Reviews for February 2024
Saga of Me Watching 2.5 Tanya the Evil Episodes so I Can Read Twice as Many Fics
We’re almost there: the one-year anniversary of when I decided to start writing these reviews. Who would have thought I’d one day be world famous and sometimes get three likes on a blog post? Me, all the time.
This month is marked by my decision to finally give up and watch some anime to unlock a fraction of the best fanfiction this world has to offer. It might have been worth it. It is not marked by my decision to finish that one long review I’ve been writing for what, four months? Jesus christ it better be good.
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.
★: A Young Girl’s Game of Thrones
*: Chains of a Time Loop, A Young Woman’s Political Record, Count of Serenno, Poor Things, The Main Man: Mineta!
Check out the ten monthiversary’s blog post, if you missed it:
‘Til the Day I Die
This fic was recommended to me directly. It initially looked like a cool time loop story, but it turned out to be melodramatic and borderline psychopathic.
I don't care for seeing Sakura kill Sasuke over and over with bad stream of consciousness paragraphs as connecting tissue. One of “those” stories where the writer clearly is just looking for excuses to write angst, not an actual story. Avoid.
Warlock 1: Wizarding World
This is a terrible, terrible Harry Potter CYOA fic. For those who don’t know, because I think somehow I’ve never explained, CYOAs1 are a type of organized self-insert, a bit like one-world-jumpchains, where the writer selects from a variety of extremely overpowered, story-breaking powers and circumstances.
Here’s an example of that looks like for the most popular Worm one:
The brand this writer used for Harry Potter isn’t nearly that bad, but it still leads to an incredibly powerful self-insert with the power to completely break the setting, own Voldemort, Dumbledore and take over the world.
Anyway, by chapter 38, we have sequences like these:
As planned I'd rented out a large room at this pub so that Marigold had a place to celebrate her 17th birthday. So far the event seemed to go well as people were making their way into the hall, and there was a growing stack of presents on one of the tables.
As the younger guests moved around the large room, taking food from the buffet, they met up with people they knew and began conversations, ones that I hoped led to Marigold making more friends.
The OP self-insert beats Voldemort like ten chapters in, fairly anticlimactically. Then, in a funny twist, the writer realizes that now that all the challenge is gone, only slice-of-life remains. And turns out, he actually likes writing fluff more than he does one-sided beatdowns.
So as of today, we have Wizard Jesus planning birthday parties and trying to be a good parent for his adopted teen, because all other challenge is gone. Just one of those fanfic things.
Chains of a Time Loop*
I don’t usually go looking for original fiction on Royal Road, because it’s usually just bad enough to be boring, and just good enough to be boring in a different way. However, I’ve talked to the writer a couple of times in the Alexander Wales Discord, so I thought I’d check this one out.
This story is very derivative of Mother of Learning (with a student trying to prevent the invasion of a fantasy university at the end of the month), which is a good thing for me. If I cared about originality I wouldn’t have reviewed a Harry Potter fanfic above this. I however have some issues with the pacing. What feels like twenty chapters’ worth of plotlines are dropped on the reader at once during Chapter 2, which was close to making me drop the story, and it wasn’t an isolated incident.
In other time loop stories, mysteries are slowly shown to the reader, combined with character interactions, worldbuilding, etc. In Chains, the mysteries seem to take priority to almost everything else, at least early on, as the writer tries to get the “early days” out of the way and get on with the “proper story” ASAP.
Luckily, they are good mysteries, and hopefully this awkwardness will have been retcon-fixed before new readers like you get to it. The story is nice and intriguing enough, and does fill the MoL shaped hole in my soul.
Also there’s one character that stutters, and the writer keeps writing down the stuttering. Don’t do that.
Saga of Tanya the Evil
Just like with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I’ve always had a background annoyance in my life, caused whenever I look at SpaceBattles and see a fic of a setting I know absolutely nothing about, yet has 1000 replies and hundreds of raving readers.
The Saga of Tanya the Evil is one such setting, with A Young Woman’s Political Record being one of the most well regarded fics in the forum period. I’ve been putting this off as long as possible, but a second renaissance of Tanya fics left me no choice.
I decided to watch as many episodes as it took to get the gist of the main character. No need to understand the plot in detail, these fics usually just put Tanya in a different world anyway.
Two and a half episodes was enough. If you’ve heard of Flashman or Rincewind, you know the archetype: a complete coward who gets away with everything by getting lucky, and manages some global victories despite his self-centered objectives.
