GotWoot Story Contest - Preliminaries - Round 1

[Sapphire]

Hi all!

GotWoot members have each written their own original short story.

Vote on your top two favorite stories!

If you participated in the contest, you have to vote, but you can't vote for yourself.
Therefore, you have to vote in every voting bracket but your own.
Please read ALL of the stories before you vote!
If you only vote for one story your vote is automatically discarded.
Pick your FAVORITE two (or at least the best two), trolling the other vote screws the other contestants over. If you do this I will know and hate you forever.

Preliminary rounds 1-4 have 4 stories each. The preliminary groups were completely randomly chosen. The top two stories from each bracket of the prelims will move on to semi-finals, then the winners of semi-finals will duke it out in the championships!

Authors will remain anonymous until the final results are declared!

Voters should give personal feedback below to our budding or seasoned authors!

The voting period for each round is 72 hours.

ROUND 1 - FIGHT!

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Pastebin Mirrors
The Game
The Man With A Thousand Dicks
Friendship
Firefly

[Sapphire]

Firefly - Well written and suspenseful. I want more. I want to know what happens next, the background of the characters, how they got there, etc. I hope this one moves on, because I want more.

Friendship - Sentimental, well written, AWW factor. Solid story.

Thousand Dicks - ......................................Completely nonsensical. Okay, I'll go back and admit this was actually funny. Damn you author #2!

The Game - The transitions are a little hard to swallow.
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PS - I see that someone only voted on 1 story. You can't do that because that unbalances the power of the votes. Vote on the top 2. PM me your second vote.

Restarted poll because people... yeah.

[shinta|hikari]

Firefly - I didn't have any idea of what the premise is about, if it is indeed based on something. It was a bit traditional in terms of writing style, but it was well executed.

The Man with a Thousand Dicks - I chose this one because the other entries were pretty weak. That, and the last line about reaching the 500 word limit cracked me up. At least this one was interesting despite being vulgar and inane.

[RyougaZell]

The Game - The grammar is very weird... which makes the plot very hard to follow. The transition towards the World Leaders heavilly assumes you understood what is going on.

The Man with a Thousand Dicks - Funny speech and with good grammar... yet a terrible plot. Make me laugh though. Time jumps for the lulz are very bad though.

Friendship - Very well written. Not the best of plots, but It works. Easy to read, follow and maybe even relate to the character. Best of all? Start and ending. And maybe a setup for future plot.

Firefly - It seemed solid at the start... but the 'what?' ending isn't really satisfactory due to the cliffhanger. It would work as long story though.

[Sapphire]

I liked the beginning portion of The Game. It sort of reminds me of Gantz.

[shinta|hikari]

I think the main weaknesses of The Game were the story length and grammar errors.

[Uchiha Barles]

Man with a thousand dicks: I laughed 1000 times.

Firefly: I wonder what's so infuriating about the firefly and monkeys story

The Game: Grammar errors aside, that story needs to be longer. There still seems to be something missing to relate the gamers to the events happening in the world. Has a lot of potential.

Friendship: Too damned adorable.

[enkoujin]

"The Game"

What's going on?

That sentence describes the entire story for me. What is going on here? Where was the conflict? What's The Game? Reading this felt like I was reading the book description on the back of a book. If there was some real content, it could be more interesting. But with a 500 word-limit, the author couldn't have brought out anything good with a few passages.

"The Man With A Thousand Dicks"

“How… How did you manage that?!”

That's what I would like to ask the author - were you inebriated or on illicit drugs when you wrote this story? I'll admit that it is amusing and funny the first time around, but the story will "limp and saggy" later in the rounds. This was one of the only stories here that actually had a plot. I don't like this story that much, but I wouldn't be surprised if this won the contest.

"Friendship"

I was always a loner in school. That's because nobody shared in the same interest as me, which happens to be video games.

What?

I liked the calmness of the story, but it was pretty pale. The story can be summarized in three sentences:

Guy, who likes video games and has no friends, meets a girl who plays Pokemon. They play together. Eventually, she moves away and leaves the guy with a new game.

