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 Over seven hundred authors have written ten thousand stories totaling nearly eleven million words! There's got to be a pony in here somewhere! THIS. IS. T H U N D E R D O M E!   CLICK HERE FOR CURRENT PROMPT I’m sorry, what’s a “Thunderdome” exactly? Thunderdome is Something Awful’s first, only, and best weekly flash fiction writing contest. Oh this like a writing group? I’ve done writing groups before! Not like this. Let's face it, most online writing groups devolve into hugbox circlejerk bullshit even if they weren't designed that way to start. Here, we do brutally honest critique through the magic of goonery and kayfabe. All of your authorial flaws will be laid bare, and with luck, burned away. They say everyone has, what, a hundred thousand awful words in them. Here's where you spew them out your word orifices and git gud. Neat! How do I join? Click the link above. Say “In.” Should I know anything important before I join? Yes. First and foremost, read the prompt post. Then read it again. Then read it a third time. Don’t gently caress this up. It’s just "reading." And the prompt post is going to give you a lot of important information. Such as:
What happens if I win? You decide the next prompt. You judge the entries. You give critiques. You continue to the cycle of blood. Click here for help. What happens if I lose? You get some harsh words on how to improve. You also get a fancy new avatar for dying historic in the dome.  See? That’s not so bad, is it little baby? Okay, I'm sold. How can I enter this wonderfully horrible arena of blood again? CLICK HERE FOR CURRENT PROMPT
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Jan 3, 2023 19:39
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Resources Discord PM me or post in the thread for a link. Fiction Writing Advice and Discussion If you want to talk writing in general, this is SA's home for it. Placeholder for companion thread link Placeholder for companion thread description. Previous threads: Thunderdome 2012: FYI, I do take big dumps, holla. Thunderdome 2013: If this were any other thread we'd all be banned by now Thunderdome 2014teen: Stories from the Abonend Bunker Thunderdome 2015teen: Weekly Stories with Positive People Thunderdome 2016teen: Fast Writing, Bad Writing Thunderdome 2017teen: Prose and Cons Thunderdome 2018teen: Abonen Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here Thunderdome 2019teen: Writing Our Wrongs Thunderdome 2020ty: This Dumb Joke Will Continue Until the Words Improve. Thunderdome 2021ne: Out of the Dumpster and Into the Fire Thunderdome 2022wo: The Stakes Have Never Been Lower On Judging The number of judges should be three. Since a normal week will only have one winner, that means other people have to step up. On any week where you don't have writing a story in you for one reason or another, consider signing up as a cojudge. Qualifications This is up to the head judge, but typically this means someone who has done a few rounds of the dome and doesn't have a backlog of missing crits. You don't need to have won, or HMed, or even no mentioned to judge. You can learn a lot from judging, especially as a newer member of the 'dome. Expectations Read all the stories. Communicate your opinions with the head judge. Usually this happens in discord but other methods happen, especially if there's a big timezone difference. Post crits to the thread. Crits The soul of thunderdome. Crits can be anything from two or three quick notes to a detailed line-by-line analysis. What's most important is that they get posted and that they be honest to the point of brutality or beyond. If you do like the words that you had to read, of course say so. But don't feel obligated to wrap up your opinions in half-hearted compliments. Glossary by Sitting Here
HM - Honorable mention; a story that was in consideration for the win, or had some notable positive quality. DM - Dishonorable mention; a story that was in consideration for the loss, or had some notable negative quality. DQ - Disqualification; a disqualified story. Stories that were submitted before judgment, but after submissions close. Also includes stories that went over word count and stories that were edited after posting, as well as cases where the judge feels a prompt was ignored in a particularly egregious manner, or when, due to some shenanigans or other, the author was also a judge. Disqualified stories can’t win, but they can lose, which is better than failure. See also: Redemption. Flashrule - A sub-prompt given by the judges as part of the main weekly prompt, often serving as an additional challenge or piece of inspiration. Hellrule - A particularly unfair flashrule, requested at one’s own risk. Not every judge will issue hellrules. Redemption - A disqualified story submitted after judgment has been posted. Better than failure.  - Adding to your signup post indicates that you will forfeit your forums account if you fail to submit. Banned accounts may be unbanned at the owner’s expense.FJGJ - Fast Judging, Good Judging. A thing impatient morons begin shouting the moment submissions close. Brawl - A duel between two or more writers. Brawls are separate from the weekly prompt. See On Brawling by Sebmojo for a detailed explanation. The Archive - A repository of all Thunderdome stories, faithfully maintained by crabrock and Kaishai for several years. Losertar - Another name for the free avatar given to losers of the weekly contest Kayfabe - It is the showmanship that makes Thunderdome different from other, similar contests. Kayfabe gives participants the opportunity to show a little swagger, or act out grudges and rivalries within the arena of words. Kayfabe is optional, and it’s meant to be fun, not abusive. Come find out what you’re made of, you unblooded weenies. sebmojo posted:
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Jan 3, 2023 19:39
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Thunderdome Archive by crabrock We've done a lot of weeks of Thunderdome, which can be a little overwhelming to keep track of. Enter the archive, which makes a robot keep track of everything so you don't have to. His name is TdBot, he is a creep, and we hate him. The archive is a repository of the thread's weekly entries, brawls, and even interprompts. In addition we track judges and has done their obligatory and extra story crits. There are statistics for all sorts of interesting things like author wordcounts, entries and more! If you're thinking "I wonder how many..." then it's probably already there somewhere. Even I forget how to find things. The Archive is by INVITE ONLY, and the only way to earn an invitation is by spilling blood in the dome. Do not ask for an account if you have not participated in at least one week. Overall Records:   Your Profile Each Thunderdome contestant gets their own author summary page (e.g. here's mine). On your own profile you can change the privacy of your stories (set them to hidden) and mark your favorites. You can also use the archive exporter to build a fancy PDF to send to your mom.  TdBot TdBot not only looks after the archive, but he can pull information from it at will, which he uses to serve as the oracle of Thunderdome in his discord channel. Pop in and have a conversation with him, where he'll use your own bad words to make you regret speaking to him! Team Archive None of this would be possible without the help of Team Archive. Kaishai: Archivist Emeritus And an ever rotating cast of trusted volunteers. + others who have given their time to trawling the thread and checking for accuracy, of which there are dozens. Patreon In addition, several people give REAL LIFE DOLLARS to keep the archive up and running and enable us to do things like the weekly recap podcast, so a huge shoutout and thanks to these fine domers! All the levels have the same rewards because of space socialism. Any donation gives you this cool wizard hat on the archives:  Errors & Feature Request PM me on discord or SA and we'll get it fixed or see if it's possible to do. No we will not archive crits. Do it yourself. Thranguy fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Jan 3, 2023 |
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Jan 3, 2023 19:40
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On Brawling, by Sebmojo: brawling what so someone said something mean and your bottom lip is doing that quivery thing and you feel like you can't go a single second more without punching a motherfucker? thunderdome has just the thing. you can't fight here it's the Thunderdome when two people hate each other very much, and one of them is you, you get to slap down a challenge. make it big, make it brassy; you're slapping your sex bits down on the bar, try and make 'em bounce a little. help someone's slapped me with something help accepting brawl challenges isn't required, but if you like to sling the poo poo around (and you should) then failing to back up your bad words with good ones will be remembered. brawl stories are good, being able to beat someone you're mad at is better. how does it work? once you've thrown down a challenge, and had it accepted, a brawl judge will step up just like that weird bartender in The Shining. they'll give you a prompt, a word count and a deadline. they'll also, and this is real important, state the this means if you fail to submit by the deadline then you get banned. the judge doesn't need to give you an extension.what do you mean banned brawl toxxes are obligatory. if you're actually a literal secret agent and you've just discovered you're parachuting into Syria in two hours time then get on Discord, snivel at your judge and maybe they'll remove the from the prompt, but expect that to be a one-time mercy if you gently caress it up.anything else? don't challenge anyone until you've done a few rounds, good grudges take time to fester, don't step up to judge a brawl unless you've at least got an HM or the participants have asked you to, and declining a random drive-by brawl is more acceptable than one with a grudge behind it. this place runs on words, and hatred, and you gotta fuel the fire. brawl judges, don't grab brawls if you don't have a prompt ready and don't be dicks; what matters is whose story is best, don't gently caress around. is that it yes, fight well you horrible monsters
