Reviews for July 2024

A spectre is haunting Royal Road—the spectre of Review Swaps

I wasted a bunch of time with two seasons of Star Trek Prodigy this month, but I still managed to find some gems. A complete contrast to the drudging marathon of June. You might want to check the archive if you haven’t checked this in a while, btw,¹ I recently wrote some long form articles you might enjoy.

★: Rocketship Voyager, Reach Heaven Via Feng Shui Engineering, J.OM.T.M.A.

*: Play Test, Tom Riddle and the Quest for Dominance²

Previously, on Record Crash:

Reviews for June 2024

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Reach Heaven Via Feng Shui Engineering★

I’m pretty sure the writer of this despises me. I mention this to avoid accusations of bias when I say it’s actually really, really good.

Let’s get the bad out of the way first, what you’ll be able to see in Royal Road reviews: the author is Russian, and there are quite a few grammatical issues here and there, like missing articles, tense mishaps, etc. The character names are all Chinese and almost adversarially chosen to be hard to remember. I had no recourse but to find+replace my copy to rename characters like “Jian Shangguan” to “John Smith” okay that is a joke.³

Oh, and it’s unfinished, and could turn to shit at any moment or get abandoned/murdered like Elemental Arena. Okay, let’s move on to the good now.

Feng Shui Engineering starts off like one of those ontological mysteries I like so much: this trainee cultivator⁴ finds herself locked in someone’s pocket dimension with nothing but a bunch of rare treasures (magical items and the like). She needs to find a way to survive by exploiting the limited resources, and prepare for an opportunity whenever the master of the pocket dimension shows up. What follows is… the title, basically.

That’s only the first arc. She eventually gets out of the hole⁵ (spoilers?), and goes on adventures all over this xianxia world. Here’s where my knowledge fails me: I don’t know if all the following arcs are super original or I merely haven’t read any of the cultivation stories that inspired this writer. But they certainly feel good and unique to me—there’s intrigue, unique power exploitation and worldbuilding in spades.

The main character helps a lot too. Qian is sort of a fucking asshole with the single-minded motivation of “reaching the Heavens” (and waging war against them). This initially seems like absurdity, until the context is explained.⁶ Whatever the logic, it makes her a fun character to read, with a lot of agency.

“I am a cultivator,” she hissed, “and to cultivate is to rebel against the heavens! Do you comprehend what that means, junior?⁷ To wage war against a foe that could squash you at any second? To burn your life and soul to cinders, even if all you can do is break their single finger? Confident? Of course I am not confident! But I would rather detonate my dantians than bow my head in fear.”

She spat on the ground between them, unsheathing her sword with deliberate slowness.

“You want a fight?” she sneered, “Come on, then! This daoist will not die quietly.”

Wang Yonghao took another step back, and she felt his spiritual energy vanish as he finally got his emotions back under control.

Coward.

“You are crazy,” he said, breathing out, “you are actually just crazy.“

“I am a cultivator,” she snorted, sheathing her sword back in a single move. On some level, she was glad her bluff got him to back down, even though she wouldn’t have minded blowing off steam with a proper spar, “It comes with the job.”

“No, it doesn’t,” he shook his head vigorously, “I must have met hundreds of cultivators in my life. Do you know how few of them would throw their life away on a point of principle? I’ve seen dozens beg for mercy in front of demonic cultivators or angry sect elders, drowning in tears, even when they must have known their ending was a foregone conclusion.”

Wang Yonghao grabbed his head in both hands.

“When normal cultivators break their leg, they take it easy until it’s healed!”, he continued, his voice raising in pitch, “They don’t just go around getting into more fights!”

“That may be so, but what do normal people matter here?” Qian Shanyi said, crossing her arms.

“I am saying you are insane!”

“It takes a bit of insanity to break into the heavens. Anyone who steps on the path of cultivation should know this.”

“No they don’t! You keep talking about breaking into heavens, but not even one out of a dozen cultivators would care about this! It’s ancient history!”

“Their ignorance of the roots of cultivation is no excuse.”

She’s often funny too, but that quote is long enough. Without spoiling you further, all I can say is: read the story, I highly recommend it, even if you’ve never read anything Xianxia.

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for no laid course prepare

This is the second glowfic I’ve ever fully read. If you don’t know what that is, multiple people have told me I’ve written the only sensical description on the Internet, here.

It’s about an outlier in Dath Ilan⁸ society. Dath Ilan is rationalist land, a world based on (and created by) ratfic writer/AI researcher⁹ Eliezer Yudkowsky: the median person is just like him, and a normal person is vanishingly rare.

Our protagonist is one such normal/rare person, a nurse with the Special Ability to work longer than four hours before needing to take a break. To deal with boredom, she’s gone through many, many simulations of weird medical cases, using the rest time she doesn’t actually need but all other nurses do.

She’s working at a shitty hospital in the relative middle of nowhere, overqualified and underpaid, because of an inferiority complex: she may be special in a way that no one cares about, but she’s actually pretty dumb. Dath Ilan is kind of an utopia, but everyone is super smart so you’re definitely going to feel like a fucking loser when the median person is a Yudkowsky-level genius.

