Reviews for October 2023
TV shows, movies, crossover fanfiction, fancomics, anime, and everything else. I'm so close to shouting Bingo.
We are so back. I’ve had a lot of time to read trashy fiction this October, and even untrashy fiction. Like seriously, this one makes up for the previous two months by far. It might even be too long? It certainly is too much to fit in one email.
2024 update: I’m retroactively adding the modern ★/* highlight system to the top of each old monthly review post, as it was a well received feature.
★: LOST, Fargo, Desperate Times Call for Desperate Pleasures
*: A daring synthesis, Coin and Conformity, Always Be Yourself…
True fans will remember last month’s article. New fans may want to check it out:
Jeeves and Wooster
A TV adaptation of a series of works about a lazy (but well-intentioned) rich guy and his insanely competent and plausibly-deniably-sarcastic valet Jeeves. I watched it because it vaguely influenced the robot valet character in Tresholder, and the general canon influenced the search engine Ask Jeeves and basically all the best butler characters in fiction since the 1920s. You know I’m all about watching foundational works just to get dumb references.
Unfortunately, despite the fairly good video sample above, the brunt of Jeeves/Wooster interactions often only take 20-30% of the episode’s runtime. The rest is filled with childish misadventures, slapstick and humor that do feel right out of the 1920s,1 moldy and predictable. I couldn’t make it past the second episode. It’s possibly one of those shows that are best experienced through “Best of” compilations.
The Outsider’s Resolve
I feel like I’ve read the entire spectrum of Naruto self-insert fics now. This one is marginally more original than the usual, because the self-insert does not inherit the knowledge of the body he’s hijacked, so he’s stuck in the final year of the ninja academy with zero skills whatsoever besides the language.
This leads to angst: no one likes him, and he has one year to prepare to pass the exams or he’ll stay an orphan civilian with no funds. He desperately tries to train himself with only minor success. He finds a retired ninja mentor after a while, which helps him a little, but it means we’re going to get a ton of training scenes.
The main character is no Mary Sue, he’s pretty bad at everything that involves muscle memory, and he barely makes it to the bottom of the class even when doing nothing but train. There are some hints he’s special in some way related to genjutsu, but they never manifest in a productive fashion and were still unexplained by the point I dropped the fic.
The writing is average, but what really killed the story was actually the core premise, I think. The objective is to portray a realistically weak outsider, but that just leads to barely any dialogue, endless training scenes, an extremely slow pacing, and very rare victories (we see him win fights about 10% of the time, maybe, which is insane). Even with some interesting derails like his joining the (fanon) genin corps and an underground fighting club, there’s not much to keep you reading, with no narrative highs to speak of.
Maybe more timeskips would have helped, I don’t know, but even this mini-review is putting me to sleep.
A Call to the Dark City
I feel like I haven’t read anything like this. It’s a Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality/Mother of Learning/Delve/Mage Errant crossover, where the first three protagonists are sent to the Mage Errant world and have to cooperate to survive.
Extremely accurate characterization leads to some funny moments. I really miss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comedic writing from HPMOR, so it’s good that Harry is still his hyperactive, eclectic self. The narration changes to suit the style of the original works for each protagonist, which is a nice touch.
The one flaw2 is that this is still extremely early, with only six weekly updates so far, four of which I read before writing this, so I don’t have much else to say. Extremely promising start, however, so be sure to check it out.
JARI: Death of the Author
This is a Homestuck fic that will make absolutely no sense to you unless you’ve read the original comic. I saw a really good web 3.0-style HTML animation made for it on Twitter, which led me to check it out.
My logic: if this good of an animation was made for the comic, if so much effort and time was spent on it, it can’t be that bad. I was wrong.
The visuals are interesting and stand out from the average fanventure3, sometimes in the wrong way. Homestuck was a comic about some stereotypical 2009 white kids made by a white guy, and the author only pivoted to claiming they were “aracial” when a new demographic found his comic and started complaining about that fact.4 This means it’s always a bit jarring when I see someone editing the original designs to give them random races, as this comic does… inconsistently?
But that’s a minor issue, if an issue at all. The biggest flaw is how horny the artist is, and how little they manage to restrain themselves from showing it. This is not a porn story, but every character is drawn like they’re in one.
I read plenty of stories where the author is regrettably horny and poorly hiding it, but this one reaches the point where I’d actually feel ashamed to recommend it to normal people. It’s not only the art either, the writing makes it clear everyone finds the main character appealing. I mentioned the previous fic’s main character was no Mary Sue—well, I think this is the first actual Mary Sue I’ve read in a long time.
