Contest July-August 2016 Short Story Contest Voting Thread

[spawning of Bob]

You got me there.

 

[Y'ttar Scaletail]

And we race towards the finish line as the clock ticks down, will there be any last minute votes to upset the crown?

Wow, i'm rusty...

 

[Scalenex]

And we race towards the finish line as the clock ticks down, will there be any last minute votes to upset the crown?

I doubt the crown will change hands in the next eleven hours, but I'll refrain from announcing the winner till then.

 

[Y'ttar Scaletail]

So, I didn't get a magical eight last minute votes to make me top rat hound. I blame Eshin.

 

[Killer Angel]

Story Six (The Weight of our Actions) : I fear this author-meat might be a dead-thing in disguise. I say-squeak...I mean...say-hiss that we root out this dead-thing and kill-slay it before the tunnels...I mean...weird pyramid-things start smelling of bad-rot!

But yes, the author certainly seemed to have a good grounding on their Khemri lore and characters, and whilst not everyone may know about Apophas, I think the writer managed to convey enough meaning to cover that up. I for one enjoyed the teasing out of Apophas being the antagonist of the story, with the clues building up to the big reveal and his final pie to the face.

(snip)

I thought Apophas was maybe a little too gullible in his belief that Qor-Tec was black hearted and greedy, but iirc that Prince was never a great one for brains anyway, so it’s prolly just me.

Yeah, Tomb Kings is basically my second army.
And yes, Apophas was not exactly a smart guy. He killed all the royal family to take the throne, without thinking too much about the fact that kingslaying was one of the worst crime.
He was Condemned to be sealed in a tomb and eaten alive by carnivorous scarabs.
His soul was condemned to hell
, but Apophas, being of royal blood, made a pact with Usirian, to avoid his penance: he must find an equal black soul to "substitute" him, and at that point he will be free (hence his special rules, with bonuses against heroes, yadda yadda).
But Usirian fooed Apophas, cause souls are like snowflakes: no one will ever be equal.
I simply imagined Usirian that likes to mock the fool Apophas in his eternal quest for something he'll never be able to find, and I also like to imagine Apophas that is completely into his self-constructed obsession.

 

[Y'ttar Scaletail]

Yeah, Tomb Kings is basically my second army.
And yes, Apophas was not exactly a smart guy. He killed all the royal family to take the throne, without thinking too much about the fact that kingslaying was one of the worst crime.
He was Condemned to be sealed in a tomb and eaten alive by carnivorous scarabs.
His soul was condemned to hell
, but Apophas, being of royal blood, made a pact with Usirian, to avoid his penance: he must find an equal black soul to "substitute" him, and at that point he will be free (hence his special rules, with bonuses against heroes, yadda yadda).

Aye...I really didn't like what End Times did to Apophas and the TK as a whole...

But yes, I should have figured you'd have been behind that one.

 

[Bowser]

So about 10 minutes to go, still need 5 votes for first place, I remain optimistic!

 

[Scalenex]

Congratulations to @thedarkfourth for sweeping the contest with his awesome piece "Food for Thought"

I posted all the author identities on the second post as has become my new tradition.

 

[Bowser]

Comgrats to @thedarkfourth Brilliant story! Well deserved win!

 

[thedarkfourth]

Thanks for being nice, guys. Not sure it was deserved but very chuffed nevertheless. I'm a bit sad that we seem to have fewer voters than previous comps - hopefully it's just a combination of it being summer (hey, has anyone seen @Slanputin?) and everyone's attention being diverted to Golden Serpent. (grrrr. hate those incredibly talented bastards). But I'm thrilled that the quality of everyone's work continues to be epic.

So the story of this story is that I was travelling for most of June and July, but managed to get a few days of downtime right at the end of July. I scraped together an entry much quicker than I usually do for these comps, and submitted just hours before the deadline. The worst bit is I left thinking of title til last, giving myself no time - hence the dreadful title. I love the fact that this hastily thrown-together thing seems much more popular than my previous entries that took weeks of careful planning and drafting. Reminds me of my university days: essays I thought were the worst or most rushed would always get the best marks.

Because it was rushed, the story is a hodgepodge of ideas I’d been mulling for L-O. For ages I’ve wanted to have a story entirely set in the rain, because I think rain is an under-appreciated element of rainforest life. And the first line, “make your choice”, but referring to something inconsequential, is an idea I’ve had for ages. Combine that with inspiration from the greatest movie of all time, Emperor’s New Groove, and also the greatest fantasy novel series of all time bar none, Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching, this is kind of what came out.