Yes, I’m writing that in a sarcastic tone, but that’s the premise, don’t shoot the reviewer.

Anyway, the plot is kicked off when a body is found in a near freezing river. This turns out to be the body of a VIP, activating a special branch of the Dath Ilani government, “Exception Handling”, spooks that can bypass most legal protocols, red tape and morality whenever needs must.

Our nurse (for she obviously turns out to be the only qualified person to deal with this body) has to keep the VIP alive at any cost. Will she be able to overcome her mental hangups???

I found the worldbuilding of this glowfic really nice. Yudkowsky’s little world never fails to be weird and interesting, he’s good at pushing past other people’s social blockers (that other people have for good reason, but it’s not like Yud’s PR can get any worse). The nurse is a very likable main character, too, as is the side cast. Props to the head of Exception Handling, who dresses up as Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget and delivers evil monologues as a treat while doing his actual job.

But this is not really worth reading in the end. The glowfic is a team effort, Yud plus “Swimmer963”, and I suspect that other person is an actual doctor,¹⁰ for 90% of the word count is dedicated to extremely, pointlessly detailed near-future medical procedures. They were not any fun to read as a humble layperson, and worst of all, they distract from the actual point of the novel, the main character’s psyche.

Any glowfic needs to be really, really good to justify the format, and this was only okay at best, straining under the weight of minutia, so feel free to carry on with your life and ignore this exists.

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Tom Riddle and the Quest for Dominance*

A Tom Riddle self-insert, specifically the one in the Diary. After possessing Ginny, he develops a smidgen of a conscience. He successfully convinces Harry that he’s a good guy (more on this later) and escapes into the wider world to take over the world slightly more effectively this time around.

This is not a super uncommon premise, in fact I’ve got two very similar fics in my backlog. The execution is fun, though. Maybe too fun? My first issue is the tone.

Ah, what a perfect opportunity. This was my lucky day. I grabbed Ginny's arm and frowned in the most concerned way I could.

"We are losing her," I groaned dramatically. "Voldemort will return!"

Potter and Weasley both said something unintelligible, sounding absolutely panicked.

"There is only one thing I can do," I said. "But it requires a terrible sacrifice. Voldemort trapped me in the diary, and the only way I can return to true life is through a similar ritual he is trying with Ginny. To restore someone back to life, someone else must lose that life. If you give my diary to the professor, I can restore myself through him. Then I can try to exorcise Voldemort's soul before he drains the life out of Ginny."

"You'd need to kill Professor Lockhart?" Potter said in dismay.

"It is the only way," I said, faking my voice full of sorrow. "A sacrifice must be done. But if I don't do it, Voldemort will return, and Lockhart will be doomed anyway. The question is not whether he or I will live, but whether only he or all of us, and perhaps the entire wizarding world, dies."

Hot take, but Harry is not a fucking moron. In the original books, he’s consistently smart in social ways, quickly figuring out when people are lying to him or hiding anything. He’s one of the detective characters in what are mystery novels with a fantasy skin. So the fact Voldemort can just talk his way out of increasingly suspicious circumstances convinced me this was a crack fic for a while.

It’s not, though. The writer takes things very seriously, but kept taking the easy way out of situations, so I was always left wondering whether I was meant to laugh or not. Most of the time (especially early on) I defaulted to finding the story funny instead of smart,¹¹ even though it takes a lot from the rational fiction genre and I think that’s the intended lens.

Beyond the tone, Tom has a penchant for something I can only call “ponderous” dialogue. This works for him, since he’s meant to grow into a super dramatic Dark Lord and everything, but I don’t think this is the intention, especially once fucking 11 year old Harry Potter starts talking that way. A (mild, non-spoilery) example:

"But what do we tell the professors about what happened here?" Potter asked. "They'll want to know everything, and it would be odd if we declined to speak."

This is a big issue the writer has with distinct character voices. I assume it comes from his being Finnish and having English as his second language?

Ignoring these issues, it’s a very competent mystery story, and it only covers two years instead of the usual plodding seven. Stations of canon are few, worldbuilding is expanded massively,¹² there are a TON of cool twists that you can see coming,¹³ but even if you do are executed wonderfully, and so on.¹⁴

I overall recommend this to every Harry Potter fan, especially if you have a tolerance for Finnish-sourced ESL.

I’d be remiss in not including the most punchable author note of all time:

I tried to be very canon-compliant when writing this story, but one thing I simply could not stomach was the Weird Sisters, a pop music band. It is not just the fact that the isolated wizarding world should not have such cultural influences from the Muggle world, it is also that I strongly dislike pop music, as you can tell from the first paragraph of Chapter 16. That is why I replaced the Weird Sisters with a dignified chamber orchestra.

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Sanity is Subjective

This was sold to me on its premise: the world of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, starring a Sith diplomat, of all things. He’s got a fake lightsaber because his master doesn’t trust him, and his role is often being a walking distraction while better plans are executed elsewhere.

There’s a seed of a good story here, but the author can’t hack it. Bizarrely, many chapters seem to be cut short abruptly, even if the scene had an unfulfilled natural progression.

