Reviews for February 2025
Your outie reads a fan fiction review blog
It was one of those months where the number of fics and novels I read was pretty low, but the word count of this review is ludicrously high regardless.1
I hope you like visual media,2 bro.
★: Severance, The Second String
*: The Boys Season 1, Cobra Kai, Wicked Part 1, hollow hill archives, Speleomorph, Taskmaster NZ + AU
Previously, on Record Crash:
Ranma ½
Well, that sucked.
Ranma was one of those legendarily influential works, one of the Citizen Kanes of the East, and yes, I say that to annoy film students. From Hammerspace3, to almost every harem anime trope, to HPMOR’s cringe reference, you can’t help but see its shadow everywhere.
However, at this point the influence is many degrees removed from anything you’re likely to watch today, and, much like the film I mentioned, there isn’t really any real reason to consume it unless you’re really into history. It’ll just feel old, dated and overdone.
I read all 407 chapters of the manga for the fanfic it unlocks—Ranma is one of the original anime fanfiction sources, and really one of the last ones4 I needed to knock off the list before I can read the “safe because everyone has watched it” anime macro crossovers.
It’s about this martial artist who was cursed to turn into a girl when splashed with cold water, and back into a boy when the water is hot. He’s betrothed to this girl Akane, and they’re both in denial about their feelings for each other. They still have to work pretty hard to prevent the betrothal from being ruined by an endless succession of suitors for Ranma, Akane, and Ranma’s female self, most of whom seem to be experts in weird schools of martial arts.
Ranma features a lot of slapstick comedy, farces and confusingly depicted fight scenes. It’s procedural, both literally and figuratively: you could write a simple script on a computer that says "X character returns to town, Y's old suitor wants her hand in marriage, Z organizes a tournament/race/fight that keeps dunking Ranma/Ryoga in water, there’s a new potential cure for the curse" and accurately predict 90% of the chapters. If it came out today, people would say it’s plotted by ChatGPT.
Bad comedians are known for always returning to comfortable wells of comedy whenever they blank before a live audience. Ranma runs out of water around volume 5, and just keeps depicting the bone dry wells for the remaining 33, with endlessly repeated stock scenes like female Ranma accidentally turning into a guy inside a changing room for women. The author isn’t even able to come up with a good closer after all that filler—it’s one of those lazy inconclusive “the adventure continues” endings I’ve probably hypocritically defended in the past.
Next, I’ll destroy some of the assumptions I (and probably you) had:
It’s not a groundbreaking meditation on gender, even for the time. If there’s any of that, it’s completely binary, and revolves around the existing gender roles in Japan in the 80s, which everyone interested in gender stuff will probably hate.
Read right-to-left. This storyline (I think not fully adapted in the anime) concludes with Ranma’s mom only accepting him because he showed “manly” traits (saving her life) despite having a lowly female body at the time. There are a few characters like panty-stealing rape-attempting5 Master Happosai. Some of the fanbase (who have almost universally only watched the anime) now claim he and others were always meant to be a critique of contemporary stereotypes, that every character wishes him dead, and that he’s not meant to be funny. I can confirm he’s absolutely meant to be funny (the humor merely no longer works), and Ranma and others save his life on multiple occasions because “he’s worth saving (very) deep down”.
There’s a lot of very explicit fanservice. It’s sometimes played for comedy, but fans who tell you the author wasn’t aiming to pander to horny teenagers6 are lying to you.
Allegedly the original anime7 tried to paint Shampoo as vertex 3 of a romantic triangle between her, Ranma and Akane (the Main Girl and deuteragonist). The showrunners were also waifu-ing and whitewashing her pretty hard. In the manga she isn’t particularly prominent over Ranma’s other secondary suitresses, and she tries to kill his friends multiple times, so she’s one of the least believable candidates.
Despite the action shonen manga label, the action fucking sucks.8 The artist just isn’t very good at storyboarding beyond establishing shots (and I suspect those are only good because she really loves backgrounds and costumes). This is a very easy manga to read,9 and the times I was forced to pay very close attention universally involved fight scenes.
She often breaks the 180 rule, fails to depict necessary transition shots like a character jumping before we see them in the air, cuts back to reaction characters mid-clash, uses tiny black and white panels for complex interactions between weapons/ki attacks/whatever… there’s a lot of dialogue during fights, and this is mostly because the visuals aren’t doing their job.10 Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure (the only other shonen manga I’ve read) also does this, but that’s night and day with regards to practical complexity.
Anyway, I don’t really regret reading it, but this is firmly slotted into the same category as RWBY: absolute garbage that hopefully unlocks better fan-media.
The Wild Horse and the River
This is one such allegedly “better-than-Ranma” fan-media. I had been eyeing its thread on Questionable Questing for a long time, since it kept getting a massive amount of likes and replies for how obscure the source is these days.11
I was surprised when I started it, fresh off the manga, only to discover it’s one of the worst genres of fic: the author watches an anime, transcribes it faithfully, then inserts a self-insert character who only sarcastically reacts to it. No one even really listens to his quips, and the plot remains unchanged.
Once I realized this, I could have stopped reading. It was weird that such lazy execution was getting so much attention, but maybe I was overestimating the audience. But Questionable Questing is a forum, and I discovered there was a lot of value in something else: the seething replies.
People were so fucking angry because the author wasn’t responding to their good, straightforward advice at all. Make your self-insert do anything besides comment on things, they said to a blank wall. Pages upon pages of this, increasingly angrier when a new chapter of commentary came out with no response, no sign their feedback was even getting read:
I lightly chuckled for a while, was about to drop it, and then… surprise bait and switch. Turns out our main character had just given up before the story started, after many attempts at trying to change the course of events through rational action. He discovers he can change things in chapter twenty-four, a chapter that also introduces the main character’s ability for introspection.
