Contest January-February 2021 Short Story Voting Thread (Voting complete)

Well deserved victory for our glorious leader.

And here was me thinking you used this article and this article (first entry).

 

Because the contest is over there’s not really much point in giving reviews as detailed as mine now, but I’ll give each piece other than mine a few words - think of it as ‘Lord Agragax’s Review Minute’ rather than the usual ‘Review Hour’ - with the pieces ranked based on my opinion of them:

1. Story 4 got my first vote, because its parodies were hilarious (even with me not understanding which film the second one was parodying ) and because it interpreted the theme not just figuratively with the film parodies but also literally with the initial Sir David Attenborough sequence followed by John Cleese’s immortal Monty Python phrase. This piece is so funny that I award the Lord Agragax of Lunaxoatl Comedy Award for January-February 2021 to ‘True to the Theme’!
2. Story 2 scored my second vote because it’s a great parody of one of my favourite films - Night at the Museum - that balances parodying the film with adding some Warhammeriness into it and still delivers an original story.
3. Story 8 was certainly a good story, though unlike the first two that had parodies of films I had seen and/or understood, this one ripped off 80s American cop movies which I haven’t seen a lot of (the only ones of note I’ve seen being the first two Beverley Hills Cop films). However, the continual gag of the video skipping is great, the rough-talking US cop dialogue is spot on and a smattering of fantasy game and film references (a super-expensive luxury hotel being named after Forge World and a Halfling shouting ‘Gollum’ as a swear word are the best ones) mean I would have given this my third vote if I had been given one.
4. Story 4 was a nicely grimdark one, with Lizardmen being forced into hiding, and the protagonist being forced to survive, and gets bonus points for having a Saurus protagonist (because as a lot of you know Saurus are my favourite Lizardmen), but my only points are that would a cloak be enough to hide a hulking Saurus, and that surely a Saurus would rather die than allow warm-bloods to overthrow the Lizardmen?
5. Story 3 was a nicely original and ‘different’ story, with the Lizardmen being the raiders rather than the Old Worlders, with beer being the stolen goods as it’s unlikely the Lizardmen would have the knowhow or the technology to be able to brew it themselves. My only problem with this one is that it’s much too short, little more than ‘they snuck in, waited a few hours, stole some beer and left again’. I’d have liked some characterisation and perhaps some action in this one (perhaps the Skinks could have fought their way through some Old Worlders that tried to stop them stealing the beer).
6. Story 5 was , but to me at least the protagonist was rather dislikeable because his arrogance and boredom reminds me a lot of some of the genius-level students at my University who were impatient and disrespectful to me just because I didn’t have their prodigy-level intelligence, but to be fair, because it reminds me of such people, this could actually be interpreted as kudos to the accuracy of the characterisation. The whole idea of the Slann communicating with a single Earth human to get them to warn Earth of an impending Chaos Invasion is certainly a fun and different idea but I would have liked to have seen how Ben could convince humanity on his own that the world will be invaded by a massive army of Chaos Daemons - instead the story ends rather abruptly and has the feeling of a part 1 story (like mine admittedly).
7. Story 1 was very thought-provoking, as the concept of Lizardmen being forced to adapt to placental births opens up a lot of interesting possibilities as to how conception could have occurred, why it occurred, and what it means for the Lizardman race, but that’s the only thing that is different about this one compared to normal Lizardman stories on this forum. What’s more, the fact that the main characters interpret the birth as nothing more than ‘something different’ is rather anticlimatic, and the title also bears very little relevance to the story, being merely a reference to the old Priest nearing his time, which actually detracts from the new life born to the pregnant Skink.

Anyway, a big well done to everyone as always, especially to @Scalenex whose story won a convincing victory.

It’s not ‘firmly’ in last place actually, it’s joint last place with ‘Foreign Shores’. There’s a big difference...

Though to be honest I was sweating for a while, because mine hadn’t got a single vote for a good long time. Then just before the weekend someone finally saw reason and voted for it - whoever that is will receive my undying respect and the Lustria Online equivalent of a real-world handshake. Please come forward, and receive my blessing!

Nope, it parodies the 1969 British original, because the 2000s American remake is dubbed as heresy, at least in my household. Though to be fair I haven’t seen the remake so I don’t know how closely it follows the original in terms of lines.

Yeah, perhaps I followed it too closely, but I just wanted everyone to recognise that it was clearly parodying The Italian Job and hadn’t simply pinched the name. On reflection I see now that ‘Sneaking in the Shadows’ got the balance right between being a parody and being an original story in its own right. Also at the time I didn’t think that perhaps not everyone had seen the 1969 rendition of The Italian Job and wouldn’t really get the parody anyway...

Heists are a popular part of the Western genre as well as more modern crime films - bandits robbing a train, stagecoach or a bank are a common enough trope, and to use Westhammer as an example the Chaos cult mob bosses are also a source of potential heist material, as is Goldmann’s Bull Squad (Goldmann would happily get involved with stealing something from a rival to render them poorer and weaker). My piece is simply one of these with a more varied cast of Western low-lifes, bribed guns and con artists, with an overall plot that happens to parody The Italian Job.

 

@Scalenex : do you have got a Theme ready yet for the next Short Story contest?

Grrr, Imrahil