Forums » Creative Corner » Read Thread

Whoever loses should be murdered as a funny reference to Squid Game

Best of luck to both contestants! Looking forward to this.

The theme is so fitting for some reason.

Might I suggest a site-wide battle royale writing competition (after this match is done, of course) with seeds and brackets like the NCAA tournament, with these sort of 1v1 battles until one writer is left the winner, and no-shows automatically losing their matchup? It might be a fun and interesting diversion from the usual contests. All of the entrants would have to stay anonymous to the judges until the final winner has been declared, though.

Aww, too bad.

@FemaleWolverine 

Smh you can't even write. Your momma is a ho. Your dad is a ho. You are a ho. Your cat is a ho. You dog a ho. Your goldfish is a ho.

Your writing stinks, and I could write a whole story about it. But it would just be better to glaze over the details.

Trashtalking in its finest form is a way to overcompensate  for something else. As for Corgi I will leave it to his writing to reveal that in due time. /s

Ironically, instead of scaring FemW off, I think this message will serve to motivate her instead. Corgi already wanted vengeance because FemW defeated him in the last battle, so he's probably inspired by the theme. However, by him posting this, FemW will be motivated to get vengeance too after all the name-calling, thus the theme fits for the both of them.

In any case, I wonder if she will reply to this amusing message.

Thank you, random side character in the anime that is just there to explain things.

No problem! Did you know that the reason why younger generations tend to use 'no problem' instead of 'you're welcome' is because they feel the need to assure others that helping them is of no burden? On the other hand, some members of the older generation view helping as something extra, thus they are essentially accepting the thanks. It's kind of related to symbolic interactionism!

I'm dying to see two preschoolers verbally fight each other with little pencils.

@PerforatedPenguin This seems like a job for the Placement Police/ Placement Deputy of the forum!

These both made my kidneys bleed and my sides are in terrible pain, but it's possible my kidneys just didn't stop bleeding after reading the first one. I'm going to have to go with the second story because there's the potential that this did not physically harm me

I did not remotely enjoy either of these stories and will be looking into the possibility that I, too, developed kidney damage from this experience (thanks to ISentielPenguin to raising awareness about the kidney-damaging effects of literature).  I'm voting for the first story, however, because it managed to genuinely surprise and confuse me, while the plotline of the second story seemed too familiar.

I would say that the second won by a long shot. 

The first one about ghosts seemed to skim over lots of details and it felt like they were trying to summarize a long story that they read five years ago and can't remember anything about. The narrative style also didn't feel right for a story of that size and it distracted me from the actual story. The only thing that I liked about the story was its plot, but the way it was told ruined it for me. Altogether the story felt rushed and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. 

The second one wasn't the best either, however, it did have slightly more okay parts than the first one. First of all the story felt a bit more thought through, but still awfully rushed. It had more details than the other story, which is to say little over one. The story was easy to follow because the paragraphs were nicely spaced and the story moved at a better speed than the first one. I also liked the kind of humor in it and how it told the story in an interesting enough way that didn't make me want to break my computer. I do feel like this as the easy way out though and that they put minimum effort into this. I could tell that the first one was written by someone who was trying hard even though the writing itself sucked. If we were voting on effort and time it probably took to write then I would say the first, but unfortunately the second one sucked less and I actually liked it (very much possible it was because I had just read the first story right before that). So I vote for the second one. 

You did not disappoint me, Mizal haha. Both stories make me laugh for completely different reasons. The first story has such a ridiculous plot coupled with occasional typos and oddly phrased sentences that it caused me to heartily chuckle. The second story does it with its amusing description and overall concept.

As for my enjoyment and especially overall readability, I have to place my vote on the second story! It's revengeance for me!

Listen, both essays were better than what I have been reading all week, and neither of them accidentally pasted in a link to the best of indiana jones | robot chicken | adult swim youtube the best of star trek | robot chicken | adult swim, so as far as I can tell, they are both well deserving of A+'s in my book.

But Revengeance wins.

You know they're bad when an English professor mistakes 2 short stories for essays.

As far as I am concerned, they were essays on As You Like It.  They looked more like them than the ones I received this week.

I planned to jot down some thoughts on these stories while reading since I'm usually plagued by indecision, yet my notes ended up being lengthy reviews and an excuse to procrastinate my assignments. Guess I’ll just post them here. 