The rest of the day passed by like a blur and I laid awake while Genma and Ranma had already fallen asleep. I just didn't get it. Why was I able to make a major change this time? The only thing I could guess at this point was that it was because it was accidental. What a fucking joke.
…Joke?
…Was it because it was a joke? Did I really go through an entire fucking decade of failure after failure after failure as the setup for a joke? Do I need to be fucking funny to get changes through?! How the hell am I supposed to do that?!
After this, sure, the stations of canon are still there, but our self-insert becomes more of an active player—and the story an average harem fixfic—changing plenty of stuff as long as he stumbles into ones that fit the world’s Genre.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s still not good, has way too much weird sex shit and I don’t recommend reading it. But it was a nice surprise that turned the fic into tolerable popcorn for me, especially since it goes through the anime-only arcs of Ranma I missed.
The Boys*
The first season* is a must-watch. But you should probably stop there.
The Boys is yet another show that deconstructs superhero settings, like Worm and Invincible. It even has another evil Superman. But it stands out in some ways, early on:
Its Evil Superman, Homelander is very weird and nuanced, so even after his atrocities you can’t help but feel bad and root for him. His actor also sells the role better than the ones in ostensibly serious superhero movies.
There are no supervillains in The Boys, not exactly. The heroes are mostly just celebrities, controlled by a single media company, and the show itself is making fun of celebrity glorification, social media, and all kinds of hero-unrelated things. The “good guys” are equally flawed but powerless terrorists who pretty much just want to murder every superhero or at least prevent them from gaining more power.
Very willing to alter the status quo in Season 1. Lots of deaths and ruined reputations.
Very good music.
It’s based on a largely inferior comic I read some issues of. The comic is exactly what you expect something with an “evil Superman” to be, pointless edgefests with misery porn, gore and crude jokes. The show has a lot of that, sure, but it elevates the story, changes a lot of the dumb plotlines,12 crams revelation upon revelation into the first few episodes…
That unfortunately goes south pretty fast. I guess it explains why other shows don’t try its breakneck pacing. Either the story ends pretty fast as a consequence (and you can’t get millions from Amazon over five seasons) or you have to constantly press the reset button, come up with contrivances why the status quo will never change and the story can’t end.
For example, by the last season, Homelander knows where the people actively planning to murder him are at every moment. He can kill them all without opposition. He’s already publicly murdered people who threatened him.
Still, he never shows up. He sends a couple of low power superheroes to beat them up a little, and keeps giving excuse after excuse like the writers still needing a paych—uh, like the masses would look badly upon him if they found out he personally got involved in stopping terrorists, which he’s done multiple times? I don’t know, it never quite makes sense.
I probably will keep watching it. There are only eight more episodes left, and while the show gets really stupid, it’s rarely actively boring.
Antilia
The author of this (someone mildly associated with the Madoka Fargo fanfic scene) teased this work for a while as “The Femboy Gangstalkers Novel”.
And yep, that’s an accurate descriptor. If only it led to a good book.
It’s an old adage that readers are usually pretty accurate in pointing at what doesn’t work, but they suck at giving constructive advice. In this case the critique/advice is as simple as it gets: I did not, at any point, give a shit about a single character. Let’s maybe explain the plot first, though.
The protagonist is one of these femboy gangstalkers13, part of a gang of three tulpas who are tormenting their creator, a fat guy with a very obvious fetish for a certain brand of boy. Their victim tries to stay in the outskirts of society, as the tulpas constantly escalate their powers through imagination and mess with him. But they might not be the only ones.
What’s that, you want me to define two of those terms? Alright sure:
Femboy: a boy who acts and dresses like a girl without actually being transgender.
Novel: a long-form written work of fiction.
You mean the other two, you say. Wow, you really need to crack open a book sometime.
Gangstalker: a lot of paranoid schizophrenic people tend to have the same clusters of specific beliefs, like gangs of people (often the government, often just sadistic Internet trolls) stalking them and trying to ruin their lives. Since the Internet allows these schizophrenics to have communities dedicated to these beliefs, they’ve pushed each other into building an entire body of work around how these non-existent gangs operate. Case in point, /r/gangstalking. Common tactics include tracking or torture microchips implanted in the person’s body. Anything that doesn’t lead to physical evidence and could just be paranoia is in these mysterious gangs’ toolset.
Tulpa: I think this was originally a pseudoreligious term, but 4chan took it over. This might be an uncharitable summary, but, basically, their My Little Pony board wanted to make the ponies real. After consulting with the paranormal board, the bronies combined a bunch of meditation techniques into a procedure that they claim creates a visible, tangible imaginary friend in an adult’s mind. These techniques don’t actually work, of course, but people love pretending they do.
This novel’s victim is facing his demons in an oddly literal sense. The tulpas have the power of belief on their side. As a tulpa, anything the victim believes you could do, you can do. This leads to some cool instances of placebomancy, tricking your creator into giving you more and more powers because “well, of course my torturers can teleport, how else would they always be one step behind me?”, but it’s a double-edged sword, because if the victim is misled into thinking something could actually kill you, you’re fucking dead.
These are likely the concepts the author actually wanted to play with. The characterization and actual plot weren’t priorities, and it shows. As I said earlier, at no point did I care what the torturers did, or even if the victim got away.
