Reviews for March 2024
90% dragons by volume
This one’s got a lot of visual media. I wish I could have read more things this month, but I was working hard on finishing a full review, my highest effort one yet.1 You should be able to read it a few months from now due to reasons. It will all make sense eventually…
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.
★: Balatro, Whiplash, Seinfeld
*: House of the Dragon, A Young Woman’s Inevitable Dance of the Dragons, How to Train Your Dragon
See last month’s reviews if you missed them:
Chained Dragon
One of those rare actual jumpchains. The protagonist actually goes from one world to another gaining powers in each, as opposed to staying only in Worm for 300k words before the writer gets bored and drops the story. Adding to that, the jumpchain is action movie-themed. This all sounds great, but unfortunately, the writing is poor. Very amateur writer who doesn’t have the skills for detail and proper pacing yet.
Reading just a bit of it was worth it, if only for a single scene. Our protagonist’s first world is Conan, and he befriends the titular character (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger), but has to leave him behind. Much later, he jumps to the Terminator universe…
Right as we’re heading for the door a girl screams out behind me, causing me to spin around and drop to my knees, my shotgun trained on the big man pointing a laser-sighted pistol at me.
I go to pull the trigger, but right as his face registers I hesitate. That’s the face of Conan. The face I fought through dozens of men with. The man I spent nights teaching science, and philosophy.
All my reflexes and perks, but I still hesitate.
He doesn’t. Three .45 caliber rounds slam into my vest, knocking me on my ass as another shotgun blasts the bastard wearing my friend's face back once, twice, three times! His 400 pound body crashes into the bar, scattering alcohol and glass everywhere. For a moment I’m back in the Hyborian age, in the temple of Thulsa Doom. Conans twisting a sword into my chest, Doom’s hand placed on his shoulder in pride. A betrayal most cruel. No sign of emotion on his face, just the cold machine killing its enemy.
Okay, it was worth it for me (can any other form of fiction create this exact situation? I don’t think so), but you’ve now experienced all the good parts of Chained Dragon, so let’s move on.
The Taste of Peaches
There’s this infamous Worm fanfic titled Taylor Varga. In it, Taylor gets a lizard tail and some generic strength and agility powers. The actual Worm plot is left in the background as every villain’s power level and meanness is lowered to the minimum, so Taylor can beat them up a little but let them live for the next episode. It’s two million words long, and no plot progression whatsoever happens across them. There are multiple chapters where Taylor goes clothes shopping.
It’s the most bizarre treatment you could think to apply to Worm. Maybe there could be a twist here where I say “and it’s actually great!” but no, it’s actually really, really awful.
The Taste of Peaches is exactly the same, but with fox powers instead of lizard powers, and Taylor doesn’t even fight that many people. What a waste of time.
A Young Girl’s Guerrilla War
Another Tanya fic,2 this one with Tanya transported to the Code Geass universe into the body of a Japanese girl without rights. This is the longest fic of either setting I’ve read so far, 500k words. It’s all technically competent, with good characterization and an amazing attempt to fix the completely stupid Code Geass setting, otherwise I wouldn’t have read all of it, but it has problems.
The story begins a few years before the true plot kicks off (and in fact, we don’t even see Lelouch, the main character, until around halfway through). I suspect the writer had something in mind like “I want Tanya to have a full army and be able to rival Britannia by the time Lelouch gets his broken mind control power” but thought it’d feel like bullshit to skip ahead, so he painstakingly shows every single decision Tanya takes onscreen in order to make that happen, over an only very lightly compressed timeline spanning half a decade.
Once again, it’s well written. When the author gets to the classic slow-pacing pitfall of having too many characters, he puts some of them on a bus3. When Kallen’s journalist storyline begins dragging, you can feel his sudden decision to make her a sleeper agent soldier instead. This does make me feel like he never had much of a medium term plan for progression. The obvious problems never seem to get tackled before they’ve already gotten old for a couple chapters.
