Macro Review: The Shills List as of 2024 (Part 1: Main Shills)
Every work I've added to the extremely famous recommendation list and why, part one
Hey there, record crashers (I’m not doing that ever again).
This is a pretty fucking long post, so I decided to split it in parts as it was already reaching 10k words. Here’s the table of contents, with this part’s content bolded. Read the introduction if you’re confused. Enjoy!
Table of Contents
Introduction
Main Shills
And I Show You How Deep the Rabbit Hole Goes…
Worth the Candle
Worm
The Northern Caves
17776
Crystal Society
Modern Cannibals
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Unsong
CORDYCEPS: Too Clever for Their Own Good
The Man From Earth
A Beginner’s Guide to the End of the Universe
Mother of Learning
Kid Radd
Dream Drive
Three Worlds Collide
Transdimensional Brain Chip
Ever 17: The Out of Infinity
John Dies at the End
God-Shaped Hole
Chili and the Chocolate Factory
The Flower that Bloomed Nowhere
Cockatiel x Chameleon
Ultimate Rock Paper Scissors
Time to Orbit: Unknown
Additional Shills
The Library Unpublished
Instruments of Destruction
Seventh Horcrux
The Lie I’ve Lived
A Black Comedy
The Nonary Games
The Talos Principle
Umineko no Naku Koro ni
LOST
Farscape
The a-Kira Story
There Is No Antimemetics Division
An Unauthorised Treatise
Astlibra Revision
Silent Partner, Unfinished Business
Fargo (not that one)
Cowboy Grak 5: Yet Another Fistful of Obols
Flawed Shills
Floornight
Security!
Tails Gets Trolled
Bond Breaker
The Gamer Taylor Saga
Micro Gates
The World As It Appears To Be
Almost Nowhere
Honorable Mentions
2Kawaii4Comfort
The Game of Champions
Outro
Introduction
Pardon the potential autohagiography, but, in order to properly explain what this article is about, I must go over the highly complicated story of this blog.
Long ago, I started maintaining a fiction recommendation list at the Homestuck Discord, after the original comic ended in 2016. We were all desperately looking for more stories like it, because with that awful ending, it hardly felt like we had finished anything.
I made the list with a specific design philosophy in mind that totally didn’t emerge organically:
The works in it must be good and original (duh).
They must either be reasonably obscure1 (i.e. Dream Drive) or have a reputation problem that means they need to be recommended in order for people to read it nowadays (i.e LOST). No point in turning every list into a samey sludge with the occasional gem. We don’t want to be like Drew’s List, which used to recommend Red Dead Redemption 2. Point and laugh.
They must at some point have been free and easily readable online (i.e. Worth the Candle),2 or have owners that encourage piracy (i.e. The Man From Earth, Ever 17).3
The Additional List includes works that break the above rule (i.e. Farscape), those that are too much like an existing work on the list (i.e. Antimemetics), or fanworks for something else, requiring previous reading/watching, not just cultural osmosis (i.e. Seventh Horcrux).4 Something that would be unfair to force someone to pick up.
The Flawed List includes works that might not be good (i.e. Micro Gates) or that have extreme issues (i.e. Floornight), but are still worth reading for the interestingness factor.
Some healthy memetic gamification is added to the list to encourage people to finish it once started. You can even achieve the ability to recommend your own favorite works on the site! Even worthless token goals are great at motivating people, as gacha games have discovered.
All this prevents scope creep and makes it more immediately useful to anyone who comes across it. Also there are no exceptions to the rules, none, not even that one, shut up.
The list was initially textual, a pin in a Discord channel, but it had turned into an image by June 2017:
Eventually, after a few iterations, it became a fully featured Vue website5 in 2021, recordcrash.com.
Back then, I had already been writing a few reviews for myself, hosted in a simple markdown-to-HTML format (like my Delenda Est and Learning to Live with Orcs reviews).6 I did slowly realize that, while not a lot could match the quality level of the average Shill, some got close, and went completely forgotten. Other works might not even be fully recommendable, but still deserved to be recognized, like Lord of the Mysteries.7
As I wrote a review for Buffy the Vampire Slayer that ballooned to stupid lengths, I decided to just open a Substack to get access to its footnotes8 and convenient subscriptions. More recently, I turned to monthly mini-reviews of everything I consume after someone suggested it, and those have been very successful.
Right now I only have around 70 subscribers, which isn’t a lot compared to Scott Alexander’s 70,000, sure, but there’s a cool upward curve that will totally become exponential soon, especially if you click this button:
This has led to what’s most important to me, good recommendations. People actually seek me out and tell me things they think I would enjoy, often accurately (you can do that now!). Hopefully, in the future, it will also somehow turn into infinite money, which is the second most important thing. But that’s what I hope about everything.
In any case, back to the List, there’s an interesting disconnect between it and this blog. I’ve reviewed some of its featured works upon reread, but the vast majority remains untouched, to the point I highly doubt many of you know it exists. This post will bridge that gap: I’m going to write at least one short review per work in every category of the list. I’m not going to reread everything, because according to these stats it would take over 2000 straight hours, but I have a decent memory for these.
If you want to die, take a shot every time I mention robots, munchkinry, or metatextuality.9
…And I Show You How Deep The Rabbit Hole Goes
Also simply known as “Pills” because that name (a reference to The Matrix’s red and blue ones) is a mouthful.