Honestly, if the story hadn’t been so short, I probably wouldn’t even have finished it. These are some major issues for a story to have, and this means I don’t recommend you read it either.14
Speleomorph*
Thank G-d people in the Alexander Wales Discord keep recommending these little itch.io games, it’s like a Flash renaissance localized entirely within this blog.
This one isn’t as good as Dragonsweeper, and you can really only play it once, but it’s still plenty of fun. You’re basically moving this shape around, and by squeezing it through certain areas, unlock new shapes you can contort it into, which will allow you to navigate the place more effectively.
It reminds me strongly of Can of Wormholes, another “topology puzzle”, except it doesn’t overstay its welcome. Just twenty minutes of what IGN would call MIND BENDING ENTERTAINMENT or something equally stupid.
Taskmaster NZ* + AU*
I don’t have too much to say about the format that I didn’t in the original review for the UK version. However I’ve now watched the other two English-spoken shows,15 and I have a few comments and whinges on their uniquities:
Taskmaster New Zealand: the titular Taskmaster position is filled by a humorless man who doesn’t seem to understand half the jokes he’s reading off the teleprompter, and his scores feel randomly generated. He’s a low point of the show and we’re unfortunately stuck with him. He’s luckily balanced by his Assistant, a very good actor who gives a different yet still excellent vibe as the UK’s Alex Horne. Overall a pretty hit and miss show—Seasons 116 and 3 have pretty weak to unlikable casts, while 2 is maybe the best in Taskmaster history.
Taskmaster Australia: this Taskmaster is actually a very likable man17 with proper stand-up comedian credentials, and he’s only a shade less funny than the original Greg Davies, so no problem there. The Assistant cannot keep the standard poker face to save his life, and he has a friendlier relationship with the contestants, which I’m fine with, actually makes this show feel somewhat different to the other two. Season 3 is the standout, but they’re all pretty good.
Unlike the non-English versions, both shows mostly have original Tasks. I want to say New Zealand has the best collection out of all three shows, but I’m pretty sure the same international team deals with task design, so maybe that’s just a fluke.
Overall, they’re good for people who are already Taskmaster fans, which I hope includes you after my last review. It’s still by far the best and funniest unscripted show on TV.18
New Game, New Life
I had actually checked this one out like five years ago when it came out. Didn’t understand much of it, because it’s a combination of multiple animes I hadn’t watched plus The Gamer.19 After I read Ranma, the main crossover, I felt like giving it another try.
I “got” it about the same as before. Just like Wild Horse, you could say this fic features a bit of false advertising. The names of characters are there, yes, but everything is so genericized that it might as well be an original story.
And it’s not a good one. The Gamer itself was ultimately a lot like this fic, with one dimensional characters and very simple faction-based plotlines that essentially turn them into Let’s Plays of a bad video game for children.20 I like popcorn, but New Game, New Life’s highs are all about very low stakes action I couldn’t get invested in, with few twists to the premise. I dropped it even earlier than I did back in the day.
Wicked Part I*
Like all of us, I saw the incredibly awkward interview footage of the two leads, and I expected the movie to be shit, or if not shit, at least as mediocre as the Mean Girls musical movie was.
Maybe those low expectations set me up for a surprise, this is a fine if retroactively cliche fantasy movie. The classic Seinfeld effect: before the era of Wednesday and Cruella, the concept of retconning villains into sad backstory protagonists wasn’t that mainstream. Though I guess the very first fanfic, Paradise Lost, already did this?
Anyway, you will roll your eyes at the very predictable 1995 storyline featuring the Extremely Evil Witch from Wizard of Oz as a misunderstood victim of fantasy racism, but beyond that, it’s got decent songs, likable characters and good pacing, even with its stupidly long three-hour runtime. I watched it in two enjoyable sittings and I recommend you do the same. Just pause and resume roughly 60% through.
The non-diegetic story of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and how we ended up with Wicked is actually pretty interesting too, but that’ll have to wait for my inevitable review of the book series.21
Generic Universal LitRPG
I’m very conflicted about this work. It’s the one by the author of the fic I mentioned last month, which got a light recommendation. I can’t really recommend this one yet, though.
It’s ostensibly a Jumpchain story, but our character starts with no powers and has to very, very, very, very slowly build them up. The system is based on the existing GURPS tabletop format, and I get the feeling that even those campaigns always become as drawn out as this fic.
GURPS is also known for its excruciating detail. There are a ton of non-combat skills, and dice rolls are triggered by the most minor stuff, which of course bleeds into the prose. A sample of how this story reads:
The Achilles’ heel of the fic isn’t the powers or the pacing, somehow. It’s the worlds the writer chose to use. They’re also taken from existing generic GURPS campaigns, but I suspect those are designed for groups of newbies that want to quickly try out the system, they’re not meant to generate complex, interesting stories. There’s one exception, as you’ll see in this list of adventures our character has gone through so far.
Desert Caravan Escort
Draugr Cave Rescue
The Scarlet Pimpernel
Fantasy Orc Battles
Tourney of Knights
Yes, there’s somehow a default GURPS campaign that takes place in the world of The Scarlet Pimpernel, the historical fiction novels that inspired the entire genre of superhero fiction. During the French Revolution, this noble saves other nobles from unfair execution with his secret identity. And our main character will become his occasional sidekick, dealing with political intrigue while he works as a stagehand.
That world in particular is fantastic, no matter how grounded it is. Setting it in the Real World demands research and makes for some interesting conceits. The author admits this makes his fic the rare Jumpchain with a bibliography.22
It’s still a Jumpchain, and he has to move on eventually. This could have been one of my favorite stories if every world was as good as that one, a better version of Thresholder, but nope. Even the lamest fictional worlds would be better than what he ends up choosing.