The plot stands out, but also due to the wrong reasons. It’s a rare (for Homestuck)5 self-insert story, justifying itself with dream and mind-based plot devices, which just lead to surrealist imagery (good) and nonsensical, dragging scenes (bad).
Finally, like many fanventures, it’s really slow to update. So, to sum it up, it’s got uncanny visuals, a slow and meandering plot, and its best feature (its animations) would only slow down an already slow story.
Let’s just give it a pass. Do watch the animation I mentioned if you’re a Homestuck fan, though. You won’t get the plot, but it’s a nice audiovisual experience, and the voice acting is quite good.
LOST★
It took me many months, but I finally finished it. It’s a rewatch, but the first one I’ve done in a long time. I’m not sure I had even revisited Season 6 since the show ended.
For those who don’t know what LOST is, it’s a survival show with liberal use of the “mystery box” writing technique. Lots of cliffhangers, character revelations, but overall decent sci-fantasy mystery writing.
This show got a terrible reputation after its series finale, some of it its own fault (an extremely misleading credits visual made people think everyone was dead all along) and some of it unwarranted (some watchers were so casual they missed the repeated answers to mysteries and constantly complain “the polar bears were not explained”).6
Everyone has talked at length about this show, so I’ll just leave a few new observations I had, in bullet point form. If anyone wants a true full show review I guess they can ask for it in the comments:
I thought Season 5 was really good on my first watch, but upon revisiting it I’ve realized just how fillery it is. Many questions are answered, but not the ones that matter, only Dharma stuff, and even the Dharma fanservice is hindered by the plot focusing on the barracks, the most boring location on the island. Hurley and Faraday are the only redeeming parts of the season, both because of the time travel conceit.
The “magic system” makes no sense. Every fantasy element of the show was clearly meant to be either more sci-fish or grounded at the start, and every answer given in Season 6 clashes with evidence from the earlier seasons. Most obviously the Whispers were clearly caused by the Others in some way, but they’re poorly retconned to be the whispers of actual ghosts stuck on the island. Jacob and his brother also seemed to be a single character as late as Season 4, as you can tell by the cabin they supposedly took over at different points.
Season 6 is as bad as everyone says, with the island plot being completely pointless,7 and revolving around the flash-sideways scenes, which are just an epilogue. The actual conclusion we care about is just the finale, with 14 other episodes that could have been used in some better way (well, the Richard episode was good, but that was mostly flashback).
Hurley really is the best part of the show. Everyone else is so angsty. They manage to fuck up even Sawyer in season six.
Eko was possibly the best actor/character combination in LOST and it’s a travesty that the actor decided the tropical paradise of Hawaii was too boring for him.
The character Eloise Hawking turns dramatically to the camera with a “spooky” sound effect at least four times throughout the show. What a pointlessly hammy character, though she’s funny in a so-bad-it’s-good way.
Kate is still the fucking worst. I remembered only the awful love triangle, but she actually repeatedly ruins things for the protagonists due to bad decisions, sometimes too subtly for first watchers to notice.
Anyway, I still recommend the show. Even sections like Season 5 and Season 6 are tolerable without the foreknowledge that most of them is pointless (oops!).
Fargo (the Madoka fic)★
I’ve mentioned almost everything else the author has written (Cockatiel x Chameleon, Modern Cannibals, Cleveland Quixotic), but this is actually a contender for the author’s magnum opus. It has a sequel, Chicago, which I haven’t read and seems slightly less successful, will probably get around to reading it soon.
This is another fic that absolutely requires complete knowledge of its mother franchise, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, movies included. I somewhat recommend watching it so you understand this, though it’s not bad on its own. The premise sounds like Sailor Moon, but it’s one of those edgy deconstructions that the current millennium loves so much.
People often hear “you should check out Fargo” and think you’re talking about the movie or TV show by the same name. They’re completely unrelated. In this fic, magical girls take on the name of their territory as a pseudonym, so our main character, Sloan Redfearn, uses the moniker of the shitty location she has to protect, the North Dakota town Fargo.
The fic is divided in three acts, with the first being fairly terrible. Although it introduces the best two characters, Sloan herself and Delaney, the main conflict is a poor vehicle for character interactions, too one dimensional and boring (find big monster in mining town and kill it). It’s so simple that’s basically all I have to say about it.
The end of the first act and the start of the second one start getting interesting, introducing the overall plot and firmly setting this as a Madoka sequel, not merely a spinoff. Post-rebellion, Homura has Madoka trapped in a perfect if fake life, having completely hijacked Madoka’s original wish. The incubators/Kyubei don’t like this, so hiring Fargo to take care of that mining town is part of a long and complicated plan to take control back and kill Homura.
