"Eren is fresh in politics but already has a history, and it is bad in some places." I think you can get rid of of 'and it has been bad in some paces, since you already about to show how crappy he is.

"You may take it as true or not." After the whistleblow seems kinda redundant and odd for a paper specifically meant to slanderize him to question the validity of statements that support their motive. Although if you do intend to keep this I think you should try using language more typical of a news article instead. such as "we were unable to confirm this" or something like that.

If you're referring to the Chinese philosopher it would be spelt Neo-Confucius.

"but while the latter simply went on world tours and lay down with girls" laid down* with girls is more fitting, if it's meant to be describing the past actions of the same people.

"We will spare you from showing it; it is filled with gore and is still up in Cyber Town Hall despite the app censoring evidence of massacres by the Ten as ‘community guidelines violations’ even when they were blurred." 'it is filled with gore' is a very blunt way to put it, maybe try matching the tone of the typical news article and try to be vague on the contents, as in, 'it contains explicit material possibly disturbing to many readers.' or some version of that.

I really like the Twitter-style boxes containing his statements. I especially like the first one, Perfect amount of megalomaniacal hatred seen through the hearsay and propaganda attempted to spout, major "they're eating the dogs" energy.

"And this guy is now the new regent of New York." I guess this might be alright, although I feel it's kinda redundant to say what the reader is already thinking.

Maybe I just don't know enough about Sub Machina lore but how exactly are they getting kicked out of the ten and what would that exactly entail for Sub Machina? I'm hungry for details, especially in an article going in depth detailed as this.

"In a way, the region is now on a ventilator, and Eren holds the plug, and he is blind." dunno how to feel about this line, it kinda feels article-y for an opinion piece to write this. My only fear is it might be a bit redundant, which it is, but I think it neatly summarizes the previous text in a way that conveys the intention so it's good.

SPAG is always welcome.

http://wanderers-sandbox.wikidot.com/dr-nepalwala

just for a moment.

Shouldn't have a period at the end; none of your other sentences do. You might even consider removing the question mark from the first line.

Other than that, I don't have much useful advice. The imagery works okay, at least to me. Someone who does more poetry can probably give you better critique regarding it than I can.

+1.

River flows to the sea. Rough rocks wear smooth after years and years.

I really like Jack Manganese's style. Same vibes with Leavings Of Another World, playing with language, representations, meanings. This piece has that, but there's something so whimsical about the mundanity of it.

some of you might recognize me from the SCP wiki! unfortunately they caught me: I'm 15 T_T

so I'll start writing here until the day my adolescence bids farewell…

anyway. here's my funky little poem. I hardly remember writing this, I must've been losing my mind! http://wanderers-sandbox-2.wikidot.com/picklemonstiez

i want to briefly note that what you're writing are not, strictly, haiku. i have a whole dedicated section of my poetry guide that touches on haiku. haiku isn't to do with 5-7-5 syllables at all! what you've got going here is something of a linked verse poem comprised of senryu? so if you want inspiration for how to write in this kind of style, you might seek inspiration reading senryu or the collaborative linked verse of renga written by others!

but, suffice it to say, what you have is a poem with stanzas of 5-7-5 syllables. this has led you to some quite interesting and very lovely constructions:

On his last day, spring
He looked at the trees and was
Before he wasn't, gone

…as well as some constructions that are somewhat awkward:

He lives on a hill, in here.

He was proper, life
Yet surrounded by none

the first example stanza works because the contrast between "was" and "wasn't", and the punctuation of "gone", is a neat way to describe death in terms of being and nonbeing, enfolding the concept in commonplace language. elsewhere you are more tongue-tied; the insertion of "proper" and "yet", and the repetition of "in here", shows me that you're struggling a bit to convey the imagery you want in these syllabic constraints; elsewhere words feel awkwardly short, in straitjackets. i would do another pass, reading these stanzas aloud and seeing which words feel superfluous—try to avoid having any words feel like filler. each word should contribute as much as possible to the poem!

