I wanted to write my positive piece like I did on the rogues, but never really found the time, so I'll post the tidbits as and when requested with a little bit of critical stuff for thought.
So,
@Raptori and co. – I really enjoyed this story. Honestly, the opening was amazing. I found the whole race to be really thrilling. It gave me a real Avatar moment.
I think that where it fell short was more to do with the theme it was trying to be shoehorned into. After reading in the other thread that it was supposed to be underwater, I’m afraid I also fell into the crowd who never got that, though I do now see it on rereading. I think the problem here was threefold.
- Firstly, knowing there was meant to be a twist in each story, when you mentioned that they were dragons that sort of hit the moment and I wasn’t looking for another more subtle one. I think it would have been better to have either kept them in the air and used them being dragons as the real twist at the end, or else revealed right at the start what they were so there was no confusion later on.
- Secondly, I had the picture of a human hunters’ spaceship in my head from Henry Dale's piece coupled with Rukaio's alien from the earlier post, so with the Avatar hook I latched onto, I probably just assumed the giant spaceship was what you were going for. Obviously this is no fault of yours, just an unfortunate circumstance of what was around the story when I read it.
- Finally, you set up the opening scene so incredibly well that the vivid picture of high cliffs and mountain gorges wasn’t able to be overwritten by the final sentences mentioning it being underwater. I think there was also a bit of cheating going on here. For example, you mentioned repeatedly that they were flying, yet you can't really fly underwater. They're dragons, yes, but surely they'd be stroking their wings as giant fins/flippers to swim, not flapping them to stay airborn.
The description of the underwater landscape was also sort of twisted to be more like a mountain formation than it could really be. Things like how he could see "
every tuft of grass", does grass grow under the sea, or is it weed? And do weeds come in tufts or are they clumps? Also, "
every piece of rubble strewn across the tops of the cliffs” Rubble gives more of an image of a pile of stones near a collapsed wall, not a scattering of rocks that have been littered around the seabed on the current's whim.
But the killing blow came with the dramatic surface when he was belching flames to scorch the cliff walls. I don't think even a dragon could scorch stone submerged in sea water unless they were focusing flames on it for a good while. This sentence hammered down the image of a dry sky high mountain rift right when you wanted to be nailing the fact that it was underwater. Switching it up to mention something about the surrounding water bubbling/boiling would have likely fixed the confusion on my part and made me realise exactly what you were going for. But in doing that, you'd probably also want to remove him using the flames earlier on so that you can save it for that grand finale.
Overall though, I think a lot of this was merely a byproduct of trying to fit a good story into the theme. I don't doubt that most of those issues probably wouldn't have been there were a twist not the topic of the month. And outside of those minor blips, this was a well written piece, fun, and with a rather interesting concept exploring how these underwater dragons are just having fun. Even though I pictured the entire event happening in the skies, I really enjoyed it nonetheless.