress slowed under Britain’s Prime Minister Love of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. He refused to accept any demand “spoken in a Yankee accent”, and insisted any treaty between both countries be written according to “BBC Guidelines”.

Meanwhile, Canada launched its own offensive on the northern states. At the time, the Second Civil War had already ravaged the United States of America due to inevitable conflicts between the chiefly southern Republicans and the chiefly northern Democrats. The civil war’s beginnings are no mystery; tired of the Democrats’ constant censoring of anything that didn’t mention Global Warming, the Republicans pooled their modest resources from the oil, mining, factory farming, and arms industries to crush anything north of the Bible Belt.

The Democrats were already in dire straits, many having apparently convinced themselves that righteousness was sufficient armour, when the Canadian offensive swept aside any remaining resistance. As a mark of nationalistic defiance, the Canadians wore their traditional dress; it remains the only war in history where one side fought entirely with hockey sticks. Republican attempts to predict future attacks by decoding Canadian communications were hampered by the infamous “EH?” system.

By now, Queen Victoria II had taken a keen interest in the expanding British Empire, and what was originally the White Man’s Burden v2.0 became a juggernaut, sweeping across Asia and Africa, leaving green tea and devastation in its wake. Confidential documents – later released by MI22 – revealed that conquering the United States became the national priority. Within days of peace talks failing, Prime Minister Love organized an emergency COBRA meeting, declared America the “number one place in need of civilizing influences”, and sent a direct order to the revived Royal Air Force to commence Operation: Clear-The-Table.

Within three hours, ten thousand Prematurely-Bald Eagle jets left the reopened factories in Yorkshire, flew across the Atlantic, and swept across the United States. At the same time, Queen Victoria II delivered on live television her famous speech: “Stiff Upper Lip, My Arse”. Legend says, though the claim is easy to disprove, that Hollywood too was bombed at the precise moment she read the immortal line: “The poison is red, the poison is blue; it seeped into Blighty, and pissed me off too.”

Naturally, the decision to use nuclear explosives immediately became a source of controversy among the British public. One benefit, however, was undeniable; Canada ceased all military operations and spontaneously voted to annul its commonwealth status. Like Atlantis, it voluntarily re-joined the British Empire and accepted full sovereignty under the queen. The purple flag of royalty – an appropriate replacement, ever since the original Union Jack was criticised for being “too American-ish” – now flies proudly over every major governmental institution throughout the world.

There were many – once outside the British Empire, when such a thing was possible – who claimed that the entire American affair was an overreaction. Cultural contagion, they insisted, was not worth the immeasurable loss of life, irradiation of an entire continent, and bad language from the queen. To which, one can only quote Her Majesty’s final line: “If some arrogant bastard’s gonna bugger up our lingo, then it should be the original arrogant bastards. At least we’d do it properly.”
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#1 · 1
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You haven't really leaned much on the comedy here, author. It comes off as more of a war drama, which is obviously going to look a bit silly given the premise.

It felt a bit like reading a police report summarizing the events of The Grand Budapest Hotel. There's a funny line in there or two, but I'd rather just experience the story, instead of get lectured on it.

Tone, tone, tone!
#2 ·
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Well it’s zany and absurd, but I’d say not sany or absurd enough. I’m not exactly sure why and how, but fact is after the first smile, it reads more like a mishmash of disjointed facts than a whole. You lost my attention quite quickly.

Maybe the form you choose, an impersonal narrative, doesn’t help to connect.

To use another metaphor, it’s like you had an idea for a broth, put a lot of ingredients inside, but the result is not as savo(u)ry as you had wished it to be. Comes out as a pile up of different flavo(u)rs instead of a nice blending together.

So, well – can’t really say where this will land on my slate. If I could, I would abstain, but I already used my two slots for poetry. So… We’ll see, I guess.
#3 ·
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Alternate Title: Fuck the British Episode II: Attack of the Clones

From the title I can gather this is like an excerpt from a nonfiction book, presumably about how Britain conquered the world because of some "Americanisms" creeping into their lingo.

Just from that premise along this sounds like a fun time; it sounds like a comic satire descended from the likes of Dr. Strangelove or In the Loop. Absurd and yet highly relevant. There are quite a few lines, or phrases anyway, sprinkled throughout the story that almost got a chuckle out of me, and some of them are very witty indeed.

But something is missing here, author. Despite cramming a ton of bite-sized jokes into this entry, none of them reached the level of getting me to laugh out loud. Maybe it's because, with a few exceptions, a lot of these jabs seem like low-hanging fruit, like the stuff with Canada. As absurd as an army of men using hockey sticks for weapons is, we've all heard that on before. Conversely, the jabs at American politics threaten to seem poignant at times, although once again the author failed to resist the temptation to go after low-hanging fruit.

And I'm not sure if the line about the Republican party's "modest" resources was sarcastic or not.

The ending, or at least the idea of it, is very lol-worthy, considering how impossible it is to imagine really happening. It's not supposed to be believable, which is why I think it works. Then again, as an American I've had to learn in the past few years that quite literally anything can happen.

Maybe, with that in mind, it's that in our current socio-political climate our appetite for the absurd has become more insatiable and more demanding, as our world has been getting more absurd.

Maybe not framing this as a nonfiction excerpt would've helped? Or maybe pushing the absurdity up another notch or two, which seems to me the better option, since I don't really have any qualms with the framing device.

Also, make sure to not put commas, periods, and such outside something that is quoted. "See this"? Doesn't that look a bit? "How about this?" Doesn't that look better? Just a suggestion.
#4 ·
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I don't usually like to do this, but I might have to draw a direct comparison between this story and California Just Legalized Supervillainy. Because although they take a similar approach to storytelling and world-building with a ridiculous premise, I think California manages to be more successful because of a couple of reasons.

Firstly, California was written specifically to evoke the style of a news editorial. This story feels like a mash-up between a Wikipedia article, a history textbook passage, and a Youtube comedy vlog. The construction never seemed to really come together for me, and in the end it kind of felt like an excuse to keep piling on the weirdness.

Speaking of which, I was afraid that the jokes never really landed, because there was nothing to contrast the insanity to. There's nothing resembling a straight-man role. and even comparing this to real life (which would be the logical "voice of reason" contrast), things just seem too ridiculous to compare to IRL geopolitics, outside of some pretty well-trodden memes about country stereotypes.

California might have taken the opposite approach in terms of tone (playing things off a bit too seriously, perhaps), but the fact that we could compare its world to our own to a reasonable degree meant that there were still definitely some moments we could smile at the idea of corporate-sponsored supervillains. But here, any earnest comparison to the real world was chucked out the window by the third sentence.

So in the end, there's a lot of things going on here, but none of it ever had enough weight to seem particularly biting or humorous to me.