[oats]

Mercy: this had a lot going on, surprisingly. I think your sweeping generalizations worked, despite lacking any sort of support or examples for your assertions. The heavy-handedness of these philosophical musings (which is how I basically took the verse) worked in that way, though. The comparisons/personifications of the characters were very provocative, and easily glossed over due to the smooth rhyming. Honor being a grave robber was great. Despite that, the brevity did have some drawbacks, namely that it came off as a tease, and how they went about murdering Justice was pretty unclear, and unsatisfyingly so (as opposed to the enjoyable lack of clarity in personifying the others). I wonder how much of this was deliberate, and how much was due to time constraints of some sort. Either way, you pulled it off, and it was very dope.


Vivid: I broke a cardinal rule after reading your verse. I read it twice, and still had no idea what was going on. So I wanted to see if it was just me, and I read the other votes before this, which I generally don't do as a rule of thumb, but yeah, I was confused, and I think it was because the action was confusing. I'm not going to talk about the actual writing because it's solid, nothing jumps out at me as concerning. But the action just flashed by so quickly without anything to clearly slow it down and include me in on it. It was like watching highlights of a movie in fast forward. I still read it and was excited about it for some reason, and was able to piece things together in small segments, but overall there was just something missing for me to hold it all together.

Vote: Mercy wasn't stellar, but he definitely delivered a lot of thought-provoking rhymes seamlessly. It was risky, but it paid off because Vivid fell a little too deep down the rabbit hole and I was still waiting at the surface. I just felt left behind by this verse, anchor it down, repeat some things, pause to lay out some feelings/thoughts of the characters more, or even describe the scenery, do something to slow it down a little. Your ideas are great, and possess a cinematic quality to them, just gotta volume it a little better.