[ OT ] 4yr Contest Voting - Round Two ( of two )

I vote for /u/WinsomeJesse for `` The King of Camp Wabanaki'' 
 
 This is my same choice from the previous round, you can see my rationale for voting for it [ here ] ( https: //www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/4wmjpz/ot_4yr_contest_voting_round_one_of_two/d6acpya ). My one qualm in voting for this is that it is so obviously an unfinished work. But the reason for that is that is that the core of the story is so powerful, so well-realized, that you can see so clearly what the rest of it has to live up to. This, to me, is the entire purpose of writing, to capture this sort of truth about the world and put it into words. 
 
 I also wrote down my opinions of all the other finalists: 
 
 *Greenland*, by /u/Barahagara is the story I would've voted for if I were n't so biased. This is just professional, in its effortless depiction of an Antartic expedition, the evocative dream imagery, the growing socio-political tension. It's all the more appreciated knowing that it was inspired by the dumbest possible pun. My one criticism is that the betrayal is far too abrupt an escalation. For everyone to conspire against Alex to the point of murder, when his biggest sin is speaking of Christmas and saying he does n't want a cut of the profits - it does n't feel earned by the story yet. 
 
 *By the light of my cigarette*, by /u/schoolgirlerror has a lot of great lines. `` The Athenians would have called her pretty as a cow'' is a transcendent example of m'ladying. When Sha responds with `` It ’ s a proper Dido night, if you know what I mean, ” I audibly said, Oh my God, and I do n't even know who exactly Dido is without looking it up. The whole conversation between Sha and Nate leading up to part IV is incredible and keeps escalating. 
 
 Ultimately though, I was disappointed with the climax. The story signposts much too hard. Right here, these lines: 
 > A boy goes to his teacher and asks for guidance, but the teacher ’ s a metaphor for the boy when he ’ s grown up and wise. It ’ s a circular allegory for coming of age and realising young people are idiots, but no one who ’ s read it understands the message. I ’ ve sent it to Writers Exposed, and it ’ ll be published in September. 
 
 This is like the author holding up a sign saying,'hey, the main character's a pretentious prick who's going to get shit on later in the story, I just want to make sure everyone knows that.' I would like to at least be nominally on Nate's side at the beginning, but the story signposts so hard that he is heading towards his comeuppance. That's why the introduction of Sha was so delightful to me, because a girl even more pretentious than him was a twist I was n't expecting. 
 
 But Nate's turnaround is far too abrupt. After everything I've seen of him, I no longer believe Nate has the self-awareness to accuse someone else of acting without irony. For him to accuse Sha of tryharding is like putting a gun to his own head to shoot the person next to him. And I do n't feel that he has experienced enough in this story to bring him down to that low a point. Merely being made uncomfortable is not enough. He has been set so hard down this path that I think the only way to turn him around is to destroy him, and then rebuild him facing the other direction. Either that or tone him way, way down so that the reversal comes easier. 
 
 *Burden*, by /u/LustLacker has an uneasy discontinuity running through it, as if it's been patched together from multiple dystopian worlds. There are shades of Orwell with the Morality Police, where the citizens are so tightly controlled that men do n't have the autonomy to grow out their own beards. And yet the protagonist and Ana are free to drive out into the mountains on the weekends and do whatever. Or how the repeated use of Capitalized Simple Words and Titles - Ana the Curious, Crafty, etc; the War; Severe Consequences - suggest a return to primitivism. And yet there are rockets and mines and cars and kilometers. Or how the protagonist's insistence on constantly calling his daughter'the girl' evokes a post-familial landscape, where the natural bonds of blood have been severed by the upheaval of the world. And yet he was forced to marry Ana because he got her pregnant. 
 
