Judgement- Macbeth vs. Morpheus
Barsoomcore-
Macbeth "Art Memoir"
Wow. I really, really liked this story. Absolutely fresh and original, with a couple of nice recurring phrases to hold it together. Confessional stories are hard to get right because the voice has to be completely authentic or else it comes off like a cheap trick (which it is, but hey, a cheap trick is sometimes just what you need). This voice takes a couple of paragraphs to really get up to speed, and you probably could have edited that opening a little, but I was grooving on it.
"I'm crazy. I'm charismatic." Now I'm starting to get a feel for this character. And when we get to "Pope-Dalai-Lama-Anton-Levay way" I'm starting to like this character. And when THAT little trick pays off with the later hyphenated lists, and then the "Fear and Loathing" repeats, I feel like I'm in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing. Did you really just combine Patton, Hitler and Moses? Yes you did. Props for balls.
The hands and the lizard pictures are beautifully integrated into the story. The masks are a little bit of a stretch, unfortunately, and if I had to pick the point where this story just doesn't quite reach its potential, it's in the last picture, of the guy on the phone.
If this guy calling the cops were the turning point of the story, this would be solid gold. Problem is, with all the build-up, a couple of burst water mains feels a little... anti-climactic. I was preparing myself for an honest-to-God (or maybe two) Great Flood, so there was a certain amount of let-down at the end. And the fact that the cops are coming doesn't seem like such a big deal, so the guy on the phone feels a little tacked on.
If we'd had a little more set-up on the cops and their efforts to get at our narrator, this would have turned that picture into a critical plot point and there's a Ceramic triumph.
You got me ready for a tale of "Biblical proportions" -- you need to either deliver, or make a point of NOT delivering.
Still, I really loved this story. Very unusual and a gripping read. Great stuff!
Morpheus "The Third Degree"
I loved the gritty details and especially the opening -- the "official document" idea is a good gambit if you can fill in the right details, and that opening bit is very nice. Fills me with anticipation for the tale to come and gives me a sense of where we're going -- which lets me hang on for the ride, if you know what I mean.
I think, though, that you made a miscalculation in blending the "official document" feel with the more traditional narrative material. Keeping to the official document -- making your story nothing more or less than a military operational report and interview record, would have made this story a lot stronger, I think.
When the first narrative bit starts up, with the entrance of Corporal West, I'm okay with it. The "report" was the introduction and now I'm getting a story. Fair enough. But then you go back to the "transcript" feel and I start getting distracted. I start looking for a pattern in the switches between one narrative style and the other, and I don't see one. So I start wondering why the switches are happening -- which is distracting me from the story itself. I get a further distraction when suddenly, towards the end, the narrative voice goes into Walters' head and I get his thoughts, as well.
Cthulhu stories have a long tradition of being told through "reports" -- "The Thing On The Doorstep" purports to be the written testimony of the narrator, "The Haunter of the Dark" reads like an investigative article, and of course "Pickman's Model" ends with the classic "But by god, Eliot, it was a photograph from life." So you've chosen a good model, and updating it as a military record is a great new twist. I feel like you didn't really have faith in that approach, however, and added in the narrative sections to get across details you didn't think would come through in the interview. If you were to rewrite this, I'd say, have faith.
The final comment concerns the pictures, which don't really get used in the story. The primary images of the story are the helicopters, the guy in the wheelchair and the Bloated Woman. All fine images, but the pictures provided don't seem to fit in very "holisitically". And I have to say that the first two pictures don't seem to be part of the story at all -- you could have left them out with no impact on the story, which is a problem for a Ceramic DM entry.
Decision: Macbeth
Mythago-
First let me say that I'm happy I don't get to beat on you guys for
silly spelling and grammar errors. That aside, this is going to be a
grumpy review, because I was a little disappointed in both of the stories.
ART MEMOIR (Macbeth)
A lot of good ideas that read like a rough draft. It's the first round,
so somewhat to be expected, but I found the flow and development of the
story impeded by the bumps.
First is the "show, don't tell". The narrator is telling us a story
about the events leading up to the climax. It makes sense in this
context, but unbroken by much dialogue or description means it's easy to
skip over instead of hanging on and following the text. There were also
parts where the narrative skipped around--first the artist gave his
followers poisoned wine, but then mentions that before they died he had
them carve masks. Now, presumably they weren't doing it WHILE poisoned,
but the structure makes the reader stop and say "Wait....oh, okay, he
must mean before he gave them the poison in the first place."
There was also, honestly, a suspension-of-disbelief problem. Nobody did
anything about the guy using body parts? Nobody noticed a colony of
drug-using, law-breaking corpse-robbers in the middle of San Francisco,
even though they had enormous publicity and "even the free speech
people" knew about them and hated them?
The repetition of the "Las Vegas" phrase was clever (although it might
have worked better if they were *in* Vegas), and the last paragraph
really captures the narrator's off-kilter mind. Extend that back through
the whole story and it would be very much improved.
Use of the pictures was very steady, especially given their, er,
eclectic nature.
THE THIRD DEGREE (Morpheus)
The biggest problem with this story is that it doesn't pick a single
narrative style; it's a mismash of a "report," an interview, and
narrative description. A transcript of a report wouldn't contain a
paragraph explaining Corporal Walters's point of view in watching
Corporal West brought into the room, and the descriptions of the event
need to be set off somehow if they're 'flashbacks' of what West is
describing. This made it very hard to follow along.
There's a Ceramic DM tradition that it's a no-no to use a picture *as* a
picture, but I didn't ding you on that becaues it wasn't emphasized in
the rules. The problem is that I couldn't figure out where in the story
they *were* supposed to be; Walters pulls them out of the folder and
that's the last we hear of them.
The story centers around an interesting incident, but that's about all
it is--an incident. We don't learn how West got out, or who the Black
Fan was other than something icky; why is Walters so afraid? What was
the point of the mission in the first place?
Judgment for this round goes to MACBETH.
Alsih2o-
Macbeth- Starts off with one of those comic book indulgences of a characters running monologue. I always liked that, some of us are reared on Shakespeare, some of us on Frank Miller. There are lots of echoes in the writing and while I enjoyed the rhythm they created it sometimes made it hard for me to catch what was being said, “it meant, it meant.” I did enjoy the fun Macbeth was having in giving the character the rambling sense by the use of the something-another thing- something sing song descriptive style.
The character chafed me with his language and in how everything he did was consciously derivative, but I give Macbeth credit for that because I think it was intentional. Even the pounding of the Hunter title entertained me.
I just wish something more had happened. Something more in line with what the mood implied.
The picture use was good without really being surprising ever.
Morpheus- At first I was excited by the formal tone, a really challenging way to tell a story, but soon there seems to be a mish-mosh of styles, and I found it distracting. This may have worked with jumping editing in a movie, but was stilting in a story.
But where do the first two pictures come in? I feel maybe there was an err here. I like how tied in the masks are, but the hands are mostly just added in and the “man on phone” and “monitor lizard” pictures are just pictures.
Unfortunately I know how hard these thinga are to blend, I got my tuckus handed to em last time trying it. J
Judgement for Macbeth.
Winner, Macbeth 3-0. Thanks for joining us Morpheus, come back again. J