Tanya the Evil is not that different: a sociopathic salaryman with a degree in Economics gets pushed in front of a train by an employee he just fired. God (or “Being X”, because Tanya refuses to believe in him) is coincidentally lamenting how people are losing their faith more and more, using the salaryman as an example. The man who will soon become Tanya argues back that with his cushy life, of course he never needed to believe in a higher power. Being X decides to test that theory by sending him back to alt-history Germany (basically the same with some changed country names and borders, oh and flying wizards) in the middle of World War 1.
Tanya is reborn as an orphan, and is later recruited at age 9 into the military due to her high potential for magical powers. In this world, there’s a random genetic chance that determines it, and, compounding that, Tanya’s powers are increased by praying to Being X. This is clearly part of the guy’s plan to make the salaryman more pious blah blah blah whatever. The rest of the anime devolves into boring milsim,2 except the guns of flying mages cast overpowered magical spells and decide entire battles, plus the gimmick that Tanya, like the title suggests, is Evil.
The thing is that, at every point in the anime, she’s trying to get a cushy desk job, but she’s overly paranoid and has a blind spot (which the fandom calls a Misunderstanding Field) that always results in forcing her more and more into the frontlines, giving her more and more victories, leading to a feedback loop until she’s the country’s star soldier. Everyone thinks she’s just the perfect killing machine in the body of a little girl, but in her mind she’s just kind of a boring sociopath using future knowledge to poorly calculate which actions will lead to less danger for her.
This work has a complex metahistory that I’m going to steamroll over: it was a webnovel, then a light novel, then a manga, and finally an anime. Unlike the usual tale, I think it’s generally accepted that things got better as more and more changes were made to the original plot. Most importantly for us (for Political Record anyway), the Visha character (her female adjutant who helps balance the plot a little with more human scenes) is completely absent from the original.
I now understand the complex character of Tanya Degurechaff. Let’s move onto her fanfiction.
A Young Woman's Political Record*
Saga of Tanya the Evil is about a version of World War 1. What if we extrapolated that fictional history based on the real world and arrived to the natural conclusion, with war-hero Tanya accidentally stepping into Adolf Hitler’s role, taking over a far-right political party and reigniting things?
An insane premise, but an extremely fun one. This is one of those “the writer spends a week researching missile systems to see if his lore change makes sense” type stories, too, which leads to an incredible amount of detail. The plot just makes sense, in the way one may call “rational”, except the writer actually hates rational fiction and is in denial about how much his fic qualifies.
In any case, it’s excellent, and by itself it made watching those Tanya episodes worthwhile. Unfortunately, the fic, while complete, is split in three parts. The first one concerns her rise to power, the second concerns the intermission between that and the World War 2 equivalent, and the third is just that war. Act 1 is flawless kinofiction, Act 2 is slice-of-lifey but tolerable, and Act 3 is incredibly, incredibly boring, the bare minimum someone would write to tell his readers that the story is over.
So yes, I think the writer should have quit while he was ahead. A shame he couldn’t stick the landing. And you should still read Act 1, it’s great and conclusive-ish!
A Young Girl's Delinquency Record
The more cracky counterpart to the fic above, this one puts Tanya on trial for her war crimes, with her unwittingly incriminating herself more and more as she’s oblivious to the degree of sociopathy she’s been showing over the years of canon. She escapes in the middle of the trial and abandons her old life to become a regular organized criminal.
The premise sounds interesting, but the writer just can’t hack it. This is less a story and more a series of disconnected events, quickly shifting settings and sets of characters whenever the amateurish writer feels like it. Zero connecting tissue, beyond “Tanya is a Mary Sue and does what she wants”, not much writing skill. It’s possible reading Political Record first ruined every chance this fic had to impress me, but eh.
A Young Girl's Game of Thrones★
Much like the fic below, this one is barely a Tanya fic in the first place. Yes, she is there, inhabiting Myrcella’s body, and she is actually the main character, but this author’s amazing skill doesn’t lie in their main character. They just get what makes A Song of Ice and Fire fun to read.
It’s a bit hard to boil down what that means in a way you will understand, but there’s just the right balance of intrigue, wars, and character interaction to keep one interested. The many game pieces of the seven kingdoms are all taken into account whenever Tanya does something, and they respond believably and interestingly.
It would have been so easy to just make Tanya take the side of the “good guys” and fight the white walkers or the Lannisters or something like every other GoT fic, but the fact she’s allied with some of the worst people ever and trying to make them win, while she’s fighting every other reasonable faction, makes this an uniquely engaging plotline.