moreover, right now you're really keeping yourself to this halting pattern, in which nearly every line is a full clause with a pause at the end and a capitalized letter at the start. this really emphasizes the independence of each line, and chops up your stanzas quite harshly. this puts a lot of pressure on your lines to each be well-constructed and poetically interesting; which puts lines like "What does he look like?" or "His smiles, empty" (too cliche!) at a disadvantage. other lines fare far better though; "His eyes are a deep" is quite interesting when read alone, for example, so the strong enjambment works to your favor there. "Before he wasn't, gone", again, turns out quite well thanks to the interesting ambiguity and double meaning given by the comma. you might consider whether you want to lean more into the independence of these lines, or allow yourself some more fluidity by placing your line breaks more freely, or carefully considering whether you want to break on the clause or break off the clause; a "strong" or a "weak" break. example:

I would consider this
A strong line break

I would consider
this a weak line break

…as reinforced by capitalization, or not! allowing yourself to choose freely between the two means you can divide your lines with more intention behind it, allowing for the lines you really want to be alone to stick out.

as for the imagery and meaning-making/story-telling of the poem, i think stories of regret and death are interesting! the most interesting narrative seed here is the kind of "in between" place, the bardo, that our old guy is thinking from. this kind of narrative place between is and isn't. i also find it interesting that you introduce him as a person whose life is "full", before seemingly contradicting this later. i enjoy the linguistic ambiguity over whether "being gone is no concern" or him not having much longer to live "as he does" (?) is what he doesn't see. also a bit of an awkward line because of the meter—shouldn't it be "of no concern"?—but that being gone is also literally no concern, a state of being unconcerned, is fun too.

there's a lot of chaff in the way; the first stanza is largely useless, and i don't understand the purpose of the rhetorical question "what does he look like". the image of the hill doesn't recur, so i wonder why you focus on it so heavily in the first stanza and in the title. is it a reference to something? i also think the "His smiles, empty / Never fighting for anything" lines are a bit on the nose, a little telling-not-showing. "He spent years hating, watching"—hating what! watching whom? i worry here that the poem is being oddly moralizing without really telling me the story of who this guy is and what he's actually done right or wrong, instead hitting me with slightly stale imagery of hell and fire. though "stages of hell, envy" is a fun twist on the concept of "stages of grief"!

in general i think this poem could use some more sensory imagery, or something to ground me in who this old guy actually is, what is unique about him, where is he as he dies, what specific thoughts does he have before he goes, what does the experience of death or of hell truly feel like, in specific terms, in unique ways. he passes on but i still don't really know much about him, except that his eyes are a "fascinating" blue. but it isn't enough to be told his eyes are fascinating! you have to fascinate me. what was the last thing he ate for dinner? who made it for him, where did the ingredients come from, under what roof or sky did he eat it? what is reflected in his eyes? what kind of blue are his eyes, blue like what, like delftware, like lightning, like cornflowers, like ice cubes, like the blood of a crab? what does he see, smell, hear, taste, feel, kinesthetically sense on his way to the other side? this way, you can better support the good work you've done to touch on abstract imagery and language in interesting ways, and can touch this specific experience to the universal. i really want to see you flesh out this narrative arc, between the sweet appearance of a man, the bitterness he holds within, and the tastelessness of what comes after.

best of luck! thank you for sharing, and i hope to see a second draft soon!

All art made by me and released under the site's license, like always.

First, some stats:

We had about 450 new members join the site this year.
We had 212 new entries posed to the site this year.
In terms of site events we had the Wing Two contest, and introduce the Writprompt rotation.

To get to the point, this is a downward trend for the Library. In addition to the decreased posting and join rates compared to previous years, I am pretty sure the typical ratings a new piece can expect have gone down (I haven't run the numbers on this myself because Wikidot is terrible for gathering statistics, but it does seem to be a noticeable trend to me eyeballing it). We have had staff members leave. We have had major users leave or step back from activity. Large chunks of the website's work have been self-deleted by their authors. New authors aren't getting attention on their work.

Looking at all this, I want to say: Don't panic, and don't doom. Action needs to be taken to reverse these trends, but these trends are reversible - the site has recovered from far lower periods of activity. Now isn't the time to get caught up worrying, but to try to figure out what concrete steps both staff and users can take to get the site back on a growth-track.

