>>No_Raisin
Aight boys. Show’s over. Raisin’s got corona.

>>Anon Y Mous
>>No_Raisin
What are you talking about, Raisin getting corona means the show just got started.

Woo!
My prompt won!
And I'm also in a government mandated lockdown, so I guess I have no excuse not to participate.

A nice scene:

But I'm not finding any sort of a story here. I would've liked more set-up at the beginning, something that would've given me a sense of who these people are and would've let this scene be a culmination to their story rather than just a scene...

Mike

Okay, by the end of this, I'm super into the whole R-rated Zootopia setting you've got going on here. You do a really good job of presenting Beven's character, and bouncing him back and forth between situations in which he's confident or unsure in himself. It really does add that extra bit of investment that helps the narrative gel together, even if the resolution was a little expectable. The pacing here is also really, really solid, with each scene moving us nicely along and telling us what we need to know to get to the next.

The first bit of this story really did make me feel dumb, though, because it took me going back and re-reading the entire first scene before I figured out that this was an anthropomorphic animal setting. I'm not exactly sure why it took me so long to get oriented, considering on re-reads, I do notice that you put in a lot of signposts. Maybe I'm just out of it, today. :P

I also had the slightest bit of trouble figuring out the tech-level/time-period. "Constable" instead of "officer" and "inspector" instead of "detective" suggested late 19th or early 20th century to me, but then we have sports cars and tranq guns. Not narrative-breakingly distracting, but just something in the back of my mind.

Really, my concerns about introduction of the setting are nitpick level. There's really enough here to sink your teeth into (ha), and I think it's presented in a clear and engaging way.

Thanks for writing!

Shit, sorry, accidentally posted a blank comment. Didn't even know you could do that.

Let me, *ahem*, just get along with the review.

I really like the breezy tone of this one, with the touches of faux-formality in both Barbara's speech and the narration. It gives the irreverent jokes a great contrast to bounce off of, and overall gives the piece a lot of character.

Now, I'm going to have to be honest and say that the jokes themselves didn't land all the way with me. For one thing, the two main jokes (the cat and the broom) are kind of stretched out, I think. We get a lot of repetitions of the punchlines, but there's not much further development after the first one or two that make the others feel unique.

I'll also have to note that when the story abandons the veneer of its faux-formality and just goes out and says things like faux-penis and wetness and semen, it was a little bit off-putting. I mean, we all know what's going on, so spelling it out and repeating the joke feels like an overstatement. So much so that I kind of started wondering if we were supposed to actually be worried about Barbara's broom infatuation.

So in the end, to me there felt like there was a bit of dissonance between the primary joke and the tone that it was executing itself within. I really don't think I'm a great judge of humor, so I'll be eager to see what other reviewers have to say. But I will end on the note that I liked the concept of the whole campy, over-indulgent double-innuendo nature of the piece as a whole.

Thanks for entering!

>>Miller Minus
How dare you.

>>Bachiavellian
Bring me his head.

Nitpick first:

The entries from 1683 through to the end should have the year 2079 unless there's some temporal jiggery-pokery going on here... :)

But this is really nice. The character work is so strong, the lack once again of an actual story hardly bothers me. After all, the plot elements here are completely secondary--and rightly so since this is a character piece. But I'm greedy. I'd like the external stuff to weave in with the internal stuff and vice versa. As a "girl gets girl" story, it's all kinds of fun, and the word count is as always around here a limiting factor. But I'd like the background bits--the company and Jeff and the weather and the whole concept of living at work--to tie in and pay off somehow as well. Like I said, I'm greedy.

Mike

I'm really liking the prose, here. It conveys the ideas and actions happening very cleanly and effortlessly, while not coming across as clinical or laundry-list-ish. The general pacing of the scene feels good too, bringing us along from moment to moment without rushing or dragging. Overall, this is just a really pleasant reading experience, in terms of how well it gets thoughts and words into my brain.

Now I'm going to kind of agree with Mike that this feels a little lacking, but I personally think this isn't due to a lack of a story, but more because of a lack of a unifying theme/motif/message. The piece as a whole doesn't seem to be commenting at all about the sexy-time happening here or the nature of sexy-times in general, which makes it feel kind of... pornographic? I don't mean in terms of the explicitness of content, but more in the sense of eliciting emotions without eliciting as much thought.

