Survival Of The Fittest

Hello gumdrops

Welcome to the Best Kill and Best Death Awards for April. Before we begin, the rules:

1. In this thread, you may post as an anonymous guest to select one student to receive the day's Best Kill Award, and one handler to receive the Best Death Award. Prizes will be given out in-character for BKA, consisting of a weapon and food, and out-of-character for BDA, consisting of a quote from their character to be displayed on the board index until the next BDA is awarded.
2. You may only vote while logged out. You can identify yourself in your vote if you want, but you may not claim to be another handler.
3. You may only vote once, and you may not vote for yourself in either category. Staff can see IP addresses, and we will check them if we have reason to suspect shenanigans.
4. You must provide reasoning with your vote for why you think your choices deserve the award. Votes with no reasoning will not be counted.
5. Don't be a jerk. You can explain why some scenes are your favorites without tearing others down.
6. Make sure that your answers are clear; please don't use any formatting that might cause votes to be miscounted or left out.
7. Please be sure to read every kill and death before voting, please vote for your genuine favorites rather than just voting for your friends, and please don't campaign for awards in the chat or otherwise try to influence the vote.

And your Best Kill and Best Death contestants:

BEST KILL AWARD:
Daniel Ozanne for killing Aion Rhodes
Derek Caldwell for killing Betty Hartley
Salem Fox for killing Billie Sommerfield
Jezzie Stark for killing Humphrey Hayward

BEST DEATH AWARD:
Primrosette for the death of Aion Rhodes
Grand Moff Hissa for the death of Olive Mayo
Kamikaze for the death of Betty Hartley
Dr. Adjective for the death of Andrew Lapson
Skraal for the death of Billie Sommerfield
Namira for the death of Humphrey Hayward

Voting will run for five days. Votes will remain hidden until time is up, and the winners will be declared in the following announcement.

• Jezzie Stark for BKA

There were a lot of great kills, but for me this one wins out.

I really liked her character so far, with a great call back to the hot springs and a good turning point, from her being deathly afraid of dying to growing almost comfortable about it and turning that fear into a reason.

• Primrosette AKA Aion Rhodes for BDA

A great heartbreaking moment, with Amos death being a really dark follow-up scene.
Poor Aion. Also Poor Daniel.

Best Kill: Daniel Ozanne for killing Aion Rhodes. I felt that Daniel was really working to sell the emotion in this scene, and the follow-up oneshot delved into his personal feelings and history with Aion in an interesting way that built up on the death. I'm looking forward to seeing how he continues to unravel from here.

Best Death: Dr. Adjective for the death of Andrew Lapson. I really like when people utilize the scenery, especially changes that others have made to it, so the use of Shawn's pitfall trap here was great. I also liked Andrew's musing on how in his case, boredom might be the real killer, and how SOTF is not a constant explosion of violence because people run and hide and isolate themselves, which can be as mentally draining as the rest.

BKA: Salem Fox for killing Billie Sommerfield. Salem continues to be a complete asshole and I love it (problematic). I’m enjoying how he looked for excuses to escalate the situation, but also was still a cringe teenager thinking about how he had used his best spooky bits already.

BDA: Dr. Adjective for the death of Andrew Lapson. This death was chilling. The way it’s described with Andrew starting angry, but gradually losing hope of a solution that lets him live, until he remembers his way out disturbed me.
Also I’m glad we finally got a payoff for the traps that Shawn has been leaving around. I love when handlers look at other things happening in the version when looking for inspiration.

I always enjoy watching off-island drama have an effect on the island, and this thread portrays it very well, even with me not really knowing most of the context behind this (probably buried in a relationship thread somewhere, I'm too lazy to check.) The sort of tenseness between these two former lovers slowly ratcheting up as they just kinda pick at each other's weaknesses and sore spots until eventually they come to blows and it all goes terribly wrong just really shines for me. I'll definitely have to go back and figure out the exact context of Daniel and Aion's relationship, because I figure this scene would be even better with that! Even still, it's a great read, and Blizzard and Prim really wrote their hearts out here.

You know what else I really love seeing? Chekhov's guns going off. And with Andrew's death, Dr. Adjective very much delivers on the sharp and spiky guns set up by Shaun a while ago, as well as the cyanide pill that Andrew's been hauling around for a while. His reaction and how he slowly loses hope is really fun to read as well, what with him acknowledging that there's nobody else coming to save him and trying to save himself from the trap, to angrily ranting at the camera because he can't do much else, to eventually accepting that nobody can save him in a sort of different framing from his initial acceptance and taking the pill just to have some control over how he went.

Unrelated, but I wanna give a shoutout to Amos Flannigan's death as well. Really well-written and I love to see my favourite malevolent man Josh malebossing and mansplaining

Bit under three days left for votes!

Oh man I’m finally caught up enough on time to actually be able to vote.

I think I’ma break my usual pattern a bit and vote for the same set for BKA and BDA which is Derek Caldwell for BKA and Betty Hartley for BDA. Primarily because I love a good clusterfuck of ‘one action snowballing into a huge mess,’ and it had a lovely blend of just enough accident/oops in what could have been a more straightforwardly one-on-one situation, and that adds a nice mix of ‘who’s killing who’ which is always a delight. Plus all four characters involved had aspects of being involved, it’s always great when a death thread involves everybody in fairly equal amounts (and consider this an extra honorable mention also to D and Chiara for their help/a decent kill/death that didn’t make the cut due to time constraints).

Going to do a double BKA/BDA for this month, for what was my favourite scene this time around.

