As March comes to a close it’s time to announce the winners of Everfree Northwest’s 2014 Pre-Con fanfiction contest! We will start with the winners but also include reviews further down the announcement.

Drum roll please.
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Our third place winner is The Revelation of a King by Tidal. King Sombra was the most redeemed character in this contest.

Tidal will be receiving a 3rd place patch, a copy of our special 3-print run of the contest winner compilation book, and will have their story information for The Revelation of a King included in the EFNW 2014 con book.

Our illustrious second place winner with a clean lead was Tarnish by KitsuneRisu. Silver Spoon was tied for our 4th most redeemed character in this contest.

KitsuneRisu will be receiving a 2nd place patch, a copy of our special 3-print run of the contest winner compilation book, a messenger bag, and will have their story information for Tarnish included in the EFNW 2014 con book.

Our mighty first place winner not only beat the competition, but also did so with the only Mane-iac fic. Seriously, Broken Gladiator by BronyWriter is amazing. Bronywriter had also applied, and was recently accepted, to be a panelist at Everfree Northwest 2014. We are still accepting applicants for writing track panelists, so feel free to apply here.

BronyWriter will be receiving a 1st place patch, a copy of our special 3-print run of the contest winner compilation book, a messenger bag, the EFNW 2012 con exclusive Fluttershy foil card, and your story will be featured in full in the 2014 Everfree Northwest Con Book. Congratulations!

The winner of the Community Choice (Herd Choice) patch is Reformation by Regidar. With 267 votes, after accounting for some liberal use of the reload button, Reformation was the clear winner. Regidar will receive a Herd Choice patch.

Speaking of the best, how did we rate our best fics and what did our judges have to say for each of our winners?

The contest ended up with a combined total of 75 entries. Initially Piquo Pie, EFNW Writing Track Lead, was going to review all the fics, but when we started getting 5-10 entries a day Horizon and Xepher—both Writing Track staffers—were brought in to review a section of the submissions. Each reviewed around 25 stories, grading each fic based on Technical aspect, Plot, Character, Creativity, and a bonus category of ‘Other’ (to represent that special something).

Each category was scored on a 1-5 (1 being highest) and then totaled. Each took their top individually rated fics and 1-2 of each of our favorites to be graded by the other judges (with special guest judge Pen Stroke) and rated them from favorite (1) to least favorite (14).

Below you can see each judge’s comments on our winning three fanfics.

Pen Stroke: This one pulled itself of well as a super villain monologue and gives an interesting commentary on what heroes would be without the villains they face.

Piquo Pie: Not only is this a interesting take on redemption, it would make logical sense in it's own world without changing the cannon. It's well executed with excellent pacing. It shows a momentum in the world that extends beyond and before the fic at hand. At the same time between the beginning and the end of the fic, nothing has changed, which is quite poetic. And as someone with a degree in Psychology, I can really appreciate Man-iacs feelings and the actions she has taken to try and keep herself sane.

Horizon: Nice take on the superhero genre, one of the comp's most original ideas, solid execution.

Xepher: Very creative twist for Pony, if slightly cliche in superhero fiction.

Pen Stroke: I feel this one captures Pinkie Pie well in the sense of "She explains it in her own round about way that gets you thinking," but it doesn't stand out to me much otherwise.

Piquo Pie: I loved Pinkie, one of the best characterizations in the contest of any character. I also loved how Silver felt like a actual kid.

Horizon: Utterly magnificent character building and execution, marred only by a bizarre analogy that … works despite itself, I suppose.

Xepher: Near perfectly executed piece of introspection and minor redemption. I... I'm wowed.

Pen Stroke: I liked this one for it's use of the ultimate end as a means of redemptions, purification by fire and the torment of Tartarus. Also liked the authors use of Sombra's cellmate. If this had been a longer story I feel we could have come to care for the cellmate and been hit, as Sombra was, by what happened to him.

Piquo Pie: I like religious themed stories when the religious aspect makes sense. In this story it makes sense and has that certain flow that is smooth and reasonable. It never struggles and, while dark, it shows a true redemption. It also shows a very believable psychology.

Horizon: Seemed initially weaker but grew on me over time. Nice slantwise, less-morbid take on hell. Thematically powerful.

Xepher: Dark, and... dark. Unclear who the ponies are that come for Sombra in the end to give him another chance too.

Here is the rest of the top 14 fics that made it to the finals list in no particular order. That doesn’t mean that there weren’t other great fics, and you can see all the entries in the ‘Everfree NW 2014 Pre-Con Contest’ story folder in the Everfree Northwest FIMFiction group. All of us wanted to include more fics in the top list than we were able to.

The King In Crystal by The Headless
A Dream of an Other by stanku
Second Chances by Grand_Moff_Pony
Trixie’s Number One Assistant by Rustle my Jimmies
My Penance, My Plans, My Hope by Blood Brandy
Rogues Anonymous by Nyronus
A Little Silver Lie by Serious Contemplation
Changeling to Fit the Role by Darkentrophy
Lightning by BlazzingInferno
Left In The Dust by RainbowBob
Despicable Blue by Einhander

Thank you once more to everyone who entered the first ever Everfree Northwest 2014 fanfiction contest, and another hearty congratulations for our winners and runners-up!

