User blog comment:Icey778/Rap Battles of Excellence Redux 18: Death(Final Destination) vs Esdeath(Akame Ga Kill)/@comment-3401602-20170616212817

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Idk either of these people so I can't really judge the whole in-character aspect of this, but I do think that Death's verses were better than Esdeath's. Although, I'm not really a fan of the line:

"I'll steal your life while you're eating dinner, can't stand anything I trigger!"

like does Esdeath eat a lot or something, because if not, eating dinner is an extremely irrelevant / moot point to make and is basically just saying "I'll kill you when you're not paying attention / when you're back is turned". And when you think about it, that isn't much of a thing to brag about since killing someone who's not even aware of it is a cowardly move compared to a one-on-one fight, which appears to be the whole theme of this battle; the two opponents creatively listing off how they're gonna kill one another. Also, the "can't stand anything I trigger!" part just seems unrelated to the dinner thing. I assume the thing Death's implying it triggers is a gun; what else? What else does it trigger?

I'm also not a fan of Esdeath just listing off words that end with "less": "Faceless, nameless, baseless, shameless, painless, aimless". You can convey the same message in these two lines without bunching all of these words together. Nothing changed up with this series of rhymes until the following one where "sadist" and "say this" were introduced; I think if this happened earlier, the lines would be more interesting to read.

Something about the last "leader / eats her" line sounds off to me but I can't really put my finger on it.

In short, I think you try focusing too much on inner rhymes within lines. To me, it reads out as if someone's flexing their knowledge of how many words in the dictionary they know or looked up on rhymezone. And by no means am I saying you should refrain from doing that, hell, I do it all the time; I just believe that focusing more on what you want your characters to actually say to one another is more of a priority. Lines like "by the way I gotta say this" just sound like filler where in its place can have a hard hitting insult or another self-brag or what have you.

All that said, I do really like Death's line:

"But your entire scenario of love was an accident like this match we're in"

Something about it sounds really smooth.

Critiquing is hard. Good job anyway, I still enjoyed this.

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