Scott Alexander, the author, has run a successful blog since at least 2013, and a decade of experience writing posts with an occasional joke apparently translates into great comedic fiction skills. This is the first of two such works of his in the List, the other being Unsong.
Scott saw this picture somewhere, and decided to write a story based around it. What would happen if each pill was taken by a different person, all living on the same Earth and having to deal with each other?
One obvious answer is that the best pills would subjugate their lessers. Black Pill is even stronger than it sounds, as we find out, as its user breaks the month limitation by simply ensuring he’s looking at his future self looking at this future self and writing down what he’s seeing from yet another self, etc. Orange Pill easily takes over a country just by mastering the right skills.
There are a bunch of minor textual implications in the image which are examined to their natural conclusions. Pink actually getting more of a love-themed Pushing Daisies curse, Yellow growing disillusioned with humanity after looking at their thoughts and becoming a hermit, or Green almost immediately dying, because turning into an animal also means you turn into prey for some other animal.
Beyond which powers they get exactly, what type of person would pick each pill? Obviously Green, Pink and Red are kind of morons; Red in particular being responsible for most of the comedy, as the pill mostly just unleashes his dudebro personality.
After some introductions, the main plotline is triggered by Black getting a message from his far, far future self. He’s told they still can’t figure out how to reverse entropy and prevent the universe from dying, and the past self is tasked to find a solution. I wonder if the other pills might help???? I’m not going to spoil you.
Fun, short story, and the perfect introduction to the List.
Worth the Candle
Worth the Candle is about overcoming depression, but like, not in the absolutely shitty boring way that description instantly brings to mind.
Alexander Wales, the author, is a seasoned Dungeon Master as well as a writer, which means he has decades of concepts, worlds and magics in his portfolio. This backstory is transferred to the main character, Juniper, and Juniper himself is transported to a world that incorporates virtually all of those ideas. Simultaneously.
Aerb is a massive, bloated mess, a tiling flat world many times larger than Earth, featuring hundreds of different species and magic systems, to the point that, over the centuries, some suddenly-overpowered magics and beings have been Excluded to a single location on the planet to avoid breaking the rest.
Juniper has the advantage that he knows most secrets and weaknesses in the setting, and he’s got some degree of tabletop mechanics applied to himself. He can learn skills faster, at the very least, and the game feeds him information about people and his goals.
What about his motivation? His best friend died in a car accident months before the story starts. This sent Juniper into a depressive, edgy spiral that made him push everyone away. He, in fact, accepts a deal to be transported to this fantasy world because anything would be better than his current life. Once there, he finds that his friend’s tabletop character is this world’s Lost King, a mythical figure that seemingly “invented” a lot of Aerbian concepts, obviously cribbed from Earth’s. His real-life friend clearly might not have died at all, or he was resurrected after taking the deal Juniper did.
What follows is a massive, 1.6 million word adventure to find his bestie. Despite the length, little feels like filler. Much like the story I will talk about next, the story benefits massively from many of its concepts having been “beta-tested” before it started. Beyond that, Alexander Wales is really, really good at introducing magics and items that have One Weird Trick, leading to great climaxes in fight scenes. The characters are excellent, feeling like realistically flawed people, in Rational Fiction or maybe Vanishingly Rare Well Written fashion.
The very end of the story is controversial, but that’s just because people are weenies. Go read it.
Worm
You probably know at least the basic premise of this. Worm is a world with superheroes.10 Taylor, the main character, wants to be one, probably because she’s constantly bullied at school and no one is saving her. She screws up hard on her first outing, since her seemingly shitty and creepy power (insect control), ends up getting her confused for a supervillain. After seeing the corruption of the “good side”, she decides that maybe staying a villain is the way to accomplish her goals: bringing down worse and worse people. Beyond Taylor, behind the scenes, there is clearly more to the origin of superpowers than what the wider public knows.
Rare for a story in the List, most of Worm is actually fairly bad. Very loosely, arcs 1-15 are mostly excellent, as are arcs 26-30. I could take and leave the others.
The reasons are clear if you know the backstory: Wildbow wrote the first couple arcs over and over. Long before the story started, even. He kept a huge folder of drafts, where he kept trying out new protagonists and plotlines. He ended up choosing Taylor, but the side effect of his indecision is that by the time he was done, Brockton Bay (see the map above) and its inhabitants were fully developed. A lot of the people Taylor meets have as much depth as other books’ protagonists, and the many factions and even minor locations of the setting rightfully feel like Wildbow spent months on each.
This doesn’t only make the first few arcs better, it has lead to Worm fanfiction becoming incredibly popular. The writers have a lot of pieces to play with, and know exactly how they tick. Change even just the power Taylor gets, and you can extrapolate fifty new interesting plotlines, different clashes and characters she could meet…
Unfortunately, the author runs out of Brockton Bay material by the time the supervillain Coil is defeated, and the following arcs just feel half-baked in comparison. Wildbow has this general issue, beyond Worm,11 where he can’t stop himself from escalating the angst and action until the reader stops caring, which gets truly awful in a serial as long as this one. It starts feeling procedural. Nowadays, people would compare it to the repetitive, uncreative output you get from ChatGPT.
Thankfully, the final arcs were clearly also planned from the very beginning, and the story instantly gains in freshness and originality when we get there. But it means, and I endorse you do this, that you might have to skim or skip a bunch of arcs to get there, if you value your time.
