[Dominate]

Alright first of all I have to apologize to fraze, because ACTIVATE you’re way over the line limit here man. Even allowing 15 x 32 = 480 words to account for your shorter line format you’re well and truly over at 561 words compared to fraze’s 404. I should have noticed earlier and asked you to trim it down. It’s unfair to fraze in two ways - first because he has to compete with less material, and secondly because it makes this more of an effort to vote on which turns people away from doing so and means he gets less feedback on his verse. Fraze - I’m sorry man. I dropped the ball here with not intervening early. It’s still open to you to take the DQ win if you want to.

Aaaaanyway, onto the verses themselves.

ACTIVATE:

I’m not sure how I feel about the idea of a verse in a new round continuing on where the previous one left off. I suppose I’m okay with it if each verse works on its own and the prior reading isn’t NEEDED to understand the present verse. Which I think is the case here, so that’s okay. That said I’m still not sure about the take on the topic - I’m not getting this dark/horror/psychological thriller vibe that was present in your verse from this picture at all. For me the theme of this picture is more like… “uncertainty”… “Which direction to take?” … But I acknowledge that this is subjective. You ticked the box of connecting to the topic by describing elements that were in it, like the stairs and compass and figure/shadow man. The premise was interesting - the mind of a monster cast as “The Hollow”. I note that you stepped it up with the multi syllable rhyming this week. Points for that. There were some words choices that weren’t quite right for me, but overall I think this was pretty well written. The pacing was good. The visuals were clear and compelling. It held my interest all the way through and again on a couple of rereads.


Fraze:
This took me longer to get the idea of what you were writing about. Epic, mythic battles in a surreal/dreamlike landscape. That works, with the two figures shown in the picture and the misty/cloudy weirdness of it. I think the opening lines especially would have benefited from plainer language to clarify the idea ASAP, because at first I had no clue and it felt like too much work trying to decipher the meaning of the abstract language and poetic imagery in each line. I think you’ve lost some of the other voters this way. Once I figured out what this was and reread it I enjoyed it more. Your rhyme schemes and mechanics were a highlight, and I enjoyed some clever turns of phrase throughout like the morbid/more bids line. It’s interesting your opponent continued on from his verse last week and you used the same idea of jumping around from the narrator to different character voices. As with last week, I think you’ve succeeded there with making the voices sound distinct from one another. I feel like the narrator got too much airtime this week. Maybe a verse from the point of view of Tyrant Xun or Valinar would have been good, would have given us a bit of “action” which I think would have lent itself really nicely to the epic-ness of what you wrote about. Have to be honest - I don’t really understand what the Parley Pete verse was.


It’s definitely close, but I’m giving this one to Activate. I generally prefer more plainly stated language and to understand without toooo much effort what every line is about. There was a ton of creativity and linguistic prowess in fraze’s verse, and I had him ahead in mechanics, and probably take on the topic too. But the more grounded and coherent narrative with clear emotional stakes in Activate’s verse was ultimately more enjoyable to me.