The second act is still personal for Fargo, though, it’s a revenge tale as she travels to Minneapolis and fights magical girls protecting the leader, and eventually the leader herself. I was very reminded of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure’s Part 3 throughout, with interesting power applications and funky personalities. A standout character is Sepulveda, a magical girl hired independently to kill our main characters over their generally unsanctioned murder quest.
"BEEP BOOP," shouted someone outside the dumpster. The Terminatrix, appearing now that the cops had been incapacitated. "ALL OF YOU, CEASE AND DESIST. YOU ARE INTERFERING IN THE OFFICIALLY-SANCTIONED TERMINATION OF SLOAN REDFEARN AND DELANEY POLLACK. FOR YOUR SAFETY, I IMPLORE YOU GET THE FUCK OFF THE STREET WITH YOUR BULLSHIT SHENANIGANS LEST YOUR NAMES WIND UP ON MY LIST NEXT."
"Who the fuck," said Bloomington, "Are you supposed to be?"
Sloan pulled herself onto the edge of the dumpster and watched for spinning discs. A tableau of destruction spread from the apartment complex to the motel entrance: Two crushed police cars, three cops in various states of consciousness, a field of half-buried silver circles, streaks of blood (mostly Woodbury's), a smoldering flame where her gun had exploded. One car's sirens continued to blare. The Terminatrix and Bloomington, amid it all, stared each other down. Woodbury hovered nearby. But Discgirl, where was she?
"WHO AM I?" said the Terminatrix. "I AM A ROBOT PROGRAMMED TO SLAY CRAY BETCHES. ASSEMBLED IN A MAQUILADORA ON THE BORDER OF MEXICO, I CROSSED THE TORTILLA CURTAIN UNDER SONORAN HEAT AND DEVOURED THE HEADS OF GILA MONSTERS TO ABSORB THEIR VENOM. FROM THE COYOTE I LEARNED WILES, FROM THE TORTOISE I LEARNED DETERMINATION, FROM THE CACTUS I LEARNED HOW TO BE A PAIN IN THE ASS. I MET ANCIENT NAVAJO SHAMANS AND SMOKED BOATLOADS OF PEYOTE IN A FUCKING TEEPEE OR ADOBE HUT OR SOME SHIT. IN THE THROES OF DRUG-INDUCED STUPOR I SAW MY SPIRIT ANIMAL: MECHAGODZILLA. HE SAID: KILL THEM ALL. MY PURPOSE KNOWN, I WANDERED DUSTSWEPT INTO THE CITY OF ANGELS, THE CITY WHERE MAGICAL GIRLS GO TO DIE.8 I SAW THE ANGELS, AND THEY TRIED TO DRAG ME STRAIGHT TO HEAVEN, BUT I WAS TOO MUCH A PAIN IN THE ASS FOR THEM. FROM THOSE BLOODSOAKED STREETS I STOLE MY NAME: SEPULVEDA, THE BOULEVARD OF BROKEN DREAMS. I EMERGED FROM THAT HELL ON EARTH BETTER—FASTER—STRONGER—HARDER!"
At the last word she struck an acrobatic pose, her arms and legs bent at sharp angles, her head tilted dramatically as flames and lights smoldered behind her as though the scene had been choreographed from the start. Bloomington stared, speechless.
Sloan vaulted out the dumpster, summoned a new gun, and fired.
I left that seemingly irrelevant sentence at the end because it’s actually important: Sloan fires her gun. She’s not here to be a moral or philosophical opposite to her enemies, she’s a moron with the extremely basic magical girl power of Gun and boy does she use it.
I somewhat regret not writing a full review for this (too late, I took no notes), since this is already getting too long for a mini-review. I’ll be quick with the rest. Sloan successfully kills the magical girl that ruined her life, it all turns out to be part of Kyubey’s plan, and Sloan goes to Mitakihara Town, Madoka’s setting, to try to prevent such plan now that she knows about it, to try to do something good with her life for once.
The third act of the story is very different. If the first act is a boring angsty action tale, and the second is a bombastic revenge adventure, the final one is just a Madoka OC Self-Insert. It has all the fixtures, including canon character interactions, with sleepovers and Christmas gifts. This gives Sloan a moral motivation beyond Gun, and finally makes her less of an anti-hero. She’s now more in it to protect her friends than to spite Kyubey. The rest of the final arc is a race against time as they keep using Homura’s emotional weaknesses against her.