This fic was explicitly an experiment. “Does GURPS work as a LitRPG system?”. The answer is a definitive no, even with the confounders. I don’t think I can recommend this in good faith.
The Second String★
I usually review fairly obscure shit here, but I’m pretty sure this is top 10 in Archive of Our Own for Harry Potter works. 15105 Kudos is a lot.23
But let’s maybe look at a different zone of the metadata, the character tags:
Harry Potter / Aberforth Dumbledore / Gideon Prewett / Fabian Prewett / Original Characters / Caradoc Dearborn / Portrait Ariana Dumbledore / Albus Dumbledore / Alice Longbottom / Rubeus Hagrid / Argus Filch
That’s it.
That alone tells you this is a very original piece of fanfiction. Most of these characters get basically no screentime in the original novels. To be fair, a few are dead or incapacitated. This is a time travel fic to the seventies, a few years before Harry is even born.
Of course, time travel doesn’t preclude going back to the popular character well. Simply have Harry go to Hogwarts, make this one of those awful Marauder stories. Nope, this Harry is super paranoid about time travel and preventing his own birth, and still 15, so he actually decides to pretend to be a squib in order to avoid being forced to go to school and interact with people he knows.
These odd choices lead to a very strong and fresh story, Harry ending up living at the Hog’s Head bar in Hogsmeade. Aberforth is the curmudgeon and crass old man mentor and eventual father figure to Fake Squib Harry, and their interactions are pretty fun to read about. In anything featuring Aberforth, you can almost always expect Albus to be a Manipulative Dumbledore pastiche, but The Second String doesn’t go crazy with it, and presents a darker but very grounded version of the character that would be right at home with the revelations of Deathly Hallows. Then, it goes further beyond. Possibly my favorite Dumbledore ever, and that includes canon.
One thought that kept coming to mind as I read this was “Rowling would have written this”. She has a very particular way of writing characters and mystery that this author replicates flawlessly. Most fanfiction writers don’t give a shit about translating the feel of the originals, because it’s not really necessary. But I kept getting rare flashbacks to the emotions I felt when reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for the first time, and that’s an objective achievement.
It’s not all great. The pacing is very slow before the story gets going. Some of it is the focus, which lends itself to slice of life scenes (Harry can’t do much without publicly practicing magic, of course), but even beyond that, there are some bizarre lulls that might (wrongly) make you want to drop it, even with all the little clues to the overall mystery. Of course, now that I finished it I know a lot of that was mandatory setup, but that knowledge isn’t particularly helpful to whoever’s reading this review.
There’s also a pretty terrible though mercifully short “pirate arc” smack in the middle, separating two major parts before and after a big event in the plot that I don’t want to spoil. The big event is handled very clumsily24 in a way that the comments and probably the writer punchably describe as “OMG so true to real life!!!111”. This argument always falls completely flat on me. Like Mike Stoklasa said a few days ago, reality doesn’t have scoring, but that doesn’t mean movies can’t have it, they’re an art form and not a copy. You should properly set up everything that happens.
Beyond these flaws, it’s still a charming and very original tale in the Harry Potter world, focusing on all the little, less magical parts the seven novels ignored. The ending is superb. In fact, everything after the pirate arc is like a freight train: slow to get going, but an unstoppable mass once it does. My eyes legitimately hurt after my second to last multi-hour reading session, as I just wanted to keep on reading to see what happened.
Overall, great characters, surprisingly great plotting, and the biggest count of epilogues I’ve ever seen in a story. Potentially perfect if it got an edit, and a must read for anyone who wants to see what Harry Potter fics should be like.
Immortem
A short story by the author of The Library Unpublished. It’s about monks in the post-futuristic-apocalypse trying to preserve their way of life to prevent further apocalypses.
I think this is a metaphor for AI safety as these rational fics always are, but even then I don’t think I got the actual point of it. The concept would make for a cool short film or something, but I was left vaguely unsatisfied with the current shape of the story.
Severance★
Okay, sometimes if there’s a lot of buzz around something, it’s for a reason. But only sometimes.25
Severance is really fucking good. I need to warn you that you’ll be slightly disappointed if you expect something like LOST, because it can’t match those stakes, and I continue to find the scoring repetitive and lame,26 but besides that? An absolute masterpiece at everything it tries to do.
And what does it do? Well, it’s about memory-wiped office workers, but the mystery and process of discovery is the point so I’m not going to spoil it, fuck you.
There are of course some red flags that shows like Westworld and, yes, LOST itself had. The second season sure seems slightly weaker, raising more mysteries than it resolves.27 But even without answers, I still enjoy the interpersonal drama and all the little dystopian concepts these writers come up with every episode.
Maybe the best recommendation I can give is that I have to drop everything the moment a new episode comes out. This is currently the only piece of media out there that makes me do this.
The Only Hero
This is another My Hero Academia fanfic, a fandom I’m still not sure I’ve read anything truly great from. Maybe I should just stop.
The plot is basically The Leftovers, except it’s everyone with a quirk who gets mysteriously raptured. The quirkless and edge cases like Izuku are the ones who get left behind.
This premise does something good for my interest levels, and it’s focusing on lesser known characters instead of the staples, much like The Second String above. Unfortunately, that’s about all I can praise. It doesn’t really fuck up massively (not in ways that translate to funny quotes anyway), but the writing is very mediocre, and in general feels a bit childish. It’s weird, because you’d think fanfiction of a shonen anime would always feel childish, but something about this work in particular really triggers “I’m not the target audience for this” for me.
