[oats]

Totoro: it took me a while to get into this, which is rare when reading one of your verses. The writing was good, strong rhyming and plenty of stand-out lines to keep me moving. But it took me a number of reads before making sense of a lot of it, and there are still some gaps. I like that this is open for me to find my own meaning of it, but I think it could have benefitted from some concrete detail to separate his daydreams from his reality (though the blurring of the two is purposeful, I'd imagine, and the implications are not lost on me). I like the death's a facade couplet, as well as the evolution is (hypo)critical bar, as those are vital in understanding the background story of this rags to riches story of the future. Overall, lots of interesting thoughts interwoven in this, but not without its stumbles.


Witty: the pace of your writing is really unique. it's frenetic, and once it reveals itself it becomes easy to fall into the flow, even on the occasions with jarring breaks from the rhyme. your writing is good, and the rhyming was strong for the most part (couple lines weren't particularly great, but not every bar is meant to be an extravagant rhyme). The story progression was good, took me from the stumbling home drunkenness, paced around the house, to the slow piecing together of fairly obvious clues, but of course when you're hammered it takes a while to figure it all out. So it worked.

The ending seemed predictable, but it was also seamless. I don't know another scenario that would have worked as well tbh, so better to go with the one that makes the most sense, even if it seemed obvious. Overall this was a dope story, and I enjoyed it a lot.


Vote: This is super close. Totoro had a psychedelic daydream of the future, Witty had a Guy Ritchie-esque scene of a man coming home to his dead wife. Both were dope, with minor grievances popping up here and there. Totoro had a more engrossing, interesting verse, but it was hard to make sense of in places - I would have liked to see more meditation on the isolation of immense power and how that affected him, which would have made his thoughts a bit more coherent and meaningful. Witty's main gripe was that his verse was predictable, and didn't leap out at me or leave me with any lingering feeling.

I've reread these both numerous times, and it's tough to find something that separates one from the other. My gut feeling is that Witty executed his topic more successfully, so I'm going with that. Best battle I've read this week.