I’d only recommend this if you have nothing good to read. Surprisingly low enjoyment/word count ratio despite its objective achievements.4
House of the Dragon*
This is a Game of Thrones prequel. It’s based on a Targaryen worldbuilding book the author chose to write, as opposed to the one book everyone wants him to make. Where’s the book, George?
It concerns a succession crisis caused by a king who wants his daughter to inherit the throne, even though he manages to sire perfectly cromulent male heirs years later. Westeros is a medieval society, so everyone tells him it’s a dumb choice, but he’s kind of a naive, conflict-avoidant king and he refuses to take any advice on the subject.
As the princess grows up, she has to deal with the intrigue caused by that, and causes problems for herself with her own carefree hedonism. She’d clearly be a terrible fucking queen from what we get to see.
Unlike the original, there’s very little action, focusing on court and relationship drama. It’s really well written, acted and directed, which makes this bearable, but I feel it’s a “more than the sum of its parts” situation. The events aren’t terribly interesting when written down.
I also have to ask, why are there so many births and body horror? There’s a scene early on where they intercut footage of a swordfight and a birth as if they were somehow equivalent just because a character says “the birthing bed is Woman’s battlefield, hear us roar” or something absolutely stupid like that. We see breastmilk leaking through people’s dresses, graphic stillbirths, it’s all shown in excruciating bloody detail for no real reason.
Despite my complaints, overall a worthy recommend, especially if you liked Game of Thrones for the talky scenes in seasons one and two. There aren’t any Blackwater Bay or Battle of the Bastards scenes here, the only equivalent, a war in the stepstones, is the most (intentionally?) boring and pointless subplot in all of ASOIAF.
Balatro★
I technically am still playing this game, but whatever. It’s probably going to be just a flavor of the month, since I am quickly running out of things to do (barring some virtually unachievable achievements), but it’s the only “card-themed roguelike” game I’ve ever liked. It’s a surprisingly populous genre.
You’re basically trying to get high Poker scores by playing pairs, flushes, etc. and beat increasingly high thresholds. You can only do that by upgrading the cards themselves, the hand types, or using modifying Jokers that add interesting, emergent gameplayey mechanics and synergies.
It’s the best parts of Binding of Isaac and what I assume people enjoy in Slay the Spire and other such games. I’ve played for at least a couple hours a day every day since I’ve got it. Really addictive, really engages your brain, go buy it if it sounds even remotely interesting.
A Young Woman’s Inevitable Dance of the Dragons*
What a long-ass title.
This is a story by the same author of the Game of Thrones/Tanya crossover, which a similar starting point: Tanya is reincarnated into a sister to Rhaenyra, the main character of House of the Dragon.
There’s a twist, however. We’re not getting any Tanya viewpoint chapters. This is one of those fics that really rides on the crossover, since there is a lot of humor hinging on “oh, you as the reader know exactly why she did that, and it’s so stupid, but this viewpoint character thinks she’s a proper princess doing nice things” situations.
And that’s basically the entire fic. Subtly funny scenes as Tanya is clearly trying to avoid the obvious inevitable dark fates that await the major characters in the original, with little action. I like the author’s first fic more, since I think their natural style synergizes more with the tone of Game of Thrones, though this is enjoyable enough.
Nothing Succeeds Like Success
Here’s a Worm alt-power fic wait don’t close the tab. It’s not Taylor for once, it’s her dad.5
This fic is about how Danny gets broken powers, and then uses them to live out a midlife crisis instead of doing anything productive. His powers let him acquire discount Thinker/Changer powers based on any heroes he’s touched.
Unfortunately, as stated, our main character isn’t a naturally heroic person. All the fights in this fic are reactive, as Danny stops a bank heist because he really wants to cash in a check, or gets trapped in one of Uber/Leet’s games as a bystander.
Keeping up this dynamic pretty much guarantees street-level fics and little escalation, and allows the story to focus on lesser used characters in fanfic, like Bakuda and Squealer. Though honestly, that might be the author being horny. It’s 50/50 odds. Overall I’d rate it as a not amazing, not bad popcorn fic, worth it if you just want a shortish fic with lots of action.