“I was always a little jealous of other kids when I was little due to being Quirkless.” Melissa admitted, feeling a little embarrassed talking about such old feelings. “I was never bullied for it, thankfully, but being Quirkless made me feel like I was, well, good for nothing.”
“Good for nothing…” Izuku seemed to resonate with her words for some unknown reason.
“Yeah. Everyone looked up to All Might, who could use his amazing Quirk to stop Villains and save the day. I felt like there was no way I could be even a fraction of the Hero he was. When I told All Might that, do you know what he said?” Melissa asked him.
“What?” Izuku asked, enraptured by Melissa’s story.
“All Might told me about the suit my dad made for him. The very one he had just used to save my town. He said it was my dad’s work that he turned to when he needed support. That he was All Might’s Hero.” Melissa explained. “That’s when I realized there’s more to being a Hero than having a nice Quirk. Being a Hero means being there for someone in need in your own way, like Dad was for All Might!”
I think it might actually be the complete lack of subtext, now that I reread the section above. Just very eh.
Cobra Kai*
I just zoomerbinged the final season of the show, so I guess I need to re-review it. I’ve been following it since the beginning, because the premise was batshit and I had to see how they handled it. I reviewed it briefly in a footnote for a Cobra Kai fic last year:
Cobra Kai is surprisingly enjoyable. A sequel to Karate Kai completely based on a meme YouTube analysis: what if the bad guy of the first movie was actually a normal kid retaliating against the protagonist’s dickish actions? Normal Kid Johnny Lawrence is now in his early fifties, an alcoholic in a dead end existence, while the titular Karate Kid is rich and respected. Johnny reopens a dojo to try to help a teen he sees himself in, all while trying to fix his terrible past choices.
It’s also fairly described as an “action soap opera”, but it’s better than the sum of its parts. Sometimes it’s even pretty good!
I stand by this, and I recommend giving the first season a try at the very least, it’s probably one of the best first seasons of an action TV show ever, even with all the teen drama. Also, something I didn’t mention above is that the soundtrack is amazing, both licensed and original score. If you watch that last link you’ll be able to tell how much the scene is enhanced by it.
Alas, the final installment showcases the worst of Cobra Kai's excesses. After the previous one, everyone is friends now, even the bullies are redeemed, so they really, REALLY have to reach to create any soap opera drama between characters. A lot of nobodies beating up the main characters in the first fight of two, followed by long, “inspiring” cliche pep talks. This happens like twenty times. An inevitable consequence of stretching this premise to more than three seasons.
The very end, as in the last episode and a few moments of the last five or so,28 is great. One of those perfect endings that you can imagine the writers had in mind from episode one, going back to basics, full circle, etc. That made this terrible final season worth it overall.
Your mileage may vary on whether it’s worth skimming the show (and I do recommend aggressively skimming most of the soap opera drama at a minimum) in order to get to the good parts and eventually this finale.29
Lessons in Love
I need a trillion disclaimers for this one. First, no, I don’t seek out porn games featuring problematic age gap narratives about a high school teacher and his students. I don’t seek out porn games at all.30
However, I decided to make an exception when the author of one of my favorite novels cold DMed me like “dude, you need to check this out, it’s KINO”.
It wasn’t kino. Ultimately I don’t recommend playing this even for historical/cultural reasons, it was a bit of a waste of time. To be fair, I can understand what the guy saw in it, and most of his recommendation is true if you squint (words his):
Currently around 3 million English words long and not even halfway done; will be 6-10 million words when complete. Rationalist fiction fans love wordcount, right?
Has been vetted by 2 enthusiasts of rational fiction; both enjoyed it, one so immensely they described it as 'the next great american novel'
Has an extremely active fan community theorizing about mysterious plot elements in ways which remind me of ye olde Homestuck days (although I don't mean to make a deceptive equivalence; this is NOT a work all too similar to homestuck itself)
is one of those things one will approach with disbelief and get more and more shocked for the entirety of the 200+ hours one will be reading
(there are gamelike elements, though it's mostly a visual novel; there's a guide [mod] among other things to focus the experience into one predominantly text-based) I can only describe the game as a kind of rumbling behemoth...
it stirs beneath the surface in its enormity and the further you dig the more shocking it becomes. this is a true one-of-a-kind experience. that said, you may also not like it
Going one by one:
Yes, it’s very long. Despite that, if you put all the narrative scenes in a row (more on this disclaimer later), it wouldn’t feel like it. It’s not wordy or particularly fillery, to its credit, and the character drama is addictive.
I can see why ratfic fans enjoy it, the main character is extremely self aware about his flaws and all the girls treat everything he does fairly realistically. I need to call bullshit on “the next great American novel” considering how derivative it is, though.
Yes, I’d say it’s more like a David Lynch story than Homestuck, even though the mysteries are about the creation of the universe and the nature of stories and that kind of shit, which fits more with the latter.31 Lots of dream scenes, spotlight on weird quotidian32 situations, people speaking backwards... I think the fans are deluded if they think that’s going to be satisfactorily explained, though.
Shock? It didn’t shock me, at least. This one is a complete miss. More on that later.
The gameplay is what you’d expect from a game like this. The “guide” mod just tells you what to do next. You still have to click things (plus two additional clicks every time you need to consult the list).
One major issue the game has is the “game” part. It’s one of those dating sims that give you a number of days to do stuff in. You choose where to go in the mornings, afternoons and evenings before going to bed and restarting, with some random events taking over your choices once in a while. Unlike many dating sims you have infinite time—there’s a narrative element where the world crashes and physically restarts after 200 days, preserving your relationships—so there aren’t any real time management elements.
