[Dominate]

Halo,
I think this is my favourite verse from you all season. This was chock full of the fantastic descriptors that are your signature style. Your rhyming has been more of a variable from one verse to another but here you were about as good as I’ve seen you in that regard – you held some cool schemes over quite a number of lines at points. My main complaint against you in the past has been that even when you do a great job with those two things I just mentioned you jump around from descriptor to descriptor too much, painting us some vivid imagery but not really building a story or an emotion or whatever, but here I think you were a lot more focussed. Your imagery was interspersed with lines about the characters actions and thoughts and some exposition about why she was doing what she was doing. Much, much better. There were still some areas where I got a bit lost and some sections where it was obvious that you had relinquished control of the narrative to the rhyme scheme, but for the most part I think you kept yourself tethered to a story that you had planned out. Great job.


NYC,
I had to read this verse flicking back and forth between tabs and googling words I was unfamiliar with. I learned a lot. This verse was a crash course in ancient Japanese folklore and modern Japanese socio-cultural issues. The story was engaging, with some excellent turns of phrase and rhyming. Maybe my only criticism is that things like "pfft", "dudes who were bitches", "need to level up" felt a bit discordant with the tone of other lines/sections. But damn man did you really write this in one morning? Super impressive... I would be happy to have written this as a final product after working on it all week. Yeesh.



Kind of similar verses – story based and revolving around ancient Japanese customs/folklore. I want to vote for Halo bc I really thought this was a level up from what I’m used to seeing from him, but NYC’s verse was just a lot cleaner/more refined/polished. Voting for him.