A Young Girl’s Weaponization of the Mythos
Instead of isekaing Tanya to another franchise, this embeds the H.P. Lovecraft mythos into her canonical world. The fic follows an epistolary format, which is very rare in fanfiction. I think that might actually come from the original light novels?
In any case, the story is decently written, as Tanya bullshits her way into discovering ancient, Lovecraft-themed rituals and magics and has a bunch of battles where she deploys one of them and pretty much instantly wins.
This is all handled with relative care and decent writing, but I wasn’t feeling it.
It just got too repetitive, and the format means you’re not really getting any of the humor associated with the main character (despite this fic being labeled “crack”????). This is however one of those fics where I think it’s completely possible I’m the weird one and most people like it, so feel free to give it a try if you’re a huge Lovecraft fan.
Seinfeld★
What’s the deal with this show?
Jerry Seinfeld, who plays himself, calls it a show about nothing, despite the fact his standup segments sandwich nearly every episode. It’s very obviously “a show about a comedian and the mundane events that inspire his observational comedy”. That’s not nothing.
Shows from Friends to How I Met Your Mother were all highly influenced by it.6 All sitcoms were. Larry David from Curb Your Enthusiasm is behind this show too, and he’s clearly an extremely funny guy. It’s hard to boil down the specifics of why the jokes hit so well and so often, so I’m just going to talk about one specific thing I did notice.
Many shows do this these days, but Seinfeld pushes the concept to its limits, and it’s cramming as many different plotlines as possible in twenty minute episodes. It does so in a way that not only works, but which synergizes whenever the subplots interact. It’s a cool house of cards. The closet Kramer has been guarding the whole episode turns out to contain the Soup Nazi's recipes that Elaine needs to dethrone him. In another episode, Kramer's theater temporarily hires Costanza to dress up as a king for a promotion, and it's just the right escalation for his ongoing comedy of errors where an acquaintance keeps thinking he's mentally ill. It leads to some subplots having like, two scenes, but you barely notice.
It’s a good show. I’ve only seen half or so of all episodes, mind you, following an episode guide, so I might be biased, but they still lasted me many months. Very much worth a watch.
White Knight Errant
Sometimes I’m hoisted by my own petards. In this case, my tendency to not read the story summaries made me think, for multiple chapters, that this would become a serious RWBY AU fic about a slightly more competent Jaune, who’s been messing with the White Fang before the events of the story.
That turned out to merely be the backstory to a terrible, extremely by-the-numbers harem romance comedy, which, after dropping, I noticed the summary warns us about in detail.
I will proceed to learn nothing from this. See you next petard.
The Batman
I’ve delayed watching this for ages despite being interested. Why is every single movie three hours long nowadays?
It’s an intensely weird film, and I’m going to pull one grand theory out of my ass to try to explain why. I think DC really wanted David Fincher to make a Batman movie, with the superhero ostensibly being a “great detective” in the comics yet showing nearly none of that in previous adaptations. They had one rich exec pushing for it for decades. Maybe they got close to getting him, with the project off the ground, and then lost him. Maybe they never even heard back from his agent (do directors have agents?).
In any case, they failed to get Fincher. They just got the Planet of the Apes reboots and Cloverfield guy. So they just told him: just try really hard to make a Fincher movie or this exec won’t shut up.
And that’s what this movie feels like. Fincher fanfiction, Se7en with the number filed off.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the director, both the aped and the actual, so it doesn’t ruin the movie. But at times I felt like Matt Reeves wanted to make a slightly-sci-fi film instead, which clashes with the extremely grounded world we get in half the scenes. He loves dark blue-and-orange shots, mostly orange. He loves rays of light and neon shining through fog and smoke. But then we get a laughably over the top gothic cathedral with hundreds of bats hanging from the ceiling hosting Batman’s high-tech batcave. Or his car has a rocket on the back for some fucking reason.
The plot is good if maybe a bit too stretched out. It does deliver on the “Batman as a detective” premise,7 but the simplicity is ruined by Catwoman, who feels wholly tacked on. Both are good actors, and they have decent chemistry, but she just randomly shows up and leaves at key points without significantly contributing to anything except the runtime, which once again is three fucking hours.
