[Certain]

Objective: I really liked that you used the painting both literally in a bit of imagery and figurative as a spector hanging over the town. I thought it was strange to make this kid a 5-year-old so late in the verse. Before that, we had the impression that he might be young, though even that was somewhat unclear. Had you made it a 10- or 13-year-old and provided context clues that he was still so young earlier in the verse, I think it would have worked better. A 5-year-old assassin just seems really out there, but then again this child supposedly was possessed by the devil or something. Believability isn't really important in a story like this, though. The way you told the story was so perfect, making it feel like a oft-whispered wives' tale, the type of thing people discuss around a campfire in the fall nights. The ending really hit this note strongest. Your mechanics are not polished yet, though. That's probably the biggest failing about your writing in general. Better complexity in the rhyme scheme can cut into word choice, but that's a sacrifice most of us are dealing with, you know? If you choose this format, you have to respect its demands. It's not that you're completely ignoring rhyming or anything, but your rhymes are very simple and often based on one syllable rhymed once, at the end of lines of a couplet. I'll take this style over the heavily rhymed nonsense many writers try to pass off as abstract writing, though, especially because you know how to tell a good story.

King Ra.: I really like your writing style. It's flexible without ignoring mechanics or voice. You bounce around on rhyme schemes and sentence structure. This verse was written very well to the painting, creating the same sort of tone as "The Starry Night" so famously features. The problem was it didn't go any further. There was no cohesive purpose to this, aside from the beauty of the painting becoming the writer. There wasn't much creativity at all here. Basically, you strung together beautiful words that didn't really mean much. I don't have anything against topicals and write them myself often. But they should have a salient point, where as this was art for art's sake. That is how some people appreciate art, and I think for those people this probably will feel very real to them, very much like perhaps the greatest painting ever, which you were writing on. But I think "The Starry Night" is so wonderful because it tells stories, many stories. It's about so many things, different things to different people. You chose a thin approach to your topic, and while you wrote it well, you didn't do enough in that writing. It's almost the opposite scenario for you from last week, when you won because of your aggressive and creative take on the topic. You may still win this week, and I wouldn't begrudge anyone for voting for you. But I think you're better than this verse showed.

Vote: Objective