Obsolete: Summer 2019 Oneshot Competition: RESULTS

[unrepentantAuthor]

Hello everyone! I hope you've all had a good time this past couple of months. We're now at the end of the road, and it's time to announce our winners. In the end, we only had ten votes, and the competition was pretty stiff, with not much margin between the top-placing fics at all. So if you didn't win this time, you should still feel proud of yourself for participating, for writing an entire story in just about a month, and for giving your readers something to enjoy.

With that said, here are our winners for this season:

Best Use of Theme, as voted for by our judges: "Hear That Which I Desire" by @Beth Pavell

This category was the narrowest win, and everyone did a great job with the competition theme. Beth's fic is a Legend of Zelda fanfic featuring an OC protagonist whose personal calling to fight for his country isn't acknowledged by fate. I'm not into LoZ, so I can't speak to its nature as fanfic of those games, but I personally found it a compelling story with the competition theme woven in subtly in many places. I've also got a soft spot for stories about hopeless causes and the ordinary heroes that take them up. Go check it out!


Best Written Entry, as voted for by our judges: "kunāne" by @kintsugi

Well done to kint for another offering of beautiful prose that cuts straight to the heart of deep emotion. Her story is about the relationship between a pair of Alolan siblings and some of the experiences they have, and haven't, shared. This one might be an emotionally rough read but I consider it very much worth the time. It was a tight deadline, but kint managed an impressive polish on this one. I'm especially fond of the beautiful description of the lapras character, which had me pining for their existence in our world. Nice work!


Best Fic Overall, as voted for by our members: "Mail for Welltown" by @canisaries

This fic is the story of a breloom mail courier who simply cannot let any letter go undelivered, even to dangerous locales. Canis was the winner of the public vote by quite a wide margin! It seems that Mail for Welltown struck a chord with quite a few of our voting readers, and I must say I really enjoyed it myself. In my opinion, Welltown is a solid showing with a broad appeal, having humour, dread, charm and solemnity at different points. A win well deserved!


I'd also like to give an honourable mention to @namohysip for being the runner-up in the public vote, with his fic "Prayers Unheard."

His story is about an aerodactyl mother in the afterlife, mourning the state of her living son. This story is also a sorrowful read, and I've heard it said that some readers shed tears at it. That's impressive in itself! Well done.


I was the other runner up but it feels prideful to make much of that! I'll just say thank you! to those who enjoyed and voted for "Dispatch Deferred."

It's about an expedited same-century amazon delivery, and never giving up on the mail.


Congratulations to all of you! As promised, our three winners have been granted 60 points of review league credit. Some winners' banners will be available within the next few days!

I hope that you all feel that this has been a successful event, but please don't hesitate to let us know what you thought of it, by giving your feedback here, or in a direct message to any of our moderation team. Would you like to see more events like this in the future? Was two months the right amount of time, or would you have been more likely to participate if it had run longer? Anything at all that you have to say will be listened to and taken on board! I'll be leaving this thread up for a week or two to collect feedback. A reminder to all that you can still earn 4 extra points per review for reviewing competition entries! I myself will be reviewing our several participating short stories in the near future, having held my tongue until after the votes had all come in.

And lastly, until next time, thanks and well done to all for getting involved, and I wish you all the best with your writing.

 

[LightningTopaz]

Congrats to all the winners, and thanks to all the voters!

 

[canisaries]

Thank you all so much for voting for my story! I was honestly really surprised to hear it'd won, given all the other great stories it was competing against. Aki seems excited, too!

Spoiler

On a more general note, thanks to the organizers, judges and all participants for making this competition possible. It was a very fun experience, and I'm totally for more events like these in the future.

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

That's a lovely pic, @canisaries! What a cute mailmon.

Also, thanks x

 

[Juliko]

Congrats, everyone!!!

 

[Beth Pavell]

Behold! Misfit Angel's finished the banners with Cresselia92's artwork:

 

[kintsugi]

hearty congratulations to everyone who won and participated, and thank you to all voters and judges!

quick thoughts regarding the event:

• one-shot/short story concept is really good — as a judge it makes the assigned reading so much better, as a writer it’s a lot more attainable of a goal than “stare at the screen and realize you’ve only done three chapters this year”, and in general it makes things feel more special/contest themed. Would love to see more of these in any format.
• STV voting is good for crowds but rough here, haha; uA already knows this but just listing in case we forget. Maybe doing a first -> 5 points, second -> 3 points, third -> one point or something similar.
• Art and banners are so lovely <3
• Given that the judging pool and voting pool were so similar in both size and expected duties (read all the stories + vote), I wonder if we could restructure things?

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

To be honest, I was actually thinking that we could run something like this without a judging panel at all. It was a good way to structure critical discussion out of sight of the authors, but does that really justify the expense in time and effort?

 

[Beth Pavell]

The advantage to judges is that we can be sure that at least some of the prizes are voted for by readers who have read all the entries. That's not to denigrate a public vote (Because the more people that get involved, even in small ways, the better), but on that basis I'd prefer to keep some kind of judging system.

However next time I think we'd be better served not having discussion PMs and running a public discussion after voting

 

[kintsugi]

clearly the solution secret discussion channels for the entire WW except the author

I mean, we could require some sort of summary-submission/quiz on the entries, but given that there was a public vote this round I figured there was implied trust that voters would read all the entries prior to voting? In the same regard idk how judges could really prove that they read the work; theoretically I could’ve just rephrased all the commentary in judge threads to appear as if I did. With subjective stuff it’s harder to define metrics but I do think community engagement is pretty great.

tldr still unsure

 

[Felly]

Me when I saw results were up: "Okay I'll reply to this later!!"
Me a solid week and a half after I said that: "Whoops, forgot to reply, but here I am now!"

I'll start by saying congrats to all the winners, and the banners look awesome! I had a lot of fun working on mine, and I've been reading the reviews y'all have left on my story and I'm keeping them in mind for my future works! ♥

I like the idea of a public vote because yay community engagement. I think the judging aspect is important too though. I trust that people that voted actually read the stories, but I think they're more so reading to see if they like the story and not so much to provide constructive criticism; that's not to say that they can't do both (because they can and it'd be awesome if they did!), but I think it's hard to really get someone to prove they read something since they could just skim for the answers they need for a quiz or even just skim to provide a brief summary of the story. The only thing I can really think of for some sort of verification that they read the stories is that maybe we could add a little something like one thing they liked about the story and one thing they disliked about the story to the voting; they don't have to go into detail (but it should be encouraged to do so!), but it would at least get something out of the readers that possibly shows they read it, even if it is something brief. Could also share those comments publicly when results are announced and still keep it anonymous, or maybe it'll encourage them to get more in depth with reviews on the stories themselves.

Also, also, I'm not sure about the rulings on this, but I see XenForo has little notices at the top of the forums that are global. Could we maybe get something put up there when voting starts to try and draw people in for voting? Same with the Discord server, but with #announcements instead. Just more advertising of the public voting in general, I guess is what I'm trying to suggest here, if it's possible. I feel like a lot of it was kept in the #writing channel on Discord, and it could be cool to draw in more of the community.

Basically, public vote and community engagement good. I'm looking forward to more events like this in the future!

 

[hanecco]

I'm also very late, but congratulations to the winners!

I noticed a lot of people dropped out just before the end of the competition due to time pressure. I also ended up with a short amount of time to write my entry because school had just started for me when the competition was running. Maybe increasing the time given to write entries would increase participation? Or maybe I should just plan my time better.

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

Thanks for your feedback, everyone. It will all be part of our considerations during preparation for future competitive events.