WEEK 4: Champ match: Clutbuck vs Adverse - CLUT WINS 5-3

[dead man]

clutbuck, extremely literal direction here. you've solidified yourself as a master of melding topic to rhyme, with a universally sound rhythm. you have one of the best senses of RHYTHM here as a participant, your cadence is probably the most consistent, and that makes it easy to follow along whatever story you're drawing for us. you take on a voice of authority and, not negativity, but realism. you're the bootstrap father or the neurotic friend on the spectrum obsessing over details and microtopics while everyone else dreams in big picture. i am a very big picture sort of thinker, so i cannot relate to this voice, but i am familiar with it. the specifics you detail to this kid almost as an instructional manual were an effective touch for the type of character you're embodying. maybe it's how you operate IRL. the writing was sound, for sure - some standouts:

The energy saved in doing so here’s as crucial as any —
weight distribution needs plenty of thought to help move as intended.
- perfect demonstration of your rhyme talents. you weave them into the verse seamlessly, not simply at the end of a stanza.

See space is a vacuum, but not the kind your mother uses
- draws us back into the world from the speech-tone, creates a nice distinction and an anchor for the rest of your context.

this was cool. not CONVENTIONALLY as creative as i might have hoped. at least not in the abstract. but it was nicely done.

ADVERSE had a different take, clearly. that of the space invader himself, that rested almost entirely on descriptive self reflections of the crew he's a part of. creating a collective ideology of this group, flying through blackness, pirating the galaxy. i like what vulgar said. this was ambitious in its scope and definitely more of an "abstraction" on the image than clutbuck hit us with. while his was grounded in fact and reason, yours flew off into the stratosphere, so to speak, giving us a big picture effect. your cadence is kind of... stretchy. it feels like you could stand to edit out a LOT of fat in your writing and try to use more distinctive word choices. it sort of interrupts the content you're providing and drags into these run-on sentences the tend to lose my interest at times. not lose it i guess, but strain it so i need to actively draw myself back into the work.

Carnivorous scavengers, surgically picking every piece from the corpses
Leave into orbit, find our next home, ping in the coordinates
- this was sick. even something as succinct as this, however, could stand to be trimmed a bit. but it was your standout stanza, technically, for me.

the direction you took this worked well enough to ground the topic in a familiar place. it sort of felt like an apocalyptic space-age PSA. executed well in theory. the writing itself was not as easy to digest as your opponent. but i sort of enjoyed your direction more. so, like all things, this comes down to personal preference between stylistic execution and the power of your idea vs. Clut's.

i'm finding myself sort of at an impasse here. i suppose it depends on personality type. although yes, adverse's writing was conventionally less masterful than clutbuck's, who has long since dialed in his cadence - i just found adverse's take on the picture more engaging.

voting for adverse here.