You just click go to X, talk to Y constantly. Remember this game’s script is three million words long, three Uminekos. Now imagine how old “playing” this piece of shit gets after a while. This should have actually been an American Novel instead of a “video game”.33
Now, this might have eventually made me drop Lessons in Love even if I was enthused with the plot, but I wasn’t, so I quit much earlier than expected.
The best thing I can say about it is that it’s funny. It’s got a lot of self-aware, fourth wall breaking humor, but, yes, in the Homestuck way, not in the Marvel way. It’s definitely this porn VN’s top feature, and there’s a LOT of it.34 It’s not good enough.
I just… strongly suspect the recommender hasn’t consumed enough media. I’ve read Bond Breaker, I’ve watched School Days, I’ve read A Daring Synthesis*, I’ve played Doki Doki Literature Club★, I’ve played Undertale★, and I’ve read I Got the Waifu Catalog and I’m Still a Loser. Those works contain pretty much everything this game’s got, and more, minus some David Lynchian influences and suspiciously unironic sex scenes.35
I wasn’t wowed by anything, and I need to be constantly wowed if I’m to play a shitty porn game, especially when I had to skip all the porn for my sanity. I ended up playing around 220 ingame days before realizing that I had already seen more than enough glimpses of the “cool shit” and it wasn’t going to get better.
I told this to the recommender, who told me “LiL is something which should be tried once by kino investigators” and that now I have the cultural grounding for understanding the many LiL clones. But I actually highly doubt those have anything to offer, either.
Sometimes my heuristics to find cool new works of fiction fail me, but at least I only lost like, 20 hours tops? I will continue to learn nothing from this (except ignoring this recommender in the future (unless he writes another really good novel)).
hollow hill archives*
With a younger writer, this would have been Youtube Analog Horror about faux children’s media like Valle Verde. Thankfully, this was made by someone who’s more of a SCP fan.
It’s horror based on a beloved children’s children’s show that actually exists. I won’t spoil which one it is just to preserve the WTF value for you (you’re welcome), but the specific choice really adds a lot of constraints that help the writer set his work apart within the crammed genre.
I’ve mentioned the SCP influences, but something the fic does right is the mixed format approach. It’s not one short description and maybe a log with narrative elements, it ranges from chatlogs to emails to actual pictures. It prevents it from getting old too soon.
Something that also prevents it from getting old too soon is how fucking dead it is, with the author MIA since 2014. I think the story itself got abandoned because of a stupid timeskip element that removed a lot of the tension too early. It’s a shame, if it was a bit tighter and had an ending, this could have been a no-disclaimer recommendation from me. As it stands, it’s just a fun concept with a short period of good execution.
How the Questing Beast Chased, and Caught, Her Own Tail
This story was hyped for a long time by the author of Fargo, as well as by some Discord dwellers I am forced to interact with.
This was bad news for the fic, since my expectations were unfairly raised.
However, I also read this Madoka fic soon after Puella Furia.
This was good news for the fic, since my expectations were unfairly lowered.
Funnily enough, both fics feature the storyline of Kyubey becoming more human, or at least less alien, and rejecting its forebearers. In Furia, that basically went nowhere. In Beast, that’s the whole point of the fic.
And that’s a good thing! It’s possibly the part of Furia I thought had the most potential, so I’m glad I actually got to read a good execution of the concept immediately afterwards.
The first six chapters are what we in the industry call Kino, I’d say. Excellent dialogue, alien mindsets,
Akemi Homura defaulted to silence unless paired with a countervailing extrovert, though she had become less uncomfortable with that habit after their second brainstorming session and had called their relationship “companionable” in their fourth, reddening slightly as she did. And it was companionable, insofar as that was possible with an Incubator, given that they were neurologically incapable of the human emotional cluster called “friendship.” It was a promising sign of her coping strategies for social anxiety. Kyubey had made a note in her dossier, alongside the notes on apologizing less.
“So,” said Akemi Homura. “I didn’t know you had a hobby.“
Well. You could call it that.
“And it’s… comedy?”
Insofar as comedy involves wordplay. Of course, pared down to its barest essentials, the error was the undue weight its value function placed on manipulating verbal abstractions more generally, not to another end like eternal samsara but to enjoy their esoteric or novel shapes. But that didn’t translate well. Is that really so strange?
“I would have thought, well… it’s just that you spend so much time with Tomoe-senpai, especially when she’s baking. I always see you on her shoulders, with your tail curled around her neck like… a fur stole…?” Akemi Homura gestured to an imaginary stole. “So you can observe from up close. And you always eat her leftovers, and Kyouko’s, um, crumbs. I would have thought you’d want to try that.”
That might make sense. And it would certainly bring Mami and I closer together if I took an independent interest. I imagine that Kyouko and Sayaka might appreciate it, too, given how much they’ve clamored about shortbread and moon pies lately.
“Well, yes, though that’s not really what I meant…”
Kyubey tilted its head. I’m sorry to say that I can’t control what I’m interested in, Homura. Mami likes having me around while she works, but it’s only rewarding to me in proximity to her. I wouldn’t do it on my own.
“Hmm.” Akemi Homura looked at it, then averted her eyes slightly. “Is it wrong of me to say that kind of, well… makes me happy?”
It was a sentiment that it had never heard before, or at least not in this context. It said nothing, and let her go on.
and unexpectedly funny segments.
They had breakfast on arrival. A nearby stall provided eighteen-hundred-yen artisanal sandwiches, served without sides. Their order was brought to them at a picnic table by a college student with hair messily dyed black, possibly in rebellion against the cultural predominance of standard Japanese ethnic hair colorations, like aqua, forest green, and the overwhelmingly common dusty pink. Such was Mitakihara.
