Congratulations to those who've managed to move on to round two. If I've right, there are 598 stories which made it past the first round, but given ONC said there were over a thousand stories entered, that means your story is in the top 60% of the stories entered this year.
For those who haven't moved onto the second round, don't take this as necessarily meaning your story isn't good. For example, this year, I think one of the stories I was rooting for ended up nixed because certain graphics could be considered triggering, yet I say I think because I wasn't sure as I was reading the story that this might end up being the case.
And while most of my stories passed the first round, A Silent Place did not. The first thing that comes to mind is that A Silence Place is the last of the nine entries I've entered. When I submitted it, I didn't feel that great. Of course, could it be for another reason? One of the things that come to mind is that the one other year I submitted nine stories, I had one nixed, yet I felt that was because I submitted it as being written as co-written, and this year I can't remember if I finished submitting or not because it was the last entry.
I know it wasn't the prompt because A Silent Place is actually spot on for the prompt - well unless they took Muggles as being human, but I honestly don't think they were being that strict with that particular prompt. So, the only other thing I can think of is there is the fact Regulus is leaving the house because his mother and brother are constantly arguing. It's not a good home life, which could potentially have been seen as triggering, particularly since I didn't rate this one as mature.
I think, though, I'd rather give thirteen-year-olds credit and say most are able to handle this kind of material, where there is fighting at home, so it not being rated mature shouldn't have been a problem so much as a trigger issue. However, in saying this, I didn't go into any details, just that Regulus was dealing with some stuff. So it kind of feels like it is playing it too safe.
As for why some of the other entries got nixed, well, I've an idea why some of the ones I came across and read got nixed. I'll try to explain why without identifying the stories.
Story 1 - In this particular case, the writer picked a bunch of different prompts. However, from what I've read of the story, there was honestly no real connection between the story and the prompts. This was one of those cases I knew all of the prompts the writer picked, but in the end, I couldn't discern which prompt was, in fact, the main prompt as I read the story. In fact, I couldn't find any of the prompts within the story.
Well, sort of.
Two of the prompts the writer picked for this particular story were in fact forty-two and sixty-nine. Prompt forty-two is "the hero finally gets an opportunity for revenge but it comes at the cost of something meaningful to them," and prompt sixty-nine is a Taylor Swift quote, "I had a marvelous time ruining everything." And in this, I can see how the writer thought they were using the prompts but really weren't.
For starters, the story does start off with the idea that the main character ruined things. The problem is, having read the story, I personally could not blame the character for blaming things, although there was a character in the story that did, which in turn, I think was meant to lead to the main character getting revenge. The conflict, however, was forced in that it honestly didn't make sense for the character to blame the main character.
True, the writer had the culture of the main character have a particular belief that would lead to the one character blaming the main character. However, there was no explanation for this belief, and there was previous narrative that either contradicted this belief and/or made readers think, "well, no wonder they're dying out if they're acting like complete idiots for fighting to the death and not knowing when to back down."