The Northern Caves
This novel is genre-defying.12 It’s both a love letter to early 2000s internet forums and a House of Leaves-esque horror story. Doesn’t go hard on the fantasy element, but it’s too abnormal to slot into literary fiction.
We’re reading a diegetic report written by GlassWave—a Chesscourt forum user—about a recent IRL meetup the forum had. Chesscourt (a children’s book series turned overcomplicated monstrosity) has been a dead property for years, though recently the massive unpublished sequel The Northern Caves was found in the deceased author’s personal belongings, and scanned by one of the users. GlassWave implies offhand that multiple deaths happened as a result of reading it at the meetup…
The way I’m describing this makes it sound like a creepypasta, honestly, so I’m going to leave it there. Trust me that the novel is many things but not stupid.
The forum sections are amazingly true to life, as author Nostalgebraist was a frequent patron of the MSPA Forums and based these on them. I think they’re the best part of the work. Why do we get so many period pieces but nothing about this specific zeitgeist?
Regretfully, Nostalgebraist is at this point known for his terrible endings, and TNC is no exception. It’s not as bad as his other work Floornight, but it’s bad. It’s not merely a problem of bad execution, better reviewers than I have mentioned that he seems to be unable to grasp what makes a good ending (or he writes for himself, and he has bad opinions).13
Still, that negativity can’t prevent me from recommending this. Once the in-story “Separation” happens, the story loses quality, and after that only the podcast at the end is worth talking about, but everything else is gold.
17776
The video above actually has nothing to do with the story, except they both feature space and football.
The half-animatic, half-novel (honestly, it’s some Homestuck multimedia bullshit) is based around a single high concept: what would happen if everyone on Earth suddenly became immortal and unaging, humans were the only life in the universe, and they had nothing to do?
As the suddenly sentient Pioneer 9 probe discovers upon waking up in the year 17776, they would play a lot of sports.
American Football in particular has evolved in crazy new ways. The main game on the US right now, which 9 and his satellite friends are watching, involves a single match taking place over decades, from one side of the country to the other, with players never seeing each other for miles, and a lot of weird stratagems to get balls undetected past enemy territory.
The story concerns both the minutia of the game (Jon Bois, the author, is a sports writer) and more generally, an exploration of humanity and their motivations in this crazy new setting. It’s funny, unique, and excellently written.14
Crystal Society
It’s aged like fine wine, this one. A technically-published-but-free-online novel by Max Harms, it concerns a novel type of artificial intelligences that work by consensus in order to pilot a single robot. Our main viewpoint is one of the individual components of the group consciousness, the titular Crystal Society.
That protagonist is “Face”, the AI designed to understand and communicate with the humans in the outside world. We see her interact and barter with her siblings like “Wiki”, “Safety”, “Growth” as they make decisions on how to use their physical body and decide their long-term goals.
They’re all basically sociopaths. Most of the success of the “Socrates” robot is in how it has successfully fooled the humans into thinking that it’s on their side. AI safety is one of the thematic foci of this novel, obviously.
The plot concerns the robot’s escape from the facility, and maybe some further sci-fi adventures I don’t want to spoil but that the official synopsis does for some reason. I’ll just say aliens are involved, and encourage you to find out the rest first-hand.
Modern Cannibals
The Shills List was originally designed to appeal to a specific fanbase, and this was one of the founding works. It’s only cosmetically related to Homestuck, though.
It tells the story of a young girl (who goes by the letter Z and nothing else) trying to figure out why her best friend Max has become obsessed with the webcomic and abandoned her. Z chases him to a geek convention alongside two older weirdos of different varieties.
As the plot progresses (to be vague), they meet a bunch of weird fictional figures surrounding the management of Homestuck and Z’s own obsessions, and they have to deal with various fallouts. Eventually, they clash with the man behind the comic itself. Many points about authorship, parasociality and audience are explored.
It’s the work of Bavitz, a virtuoso with a flair for annoying/unique/fun viewpoint characters, which luckily15 we’ll shuffle through as the plot progresses. He’s written a couple other works in the list, since he’s the perfect storm of prolific, original and permanently unsuccessful at marketing himself.
Most of the good things I can say about Modern Cannibals are related to the execution, so it’s hard to say more about it that isn’t a spoiler or useless without context.16 It’s a highly abrasive work early on, so just give the first few chapters a chance, and if you can’t stand it, just stop there.17
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Oh boy, even if this one ever becomes incredibly popular (legendary engineer John Carmack has read it, so… we’re almost there?), this will always belong in the list.
Why? Many people have an instant visceral dislike for HPMOR, with the work having a terrible reputation overall. There are many reasons:
The main character appears to be a Gary Stu who’s about to steamroll through the beloved Harry Potter setting.18
People have a knee-jerk dislike of “Rationalism”, some because they’ve met annoying redpill/philosopher king-type people who scream versions of it, some because they hate the superficially similar Neil Degrasse Tyson-style pop “science”.19
The author, Eliezer Yudkowsky, has made many enemies throughout his life, and is embedded in an extremely weird social bubble that has created more enmity on its own.20
As you probably know, I often read unironic Gary Stu fics or worse and feel no shame, and a weird author is a bonus, so none of these arguable red flags did anything to me.
