Caption battles are fun, and I love working with them every week. That said, some weeks are very easy to judge and some are far harder - and personally, I like it when it's harder to judge. That means the week contains a lot of high quality, very funny captions.
In an effort to make future weeks of caption battles better and harder to judge, I have compiled a short list of guidelines you may wish to consider when Thursday comes around - long story short, here's a short list of caption battle tips to think about before putting fingers to keyboard.
(Image by Ranefea)
SomeGuy's Guide To Caption Battles:
- Read the captions that come before yours; repeat ideas are more often than not ignored.
- Profanity, perversity or bad language can often be funny. However, in accordance with site guidelines, captions using excessive amounts of these can't be considered. Use common sense here.
- Good spelling and grammar will always give you a better chance at winning than not.
- Smilies and emotes, while not necessarily hurting your chances for winning, are unlikely to help your chances either.
- Short and sweet captions are the way to go; extremely long dialogues rarely win unless they are incredibly funny in the end.
- Yaoi can be funny in the right context. However, yaoi is not inherently funny by itself. If you choose to go this route in a caption, yaoi can only be the means, not the end.
- Follow-up to the yaoi point: pretty much anything can be funny in the right context; use common sense for this.
And most importantly:
- Caption battles are based around adding words to an image - a single, flash-frozen moment in time. The best captions are the ones that take the image given to them, understand the details and expressions on everyone's faces, and works with what's displayed. If it's an image of two people sitting down calmly, appropriate captions should not describe them shouting and frantically running around. At that point, it's a story "inspired" by an image; it's no longer a caption.
Remember, this is neither a rule, a code or a law. This is merely a guide. However, it's a guide the judge every week uses... as such, it may be a guide you yourself may want to consider.
