Reviews for April 2023
A new thing? Featuring an Actual Book, fics for HP, ATLA, Naruto and more!
Everyone loves Slate Star Codex’s monthly Links posts. I recently realized that I, too, get access to a lot of monthly content I can talk about. I’ve decided to try out these short form multi-review posts, monthly, as a treat.
Be warned, these are designed to be written faster, so they might have more technical errors or typos. Comment if you catch one.
I also think it’s best to avoid separating the list into LOVED IT, KINDA LIKED IT, HATED IT as usual. Since most of this is bottom of the barrel Spacebattles trash, it’s possible that some of these months, if I keep doing this, will only contain bad fics. I do this so you don’t have to.1
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.
★: Project Hail Mary, Gacha God
*: N/A
Project Hail Mary★ and fics
A really strong start for the month, and it’s literature you can buy at a store. You might know the author of this from The Martian2 and, if you were unlucky, from Artemis.
His style can be best described as engineering/science porn with a healthy amount of humor. If this makes you think of some xkcd-tier pretentious bullshit, don’t worry. His characters are always charming, and he focuses on his strengths, sticks to his lane.
Unfortunately, I loved this book so much that I can’t bring myself to spoil it for you. Favorite thing I’ve read in a long time, and it’s one of those where it feels so much better to make your discoveries alongside the main character. Go in fully blind without looking at the premise.
You’re welcome for this amazingly useful review.
Immediately after I finished the book, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I checked out some AO3 fanfics. Here’s a bunch of one line, spoiler-free descriptions of the memorable ones:3
The Hail Mary, full of Grace: you know all those Harry Potter fics where it’s the same plotline, but from the perspective of Ginny or some other terrible character? You don’t? Okay trust me they’re horrible, and this is bad for similar reasons.
Moonage Daydream: the above but good, a short scene that could fit in perfectly within the actual book.
The Next Generation: a straightforward sequel to the novel, it was solid, but unfinished.
Coward: a scene that I really wanted to read, but which never happened in the book. Unfortunately, it’s kind of clumsily and wish-fulfillily handled.
The King Who May Yet Be
A self-insert wakes up in the body of Jon Snow as a child, and proceeds to leverage that for all it’s worth.
But I digress. The original book series isn’t actually finished, but I’m going to talk about some potential spoilers anyway. It’s obvious that Jon is going to be a secret Targaryen heir to the throne R+L=J blah blah blah.
HOWEVER I don’t think that includes secret dragon eggs in the Winterfell catacombs. I think the writer is just really lazy and wasn’t smart enough to actually leverage his SI’s position.
There’s a bunch of Targaryen lore exposition delivered through dream scenes and incredibly natural dialogue derived from those dream scenes:
"Though the tales of the Prince Jacaerys and his love for Sara Snow are known far and wide, particularly among the small folk, there is much debate on whether she ever existed, for her supposed father, lord Cregan, was never known to have mentioned her. But many believe the pact of Ice and Fire was created as a result of the love the prince and his lady snow shared."
It’s often just excuses to give Jon yet another unearned power-up. It eventually escalates to actual ghosts giving Jon advice.
Also, there are essentially four characters total: Jon, Arthur Dayne, Barristan and Jaime, and they’re all boring stock characters. Even the self-insert, somehow?
You better skip this. I’ve read some cool ASOIAF self-inserts, and this ain’t it.
Ramen Days
This one doesn’t deserve a long review. It’s a gamer Naruto fic. It’s a time loop Naruto fic. It’s a combination gamer/time loop Naruto fic.
It’s initially an okay popcorn fic, but it’s progressively ruined by recruitment mechanics that slow the plot to a crawl and destroy the stakes. It’s very abandoned to boot, though apparently this was once a classic? Don’t.
Everything Everywhere One Thing at a Time
This reminds me a bit of the fic Forests of Valbonë. A Harry severely fucked up by his abused backstory gets a funny new mentor. It’s Nicolas Flamel instead of a hat this time, though.
A succession of repetitive hurt/comfort scenes ensues, but I think the writer overestimates his own ability to make Harry adorable, and he instead comes off as annoying and clingy to us readers.
The story has some Peggy Sueish elements, but instead of actual time travel, Harry sometimes get flashes of the future lifetimes of his alternate selves. A bit like the movie the title is a nod to, but not quite the same.
This leads to the rare cool dream-logic scene where, for example, Harry astrally projects out of his own basilisk-petrified body to hunt a ghost. The downside to this gimmick is that for each cool sequence, we get two where nothing makes much sense. And the overall arbitrariness of their timing means you can’t really get a “handle” on the main plot, whatever the fuck it is. Every time Harry downloads a new self he basically becomes a new character with new goals while simultaneously and impossibly keeping his worst traits.
This fic also somehow claims to be a Stargate crossover. It really isn’t, or at least hasn’t gotten to it (or will! It looks abandoned).