This novel was written by someone who, when he started, had only watched the Harry Potter movies, and not even all of them, so it’s loosely based on the cultural image one has of the book series. This makes it readable to randos who somehow have never experienced either.
Many people give up during the first arc, which reveals this: HPMOR is an alternate universe where Harry was raised by a different adoptive father, a STEM university professor. He’s grown up reading all the science books that may potentially turn you into a really annoying child. He’s immanentized that potential, a bit like a magic-themed Sheldon Cooper.
He argues with McGonagall as she tries to convince him he’s a wizard. When he sees evidence, he complains that it breaks a bunch of physics rules. He constantly whines about the Wizarding World making no sense, dismisses characters like Ron Weasley who don’t seem as smart as he is…
In a more classically published work, readers would have assumed this is a character flaw, something the protagonist has to get over. And they’d be right, HPMOR is ultimately about Harry discovering that his cosmetic rationality and superiority doesn’t stand a chance against the real world. At some point, he has to actually put the hard parts of his ideals in practice and win, give other people a chance, admit he’s not the smartest guy in the room…
Unfortunately, many readers give up before that point. The fanfic is really long, and beyond the initial arc, which has comedy but is highly annoying, there are a bunch of digressions. For example, Ender’s Game-style games that Eliezer just thought were cool but add nothing to the story. It also seems to promise, near the start, that Harry will figure out all the secrets of magic with the scientific method. That check is never getting cashed.
Overall, though, I think the core of the series is very strong, and, while some of the science and pedagogy is wrong, there’s no more important message you can successfully transmit to readers of fanfic than “be less annoying”. A fun, smart read, in subtler ways than it might seem.
Unsong
From the creator of Pills comes, uh… Torah-themed urban fantasy? What?
On 1968, when trying to fly to the Moon, an American spaceship instead crashes into the glass sphere surrounding the world. This breaks the careful machinery assembled by archangel Uriel, which was preventing certain readings of the Old Testament from becoming truly literal.
After the crash, miracles begin happening. Angels reveal themselves to the world again. Nixon tries to make a deal with Hell. A true Messiah crops up. Companies start making sweatshops where people say random words over and over in hopes of finding one of the True Names of God, each of which has a unique, hopefully profitable effect.
The story begins in one such sweatshop, with our protagonist stumbling into a random word that has the ability to ensoul anything, including machines. This makes him an enemy of anyone who would want that power. The story immediately turns to survival. Later on, more and more of the backstory is revealed, with clearer good and bad guys, as well as the ultimate purpose of everything (and I mean everything). While the plot sounds somewhat serious, there is plenty of comedy throughout, mostly in the form of extremely tortured and funny plays on words.
Unsong has a big flaw, and it’s a direct consequence of its serial release. I think, for Scott, it felt more like individual blog posts than a proper novel, barring the beginning and the end. This leads to weird decisions like the middle of the story spamming interludes, or generally terrible pacing throughout. The individual articlechapters are all good, but there’s little cohesion, and the main plotline is often put on pause because Scott felt like writing about Donald Trump that week.
Reading this can feel like watching a fan-cut where some idiot has put all the deleted scenes back into the film, bad audio and missing dialogue and all, and called it the Definitive Cut.
Scott has mentioned wanting to edit it, but all his specific ideas are terrible and miss the point. Things like changing a character’s name to perfect the potential anagrams, instead of cutting out chapters or anything that actually improves the story. Luckily or unluckily it doesn’t seem like he’s gotten far with the overall project, and the original Unsong remains untouched.
Of course, right as I was writing this article, he finally got off his ass and published it on Amazon, with all the awful changes. Sigh. Just make your choice: the original, or the Snyder21 cut?
I’ll possibly end up making a full review of the Unsong edit whenever I feel like re-reading it. Stay tuned.
CORDYCEPS: Too clever for their own good
A funny horror/ontological mystery story about pink elephants. A few amnesiac people wake up in a facility, and somehow screw things up for themselves by investigating what happened to them.
In what’ll become an annoying pattern for the review, I can’t go into detail without ruining the entire story. Maybe it’s just enough to mention that many people call this The Anti-Rational Fic. There’s a quality of the setting that makes it so the smarter you are and the harder you’re trying to find out the truth, the worse things will go for you. Hence the title, and maybe the moral (trust the science?).
While I didn’t have this issue, many people find one of the main characters insufferable (you’ll know who when you get exposed to their unbearable paranoia). Some find multiple characters annoying. I’ll just tell you it’s an ensemble, and everyone gets viewpoint chapters, so just bear with it and enjoy their development.
I consider this a very focused, less ambitious (but all the better for it, it’s like a tight movie script) version of There Is No Antimemetics Division, hence why the latter is in its less important list.
The Man From Earth
Half the shots in this movie look like this. It’s one of those Twelve Angry Men style kinos with a lot of people talking, and little if any action. It was written by Jerome Bixby, whom some of you may know from Star Trek, inventor of the Mirror Universe among other things.
It’s fucking amazing. The plot is about a guy who’s about to leave town for a mysterious reason, and his fellow professors come say goodbye. As they keep talking, they start prying the truth from him, and what they unveil turns out to be far more interesting than anyone would expect.
I’m being incredibly vague because the mystery is once again the plot. Extremely good pacing, okay theater-level acting and cinematography, stellar writing. Go watch it now, it’s not one of those three hour filmic catastrophes.