Let’s say our main character meets a jedi, get ready for it to cut away before they start speaking, with nothing expounded in the following chapter. It’s all very annoying and, while the writer shows they’ve mastered the world they’re writing in, with details here and there, actually reading the story is an insufferable experience. What could cause this, a lack of confidence in executing certain scenes? Laziness?

The thread seems to be mostly composed of people discussing KOTOR instead of the actual fic, so I suspect the readers agree with me.

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Weary Wanderer

Someone’s Final Fantasy XIV (the MMORPG) player character is transported to the Wormverse before the story starts.

This story is… “competent” is the best way I can find to describe it, based on the premise. The main character is a parody of video game main characters, absolutely silent unless dialogue options are chosen, prioritizing number of quests over all else, no matter how minor and stupid they are…

The vast majority of the plot, we see through other people’s eyes as our guy plays Scion-lite and has unique interactions with known characters.¹⁵ It’s that type of fic. But yeah, competent is the right word. It’s not exactly “good”. I was not surprised at any point, I was not overly amused, I wasn’t annoyed… this fic just made me feel nothing at all while reading it. I guess it might do the job if you’re very, very bored, but this doesn’t get an actual recommendation.

Funnily, this of all fics is part of the 0.1% that actually gets to the end of Worm, with not only Zion defeated but the plot of Ward referenced as potential expansion content. I guess that’s something.

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Save the world? Fuck that, I want to make money!

This is a RWBY self-insert, but it doesn’t take place at the academy, or involve the titular characters at all.

Our guy is the heir to an industrial empire, one which is currently nearing bankruptcy. He was sent there like a decade before the story proper starts. His only hope is using lore knowledge and his tinkering Semblance to get his factories back on track and unseat his family’s enemies, the Schnee Dust Company.

But the funny thing is, his goals don’t actually matter. Through the selfish actions the title implies, he keeps accidentally fucking over or redeeming every future bad actor in the RWBY franchise. Filling this relatively unexplored period of canon are a bunch of real-life historical characters and events, like the Courriéres mine disaster, or John fucking Brown.¹⁶

The thing that prevents me from outright recommending this story is… I don’t actually know for sure? Each individual scene is well written, the concept is good, characters are reasonably appealing, but there’s a missing X-factor somewhere.

Maybe it’s not a lack of something, but too many filler scenes that amount to the author wanking over weaponry or historical lore? If so, it could definitely be saved in the editing, but I somehow doubt that will ever happen.

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Convergence of Fates

Harry Potter goes back in time to his first year at Hogwarts. He decides to live in Diagon Alley and start studying hard, he gets a pet snake… you definitely think you’ve read this story 999 times before.

But there are a few twists here and there, mainly that this generic Harry quickly becomes a side character in his own story. I don’t know what the author’s intentions were, if this was his plan all along, but he seeded a bunch of OCs into Hogwarts (like Bellatrix’s daughter Juno, or Diana, a muggleborn that befriends Harry) that start getting viewpoint chapters and pushing the plot completely off the rails.

Just to give one example, by the end of the first year, Ron is a friendless pariah due to Harry making different friends and not being there to protect him. He gets his own drama and character development that is pretty fun to follow, and yet makes perfect sense.

Another spin: Voldemort is in Quirrell’s body, and seduces Trelawney for details on the prophecy, only to discover he actually likes having a girlfriend. Dumbledore can’t even start conceiving of Voldemort doing this, so he’s bad at responding to his shenanigans… the Elder Wand ceaselessly pushing aggressive thoughts into his head certainly doesn’t help.

Harry himself is pretty angsty, but I find him angsty in a more book-accurate way than usual, and he comes from an AU future in the first place. Instead of edgy and Gary Stuish, I find him tolerably boring.

Once again, I have no idea what the writer is planning, but I definitely feel like he’s trying really hard to make an intentionally terrible idea work. And it does. I read an essay on Tumblr recently about authors who write by the seat of their pants, “pantsers”, or more charitably, “gardeners” who wait for characters and events to develop and then make use of the naturally emergent plotlines. I think that might be it, that this is a story made by a pretty talented gardener.

Do I recommend this? I don’t know. The start is pretty rough, before all the little differences start piling up, and we’ve only now reached the end of year one. I’d wait a little longer to see if it peters out or becomes a cool saga.

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Play Test*

Oh this one pisses me off.

Not because it’s bad, no, the opposite.

She opened the envelope and pulled out the little slip of paper inside. “Kami-sama, you martial artists are all incredibly strange. It’s an invitation for tea followed by ‘light mortal combat’, or in reverse order if you prefer, and at your leisure. There’s no name given, but there’s a number and it’s signed, ‘An Old Friend’.”

“Oh. That’s fun! Pretty friendly, all things considered.” I took the letter and quickly added the number into my contacts. “Now I feel bad about getting mad.”

“You…you can’t be seriously entertaining the offer. Someone wants to kill you. I was about to apologize for doubting you.”

“No, no, I should be the one apologizing for losing control like that. They were just rolling out the red carpet before asking for a fight. That’s actually pretty classy of them, hm? I mean, you could buy me a few beers, and I’d probably agree to fight you – That’s just the kind of guy I am. Well, not you specifically, but you know what I mean.”