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Jan 3, 2023 19:41
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2023ee Leaderboards The past is dead. The future is now. Ye Olde Leaderboards  
Tyrannosaurus fucked around with this message at 13:09 on Jan 7, 2023 |
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Jan 3, 2023 19:41
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Week 544: Let's Get Biblical Hey guys, I hear you like short stories. Well, let me tell you about a guy who wrote some of the best short stories of all time. "The Parable of the Sower," "The Good Samaritan," the list goes on. You might've heard of him. His name is *sits backwards in chair* Jesus. To start off the year, we'll be returning Thunderdome to its Judeo-Christian roots by adapting Bible stories. You can choose to adapt it fairly straight, focus on a neglected character, or completely shift time periods/genres. You can change story elements to better fit your themes, but the reader should still be able to see the original story underneath all the trappings. For our purposes, a Bible story will be pretty much anything from the Hebrew Bible, the traditional New Testament, or the Deuterocanon. Sorry if I'm not including your favorite Nag Hammadi Coptic Gnostic Gospel or whatever, but let's keep the stories within the general knowledge pool. You do not have to tell me what story you're adapting when you sign up, but please say it when you post your story. You may request a story to adapt to be assigned by a judge. For a little bit of extra fun, you may also ask for a genre to adapt your story to. The genre will be something I or another judge have been reading/watching/playing lately, described hyperspecifically. So if I've been watching Game of Thrones, you might get hard-R politically driven dark medieval fantasy. If you don't like your genre, feel free to reroll as many times as you please within reason (or just cancel the flash), as I want these to make writing more fun, not more constricting. Let's go with 1750 words, but you will not be DQ'd for going a tad over, I'll just be like, mildly annoyed and may take some points off. Entry deadline is Friday by midnight US central, but you may enter later than that if you toxx. Submission deadline is Sunday midnight US central. Judges are Albatrossy Underscore Rodent Thranguy Fuchsia Tude Entrants are Chernobyl Princess Admiralty Flag Tibalt Staggy Idle Amalgam M Rohan Antivehicular Something Else Applewhite Chairchucker DigitalRaven DoomsdayPrepperoni Vinny Possum Dicere Bird Tyrant Albatrossy_Rodent fucked around with this message at 17:59 on Jan 8, 2023 |
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Jan 3, 2023 21:09
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In, please give me a genre
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Jan 3, 2023 21:16
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In
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Jan 3, 2023 21:23
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Chernobyl Princess posted:In, please give me a genre Satirical modern vacation whodunnit!
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Jan 3, 2023 21:24
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In, please give me a genre.
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Jan 3, 2023 21:25
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Tibalt posted:In, please give me a genre. British Horror Kids' Puppet TV Parody!
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Jan 3, 2023 21:27
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In, please give me a story and genre!
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Jan 3, 2023 21:49
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Staggy posted:In, please give me a story and genre! Job as Cyclical Claustrophobic Woodland Horror
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Jan 3, 2023 21:58
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IN, story and genre please 
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Jan 3, 2023 22:33
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Idle Amalgam posted:IN, story and genre please Judith as a cooking competition show.
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Jan 3, 2023 22:38
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What the hey, in. Flash, please.