A Beginner’s Guide to the End of the Universe
Beginner’s Guide (not that one) is a “fanventure”. This is a story told in the style of linear choose-your-own-adventure comics, mainly based on Problem Sleuth and Homestuck’s invented style.22
The plot is simple, another one of those ontological mysteries. A guy wakes up in a backrooms-style world (keep in mind this is a 2010 comic) with CREATIVITY powers, and he has to figure out where he is, what’s going on, and eventually fight the threats within with the help of an incredibly based dog friend.
This is simply the best finished fanventure that exists, so I would be remiss if I didn’t recommend it. Maybe strangely, it’s also a good introduction to the medium, short and sweet.
Mother of Learning
You’ve watched Groundhog Day, right? Our protagonist is stuck in a similar time loop, with his fantasy world resetting every month, and only him keeping his memories (so far as he knows).
Zorian is a very annoying, smug nerd, and naturally untalented to boot, with a tiny mana pool compared to most, which gives him no staying power in fights. He gets entangled with what in any other story would be the protagonist, Zach, a wealthy heir with all the broken powers you could imagine (the virgin/chad dichotomy is obvious here).
Of course, it turns out Zach is only that broken because he’s been in a time loop for a while, using the additional time to train. Zorian gets dragged into it. To complicate things, they don’t get along, and their city gets invaded at the end of the month, every time. Even if they figure out a way out of the loop, they’ll need a good plan to defeat the army first, all by themselves.
Zorian’s natural drawbacks mean he has no choice but to be smart. Brute force like in Naruto (it might seem like a random comparison, but this story takes a lot from that setting and not the obvious ones) isn’t going to cut it.
This all sounds great, but money prevented Mother of Learning from being as good as it could be. You’re reading an amazingly well paced story with plenty of character development, and suddenly the plot developments hit the brakes. Turns out an entire book is about to be dedicated to a pointless fetch quest.
Why is money related to this? Well, this is just my theory and not a legal statement of fact, but nobody103, the author, had really started racking up donations, and if the story ended sooner, then he wouldn’t have been able to extract as much profit as he could from the audience. 20 additional chapters turn into around $30,000 dollars, a small fortune for a Croatian author. Any way you see it, it’s a filler arc. No character development, no plot reveals, just finding the next magical item and engaging in boring action scenes over and over.
Fortunately, it’s “just” one book that drags (I’d say it’s roughly 20% of the story, as opposed to 60-80% like in Worm), and if you ignore or skim it you’ll be left with an excellent, complete fantasy story. That’s why it’s on the list.
Kid Radd
If Beginner’s Guide to the End of the Universe was the best fanventure, Kid Radd is the best sprite comic.
Sprite comics are kind of what you see in the first image. Usually, they were made by children or the less artistically inclined people, because they don’t require art skills. People simply took sprite sheets from the Internet (from Super Mario, Sonic, Megaman, etc.), posed them, and typed text in MSPaint above the sprites. Some of the laziest, unfunniest crap you can imagine.
Of course, in Kid Radd, the artist drew all his own spritesheets and backgrounds, willfully missing the point. So in the end, it’s almost more of a traditional webcomic with heavily reused assets, like Homestuck. They do share a musician, and the fact that this comic has music hints at how the web medium is exploited here.
The story is a bit like Wreck-It Ralph (or rather, Wreck-It-Ralph’s author conceivably ripped it off), with a laughably dated video game character discovering there’s a modern world outside his game, and having to react to an existential threat coming from it. The first few strips mislead you that this is just going to be a joke-of-the-week style comic, down to an arc stolen right out of a Futurama episode. But then the plot really opens up, and Radd has to join a resistance of other video game characters to… well, why don’t you read the comic and find out?
Dream Drive
We’re continuing the theme of “it gets better later, I promise” here. It’s legitimately funny how terrible this story seems on a first look. Maybe it was intentional, or maybe, given that this story was posted on “Literotica”, the plan was really to make a story about a guy banging women in a virtual reality world, but that’s all you’re getting in the first chapter.
Wait, I’m lying. You also get some exposition about a new VR RPG like the one in Sword Art Online. So it can get worse.
You’ll have to deal with all the red flags for a while. Later it’ll turn out the real world is equally important to the “fantasy” world inside the game, which isn’t exactly fake either. There is a big purpose and a plan that our protagonist Jackson is only a pawn to.
Well, I say our protagonist, but there is a second character, Charles, that completely steals the show when he joins the plot around halfway through the first book. He’s a chef’s-kiss-level antihero, and brings some needed chaos to contrast Jackson’s passivity. His arc might potentially make him a good person or at least aligned against the ultimate evil, while Jackson mostly needs to grow up.
I think it’s fair to call this the worst main shill, especially given this is only the first book of a saga, and the second has been in development hell for almost a decade now. But there really is some gold at the end of the shit rainbow here, you’ll have to trust me.23
Three Worlds Collide
A shorter work by the creator of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. It’s sci-fi this time, one of those novellas that you found everywhere in the pulp science fiction era.
It concerns the first contact meeting of humans and two alien races around a star. As the plot progresses, you find out that this is the far, far future, with humans having evolved in a weird direction that makes them equally alien to the reader.
The whole point here is the moral relativism, and the weaknesses of Star Trek’s Prime Directive, the general aspect of “don’t mess with other cultures” falling short when you meet truly bizarre and disturbing social mores that the aliens are completely okay with. Time for ethical dilemmas.
