Reviews for June 2023
Featuring fics for Homestuck, Worm, Harry Potter, Minecraft, Skyrim, and even stupider settings.
A pretty negative month barring some Worm fics, I’m afraid to say, so you can skip this if you hate whining. I ran out of backlog and got some fics from some questionable sources.
2024 update: I’m retroactively adding the modern ★/* highlight system to the top of each old monthly review post, as it was a well received feature.
★: The Northern Caves, Back and Forth
*: Tenjin
Check the last article for more toxic positivity:
Taylor, Time Tinker!
The title says it all. Well, not all, since I’m still typing this review, but whatever.
If you liked Primer, you’ll probably like this. I’m confident the writer has his very complex time travel diagram written down in a notebook somewhere, and the loops are consistent.
If, like me, you think Primer is an ambitious yet overrated and kind of trash story,1 you’ll also think that of Taylor, Time Tinker!
With both the movie and this fic, there’s hardly any narrative, or any characters. Everything works in service of letting you see the diagram in more detail, making the story more like a puzzle and less like a novel you’re trying to read. Many scenes where characters understandably explain they don’t grasp what’s happening.
By virtue of its weird time shit, it also starts with a battle with Scion, ostensibly Worm’s final boss, and things only get more batshit from there. I had to eventually drop the fic because I didn’t know what was going on, and honestly didn’t really care. Make sure your time travel stories still follow a reasonable structure, writers. Anyway, onto the Homestuck fic review.
DLC Unlocked: New Game+
The rare Homestuck fic. The even rarer non-romance self-insert Homestuck fic.
It’s overall just readable. The SI manipulates herself into the friendships of the main characters, while living in a hidden basement below some rich people, Parasite style. This means she’s in a position to play SBURB with them. Clearly the game isn’t designed for her though, as she gets a planet but no consorts, and her lore is all about how the game is not ready for her.
I think the writer forgot one of the main points of self-inserts, which is to let the reader interact with their stories through a proxy. This SI stays on her planet and just… does her Land Quests, while largely leaving the other kids alone to go through the stations of canon. Barely anything changes. There is barely any dialogue, just lame, slightly aimless adventuring.
Disappointing, as there’s some time travel, denizens and all the things we can expect from Homestuck, so I know the author can do it. They just prefer not to. I remember reading a fic similar to this one called Ashes to Ashes, Grist to Grist, which had the same problem of trying to write a generic adventure story instead of writing Homestuck.
To make matters worse, they decide to use roughly 20k of the limited word count to rant about their very wrong and unsupported classpect theories.2 Overall this hinges on the line of readable, especially because HS fics tend to be so bad. I’d definitely avoid this if you haven’t read the original.
Be warned, the writer is one of those morons that think that AI crawling can be stopped by a login prompt, as if it wasn’t already crawled and in Common Crawl3 long before the viral warnings were spread. So you’ll need to log into AO3 if you want to read this.
The Northern Caves★
Still the best.
But the best what? This is kind of genre-defying. It’s both a love letter to early 2000s internet forums and some kind of House of Leaves-esque horror story. Doesn’t go hard on the fantasy element but it’s also too abnormal to fit as literary fiction. I decided to reread it as I had run out of new stuff at the time.
We’re reading an in-story report written by GlassWave—a Chesscourt forum user—about a recent IRL meetup the forum had. Chesscourt has been a dead property for years, though recently the massive unpublished sequel The Northern Caves was found in the dead author’s personal belongings, and scanned by one of the users. GlassWave implies offhand that multiple deaths happened as a result of reading it at the meetup.
The way I’m describing this makes it sound like a creepypasta, honestly, so I’m going to leave it there, trust me that the novel is many things but not stupid.
The forum sections are amazingly true to life, as author Nostalgebraist4 was a frequent patron of the MSPA Forums and based these on them. I think they’re the best part of the work. Why do we get so many period pieces but nothing about this specific zeitgeist?
Regretfully, Nostalgebraist is at this point known for his terrible endings, and TNC is no exception. It’s not as bad as his other work Floornight—where the ending is so soul-crushingly terrible it actually retroactively ruins the previous, great, chapters—but it’s bad. Better reviewers than I have mentioned that he seems to be unable to grasp what makes a good ending, it’s not merely a problem of bad execution.
Still, that negativity can’t prevent me from once again recommending this. Once the in-story Separation happens, the story loses quality, and after that only the podcast at the end is worth talking about, but everything else is gold.
Easy Mode
I’m pretty sure I talked about jumpchain stories already in a previous article. This is one of the bad types,5 where the MC refuses to do anything but maximizing his resources. If you squint, there’s something interesting about how it affects him psychologically, to the point he craves human interaction when he finally makes it to a world with people, but then… he gets it and goes back to grinding. Just a complete waste of our times.
