NationStates

1 | A New Carthaginian Factory Worker's Life, by New Carthagea

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While "Slice of Life"-style factbooks are by no means a new idea, NC more or less singlehandedly revived the genre on F7 with Factory Worker, and in the process established a ground-level view of NC's politics that managed to actually contextualize precisely why NC has some of the political quirks it does. Thatcher comparisons notwithstanding, it's a really creative and novel means to worldbuild compared to the drab, third-person overviews we see so often, and I'm definitely keeping it in mind when I get to my cultural stuff. The emotional aspects of the piece combined with its quaint aesthetics endear the reader to Dickie over the course of only a few paragraphs and really let the reader empathize with his plight on both an immediate and a broad level. Good stuff all around, all things considered.... and, well, the pictures make me hungry. Mrm, mashed potatoes...

2 | Aozoratarianism, by Kyoki Chudoku

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Personally, I've always found the matter of "ideology" to be absolutely and completely underrepresented on NS- and yes, I know how ironic that sounds. Given all the @@IRL_IDEOLOGY_HERE@@ states on this website you'd think that ideology would be one of the topics most covered- but rather I find that outside of those ideologies extant in the present day hardly anyone covers the topic, and within that already tiny sample size even fewer people go the extra mile to come up with their own coherent ideology, even if said ideology might amount to "batshit totalitarianism isn't actually so batshit after all." Aozoratarianism competently and coherently covers the guiding ideology behind Kyoki Chudoku (at least before it broke in that one alt timeline) in a manner incredibly comprehensible to the reader, even going so far as to compare it to other ideologies as a means of contextualize it. If I wanted a better guide on how to make an ideology overview format I'd have to make it myself- and I think even my efforts would fall flat.

3 | Black-Blooded Scion, by Khoronzon

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The first of the two prose nominations I'm doing, because I'm a big softie for that sort of thing :}. ...uh. Ahem. Anyways, well... personally, I think that aesthetically speaking Black-Blooded Scion is both visually and literarily beautiful. It's the go-to metric for "what prose on NS should look like," really; short and not 9OOCly) intimidating to look at, digestible, and visually appealing, but not too short to lose all substance from the writing. On another note, I find it interesting how closely this much older dispatch evokes Khoronzon's present format- which is in itself both a radical divergence from what he had going before and far more, well... soothing to look at. That design descendance is always an intriguing thing for me to take note of. That being said, I chose not to vote for its further progress in the contest because to me it was incomplete. Here, though, that factor doesn't matter, and so it takes one of my official honorable mention slots.

4 | Through the Rains, by Western Fardelshufflestein

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This nomination is more or less for the entirety of WF's Through the Rains prose series, though I can only nominate part 1 as it is. I've complained before that WF has sort-of missed characterization opportunities with Alastair, often thanks to the limitations of a more typical "leader" factbook reducing the character in question to a backdrop for a bit of forum RP. Through the Rains, when taken as a whole, goes quite a long way to fix that, and I feel that through the series Alastair as a character comes into his own. But it's not just him, either- it's his family, too. The inclusion of Wilhelm in particular I find absolutely wonderful, since Wilhelm's interactions with those around him and the palpable sense of regret following him combine to make him feel a deeply human character. I don't really think that Through the Rains was all that suited for this contest, but I enjoyed it greatly nonetheless.