I thought the critiques of this story were great. Especially the varying responses to the skink spawning scene. I stand by what I said in my own critique, which is that it’s unnecessary, but others were totally right to point out the reasons I wrote it in the first place (give a sense of the site’s importance for Myol, inject some spirituality/mysticism etc). Also the art from Essmir and Bob is superb! I especially love Bob's lightning-illuminated llama, it makes me incredibly happy!

I don’t want to do a big exploration of the themes and such cos I did that last time and I immediately felt very stupid for doing so… it completely defeats the point if you tell everything after carefully showing it in the story itself.

But I will comment on one interesting point. Several people mentioned the use of gender. I was very curious as to what the reaction would be. I was actually a little worried it would make people like it less! Basically it came from a long-simmering sense that Warhammer, and especially Lustria, is a ridiculously sexist place for storytelling, because it’s only really men who live there. But then I thought, hold on a sec, couldn’t Lustria really be a gender equality utopia* - there are no genders there at all! Lizards are spawned. People only use male pronouns because that’s our sexist convention. Scalanex already pointed this out, but lizards are just are validly described as “she” as “he”, although probably the most accurate would be “it”. So I thought I’d do an experiment of just going with “she” in all cases, but otherwise keeping everything exactly the same. I literally went through and changed each pronoun after finishing it. Very revealing that people started talking about “maternal instincts” and such…

For me this experiment was a satisfying success and I’d like to encourage any other L-O writers who’d like to see a bit more gender equality to use feminine pronouns too (seriously, please, otherwise my entry will be super obvious in every competition). I have a new story I’ve been working on that I will post shortly that also uses feminine pronouns. And I’m considering doing some sequels to Myol’s llama world (llamaverse?) because people seemed to like it. (if others want to jump in on it, feel free!)

*No. Only masculine-associated qualities are rewarded in Lustria

 

[Y'ttar Scaletail]

Thanks for being nice, guys. Not sure it was deserved but very chuffed nevertheless.

Nonsense, you got one of my vote-things. Exceptional writing, sir!

And for the record, it was A Story of the Stars. Beret wearing assassins have been sent to hunt Scalenex down...

Jokes (if you want to believe that...heheheheh) aside, it was fun to take the piss with writing this piece and to be fair I expected to come dead last because of that very marmite ending.

 

[Scalenex]

Jokes (if you want to believe that...heheheheh) aside, it was fun to take the piss with writing this piece and to be fair I expected to come dead last because of that very marmite ending.

That's not what really happened. See @spawning of Bob was concerned that his piece would stand out like a sore claw. He couldn't ask for me for help because he knew I wasn't writing an entry, so he had to stop to bribing a rat friend-thing. "I need you to add a crazy twist ending referencing Aartzifartzi for no reason to throw people off of my trail. Here's a glowing green cookie!"

 

[spawning of Bob]

You'll never prove anything!

And the reason for no cryptic author guesses this time is that I had no idea and no chance. Y'ttar does a story with no rats, TDF does one with what could be argued to be pacing issues. That's cheating.

I knew two identities (my own and one I proofread), and Essmir's I was 50% sure of. The others?. There is certainly no differentiating L-O authors by idea and story quality.

I look forward to seeing these in phase three threads to find out more of what was going on within the authors' minds.

 

[Y'ttar Scaletail]

And the reason for no cryptic author guesses this time is that I had no idea and no chance. Y'ttar does a story with no rats, TDF does one with what could be argued to be pacing issues. That's cheating.

I knew two identities (my own and one I proofread), and Essmir's I was 50% sure of. The others?. There is certainly no differentiating L-O authors by idea and story quality.

I had a Skaven in a star constellation, a lack of action, and an overuse of stars/light emitting objects. I thought mine was very obvious.

 

[Bowser]

The Rat and The Serpent: a few after comp notes

Ratek is glorious, and is really interesting the triple Tehenahuin.
We have the choice made by the skink heroes, to investigate their true nature, an astral conjunction and also the conjunction between two certain gods... well done.

Thank you. It started with the idea of multiple slann remembering the same hero, only each one remembered it slightly differently. What if they met? So I needed a hero, and chose one shrouded in his own mystery. And who better to fight a hero, then a bad copy of the hero? Super heroes and evil copies go together like peanut butter and evil imitation peanut butter.

Also, would the real Tehenhauin please stand up?

Turns out the closest copy was a rat the whole time.

The strongest moment is in the middle, when the three prophets see each other and argue. When they then realise the truth of their situation, and learn to accept that they might not be the "true" Tehenhauin, it's a powerful thing. Really this should have been the climax, the ending.

This probably could have benefited from a rewrite or two. The whole thing is out of order just trying to get the ideas in there. Will most likely get rewritten into a better format before reposting this.

Plot? Set us all up for an epic history changing showdown , then spun us away on the real beauty of this story - some very big ideas.