The movie also loses all energy once the plot behind the scenes is finally revealed (with the Riddler being an excellent villain before then), and then we have another forty minutes of big action set pieces that The Dark Knight-loving focus audiences presumably forced in (as well as a terribly, terribly unnecessary Joker MCU cameo).
The music is also excellent when it’s properly used, but otherwise repeats the same two main themes over and over and over like we’re watching a quieter version of Oppenheimer. It’s just distracting, and should really have been reserved for the climaxes.
All in all, decent movie, but weird decisions stop it from becoming a classic, let alone a masterpiece like some say.
The Healer Prince
The writing for this House of the Dragon self-insert fic was fairly terrible (poor grammar, zero editing), but I decided to give it a chance anyway.
That was a mistake.
But what could he say? House hated interacting with patients who seemed to be hell-bent on lying over idiotic things. Idiotic things that could cost them their fucking lives.
Gods, he was a healer, not a tax collector. Lie to them as much as you want. Even he did so.
Yes, a character is introduced named Greg House, and that was the point where my suspension of disbelief exploded. Nothing else to say about this mess.
Kung Fu Panda 1 + 2
One of those franchises that everyone watched as a kid or teen but I completely skipped.
The main character is a very fat panda who’s obsessed with the kung fu masters living next door. After he sneaks into their temple as they’re about to announce their next Chosen One, he falls into the middle of the ceremony and gets selected by accident. But there are no accidents, as the Wise Master Who Will Die Halfway Through The Movie says.
The first movie is essentially a big training montage while the Big Bad approaches, but a fun one. Unlike many other movies at the time, but I guess like many Dreamworks movies, the message is not to change yourself, but find your unique strength. Po will never be able to match the other masters, he’s too fat and scatterbrained for that. He instead learns to use his fat to reflect attacks, and imagines food to motivate himself.
That’s a pretty weird and confused moral given two of the lowest points in the first movie involve Po shamefully mentioning he eats as a coping mechanism whenever he’s feeling stressed or depressed. So essentially, Po is keeping up an eating disorder to win? It could have just been about a natural body type or whatever and not be based on unhealthy habits, but they had to put those scenes in.
In the end, Po wins with his unique strengths (the bad guy can’t disable his chakra points because he’s too fat), but he also uses a lot of regular Kung Fu, so the movie is also split between hard mainstream training being the solution and not.
The second movie is supposedly the best in the series, but I felt it was a step down. The main villain is just the classic “become more and more evil to avoid a prophecy about his defeat, which justifies the prophecy in the first place” type guy. He’s making cannons and guns to end the Kung Fu era, and Po has to travel to his city to bring him down. While Po learns about his parents and backstory, it’s all fairly generic, and not much about the installment stuck with me. Very standard approach to a kids movie sequel.
Overall, the two movies are watchable, using Jack Black as the main charater was a masterstroke, and the action is fun enough. I really don’t think they’re a must watch except for cultural relevance, however.
Chicago (the Madoka fic)
The sequel to Fargo (not that one), which I reviewed back in October.
It’s not good. Not as a sequel (it takes place in the same world, but it doesn’t meaningfully continue any plotlines or themes there), or as its own story.
I talked to the author, who tried to convince me I was missing all the political subtext. The main characters were meant to represent political theory concepts, the curtains were pink, and their clashes were philosophical in nature or something.
In practice it’s just a bunch of tweens shooting spells at each other. The text is not good, with most battles falling prey to Bavitz’s Zombie Action Problem, which I coined just now.
I define the problem as every fight scene falling into the same pattern:
Huge forces of many combatants fighting each other.
But the main character is weak and can’t meaningfully influence the battle.
The viewpoint character just runs away, or can only deal small amounts of damage repeatedly, seemingly to no effect.
The environment is dangerous, or many weak enemies are mobbing the viewpoint, or anything that makes the fight seem more chaotic and harder to follow but prevents any progress.
The fight goes on forever until Bavitz gets bored and has a random character finish it with an ultimate move (NOT the viewpoint character), feeling like a cutscene at the end of a bad video game level.
