[Certain]

Adonis: This probably was about you, but I felt like it was about me. I connected to it a lot in that way. On first read, I didn't connect the thoughts well enough. But deeper readings led me to believe this verse basically was about the sellout aspects of competitive writing and the difficulty in being true to yourself while still writing verses for judgment. There were about five or six lines I didn't quite connect, though, which is the difficulty with writing a more abstract verse in these leagues (and of course directly ties to your approach to the topic). I also wish your rhymes and schemes were stronger. There can be beautiful poetry amid complex rhyme schemes, and using those is essential in these leagues. But you, like I just wrote about Diode, balanced that here with better-than-normal cadence.

patrown: So you wanted some thoughts on character development, then you spent the first half of your verse doing a very strong job developing a character. From the first line all the way through the pictionary line, you really had me here. But the key was that this verse needed to go somewhere, and it simply didn't. There was something to say about disillusionment and our lack of place in the world, and you seemed to be building toward it, but then you let your verse fall into a somewhat lazy finish. The last eight lines didn't feel in-step with the rest of your verse because you cast aside subtlety and seemed to try to turn this story into a something else entirely, perhaps a meditation on conspiracy theories? I'm not even sure. The writing was a bit broken from that point, and you lost the soul of the girl you had developed so well in the early going, which was a real disappointment.

Vote: Adonis