“But you were right! They were intentionally antagonizing you!”

“Maki,¹⁷ if someone fucks with me, but then immediately hands me an opportunity to beat their ass, how am I supposed to stay mad at them? Every great face needs a great heel, and this is some proper petting-a-cat-while-seated-in-an-armchair type villainy right here.”

Her mouth dropped. “James! They. Want. To. Kill. You.”

“He said ‘light’ mortal combat; I’m guessing he wants a No-Limits match. That’s fine. Who doesn’t like a good fight, right? Just because someone gets killed doesn’t mean that they’re dead, Maki.”

This is (technically, it uses a dicepools system I’ve never seen before) a litRPG built around a group of real life friends playtesting a tabletop game, which of course turns out to be real. Upon building their characters, each gets sent to a different part of an alternate, kitchen-sink-worldbuilding Earth similar to the one in Street Fighter.

Our extremely likable main character built a guy who wants to be the next Jackie Chan, a stunt artist working on a new martial arts style in the American city of Black Harbor (basically Gotham in a fighting game world). He didn’t keep track of his friends’ tabletop characters’ names, so his only way to find them is to get famous enough that his friends find him.¹⁸

This author is really, REALLY good at writing action/comedy scenes and dialogue, by the way.

So we’ve got a fun action romp by a skilled novelist with some original game mechanics. What’s the problem here?

I think this (uniquely bad written, too) quote encapsulates it:

The stronger I was, the faster I could find my friends, and the faster I could find my friends the less chance there'd be for any of them to die. I needed to get into confrontations, stick my nose where it didn't belong, and really dive into the City of Shadows. But considering the message from the Producers of this show…

"I need to get hornier!" I yelled at the ceiling. "To give you perverts what you want! Because I'm stuck in a fucking PORNO!"

Wait, why was I mad about that? When I said it out loud that sounded kind of awesome.

"Oh right, because it's AGAINST MY WILL! Send me back, you FUCKS!"

Yeah, this isn’t like Dream Drive, where you get a few sex scenes early on until the author gets bored and permanently focuses on the actual plot. No, in Play Test, it’s definitely staying 50% porn until the story ends. Some sex scenes take two long chapters to fully resolve, even. They’re not skippable, the guy earns new abilities by banging new people,¹⁹ so you need to keep track of what he’s doing…

I don’t even think the author himself is that horny. I think he’s playing to the only audience he knows, who demand constant sex scenes.²⁰ If only he had kept things PG, this might have potentially gone into my permanent recommendations list, but as it is, your mileage may vary on whether the cool story is worth sitting through the smut.

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Fallumns

I’m reviewing this here, so obviously there is some twist to this match 3 game. I saw it recommended next to Void Stranger, and I played myself by thinking it would be remotely as complex. You’ll be done with it in twenty minutes, though it’s an ambitious idea considering it was made for a game jam. Mostly only a curiosity.

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Foreach

This is a weird one. A webcomic that opens with a trio of nu-furry designs having slice-of-life urban fantasy drama. But the comic isn’t about that! It’s like the creators don’t want you to read it.

Thankfully, it’s got decent pacing, and the actual premise is soon revealed,²¹ as the main character Jasper starts playing a dating sim video game…

Whose protagonist, Jiro, is seemingly sentient. And then Jiro, after doing the rounds in his harem adventure, starts playing a different video game…

You get the gist. Foreach (the name makes sense now) goes through a few layers of worlds that start interacting with each other, first one-sidedly, but eventually with actual crossover and meetups.²² There’s a lot of Undertale-style commentary on the nature of video games, and a lot of Homestuck influences in the dialogue and format screws (each layer gets one or several new art and dialogue styles)… and this isn’t just a Boss Baby moment,²³ I instantly found the Homestuck-heavy tumblr of one of the creators after finishing.

Throughout the plot we’ll also find a lot of angst, some of it gender related,²⁴ some of it painfully overdone “wtf killing video game monsters makes me sad and is pointless????” dreck, akin to the iconically terrible “Super Mario Mushrooms = Drugs” “joke”. But it’s overall tolerable and fun, and I praise the pacing again here—you can’t ever get bored because you’re constantly flipping through layers. Though I often don’t care about art that much, there are some cool things being accomplished with it too.

I don’t recommend this just yet. It’s only got 80 pages. The plot proper has gotten started, but, while it feels like the endgame could technically happen at any point, it’s currently at an extremely awkward point to catch up to. Even if I did recommend it, I’m permanently and actively annoyed by the furry aesthetics that keep cropping up even outside the Designated Furry Layer, so no glowing recommendation is going to come from me. Call it prejudice, I call it incentive.

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Stupid Rock Lady

This is a Steven Universe self-insert fanfic from a gem’s perspective. That’s fairly novel, and its strongest point, giving it a good excuse for decent exposition dumps on how the gem society and world work (something the show desperately tried to avoid showing).²⁵

The protagonist is pretty much a Mary Sue, a talented Pearl designed to support an admiral. I actually don’t think she’s failed at anything in her whole life, but it’s the type of story where her hypercompetence is mostly used for comic relief, so I’m not that upset about it.