The conclusion is really good, more fitting of a long book series than a relatively short 300k fic,9 and I’m not going to spoil it for you. I’m going to leave the review here, with the summary: it’s got good characterization, a good plot and intelligent fights. Just bear with the horrible Act 1 that Bavitz really really should rewrite.
My life as a youngster with a top percentage Rattata
This had a better cover when I read it.
Despite the memetic title and cover, it’s actually just a generic self-insert journey story frontloaded with training scenes (many such cases!). Our main character is very “the fundamentals matter more than a strong Pokemon”, and it seems to be working out for him. Not much else to say, it wasn’t bad, it wasn’t stellar, it’s still early. There are probably at least a dozen better Pokemon fics you should read before this one.
Pokémon: Pinnacle Platinum
If the previous fic was generic, this one goes further beyond. I don’t remember a single original detail about it, except that I dropped it because it was boring as fuck. I guess that’s the review. Thank god I’m not getting paid for this.
A daring synthesis*
Remember Worm? Remember The Gamer crossovers? Well, you should, because they’re not rare. There are at least three with Greg Veder (Worm’s annoying nerd character) as a protagonist, which constantly made me avoid this one, thinking I had already read it. After repeated recommendations, I finally realized that oops, nope, I hadn’t even tried it.
Despite the expected blue boxes and skill grinding, this is actually not much of a Gamer fic, though he does have the powers. It’s a character study. Greg himself calls it a Flowers for Algernon situation. He starts off as an incredibly annoying kid, but, as he keeps raising his Wisdom stat, he’s forced to reflect upon how stupid his past self was, how he drives away and hurts everyone around him.
I’m probably making it sound smarter and deeper than it is.
"You were miming a lot," she made a few jerky puppet-like movements. "Are you feeling ok?"
"It's a power thing," I said sagely. "You'd understand if you ever played old-school RPG's."
"Ah."
"It's some real FFII type shit, namsayin? That's my life now, the grind. Imagine playing Runescape but it's for real, and I put like five thousand hours into that shit so this'll be a piece of cake. I'm basically my own Isekai protagonist, and really there aren't enough animes like that I really like the Isekai genre."
The trooper grunted.
"The LN just isn't the same, and it's a shame there's no western comics with that theme I reckon there's a lot of money to be made there; y'know I've sent so many emails to the publishers about this and not even once have I gotten a reply."
I’m not even quoting the parts where he’s using the gamer slurs.
The fic continues to get better, but sadly, about halfway through, the author hits one of the pitfalls of any writer trying to write a deeper story: he confuses depth with angst. Yes, Greg will spend most of every chapter lamenting his situation, everything will get worse around him so he can lament things even more. Classic Cerebus syndrome.
There’s an end of Book 1 that serves as a conclusion to the series, though a lame one, and a Book 2 that’s so bad and short I was told to skip it. This story is still probably worth reading, I guess, but keep in mind that the fic starts out really fun and increasingly turns into the bad arcs of Worm, without even any clever power asspulls to make up for it.
Section Nine
The classic alt-power Worm fic. Taylor is more fucked up by the locker incident than in canon, losing use of her arm, and triggers with a Cybernetics tinkering power.
You’d think this would lead to android based fighting scenes, but this is actually a godawful slice of life found family hurt comfort fic for some unholy reason? Taylor reaches out to Toybox, the edgy libertarian secret society of tinkers in canon, only in this fic they’re actually some kind of LGBT-only consortium populated with AU versions of the Slaughterhouse Nine (the serial killers in the original story).
Taylor goes to the Toybox pocket dimension, and proceeds to have the most boring scenes known to man, as the writer parades their OC versions and explains their sexualities in the most artificial and forced way ever. I almost want to make a hugbox pun, but let me be clear, my issue is not that the story has queer themes, it’s that it has no plot whatsoever. It’s one of those fics where the writer has fallen in love with their OCs and we’re merely on the rails of their obsession.
This fic was terrible, I could not get far. I recommend avoiding it. Also, it’s a hilarious contrast to the next one.
Desperate Times Call for Desperate Pleasures★
In this Worm fic, Taylor triggers with the power to hear and control people’s emotions. Paralleling the original story, she immediately identifies Amy “Panacea” Dallon as the craziest person in the city and attempts a suicide mission to fix her on her first night out.
It kind of works, mostly because Amy is desperate to be normal. Taylor’s power is temporary, so she needs to regularly apply fixes to Amy so she stops being in love with her sister. Emotional powers like this one are the kind that land you in superhero prison if you’re ever discovered, so they need some kind of cover story.
You can see where this is going. The extremely straight Taylor is going to have to pretend to be Amy’s girlfriend. It’s important to mention that I was recommended this as crack comedy, but it slowly dawned on me that it was more of a fucked up romance fic (as Taylor is asked by Amy to make her actually fall in love with Taylor to keep up pretenses) and starts playing things more and more straight (ironic).
