Reviews for May 2023
The saga continues. Featuring fics for Worm, Mass Effect, Death Note, and Yu-Gi-Oh!
See the previous post, I’m doing these as an experiment, for all I know people will get tired of monthly reviews of trash. Make sure to let me know if you like them!
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.
★: Silent Partner, Unfinished Business
*: Checkpoint One, Till I Change Your Mind
One Card Short of a Full Deck
A crossover between Yu-Gi-Oh! (do fans type that all the time???) and the DC capeshit universe, specifically Young Justice.
If you’ve read a crossover with a card game before, this one won’t surprise you. The main character can equip a few cards and use superpowers based on their effects. If the cards are person-like, he can also directly talk to them. Cards are dropped once in a while, with the character getting small packs from themed decks after choosing a deck, but the details lose me since I’ve never played YGO (that’s how I’m going to type it).
The “gameplay” is good and makes sense (comparatively speaking). There are even regular YGO duels spliced in, tied to the hidden backstory of how he got his card superpower in the first place. Those largely lose me but, presumably, are well written to fans.
The main issue is the main character, and the pacing. Our MC never takes risks, things always happen to him, and everything takes roughly three times as many words to happen as it should. The writer is in love with his objectively boring as shit protagonist:
"I'll let you go first. I suppose you get one kindness before you get knocked off the board," Logain said with as much emotion as a bored teen. I was nothing more than a chore to him.
My death was a checkmark on his 'to-do' list.
"Talk about being turned around," I muttered as I eyed cards I mostly had never seen before as our duel disks flashed with an ominous '4000' Life points.
Oh goodie, my life was quantifiable.
Oh yeah, and there are dumb quips all over.
Plot-wise, there is an element of mystery around the MC himself, but mostly he hangs around the Young Justice cast, sometimes alters canon slightly, then returns back to his own low stakes adventures. Rarely he gets a broken card that fixes problems above his paygrade. Once, his arm gets sacrificed to Exodia. Those events happen maybe once every hundred thousand words.
This one is a pass. Barely above the waterline of readable, and I got nothing from it.
And Nothing of Value Was Lost
You might remember a ASOIAF Jon self-insert from the last review.
This one is even worse, honestly. It takes place long before the canon events of the novels, with an original Targaryen character as the self-insert target.
The writer wants this fic to be one of the “MC masterminds events with a perfect plan until he’s destroyed the white walkers” variety. Unfortunately, his writing skills are not up to the task. What we actually read is a complete idiot falling upwards due to his unexplainable Gary Stu abilities.
Just to put it in context, the first step of his plan is getting second place as a teen in the big Westeros melee. You know, the thing adults usually win for obvious reasons. The next stage of his master plan is facing off the most dangerous and insane dragon and convince it to let him ride it. None of this involves smarts or good character interactions, he just keeps rolling natural 20s when his plans are trash.
I will give this points for being complete, but still, don’t bother.
Beyond Good and Ego
I was like, “yeah this is a Guardians of the Galaxy fic, I can use it to refresh my memory before watching the new movie”.
Oh how wrong I was.
This is written by someone on a drug trip. I could barely get my handle of the plot: Peter Quill is sent back in time to his child body after the “dance off” scene in the first movie. The process reads like stream-of-consciousness, in a bad way:
And as he followed down the path traversing stars towards the apex of his Sign, he started seeing things again. A barbarian conquering the Hyborian Earth here. A convenient night-time assassination against a married couple there. A parentless genius and his next of kin being born into the world while skipping a generation. An implausibly familiar Abilisk shooting out form nowehere in pieces and being knocked away by a cane smack from the old robed Wizard Dude. Whoa! His inner Wise Guy was almost as badass as he was. It was almost enough to distract him from all the other stuff playing, sounding and hologramming its way in an out of being every time he stepped from one star on the path towards the next. He could have sworn he even saw that red-caped Wizard Dude falling sideways screaming at one point. Except he didn't have the cape and didn't look much like a Wizard Dude. Any Wizard Dude. And especially not his inner Wizard Dude, although the latter did seem to shoot the screaming guy a weird look as he fell sideways by. It was a strange – heh, Strange – cross between a teacher that was fondly embarrassed on your behalf even though he wasn't your teacher, and the way his mom looked at him on her deathbed back in the day just before he was abducted by aliens.
His grandfather turns out to be some random alien superhero. At this point I looked at the description, and turns out it’s more of a comics fic despite the fact it starts with an event from the movies.
I tried to press on just in case, but nah. It’s all mostly written in the same style as that big wall of text, and the canonical events I could have theoretically used as grips weren’t a factor.
It’s also very dead, so I don’t feel bad in telling you not to read this.
Brockton’s Zoo of Myth and Legend
Is this the first Worm fic reviewed here? SpaceBattles has a lot of them, and that’s an understatement.