 This feels petty, like nitpicking, but I genuinely feel it's detrimental to the story. The conflict flickers around a lot. For the most part, it's purely survivalist, a father struggling to keep his daughter alive in the wild. But it's interspersed with all these other concerns: racial animus, poverty, complicity in hoarding, that do n't get fleshed out but are merely referenced. These are communal concerns, but they end up meaningless because there's no portrayal of a community. The protagonist and Ana do n't seem to have any other friends, do n't spend time with anyone else other than her uncle, and even he's more of a plot device than a person. The opening line of the story is particularly confusing to me. Voice says the rockets are fired at the enemy, but Ana does n't believe it and wonders where the rockets go. What? What else would you fire rockets at? Of all the things to doubt, why this? I do n't get it. 
 
 The story is frequently beautiful, but I do n't feel it quite coheres into a whole. 
 
 *Diner Du Duane*, by /u/Mirari_Inanis is about a duo who found their passion project of an authentic French restaurant in the middle of Tennessee, and its biggest sin is that it never once makes me feel hungry. The dishes, we are assured, are delicious, savory, `` as satisfying to look at as they were to eat,'' but none of that tells us how they actually taste. Even the restaurant review from Saveur tells us that they served `` the best French meal... ever experienced'', have `` a level of elegance and authenticity,'' `` fancy selections,'' are `` inspiring a new generation of gourmandes'' - and yet it completely fails to describe what the food tastes like! 
 
 Duane and Buck do not seem to be acting out of a love of food, because the story is uninterested in describing it. They merely seek to emulate everything French. This is most clearly illustrated when the man who is so moved by their buche noel *completely fails to eat the dessert! * He just sits there staring at it because it reminds him of his dead wife. At this point this has nothing to do with food anymore. The man could have smelt perfume, heard a fragment of song, seen a postcard, and gotten just as nostalgic. The seeming value of French cuisine is that it reminds people of France, and relies on people having good memories and feelings about France. There might be a story in this, certainly, but for the moment Duane and Buck just seem like a pair of pretentious Francophiles who continually shit-talk their hometown for not being France. 
 
 *Mother May I? * by /u/Just-a-Poe-boy features a protagonist who talks incessantly about everything - her cat, Nancy Beth Harrington, their three bedroom home, all the other incompetent mothers, hand sanitizer - everything except her newly adopted son. Timmy serves as a conversation starter, a segue, an opportunity to start talking about the things that really interest her. The only thing we learn about Timothy himself is that he's very polite and says'Mother may I' all the time, and that he is six years old. Victoria is such a self-evidently narcissistic high-strung person that it's obvious this ca n't end any way but badly. 
 
 Victoria is not quite one-note, but she manages to make every note sound almost the same. She gets so hysterical about every little thing that there's no real sense of escalation to the story. She might have been funny, in her own terrible way, but the choice to go for pathos at the end kills it. 
 
 *Stitches*, by /u/resonatingfury is a story populated by cardboard cutouts. Victoria is eight or nine years old, her father has been dead since she was five, and she still does not understand that her father is dead, she does not understand the concept of death itself, and she casually invites a random stranger home to dinner under the delusion that he is her father. This is not a little girl being cute or naive, this is a severe psychological problem! How has this little girl survived in this state for the past four years without her father? I dunno. Her mother is apparently resigned to it. But Frank gives her a talk at the end, and she's fine, she'll be fine, that's all it takes, I guess. 
 
 Frank is likewise cardboard. He tells Dana that `` When you asked my name, you did more for me than anyone has in over thirty years.'' So in thirty years he has never made a friend, a friendly acquaintance, never eaten at a soup kitchen or spent a night in a homeless shelter. And yet despite supposedly being abandoned by society for the last three decades, he is perfectly polite, pliant, willing to be led around by a little girl. Because if he was paranoid or resentful or mean or just somehow unpleasant to be around, this story would n't work. It relies on everyone being perfectly reasonable, polite, communicative people to each other, despite having incredibly psychologically stressful backgrounds. There's no sense of any real effort or struggle. It rings false. It's unreal. 
 
 Congrats to all the finalists.