There are no fights, since Taylor’s ability is extremely overpowered, this is slice-of-life and slippery-slope romance. At the point we’re at, we’re probably a few chapters away from Amy turning Taylor into a lesbian so they can stay incognito forever. I wonder what the readers’ reaction will be.
I was surprised how fresh the premise felt. It’s good to read wildly different stories once in a while, even if they’re ones way out of your wheelhouse. I recommend checking the first few chapters out because they’re at the very least representative of the rest of the fic.
And no, despite the title, this isn’t actually a porn fic.
I, Jaune: Or, The Context-Insensitive Semblance
Similar to A daring synthesis, we’re placed in the head of a moron as they bungle their personal relationships and are then forced to fix them. Unlike the other fic, Jaune is the self-insert of an actual messed up writer10, an ex-soldier from Louisiana with substance abuse problems, a very noticeable accent and a tendency not to take anything seriously.
The concept and character interactions are pretty interesting, but the plot moves both too slowly and too fast. Jaune is able to fix the problems he causes very early, while the actual plot of RWBY moves at a snail’s pace. Pacing is fucked up, and I stopped reading after Volume 3 not really because I hated the story, but because it was somehow draining.
Her stare could wither a bull's testicles. "Everyone has an aura. You went to a combat school before coming here. What did you try before?"
Poor Jaune. Don't worry, bodyjacked buddy, I'll keep your secrets safe. Just like how I'll never tell anyone your PIN number is J-A-R-C or how you have a truly startling amount of time invested into watching near-naked girls livestreaming themselves playing video games. Do you know how hard it was navigating an unknown phone OS to turn off those "livestream starting" notifications?
"Well, I tried getting punched in the face, jumping off ledges, asking the hot girl to junior prom—normal life-threatening stuff that could activate the aura. Eventually came to the conclusion I needed someone to help me do it for me."
"Meaning I have to use my aura to unlock yours," she said slowly with this dawning look of hopelessness.
I shrugged. "Prolly. What's the matter? Figured someone as strong as you would have no problem."
The ego stroking didn't work. Weiss slunk down in her chair. I set my book back into the shelf and slid down the ladder. My wounds from the forest ached in protest as I landed.
"There's an interpersonal emotional component," she said before I had time to ask.
Unconsciously I found myself drumming fingers against Jaune's arm-shield. "Meaning?"
"Meaning it's tied to emotion and the soul. Meaning I can't just aura-tap you and fix you. Meaning if I tried it could backfire."
"Why?" I asked self-consciously.
"Because for my aura to pull yours out, I'd need to actually like you."
I paused, taking her meaning instantly. Produced a toothpick from a pocket. Chewed it. Probably had an oral fixation.
Fuck me sideways. I tried not to think about the pit welling up in my gut. Or about the general impression I'd made back during orientation. It helped that I barely remembered it in any case. Back then had been my closest moment to sobriety in a while, and only then because I was hiding my alcohol and instead downing caffeine like it was going out of style. It was hard to find the right mix where I could be funny, and not a depressive trainwreck in Jaune's sleeve.
This narration can get to be a lot. I might get back to it in the future, so it wasn’t awful, but be warned: it’s weird, long and abrasive.
Mob Psycho 100
For the life of me I can’t see what other people saw in this anime. There’s usually a three-episode rule, I gave this five. It was maybe a bit novel early on, because we didn’t have one of those annoying “react-characters” that comedy anime so love to have, then Dimple joined the main cast. I hate Japanese “humor” so fucking much.
The animation was good, but if I wanted to look at pretty things I wouldn’t be watching anime in the first place. The plot was constantly interrupted by slice-of-life and variations of the same gag like “this guy isn’t actually a psychic, he’s a fraud!”. There were some interesting developments like Mob joining the body improvement club, but even that fails to affect the status quo much, which is a vehicle for the same three jokes over and over.
I can see how I might have enjoyed this when I was a teenager, but it’s just a bit too trite and repetitive for me nowadays. I can’t recommend it unless you’re already one of those people that watches all the seasonal animes.
Janus
A time-travel Worm/Ward fic. Victoria is sent back in time to Taylor’s head (or shardspace I guess, god I hate Ward so much) after the events of the sequel.
The writing is pretty good on the micro level, with some exceptions. I don’t like the constant TikTok therapy that this fic inherits from Worm’s sequel, and Taylor is still extremely irrational to her detriment, but besides that it’s essentially all you can expect from the premise.