I think the conclusion is that this has a few really fun scenes wrapped in 60k other words of ehh connective tissue. Not really worth a read.
Magic Knows No Boundaries But Those We Believe In
A Harry Potter from a universe where he won the war just fine and became a professional Quidditch player gets transported into a darker AU with no Chosen One.
I’ve just described like fifty other fics. This one is fairly unique though, with Harry leaning into Pureblood ideals at the weirdest times, very weird characterizations in general. I’d call them OOC, but I think it’s intentional, because…
I admit it. I’m burying the lede. I’ll come out and say it. There’s a lot of weird and political Author Tract in this fic:
Having his fingerprints taken upon entering the Ministry of Magic was a first for Harry. The aura scanners and wand inspection, on the other hand, were par for the course. The pat down and metal detector scans were just dreary and too big of a reminder of the Orwellian—not to mention wholly unnecessary and ineffectual—TSA the Muggle governments across the pond had implemented after the "Saudis" decided to fly a pair of planes into the Twin Towers.
God, what a shit show. The ridiculous measures that the entire world went through to try and cover up the magical involvement in that incident was the dumbest coverup in history.
When Muggles asked obvious questions like "How did these totally devout Muslims who drank and banked prostitutes on the regular manage to hijack two planes with nothing but box cutters when there were highly trained military veterans on board those plans?"
They couldn't respond with :"Weeelllll they actually weren't Muslims, just Arabic wizard terrorists who using a mass fear ward, kinda like an area of effect obedience spell, to coax everyone into obeying them."
When the natural follow-up questions like: "But how did these hijacked planes fly around American airspace for hours without being detected or shot down?"
Their Muggle governments couldn't come out and answer "Weeeeeellll the hijackers had turned the planes invisible. With magic."
When building seven and the pentagon had suffered similar collisions to the towers without a single frame of footage showing said planes those same governments couldn't come out and say: "Weeeeeelllll two of the four hijacked planes remained invisible after colliding. Because of magic."
Add to these the seers who shorted plane company stocks the day before and warned Muggle relatives in New York not to go into work that day, and the terrorists in question having indestructible passports enchanted to be fireproof(a practice since banned by the international wizarding community) that survived the crash and you have nothing but fuck ups all around.
And those were just the fuck-ups on the wizarding side. That so many intelligence agencies—from Mossad to the alphabet agencies in America—had been forewarned but failed to act was an even bigger fiasco to say nothing of the racist dancing Israelis and Muslims who were celebrating the attack AS IT HAPPENED!
If it seems like the funniest shit to you that the author is putting these paragraphs into a Harry Potter fanfic, you’ll probably enjoy this. If you’re offended, you’ll definitely be better off avoiding the fic. That’s a light example of the chicanery found within.4
The Wizard Who Meddled with Time
One of those famous Peggy Sue fics. Harry invents the field of Chronomancy after winning a pyrrhic battle, and returns to his fourth year, quickly murdering his young self to take his place (with permission!).
Despite the name, there’s not all that much literal time travel in this, but a variety of time-based spells. Harry ages things to death, heals things by reversing them to a previous point in their timeline, etc.
The story is made out of extremely long chapters, reaching ten thousand words at times, and some pretty good versions of Sirius and Aberforth, alongside funny recurring gags. In general it tries avoiding the “main cast” as much as it’s possible to do so while keeping up the classic Voldemort assassination mission.
That’s not enough for me to automatically recommend this, though. The plot constantly goes off in weird directions and sidequests. Like when Harry takes Firenze’s eye and accidentally makes a permanent compact with the centaurs without meaning to. Crazy shit that I can barely explain myself. It also leads to cool scenes, but it’s 50/50.
It’s also solidly dead. Not merely abandoned, but deleted by the original author. I’m linking to a mirror by an amazingly based archivist. You’re probably better off skipping it.
The Problem of Potions
I’m taking the opportunity to make this a callout post for user Kaisheng21, who did the crime of putting this fic in a recommendation list next to relative masterpieces Seventh Horcrux and Natural 20. Get some taste.
You know what the stations of canon are, right? Well, Harry Potter always has the most egregious examples in its fic universe, but this one… man, this one changes so many key things, only for the plot to always somehow revert to directly quoting passages from the books.
It’s about Harry being bad at Potions, Snape’s subject, but loving the subject and desperately wanting to learn. This pushes the two characters together, not romantically, but causing the exact type of hurt/comfort/angst scenes you can imagine.
This is extended to seven books, Harry even becomes friends and more with Draco Malfoy. This fails to shift the main plot’s course in any way, it drove me fucking insane. The entire purpose of the fic is just writing out-of-character versions of Draco and Snape so they can match the woobie images in this deranged writer’s brain.
“I do not claim any talent for the Second Sight, Potter, but I have had a vision. In this vision, you did something so monumentally, blazingly stupid that even I, who expect very little of you, would have been shocked.”
Harry was so overwhelmed by the sheer Snape of this comment that he could think of nothing to say.