There's been a lot of excellent discussion about what to do about these problems both on the site and in the discord, and the passion and care so many of you have for this place has been evident. While a lot is up in the air right now, and I don't want to make any promises, some of the broad areas staff have been discussing include:

• Improving processes for getting feedback on works
• Increasing awareness of WL with non-users
• Navigation and organization changes to help with discoverability
• A renewed focus on events and collective ways for the community to organize writing

Putting together a timeline for everything here is difficult: This is a hobby for us, and we're all pulled in many directions by life. With that said, we are doing our best to implement what we can, when we can. For better or worse, our two sites do not have a "move fast and break things" culture - we tend to move slowly, through long discussion which can seem like it leads to delays, but is also important for making sure changes are put in place correctly.

In the meantime, there are actions all users, not just staff, can take to help the site grow again. The thing you can do is to be active on the site. Read and vote on new works. Leave comments when you vote. Check the crit forums and give feedback to works that haven't received any yet. Share works you like in the discord, and in non-WL spaces as well: whether it's SCP, or with other people you know. No matter what staff does or implements, it will do very little if new users coming to the site do not feel that their drafts or published works will be read, or if they see days with no new activity in recent posts. If we ourselves are not active on the main site, not reading works, not giving feedback to members, why would anyone else want to come?

With all that said, this still is, in fact, a wonderful website. We have great writers, great users, and great amount of passion for this project we're all engaged in. While we have had hiccups in the past years, I am certain that, looking back, we will find them to be bumps in the road as we continue to expand and develop what we're building here. Challenges and setbacks are inevitable, but it's through them that we're forced to strive forward and become something even better. Thank you all for this past year, and I'm looking forward to seeing what we can do together in the next one.

another…

I'm sure there's a lot more military isekai, but from what I've seen, it's all jingling keys. You wanna see Jane and Joe Human square off with dinky fantasy races, using service rifles, grenades, and whatnot, and triumphing over them? We had that in 1994; it was named Stargate, and it was fucking awesome. Then we had SG-1, and it was everything you're looking for.

This is the beginning of an attempt to write a military isekai that isn't jingling keys. There's gonna be a lot more explanation about my own isekai logic past "oh, they just kinda go there," and it may involve remote viewing.

i really love poetic works that respond to atrocity by deconstructing some kind of clichéd language. there's a few examples i can think of… the first that came to mind was Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, a book which responds to the 1781 mass murder of enslaved Africans aboard the slave ship Zong by tearing into the legal documents, the constructions and clichés of legalese, from the insurance case that follows. here are a couple links to some excerpts. and this is the legal document that Philip is deconstructing

another example that came to mind was Disaster Suite, a poetry collection by Rob Halpern responding in large part to the wreckage of hurricane Katrina and the atrocities of the Bush administration in the United States, borrowing and plucking from government reports, radio and tv broadcasts and the clichéd speech surrounding "natural" "disasters".

probably the most classic in this field is "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats. Yeats was responding to the senseless violence of the first world war by flipping imagery from the biblical Book of Revelation on its head…

not a poetic work, but i'm also reminded of a photography exhibit i saw at the Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam by Giath Tata called Becoming a Ghost. the artist is from Syria, and the photography in the installation largely consists of screenshots of the video game PUBG: Battlegrounds. it's in large part about the strange popularity of PUBG in Syria and the ways in which games about war respond to and interact with circumstances of real war, death, and despair like the Syrian Civil War.

something you'll notice is that all of these works are responding to a specific atrocity rather than atrocity in the general sense. i think this is something your poem would benefit from too, as right now you risk turning "the horrors of war" into a genre cliché itself. what is the horror you are actually responding to? how does it feel to you, as the author responding to it? what is your personal relation to the event of atrocity?