Story 1

Right off the bat, we’re greeted with a missing quotation mark. Really not the best way to start the story. Being generous, I’m going to remind myself that there’s the possibility it got lost in the copy-pasting over— Nevermind, I take that back. There’s a whole block of dialogue without new paragraphs for each speaker, which is one of the first few mistakes I’ve learnt to look out for. Oh well, perhaps I ought to examine the narrative instead of the grammar. The story doesn’t immediately catch your attention, but it does draw you in with the dialogue. Both characters are reasonably well characterized here. Amanda also has a goal she wants to achieve. Let’s continue.

It’s a good thing you know not to overuse dialogue tags in the next paragraph; that’s another thing I was initially worried about. I like the build up of suspense, combined with the mother’s efforts to not alarm the child. Since I’m in an editing mood today, I found a slight error: ‘Signalling [to] her to be quiet. Unless I missed something, I don’t think there are any other grammatical errors in the next part except ‘thing lips’. That really shouldn’t have made me laugh as much as I did.

There is a distinct shift in tone in the 6th paragraph. Before this, the narrator kind of took the backseat, letting the two characters shine a bit more. Now, the narrator is given a personality. They say things like ‘just in case you didn't figure it out’ and ‘irresponsible little fucks’, so aside from this revealing the author of the story to me, it also changes the narrative. I’m not sure if a shift in tone is a positive or negative thing though, just thought I’d point it out. The new tone actually makes the info-dump more humorous, so I guess that’s a point in your favour. Minor nitpick here: maybe you could replace the first comma with a semicolon? Oh, and there’s the obvious lack of space between ‘at’ and ‘least’, which perhaps implies you didn’t proofread.

Alright, just as predicted, vengeance will come in the form of Amanda getting revenge for her mother. The part about it taking a long time adds some realism to the story, which is good. It’s interesting how she never stopped to wonder about whether or not she could impact the physical world around her as a ghost. 

I find the ‘Awmmm’ part rather funny. Here, there is a lengthy sentence where your thoughts probably changed midway so the first part doesn’t really make sense with the rest of it, but my editing mood is fading so I’ll just keep reading on. Wait, Amanda nearly dosed off? Where did she even find pills anyway? 

Aside from a few minor grammatical errors I’d rather not go into, this next part is alright. There’s just a long sentence (second last, on the ninth paragraph) that I am a bit confused by. Oh well, I may just be tired right now. Then we arrive at the final fight scene. It starts with a minor tense error, but I’ll set that aside for now. The author should try and find out what comma splices are and how to fix them. As for the narrative, it’s pretty strong and I get a sense of what’s happening throughout. The final part is sufficiently foreshadowed; the descriptions are vivid and slightly dark too.

As a final word, I’d say that the scope of the story negatively impacts its overall narrative. By this, I mean that there are too many scenes taking place over a long period of time, causing the author to resort to telling instead of showing during some points of the story.  This could partly be due to the word count and time constraints too. Although a few sentences to get the reader up to speed may sometimes be necessary, in this case, it means distancing the reader from the story a little. The most powerful scenes here are the start and the end, since they’re focused on what’s going on in the moment itself. 

The main character’s shift from innocence to full-on murderer is something that could have been developed a bit more to really get readers to understand her point of view. At several points in the story, I wondered how much of her naivety she retains and how corrupted she actually becomes.

I’ll end this with a disclaimer: All of this is just my opinion, and since I’m not too experienced as a reviewer (this is my first official review), do take everything with a grain of salt.

Story 2

I’m laughing at the first three sentences; I know what’s to come. The obvious, though well-deserved flattery sticks out to me. Maybe Cystia ought to be capitalized since it’s a place of sorts? There’s an apostrophe mark missing in the 5th paragraph too. 

Both authors are defeated by the next obstacle - dialogue! The second author’s error is a lot more minor since the full stop just needs to be replaced by a comma and ‘said’ can be un-capitalized. That’s just me being nitpicky today. ‘Over saw’ can be combined into one word. Sentence fragments are found in the next part, but I’m not sure if they’re a problem since I recognize a lot in my own works too. 

Defeating Corgi by accident the last time surely makes me laugh. Yet, after the flashback is mentioned, the author seems to have forgotten the story’s tense. Even though he ‘arrives’ at the tournament grounds, it ‘was’ hard to put on his armour. I re-read the first few parts and notice the same error again (with the ‘said’ and ‘dons’). This is not an uncommon problem; in fact, I generally have one proofread session just for ensuring the tenses are consistent. 

