[Certain]

UnbornBuddha: On one hand, this was a terrific, creative plot that could have been turned into a movie if it were fleshed out much more. On the other, the writing was all over the place, from loquatious to stream-lined to disconnected. You use so many adjectives that clutter things, and you often force rhymes a bit too much. To phrase it another way, your writing is so close yet so far from working in traditional grammatical structures, mostly the result of rhyme. If you improve on that, you'll be much better. But you also waste a lot of space. While 650 words is the limit, very rare is the verse that needs that many. As an editor, I would have no problem stripping your verse down to about 400 words of a great, exciting and ultimately heartbreaking story. The emotion gets a little buried because it's so long and a bit too direct, which is another thing: When writing from a first-person perspective, you should figure out a voice for the writer that fits his character. That allows the writing to feel more genuine and emotional, which allows the reader to better connect with the narrator and thus the verse itself. With all of that said, this was very good, your best work yet for this league.

Defiant: If this verse was in reference to the movie Elysium, I haven't seen it. I know the plot outline well enough to grasp that it probably is about that movie, but the characters don't exist to me. That's the problem with basing a verse on a non-ubiquitous pop-culture touchstone. You wrote this pretty well, though. You were clean and had a good rhyme structure. You hit the points that would make your verse stand out against UnbornBuddha well, and I can respect that as a strategy. But you didn't do enough here to captivate me. You spoke in a lot of generalities that perhaps were calling back to specificities in the movie. This was a solid submission, but it didn't have as much upside as your opponent's.

Vote: UnbornBuddha