Philip has legal writing, Halpern has the speech of radio broadcast, Yeats has the awe of the Book of Revelation, and Tata has the design of digital battlegrounds. more to the concept of your poem, i think you should absolutely explore a deconstruction of the casual language of war as deployed in board games and in chess!! i want to encourage you to really delve deep into this, be daring about it! there's a very rich linguistic world surrounding chess and its metaphors; you might find inspiration listening to commentated chess tournaments, maybe even doing some light research on chess and war metaphors (some interesting stuff about the Great Game and the cold war in there!)… maybe there's a chess match that really inspires you—what happens to the white king's pawn, or the black queenside knight's pawn, in that match…?

i hope this isn't discouraging! my point is that you should figure out what really drives you towards these themes, what gives you a passion for pawns. for a first poem, this is an excellent start; you have a great sense of rhythm and meter, and i really get an impression of war drums, rolling and intensifying beats, and indeed hoofbeats, from the way you've constructed the piece so far. i think that's something to absolutely keep thinking about as you develop this further… the tempo of a chess match, the intensifying speed as opponents run out of time, the call-and-response…? it might even end up that the poem isn't really about the horrors of war at all, but about fantasies of war surrounding chess, perhaps to do with the masculinism of the chess world…?

depending on what motivates you, you could develop this piece a LOT of different ways. i hope this is useful! i'm excited to see where you take this :>

Author: Ray Bradbury

Genre: Sci-fi, Post-Apocalyptic

Author: Ray Bradbury (again)

Genre: Sci-fi

Reading it again now I see what you mean about this still being a rather broad strokes poem. Perhaps I can go back and make each of the little sections here into a larger stanza here to go into greater detail. Maybe some details about him marching over the bodies of other former soldiers, or how his feet are near falling off from walking so long.

Also, perhaps it could be good to go into further detail about the generals ordering this attack. What I didn't like about "The Charge of the Light Brigade" was how it brushed off the "blunder" that the speaker admitted had happened, so I do think it's somewhat hypocritical for me to not get into the callousness of them either. My thinking right now is maybe I can frame them being "pawns" as the perception of the command, rather than just reducing them to that like you said. Of course I won't know until I try, so I'll get back to you later after I get another draft done.

So, thank you for all of your advice here! It helps to have a more experienced eye help me refine my message more.

quick note: the word is "cavalry," not "calvary."

i like the imagery you have going on and it's clear youre thinking a lot about the people who suffer from war. i think a couple of things:

1. a piece this short has very little space to impress. you have to create an arc or paint a really vivid portrait in a really small area and every single word is incredibly important. i actually think the repetition of "a pawn" hurts you here. that sort of conceit works better to establish rhythm or cadence in a longer work but feels like it waters this one down. i think a case could be made that it hurts you thematically too by recentering and renaming a cog in the war machine and it seems the general thesis is that pawns are decontextualized and dehumanized and rendered out of center, so there's a bit of cognitive dissonance there that i'm not sure works, but your mileage definitely may vary there.

2. more importantly to me, if you want this to be about the horrors of war, it has to be a lot more horrific. this is still pretty abstract. i think you could go a lot more immediate, a lot more visceral with your imagery, or it runs the risk of ending up feeling samey to a lot of other writing on war through history, which ostensibly portrays war's horrors but ends up sanitizing them through lack of focus or clarity.

overall nice work, especially since you say this is one of your first poems! i think it's solid but could really shine with some editing, polish, and care. best of luck!

( http://wanderers-sandbox-2.wikidot.com/nformer another link in case the one above doesn't work)

What I think may be the weak point of my poem is that fifth line about the calvary. I've considered omitting some/all of the words "thundering gallop of the" to make it more concise, but I don't know if it would still get the same image across that way. My goal here was both to make the reader imagine the heart of the pawn beating loudly and quickly like the clip-clop of heavy calvary while also emphasizing the difference between vulnerable pawns and the armored calvary. So would it be more effective by cutting the fluff since that could be inferred, or should I keep it? And of course if you notice anything else that could be improved, feel free to let me know.

I liked this one

A prologue for a bigger story at hand……. gulp…..

A global superpower somehow fumbles the assimilation of humanity into its military.

After that cancellation [of the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas, after $2 billion had been spent on it], we physicists learned that we have to sing for our supper. … The Cold War is over. You can't simply say “Russia!” to Congress, and they whip out their checkbook and say, “How much?” We have to tell the people why this atom-smasher is going to benefit their lives.

