[sral]

The topic itself leaves it open to quite a few ideas here, IMO. There’s obviously the Japanese influence, then you have the various heads/characters orbiting the space that could be used as maybe voices in the persons head etc, it reminds me of the video for Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. Anyway, the black/white film noir kind of look to it has my interest. It could be used in the ying/yang sense, there’s room for something with contrasts between light/dark or good and evil even. There’s quite a lot that can be played with here depending on what you wanted to do. Lets see who had what…

NYCSpitz: You had the longest verse this round, I think? Wild. I liked how you spun the 13 characters into something, it’s no mean feat trying to do so much in such a limited lined format. While you didn’t have to flesh out all thirteen characters, I felt you did enough on the central characters work to make it believable and the ‘victims’ were almost disposable, which works in the context they were used (different to with in Pharoah’s Army’s piece this round, where his central characters were almost the disposable ones.) Your word choices are great at times, salute to ‘ephemeral fractal’ and ‘senescent gaze’. I enjoyed those two. The thing I’ve noticed with your work, other than the unrelenting pace to them, is the descriptive imagery that you bring along with it.

Their waxed skin swallowed our bullets

This one was a nice slice of visual imagery for the reader, it made me think of The Matrix for some reason, possibly with the mention of all those agents etc.

If I’m completely honest, sections of dialogue like these that run over multiple lines don’t really come off naturally when read in this format:

“you’re the final piece of my lovely experiment
Through biotech my children are immortal now so of course there’s appeal
to add your DNA to their lifespan and intelligence - that brute force of your will”

I could maybe see it working up to the ‘intelligence’, at a push, but the rest of that third line seems a little out of place if you're looking at naturalistic sounding dialogue.

In terms of creativity and originality, Spitz sci-fi secret agent take was dope here and completely transcended the topic in terms of both those categories. I didn’t look at that image and think of either of those things. It can’t be overlooked (by me) and I’m glad he did go with something I wouldn’t. There was good pacing to the story, nice word usage, some great descriptive imagery scattered throughout as I highlighted, and this was a marked step up from last rounds submission. This is more the NYCSpitz we know and love (to hate).

Scar: Right off the bat what stands out to me is the use of dialogue, it’s kept short and sweet, it’s natural sounding and in a contrast to what NYC chose to do with his. Admittedly, there’s only really two instances where it was used - but you’re using it to far better effect by using it sparingly (in my opinion) and it works. The hanging rhymes at points were done well, very reminiscent of Millz to me (who I saw resurface recently in this forum) so he will probably appreciate that nod. The section where you showed off your technical merit wasn’t too be overlooked, either, here:

To sum up our respective positions: Vicarious living.
they had parents and siblings. Gifts, trinkets a parent could give,
but would dare to be different.

It’s almost a stream of consciousness type flow to it that rolls off the tongue smoothly, and I particularly liked the carry-over rhyme going into the third line that gave this an extra added fluency to the read. I think purely from a technical point of view, it showed a clear difference between you both in terms of style and execution.

The final third, and particularly the “not literally” explanation of the metaphor felt a little out of place to me here within the more conversational tone the rest of the piece had somewhat. It felt a little like your character breaking the 4th wall, and unnecessarily, explaining himself to the reader when the idea of the metaphor should have been self-explanatory (to me) if done right. The closing lines carried more weight as you rounded out proceedings, particularly with you dying and them to live life continuing to do what you no longer could. It seems unfair, but life is like that sometimes. Rinse and repeat.

I think creativity wise, I enjoyed NYC’s more out of the box creativity and originality in flipping the image and his ability to build this fantastical world around it full of anthropomorphic agents and assassins. The fast paced story of Spitz was action-packed and had a lot going on, where Scar’s focused more so on a mechanics driven tale with emotion at its (dying) heart. We have two different styles in this clash, and while I often favour the more mechanics heavy verse in a contest where the two are evenly matched, I did feel that on this occasion there wasn’t a great deal to separate the two of you in that regard and where NYC really excelled was in the creativity and originality stakes, so that ultimately lead me to lean his way this round.

I gave this one to NYCSpitz.

Keep those pens moving!