This might out me as a fake book fan, but I’m pretty sure I’ve enjoyed this fic more than I enjoyed the actual fourth and fifth books of the original. It’s still going, so it could shit the bed, but I’m optimistic, one of the rare fics where I instantly signed up for email updates.
Count of Serenno*
The title shows it, really, but this is a fic about Count Dooku from Star Wars more than it is about Tanya.
It’s just a really good character study. This tackles the backstory of The Phantom Menace with the change that Dooku got married and had a child (Tanya), leading him to care a bit more about how he does things, to be vague.
I don’t actually want to spoil the actual changes, though it’s obviously far more interesting than the original movie. Just trust me that this fic is good, but it may require a bit of prequel/EU knowledge3 to fully appreciate.
Psychoprotective
Honestly, I would have read this even if it was really bad, just for the novelty of a Psychonauts crossover.
Tanya is sent to the world of the video game and adopted by Milla, one of the camp teachers. Her war PTSD and general sociopathy leads her to build a perfect shell around her thoughts from an early age, and the fic is largely about healing her from needing to use this.
The crossover element really makes for something better than the sum of its parts. While the original setting of Psychonauts is extremely “video-gamey”, I like how this writer handled basically every implementation of it as textual fiction, and fans of the game will definitely like this.
That said, sane readers might definitely hate this, because the writer has a poorly disguised piss fetish, with multiple characters soiling themselves while they’re learning to astral project into people’s minds. This fic is on SpaceBattles, which doesn’t allow NSFW fics, so there’s a limit to how poorly disguised it is, but it may be a dealbreaker for readers. I know I’ve read far worse, at least.
The Martian: Lost Sols
Did you ever read The Martian? This is a new official short story that covers a period of time skipped in the original novel.
It’s exactly what you’d expect from that description, “only” a funny science-adventure. It’s good, but short and definitely not worth reading the original book for, so I will only recommend this to those who already have.
My Pokemon Retirement Was More Fun Than I Expected?!
This is The Average Pokemon Self-Insert. Literally the only thing that sets it apart from the hundreds of similar fics is the fact that it’s set in Galar, the region of the Pokemon Sword/Shield games everyone hates, with a slightly altered revenge storyline that turn Leon into the Worst Brother Ever.
I’ve said that it’s average, so you may not be surprised to hear there is nothing too wrong with it either. The main character is pretty overpowered and never loses fights, but the tone of the fic is definitely “it’s funny that this is happening” more than “wow I’m so badass!” so it’s vastly more tolerable than it sounds. I can still see him coming across as cringe to other readers: his gimmick is that he only trains cute pokemon and refuses to optimize his team.
Of course, just like that other fic I reviewed a while back, the “moral” self-destructs when his pokemon is revealed to have perfect stats by pure happenstance…
It’s just okay.
callout post for “@qingqiu” on twitter
A parody of the Average Twitter Callout. Stories set on the Internet are right up my alley, but this one is a bit too “realistic”, to the point this feels less of a funny parody and more a real callout with names changed.
I think essentially everything attempted here was far better handled in An Unauthorised Fan Treatise. Feel free to read this one anyway, it takes like five minutes.
The Guild of Gamers: The Tinker
This writer has like ten fics named “The Guild of Gamers: Something”. I’ve only read this one, but as far as I can tell they’re extremely overpowered self-inserts given access to a points shop. They get more points the more they embody whatever their archetype is.
In this one, the main character just stays in his home all day playing video games and has drones beat the plot for him. He’s not once in danger throughout the entirety of the story. It’s not as boring as it sounds, but this is definitely one of those fix-fic power fantasies4 where the entertainment lies in reading “how does Piggot react to Nilbog being defeated overnight with no issue” over actually seeing the scenes where the fights happen.
It does have this funny line:
Or I could help her, wait until she triggers and get her out of the locker myself, but what do I actually know about canon Taylor?
Her fanon personality varies immensely but I didn’t read canon. All I know is that she’s apparently a control freak and escalates constantly.
It’s popcorn fiction, but I’m sure you’ll enjoy reading literally anything else more.
Poor Things*
I’ll be the first to admit I’m not exactly an artsty type person, but just like with Mean Girls, sometimes I’m near a theater and there’s literally nothing else on. You’d think Hollywood would want to be less of a walking embarrassment. At least I didn’t watch Argyle.
Poor Things looks artsy, including an excruciatingly long and pointless 30-minute black and white sequence at the start (yes, I get it, no, it’s not worth it). However, the content is more batshit than artistic.