“If ever you intimate that you will do any such thing again, I will give in to my normal impulse and kill you and then myself,” Snape said, quite as if discussing the weather.
God, while looking for that quote I looked at the tags and remembered this has a Luna/Goyle relationship for some unholy reason.
This sucks. Don’t read it. Don’t make my mistake.5
Focused Fire
Right off the bat I’m going to tell you that I’m absolutely certain the writer only wrote this because he really wants to have sex with Azula, the young female villain from Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Thankfully, he works really hard at establishing the pretext of an actual story, and we can ignore the horny elephant in the room and enjoy the alternate timeline, the political intrigue and a lot of worldbuilding details the original cartoon didn’t get into.
The main character is a self-insert, but we hardly get any viewpoint scenes, so he just comes across as a tactical genius instead of the cheater he is. His plan seems to involve making the Fire Nation win the war, and then do a heel-face turn at the last second, so he’s not exactly a good guy, but he’s definitely planning ahead so the good guys win in the end.
It has a few red flags beyond the shipping, like an extended character list, because outside four or five characters every army mook is samey and replaceable, with forgettable names. Unfortunately, if they get named, they are recurring.
I’m split on the story. On one hand I did make it to the end of the currently available plot, so it can’t be complete trash, but in retrospect it was way more tediously paced than it needed to be. Of course, it’s all designed to allow for a slow burn romance between the self-insert and Azula. He can fix her.
Check it out if this sounds interesting to you, I guess, or if she’s your waifu? After a long Fire Nation-exclusive arc, it is only now finally getting to the “canon” segment of the Avatar universe.
The New Normal
I’m probably doing this innocent writer a disservice. But, remember Hard Enough from my Pokemon fics review?
It’s literally just that, but the guy is a new member of the Indigo Elite Four instead of a gym trainer. And it’s slightly worse written. You can apply the rest of the Hard Enough review here.
Thankfully, it recently entered a Hoenn arc that might be a bit more interesting. Wait, isn’t the other big popular fic set in that region? Hmm...
Gacha God★
You know I love high concept trash. Well, you have to be pretty goddamn high to come up with an immortal time traveling jerk solving the MCU6 Avengers alien invasion only because it’s a mild inconvenience to him.
The time travel power is the kind where you’re constantly murdering your past selves, or letting yourself get murdered for the Greater Good, and it only works because our protagonist is kind of an insane weirdo from a different era, whose backstory wasn’t yet revealed when I caught up. Oh yes, this is still going, with an update just today.
There’s some romance, some minor power fantasy style capers, but at no point does this feel like a self-insert or a Gary Stu. The main character is a dick, and the time-travel is so complex and well thought of that it honestly seems like a weak main power at times. This gets supplemented with a spin on a specific brand of reverse-jumpchain, occasionally giving him unique items from different media universes, which most of the time range from uselessly weak to uselessly powerful.
I caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye as I stepped on a plastic tarp, but when I turned to see it, I only caught a view of a baseball bat just as it slammed into the side of my head. I hit the ground hard, my vision swimming with dark spots and red, trying to pick myself up. Before I could raise an inch, the bat struck me in the back of the head and everything went dark.
…
“Sorry past me,” I said, holding up a bloodied bat, and bashing his head in one more time to make sure that he was dead. It was a small time loop. We went through the same things and had the same idea -- going back in time a couple of times and killing the past mes in those timelines to run out the clock. I’ve spent the past six timelines doing it, rewinding back an hour each.[…]
The past future mes had been busy. I had everything that I needed to make this the true timeline -- two alien guns, my Air Treks, and a human gun. There were stashes across the city of weapons that I could use. All that was left was to make a final adjustment.
It’s funny, it’s got great, imaginative action scenes, and its only flaw is maybe how seedy it feels at times. Sometimes fics are too popcorny, you get me?
Still, I recommend you at least give it a try. You will be confused until you understand the weird time shit, but I think with the right mindset it will be worth it.
The horrible parallels keep piling up to the point I might need to quit the Internet to spare you.
There’s also a movie starring Childish Gambino and Matt Damon that I didn’t watch. I recommend the book if the premise (astronaut stranded in Mars has to figure out how to get rescued with a very limited range of technologies) seems even remotely interesting to you, and then you can move on to PHM. The latter is the better book, and shows significant growth from the writer, so going backwards could be awkward.
I don’t think I need to say this, but just in case, all these fics spoil the book. No, it’s not worth it even if you really need something to read. Read the novel first.
I know I’m using ‘chicanery’ wrong, but I just think the word is neat.
P.S. Kaisheng wrote it as “the problem with potions” which sounds better, and is also wrong. If you check this blog’s Twitter for the latest updates, you know he made me screw up over there too. When will that guy get good at reading things…
The Marvel Cinematic Universe… if you don’t know what it is, I envy you.
The Next Generation links to chapter 4
Thanks for the reviews!