Throwing Out the Script
I believe I saw this recommended in a “best fics you’ve recently read” thread on /r/hpfanfiction, which I was checking to see if I was missing any new good fics.
I clearly wasn’t. For some unholy reason, someone recommended this 30k word, 8 years old fic. To be fair it has a relatively interesting setup. To be fairer, come on, it’s dead and will never update again, and 30k words barely has room for a couple of unresolved arcs at best.
Hilariously, this time travel fic was going to have Harry/Lily/Narcissa/Bellatrix as the main pairing. Did they just roll a dice? The writer is also pretty insistent that it’s not incest, but I think they were only fooling themselves:
As far as I'm concerned, the Lily in the story isn't Harry's mother. Yes, they are genetically related, but she didn't give birth to him or raise him. Harry doesn't really even have any memories of the Lily that did give birth to him. He's not going to be gooey eyed over her at first sight, and he's going to have a weird enough time interacting with her even before romance becomes an issue. Like I said, the pairing is eventual.
No it’s not eventual because you didn’t finish the fic, you hack. Don’t bother with this, even what little is there is not nearly good enough to justify checking out.
Back and Forth★
This is an excellent Worm original character fic with a very interesting power. The guy can teleport to anywhere in his line of sight, but he increasingly finds it harder to breathe the further away he goes, until he teleports back to the point of origin, which he has to do. If his point of return is blocked, he’s screwed. He can’t take things with him, either. Somehow, he makes it work, with some tricks as smart as the ones Taylor figures out in the original story.
To add more flavor, the actual character isn’t bad either. There’s something wrong with him. Debilitating ADHD, some developmental disorder, it’s not completely clear, but his skills are extremely uneven. He has trouble figuring out things that come obvious to other heroes, he loses track of conversations in the middle of fights, targets villains and forgets about the mission objectives… but he has a natural charisma that he’s oblivious about. He’s got an entire department of Image doing damage control for everything stupid he does, but he still shines at interviews and ends up coming across positively.
I think I’m selling it short, I’m making it sound like crack but it’s a pretty serious story. I think this wouldn’t be that out of place as a very long interlude in the original novel. I highly recommend it.
I am not paranoid!
One of those high concept fics, but the concept is really stupid. A paranoid guy with a tendency to stupid conspiracy theories is transported into the Harry Potter world.
Until I had time to investigate the situation more, my leading theory was that [McGonagall] was a program sent by the system to get rid of abnormalities that took place in our living room. That meant that she was something akin to agents from Matrix, sent by our synthetic overlords to purge any glitches and mistakes in the code. I actually think that Matrix, though it wasn't released in this "world" yet, was a brilliant plan on the part of machines. It normalized the idea of being locked in the simulation in our minds, meaning that when people would discover the abnormality in the system, they wouldn't rebel against the programming with all their strength, only thinking "wow, it's like in the Matrix",6 stopping them from breaking free. It was a devious, ruthless method, which honestly both impressed and terrified me.
Of course only if it was true. Simulation Theory was only one of the theories I was considering at the moment, though it was very plausible.
However, it was probably not a good time to unravel the true reason for creating a movie Matrix, as I should instead focus on a reality warper/Agent in front of me. It really wasn't something I could forget about, as her being in my house most likely meant I was in grave danger. Was she there to kill me for awakening my psychic abilities? Or maybe she was going to delete me for creating a mistake in the code? Would that extend to my family? After all I didn't know if they were just programs or other subjects, kept imprisoned in the system by cruel machines. I didn't have enough information to be sure. Unaware of my thought process, the intruder spoke, seeing that everyone was able to collect themselves and ready to carry a conversation with.
"First of all, I would like to apologize for startling you. I should have been more tactful with my entrance" said the old woman with a slight regret in her voice. Her appearance suggested she was about seventy years old, with grey hair and wrinkles on her face, but her posture was straight and her eyes were sharp, suggesting she still had a lot of energy, despite her advanced years (or she was just a robot). She was wearing a long, black robe and huge, pointy hat, giving her a quite unusual appearance, which was probably the point.
Knowing what I knew about human perception, I realised how frightening the woman before me really was. Human mind was built to ignore certain abnormalities. The fact that she was dressed like a typical witch and was able to enter our house without raising any suspicion most likely indicated that she possessed an intimate knowledge about human perception, using it to travel through crowds unnoticed and most likely to assassinate her victims without anyone spotting her. The fact that my parents reacted with panic after seeing her meant that they either didn't know her, meaning that she belonged to the third party, capable of infiltrating the organization my parents belonged to, or they recognized her, meaning she was someone so dangerous that just seeing her made my parents afraid. Both options were equally bad.