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Jan 3, 2023 22:55
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in, story and genre please 
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Jan 3, 2023 23:41
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The man called M posted:What the hey, in. Cozy Children's Scandinavian Folklore Urban Fantasy
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Jan 3, 2023 23:47
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gently caress it, dude, let's go bowling In, story and flash please
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Jan 3, 2023 23:48
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rohan posted:in, story and genre please Tower of Babel as Whimsical Christmas High Fantasy Adventure
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Jan 3, 2023 23:48
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I’m in
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Jan 3, 2023 23:49
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Antivehicular posted:gently caress it, dude, let's go bowling Tobit as Elementary School-Set Action Comedy
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Jan 3, 2023 23:51
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In. Story and genre please.
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Jan 3, 2023 23:53
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Applewhite posted:In. Story and genre please. Reunion of Jacob and Esau as Puzzle-Focused Techno-Fantasy Adventure
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Jan 3, 2023 23:58
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gimme story
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Jan 4, 2023 00:02
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Chairchucker posted:gimme story Nativity of Christ
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Jan 4, 2023 00:16
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In, gimme dat sweet story and genre.
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Jan 4, 2023 00:57
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DigitalRaven posted:In, gimme dat sweet story and genre. Joseph (of technicolor dreamcoat fame) as a Hollywood Rise-to-Fame Musical Romance.
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Jan 4, 2023 01:50
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Ah heck, everyone's asking for stuff, let me amend my 'in' to ask for a story.
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Jan 4, 2023 02:59
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Admiralty Flag posted:Ah heck, everyone's asking for stuff, let me amend my 'in' to ask for a story. Herod's daughter and John the Baptist
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Jan 4, 2023 03:07
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Judging.
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Jan 4, 2023 04:09
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in
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Jan 4, 2023 07:47
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Week 543 Crits Given all the earnest chat last thread re: doing crits, I have decided to dust off my highly complex crit sheet of six questions and use it on your stories! Template available here. I say it a lot but the bottom line is you have been qualified to crit since you learned how to read and need no further permissions from anyone. Give the template a try if you're stuck for how to start. Anyway. Admirality Flag Albatrossy_Rodent flerp Idle Amalgam Thranguy rohan Flyerant BeefSupreme
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Jan 4, 2023 08:52
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In, genre me please I'll take a story too if you want
Vinny Possum fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Jan 4, 2023 |
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Jan 4, 2023 20:59
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Vinny Possum posted:In, genre me please I'll take a story too if you want Jesus in the Wilderness as Hip-Hop Surrealist Dramedy (edited "African-American" to hip-hop, the show in reference is Atlanta, I guess I figure if the writer's white I don't want them to think they're expected to write something profound about the black experience in America or whatever) Albatrossy_Rodent fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Jan 4, 2023 |
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Jan 4, 2023 21:12
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Week 543 Crit My crits come in three parts:
Hopefully some element of it helps you! Feel to argue with me about your story on Discord. Flyerant's The Courage of Nearly Flightless Birds Synopsis: normally, I would do a literal transcription of the plot, but I don't think that's really useful here, given that this is sort of plotless. Instead, I'm going to summarize in broad strokes. The story opens with lines of verse about someone mourning the plight of flightless birds, imagining that those birds do try to fly but cannot, regardless of effort given. (The author of this poem is not related; given the subsequent dreams about the subject it is possible that it is our narrator.) The remainder of the story is narrated in first-person, and relates the thoughts and feelings of one (particular) day in her life: 50 days after the death of her child (possibly a miscarriage, based on a couple of details, but it could be otherwise.) She proceeds through the routines of work and home life, remarking on how both her coworkers and her husband are unsure of how to handle her or appropriately