Pacing is the real weak point. I mentioned above in the HP fic review that some writers are natural gardeners. Well, this writer is clearly writing by the seat of his pants, and he’s not good at dealing with the consequences. You can feel him getting bored about certain arcs and aborting them halfway through. There’s a general lack of commitment to any particular plotline or even premise for this story.

As she makes her way to Earth to help the Crystal Gems with their mission, she turns out to arrive a bit too early, and Steven doesn’t even exist yet. This is a shame, because it means there are no real immediate threats, and the pacing suffers further (also not helped by the author’s obsession with OC fusions, which I’m immediately assuming is a flaw with SU fics in general).

I still read it to the (current) end. I don’t know, I guess it’s the novelty of a fic for this fandom that is slightly more sci-fi aligned than usual. I don’t recommend against reading this, but I don’t feel strongly about it either.

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Star Trek Prodigy

Showrunners do this cruel thing nowadays, where they get their show cancelled, and tell their fans: “hey, if you watch the latest season, we might get renewed!”. They know this almost never happens, but they do this anyway, as some sort of pride-preserving measure, or maybe because they’ve themselves been lied to?

This is what, I think, has led a multitude of adults to shill this show’s second season to any Star Trek fan so hard,²⁶ despite how nonsensical it is compared to the first. They think that if enough randos hit play on Netflix, that the show will get magically uncancelled, despite even the horrible Trek Discovery making better numbers.

But let’s be fair. Prodigy doesn’t actually suck. It’s a fine Star Trek show, and despite the aggressive marketing I would say it’s more “for the whole family” than for children.²⁷ While it certainly starts off as a ripoff of Star Wars Rebels²⁸, with a bunch of slave children trapped in a mining colony and stealing a Starfleet ship to escape to Federation space, it very slowly introduces all the elements of Trek until you forget about the SW influences completely. The showrunners show their care for the franchise at all times.

There are some good episodes, too, here and there. Star Trek Discovery had like, one “standalone” episode per season, while the rest was always dedicated to the godawful seasonal arc written by monkeys on typewriters. Prodigy instead is more 50/50, and, at least for the first season, the seasonal arc isn’t half bad either. There are a lot of “kid learns an obvious lesson” episodes, but they tend to be balanced with the sci-fi mysteries and cultural examinations we expect and love.

This changes in the second season, which as I mentioned is pretty nonsensical. The people running Trek have been teasing a crossover with Doctor Who in the near future²⁹—but I say it already happened. From Back to the Future polaroid-style mechanics, to monsters that hunt people stuck in doomed timelines, to time gimmicks being retconned halfway through their introduction, to a crazy Wesley Crusher showing up in a funny outfit with a bunch of time gadgets… it’s just Doctor Who. And the individual episodes kind of fade away. I didn’t like that at all.

Some of this is related to the kids’ (I need to hit pause and mention that despite everyone calling them kids, two main characters are seventeen years old and just act ten) character arcs being somewhat completed.

With one exception. This purple guy, Dal, who’s the “captain” of this crew and has a trillion inferiority complexes, constantly hiding the fact he doesn’t know what he’s doing to present a front of confidence… he’s the only one who doesn’t get to have his flaws fixed until the very end. Somehow, his friends are fine keeping him in charge despite his constant fuckups.

This is made worse by constantly matching him with Gwyn, a girl who is perfect from the get go, and whose failings are never her fault. It feels like the Ron/Hermione dynamic from the Harry Potter film adaptations, where all of Hermione’s flaws got pushed into Ron and all of Ron’s positive qualities got pushed into Hermione, but there’s no director meddling as an excuse here. The characters are just designed this way. Gwyn is likable,³⁰ but the dynamic is annoying and headscratching to the point I found myself skimming through their scenes together.

The Dal dynamic has a parallel in how Starfleet keeps giving them power and responsibility they haven’t earned, mostly in Season 2, but that’s a problem with the premise of the entire show, so I can’t complain that much.

Anyway, this is getting long and minutia heavy, so maybe I should have done a full review, but whatever, time to cut it short. The thing is, I didn’t super enjoy the show after finishing it, but I don’t regret having watched it, knocking it off my Trek media to-watch. I definitely wouldn’t recommend it to random people. You should watch the opening, it’s pretty good. Something I will hand to this show is that it always looks and sounds great, but unfortunately those are the aspects I tend to care the least about.

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The Island and the Machine

You know me, I’m always desperately looking for the white rabbit that is a good LOST fanfic.³¹ This one was a crossover with Person of Interest.

You see, a major character in each work is played by the same godlike actor, Michael Emerson, so it’s an obvious idea to make them twins born in a shared universe. Maybe that obviousness should have been a hint: the writing is pretty bad and cliche, almost ChatGPT-esque, and the stations of canon are somehow heavy on both fronts. Ben is going to get stuck on the Island, and Harold will still make the machine in the outside world… they basically get three chapters together and otherwise it’s a retelling of the two shows + a lot of whining and angst about being separated.