Bonus for most of the fight taking place in the character’s head berating themselves for being weak or cowardly.
This applies to not only Chicago, but the first arc of Fargo, the final fight in Modern Cannibals, almost every fight in Cleveland Quixotic. We’re lucky neither MC nor Cockatiel x Chameleon are action focused.8
Weirdly, maybe because Bavitz’s stylistic flaws hadn’t fully set in yet, the second and third arcs of Fargo do have some pretty good magical girl action scenes, JoJoesque fights that don’t drag too much and are based around figuring out weaknesses and novel power applications. Chicago should have been more like that, but barring a cool tense scene atop a yacht, and the last fight before the horrible final arc, it’s all zombie slop.
Another big problem is seemingly intentional. Bavitz didn’t want to write too many characters despite the story being incredibly long and spread over many locations. So the arcs all feature the same fifteen or so characters in different permutations of heroes and villains. This leads to a few of the main heroic characters turning villains in the final arc with no significant setup. It’s less economical and more baffling.
Overall, there isn’t much value to be found in Chicago.9 Together with Cleveland Quixotic, it will remain a black mark in Bavitz’s decent record. Let’s hope the Pokemon fic is good…
A Precise Note
Despite not being the author’s intention, this is pretty much a “rational fic” for My Hero Academia. The main character, Izuku, has no powers (no “quirk”) in the original anime, and needs to get handouts from the world’s best hero in order to be able to save anyone. With almost unlimited power, he decides to not alter the baffling status quo (yeah let’s just have superheroes in tights fight supervillains in tights, and this will fix society) in any way.
In this fic, Izuku does get a quirk, “Precision”, which the fic defines as being able to be precise at any action he executes. I’d say that undersells how OP it is, though. I’d call it “Perfection”, and despite what you might think it’s not just a mental power. Izuku can perfectly control his own body and spend seemingly infinite energy, with the bullshit stopping only at not gaining superstrength or laser beams or whatever.
The thing is, the fic is not really concerned with fighting villains, and thank god for that because there wouldn’t be much challenge. Instead, Izuku starts applying the power to his own brain, and he realizes he should be fixing society so that there aren’t any pressures to become a supervillain in the first place (his final goal being removing quirks from the world). Messing with his brain does have the unfortunate side effects of a moral slippery slope he’s currently sliding down.
Many characters in the original are reimagined and revamped, and the world is generally smarter. Unfortunately, and bafflingly considering its home at Fanfiction.net, this fic really gets horny in places, and not in ways that mesh with the narrative. MHA fic writers’ favorite waifu Himiko Toga is there for absolutely no reason, and the main character seems to be building an unjustified harem.
In the end, I really wish the story would focus on its plot instead of digressing towards the main character’s romantic conquests, but it’s otherwise a solid fic. Just Deserts is still better, though.
Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole
This is a short story, a response to the Ursula Le Guin story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. It requires at least a familiarity with the original.
It’s a funny, if annoyingly written twist on the formula, very reminiscent of Scott Alexander’s short stories. I don’t have much to say about it, it won’t stick around in my memory, but it was a fun experience.
How to Train Your Dragon*
Another movie watched in my “watch Dreamworks films I skipped” event.
It concerns this guy named Hiccup (it’s a town tradition to give people shitty names) raised in a Viking village where dragons regularly sweep down, steal food and generally fuck people up. There’s naturally a culture of dragon slaying above everything else.
Hiccup is just a blacksmith’s apparentice, since he has no interest or ability in the dragon slaying part, despite being the town leader’s son. While forcing himself to fit in for his sake, he makes a machine that brings down a dragon.
As he tries and fails to bring himself to kill the dragon, he befriends it instead. They’re a lot like cats, really. The newly named Toothless is missing part of his tail, so Hiccup builds a complex prosthetic that he can use as he rides it, in order to help it fly.
Eventually, his adventures are found out, and Toothless is captured by the vikings, with Hiccup having accidentally revealed that his dragon knows the way to the nest. The town leader has always wanted to genocide all the dragons in order to stop the attacks, so everyone sails there.
