Well, friends, we made it. You made it. Over just a couple months you've put together 38 young six stories for a total of 231,313 words. I'm mad impressed by the turnout and I'm immensely proud of you all. Give yourselves a pat on the back. You've given the gift of fanfiction to the best set of six characters that MLP has ever seen.

YEAH I said it.

Now, what's a ceremonious closing of the gate without an unceremonious list of asterisks?

• If anyone has a story sitting in the queue, send me a PM and I'll sort it out.
• If you would like judge feedback on your story, feel free to let us know by a PM or a comment here or really just any form of communication you prefer. I've heard good things about carrier pigeons.
• Those with a keen eye will have seen that the winners are to be announced on March 28th, as stated in the site-wide blog post. This was a ruse. The mods wanted a "schedule" from me so I pulled a date directly out of my ass and handed it to them without cleaning it first. I don't know when the winners will be announced yet, but I seriously doubt you will have to wait until March 28.
• Once winners are announced, reviews will start appearing on the stories of those who requested them.
• If you didn't get your story finished on time, don't sweat it. No word written down is ever wasted. And if you do end up finishing and posting a The Discovery branded story in the coming weeks, drop me a line and I'd be happy to give it a read.
• I should really be in bed.

Bonsoir, friends. And once again, thank you to all our lovely participants and readers.

I'll see you soon,
M-

Man, I just barely squeaked in under the clock on this one (well, that's true for every contest I enter).

I'm tempted to ask for a review/critique, but I feel silly asking for one on my fic because I know it was rushed and half-junk... but still, feedback is tempting... I'll make up my mind at some point.

Thanks for putting it on!
(now off to check out the competition )

I'd love a review from any of the judges who feel up to the task. And thanks for hosting this contest! It was great fun.

You've given the gift of fanfiction to the best set of six characters that MLP has ever seen.

I'm gonna fucking remove my submission from the group.

Nah fam, I be chilling. I be disagreeing, but also chilling.

I for one, would love a review. Compared to these latest few submissions (which MAN I thought I was cutting it close) I'm pretty sure I'm not even gonna come close. Mine was rushed, and definitely not the most well polished or inspired story here, but I think I did well enough to get a small review. Thanks for the Contest! I hope there will be others like it in the future!~

I'm so excited to see the results!

I would very much appreciate a review whenever anyone can get to my story.

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Y'all are on the list

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It's totally up to you. Even something a little rushed can be given really helpful feedback. And I don't want to talk up the judges too much but we're a bit of a dream team???

Thanks to you, Semillon, Bachiavellian, and Aragon for the contest! That is a lot of horse words creative creature literature, and I’ve enjoyed both reading everyone’s entries and writing my own. I hope there are more in the future, too.

Could I get added to the review list?

I would absolutely enjoy being added to the review list. My submission was a bit of experiment for me (writing wise) and I want to see how I did. Can't wait to see the results of the contest!

38! Now that's a solid competition. Good luck to everybody in the running - this one's been fun.

And of course I'd love to get in on any commentary/reviews. I'm not sure I'd call it my best work, but who would say no to more feedback?

I'd like to see judge feedback on mine too. Thanks for spurring me to do this!

I already requested a review for my first story ("End Realm"), so I suppose I might as well request a review for my second as well ("Somnambulism").

Can't wait to see the winners--all said, there's some really good ones! I'm sure it'll be a close call for some of them.

I would like judge feedback on both my entries as well

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Done!

From a bored writer, a quick analysis.

38 stories, 6 characters. Our rough breakdown:

For character tags, I focused on who was actually 'starring' or had serious roles - a couple just used the Young Six tag but only used one or two of the actual characters or had the others only show up in the background.

11 have only one or focus almost exclusively on one member. Most popular was Gallus (4), followed by Ocellus (3), Smoulder (2), Sandbar (1) and Silverstream (1). Yona did not get a solo story.

9 used the entire group as a cluster.

