Furry Foray Contest—a retrospective · 12:30am Apr 11th, 2023
Furry Foray Contest, a retrospective.
For anyone who was paying attention to this account or FimFiction in general, there were suddenly a bunch of crossover fics with very specific furry characters . . . somebody ran a contest. Probably can't link to it, 'cause the rules, but it was called the Furry Foray Festival.
There's gonna be some behind-the-scenes stuff, so maybe this isn't the blog for a judge to read.
[SOFT BREAK]
DirtyLittleSecret pointed out in the post-contest blog that a lot of us were procrastinating, and that was true to a point; I think three or four of my contributions were posted in the last week of the contest. That having been said, they weren't all written late, they were just posted late due to editing or other reasons.
The first one I wrote--which should win a prize, since it was published the day the contest was announced (or the day after, I don't remember) was Trouble Rain. I planned and plotted it all out while I was at work, and had the advantage that I didn't have to think very much about how I'd fit Rain's character in Equestria, 'cause I don't know squat about her except for what I read on the wiki and one short YouTube clip I watched to see if she could talk or not.
For the rest, it was mostly actual equine behavior, which I've done a fair bit of research on. After that was done, I started to think what I might do for the rest. Of all the franchises to pick from, I'd only ever seen Zootopia. I knew who most of the characters were except for Rain, just from being around on the internet.
I decided that my next fic would be Lola and some Buckball players, and that I'd use the initial theming of a fic I started and then abandoned, as well as the vibe of Cinnamon and Harper (there's one Cinnamon and Harper fic on my main, two on a different website, and a bunch of material that's been written but not edited and maybe isn't fit for publishing). That was version one.
What y'all saw published was version 4a; the reason that the final four chapters got published in very quick succession on Sunday was because I didn't know which side of the max word count I was going to wind up at, and any of those four chapters had sections which could be dropped if needed for word count.
If I'd had it in me to do a full edit, it'd have been a marginally better finished product, I think. There were some pacing issues that could have been addressed, and a couple of topics I wanted to explore more in depth but simply couldn't--I ran out of words.
I also got the idea for Judy chasing Capper into Kludgetown and then hooking up with a pony while she was there. Even though it's been some years since I saw the movie, I remembered all the key points and just had to look up some details as refreshers.
The final scene with Party Favor was an 'if time permits' scene; time permitted and so y'all got it.
That left me with two characters to come up with stories for. I decided that I ought to watch Helluva Boss--I'd been meaning to--and in the course of watching the series, it actually got a lot more difficult to decide who Loona would hook up with, and why. I came up with an idea, but it was skirting the edge of the rules, so I planned to dance around the topic as best as I could.
That one also got pre-read (it was the only one that did; I had a volunteer but not enough time to get any finished stories to them). One of my main concerns was that I wasn't sure it was obvious that the sex was consensual.
It got further delayed for a couple of tweaks before it was finally published.
I had an idea for Krystal--it would be a party at Fancy Pant's house, celebrating the newest spaceship pilot to join the fleet: Cherry Berry. Fleur would be super seductive, convince Fox and Krystal to join her and Fancy in the bedroom, and a large portion of that story was actually written (for those of you who read them all, you'll know that there's nothing like that which got published). Then Dirty Little Secret announced the bonus round--use two furry babes in one fic.
I'd already toyed with the idea of writing a second Loona fic, in case the first got disqualified. Pairing her with Krystal was a natural, especially since the day the round was announced we had a truck in the shop with a "fox and hound" sticker on it.
I decided I was going to choose a stallion who had low utilization based on FimFic's character tags . . . turns out Davenport doesn't even have a character tag. What's Knighty got against him, anyway?
This was a nice fallback; if I finished a Krystal fic, it'd count as a fallback for Loona if the first got DQed, and if I didn't finish a Krystal fic, I was golden in that regard.