Salem Fox for BKA, and Billie Sommerfield for BDA.

It's not a terribly complicated set-up, but it's one that works as a solid foundation for a decent no-nonsense kill. Salem's shaping up to be a pretty despicable antagonist, and Billie showed some nice characterful defiance in her final moments. Solid scene all around.

Hello I'm here despite best attempts to foil me


BKA: Salem Fox.

I know this boy just won, but he was my favorite of this round too so I'm OK with giving him another sandwich. I really liked the sense of atmosphere that Backslash and Skraal created in the first half of the scene. I liked Salem skulking around, intentionally creating just enough noise to make someone question if there is danger or if it was just the house sounds. There was a sense of foreboding created about the house of Salem stalking the halls for Billie. Once he finds her, I like him a lot as someone who is having fun with cruelty. It's compelling to watch him try to purposefully shed humanity to distance himself from the game and maybe, just maybe, pushing himself to be the worst now that he no longer has the pressure of having to watch over California. He does it was a horrible, sick sense of humor. I did also like his comeuppance of his rage upon Billie getting slightly the upper hand just before her death. Really good writing from both people in the scene. Well done.


BDA: Andrew Lapson

This was a close one between Andrew and Billie, who I did think did a great job in her thread (big kudos to Skraal, as I've enjoyed Billie the whole way through). In the end I gave it to Andrew. Despite the length of the oneshot that details his death, I found the post actually quite the breezy read, which is quite a skill. That aside, I loved loved that someone had fallen to one of Shawn's traps. I love Andrew's refutation to the camera that this was on purpose, not an accident. I think the horror and despair of the situation were sold super well. It's not often you get a meditation on how boring and monotonous the game is, while also keeping you on high alert. Andrew did a great job of expressing that unique hellish stress of having nothing to occupy your mind and time but constantly being afraid. And once he falls into the pit, oof. The descriptions of the spike through the leg and trying to get free were genuinely tough to read. The pain and helplessness was very well explained, to when he finally took the pill I was sad, but also kind of glad for him that at least this could be over.

Honorable mention: As I said, Billie. She played opposite Salem very very well and I was a big fan of the scene overall.

Okay voting yeah let's do that thing

BKA!
I'm gonna level with you it's Salem Fox for killing Billie Sommerfield.
This was a hard pick, they're all good in very different ways, so in the end I went for the in-universe logic to break the tie. This seems like the thing the AT would most want to reward. To justify it specifically? Well I really like the way Salem's a smug prick about it right up until his victim isn't a helpless damsel, then it all collapses and he just goes ham. That was a fun stylistic shift.

BDA!
This is also really hard! But I gotta go with Grand Moff Hissa for the death of Olive Mayo. It's just so stark. Is "charmingly abrupt" a weird turn of phrase? Because that's how I want to describe it. No beef with the emotional dying moments, but there's something really refreshing about going out in such a sudden and ignominious way, and then closing out with the almost comically matter-of-fact Her glasses had landed half a dozen feet away. I love it.

1 day and 8 hours until deadline!

IM EARLY FOR ONCE TAKE THAT LOSERS

My BKA and BDA votes go to Salem and Billie respectively! Both handlers in this scene did a really really good job conveying the suspense of the situation to a reader. It gave me flashbacks to being a scared child at night in my bedroom, hearing noise after noise, not sure whether thise noise was a monster or the next noise or the next noise. Salem for his part really does a good job of portraying the anticipation and outright giddiness. The fight is also good, I like the frustration from Billie at not getting to choose her own fate, and the messy conclusion from Salem, bloodied walking out the house, is a really good ending to the scene. Good food!


Honorable mention to Andrew, that death did a good job portraying the squickiness of his fate and the sheer anguish and despair of his situation, all his futile, prolonged efforts to get out. Also good food!

I think this was a good scene. It was a tragedy, made worse by the fact that nobody there wanted it to happen, but it did nonetheless. Everybody in the thread left a different person than they entered—or, in Aion's case, not at all—broken in one form or another. Aion ends up dead, Amos loses his will to move forward, Daniel finds himself a murderer, and Wendy is left unable to comprehend how it went so utterly wrong. Its ramifications on each character present will be fascinating to witness going forward.
Dr. Adjective is one of my favorite writers currently on the site. Suffice it to say that this scene has done nothing to shake that perception. Despite how short of a run she had with Andrew as a character—a span of three threads, one of which was his death—she explored his emotional state in a complex and well-thought-out way. It is clear that Adjective had a good handle on him as a character, and I believe he could've gone very much further; nonetheless, the death was perfect, a struggle against certainty.

BKA - Salem Fox for murdering Billie. I liked the pacing of the scene and how cold Salem is as a killer along with how Billie tries to push back even up to her final moments. I dont know if it was intentional or not but it gives me cinematic parallels to Mitsuko sneaking up on and killing Megumi in the BR movie, which I find pretty neat.

BDA - Andrew Lapson. I like the incorporation of Shawn's traps and it's just an overall chilling death as Andrew slowly and slowly loses hope until there's only one thing left he could think of.

BKA: Salem Fox for killing Billie Sommerfield

I like horror movies, but slashers are my favorite kind. Salem plays a great Killer, and Billie makes a... man, she's a great Final Girl even thought SOTF isn't so kind. I enjoy both of them, this thread is so solid and a bit cinematic.

BDA: Dr. Adjective for the death of Andrew Lapson

Damn this was sad. Andrew wanted people to know that he was killed, and didn't die slipping on the proverbial banana peel, but the cyanide was There and so... ironies like that sting, and I appreciate them.