The movie takes place in some alt-history world where there are crazy scientists going around, as well as some mismatched technology levels that could be anywhere between the victorian era and the 60s. This is relevant because our main character is a woman’s baby’s brain put into the body of an adult woman by her “father”, a crazy but scene stealing man played by Willem Dafoe, who’s something of a scientist himself.
The story follows the womanchild as she’s exposed to sex, violence and fucked up societies all over the world. Though I’m not an expert in film analysis, I think this movie is an elaborate essay on how men and the world in general fetishize purity and innocence. You’d think there’d be easier ways to get that across than showing Emma Stone having sex a hundred times, but I guess the director had multiple goals there.
I recommend the film. The ending is terrible, but I haven’t explained the plot in detail because it’s worth experiencing for yourself. Beautiful cinematography and sound, too. Just be ready for crazy.
White Knighting for Fun and Profit
The novelty of a Code Geass fic made me check this out. This is a self-insert into the body of Suzaku, the “good guy” of the anime. I’m not going to bother to attempt to explain the stupid plot of Code Geass, but it’s made even stupider by the fact the self-insert has some mental issues, Suzaku has some mental issues, and both are just trading control of their body whenever the other is being a coward.
This might sound worth reading, but it gets annoying fast. The self-insert is extremely horny but also extremely bad at talking to people, so there’s some cringe there, and Suzaku constantly has regular anime-ass breakdowns, which just compounds the awkwardness. Despite that, somehow women keep throwing themselves at them in a safe-for-work way.
I will give the fic this: it’s ambitious in how it tries to change things without sticking to the stations of canon, but the background irrationality radiation of the Code Geass universe plus the terrible priorities of Suzaku and the SI make this a frustrating experience. It doesn’t help that this fic references some of the side material I’ve never read.
The Main Man: Mineta!*
Fucking finally, is all I can think. I reviewed Vitaceae a while back, one of the worst concepts I’ve ever seen. Why was it so bad, you ask, unable to go back and check or maybe unable to care? Well, in My Hero Academia, there’s this pervert dwarf character named Mineta whom everyone hates. A self-insert into that body should be a bad thing, but in Vitaceae, the writer almost immediately Gary Stus himself into a perfect body and erases all record of his former identity, making the self-insert element pointless.
The Main Man doesn’t. The Main Man is based. Based on what? On a careful study of worldbuilding and basic (ed) logic to realize that no, your self-insert will not be badass enough to steal the world’s most dangerous power in a couple weeks, and you’re stuck in Mineta’s shitty life and body for real.
The fic is horny as expected, but focuses far more on the comedic elements, though doesn’t skim on a legitimate plot and inherited character development. Mineta has to work hard with what he has, even if that involves begging for help, cleaning up his home life and facing manlet discrimination— okay maybe that last one is stretching it. But this is a fun enough fic, and it was a breath of fresh air after Vitaceae holy shit I hated that one so much.
ASTLIBRA Revision: Gaiden
I’ve never reviewed ASTLIBRA Revision here, but it’s a wonderful castlevania-JRPG-action-rpg video game with 100 hours of the most needlessly elaborate time travel fiction I’ve seen in games. You should play it if you’ve ever enjoyed a single Action RPG.
This expansion on the other hand is a lot like I described Lost Suns above: maybe worth it if you’ve read the original, but nothing spectacular. This is basically a “roguelite mode” for the original game with its own original story, closing some minor details of the plot and potentially setting up a sequel.
Unfortunately, the story elements are far and between, with 20 hours of gameplay but only around a dozen cutscenes. The game is fun, but it’s more of the same, and the promised element of “multiple classes” doesn’t matter nearly as much as the developer implied.
Like Lost Suns, sure, if you played the original, go ahead and buy this one.
School Days
This ancient anime is one of the all-time most hated by MyAnimeList, adjusted by number of watchers. Bavitz, author of Fargo (not that one) and Cockatiel x Chameleon (yes, of course that one) is a huge fan of this anime, and he continued bringing it up as if it was the best thing ever. Eventually, I gave in and decided to watch it in a day. It’s only twelve episodes after all.
It’s not the best thing ever. Judging from what I’ve heard, I expected the average bad anime deconstruction, with some axe murders on episode 1 and the show turning into analog horror or something. School Days is a bit smarter than that, or at least I think it is. It’s a bit contested as you’ll see later.
Makoto is the average high schooler, worried about confessing to a girl he sees in the train everyday, Katsura. Another girl, Sekai, offers to help get Makoto and Katsura together, with some clear ulterior motives. Anyone who’s ever read a single romance story knows how this goes: Makoto falls in love with Sekai and they forget about Katsura.