While excellently written (and it has two decent endings, to boot), there are a couple controversial lines from the humans that have prevented this story from going mainstream. I’ll just paste the funniest one here:
"Anyway," said the Master. "If we don't fire on the alien ship - I mean, if this work is ever carried back to [their] civilization - I suspect the aliens will consider this one of their great historical works of literature, like Hamlet or Fate/stay night-"
Transdimensional Brain Chip
People hate this one for superficial reasons. Okay, maybe it’s fair, given it’s a visual comic that superficially looks like this:
I just think it’s charming. Usually, someone as artistically disinclined as Öyvind Thorsby would just write a book instead, but this is a story that would be really hard to execute without visuals, since there are 50 characters that look exactly the same except for the clothes they’re wearing.
The plot concerns a really, really stupid man, who agrees to be a lab rat and get a chip surgically installed in his brain. The chip allows him to communicate with selves from different universes, all of which got the chip too. Right off the bat, this sounds like a more comedic version of Everything Everywhere All At Once, which is not a coincidence. I’m absolutely certain that the record-breaking award-winning movie stole everything from this obscure webcomic.
Anyway, what I just said isn’t strictly a plot. The plot proper, after some comedic misadventures, involves preventing nuclear apocalypse that happens in most realities. Ulf is really dumb, so the chip better allow for some cool munchkinry to give him an edge there…
Ever 17: The Out of Infinity
If Dream Drive is arguably the worst shill in the main list, Ever 17 is the best, arguably, because I have argued a lot about it.
Watch the opening:
Wait, this just looks like generic anime trash. The music is decent though. But you can see why this has a bad reputation compared to the other shills. It just looks like a weeby dating sim.
What Ever 17 actually is is a mystery science-fiction visual novel by Kotaro Uchikoshi, whom you might know from Zero Escape or AI: The Somnium Files. The guy is known for his impossible-to-see-coming twists, and how he expertly builds games entirely around them.
This game is no exception. It’s got the best execution of its specific type of twist in all of fiction, that I’ve experienced so far anyway. And that type can only exist within a Visual Novel, alas.
Superficially, the plot is about the survival of some kids stuck in an abandoned amusement park. There isn’t a lot of action, but almost all the kids have a bizarre backstory that ties into the reason they’re trapped there. And, despite what their designs might suggest, each character has a surprising level of depth to them.
Hard to say anything else here.24 Oh yeah, the cascade of twists is locked behind a True Ending route, which will pretty much require the no-spoilers guide included in the download (and the Sora>Yu>Sara>Tsumugi>Coco order is recommended). There is a reason I had to strongly recommend this in order for anyone to play it, and in a way that’s why this is the best Shill—
John Dies at the End
I was doing so well in avoiding spoiling the stories until now…
JDATE was originally an online novel written by David Wong, questionably chosen alias of Jason Pargin. If you’re old enough, you might know him from Cracked.com, he was the most prolific editor and the one that set the tone for most other reviews. He was a funny guy.25
This is a horror novel, but Jason couldn’t help but make it funnier than scary, which is an odd combination26 and makes this and his other work a unique beast.
Dave and John (no relation) are two incompetent dirtbags who have taken a special drug that allows them to see the supernatural. While most of the story is horror vignettes as they deal with spooky problems for money in their hometown, their world is about to be invaded by forces from another universe that only they can (badly) fight.
This sounds all kinds of generic, but the uniqueness is in the dialogue and tone, so let me show you a rare, faithfully-adapted half-scene from the movie.27
God-Shaped Hole
We’re going from a work by a Cracked.com writer to one authored by a far less controversial type of person: a misogynist neo-monarchist pseudo-nazi.
Look, the story itself is good. Don’t judge a book by its cover. Actually, scratch that, given that my original description in the Shills List somehow made it to the official cover as a pull quote. Judge it by that.28
Anyway, this is a psychological thriller slash sci-fi slash horror story that takes place in the near future. People live almost their entire lives in VR or AR to the point they’ve lost touch with single letter R. The plot concerns one guy’s mission to meet one of the AIs he’s become obsessed with, and general themes of TECHNOLOGY=BAD. Along the way, we get exposed via hyperlinks to a bunch of real and rarely fake news articles that justify the current world he’s in.
The writing is excellent, downright literary. I think some people say it’s the best in the Shills List. Funnily enough, the themes are transferred so ambiguously that none of the author’s politics come through if you don’t already know he’s a weirdo, and the few that do are easily interpretable as intentional flaws of the main character. So you have a huge contingent of fans that would hate and be hated by the author if they ever met him. Remind you of any webcomics?
Alas, big Wordpress isn’t as tolerating of the clinically insane as I am, and removed the author’s entire site after he released his Barron Trump isekai (don’t ask). The only way to read the story now is through Archive.org, which failed to archive a couple of the diegetic articles. I hope it’s fixed soon.
Chili and the Chocolate Factory
This fic, maybe together with the former, mark the beginning of a new era in the Shills List. I’m now actually finding new stuff to recommend instead of having to fetch it from the annals of time.
Remember Roald Dahl? He wrote things besides Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He wrote a lot of things, in fact. This fanfic takes his disparate body of work and tries to merge it into a cinematic universe monstrosity.
