R5M4 Jojolity

Judge Munkustrap (Snek)

For Jojolity, I’ll start with HotR again. The unfortunate thing about this jojolity to me is that it lacks a central coherent thesis. I don’t come out of this strategy knowing what you mean by ‘acting fishy’, and what exactly you were trying to achieve. This isn’t to say there’s nothing there, I think your puns are fun and you focus on the act of fishing, using the fish themselves as flimflam, etcetera. However, these are actions you probably would have taken no matter what, and without a clear thesis, they all feel quite detached. An explicit thesis and a bit more text tying your moves to that thesis would have gone a long way. I’ll give this one a low 6.

Now for Evergreen, I appreciate the fact that you did outline your thesis, and ultimately your methods of achieving it were fun and competent. The cat scratches are your basic way of framing your foundational movement as ‘catlike’, but you do build off of this with actual interaction with the cats and emulating the way that they behave. I do feel like you could have explored the duality you set up in your thesis even further. While there is some exploration of grace, you lean more into the comic hijinks chaos of it all, though as it stands, that’s fine. It evens out to a cute jojolity attempt that is manifested quite consistently throughout the strategy. All and all, this is worth a low 8.

Judge Rum Tum Tugger (Alpha)

Oh yeah baby, JoJolity! We have cats out here starting a heist to steal fish, so why not dabble in the art of being Catty and Fishy? Our teams were faced with doing that themselves, so let’s find out… well, I’d say how they did, but these’re just my thoughts on ‘em. I’m not a scorecard.

I’ll start with the Eaters again!

The strat is very much married to its narrative beats built on going, “We’re cats!” while simultaneously following up with Gioia’s more deliberate attempts to talk to people. While the words aren’t necessarily spiteful or hurtful, as the second textbook definition rests, it was still a functional feature.

The general thesis is more acting like cats than not, which all of the endearing stunts, the incredible leaps, and general ‘playfulness’ of the pair point directly at. This also includes the big stampede at the end, but you kinda can’t have a bunch of cats doing something without the possibility of a stampede forming, that’s just cat logic!

Rolling it back a bit, for the general commitment to the bit and the threads above acting as blurring glue between the narrative and mechanics, I believe the work deserves an **8** here!

Moving on to Heat of the Roment, we have being as fishy as possible!

What is the mission statement? What is the strat’s general thesis on being ‘fishy’? I can see the puns, I can see Mirali’s abilities used to draw attention away from places and confuse the people in them, and I can see Blake’s willingness to do weird shit, but I don’t see much in terms of raw ‘confusion’, if we go by textbook, and even less in cohesion.

Now, that’s not to say that the strat isn’t a fun read, by all means it *is*, it just doesn’t feel totally congealed. There’s not enough of a mission statement for me to find it while reading, and even on deeper looks, the best I can get is the correlation of fish puns and the team periodically doing something weird (stinky cheese, that cocaine baggie) or something off-putting (kitty armor).

It’s for those reasons that I really can’t reasonably give this more than a **6**.

Judge Macavity (Extra)

Starting once again with Blake and Marali, I don't really see the idea of "fishiness" as a throughline here. There are a few things that I could see being fishy, but there's nothing to really tie any of it together, and it kinda falls flat overall. I don't have very much to say - I think it's a **5.**

As for Gioia and Ichi, there's definitely a lot of cat-like behavior. Knocking down crates, scratching things you are definitely not supposed to scratch, and assuming the entire world is your territory and you hold sovereign rights to go where you please are all certainly things common to cats. I similarly don't have much to say here beyond that I feel very comfortable giving this an **8.**