This only kind of happens. Makoto does start liking Sekai, which she’s unshockingly receptive to. He’s just already dating Katsura by then, and refuses to dump her because he thinks she’s hotter than Sekai, even if she’s annoyingly high maintenance.
Makoto tries to pull off the classic dating-two-girls-at-the-same-time-without-them-finding-out strategy, which doesn’t at all work in the realistic world of School Days. He’s also constantly pushing romantic boundaries with the more traditional Katsura. It slowly becomes more and more obvious that Makoto is a sociopath and was only ever “nice” due to his cowardice before Sekai helped him out. His “anime obliviousness” is just his cover for his relentless abuse of both girls.
Over the next nine or so episodes, the plot escalates, as he gets bored of both girls and starts sleeping around with other students. Too many betrayals culminate in both Katsura and Sekai going crazy in different ways by the last episode. Sekai stabs Makoto to death in an incredibly well-animated scene, and then Katsura, fully mindbroken by then, murders Sekai in revenge and sails away on a Nice Boat alongside Makoto’s severed head.
I’ve made it sound better than it is. The main issue surrounding School Days is that, yes, this is a deconstruction of harem romance anime. Or is it?
For a deconstruction, there sure is a lot of fanservice and scenes that are just exactly like the ones you’d see in the anime being parodied. But wait, maybe it’s like Starship Troopers, and the excess and tonal dissonance is just part of the parody? No, there isn’t that much fanservice, not what I’d call excess. It’s Code Geass level, to compare it to something I’ve already mentioned.
Adding to the confusion are some other details. For one, this is an adaptation of a visual novel where you can play Makoto as your average good natured anime protagonist. A relevant article reads:
To put it another way, since this is very much a narrative-centric eroge in which the erotic scenes form part of the narrative, it’s rather curious that developer 0verflow made the decision to make the game compatible with a hands-free masturbation device known as the SOM. This is a mechanical beast available in both (NSFW links ahead) “male” and “female” versions where, during the erotic scenes, you can position yourself accordingly and, well, there’s no other way to say this: you let the game fuck you.
In fact, School Days only adapts a combination of several bad endings. So, was this a played-straight-harem-VN-with-edgy-endings turned into a deconstruction-of-harem-anime by an unrelated director?
In an interview, [lead video game writer] Mathers Numakichi stated that his intention with the series was to make a game that was entirely animated, and told a bizarre story like Fargo5 did
I guess not?
What the fuck is School Days?
Ever Play Competitive?
The aforementioned Bavitz is also currently writing a Pokemon fic about the competitive scene, which instantly drew my eye when I saw this other one by some rando.
This story reads a lot like Hard Enough, with a huge post-isekai timeskip before the start of the story, except instead of having been self-inserted into a known character, our protagonist has started a podcast with a few known characters where he analyzes the competitive scene.
Those characters include Team Rocket’s Meowth and Movie Mewtwo. Yes, as you may be able to tell, this fic is far crackier than its inspirations, but maybe not as much as it sounds. The plot is kickstarted when our main character accidentally gets drunk during a livestream and shittalks the poor team composition of Champion Geeta (to be fair, she uses a Gogoat), leading her to challenge him to a fight to uphold her reputation.
The fic is still in its early stages, having just concluded that one fight, but it’s both funny and promising. I wish it was the slightest bit less cracky, but I like some competitive uniquities this fic takes advantage on, like restricting pokemon to four moves, using abilities and held items… it helps the verisimilitude when you could simulate the fight in Pokemon Showdown just fine.
That’s it for the month. I’m watching House of the Dragon partially to read another Tanya fic based on it, partially because it’s actually decent, so you can look forward to a review of those next article. And as always, there’s a chance I’ll push myself through the remaining 20 chapters of a specific fic and nail my review to a Rationalist Group House door. Stay tuned…
Well, CYOA literally means Choose Your Own Adventure, those books where you get to choose what happens next. It means something different in the genre of trash I read. 2024 update: I ended up writing an article on the entire genre:
For those who know SpaceBattles, this is where you go “ohhhhhhh that’s why they like it”.
Which in true SpaceBattles fashion I’ve acquired through reading fics of them.
One of the longest subplots is him successfully “fixing” Kyushu, you know, the giant japanese island that got sunk by Leviathan. He’s that broken.
Yes, that one.
Warlock 1 sounds fun. Congrats on the year!
Since you talked about every other Bavitz story, what did you think of Cleveland quixotic ?