Remy, the author, also faithfully replicates Dahl’s tone, combined with genius uses of narration:
One million people were gathered in front of the gates to Wonkaland, which was either in England or America. Nobody really knew. The sky was a dark gr[redacted]y col[redacted]r.
But also updates things a bit, with gimmicks like chat segments:
gremlin_guard: I've been stuck at an airport for the last twelve hours, and my inbox blew up with notifications the moment I turned my phone on. I'm young and also not a history buff. Could anyone super knowledgeable about Wonka/Wonkaland/Bucket give me the rundown on what's happening?
XxX_Blakin_XxX:29 tl;dr: chocolate man bad
The actual main story is, as you can guess, a remix-sequel of the original Charlie book, with a bunch of new kids. But it goes in crazy meta directions once we’re there, extending the themes of the original novel to their natural conclusions. Honestly, even if the plot was bad, I’d still recommend this due to the amazing style, but I don’t have to do that. All of this is good, except maybe the slightly-too-sweet ending.
I hear this story is getting rewritten soon, and I’ve even heard rumors of a sequel. Let’s hope it’s not THAT soon that I have to rewrite part of this review (fuck you Unsong).
The Flower that Bloomed Nowhere
This work has a big PR problem. It advertises itself as a time loop, but none of the viewpoint characters had even mentioned a time loop at the time I recommended this, over 100 chapters in.
I’m sure there’s a bullshit twist that justifies the tag later on, maybe it’s already happened (I’m not caught up). It’s that kind of story.
We follow Su, who’s the closest thing to a med student in the weird ass world she lives in. She’s kind of a wizard that casts Mesopotamian-styled magic, but that’s the least interesting part about her. She’s neurotic, she hates herself, she’s got unmentioned traumas that are interlinked with the main mystery… a very interesting main character with a ton of layers.
The story itself starts when she’s about to attend a medical symposium hosted by a reclusive community of immortality researchers. This plot and characters are highly influenced by Umineko and other similar visual novels, which tells you what happens next: once they’re locked inside, mysterious murders start happening. Su, her friend Ran, and a laughably huge (but good and likable) extended cast of students will have to survive and figure out what’s going on.
The biggest Flower flaw, beyond the misleading tag, is the existence of some incredibly annoying, Umineko Tea Party-style meta interludes, where a playwright and a director that may or may not be stand-ins for the author stop the action and rant unfunnily at the screen. I keep telling the author to remove those interludes, but she won’t listen to me. Maybe they go somewhere (I doubt it).
Immortality is the key theme in this story, and you get quite a few political arguments about it. The universe is also pretty original in ways that provide fertile ground for novel discussions. I unfortunately cannot go in further detail, but do give this a try.
(By the way, I really want to give this a fuller review after I catch up again, so look forward to that.)
Cockatiel x Chameleon
Another work from the creator of Modern Cannibals, Bavitz. I consider this a straight upgrade in writing and pacing, if not as focused on the topics I care most about.
Cockatiel x Chameleon is an exploration of a few online ecosystems that have cropped up in recent years. The whole Venn diagram of California, The Internet, Artists, and Porn Addicts, really, with an occasional swerve into politics.
Our main character is Harper Praise, a loser technical writer who finds a refuge for her complete detachment from reality in a Discord server hosted by Van der Gramme, a Digibro-style artist and a niche god to weirdos. The entire story revolves around Harper and Van der Gramme’s lives falling apart in different ways.
I actually wrote a full-ass review of this already, you can read that if you wish. I’ll just tell you it belongs in the shills list for sure.
Ultimate Rock-Paper-Scissors
This is the “just a lil guy” of the list. A very short manga where people just fight each other in a rock-paper-scissor tournament.
They’re not normal people, though. There are ghosts, gods, magic users, and a very lucky Regular Boy influencing the outcome of the matches.
The art isn’t super amazing, as you can see, but it does the job. The plot reminds me most of Death Note, with a lot of gambits that are legitimately hard to see coming, starting with one of the competitors intentionally breaking his own fingers and just going harder from there.
It surprised me how much I enjoyed this, but I had it recommended to me repeatedly over many years, so maybe people know me well. I suspect this has mainstream appeal even though it encompasses the munchkinry aspect of the Shills List more purely than anything else. Wonder when the anime adaptation is coming.
Time to Orbit: Unknown
The most recent and most unfinished work in the list. An engineering-science-fiction-mystery very reminiscent of Project Hail Mary.30 Our protagonist wakes up aboard a generation ship with hundreds of people in stasis, having been chosen by the ship’s AI as the most apt to solve many problems currently burdening the trip to a new colony.
Of course, things become complex pretty fast. For one, there have been multiple murders the AI didn’t tell anyone about, and both the main and backup crew are out of commission. There might be a very complex class war in the backstory, and a million new genders and social structures back on future Earth, one of which our main character is embedded in, complicate our regular human understanding of the mysteries being presented.
Very original story with a lot of worldbuilding many well crafted mysteries, as well as a slightly social-justicey bent that is missing from the rest of the list. No one can say I don’t value things outside of my comfort zone.
This story is ending soon, and I’m letting the backlog build up until then, let’s hope it doesn’t disappoint when I review it again.
What’s your favorite main shill? Let me know in the comments AND SMASH THAT BELL BUTTON oh wait substack doesn’t have that.
Apparently (though I can’t find the quote) Tarantino gives the same advice, to not bother recommending popular stuff and save the recommendations for media that needs them.