Also for anyone who's checked out furry imageboards, Krystal and Loona get shipped. Someone was surprised that I'd found art of them together; I replied that the hard part was finding art of them together which could be cropped to be SFW.
Which left me with one week, three fics to finish, one to write new, and another one to write new for my main account. Also needed to post an update to a long-runner on a different account (I wound up postponing that for a week), and I accomplished it all. At a guess, from Friday afternoon to Sunday night, I wrote well over 10k words, most of it pretty good.
The last Krystal fic is kind of silly, I just came up with a basic setting and then rolled with it. I was tired, my wrists were sore (from typing, you pervs), I've only had two days off since sometime in January, and I got it done. It's not my greatest work, not by a long shot, but I met my goal.
Since I delayed at publishing this blog, I can give some results if y'all are curious. The prizes aren't gonna be awarded for a month or so, and AFAIK he hasn't finished judging all the fics yet, so I can't look at the total points value of my stories versus the other stories and see if I've got any in the top three.
My total points scores ranged from 241 (Crash Landing) to 491 (The Fox and the Hound) out of 600.
The scoring rubric considered six categories, on a scale of 0-100. Provocativeness, Progression, Payoff, Pacing, Personality, and Prose.
(Mostly) in order,A Game of Flats had the best provocativeness (97) and the best pacing (95) and the best personality (92);
The Fox and the Hound had the best progression (98) and the best payoff (75);
Trouble Rain had the best prose.
If I were to add up all the rankings in each of the six categories, the best would be provocativeness at 490; the worst would be payoff at 216. That's actually fair; a common complaint was that they weren't as finished as they ought to be. I would have expected to have the personality score higher, but it was third at 416.
Some of the fics were rushed; he wondered if one of them was written in haste to tick a box . . . yes, it was. 2 hours, spellcheck only.
Ranking-wise, I didn't expect the results I got. If I had to rate them, they would have been in a different order (and if y'all ask me to rank them in the comments, so help me . . . <shakes fist>).
That having been said, I learned some stuff and got some feedback which might be useful; perhaps after the judging period is completely over and prizes (such as they are) have been awarded, I might go back and fix some stuff on a couple of them. I certainly wasn't entirely happy with A Game of Flats, for example: it scored well but he thought it wasn't as complete as it should have been, and I agree. I had a word count, I ran out of words, and I didn't have enough time to go through the entire thing and re-write it to get it under the limit. There were a couple sections in the middle I intended, one of which was Aloha explaining why it's not cheating if it's with a mare.
Which brings me to a penultimate consideration about contests in general. Some years back I was in a contest and one of the other contestants got super butt-hurt at the scoring (their fic didn't win). In the case of this contest, I don't agree with some of the results--bearing in mind that I didn't read all the fics and the final results aren't out yet--and I do think that it's impossible for a single judge to score entirely fairly. I also think that especially with clop, your interests may vary; what one reader (or author) likes isn't gonna work for everyone.
That having been said, he was very open about what the scoring rubric was; there was an entire forum post that was linked from the very beginning explaining each of the six Ps. And--it was his contest, and I presume he's the one putting up the prize money. He can score it however he wishes.
[As an aside, I have read part of one of the other contest entries; where it seems to be going in terms of clop is somewhere that doesn't interest me. However, that author wrote Loona far better than I did.]
I think that overall, it's very difficult to run a contest in what everybody would consider a fair manner. The fairest one I've participated in has multiple judges, everything gets read by at least two different judges and the highest-ranking ones get read by more, and all the author names are scrubbed so nobody knows who wrote what. Admittedly, that's a more complicated system to set up.
And one final comment that I do agree with: in his commentary on The Fox and the Hound, he said "I can see why you like using background characters. Davenport's characterization is superb."
Background ponies need more love, y'all.
I wasn't surprised, or at least it felt that I shouldn't have been.
I didn't procrastinate. Despite what he assumed I didn't intend to enter. It was fun seeing them trickle in. Someday I might read one.