More ideas than story this time, which in a big ideas contest would have been great, unfortunately for a short story contest, ot suffered a bit. Probably should have left the end more ambiguous or put in a sequel teaser at the very least.

With hardly any definition, the skaven characters were immediately defined by their attitudes - religious loony and stabby sociopath.

Yep, basically took the original Tehenhuain story and changed the name to Two On One and made it rats instead of skinks. See, not so different after all!

Anyway, I always entertained the Grey-Clad Stranger was the true god and creator of the Skaven and that the Horned Rat is either an avatar of the Stranger or another God formed from the Skaven psyche in the Realms of Chaos. But I digress.

I was actually thinking of retelling the grey-clad stranger story, in space for another challenge. Just a really great story.

I’m not sure exactly why but the pacing of this piece felt a little off and over the place to me. Maybe it was the jumps between lengthy dialogue and discussion to the main battle. Though I liked the questions the ending brought up.

In hindsight pacing was definitely way off. Needed a rewrite or three, but as always first draft sent to Scalenex. Could have worked it out a bit better without interruption of the pace.

Dialogue was longer than needed to be. Both the Prophet of Ratek’s grandiose visions and the various Soteks’ discussions. I’d also consider reorganizing the paragraph structure. There was sentence length variation but I couldn’t tell whether it was a bunch of short paragraphs or one big rectangular block of text. Its nitpicky, but I like to see a relatively even mix of short, medium, and long paragraphs. Long paragraphs to set things up and short paragraphs to drive key story events home. Medium paragraphs for everything else.

Once again, sorry for sending you the first draft every time. Paragraphs are not something I have really paid attention to and should.

the Scalenex Cup is a subjective process. But it's not about the the quantity of deaths. Then we would call it the Peter Jackson Cup. It's about killing well developed characters in a way that makes the audience sad, or perhaps angry.

Good news, by setting it in AOS Not only do I qualify for the Scalenex Cup (Almost all well developed characters are killed off by an earth shattering kaboom by this point) but the Peter Jackson Cup as well! Not only did I destroy a major city, but hordes of Skaven cultists, and turned hordes of seraphon cultists into stardust.

 

[Scalenex]

But I will comment on one interesting point. Several people mentioned the use of gender. I was very curious as to what the reaction would be. I was actually a little worried it would make people like it less!

We like new and interesting things. What if ______? is a pretty common discussion starter.

Basically it came from a long-simmering sense that Warhammer, and especially Lustria, is a ridiculously sexist place for storytelling, because it’s only really men who live there. But then I thought, hold on a sec, couldn’t Lustria really be a gender equality utopia* - there are no genders there at all! Lizards are spawned. People only use male pronouns because that’s our sexist convention.

Well the female sculpts aren't very empowering. Eron12 came up with a good metaphor. The Warhammer fluff is at the level you would expect from a very bright (male) high school student. The student likes history, mythology and Tolkien. You get some great analogies to Ancient Egypt, Druidic England, Arthurian lore, Mesoamerica, and Norse lore on elves (Malekith). You also have bathroom/gallows humor, cheap pun names, and a skewed view on gender by one coming to terms with his sexuality.

You get a fairly cohesive story with every group relating to at least a few others but you have some major plot holes. Mainly that most of the Forces of Destructions and the various wild monsters should not be able to feed themselves in their chosen locales or little things like this: The Beastmen steal almost all their technology. The Beastmen favor large axes. The humans they steal from barely ever use battles axes, certainly not Gor and Minotaur-sized.

You get your general sexist things like beautiful Maenad-like Witch Elves fighting half naked then you get every Slaanesh model. Freud would have a field day there. High school boys aren't generally enlightened on feminism, even they try to be.

But yeah, somewhat sexist, but that's been accusation against the entire fantasy genre for decades. I'm not going to call out Game Workshop for this when I can hold better things against them.

Scalanex already pointed this out, but lizards are just are validly described as “she” as “he”, although probably the most accurate would be “it”.

I partially disagree. He, she, or it are all possible pronouns to use Lizardmen that would be technically "accurate" but each has it's own connotations. Different writers (or different stories from the same writers) fall on a different continuum. How human are Lizardmen? If you want to portray Lizardmen as scaly robots that unquestioningly obey the dictates of their leaders and the golden plaques, call them 'it.' If you want to portray them as terrifying alien antagonists to a warmblood rest call them "it." If you want them to have personality and depth, better use "he" or "she." Also think about which one you want to use they are not interchangeable.

So I thought I’d do an experiment of just going with “she” in all cases, but otherwise keeping everything exactly the same. I literally went through and changed each pronoun after finishing it. Very revealing that people started talking about “maternal instincts” and such…

Of course you are going to get references to maternal instincts. Steps on his soapbox.