Of the remainder, 17 used just one pair while 1 used a triplet. Of the pairs, the most common was Gallus/Silverstream (5), followed by Gallus/Smoulder (3) and Smoulder/Ocellus (3). The remaining were all single instances. Pairings that did not see use: Gallus/Ocellus; Sandbar/Silverstream; Silverstream/Smoulder; Silverstream/Yona; Smoulder/Yona.

Gallus appeared in 24 stories; Smoulder in 19, then Ocellus (18), Silverstream (16), Sandbar (15) and Yona (12).

For non-Y6 characters, only five tags saw more than one use. Setting aside Other (2) and OC (2), the only common outside characters were Cozy Glow (2), Chrysalis (2) and Twilight (6).

For content tags, there's a few trends.

Slice of Life covers 27; Comedy is at 14; Romance is at 13; Drama at 7. Adventure/Sad/Mystery/Random have 3 each, Tragedy has 2 and Dark/Scifi have 1.

15 of 38 clocked in at T, and the rest at E.

We've got 1 Anthro and 1 Equestria Girls (two different fics), as well as 4 Alt.U. Only 1 Violence tag, but 6 Sex and 3 Profanity. Also I'm going to insist that there is 1 Narcotics tag, because Hot Cocoa is Illegal in Yakyakistan really should have had one.

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The only reason my story has either Slice of Life or Tragedy is beucase I'm a degenerate and I thought I need a minimum of three blue tags and not a maximum.
Meh, not gonna change now, they are not completely wrong.

Thanks for running this, it actually got me to take a random story idea I had in my head while watching the show and write it down (Sandbar's Essay)! I already asked one of the judges for a review (they told me to give them a nudge nearer the time), but any feedback for my submission will be more than welcome!

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I admit, I was very much on the fence about the narcotics tag for Hot Cocoa, but I decided to not put it on there considering that chocolate is not actually a narcotic. The story was meant to take the fact that chocolate is toxic to a lot of animals and give it a weird spin. I decided that the negative impacts of putting the narcotics tag on it outweighed the importance of warning the reader about the somewhat questionable content of the story.

Interesting data analysis, though! As usual, Yona gets far less love than she deserves :(

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Cozy Glow was me. I did both of those.

Thank you for hosting this contest! Despite being terrified I would miss the deadline(Or worse and completely fail to write something interesting), I had a lot of fun. I've been wanting to get involved on this site for some time now, and this presented a fantastic opportunity for me to do so, so yet again, thank you! I hope you and the rest of the judges have fun reading all these stories(I know I will when I finally get some time to read them all myself).

As for judge feedback, I'd love some criticism myself, please! I really do want to get into the writing business, and knowing where my shortcomings are and how I can improve will absolutely help. One question though: How exactly will we receive said feedback?

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I'm defaulting to "story comment", but if you would prefer a private message we can swing that too

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Nah. A comment is perfectly fine; I just wanted to make sure. Thank you!

Please place me down on the "review requested" list - after all, while writing is good for cultivating and growing the skill, helpful critique is useful for molding it.

I'm glad that this contest provided the right kick-in-the-butt to get me to write out this simpler idea I'd had rattling around my head ever since I saw the animation. Thank you for hosting it.

I would love to get some judge feedback personally! Thank you for the fun contest, I had a lot of fun with this one! And I'm having fun perusing the other entries too!!

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Done!

While I don't feel it was my best work, a review would still be really nice if possible.

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Gotcha!

I'd be grateful for a critique/review, too.

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Great!

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...followed by Gallus/Smoulder (3)...

Two of those had to have been me. But what can I say? Those two are just fun to write for, no matter what you're doing with them.

Though Jack of a Few Trades is right too--Yona needs a lot more love than she's been getting.

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Thanks for organising this. It was great fun.

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Only one Sandcellus story genuinely surprises me.

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Wait.

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Hi. Any updates as to when results will be out?

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An excellent question!

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Oh. OK.