Generally, the writing is great on the micro level. Pull out a magnifying glass, aim at a random paragraph, you’ll probably deem it a banger. That’s good… right?
Well… in a vacuum, it is, but a good story for me is not a succession of banger paragraphs (though those certainly help), it’s a banger structure. That’s something that goes wrong with Beast. I don’t know why it happened, but I have theories.
There are twenty chapters out. On the seventh, there’s a paradigm shift with Homura—this fic takes place during the Wraith arc, the interregnum between Madoka and Rebellion, so she’s mostly been a nerd so far—and she awakens her memories offscreen, losing the character we’ve been developing for so long and replacing it with the one we already know.
This isn’t really the problem, it’s not like I dislike Homura as a character. However, the writing simultaneously takes a dive in hard to define ways. One commenter labels it an overcorrection based on the meme “show, don’t tell” advice. I think I’d just call it a lack of connective tissue.
Everything goes breakneck. We’re constantly having small timeskips to the middle of plans within plans, as, beyond the Homura thing, the incubators are now hunting Kyubey (the fic’s protagonist) with the help of OC magical girls. Kyubey, previously an amazing narrator with extremely entertaining digressions, now barely ever thinks about things, instead just machine-describes contextless action. There is a lot of dialogue, but it’s also angsty, confusingly delivered, and the “it” pronoun doesn’t help.36
With events like Homura’s return, I would be completely lost if I didn’t know the lore. With the original events in the fic, like the plan to trap and kill an OC magical girl,37 I was lost. I legitimately had to go back and reread the chapter, some sections multiple times, in order to see if I had accidentally skipped something, and not because it was particularly dense, the information was just missing. As I said, there’s no connective tissue. We’re shown events without the proper context and setup, and unlike in Rebellion, we don’t get great music or a 40 minute Kyubey monologue to explain it afterwards (actually, that’s terrible writing too, don’t do that).
I didn’t even know the team’s motivation during the action scenes—are they just trying to kill the magical girl in preemptive self defense, or do they need her for something? Is this just going to be the entire fic from now on, Kyubey and the girls constantly killing invaders like they’re chilling at SL150 in Dark Souls’ Undead Burg? It was hard to care about that particular fight with that interpretation in mind.
Steelmanning it a bit, maybe it’s less “show, don’t tell” and more taking cues from heist writing, but the thing about heists is that they’re usually grounded, and so cliche that people can easily intuit the missing pieces. When you bring all the weird shit Madoka allows into the mix, like sharing bodies, conceptual magic and so forth, it becomes a mess that a normal reader cannot untangle. I understand as a writer it’s hard to model the information readers have access to—you have the context in your brain, they don’t, and you can’t easily pretend not to know. But this problem is surprisingly rare in practice, so I assume writers manage somehow.
Everyone who has read the fic loves it. This stopped me from releasing this review prematurely, I thought I would give it another try before setting my opinion in stone. But on reread, the problems are still there.
It’s a very similar situation to Pokemon: The Origin of Species. Is my taste just bad? No, it’s everyone else who is wrong.
Do you think I have bad taste and I should be reading better shit? There’s only one solution to that:
I have to write a review of Polyhistor Academy, whose book 1 I finished ages ago but never reviewed just in case I eventually felt like reading book 2. That didn’t happen, so a review is warranted, but this article is already long enough. Stay tuned and shoot me if I forget.
One thing before I forget: I mentioned I started Alan Wake 2 a few months ago. Let me tell you that, while I found the game extremely mediocre and a big downgrade to Control (for pretty much the same reasons the first game sucks), the real reason I’ve stopped playing is that my RTX3070 graphics card somehow can’t handle it. It’ll have to wait for a new computer, but I’m waiting for the RTX5090 to get cheaper or a better “dual AI/gaming” card to come out to do that… it’ll be a while.
The Hammerspace trope technically comes from Urusei Yatsura, the author’s previous work, but Ranma was slightly more popular.
I’ve already started the Dragon Ball manga. Beyond playing some Budokai as a child, I know essentially nothing about it. So far I genuinely love the artstyle and especially the way the artist draws technology, which is rare, people who read this blog know I don’t tend to care about that shit.
I’m not exaggerating and calling groping rape, trust me that he attempts the full thing multiple times.
Not to be a Taylor Swift fan, but it’s to the point the female author’s sexuality is in question.
I believe there’s a new adaptation airing right now which is more faithful to the source material, though.
I’m assuming it’s far better in the anime, which I once tried to watch. Unfortunately, while I can speedread the manga, I don’t really like watching things at 2x, and I would have taken a long, long time to finish Ranma that way. The anime is also not a full adaptation, though it has original filler—more of that in the following review.
In fact, if I extracted any real value from Ranma, it was as a rest for my brain between harder to process works. It really demands absolutely nothing from you.
I will give it this: this page was pretty funny. Remember to read right to left:
For young people, anyway, and before the new anime came out. Maybe we’ll get a Cambrian explosion of fanfiction soon.
Sadly removing the based dog character, barring a cameo.
I think at least this character is an expy from the Re:Zero anime or something, but it doesn’t affect the story and I wonder why the author didn’t simply make them part of a fictional fictional setting.
Of course, recommender Bavitz is a notorious fan of unlikable characters, in both others’ work and his own. I should have seen it coming.
There was once a Taskmaster USA but it had pretty much the same history as the American IT Crowd remake. The UK showrunners bowed down to stupid American exec demands, they ruined the show, and no one liked it, neither the international audiences nor the local ones. They also included one of the hosts of the UK version for some reason. I have avoided it because fans say it’s unrecognizable, and it was cancelled after one season.