- The Everfree Northwest Pre-Con Writing Contest generated over 30 thousand views as of March 15th.

- Hello Sister by Michael_Ravencroft was featured on fimfiction. (There may have been more featured but monitoring the feature box would have taken away from grading the fics.)

- Both Tarnish and The Revelation of a King barely missed being included in the final cut but were included as a favorite.

- Cobalt Phoenix created a chart for us concerning the distribution of redeemed characters. Find that, including the graph, here.

- Fimfiction miscalculates the word count by up to several hundred words. This caused more than 30 authors to send us messages or include notifications in their fic description that their story was under 3k words and phrases like “Please Please Pleeeeeeaaaase don’t disqualify me.”

- We had to send over a dozen fics back to the author to adjust for things like word count or PG 13 content. Several of the authors withdrew their entry but the rest successfully adjusted and several made it into the honorable mentions.

- The Fluttershy foil card given out for the 1st place winner has been ebayed for over $125.

- The Fluttershy foil card depicts a face that mirrors our response the last fact.

I am speechless! Thank you to all who voted, and all others who competed!

Congratulations to everyone who won, and everyone who participated. It was a lot of fun to write for a contest, even if I didn't do very well (and my story wasn't very good.) Would it be possible for me to find out what place my story Sombra's Song was ranked at out of the 75? I understand if it's not, I would just like to know how it stacked up.

I had been sure Tarnish would of gotten #1 all things considered.

Gladiator was my pick for 3rd, glad to see it actually get what it deserved!

That Sombra fic, by the time I got to Sombra fics I got burnt out reading. Honestly I didn't think we'd have a single one on here.

Also, Pen Stroke's comment on Tarnish, ironically hilarious. Unless it was deliberate. Then that was just genius. xD (but I'm pretty sure it's coincidence.)

Grats to all. Though what did "- Both Tarnish and The Revelation of a King barely missed being included in the final cut but were included as a favorite." mean?

I'm a bit disappointed to not see that Lightning Dust story with the flight camp for foals story, but that Rainbow Dash one was nice. Anyways at least some great fics came out of this, even if a lot of them didn't get any shoutouts.

Still, Tarnish is the most autistic Silver Spoon I read in awhile. It read like an instruction manual of every Silver Spoon story before it, It had a mixed with a few flowery moments. But that ending was adorable, though. And her autistic outbursts were nice. Autistic Silver Spoon is fan favorite. I would liked to have seen the more original story with Silver and Scoots.

But that's being rude. It won and that's all that matters. I just don't see how it could of beaten other stories with more creativity and characterization put in them.

Bah, now I'm just ranting. Grats to all that entered and grats to those who won stuff.

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Congratulations!

Congratulations also to our other winners, and every one of our contestants. Even if we can't mention every one by name, simply finishing a story and clicking "Publish" is an accomplishment that puts you in the top fraction of fanfiction folks — FIMFiction has about 150,000 users and about 70,000 published stories! All of us were blown away by how much attention the contest generated, and we hope that we can make Everfree a great place to follow up on that, by meeting your fellow authors and learning from a full weekend of writing panels.

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I wasn't the judge for that story, so I really don't know how much I should say; but Sombra's Song's did score highly on technical, and it looks like the other categories suffered somewhat from feeling like it was an incomplete part of a bigger story. (One of the factors we had to evaluate was the story's ability to stand alone and remain powerful, since the winner was going to be published in the conbook.)

3162752
Oops, it looks like the wrong comment was pasted in for Pen Stroke's "Tarnish" evaluation. It should read:

I feel this one captures Pinkie Pie well in the sense of "She explains it in her own roundabout way that gets you thinking," but it doesn't stand out to me much otherwise.

As you can tell, we differed in opinion even on the winners! Every single one of us had at least one of the Honorable Mentions in our personal Top 3. (My own #1 pick was not one of the winning three.) The rankings are meant to reflect the broadness of the story's appeal, not how awesome any individual one of us found it; I'm sure that absolutely everyone will find something in the rankings to disagree with, and that's fine.

> Both Tarnish and The Revelation of a King barely missed being included in the final cut but were included as a favorite

We had to narrow the field by selecting a smaller number of finalists which every judge would read. That was composed of each judge's highest-scoring 3 stories out of the ~25 that they rated (this is the "final cut" mentioned), and then we each got to include one Judge's Choice in the finalists as well. (What took us from 12 to 14 were some scoring ties.) The Judge's Choice was any story we felt was especially strong, even if the person who scored it ranked it a little bit short to qualify. Hope that explains it!

3163955 Awesome, I was kinda confused about that as well. Thanks for clearing that up!

Fixed