On the macro level, I just don’t think this fic’s story was planned ahead in any way. Most of the problems our protagonists face are reactive, the writer forcing Taylor or Victoria to pick up the Idiot Ball and wreak havoc they need to deal with later. Victoria should have a solid plan to fix things given her time travel advantage and the fact she doesn’t sleep, but out of the three actions she’s taken so far, one is pointless (make Sveta mildly happier) and the other was extremely stupid (try to save Theo and cause Purity to go on a rampage instead).
God, Victoria isn’t even able to convince Taylor to tell her father she’s a superhero. Incredible levels of incompetence on display.
I suppose I recommend this if you’re in the market for more Worm fics, but it has issues I don’t think the writer is talented enough to fix. Likely has an expiration date.
Instead of Arya, I prefer her mom
It’s a rare (unique?) Eragon OC self-insert. It automatically gets points for that.
I think it deals with how people would react to the classic self-insert “oh I saw [event I read in a book] in a vision” bullshit, and having Bron as fallible as he is in the original novels. It’s generally decent at handling its canon, and the future implications of a plot are interesting if you squint.
Unfortunately, that’s where the positives end. The title is godawful and it makes me cringe to type it out (neither character has appeared after 100k so it’s not like it would fit, it’s also not a romance story in any way like it may imply). The main character is unlikable, one of those Schrödinger’s antiheroes where they claim to care about nothing but themselves, but still end up taking the same plot actions as a Lawful Good protagonist would.11 Stick with one, newbie writers.
Nonetheless, I’m still probably going to follow it, even if it’s just now leaving the starting village. Beggars can’t be choosers. Don’t bother if you don’t know what Eragon is, even the original series isn’t worth it.
Vitaceae
There’s this really annoying character in Hero Academia named Mineta, who every fan seems to hate, despite, in my view, behaving exactly like every pervert character in every anime released slightly over ten years ago. This is a self-insert into that character by someone who’s not a pervert, and in fact hates the entire idea of becoming him.
All that potential conflict is thrown into the trash when, three chapters in, he steals an incredibly OP matter alteration power that allows him to just become tall and handsome. Then, he erases his old identity.
This extremely boring, stakes-free plot isn’t at all helped by the author’s mastery of obscure aspects of MHA canon and his refusal to explain them. In practice it’s like he’s skipping paragraphs, and you’re often completely lost as to why the main character is doing what he’s doing.
Honestly, I usually try to find positives to make reviews marginally more interesting, but I’m at a loss here. There are no typos? Nailed it.
An Arc for Every Season
Another Jaune fic, this one an AU where the members of team RWBY were all granted the powers of the Maidens, who are basically elemental witches introduced in the seasons released long after everyone stopped watching.12
It’s a slice-of-life, comedic story similar to Professor Arc, as Jaune is “hired” to keep the four girls from killing each other with teenage drama. Unlike Professor Arc, it’s way slower paced, with more than a few repetitive situations. There’s also a light romance element that isn’t written very realistically and mostly just annoyed me.
The entire experience feels like watching one of those dumb animes I mentioned in the previous review. It’s not bad exactly, but I ended up dropping it because I was getting frog-boiled with the help of the slow pacing. The author subtly but increasingly ran out of steam.
Donnie Darko
This movie is a mess. Cosmetically interesting at least, with a pretty good licensed soundtrack (well, until Mad World starts playing) and good costume and environment design.
The problem is the plot. It makes no goddamn sense even if you read the official website’s explanation.
The Director’s Cut apparently gives up and just throws sections from this wiki page into the screen. Once you actually read it, though, you quickly realize it’s a backwards explanation. The writer of the book this movie is based on likely came up with a dream logic style plot where characters did nonsensical things, then invented a sci-fi system to justify it, not the other way around.
In any case, it doesn’t matter which version you watch, whether you get its overcomplicated Manipulated Living Tangent Universe nonsense. The ending is still an anticlimax, and the entire Act 3 feels like you’re watching puppets fulfill a time loop without any personal motivation.
This film is maybe worth watching once if you’re intrigued. But, honestly? Homestuck’s commentary mentions its Donnie Darko inspirations, and it’s got better implementations of every novel concept in the movie. Read that instead.
Stealing the Protagonist from His Goddess is Definitely Wrong
I’ve never watched Danmachi, the OP-main-character-with-rpg-powers anime this fic is based on. I’ve read like twenty fics based on it without a single issue, though, which should tell you how complex that piece of shit is.
In this fic, a self-insert who’s watched the anime alters the course of events by becoming the deuteragonist and helping the main character instead of letting Hestia do it.
