All right, time for me to review this shit. Let's start with Friendship.

This is one of those posts you'd see on 4chan.

Format for a successful 4chan-type post: Nostalgia aimed at people in their late teens, early twenties. Story involving an awkward male (audience pandering of course, considering the main readership). Descriptively believable, but too well manufactured to be plausible. Somehow ends in Forever Alone or That Was My Only Love or something that brings the audience back into relating to the author.

If I had my hard drive here with me, I'd bust out my 4chan/threads folder and show you this type of story in its previous formats.

Here, let's madlib one.

Nostalgic childhood interest: Yu-Gi-Oh! cards
Love interest name: Selena
Common meetup location: Park bench (Makes no fucking sense, but it's romantic somehow)
Reason for her disappearance from my life: Cancer

The story writes itself, guys.


I first met Selena when I was in the third grade. I had just moved from (fuck it, let's go Luxemburg) Luxemburg and I was new to everything. Selena lived next door and we became fast friends. She was always crying and I constantly picked on her for it.

But we were friends nonetheless.

In the fifth grade I became a big fan of Yu-gi-oh. Selena didn't see the appeal, but she saved up enough money to buy a generic deck. We would always play the game on a park bench outside of school.

We played throughout fourth grade. She never had enough money, so I would occasionally give her cards to build up her deck. Her favorite card was the first card I ever gave her - the Dark Sage. It made no sense for her to put it in her deck, but she always did. She said it was her "lucky card".

A year passed and we slowly stopped playing the game with each other. She moved to a different school at the start of fifth grade and her parents told me that she was too involved with her studies to play with me.

June 5th, her parents came over and had a talk with me. It was then I realized Selena hadn't transferred schools at all. She had been in the hospital for cancer treatment. That day, she had lost the battle against cancer and her parents felt I should know.

I didn't know what to do. I was numb, so I just took it at face value and didn't cry.

A month later, I went to the school playground. For some reason, and I don't know what came over me, I looked underneath the bench where we used to play.

There it was. A single card - the Dark Sage.

There were only three words written on it - I'll miss you.

I started to cry.
Simple. And fucking stupid. If you liked this, you're gullible and probably a boring person.




Firefly

Generifantasy. Absolute tripe. It's Riftwar mixed with Dragonlance mixed with elementary writing. I think I wrote something similar in the fifth grade, except there were goblins and wizards instead.

It was hard to read because I just felt so embarassed for the author. I envision him as a 30-year-old overweight, jobless Nintendo fan who can't even write bad fanfiction.

Terrible, terrible writing.




Thousand Dicks.

The author clearly tried too hard while at the same time not putting any effort into it. It has absolutely no redeeming value besides a few jokes which end up falling flat against the tepid backdrop of the story as a whole.

"Stream of consciousness" is right, and as a result the flow is insufferable.

It doesn't know what it wants to be, which combined with the juvenile "Hurr, hurr dicks are funny" plot is a recipe for failure.




The Game was the best entry in this godforsaken contest. The English was shit, but the story actually resonated well because it wasn't forced, and despite being unoriginal, it wasn't copy/pasted from a better source. It actually had the most effort put into it, despite it having seemingly been crafted in thirty minutes, max. It's readable if you ignore the last half.


None of these stories deserve a vote and I pray to your god that someone has the slightest bit of talent necessary to make something that's even moderately readable in the next rounds.