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No Rest for the Weary · She-Ra Minific ·
Organised by RogerDodger
Word limit 400–750
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everything stays
the wise say that life is a cycle. that we are born, we are raised, we are broken, and we are burned. they say that we walk on four legs in the morning, two in the noontime, and three in the evening. they use metaphors to show patterns, and wax poetry to show meanings. life is a cycle and cycles, well, they don’t end.
catra likes to think this. she likes to think this when she pilots tanks and ravages villages. she sees blood, and she sees pain, and she sees death — but she doesn’t see endings. no.
a small, shrivelled part of her tries not to, at least.

(the princesses are powerful, symbols of hope and healing, but they can’t save everyone. not in this cycle, she thinks.)
her hands have destroyed, her words have demolished. she leaves fires in her wake. but fires leave ashes and from ashes tend to spring life. and so she keeps going because everything comes back, perhaps different, but there nonetheless.

(she dreams of gold hair and blue eyes and whispers under blankets promising futures that should have come. she dreams of soft lips and warm smiles and hands that held the secrets of the whole entire universe in them. everything comes back.
she dreams.
she dreams.
she wakes.)

there are no endings. it’s a childish, utopian belief that catra holds on to like a lifeline despite everything. there are no endings, even when the enchanted forest goes up in flames and brightmoon, in all its former glory, falls. there are no endings even when the princesses surrender one, by one, by one. there are no endings, even when she looks at adora square in the eye and turns her back on her one final time.
she stares at the setting sun, blazing and burning and oh so alive. it has seen many wars (it will see many more). and perhaps, out of the desolation and bleakness of history, it may see some peace as well. the sun might see trees burst out of the missiled ground, and flowers bloom where soldiers fell. it might see rivers flow where blood was spilled and children play where their parents perished. it might see two broken girls where there used to be two leaders, too young for their time, holding hands, and smiling, and breathing happiness where death had festered.

and even so, war will come again. such is life, and such it will be.
the wise say life is a cycle. patience, patience, for catra awaits the next one.
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#1 · 5
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This was very moving, although having a lot of format and misspelling errors, it was still beautiful.

I’ll brush over the fact that most (all?) of the sentences do not actually have a capital letter on the first word. I think it might be a style choice because Catra DESPISES change and its eventual end whether she likes it or not- almost as much as I do- and the story reflects that by not having any capital letters.

Maybe I’m thinking too much into it.

This poem has prose, much unlike me, and it is perfect. It’s not trying too hard to be poetic, it just is. Well done, author.

Lastly the actual moral/takeaway of the story isn’t hard to find and molds well with the story. In other words nothing felt shoehorned in.

Welp. This is my review. 10/10 sad Catras. Thanks for the read. ;)
#2 · 3
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this was beautifully written! i understand that the no-capital-letters thing was an aesthetic choice, one which i make many times myself, so it was a pleasing read for me.

i'm sure there's a phrase for pretty prose like this that i can't seem to remember (one that isn't purple prose) but that's what this is. you've put a lot of time into styling your sentences just so, and it shows.

the content itself is beautiful, too: the cyclic nature of everything, including your story itself, bringing the point up at last, in the very end, about catra waiting for the next cycle was, as anon y mous already put it, incredibly moving, and i salute you. paragraph spacing could be more consistent, and i'm sure the whole piece would also read well even with the missing capitalized letters, but all in all, i enjoyed reading this immensely, so kudos!
#3 · 2
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Proper Review:
My interpretation of it made me cry so much:
Catra is hell bent fixated on a thougth, a prayer, cycles, repetition

We see that she is all out violently plowing anything in her path, doing what she believes is right

" but she doesn’t see endings. no. a small, shrivelled part of her tries not to"

Her mind is broken

"she dreams of gold hair and blue eyes and whispers under blankets promising futures that should have come. she dreams of soft lips and warm smiles and hands that held the secrets of the whole entire universe in them. everything comes back."
"everything comes back."

The whole narrative is her mind, fighting with itself, and the words "there are no endings" repeated over and over again.

She lets the sun observe, judge and decide what it all means, she is no longer important, she just wants to keep destroying, there has to be a cycle, the cycle is just around the corner, everythign will repeat again.

"there are no endings, even when she looks at adora square in the eye and turns her back on her-"
-one final time.

Catra killed her, and she snapped, she lost everything, and just keeps going cause, she will find Adora again, somehow , she knows she will find Adora again if she keeps doing this.

