I just finished writing this long ass vote for the week 12 champ match and then it was too late :(
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dead man,
Reading this makes me feel like I’m a teenager and my dad let me have a glass of red wine at a family gathering and all the adults are talking about how it’s got a generous mid palatte with hints of peppercorn and a soft and youthful profile tempered by even tannins and I’m just like… yeah this tastes like spicy Ribena, shit’s dope. Too amateur to appreciate it fully but drinking it in is a pleasure. I can talk to you about mechanics. The content of your verses always requires me to pause and consider each line, but I usually read it through once first and let the words just wash over me. There’s some other writers here that turn a phrase as well as you do, in their own style, but the way you build a rythym and then transition so seamlessly into a different one, littering your work with rhymes everywhere but switching up the flow frequently in a way that keeps it so engaging to read even totally aside from the content, is unparalleled. Alright, I did go back and reread and pause and consider. I retract my statement about others turning a phrase as well as you. Followed a road to a fork and knife, “step to the side” double meaning, stuck in transit / tunnel vision. Man, this is so fucking good. I catch something else and it gets better and better the more I read it. One thing I can’t figure out is your switch to third person in a single bar – “counts his blessings in private …”. I have to believe it was intentional but I don’t really get it. But anyway. As a standalone piece this was absolute brilliance. The only part of this that’s just OK and not great is the connection to the given topic. What I take from your piece is your character emotionally crippling his significant other through infidelity and gaslighting – ‘poking holes in her throat she doesn’t even know’. If the pic was just the bent over figure with the nails that’d be fine, but the figure pulling them out seems like an important aspect of the picture and it felt unaddressed in your verse to me. Probably I’m missing something. Oh well.
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Frank,
OK I get the all caps as a stylistic choice to show your character’s rage but I got like 6 bars in and I just can’t. Copied it to a Word doc and changed it to sentence case. Much better. While I was there I did a word count: 933. The rules are 60 lines max at 15 words/line = 900 words max. So you were just a tiny bit over which is exactly what NYC predicted lmaooo. Okay, so. It’s interesting that you both interpreted the topic as the nails being emotional trauma inflicted by loved ones. I think you addressed the ‘pulling the nails out’ aspect better than your opponent did with your character taking some vengeance on his family. “Hit the nail on the head” was a cool wordplay and great way to end the verse. You had your usual multitude of multis here, towards the start of the verse I was feeling like they weren’t as dense as usual and the flow was suffering for it but it did pick up. Maintaining the same rhyme through a 60 (or 62) line verse whilst simultaneously telling a coherent story is no mean feat. Even if you did repeat some rhymes and words here and there, they were spaced far enough apart that I’d forgotten them, so it was no biggie to me. Although you didn’t lose control of the narrative like others do when trying to flex some multis, at times your word choices were just too obviously influenced by the rhyme scheme and felt unnatural. It wasn’t that bad, really, and against most opponents I probably wouldn’t even comment on it, but it didn’t compare favourably against dead man who seems to choose every single word so carefully.
Alright, so. As standalone pieces I think while Frank’s verse was pretty good dead man just outwrote him here. But, I do think Frank hit the topic a little better which makes it closer. It looks like my vote isn’t going to change the outcome at this point so let me just leave this feedback for you guys now and I’ll have a think about who to vote for.
^ well that's useless now but I hope you like the additional feedback anyway.