Yeah, and that's kind of the risk you took on a piece like this.Originally Posted by SpoonyViking
I, admittedly, have not read the original poem. (I know, my school system sucks, and even my lit professor in college gave us more Robert Frost, Allen Ginsburg, Sylvia Plath, and Donald Goines than classical epics such as Beowulf.) At the same time, though, of course I tried to do my best research as possible on Beowulf (or at least, the TM version of him) before scoring the piece, so as to try to avoid incidents where lack of familiarity with a given character or game (I haven't played GO either... maybe once the English version is out I'll give it a go). But that left me to judge Beowulf by the TM version of him, whereas you were kind of going for a synthesis; that is very much a hit-or-miss thing, and to me, it felt more like you were going for the Legendary Beowulf of the poem, which is rather ill-fitting for the TM depiction, precisely because some of those cues were so subtle that I simply did not catch some of those.
In hindsight and with that knowledge, I can see what you were trying to do now, but since they were fairly subtle (and I missed several of them as a result), it felt more like "Heroic Beowulf with TM Pessimistic Beowulf seasoning" at the time of the review. If I would've realized how you were tying that all in better, or if maybe you laid on his own self-doubt and lying a little more clearly, your score would've definitely been higher, but even with that, I know I would've felt let down by its general lack of length, and even if that had been done, the sense that it could've been about almost any king still applies - a rousing speech is definitely a normally kingly thing to do, but when what distinguishes it is some subtle hints that Beowulf is lying to himself and some lines quoted from the classic epic itself, it's kind of hard to make it stand out from any other king giving the same speech, and I just couldn't shake that sense of wanting to have seen this Beowulf do more than lie to his men.
I still stand by what I said in my review - I'd class this overall as a good idea, that it felt like it was an idea that was a good concept, but it needed a considerably more full-bodied implementation of said concept, and a good bit more length. That'd be a contender for a solid 80+ then if your artistry could hold out for 10-20k words, as it would not only be more clear to the reader what you're doing, it'd also give them more to read, more to enjoy, and let you show off your style a bit better than a ~1300 word fic ever could. Stuff like that is important - if you're going to do a 1300 word fic, you need to do just as much in those 1300 words as a more normal-length fic would do in 10-20k. Every word counts when you're going for brevity.
Either way, my harshness aside, you've definitely got balls for entering and putting it up to people to judge it. I don't think you'll give up, and truth be told, considering how Alf and IRUN scored it I'm not sure myself anymore if it was genuinely deserving of what I gave it, if it was a letdown reaction to the knockout that was Cursed Cold Colle, or if I simply didn't "get it." Either way, you learn from what people think about your work, apply that to your next work, and you improve bit by bit.
So I'm hoping to see an entry from you in a future contest, and hoping I like that one a lot more than this one.
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