Hiccup manages to convince the other kids in the village that dragons aren’t that bad, and he gets a few new dragon riders to accompany him to the nest, where they free Toothless and fight the big dragon that was actually just hypnotizing small dragons into attacking the village to bring it food. How convenient.
The epilogue shows that Hiccup lost a leg during the big fight, and he has a prosthetic to replace the limb, just like Toothless. The village has accepted Hiccup and integrated dragons into the village, blah blah blah happy ending.
It was pretty good. It’s the rare Dreamworks film that doesn’t desperately try to be funny, and every dragon training/bonding scene is extremely charming. Designs are good, music is good, and the plot is extremely well paced. This would have joined Shrek as one of my favorites if I had watched it back then.
If I was forced to offer a criticism, it’s that, while Hiccup’s main motivation is pacifism, understanding the dragons and establishing friendship with them, he sure doesn’t mind attacking and killing a big dragon at the end without once trying to understand it. It’s easily forgivable, since I can see kids being mad there’s not a single big dragon fight in the entire movie otherwise.
After looking at scores I don’t plan on watching the sequels (or any more Kung Fu Panda movies for that matter), but feel free to try to convince me otherwise in the comments.
Cave Story Multiplayer
Cave Story is a classic game I’ve played a million times. I played this free mod of the original up to Sacred Grounds (it turns out ten years is long enough to lose all muscle memory required to not die instantly), taking advantage of the co-op elements, and I highly recommend it, the game is far more fun when you can divide and conquer.10
Sadly, the Quality-of-Life features of the Plus release are missing, but there are a few new additions, like long/high jumps, and some other features to help carry less skilled players through the game.
Whiplash★
This is a movie about the toxic mindset of wanting to become “the best” at something. I could have related more to this movie if the subject matter wasn’t jazz drumming, one of the most boring and outdated motivations ever.11 I guess that adds to the darkness of the plotline, the fact that even if he becomes the best, no one except other jazz musicians will care.
Our main guy is targeted by a jazz conductor who runs his class like a slavemaster, down to actually beating his students. It gets a bit silly with all the escalation, especially around the middle half of the movie, and it only recovers near the end. To be fair, that end sequence would be worth any amount of boredom.
Overall, the idea was great, the acting was excellent, and the music was good for jazz, but the middle drags it down from perfection. Go watch it anyway, it’s hard to see focused movies like these that aren’t pure artslop nowadays.
With Chicago done, my long-term backlog is actually empty at last,12 but this doesn’t mean no reviews. I’m currently watching 3 Body Problem (the Netflix adaptation), and I have my methods for retrieving the best ongoing fics from any number of webfic forums. Have no fears, I’ve got story reviews for years.
I also wrote a new AI-related article about 3D generation you can read if interested.
I’m not going to explain it again, check last month’s review post.
I really, really, really can’t stress how dumb Code Geass canon is. Absolutely none of the backstory makes sense. Most of the frontstory doesn’t make sense.
Mind you, my favorite comedy TV show is Community, and I see basically no Seinfeld DNA in that. If you’re interested in Seinfeld’s DNA, you should probably watch Bee Movie.
Admittedly, the “El Rata Alada” “““riddle””” was fucking terrible. Batman had one good line about forensics, one good espionage scene, and the other two hours involve solving Slylock Fox newspaper puzzles.
I’ve been informed days later that the riot scene at the end of CxC absolutely fits the definition. It’s terminal.
Notably, I was prepared to write a full review, but my notes consist of a single vaguely positive sentence about the first chapter. The fic failed to give me anything complex to think or write about.
But you can’t divide and conquer fucking Grasstown, fuck that level and fuck Jellyfish juice.
My fanfic concept Wavedash would be about a speedrunner targeted by a whale donator who keeps forcing him to attempt WRs for harder and harder games. "There are no three words in the English language more harmful than 'save the animals”.
The novel Heroes Die that I was begged to give a try is effectively abandoned unless I feel a strong need to revisit it in the future. I’ll give up and review it in… let’s say June if I haven’t continued it.