I dropped it when the Season 5 time travelers showed up and proved that despite Ben’s completely new past, he’d grow up to be the exact same person. Firmly on rails to its massive detriment.

It’s just terrible, please avoid it. Every single time I use Archive of our Own to find fics I end up disappointed.

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My Next Life as a Supervillain: All Routes Lead to Doctor Doom!

I don’t know the Hamefura series, but I know the cut of the cloth as it were: a player of romance visual novels for women gets isekai’d into the role of the villain, and ends up cluelessly attracting all the love interests away from the old protagonist.

This is a weird double self-insert. A Marvel Cinematic Universe fan gets stuck inside the body of a merge of the Hamefura protagonist (who again was ALREADY a self-insert) with Doctor Doom (who cried when the twin towers fell that one time)³² right after the events of Iron Man 1. It all amounts to a young female Doom with a peppy personality who wants to be a superhero.

I’m a bit reminded of THE TECHNO QUEEN, a famously hammy Worm crackfic, but the cursed pattern of “crackfic takes itself too seriously” holds: the second big arc already involves our joke protagonist returning to her homeland and averting a genocide, while crying a lot about having to murder soldiers just following orders.

This is meant to be a comedy, right?

Luckily, that’s over relatively soon and the fic turns into your average country building story, plus some intrigue. I still feel like this story is clickbait, since it promised MCU yet the MCU content is maybe 10% of the word count. What’s there is entertaining enough, but this is all over the place.³³

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Wand

I’ve mentioned Hiver’s work a couple of times, most recently those pretty good “Star Trek dragon” fics.

I don’t know where exactly I got this other fic from, but I assumed the quality would be similar. The guy has been writing for a LONG time, though, and this was ten years old. I will say this, you can definitely tell how much he’s improved over the last decade, because this… is not good.

It’s a Harry Potter self-insert, and I appreciate that the guy puts himself in the story instead of an OC, with all his flaws and weaknesses. The issue is that Real Hiver is just a boring (if nice) Swedish dude with no ambition, and the fic reflects that perfectly. He befriends Neville of all people, goes to Gryffindor, and just kind of stays in the background, like the average glowfic with less dialogue. It’s not actively offensive or anything, but it’s definitely the most downright sleepy story I’ve read in a long long time.³⁴

At least we can appreciate it for being a step in Hiver’s road to greatness. I guess?

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WHAT COLOR ARE YOU?

A very very short Internet Experience, one which overstays its welcome and insists upon itself quite a bit, even if the shitty format is in a way the joke? It’s a short story hiding inside an internet quiz (which is exactly my jam), but the writing is like a teenager made it and they thought it was way way deeper than it was.

If you haven’t explored Internet stories as much as I have you might get a kick out of it.

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Code Frasier

This is a short Code Geass/Frasier³⁵ crossover, posted on a Discord channel I frequent. Sadly, you can imagine the whole episode in your head with no information loss. Shocking low levels of creativity on display here.

Shout out to this, though:

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Rocketship Voyager★

Through the trackless void between Jupiter and Mars hurtled the cigar-shaped vessel that was UNRS Voyager. A thousand feet of gleaming hull and glowering rocket-tubes, sleek gun blisters and swept-back wings, spinning radar dishes and slender antennae. A vessel built for peace but ready for war, now halfway from one to the other.

Buried deep within the rocketship was the control-room known (for reasons lost in the vanished past of the pre-Atomic era) as the Bridge. At the helm was Space Lieutenant Tom Paris, with the handsome features of a televid star and a sandy-blonde quiff that skirted the edge of grooming regulations. His steady hands gripped the control and thrust levers; his earphones were attuned to the maneuvers relayed from Astrogation.

To his left sat Hyun Kim, a callow ensign from the megacities of Pan-Asia whose almond-shaped eyes took swift readings from the electroptical board that monitored everything from life-support systems to hull integrity. An alteration in the oxygen-helium mix of the synthetic atmosphere, a shift in balance off the rocket's axis of thrust, a flux in the electromagnetic fields of the Cochrane Drive: all could spell disaster if not reacted to decisively.

Around them was a horseshoe-shaped array of scopes and telescreens, where commtechs scanned the electromagnetic spectrum and radarmen kept an omni-directional watch for any rocketship or meteorite. But it was the man lying on an acceleration couch with his eyes closed to the distracting sight of those screens who first detected the danger. Tech Lieutenant TuV'k—whose dark skin and sharply-pointed ears presented a satanic visage to those unfamiliar with the serenity and mental discipline of a Martian Adept—wore the copper skullcap of an eloptic field amplifier on his shaven head, wired into the Hieronymus Machine that projected his extrasensory perception across the immensity of Outer Space.

This kind of shit is what fanfiction was made for. Turning Star Trek Voyager into a 50s pulp sci-fi adventure is an idea that would be lame or impossible to take seriously in the hands of any other author.³⁶

And seriously is the key word here. It would have been so easy to make this a short form parody fic like, say, Tank or Ayn Rand's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, but this “Odon” guy decided to put his skills to the test. After the initial shock, this turns out to really be a serious story that will push the premise to its limits.