See when I was a bright high school student writing science fiction I came up with some good things and some flawed things. My favorite alien race was the Appotanians. It just so happens their ancient past was defined by the epic fight between Scalex and Scolex. After they took each other out, it was carried on by their second in command Scalenex and Scolenex. That's neither here nor there. I figured I'd make Appotanians a mostly androgynous race. That kind of spread to everyone else: Sabitines, Ardians, Hexerns and all the rest. Even my futuristic Humans were pretty androgynous compared to contemporary Humans. I copied that sci-convention without realizing it. The trend is less pronounced now then in 70s through 90s but you noticed a lot of futuristic sci-fi settings have men and women dress alike and have similar hairstyles.

Without reinventing the wheel on feminism I believe that you can make males and females equal without making them the same. It cheapens both men and women to assume they will react the same way to the same situations all the time. Acknowledge the differences between the sexes but value them both. Wow, that's preachy. Anyone it's something I'm still struggling with, but I am at least trying to make my male and female characters have an appropriately male and female perspective. A female character's femininity shouldn't be her only distinguishing characteristic or even her main character feature (I'm looking at you Smurfette) but it should never be ignored completely. To ignore gender differences in literature cheapens the value of both sexes.

Steps down from soapbox.

 

[spawning of Bob]

< Fuse finally burns all the way to a cask of black powder. Soapbox explodes >

Dammit Scalenex, I thought you were going to preach for longer!

There is a somewhat related discussion in the Krytic's Crypt somewhere where 30-44 year old white Western men discuss why they think female stereotypes are used in fantasy, and expound on why they think Gurls Rock! and don't quite resolve anything. Here it is midway through page six.

As far as TDF's social experiment (switching pronouns and standing well clear) it just goes to show that readers can find meaning that the author never deliberately put there. Need proof? Read any discussion of @discomute 's recent work if you don't believe me.

Given that some great female authors have made their mark recently (@Hyperborean, @Tziruzitza and @Lady Tor'ti Llaz among others) it would be interesting to get any other perspectives.

 

[Hyperborean]

Seeing as I am coming in on the butt end of it I will catch myself up on this before I can properly expound what we are talking about here. Because when I get started on fantasy trope discussion it can get...long. To put it nicely.

 

[Y'ttar Scaletail]

Well, as far as the whole gender thing goes, Skaven have it tough. To the point of Skaven fluff writers and denizens of the rpg section often bending the established lore to have female Skaven that aren't just oversized baby machines with the brain power of a yoghurt.

In fact, it was partly Felrix's nature as being a non-standard breeder-thing that was behind me dropping her from my entry in the compy before last. She's always been one of my favourite creations, but for whatever reason her original inclusion felt a bit too forced and almost borderline the stereotypes you get with fanfiction to me. I probably was in error in retrospect chickening out like that, especially given how surprisingly well she's gone down with the reader and writership of LO.

The UE's writerbase throught the years has had numerous female characters that have defied GW's lore: Rattsu's female Skaven puppeteering Skavenkind from the breeding dens, Morkskittar's Verminladies, Ratty Gnawtail's Felrix Brightfur and Brrx Wyrdeye, Sketch's plethora of female Skryre Engineers, ShuNian's Grey Seeress Nee, if the UE's search function was working again I could probably list more.

It's funny. Of late i've been finding my female characters far more fun to write...and yet i'm not so sure why. Neither Felrix, Brrx, Craa, nor Ar-thrid Alpha are defined by their gender, they're far more than that as characters. Felrix and Jiao Hun are two of my characters that have a fairly similar history and background. Both were 'modified' by Seer Ironfur and driven insane by it. Although Jiao Hun's insanity is very visable due to having his psyche shattered into multiple personalities, whereas Felrix adopted a fantasy of being a Western Gunslinger as a coping method to avoid having a breakdown from all of the mental trauma. Is it because she's a female that she favours fantasy as a shield against facing the horror of reality? I don't think so. Whizz-Bang, Mizzreek and Tekris Zimkus all purposely (or unknowningly) perceive their world how they want to in order to avoid reality (or at least with Mizzreek it's a by-product of his opium addiction for the agony in his twisted leg.)

I will admit, I did a double take when I saw the female lizzies in Darkfourth's piece, but I remained open minded and quickly found that it didn't upset the story and in fact felt right as a decision.

 

[Scalenex]

@Y'ttar Scaletail, I wrote two stories that I posted to U-E both establishing a non-breeder movement. Basically a cult of females that refused to become breeders. They banded together for mutual protection and provided their services as Tunnel Runners to any leader who would accept their decision not to breed.

No one but Bob commented on U-E, sniff.