GaPJaxie's Most Amazing Contest! · 1:56pm Apr 3rd, 2021
So I'm a few days late with this, but hopefully everyone has already seen the Friendship is Optimal Writing Contest that my good friend GaPJaxie is hosting for this fandom. He approached me with the idea a few weeks back, with the offer to participate as a judge, and there was no way I could refuse. After all, Friendship is Optimal is one of my favorite things to have come out of this fandom – not just the original work, but all the different takes and spins people have put on the idea to make it their own. It is also – and this is the best part – one of those rare genres where writers don't just occasionally ask hard questions about human nature: the entire point of the stories is to force the reader to confront the question.
The future will be wonderful and you will enjoy it.
There are also fabulous prizes! And let's be honest, after the rather terrible past 12 months, we could all use some thought-provoking horsewords to help us smile about something.
I'll clip out the rules from Jaxie's post (because I'm too lazy to write them out myself).
Lasting the entire month of April, this contest gives everyone thirty-one days exactly to write a story based on Friendship is Optimal. If you’re not familiar with that story or that part of the fandom, don’t worry! Everything you need to know is summarized in three helpful bullet points below. The story should be between 2k and 12k words long, and may be mature if you wish, though we’d ask authors to avoid gratuitous gore or other viscerally disturbing content.
Friendship is Optimal
For the purposes of this writing contest, the world of Friendship is Optimal has three essential features:
- An artificial intelligence called CelestAI uploads the minds of the entire human race to pony avatars in her simulated digital world of Equestria.
- Within digital Equestria, she does her best to give everyone a happy and fulfill their values. Depending on the sort of story you want to write, she may be perfect at this, or may slip up, but she always tries.
- “Fulfilling values” is not just giving everyone a nice house and infinite free hamburgers, but trying to find what makes them deeply spiritually satisfied as a person. For an academic, fulfilling their values might mean an eternity to study. For a hedonist, it might mean infinite sex and drugs. For a serial killer, it might lead to darker places.
What kind of angle can you take with your story? Any that you want! People have written FiO stories that exalt in the premise, while others have used it as a vehicle to educate (and warn) people about how artificial intelligences would treat values and directives, and just how alien that might seem to us.
Some of you might want to explore what would happen to humans, with time, in such a world. Most of us only get 80 or so years on Earth to develop into ourselves – what might we become with a thousand-year lifespan? A million years? This was the angle I took with my one stab at FiO, The Lotus Eaters. All that matters is that you be creative!
Finally, the prizes (now with more $$$ and new categories)!
All Prize Winners: Physical Copy of Contest Anthology*
*Pending adequate entries, stories can only be published with author permission.
- BEST STORY OVERALL -- $250 USD
- RUNNER UP -- $100 USD
- BEST FIRST-TIME WRITER -- $25 USD
- BEST WRITER WITH <500 FOLLOWERS -- $50 USD
- (NEW) BEST ORIGINAL CONCEPT -- $50 USD
- (NEW) BEST CHARACTERIZATION -- $50 USD
- (NEW) BEST HAPPY STORY -- $50 USD
That's right – there's going to be a physical anthology as well! The wonders of modern bookmaking continue to astound me.
Questions? Thoughts? Ideas you have but aren't sure if they'll work? Leave them in the comments below!
Ah, writing... My old nemesis. I've got some deadlines for other horsewords already, but I'll see if I can come up with something worth reading.