It’s not only a lame cosmetic reskin either, there’s nothing lazy about it. The backstory of the Federation and all characters are changed significantly, aliens are made more alien, the inspiration means there’s a worrying amount of sexism backed into the worldbuilding—but don’t worry, Janeway is not going to enable that, and she’s actually far more likable than in canon.

50k words means that it can tell a full movie-sized story without outstaying its welcome… but honestly, I’d read more stories in this setting. I’d watch a show based on this, because taking a bunch of outdated science-fiction concepts and reconstructing them to work turned out to be a winning formula, at least with this writer.³⁷

Do give this a read, especially if you’ve watched Voyager. The only bad thing I can say about it is that there are a bit too many “I’m a doctor not an engineer” jokes.

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Legally Brunette

God damn it, I was about to finish this month in good spirits, and this story had to ruin it.

I refuse to talk about the story itself too much. It’s bad. It advertises itself as a comedy “GameLit”, but the author isn’t funny, has a bunch of stock phrases like “don’t quit your day job” that they reuse constantly, and the entire thing is written in a frenetic, desperate tone, as if they’re trying to tell the reader “please clap”. It’s ostensibly about Ace Attorney-style trials, but facts are hidden from the reader so trials are just kind of random, more focused on the “jokes” than the facts or mysteries.

But there’s something more interesting to talk about than the jokes. It’s the (alleged, by me) scam behind it. Note that all of this is my opinion, none of this is a legal claim of any crime, etc. etc.

First, the story is not “GameLit” at all. There are no game mechanics, and while it’s loosely inspired by Ace Attorney, none of the gamey elements make it through. There are only unfunny arguments.

Second, the chapters are extremely short. One I checked had around 750 words. For reference, this article is around 8000.

Third, the story has a whopping 4.86/5 score on Royal Road,³⁸ despite being terrible. How? Well that’s part of the whole (alleged, by me) scam:

1. Open a Patreon.

2. Look at the front page of Royal Road and check what they like lately. When you see a tag like “GameLit” as a commonality, put that in your new story’s title even if it doesn’t fit.

3. Update extremely fast, even if that requires cutting chapters into multiple parts. This makes your own story constantly reach the front page with a popular tag.

4. This plan will not work if your story is bad, has low scores and the reader sees that first. What you do here is contact other writers for a Review Swap. You rate their stories 5 stars with a generic review written by ChatGPT, and they do the same to your story.

5. Idiots like me will have the story recommended to them by the algorithm or see them on the front page because of the high rating and fast update rate, click on it because of the tags,³⁹ and, if they’re really dumb and have access to a credit card, fund the author’s Patreon.

My proof? Thankfully, Royal Road is a pretty well designed site with at least two developers who want to solve the problem of greedy terrible writers, so they’ve added helpful indicators:

That icon, top right? Yeah that’s it. It’s there, over and over. Out of all the full-length reviews on the first page, a 100% were review swaps.

It’s normal to see the icon once maybe. Review Swaps can happen naturally, if say, the authors of Player Manager and Worth the Candle happen to read each other’s stories and review them by chance. But when you see it this much, someone is desperate for attention or money. And judging by the Patreon, the low quality of the story and the false tags, it’s money.

By the way, I’m part of the problem, because I haven’t written a negative review on the site to lower its score (and lazily reposting this text would get the review removed for being too meta). I guess I don’t care that much, I have other stories to read. Fuck this one, though.

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That’s it for July. As always, please let me know if you find anything you think I should read (only stuff you think I’d like, please, I’m a reviewer, not a shill).⁴⁰

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Oh,

Just One More Thing, Mr Anders★

I’ve never watched Columbo, but I’ve seen some Youtube clips and watched a couple episodes of the Columbo-inspired Poker Face, so I guess I’m what MCU fans are to people who read superhero comics?

It’s really funny that I complained above about that soulless Frasier crossover for just playing everything straight. How wrong I was. Playing things straight works if you’re a good enough writer with a good enough crossover as the base.

Here, the concept is Columbo is put in charge of a murder case involving Max Anders, whom you may know as Kaiser from Worm. He’s just the perfect type of smug idiot who thinks he’s a mastermind. The mystery is obviously revealed at the very beginning, and we’re left to wonder how our detective will possibly figure things out. And it’s through a very clever plan, that’s all I’ll say.

I highly recommend this. It’s only 24,000 words, so you can be done with it in a single sitting, and I think it will be enjoyable even if you don’t know either franchise, which is a rare thing for crossovers.

1. Can you do this? Can you just use “btw” in a Serious Substack Article?

2. These things are pretty self-explanatory, right? I don’t know if I should really add an explanation and fill the intro of these posts with more copypaste fodder…

3. I was tempted though.

4. I’ve only read xianxia/cultivation “deconstructions”, so I’m the worst person to define this. Let’s let the Royal Road forums tackle this one.

5. Delve fans, contain your PTSD flashbacks, this is actually a good hole.

6. This is, incidentally, a common pattern in Feng Shui Engineering. You will repeatedly (and wrongly) think the author is losing it.