The main thing that makes this story a lot easier to read, aside from the formatting and shorter, less convoluted sentences, is the humorous tone. This remains consistent from the start. Besides, the familiarity of the whole scenario means that less words have to be spent on explaining what’s happening to the readers, which is a problem that the initial story suffered from.

‘The obvious joke’ cracked me up. I may be leaning towards this story due to the number of times I’m laughing now. And hey, I’ve got a cameo too! Slight grammatical errors follow, but there’s nothing too severe that it distracts from the narrative. Oh, how did you anticipate that I’ll be judging these ‘very judgementally’? (Also, ‘judgmentally’ is spelt wrongly too, but I can’t fault you for that since I didn’t notice until quoting this for the review on google docs).

Overall, I have to say that this story manages to foretell the result of this duel. FemWolverine, how did you know that the flaws in Corgi’s story is what gives you the edge over him? (excuse the pun). Although proofreading did clear up some mistakes, it might help if you use something like google docs to weed out grammatical and spelling errors. A bit more suspense may have elevated this story, especially when you’re describing the duel, but then I suppose it being anticlimactic did contribute to the humorous narrative.

My vote

I’ll be voting for the second story. Now, I’m going to take a break since these are probably the longest reviews I’ve written in quite some time. 

I'm pretty sure "signalling her to be quiet" is gramattically correct. Also, keeping dialogue from multiple speakers within the same paragraph isn't a grammatical error; it's a stylistic choice. Not a very popular choice when writing stories but a choice nonetheless.

Ah, I see, thanks for the corrections! It's always great to learn something new.

Revengeance wins this one. I wanted to like Fem's more, but it was way too messy. The flow was off, and way too many plot points were crammed into the story. 

Corgi wins because his story was more or less complete and was very easy to read and understand. 

Yeah, I definitely have got to vote for Revengeance. I thought the story was simple and cute and did not attempt to bite off more than it could chew.

As for Ghost Eat Ghost World, I can certainly say the idea behind it was pretty unique and interesting. Unfortunately that is where my praise ends; the pacing and dialogue were the greatest problem for me.

As far as pacing was concerned, the story covers great tracts of time and important character building moments in a sentence or two; kind of jarring. 

The dialogue itself was not bad, if perhaps a bit robotic and erratic. I was more bothered by the grand wall of text since the dialogue was not used to break up the monotony of paragraph after paragraph, it also made it a bit rough to look at.

Besides the spelling and grammar errors, I thought both stories were fairly solid efforts; props to both authors for following through.

I enjoyed the second story more, but I almost want to vote for the first story just to see the fallout...

Everyone's retarded.

lol

Honestly, I'm just disappointed in myself for not figuring that out. For one thing, it only makes sense for Mizal to keep the 'FemWolverine' if it wasn't actually you, especially since she declared the system to be foolproof due to the anonymity. Besides, I'm not sure if you'd refer to yourself as 'FemWolverine' or make it so blatantly obvious that it's you. Then there were the jokes that longer-term CYS members were more likely to use, the narrative's focus on Corgi as the main character, and randomness that seems more like his style.

Guess I could say that there was a lot of foreshadowing for this deception (on his part, not yours). No longer should I trust everything I see on the internet... I might be developing those trust issues from the other thread, after all. 

Oh, and it'll definitely be great to see another rematch.

Well, I already had gotten the hunch that the second story was Corgi's based on the writing style. Like in his work 'The Last Chieftain', Corgi kinda likes to write extremely short paragraphs with tons of dialogue while in Femalewolverine's previous story, the paragraphs are pretty condensed and the story makes frequent use of timeskips and 'telling'. While the difference is not as apparent as in the first duel, only a lazy twat wouldn't immediately recognize which work is written by whom. 

True, but I've also not read anything by either of them in at least two years, so the writing styles weren't familiar to me. 

Hehehe GOTEEEM 

@FemaleWolverine

Good attempt at least. Your writing at least has the making of someone who could be decent one day. But also all 11 year olds suck at writing. So keep working at it.

Let it be said that Corgi CCXIII is not afraid to beat up a small helpless child in combat.

Both stories had numerous grammatical errors, but the first one additionally suffered from many continuity errors. Like the other esteemed judges, I will be visiting a doctor, perhaps a geriatrician since the other specialists have been fully booked. First though, I will leave my thoughts on the first story. I won't cover the second one since the blonde warrior covered the grammar issues for the second one pretty well already, and I have a feeling the author would have spotted them on his own if he gave the story even a single proofread. As for Fem's story:

First of all, the missing quotation mark right at the start certainly doesn't bode well.