It was more ordinary than #14 from Archangel's "Them Bitches" thread. It was like reading someone's Note on Facebook. Boring, little or no conflict at all. It wasn't deep at all. Unless...

This story was actually about two people who are competing for a single purpose (victory). They battle each other using their Pokemon, which symbolizes each persons' arsenal of skills. Taking notice that they were playing beneath an old tree. Because the age of the tree is undisclosed, one may infer that this refers to the Tree of Life. Since this is all about Pokemon and evolving, the Tree of Life here was specifically the scientific (biological) Tree of Life. How this relates to the story is how two people grow apart, branching away from themselves are still kept together by friendship. Or, one may interpret that the game buried at the tree symbolizes friendship and that the Tree of Life gave birth to friendship amongst the other branches that competes with one another.

Unless the author was aiming for this kind of interpretation, the story was still pretty boring.

"Firefly"

Silence.

That's what happened after I read the story.

I didn't know what to think of it. As far as I know, I haven't heard of any stories that involved monkeys and fireflies, so I'll take it at face value.

My interpretation was that Lucas' action on the end was like a firefly compared to monkeys. Fireflies indicate uniqueness in dark places as they can create their own scripts or light that makes them different from other insects and organisms. Monkeys are generally unseen and looked down upon on humans, so in this case, it looks like Lucas was the firefly among the ten soldiers and Roger, who betrayed him. The author may have alluded to the fact that since fireflies have their own lights in the dark, these lights can be seen as ideas - which writers have plenty of in quantity.

Then, I thought why ten soldiers? I thought about each soldier representing the Ten Plagues, the Ten Commandments and thought that the history behind the garrison was a place of rebellion against conformists that wanted Lucas' team dead. Then the author talked about Roger being eight feet away and I couldn't find any deeper meaning at all behind this and gave up.

It's a pretty good story. More background could have been given, but the ideas were so abstract that the average reader can't really see anything out of the story because they'll just see the story as a bunch of soldiers gone "AWOL", one being captured and tortured and eventually gets killed when he lunges at a friend who betrayed him.

[Sapphire]

Puff-kun & Lucifus accidentally chose only 1 story, their second choice was Man With Thousand Dicks.

[twofacedkitsune]

I tried to evaluate the stories based on what I thought their intentions were--

*Firefly - I assumed this was a fanfic of some sort (because of its references to outside things), and evaluated it on that premise. The writing was pretty good, and it read smoothly. If it is in fact a fanfic for something, I felt like my understanding kind of suffered from being unfamiliar with the source material (e.g. the monkey/firefly story). If it wasn't a fanfic, it might benefit from sharing a little more info with the audience (not character backgrounds, etc. - since I think it works better if the audience doesn't know too much - but more like the monkey/firefly story, what the whole betrayal/saving incident was about, etc.)

Friendship - The writing could have been better, but I was probably drawn into this story the most. Short, simple, it didn't try to do much, so it was able to tell a complete story without leaving the reader feeling like they're missing out on something big. I almost voted for this one.

*Thousand Dicks - I didn't have any expectations when I read this, and I found it to be kind of interesting actually. Albeit kind of crude, it was kind of refreshing to read a story that didn't try to force suspense & intriguing dialogue, manipulate the audience with emotion, etc.

The Game - I think people mentioned the transitions, etc. already. The story felt really fragmented, and I wasn't able to get a clear sense of what its intentions were. It's saving grace would probably be its awareness of world events, but even on that note, on some levels it seemed like a cautionary tale, and on others, it was kind of indulgent. So I guess it felt like it was going in all sorts of directions in multiple different levels.

[Lucifus]

Bah, I kinda accidentally voted on only one. PMed Saph my second choice.

The Game - I feel as if the transitions mentioned before were done entirely on purpose. For me, it wasn't bad or as jarring as others seem to have found it. In fact, the sudden transitions was the stories saving grace to me, and had they not been present, I would likely not have enjoyed the story half as much as I did. Also, the atrocious grammar, I feel was also done on purpose? Otherwise english was not the authors first language. Regardless, it added a much needed sense of something 'alien' going on with the participants of 'The Game'. That said, if these transitions weren't on purpose.......