Some people said it was doomed to fail because American comedians have very different senses of humor, but I’ll note there are many American contestants throughout the other three versions of the program and they’re often the funniest. Hell, the next UK series stars Jason Mantzoukas, the guy who played Derek in The Good Place.
The Assistant’s actual brother is the most annoying contestant of NZ Season 1, and I initially thought he was just a naturally obnoxious showboating nepobaby. I later learned that the audience was dead silent throughout the original filming, and the guy was just repeatedly trying to hype them up to help his brother’s seemingly failing show. In general the program suffers from New Zealand’s tiny size, their comedian pool is so pathetic they have to resort to Youtubers and “media personalities” more often.
In AU Season 2 there’s a contestant who performed badly in almost every task and kept snipping at the Taskmaster. Not as a joke, he seemed legitimately and perennially upset. It’s important to note Taskmaster has no monetary prizes, it’s all in good fun and for bragging rights, but the guy is a massive if incompetent tryhard that ruins the otherwise chill and funny atmosphere. I later learned he was autistic, which is the kind of thing that would usually make me feel forgiving, except Taskmaster has had a million openly autistic contestants that were funny and likable. This is entirely on him.
That said, I still haven’t been able to finish the UK series with Rosie Jones. She’s like the Awkwafina of British comedians.
Usually a Gamer Fic is just a LitRPG, a specific story with stats jammed in. While the idea was invented by the Korean webtoon The Gamer, most people making these fics don’t know that it exists.
New Game, New Life, as I mention feels like a more direct crossover, down to the very similar character dynamics between our SI and Ranma and between the two protagonists of The Gamer.
It’s a Questionable Questing fic, so it’s not literally for children. The porn doesn’t take over the plot like Play Test, but it’s there.
I thought I was writing this sarcastically but I just don’t know anymore. I’ve started watching the Nostalgia Critic videos chronologically, so clearly nothing is off bounds.
For the curious:
I’ve been dodging it forever because I was under the impression it was only a slash fic. It kind of is a slash fic, but there isn’t even a hint of romance for the first half, and barely any in the rest.
Everything related to romance is also pretty clumsy. I feel like Harry’s romantic interest is the least developed and interesting character in the entire story, when he should be one of the most. Harry also gets jokingly sexually harassed by a lot of characters in ways I found annoying and unfunny.
Severance was so unexpectedly correctly-rated that I’ve had to recalibrate and download Andor just in case it too is as good as people say.
Especially compared to Cobra Kai in the review below. Severance’s sound design is good, I know what they’re going for thematically, but it’s just really samey nevertheless.
Nevermind, yesterday’s episode actually answered a LOT and I just forgot to edit this review until after I published the article.
Including the inevitable Kreese redemption arc. That’s such a fucking absurd concept that I made fun of a fanfic including one just a couple months ago. In Cobra Kai it builds up to an epic Metal Gear Solid 4-style old man fight aboard a yacht, it was awesome.
"Can’t I just watch the first season then skip to the last five episodes?” At your own risk, maybe. I think you’d be missing some of the important details like Miguel having to relearn to walk, or anything related to Kreese and Silver.
Though I have my eye on ONE other game, The Last Sovereign, which actually was made as a work of rational fiction and gets recommended extremely often. It was originally named The Last Fucklord so it’s always been at the very end of my backlog. I do have some standards.
The authors of both are apparently also massive control freak assholes. I did some research and, allegedly, the dev of LiL reads every forum thread about his work on the Internet then targets users for punishment. If you shit talk the game anywhere, you can find yourself randomly banned from the official Discord.
I’m using this word ironically just in case internationally read author Bavitz sees it. I actually think Bavitz is the exact target audience for this game, when I think about it.
Like many better games and visual novels (I’m thinking of a specific masterwork that I can’t spoil to you), it addresses the Player directly and talks about their agency multiple times. You can’t do that in a novel. But, eh. It’s really all been done.
There’s a lot of humor but there’s a lot of everything. The devotion this work gets based on its length makes me think of The Wandering Inn, a 14 million word (not a typo) web serial, which is equally mediocre but has obviously lost all but its crazier fans by now. Who else has the time?
Trying to have its cake and eating it too with fanservice critique is ironically something it shares with School Days. Even its creative bankruptcy isn’t novel.
There’s some “Gender Stuff” in the fic. Kyubey tactically pretends to be a girl Kyubey in order to make itself harder to smoothly replace by the Incubators, since the girls will be attached to a “mentally ill” version and the Incubators cannot replicate mental illness due to infohazard-related reasons. However, Kyubey still refers to itself as an “it” mentally, it’s all a front, mostly played for comedy.
The two magical girls are obsessed with other girls’ gems, and have weird arrangements where they get rid of the bodies and basically keep the gems in boxes and caress them and stuff, though worse shit is definitely implied. It’s very reminiscent of the best part of Chicago, which is bad, because I already read Chicago.
I haven't watched Severance, so I thought the tagline about reading a fanfiction review blog meant you were going to meta-review the other fanfiction newsletter I follow ("The Rec Center") which would have been highly entertaining. I hate-read The Rec Center (the people who run it have terrible taste lol).
Good to know I can avoid Ramna-- lots of people in my social circle like it for #gender but if that's not even really done interestingly, I will give it a pass.
Thanks for the great writeup as always!
I'm surprised that you got LIL recommended and not The Last Sovereign or something. It's a lot more of an actual game than LIL, though it does require an appreciation for RPG Maker combat and eventually you have to start spreadsheeting narrative variables. It also suffers from the long development cycle resulting in the worst content being frontloaded.