This is the voting phase for the 2023 User Choice Awards. Look at the thread titles below to select Award categories to vote in, and help your favourite threads be crowned as UCA champions!
Voting for Best Original Work opens
, and will remain open until
. For those of you who are looking for more information on the Users' Choice Awards generally, you can find it in this thread!
In short, the Users' Choice Awards are about celebrating the best and most beloved quests, stories, and other creative wonderfulness on SV, as decided by SV users. The Awards take place in two phases. During the Nomination Phase, almost four hundred nominations were made across nine categories. These have been narrowed down to only five* in each category.
Now, in the Voting Phase, you get to vote to see which is crowned as champion!
*(In the event of multiple nominees tying, then the tied nominees will all go through to voting so long as the total number of nominees does not exceed ten. In this case tied or excess nominees will not be counted. We will adjudicate this so that no tied nominees are ever privileged any other tied nominees, and nominees with the lowest number of votes are always discounted first.)
How Voting Works
Voting will be done via the poll you see right at the top of this thread. You can vote for as many or as few of the nominees as you like, and you can also change your vote if you wish, up until the close of voting. It's just that simple!
Please try to take the time to read the nominees before voting. Each of them had to fight really hard to get here, and they are worth giving a chance!
At
, the poll will be closed, and the thread with the highest number of votes will be the winner!
In the event of a tie, we will have joint winners.
Nominees
And now, without further ado, the 2022 User Choice Awards Nominees for Best Original Work:
This thread will serve as a discussion thread for the voting.
Please feel free to discuss the threads you are voting for, and why. Whether it's an impassioned argument for why people should vote for your favourite work, or just some great commentary and analysis, we love to see it, and this is the place for it!
It starts with engineering that leads to tax evasion, but at the heart of it one question: cultivation is the path to ultimate freedom, but what does freedom mean when the heavens hold all the cards?
Fifty years ago the world of Reach Heaven Via Feng Shui Engineering, Drug Trade And Tax Evasion was one of sects and cultivation, of demon beasts and rare heavenly treasures, of mystics and traveling sages that couched their teaching of martial arts in philosophies of dao and heavenly will, where any minor dispute over honor could turn into a slaughter at any moment.
Things have changed.
Scholars have torn the myths and superstition away from cultivation, broke it down into clear, repeatable practice, where a technique is crafted from linear algebra just as much as experimentation, and soon even the mysteries of luck will be explained. Public libraries have granted this knowledge to even the lowest person, and now even the smallest village can know what happens on the other end of the twisting dimensional tunnels of the world. Spirit hunters have pushed the boundaries of the wilds out, exterminating the most dangerous demon beasts and exhausting the supplies of one thousand year old herbs in the process, pushing the alchemists to develop new recipes that did not rely on what could no longer be found. The empire, in turn, took aim at the fights between cultivators, tying them down with two dozen interlocking civic systems, until an old-school vendetta between sects is not only unprofitable, but almost impossible, and sometimes, even unthinkable.
Yet even in this brave new world, not all is bright under the sun. Qian Shanyi, raised on the tales of cultivators serving justice, sought to cultivate her way despite the heavenly will, yet she was not blessed with luck, and even her sect barely welcomed her. And then, one day, she found herself locked in a pocket universe with half a dozen dangers vying to kill her.
She wanted to reach the heavens: instead, she fell down into hell.
But heaven or hell, world of mortals or cultivators, in the end, it is all the same: you look at what is in front of you, and find a way to make progress.
Can one woman break into heavens, one problem at a time? P.s. Thanks for everyone who voted for me in the nomination round! : P Pretty cool to know that a lot of other people seem to like the same thing as what I like to write.