Writing Contest 2024/I - Results

The results!!

Thanks, everyone, for your patience awaiting the results. I am sorry that my personal life and the contest aligned in such a bad way.

After the irregularities during the last round's vote, it won't surprise anyone that my personal main concern this round was the integrity of the vote. Sadly, I have to relay a mixed message. While I did not see anything that I can outright classify as ill play, I did see things that I didn't like. These happened during the first week of voting. The number of very early votes was surprisingly high, and several of those early voters had remarkably similar picks. Some of them were also seen reading contest stories after already having voted. All signs that could indicate that they had been requested to cast specific votes, instead of reading all stories and voting for what they considered the best.
I hope that I am wrong. I hope that this was just coincidence. But if I am not wrong, if someone actually did request friends to vote for them, then I hope that this someone will have an equal bitter taste in their mouth when looking at these results as I have. Remember, as an advice to everyone: as soon as you start requesting for votes, the voting results no longer reflect how people perceive your story. They reflect ... well nothing. At least for your story.
I might come back to this later with new, additional rules for voting in the future.

Okay, with that sad part out of the way, let's now move on t the joyous part!

Before I announce the results, I want to thank all who participated. The writers, of course, for creating and sharing their wonderful works. And also all those who read some or all of the stories, and helped us get a result by voting. Plus all those who posted comments and feedback to the individual stories, to help our writers understand how they can try to improve!

In the Readers' Choice award, a total of 40 people voted for one or more stories as their favorite(s). This resulted in these vote totals:

1. Children At Play, by Jemini (16 votes)
2/3 tie: Deviant, by DantesDesires (12 votes)
2/3 tie: Sexual Awakening, by Beth98 (12 votes)
4: Rape Proof, by Benny Blanco (10 votes)
5: Wings of Passion, by keyontae (9 votes)
6: Nightmare Child, by Mek (8 votes)
7/8 tie: A Maid's First Night (7 votes)
7/8 tie: The Young Volleyball Girl, by underarm (7 votes)
9: Taylor's Surprise Education, by Chaosmode (6 votes)
10: The Blossoms of Springtime, by onlypain46 (4 votes)
11: James Boned: Too Late, by P.D.Vile (3 votes)
12: Conjoined... Convergence... Ascension, by Locutus2366 (2 votes)

But we also have the Writers' Choice award. All twelve participating writers were invited to select their top three. Four writers did not, for which they are penalized by a 6-point subtraction. The other eight writers did cast their votes, with the results as shown in the screenshot below:

So that is a tied 1/2 place for Nightmare Child and Wings of Passion, and Sexual Awakening is 3rd. You can read the rest from the screenshot above.

It is really intriguing to see the huge disparity between the two votes. Only one story made both top three's. The other stories had large differences in their scores. Apparently, writers do look at other things when judging stories than the average reader looks at.

Once more, congratulations to all winners!
Several writers have already claimed ownership of their stories. Over the next hours (and days), I'll request administrators to reassign ownership of those topics, so you can edit your stories if you want to. I will also update the names of the writers here.

Please do not forget that the next contest round has already started. Writers: Get cracking!