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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mirth" data-source="post: 5884956" data-attributes="member: 5242">Mirth - JudgmentRound 2, Match 1phoamslinger vs. Piratecat vs. UselessTriviaManAh sweet time, how you fade so quickly and run so fleetingly...Style -- It must have been the cuteness of the baby seal that brought out the humor in these stories and each of them handled the funnyness in such different ways. We have phoamslinger (PS) with the tongue-firmly-in-cheek story of a dynamic duo being ruled by a god of metagaming. Piratecat (PC) brings us the implausibly plausible tale of a repo gone horribly wrong and yet oh-so-right. And UselessTriviaMan (UTM) closes it out with the rollicking adventure of a wizardly wedding planner and her increasingly difficult task list. All of them are exceedingly well written, plot and character driven fantasies of a high order. I can't find fault with any of them from a style perspective. Despite the common tone, the plots couldn't be more dissimilar and the characters more wildly different. Excellence abounds in this round. Kudos to all of the competitors.Picture use -- The use of pictures was another area where all of the writers were fairly well matched. First, we had PS with the golden temple of Pelor, the cactus grove, the doomed hyperactive seal, and the sleeping earth elemental -- all fantastic uses of some admittedly difficult to marry pictures. That seal in the desert thing is a doozy. Next, we had PC with a couple of bizarre and well thought out macguffins (a possibly delicious seal and the head of a statuary icon), a holy strip club, and a Vegas repo gone to hell. So strange, so great, so strange. Finally, we have UTM's whiny seal familiar, the deadly hidden vale, a completely different iconic statue, and a wedding of great import. Deliciously wacky, that story. I found none of the pictures to be throwaways, all were used well and were integral parts of the plots in each. All I came away with was that you cruel bastards really don't like baby seals very much. Personal connection -- So … as with many of the great stories in this competition so far, we come down to my personal preference AGAIN. I was afraid at the outset of PS's story that it could become a trite, jokey affair with far too much nudge, nudge, wink, wink for my taste, but nothing could be farther from the truth. I thought the story held its own as a narrative and paid sly homage to the reason we're all here reading this stuff in the first place. PC then throws us a curve ball that flies like a Coen Brothers film right into all of our faces. The punchy, funny material hits the ground running and doesn't let up until the well-deserved end. By the time we arrive at UTM's tale, I'd already made up my mind that there was no way this could be a three-horse race, something had to give. However, UTM rose to the challenge with his quest for the perfect wedding where not everything is as it seems. UTM takes our codified expectations for fantasy tropes and how they work and uses them against us to give us not regular hobbits, but hobbits with a SOUL, and not a regular spoiled princess, but a necrophiliac psychoprincess. Cleverness abounds in this round and IT IS SO HARD TO CHOOSE A WINNER.Final judgment - Ultimately, I found Piratecat's story to just a little too unbelievable as a whole and UselessTriviaMan's to be unbalanced in its resolution versus its buildup. Phoamslinger's had the perfect mixture for me and worked not only as a D&D plot but also as a great story.My nod for Round 2, Match 1 goes to … PHOAMSLINGER!EDIT: Having read the other two judgments, it looks like ...Houston, we have a problem. Hrmmm... we'll have to get back to you. SO SORRY TO ALL, PLEASE HAVE PATIENCE WHILE WE SORT THIS OUT. (... more patience, I should say.)</blockquote>

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