7. She’s the junior here, smugly bluffing through the conversation, which is another of her leading traits.

8. Dath Ilan is meant to be written in lowercase, but I refuse to do it because it makes no sense.

9. In order of importance.

10. Okay there was no point in suspecting, I just checked: “I was an ICU nurse” is in the author’s LessWrong bio.

This does make me think, was this a way for the nurse writer to get through her own hangups, a fun way to roleplay the perfect scenario, or just a “shooting the rodeo”-style convenience decision?

11. Tom decides on the new name Tom Valatro, which I found hilarious and convinced me it was a comedic story: it just anagrams to “a Voldemort” again. Turns out the writer didn’t know this, just took it from the Finnish version of the books (and he had forgotten it anagramed like the English version, somehow).

12

13. Throughout the story I had a constant feeling of deja vu, as if I had read it before, but not exactly it. As I found out at the very end of the story (in a very cool Mega Author’s Note (which I wish more authors did, by the way) where he explains all his inspirations chapter by chapter) a lot of concepts are taken from Seventh Horcrux and HPMOR, which I’ve read to death. Have an additional bracket to make this footnote harder to read)

14. One of them (you can stop reading now if you want) is that Voldemort isn’t the main villain. This hurts the story, though, because Tom still has to get rid of Voldemort in an incredibly anticlimactic and dragged out way before he can move onto the final boss. The otherwise decent pacing slows to a crawl there, the weakest point of the fic.

15. He never makes it to Brockton Bay, though, he gets around from Seattle to Los Angeles to Newfoundland. I think most of the characters we see are taken from PRT Quest, the timeskip and other bonus content, which makes it less horribly boring than the premise otherwise implies. I guess using this for OC fic inspiration is another valid reason to read it.

16. I mean, he does have a color-themed name.

17. No relation.

18. At one point he follows 400 ballerina-models on Instagram in the course of one night, because that occupation was one of the only details he remembers about one of his friend’s characters, and it might help her confirm he’s the guy she knows. This in-context-unexplainable decision is hilariously brought up by virtually every person he meets for a long time.

19. But not only from sex, generally every “new” thing he does unlocks something, like slaying his first spirit. This isn’t The Erogamer.

20. I’m definitely going to go through this guy’s body of work in order to find if he’s written anything that isn’t porn. He’s the next Ideas-Guy, honestly even a bit better.

21. I say this but I needed a “I swear it’s not furry the whole way through” recommendation before I could make it past this point.

22. I did often wish I was reading a fresh update of Conference Call instead. Rest in peace…

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24. It’s annoyingly not even very novel if you’ve lived through the June Controversy of the Homestuck fandom, which sometimes feels like what the creator would rather be writing, and which this margin is too narrow to explain.

25. The Steven Universe worldbuilding was so loose that we went from “the Diamonds have genocided thousands of alien species” to “Earth is the first time the Diamonds have found a planet with life, and the Hyperhitler White Diamond is just an overbearing mom analogy that you can hug to sanity” within one season.

26. Besides the “wow, this is good even if you’re an adult! This is better than DS9 season six!” stock shills, you might also hear “Chakotay is finally a good character!”. No, they just introduced a new guy and called him Chakotay. I could “fix” any character just fine if I was able to turn them into a generic protagonist with no tie to their old identity. This is what Rocketship Voyager does too, actually.

27. Barring one character that is just a long winded fart joke throughout like 15 episodes until he finally develops.

28. Or so I hear, I haven’t watched that show. I was just thinking “kiddie Farscape” the whole way through.

29. Just as the month ended, the news came out: it’s a mobile game crossover. Lol.

30. She’s well voiced by that popular Fallout actress, if you’re curious. The voice acting of this show is pretty good in general. Fringe’s John Noble is the villain of season one.

31. Did you know that a good 90% of all LOST fics made in recent times are slice-of-life Juliet/Sawyer fill-in-the-missing-times? I just want some plot, goddammit.

32. This is my favorite comic page, it’s so fucking terrible. It’s like those “cartoon characters react to tragedy” fanarts that DeviantArt 12 year olds make, but this actually got published.

33. I use the /r/rational subreddit a lot for fiction recommendations, and this one was definitely a miss. What in the world is even remotely ratficky about this???

34. Even Spacebattles users were complaining at the time, it was that bad.

35. I’ve been watching (the best episodes of) Frasier lately, so expect a review of that soon.

36. Including Voyager’s own scriptwriters, kind of. I think this fic tries to reconstruct 50s sci-fi to be a bit more like The Expanse, while Captain Proton was going for a full-on Flash Gordon deal.

37. I already mentioned Fringe earlier, so maybe it’s just on my mind, but in retrospect that show had a similar approach.

38. For reference, Mother of Learning currently has 4.84 stars.

39. In my case, I’m just seething that there hasn’t been a good Ace Attorney game in a long time, and I just wanted to read something like it. I’ve sadly already read A Complete Turnabout, which is the only decent fanfic I’ve ever found.

40. I actually received a paid review request for the first time not long ago, which got quickly refused. I’ll probably only ever do that if it pays more than my actual job, and I work in software. You can expect hobby-grade sincerity for the foreseeable future.