offer consolation, but both are relieved to be able to pass the day uneventfully. She then relates her recurring dreams, about chickens, presumably the flightless birds from the poem, but also mothers in their own right. In the dream, a chicken lends the woman her egg, which then crumbles in her grasp, and she awakens, now in the room of her unborn child. She reveals that the "crib would be forever empty", which implies that she is some way unable to have children at all. She then says she is tired of pretending to be okay, and that the falseness feels like dying, and that she is ready to confront her reality. The story ends on the 51st day after the death of her child, with her admitting she is not okay. Analysis: This story is about the difficulties of emotionally reckoning with the loss of an unborn child, and how nobody but a mother can truly offer any solace (even if that mother is an anthropomorphized chicken). It's also about the idea that pretending to be okay is a useless stance, both for the grieving, for whom it is false and provides no comfort or healing, and for those around them, for whom it provides no sure footing on which to support the grieving. The mother in this story pretends to be okay (and actually rejects the sympathy of her coworkers, reading it as self-serving), and indicates that everyone around her--including her husband, whose own pain is absent from this story--cannot relate to her. However, everyone around does appear to be aware that she is struggling with her tragedy, and attempt to offer some understanding--her coworkers are "full of understanding sympathy", they give "sympathetic speeches", her husband's anxiety "is apparent". The story ends with the woman stating that she can finally admit that everything is not alright; it appears that she's the last person to arrive at this conclusion. Response: I am mixed and mostly negative on this story, but mostly because I don't think the pieces here fit together. There are some lines that I really liked ("I could not help but wonder if the hens missed their eggs when they were plundered"; "everything has to be alright, otherwise I need the world to be burning"), but I think the details, the themes, and the emotional core of this story are jumbled up. I, like the judges, did not really understand why this story was written in semi-verse. It appears that you wrote the poem included at the start of the story, and perhaps you were trying to carry that through the remainder, but the result is that the prose reads very repetitively and monotonously. Your sentence structures repeat over and over (lots of sentences with two clauses of nearly equal length), and in conjunction with the sometimes-rhyming, it took me completely out of the story. I also think this story is trying to do too much (but only uses 537 of an allowed 1500 words) and doesn't give us enough to do all that it wants. The prompt is about new things and what they mean to the people in the story, so I understand that, by that measure, she has to turn the page to the 51st day, but this story wants to be more of a tone poem about grief. Therein lies another flash-fiction problem: trying to encapsulate this much about grief in 500 words is probably a fool's errand. Grief is a complicated and fractured experience for the grieving (which I do think is an interesting, perhaps unintentional aspect of this story, which is the actions of those around this woman and her response to them, and whether what she feels from them is matches with their intentions, given that she calls them fake), and it takes time. but this story has no time. It's too short. We are supposed to feel what this woman feels, and she remarks that none of the people around her can understand what's happening to her or know how to handle it (such that she feels more in common with the chickens of her dreams). However, I feel confused enough about the details of her tragedy to not really know what she's dealing with, as a reader. This feels like it should be an episode in a longer story, because it requires more context. Lastly, the story assumes chickens want to fly, simply because they have wings, but is that necessarily the case? Given that it's the emotional centerpiece of the analogy, I struggled with this question--and actually, so does your story: "they live with that simple fact, so why can't I?". More trouble with chickens: chickens are used to compare giving birth to flying, and compares the woman to the chicken: the bird that can never fly, but desperately wants to; the story then also directly compares human motherhood to that of chickens, when the woman dreams of the chicken and the giant hen offers her an egg to protect. She ponders whether chickens miss their stolen eggs (which implies that her "egg", her child, was taken from her?). Maybe this is just dream logic, but I found the chicken analogy to be, in the end, too confusing. Of course, if it's dream logic, maybe a turn to magical realism would serve the story better.
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Jan 4, 2023 22:29
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Albatrossy_Rodent posted:Tower of Babel as Whimsical Christmas High Fantasy Adventure
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Jan 4, 2023 22:45
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rohan posted:requesting a story reroll please 1 Macabees
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Jan 4, 2023 22:50
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In.
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Jan 5, 2023 16:36
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