— Michio Kaku

A rising star negotiates through tumult, cheating to win. Will he?

meltedbee

Likewise, my thanks to FleshMaddAvalon for giving a perfect inciting incident.

First of all, SPaG (Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar) looks to be in good shape; it's always good to see folks proof-reading before submitting for crit. The paragraph and dialogue spacing is pretty good, and I haven't had any trouble telling which characters are talking.

Regarding character development, it's worth noting that "character wakes up and has to figure out who they are and explore their mind and body anew" is a trope most readers will be readily familiar with. That's not to say it's a bad idea; I think it works well with the sort of fever-dream cold open thing you've got going on. But there's caveats. One of the main ones is that the way your character speaks and narrates their internal experience (where applicable, which it is here since you're writing in 1st person) sets certain expectations about the character's mental abilities and personality.

In this case, there's some friction between how eloquently your character is describing their experience compared to their implied situation.

"Had it always been possible for me to stand up and move? It didn't feel familiar."

This line implies that the character is very new to the whole existing thing; the reader will be expecting the character to behave appropriately. But:

"I didn’t know where I came from or what I used to be. Did it matter? I wasn’t sure how to tell. Perhaps there were more pertinent questions. For example, where was I now?"

This 'asking questions of oneself and then answering them or weighing the benefits of trying' flow is much more characteristic of someone who's experienced with introspection. Not to mention the fact that they know what a cat is, what a Velociraptor is (or close enough), and is capable of making a reference to Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein."

A little later in the story, we listen to Jelly and Asher sort of speedrun the basics of optimistic nihilism (I don't know my purpose but I can make one for myself) while openly describing their concerns in explicit words. This creates the feeling that the author is in a huge hurry to sort of 'check the boxes' on getting these characters established.

All that to say: think about what you're trying to foreshadow and why, then try to lean into that more specifically instead of trying to cover all your bases from what you know about a trope.

On a positive note, I think you've done a good job demonstrating that your two main slices have pretty different personalities.

Slight nitpicks:
- It's not really explained how a slice of bread is able to grab anything, and there's a lot of references to your characters using their 'hands' for things.
- 'He tried to take it from hands' should probably be 'He tried to take it from my hands.'

Now, on tone: I love it, honestly. It doesn't take itself too seriously, absolutely nobody around here is going to complain about the echoes of Rick Riordan in the comedy and delivery. I love the footnotes, I love that the reader has to sort of ask themselves if they're more-so inserts by the main character or the actual author. It all makes for very entertaining reading.

All in all, I hope you continue through the whole series that you've planned out. Just remember: your characters don't have to have completely figured out who they are before they start participating in the story.

Happy writing!

No idea how I'll fare with any additional writing, but I feel pretty okay about this one. Crit dearly welcome!~

Some comments:

• A lot of the terminology, countries, and whatnot is common sense in-universe. I don't know how to convey that and explain what I'm talking about. That said, I'm willing to vaguely explain some things and include a map in future chapters.
• The problem with the accurate wording is that A. I just kind of write like that, and B. I can't put a lot of emotion into this regarding any side of the war because, the way I see it, almost every party involved is "the antagonist." The humans are violent, Histan is corrupt, the Confederacy is spineless, yadda yadda.
• The whole point of this is a satire of most modern isekai.
• A lot of the worldbuilding will be laid out as the novel goes on, but I'm avoiding drawing the attention away from the war,
• The dropdown deal is because there will be a lot of long chapters and I want a way for critters to quickly find one in particular.

Additionally:

• I'm not sure why this has to be split into dropdowns.
• "unprecedented scale not seen since…" is contradictory, if it was seen in the Sprout War then that's precedent.
• My many criticism is that it feels incomplete. There's a whole world out there with all these things happening and I don't have a clear enough picture, or a focused enough perspective, to ground myself in the events unfolding in the story. Something more like a journal or historiography, with notes and digressions building out the world would help (like in the The Journal Of Aframos Longjourney).

Edit: (I'm adding this edit because I don't think it came through in the post itself) I am intrigued by what's happening here, and would be interested in seeing it continued, I just think more could be done to establish the setting and a sense of pathos than what's here at the moment.