I don’t have much to say about it. It’s one of the best fics for this anime I’ve read for sure, but that really doesn’t mean anything. It’s alright overall, it avoids stations of canon, and seems to focus on social areas I don’t think the anime or any fics did, with little action. Once again, despite what the title may imply (and the website and category it’s posted on), there’s no romance whatsoever. Probably don’t read this if you don’t know anything about Danmachi, though, it assumes you know some stuff.
Kindness to Kin
A cool short story about first contact. This describes around 983474 different sci-fi stories. This one, though, is about how aliens might have taken a different evolutionary path and become psychologically incompatible with us. This describes around 94558 different sci-fi stories.
I still thought it was cool. Can’t say anything else without spoiling it, it’s truly short and hinges on the slow reveal. I’m easily impressed by this kind of thing, and hopefully you will too.
Coin and Conformity*
A pretty standard Game of Thrones/ASOIAF uplift story, made unique by the fact our self-insert is trapped in Catelyn’s body and not one of the cool characters. She still needs to attend to the duties a medieval society expects from its ladies, which is really messing with her plan to industrialize Winterfell.
The story is one of the best stories of the genre I’ve read,13 but it’d be boring to go into detail there. I’d rather focus on the recent spicy drama around the story.
You see, the main character is a straight man put into the body of a straight woman. This apparently makes him attracted to men,14 even though he’s in denial about it throughout the early arcs, needing to drink a lot before doing anything with Ned (who, despite how this sounds, is as agreeable as in canon and never forces things, no drama there). Even though Catelyn eventually “accepts” this is his life now, Ned still feels like the relationship is in shambles due to how his wife barely wants to sleep with him and is focused on inventing gunpowder and soap over watching their children.
This world is an AU too, where Ashara Dayne lives, the woman he was actually in love with before his marriage of convenience. You know where this is going. In a move that caused multiple bans, thread locks and pages and pages of drama, the author wrote Ned cheating on the SI with Ashara.
This comes out a bit out of left field, given that Ned is “Honor: The Character”, and leads into what’s essentially a divorce arc without divorce being a possibility. The SI is really mad about it, by this point being basically in love even after his denial arcs, and just drags the plot down into a soap opera.
It seems that it’s finally moving on from that plotline, but the SpaceBattles mods’ warning to shut the fuck up about the cheating remains at the top of the thread, hilariously. Worth a read, both story and drama.
Always be yourself…*
If I had a nickel for every time a self-insert is trapped into the body of a dragon but wants to join a team of humans, leading to slightly contrived disability analogies, I’d have at least three nickels,15 which isn’t that much, but it’s weird that it keeps being written.16
The dragon stuff is okay, whatever. I’m not super interested in it, but it doesn’t become boring. What’s good about this fic is the Star Trek part.
I’ve always been skeptical about the concept that the horrible Trek producers keep trying to make happen, a Starfleet Academy show. The interesting parts of the setting are all in space, exploring strange new worlds and meeting cool aliens. Just sounds incredibly boring to have a show stuck on Earth.
This fic managed to make it interesting. Hiver has always been kind of an average at best, if prolific author. He seems to have gotten much better since last time I read him, and he’s cleverly taken underexplored parts of the setting and made sure we see the class scenes that revolve around them. The contrast of a pessimistic underdog main character and the cast that helps him get over it also leads to a dynamic that synergizes17 with Trek’s utopian setting very well: no one is getting paid. If the dragon gets special gloves that let him interact with tablets it’s because an engineer loves his job and the special challenges a dragon brings him.
This isn’t a masterpiece or anything, but it’s genuinely one of the least flawed Star Trek fics I’ve read, and I’m actually going to try to follow this. It has an incredible daily update rate, as expected from Hiver. That used to come with a reduced quality, but, well, I guess he grew the beard.
Zoolander
A classic Ben Stiller/Owen Wilson comedy movie from 2001 about male modeling. If you’re the right demographic, you can accurately imagine the entire movie in your head.
Honestly, it’s a historical artifact now. It had some really, really, ridiculously good landing jokes, but most of the movie felt like it hadn’t aged very well, and not for any boring reasons. I think we’ve just gotten better at comedy, and the stereotypes it makes fun of are largely gone from our culture. It’s not a long movie, so watch it if the initial premise interests you, but don’t go out of your way.
Through a Temple
Every time you open a SpaceBattles story, a die rolls.
Is this a good story, with character arcs and engaging plotlines? Or is this a poorly disguised excuse for a SpaceBattles user to write techwank dreck about his OC ships beating endless enemy ships, going into extreme detail about the weapons and tactics used, without any interesting story turns whatsoever?