It’s initially just a lot of this.
At one point the writer realizes that the fic is far funnier if he switches viewpoints to someone like Hermione, to give the MC a useful straight man to play off of and have the narration avoid the repetitive conspiracy paragraphs. Instantly, the pacing becomes snappier, the jokes less repetitive, and the fic readable.
This kind of development is what makes me stick with some stories to the end even when I really shouldn’t. What if they get good? I mean, this is no Seventh Horcrux, but it becomes a competent humor fic after an extremely clumsy start. It’s just okay, so you choose whether you want to read it.
Tenjin*
Hey, this Worm OC fic is actually pretty good too! Wow, two just in this review.
What makes this fic interesting is not his tinker powers, which are of the fairly generic “completely shit at the start but slowly gets better in all areas” fashion. It’s the main character’s punk rock GNU-style attitude. He makes a network of untraceable phones to make the Internet free as in freedom, and drops them around the city. Builds a whole virtual economy around them.
Of course, none of his plans work out perfectly, because this is Worm.
“In the face of all this, how do you plan to ensure your network, and devices, remain a force for good?”
I should have anticipated a question like this. Variants had been submitted by the crowd, but none of them really gained traction, and I’d pushed it from my mind.
Before getting captured, I’d have responded with some version of how information wanted to be free. That we all needed to use, and develop, our judgment to discern what was true or not. Lean on freedom of speech. Say that people were assholes, with or without the internet.
I would have rejected the idea of moderation, maybe even been a little angry about it. Back before killing four people, however inadvertently. Sitting in a cell, unable to build. Left to just think. On some level, it was silly. Purity killed dozens. Lung just as many, if not more. PRT troopers threw themselves at Lung or Hookwolf, barely slowing the monster down. The world was circling the drain.
What was four lives, in the face of that? What was one girl killing herself? But I still felt awful about it.
This is an extremely weird and good topic to tackle in a Worm fanfic. I can’t say I’ve ever read anything like this before.
It’s in progress, so it might shit the bed eventually, but I enjoyed what I read, and recommend you do too.
How To Save The World With No One Even Realizing
A short, complete Naruto fanfic wherein the three main characters go back in time and fix everything.
Made slightly interesting by the fact we don’t get to see through their perspective, just from everyone else reacting to their extremely thorough plan.
Sadly, this is more of a cerebral checklist than a story, even with that added flavor. It’s like a heist movie without any scene where things go wrong and they have to improvise. If anything they’re too prepared, so that when something goes wrong it doesn’t actually matter. Don’t bother.
A Frog Out of Water
Dropped this really fast. One of the reviewers said you can reread this even without advanced Yu-Gi-Oh! knowledge. He lied. Also I think I want to murder the main character?
Shed Skin
This is a quest where the players play as Orochimaru, a Naruto villain best known for killing and torturing boatloads of children. Also known by getting away with it by the end of the story because he’s just that powerful and useful. In the sequel, apparently the good guys, including Naruto himself, are sending him fresh children to experiment on. What a wacky author.
In this quest, Orochimaru is sent back in time (hey, it’s like that other fic) to before he’s tortured all that many children, or at least to before he’s unable to justify it as “I was only following orders”. He does that, helps save Konoha during the original Kyuubi fight, quits his unlawful experimentation, and continues helping the village… wait…
Yeah, none of this makes sense character-wise. The truly funny aspect of this quest is that the players are all goody two-shoes and refuse to make the villain do anything bad. That’s an entertaining gimmick, for a while.
Unfortunately, the story fails to develop in any interesting way. I’m unsure why exactly my enjoyment dropped off, but I suspect that Orochimaru is just a too powerful character and knows too much for there to be any stakes, so he flies through every challenge, social or ability-based. I’d give this a skip.
And that’s it for this month! See you next one, as this has actually turned out to be a fun exercise both for me and the readers. Why aren’t you writing reviews, reader?
I might be the only person with that opinion, honestly. I always get criticized whenever I bring this up.
To those who don’t know what classpect theories are: you’re lucky.
The worst and paradoxically most used dataset for Large Language Models, with a Lot Of Stuff that is poorly filtered and has a ton of repetition. Basically every dataset since was better. If I remember correctly, models that used Common Crawl showed massive improvement when it’s switched out or deduplicated.
If I manage to make it past chapter 10 this time, expect a review for his recently finished work Almost Nowhere eventually.
I admit I’m having trouble thinking of any good types of Jumpchain story.
This also explains the “literally 1984” meme, if you think about it……..
But...there isn't any Skyrim or Minecraft in the review.