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Husr's avatar
May 1Edited

Renewing my recommendation for The Count of Monte Cristo. No, it wasn't published on the web, but as a serialized story for magazines, it carries/started/popularized a lot of those trends in both format and genre. It's the edgy revenge story from which uncountable edgy revenge fics were forged, and better than most of them too. It does the 'gotta hit the chapter wordcount so here's a deluge of details', many of them managing to feel essential anyway but some of them clearly padding (I know for a fact you'll read stuff that does this much worse anyway.) As a capable driven man hiding his identity, Edmond Dantes is in many ways a precursor to characters like Batman and that whole genre idea.

Because of its serialized nature, it feels much more modern than something like Dracula, and even if you don't like it, I suspect your analysis of it would be very interesting. Certainly, I've never seen a literary analysis where it's been compared to fanfic/webfic despite some stark similarities, and if you disagree with me about that, I think that analysis would be interesting too.

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Bishop's avatar

I ended up spending an all-nighter reading Just Deserts. It was good enough that I briefly wondered why it wasn't somewhere on the Shills List, though the ending was admittedly a bit lackluster and the OC's personality was most interesting in the first chapter before they got good at social interaction. The search function didn't show a review for it, what are your thoughts on it besides being just generally better than the average MHA fic?

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