The thing in my opinion that comes closest to being the main point of the story was the little bit about cutting the woman's hair, but this idea of the significance of permanent action isn't really touched on again. In the Discord chat it was brought up that bondange aspect could be a freedom/captivity commentary. I've given this a bit of thought, but I'm personally having trouble going with this, since it's not presented as a conflict. The woman doesn't have any reason to want to be anywhere else but bound on the bed, so it doesn't quite make it feel that the story is making a statement about the state of being bound.

So in the end, while I did appreciate that this is certainly a technically well-crafted piece, I'm left wishing that it felt like it had more of a point to it, I guess. I'm definitely one of the kinds of people who really cares for a message or meaning in the fiction I consume, so feel free to take my thoughts however you'd like, if that wasn't your goal in writing this.

Thanks for submitting!

This has:

Some nice silliness in it--I'll admit, the cat's lines got a laugh out of me every time--but again, it strikes me as more scene than story. Why's Barbara more concerned about Christians than, say, scientists, or anybody with a cell phone who might make a video of her flight and put it up on YouTube? Does Barbara have some figuratively soul-sucking day job--or heck, maybe it's literally soul-sucking--that makes the releases of a night flight more meaningful to her? And all the stuff with Gerald--speaking of literal and figurative--seems kind of like a Chekov's Gun situation: we get a lof of talk, but then he doesn't actually get fired...

So, yes, it's a nice little cartoon, but as I keep saying, I'm greedy. I wanna read stories...

Mike

I don't read:

A lot of mysteries 'cause I'm no good at figuring out "who done it." But then this isn't a "who done it" so much as a "how do we prove they done it" like the old Columbo TV show. It might be nice to make things a little more ambiguous--maybe Ms. Esme can appeal to Beven as a fellow carnivore in an attempt to drive a wedge between him and the inspector. I'm a little uncertain, too, about the whole "villain goes crazy and attacks" thing at the end. If you want to do that, I'd recommend planting the seeds for it earlier by showing Ms. Esme having to clamp down on her temper a few times or something.

Mike

Retrospective: Sheena is a Punk Rocker

So basically, I thought the whole transcript/journal format would help me save words. It, surprisingly, did the exact opposite. When I got to the point where I was halfway through my planned story, but with only 500 words left to spend, I basically decided that instead of butchering everything up to that point to squeeze out a half-assed ending, I'd just cut the story short right after the third planned act out of five. I felt that it was a decent ending point anyway, even if it didn't go through the entire arc I had in mind. There's about 2-3 thousand words' worth of unwritten story left, but since I don't plan on expanding this, they'll probably never see the light of day. :P

And for all 0 of you who care, here's my playlist for outlining and writing. Basically, my taste in this kind of punk/alt/emo rock hasn't changed since high school and I'm a dork. Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2mSsyzKnes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoX8YjQCR5I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayjQA9_5azY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GoZOCNSIYw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=racYGLXM84Q

>>Baal Bunny
Thank you very much for your review! Yeah, I'm kinda disappointed that I didn't get to put in the entire story I had in mind, but it's really my fault for not gauging the word limit very well. To summarize it very roughly, I had planned to have Mikaela win the Eden lottery, and then the story would go on to deal with the strain it put on her relationship with Sheena. Happy you still liked what was here, though!

This is definitely a chuckle-worthy idea, and the general composition of the figure within the frame of the shot looks good to me. I do have to note that due to the shape of the blue lighting effects, it took me several moments to identify the broom. At first glance, it looked to me like feathers or a tail or something, due to the organic-ish shapes of the blue lines. And I think it's worth a mention that the photoshop work around the face and right hand stick out a bit, since they have a much more vivid/bright skin tone than the other visible body parts.

Thanks for arting!

This conveys its visual information pretty quickly, so kudos for that. But on closer inspection, the background does come across as pretty simplistic, and I have some body troubles with the silhouette as well. It's not clear where we transition from waist to leg, which makes the right leg look vaguely longer than the left. I do like the definition we get around the joints of the arms, and I wish the legs came across as clearly.

Thank you for submitting!

Thanks to the voters:

And congrats to the other medalists. Yeah, again, I think there's a good framework here if I wanna do some revising. I might as well, huh?

Mike

Lizard Uses Huge Fork on Enormous Cheese...?

I kid. The execution is a bit basic, perhaps hasty, but the shapes instantly set the scene. There's only one place it can take on my slate, and there it shall go...

Do You See Anything When I Do This...?

Kudos to you and the model, Artist. It's true that it's not so obvious that thing is a broom, and your fleshtone shoopery is detectable, but this is otherwise a well composed shot. There's only one place it can take on my slate, and there it shall go...