That broke me :<

Well perhaps its too much of a downer concept, and for this to be extended i guess Adora is not dead, but i think itll still make for a very angsty sad fic, which I LOVE so much too :D
#4 · 3
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Great imagery and prose here. You gave us a very interesting portrait of Catra's mentality about all the canon events we've seen thusfar. I like how it only reinforces the audience's desire to empathize with her. It's one of the most compelling things about Catra as a character, I think.

Echoing what salamander said, the aesthetic choice with the formatting/capitalization was interesting but kind of distracting in my opinion. Take that for what it's worth

It's borderline poetic as a whole, though. I wonder if you weren't considering doing this in verse if there had been more time for it? Would be interesting to see a remix of this after the contest is done.
#5 · 2
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Exactly what I'm looking for from the Writeoff.

I might suggest delving a bit into Catra's reasons for waging this war. As evil as the Horde is, presumably they're trying to kill the Princesses because they believe it will bring about a better world (for them, at least). Maybe Catra finds some hope in that... that all this blood will mean something when the Horde shows everyone the light.
#6 · 1
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This one was beautiful.

Stylistically powerful, just the right length and use of prose, with a really interesting interpretation of the theme. I also love how much emotion is blended into the narrative... each line was really well illustrated.

Kudos!
#7 · 1
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First time commenting on a She-Ra round, as I just finished watching the show. Since we have a lot of newcomers, I'll put this header on my comment for every story, since I don't know whether the new people will read the whole discussion thread or just the one for their story.

The write-offs were originally from the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fandom, which has an unusually high caliber of writing standards. Or at least it used to. Sure, there's plenty of bad stuff here, but when you attract that large an audience, you attract a proportionally large number of very good writers, and those tended to congregate in a couple of key places. One, in reviewing groups that helped writers develop, and two, in places like this, that at their best function more as a writing workshop than a competition.

Since I haven't actually started reading any of these as I write this intro, I'll say I don't know how the average writing quality of any given fandom compares to MLP, and it's possible that the critiques given by the MLP veterans will come across as harsh. That's not the intent. I wouldn't spend the 15-30 minutes it takes per minific for me to read, digest, and write up a response if I was just trying to be mean. We all really do intend to help you improve your writing.

I'll put all this above a break so people reading the whole thread will know where to skip down to on subsequent posts.

--------------------------------------------------------------

There are two levels to this one. I'll take them one at a time.

First, the story. I like this very much as a story. It can be a hard thing to talk about events that have already occurred and have them carry weight. But here, you're using imagery mostly to do that. You talk about missiled ground, for instance, instead of talking about the actual action of the missiles destroying things. Essentially, you're letting the scenery tell the story through implication. And you've done a good job of that.

Then there's the story's form. I don't get this at all. I don't see why some paragraphs get a blank line before them and others don't. If there's an effect I'm supposed to get from that, it's completely lost on me.

I'm going to have to go on a bit of a tangent. This is a gimmick story, and what qualifies as a gimmick? Anything that it's unusual for a story to do, and what's the dividing line that makes one thing unusual and another not? I don't know. Just a gut feeling, I guess.

But as an example, take a epistolary story. Not many stories are told that way, so when you see one, it stands out on that alone. Some readers will like it just for the fact it made that choice. But I look for the author to justify it.

So still using the example of an epistolary story, I have to ask myself whether the story is better than if it had been written as a standard narrative. Or at the very least, is it about the same. Authors will use a gimmick to prop up a weak story, hoping it will survive on the novelty alone. As I've said, this isn't a weak story, so that's not what's going on here, but I do still have to wonder if a normally formatted story would be at least as good. And, unfortunately, I think it would. When I don't understand the formatting decisions, they can't add anything to the story for me, after all.

That especially applies to the choice not to use any capitalization. As one other commenter did, I could read into it and say it's Catra feeling down about herself. In that case, it would make more sense to leave her own name lower-case while using normal capitalization for everything else. Maybe it's just meant to show she's world-weary and doesn't care anymore? Now you're making me do the work of assigning importance to it, which is another trap gimmicks can fall into. Besides, the narrative tone already communicates world-weariness; the lack of capitalization isn't enhancing it any.

In the end, I really like the implied plot arc, but the gimmicky formatting isn't doing anything for me, at best being an ignorable detail and at worst being the author reaching for unearned uniqueness. Give me a reason why it has to be this way or the story wouldn't be as good, or else just ditch it. In my opinion, the story's good enough not to need it, and it doesn't make it better anyway.