The Man with a Thousand Dicks - This one was definitely the most comedic of the bunch, with no true plot; but that seemed to be its selling point. The author did a good job of portraying a sense of light hearted/slice of life fun with no strings attached.

Friendship - It was certainly adorable, no question about it. However, it wasn't very descriptive; and didn't exactly paint the surroundings very well for obviously what was far more realistic a story in comparison to the first two. The author did a good job of portraying the innocence and feelings of the characters, however the presentation was a bit bland. The stories aim was to be simple, yes, but there should have been something more to grab the readers attention, and to give them something to ponder about/remember.

Firefly - Well, what can I say. Very descriptive and well executed presentation, with a mysterious hidden plot no less! Well done sir! Your well on your way to becoming a full blown author!

[8thSin]

The Man With A Thousand Dicks - Really enjoyed this, stupid title, but very effective character intro with good focus on the protagonist that makes it a easy read. I also liked the extra snippet of comedy, and thinks author#2 is the only one who really knows what he's doing in this contest.

Friendship - I wouldn't say the ending was predictable, but a bit too corny. I think the oak tree was too obvious of a setup with the way the author wrote it. But well, hard to hate this kind of orthodox seishun. Also hopes this was not written by one of our editors.

Other two... pretty much scanned through them. Need better intro to grab audience's interest.


Almost forgot, they should be in the same font + size next time... Maybe some authors picked certain styles on purpose, but changes reading experience way too much. Should be a pure story contest.

[Edort4]

Im not able of writing things like this so criticising them fells bad and unjust but when I start I cant hold back so no offense meant.

The game: too slow paced and very vague. maybe for an intro of a larger and more filling story could be valid but I dont get anything from it.

The Man With A Thousand Dicks: something similar to this came to my mind when I was in middle school. Grown past that.

Friendship: light and nice read calling basic human feelings. Even if the ending wasnt much of a surprise (and hating pokemons to death) I must say that I liked this one. Solitude, friendship always a catch.

Firefly: The most serious attempt at narrative novel made. Good start with great cliffhanger. Nice use of descriptions, conversations and thoughts. Favourite by far.

P.S:All this leaving aside that it looks that for some people reading 2 thousand words seems quite a feat.

[Sapphire]

Other two... pretty much scanned through them. Need better intro to grab audience's interest.

WHY WOULD YOU ADMIT TO NOT ACTUALLY FULLY READING THE STORIES???????????????? Your votes are disqualified.
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Kokujin forgot to select his second choice so I'm waiting on that.
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2 more days to vote then round two. Please hurry guys!

[shinta|hikari]

I think what he says makes sense. He actually tried to read them but lost interest. While I do not find the act admirable as a judge, it does speak about the ability of the written work to invite the readers to continue and finish it.

[Sapphire]

That's the equivalent of tl;dr to me. Read the stories or don't judge.

[RyougaZell]

I agree. Those that vote need to read to the end. Even if its painful. Like the grammar issue in one of the stories... it hurt to read it... but it was read to the end for the sake of the contest. If it was a question of just reading it would be understandable to glance away... but voting? I don't think so.

[Edort4]

For godsake it takes 1 minute to read each of them I have seen larger posts. He couldnt get past the intro? of a short story? the first 20 words!! At least bother to end them if you are going to vote something a fellow gotwooter wrote.

[shinta|hikari]

In reconsideration of the brevity of the entries, I would have to agree with you guys.

[KitKat]

Good entries. Here's my thoughts.
The Game - interesting premise but desperately in need of an editor to clean up the grammar. Having even one proof-reader might have brought this story up to being able to compete more equally with the others.
The Man With A Thousand Dicks - The writing style was witty and engaging, but the subject matter too crude to endear this story to me.
Friendship - like others have said, it's a simple predictable story and the writing is nothing special, but I felt like in writing this the author made themself vulnerable to write a story about a friendship they either have experienced or hope to see in their own life. Just speculation on my part, but if so that takes courage and that has my respect.
Firefly - I think this was my favourite of the round. The barrage of outside references was somewhat confusing, but it was suspenseful, well-paced, and had a good gritty thriller-novel flavour. Also, I love well placed moments of randomness.