This is a Mass Effect/Star Trek: Deep Space Nine crossover, so I thought, come on, no way they can turn that funky crossover into by-the-numbers trash. No way I rolled a one.
Obviously, given the review ends here, I was wrong.
Cube
Oh man, this movie made me mad. I’ve watched Circle, which sounds like a joke but nah there are quite a few single-word movies deliberately aiming for the audience of this film. Anyway, Circle was good, with cool character dynamics and a really good exploration of social game theory. I had always heard it was an even more straight spiritual successor to the original Cube than usual.
So I went into Cube thinking that it would be good. And… it’s only good if you forget about every single scene in the movie? The acting is so bad, to the point it’s unbelievable to me that this actually made it to proper cinema screens. The music is laughably unfitting when it’s allowed to play. The cinematography is dizzying (derogatory).
As I slowly found out while watching, it’s your average student film, only instead of running through the woods they’re crawling through the same 1.5 cube set over and over, and with slightly more bad CGI than it’s usually aimed for. It shares some aspects with Donnie Darko, in that I understand perfectly why it was influential, while I can accept it’s in itself a bad movie.
The puzzle elements are always brought up when this film is discussed. There are no puzzle elements in practice, just three patterns that a single character repeatedly figures out through long division. Not exactly riveting storytelling. The movie runs out of conflict at one point so it decides to just make one of the characters go insane and try to murder the rest. At a different point, it tries to yell the themes to the watcher, whining about government spending creating weird torture machines like the Cube without any individual part knowing why or what they’re building. I’m not making this sound stupider than it is, I’m honestly steelmanning it if anything.
Anyway, unlike Donnie Darko, there isn’t much here for an average viewer to enjoy. Just read a synopsis. I understand the sequels are even worse.
Jesus, watching AND reading shit is really bloating these word counts. Next month I’m probably reviewing an entire children’s book series, so stay tuned.
This show was made in 1990 though, it’s just meant to be a period show. Father Ted was made only five years later and its humor feels fifty years more up to date.
A personal flaw is that I haven’t read Mage Errant, but neither have the protagonists, so I’ll probably be fine.
Term for web fiction that apes the Homestuck/MSPA text adventure style.
This is not a Homestuck blog, so no need to go into detail, but any reader of the comic will tell you Hussie failed to actually make them aracial due to many textual and out-of-textual contradictions.
There are plenty of “me and my friends play SBURB” stories, fewer “I alone am self inserted in Homestuck’s story”.
I count around four different explanations of that particular mystery. The entire start of Season 3 has Sawyer and Kate in the polar bear cages, for god’s sake.
Okay, I liked the Lighthouse and Cave Names scenes, but those are two 10 minute segments in a 700 minute season.
While cities in the US are just regular magical girl territories with one girl taking over them, there are a few special places. Chicago is a weird theocracy with many layers of bureaucracy and a chain of command, while Los Angeles puts out crazy magical girls that are sent to kill others that break the rules.
Look, my standards are a bit skewed.
And is apparently a faithful recreation. Apparently the writer drove away their old co-writer with their abrasive personality and this is a bit of a therapy fic for them.
I’m reminded of the Artemis Fowl movie adaptation. I wonder if I’ll ever get to review one of those fics here.
RIP Monty Oum. Usually with shows like these there’s a lightning in a bottle element where the entire team contributed to the smash hit, but nah it was really just Oum for RWBY.
Again, doesn’t mean much.
And this isn’t even the controversial part!
Harry Is A Dragon (HP), Dragonspawn (BNHA), and now this (Star Trek). Pretty sure the author Hiver has written at least one more dragon fic I’ve read, but I’m too lazy to confirm.
Without it being a fetish thing. Trust me, at least the three fics I’ve read have absolutely nothing fetishy going on, at least from the writer’s perspective. I’m sure some sickos exist.
Sorry for that string of three words. I swear I’m not selling you anything.
i for one would love and cherish a full lost review ✋
I love P. G. Wodehouse (the author of the Jeeves and Wooster books, and I thought the TV series was very enjoyable and a good adaptation of the books. It's weird how other people's tastes are so incomprehensible. I am English, so maybe that makes a difference. I think a part of Wodehouse's appeal in the present day is the nostalgia element.
I just discovered this blog via twitter (a link to your review of Planecrash). I did like HPMoR. Homestuck, Worm, Worth the Candle and Planecrash are all stories I've heard people mentions so many times and they're on my TBR list. I might add the Tanya/ASoIaF fanfic to the list now, since I've read ASoIaF multiple times and I've given up waiting for The Winds of Winter.