Amanda heard a thud outside the room, but before she could say anything, her mother rushed her to a window and made her get onto a tree right next to it.

It's not entirely clear how Amanda goes from a window right onto a tree. Is she on the second floor? If so, that's not obvious from the preceding text and should have been mentioned in the setup..

Amanda nodded again and went off to hide,

This clearly contradicts what was said earlier:

"Okay sweetie, I'll hide and you seek. But you need to go outside, okay? "Yes mommy!"

First continuity error.

Startled, she was about to get up, but a movement stopped her. A tall, muscular man with a bloody knife clutched in his hand rushed out of the house. 

How did this man finish the deed, run down from the second house, and get out the door before Amanda is even able to stand up. Was she frozen in shock? That should be mentioned.

Amanda stood still, taking note of his features.

Extremely unrealistic action for a young girl and that she wasn't caught while staring, but I'll excuse it as a convenient plot device.

 

But that was a long time ago. A lot happened since then, her mother was dead (just in case you didn't figure it out) and you're probably thinking 'Atleast she still has her father, right?' Wrong, her father died of a heart attack when she was two. So that led to her getting put into an orphanage, but the people running it were irresponsible little fucks and she had died of starvation in all but a few days.  

Extremely jarring fourth wall break. Also contains a comma splice and 2 run-on sentences. You need a comma when "and" is used to link 2 independent clauses.

But, by some miracle, she awoke again, as a ghost, that is. 

The last comma is extraneous.

Rage shot through her and before she knew it, she was lunging at him, no holds barred.

 Missing comma before the and.

Instead her fist went right through his head. Surprised, she swung over and over, getting the same result every time.

There's absolutely no way she spent years as a ghost without figuring out that she can't interact with physical objects. Completely breaks immersion.

Feeling drawn to it, she almost unwilling moved towards it, eventually tracing it towards a pencil. 

"unwillingly"

They were intimidating people, practically six feet of pure muscle. 

This isn't technically wrong, grammatically speaking, but I initially read "intimidating" as a verb and thought the cops were intimidating random people. I would suggest "intimidating-looking" or using a different adjective.

Why are they chasing him, is he a criminal?

Comma splice.

Lucas paused for a moment and then, understanding the situation he was in, put his hands in the air. 

Did he not understand the situation before? Seem implausible.

Meanwhile, Amanda was pondering the situation, 'So, he's a serial killer huh? Well, since he's killed so many people, it won't affect him to kill just one more...right?' 

Quotes have to follow directly after the verb.

Convincing herself, she possessed Lucas again, causing the police to gasp.

It's not clear that she previously possessed Lucas to begin with or, if she had, that she had ever stopped doing so. Also, how would the police even know that he got possessed?

Using the pencil, she stabbed first one policeman, then the other and kicked them in the balls, for good measure.

Pencils are not exactly known for their lethality as weapons. There's not way she could get away with killing both officers without being shot.

She had enough common sense not to murder him in broad daylight.

What? She just murdered 2 police officers in broad daylight, and now she's afraid killing a third person will get her caught? 

Entering the house, she had seen the murderer, who she nicknamed 'A' short for 'Asshole who murdered my mother', it was about to be 'Awmmm' but that sounded wierd, so she stuck with A.

Holy mother of run-on sentences. Also, "it was about to be" is incorrect here and should be "it was going to be". "Weird" is also spelt wrong.

 

Creeping closer, she cocked the gun to his head and taking a deep breath shot the trigger. But, her grip was not prepared for the strength that the bullet would fly out with and she missed, the bullet only skinned his nose.  

There's no way a point-blank shot could miss that badly even if you released the gun the moment after pulling the trigger. The bullet is already on its way before you can feel the recoil.

He clearly had much more experience with it that Amanda did

 "than"

 

she grabbed a knife she spotted on his nightstand and lunges at him.

Tense change

There were several more comma splices, but I'm sure you can find them on your own. Also, I found the whole pencil side-arc to be distracting and underdeveloped. The story would have been better off without it.

Anyways, it looks like Fem already conceded, so I'll withhold my vote. 

Thanks for hosting this Mizal, it was fun

Second one.

I second this opinion since I've already posted in this thread. 

Second story it is.

What do you think? 

Well, I did say everyone. 

So it really is people’s choice. 

yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee