Dream A Little Dream Of Me

by horizon

11. Shame! Shame (Dubs Rewatcher)

Author's Note:

The following entry was submitted in pictoral format. I apologize to vision-impaired readers, but I do not have a plain-text transcription available at the moment (and it would lose a lot of the flavor of the original piece). Reformatting for FIMFiction would be 100% impossible. It is presented in its original submitted format.

-horizon

Potluck

Comments

[AugieDog]

Potluck says:

He accidentally drove Peridot to suicide, and it all seems to add up. The verse here is lovely to read and look at, too, though the underlying premise seems a little shaky--if this was a colony Luna had set up, I don't see how so many ponies with prejudices against Nocturnes would've been selected to join or would've applied to join. Still, I'm on board for this one, too.

Mike

[Titanium Dragon]

This certainly wins the award so far for having fun with the formatting – as a pictoral entry, this contains a lot of little plays on the shape of the text, and it mostly works, though there’s a few bits which are excessive and don’t work at all, instead acting as a distraction (in particular, the multicolored “The Night she betrayed You”).

Potluck is the nightmare.
Potluck was in charge of keeping the town safe on behalf of Luna
Peridot committed suicide.
Everything went to pot afterwards.

This feels reasonable enough – the whole story hangs together – but at the same time, feels kind of unsatisfying as the solution to the mystery, because it relies on so few hints, instead making up a bunch of stuff and leaving a lot of various plot threads unpulled, and thus, a lot of mysteries unresolved.

Why was Littlemoth so guilty?
Who was Palei Hantu?
Why was Shooting Star touched by the Nightmare?

That said, this is a strong piece and the poem as a whole flows well enough, and fits with the other poems in the piece tonally and structurally, even if it sticks out like a sore thumb artistically.

Aim for the stars, even if sometimes, you hit London.

[Sypher]

This one is quite fun to read through. The flow is good and the content ties up the loose knots of the story reasonably well. The biggest weakness here, I think, is that very little of the narrative Potluck gives actually required him to look into the dreams of the other residents. Merely being at the common-house on the fateful night and extrapolating from there could result in a similar conclusion.

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Who was Palei Hantu?

Not sure about the other two mysteries, but Peridot's section of the poem strongly implies that she was Palei Hantu.

[Titanium Dragon]

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You're right.

[Monarch Dodora]

Boy, Potluck's got some strange ideas about what constitutes decent and protective behaviour, doesn't he? "How to spread harmony? I know! I'll mind-control someone and get them to have sex with a different species."

Unless he merely told her to "love" them, and left the details to her own mind... which she unfortunately construed a little too literally. Still, I can't imagine why he'd choose Peridot, of all people, given her reputation.

Still a pleasure to read, though, and that formatting is pretty cool. I usually find, when the formatting is a crafted as this, that the author is trying to carry lacklustre content with an overly-swanky presentation, much how fancy bags of crisps are always just full of air*. But the content here is solid, too.

*Of course, they only do that to stop them being crushed in transit. Shh, you're ruining my metaphor.

[horizon]

Rereading things while judging, one side comment:

This should not be taken as general advice about poetry (nor necessarily advice for how to win my contests) ... but the Luna fanservice here was vivid and handled well.

.... I might be slightly biased about Best Princess.

[Dubs Rewatcher]

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EDIT: (and sorry if you got multiple notifications about this comment--I've deleted and readded it a few times because I wasn't sure where on the story it should go :V)

Thanks to everyone who ranked my entry, "Shame! Shame" so highly. I'm glad that my crappy poetry clicked with some of you.

I originally wasn't going to enter the contest, but last Monday I attended a reading/lecture by poet John Gallaher. I find that in my life, the thing that's most conductive to me writing poetry is hearing other poetry. That's the reason I'm both an active and administrative member of the Geneseo Poets' Society—it's an outlet to hear some great writing, and contribute your own.

I knew that I wanted Peridot to have sex with the Mooken, and I knew that it would be easy to paint her as Palei Hantu—a Moken/Javanese phrase roughly translating to 'pale ghost.' I knew that I wanted to have quotes from the original story pervading the piece, as if a virus. And I knew that I wanted to have the Nightmare be Potluck, because when I did my reading—something you may hear more about later—her stanza was one of the hardest to perform, and I came to love her for it.

Oh, yeah, apparently Potluck is a stallion? At least, people in the comments were saying 'he.' I saw Potluck as a mare the entire time.

So, I sat down that night and outlined how I wanted the basic jist of it to go:
i.imgur.com/N7jAxM4.png
You can see that there are a few plot points there—like why Littlemoth felt so guilty—that didn't make it into the final. I was aware upon publishing that not all of the questions I knew had been asked were answered by my poem. However, I was happy with the final product, and didn't wish to alter it in any way.
I wrote out a rough draft of the poem that night, and the next night I cleaned it up to remove about a hundred words, which were then filled in by the various quotes and thoughts. Using Photoshop to put it all together was simultaneously fun and frustrating:
i.imgur.com/Dlot1IU.png
s/o to Haze for being lovely

I stayed up until 5 AM the morning before a Psychology test finishing it. This was my first ever attempt at visual poetry, and I think it actually came out rather well. Some of the lines, admittedly, are lifted from other works of mine; "through my veins like snakes along garden grass", for example, comes from my 2014 poem 21:7:

Yet no experiences could have warned you
That the water you thought would bring you landward is now dragging you back out to sea
Capsizing your lungs
Surging rapids sliding through veins like snakes along garden grass.

I'm thrilled that some of you liked my work. It was an honor to write for you all.

[Dubs Rewatcher]

Well, uh... this chapter doesn't make much sense now.

[horizon]

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… oh. Augh. Damn. Imgur

I'll add to my task list to download all the files and rehost them off my website. If you want to collect them into one place and e-mail them to me (horizon (at) tomorrowlands.org) it'll save me a bit of work.

[horizon]

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Should be fixed. Can't do anything about your comments in 6476233 though.