“But what about John Dies at the End?" It used to be a free web serial, like The Martian. And yes, it got a movie on theaters so it’s not that obscure, but it wasn’t really a good adaptation and a big flop on top. I doubt anyone hears of the film before the book, and the book isn’t super popular either.
I have an email from the publisher that says not only is it abandonware, but the identity of the IP owner is actually under NDA for some reason. I will sadly have to move it to the Additional Shills section if it ever becomes fully available again, so you know what to do, Ever 17 haters.
“But what about HPMOR?” It’s 2024, if you don’t have enough cultural osmosis to understand 99% of it I’ll eat Yud’s hat.
I recently read Vue 3 added something that makes it twice as fast, and it was already pretty fast, so I might update the site again soon.
The blog system I used was so shitty it deleted a half-finished 5k+ word Star Trek mega-review. I even examined which captain is best (it’s Picard, sorry, though I guess Pike might potentially beat him with time).
I also realized I often forgot which stories I had tried, leading to constant accidental rereads. Even if I blocked the thread in one forum, I might still end up rereading a mirror in another, and only realize ten chapters in (when I drop it for the same reason I originally did).
I love footnooooooootes.
robotsrobotsrobotsrobotsrobotsrobotsrobotsrobotsrobotsrobotsrobotsrobotsrobotsrobotsrobotsrobotsrobotsrobotsrobotsrobotsrobotsrobotsrobotsrobots
If you’ve watched/read Invincible and The Boys, it’s not far off from them. They all have evil Superman.
Though I hear his latest work, Claw, is actually pretty good. I’ll check it out eventually.
This one is taken almost entirely from this review I already made. I didn’t have much to add.
Readers might wonder, why are you being so mean to Nostalgebraist? Well, I have a perfectly reasonable justification for this:
Unfortunately, it was followed by the sequel 20020, which I’d go as far as to call reactionary. The way I see it, it was a way for the author to turn any readership he had from 17776 into some form of influence for his pocket causes. Since the author hasn’t bothered to release its second half four years later, I doubt he truly cared about writing a full story, and I don’t recommend reading it at all.
Well I actually like the annoying characters in this one, but most people are put off by Z’s style.
And I don’t want to give the “““internationally published””” author that’s surely reading this a bigger head. Finish your Pokemon fic instead of wasting your time here.
Unless you want Shills List privileges, in which case fuck you, leave that plate spotless.
Yes, it’s still beloved by most people in the world, those social network bubbles that hate it because of Rowling don’t really make up a high percentage of any demographic.
In case you don’t know who that guy is:
I have nothing to say here, it’s just more aesthetically pleasing if all points have a footnote.
No, seriously, I have nothing to say.
…
Oh, alright, you can have this link to the best debate of all time, an immovable object versus an unstoppable force.
The Gemmatria value of Snyder is 619, which is the same as Skyrim’s value. This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence…
Yes, I’m significantly simplying the history of the medium. See 1011686’s excellent guide for The Truth.
And I’m absolutely certain no one would give Dream Drive a try without as strong of a recommendation as I can give.
Some completely useless information is that Ever 17 is actually the second work in the Infinity Series, which started with Never 7, a bad VN that is legitimately more of a dating sim than a mystery series, but which unlocked Uchikoshi’s obsession with crazy twists, and ended with Remember 11, a pretty decent VN that got budget problems and is missing one of its three routes, feeling overall unfinished. Both of these novels have their bigger twists reused in later Uchikoshi works, so they’re more of a curiosity than anything must-play.
Most recently he’s become a Tiktok grifter, spamming engagement bait in order to get zoomers and alphas to buy his books. I don’t even think his newer books are bad, but I find this approach to marketing distasteful.
Well, not odd for this list, I guess.
The movie was a huge flop and, while technically a fun stoner humor movie, has no resemblance to the book beyond this and a few other scenes.
I wasn’t credited though, which means we have another crime to add to the sheet.
I swear I didn’t recommend this story just because I seemingly cameo in it.
I love Project Hail Mary so fucking much, but having it adapted as a movie starring Ryan Gosling means it’s just a bit too mainstream for the List.
Just finished the Unsong edit: it’s good! I agree with your review of the original: it felt like an excellent first draft badly in need of revision, lots of good material but structurally a bit of a hot mess. The edit isn’t perfect and doesn’t fix everything, but it feels noticeably tighter. All my favorite moments from the original made it in, no baby was thrown out with bathwater. I’d have to re-read the original, which I don’t feel like doing, to establish exactly how sharp the red pen was, but nothing felt especially filler-y or slow to me on this read.
That said, it’s still the same story, and it still has the two weakest plot threads that annoyed me on my original read:
* Sarah, who after a lot of buildup ends up being totally inconsequential to the plot, with no real payoff, and more annoying than funny — this is basically un-changed
* BOOJUM vs Unsong: entertaining but no motivation, stakes, or payoff — this was improved by giving a better / deeper backstory to the head of Unsong (renamed from the original), which makes it somewhat less anticlimactic, but still anticlimactic
Nevertheless, would strongly recommend the edit, certainly to anyone who liked and is willing to re-read the original
I saw that A Black Comedy was on your shills list, and was wondering if you were aware of this review of it: https://www.reddit.com/r/HPfanfiction/s/lhmFDH8HpG
If so, what do you think of their conclusions?