This is the classic OC-self-insert-with-broken-powers type. In this mini-genre, powers usually get stronger with time,1 and this one is no exception.
Our main character gets points to summon new fictional creatures every 1000 words. They are random rolls, so he can get a normal-ass cow or he can get the dragon from Shrek. Yes, that DOES lead to the character often thinking about how shitty his new summon is, pushing over the wordcount and getting something better.
Surprisingly, the writer has terrible luck with the RNG, and it manages not to ruin the story, helped by a big flaw—he’s incredibly uncreative with the tools he’s given. Unfortunately, this review’s running problem continues.
It’s also incredibly annoying to dedicate a few words to a new useless creature so often, and he only starts ommiting or delaying descriptions way into the story.
Halfway through the pacing, he also decides to nonsensically add Dungeon elements. Any cape can go through the dungeon to get stronger, and the core is friends with the main character.
I decided to give it a chance anyway, though you know I skipped those fucking annoying dungeon parts. Master powers of this kind are super rare in Worm fics, which is weird considering that’s what canon has, and though the character is never clever, sometimes the fictional beasts have funny interactions with canon enemies. The writer has a succinct writing style in action scenes which makes them less of a drag to read than most.
Interestingly, this one makes it to the end of the Worm plot AND past it, which is insanely, extremely rare. Just for that I’m going to tell you to consider reading it. Sometimes achievements have to be rewarded. Be warned that it’s still pretty bad.
Till I Change Your Mind*
I’m gonna be a massive hypocrite. I complained about Gary Stus earlier, and I’m about to tell you a story with one is very much worth reading.
Our self-insert protagonist is a krogan, you know, the warlike, relatively unintelligent aliens from Mass Effect that look like this:
He’s also the greatest poet, philosopher, lover the galaxy has ever known. You’d be too, if you were a self-insert sent hundreds of years into the past of canon with full knowledge of the franchise’s discoveries.
We start off the plot some time before ME1. Our MC is being tracked by pretty much every spy agency in the universe by now, given he consistently shows knowledge he shouldn’t have. What doesn’t help is that he’s set his Google Calendar equivalent to public, with predicted events years into the future like “The Shepard is born”. He doesn’t get less blatant when he actually makes it to the Normandy.
Yeah, this is very much a crackfic, but there are funny character interactions, running jokes and hijinks. Just a fast-paced blast to read.
My enjoyment of this story was curtailed by the fact I never played past Mass Effect 1. I’m certain more hardcore fans will love this even harder, and I would recommend that you don’t read it if you don’t have any knowledge of the franchise. The author is also very funny, but not so good at technical writing. Otherwise, full marks.
The Bucket List
I feel confident in summarizing this one as “I can fix him” where the “him” is Lord Voldemort.
The main character is a terminally online writer self-insert that uses (≖‿‿≖)ノ⌒●~* and such as scene dividers. She has the exact personality you can imagine from that, and she’s born as Harry’s twin sister.
She’s a blatant Mary Sue, taking over Slytherin despite not being particularly magically powerful, and making everyone nicer. When she finally meets the Diary’s Tom Riddle, the plot crashes into a poor romance2 and never recovers. Somehow this isn’t a crackfic, everything is taken with the seriousness and gravitas a situation like this doesn’t deserve.
"I never understood the appeal of Quidditch," Tom commented as I dug out a scarf.
"You and me both. But it's good to show support."
"Why?"
"Because it's important to Draco, and Draco's my friend. It's his first training session, and it would be supportive to attend."
Tom didn't respond, but I could sense his apprehension and confusion. He had already seen the dynamics of the Slytherin House and previously commented I reminded him of himself.
"He already obeys you."
"I am the leader of the Slytherins, but I am also his friend."
"That does not make any sense."
"It's not an oxymoron, Tom."
His magic lashed out in irritation, stewing over my words even as he told me in a honey coated tone, "Of course. You're right Rosie. I've spent so long in that lonely diary my mind must be in a trundle. I hope you'll be patient with me."
"Certainly, Tom."
Ugh. Tom needed a job as one of those people who made audio books. His voice was like goddamn butter when he wanted something. This was going to be fun.
This is one of those fics where I didn’t give up early on and really should have. There were so many red flags. It was relatively entertaining early on, but you’re going to get frog boiled. Avoid.
Checkpoint One*
A Gamer Harry Potter time loop fic. Also the crackiest crack you’re ever going to read.
No one acts in character, and the writing is trash, but the author gets slowly better and the situations funnier.
The main conceit is Dumbledore tying Harry’s soul and his own to a specific point of time, so they’ll keep returning there after they die. To motivate him, he also gives him a device that records Harry’s progress. It includes some magically generated side quests, like “Learn all Dark Magic spells”.
Harry instantly becomes an achievement whore, and ignores the “main quest” completely. Dumbledore poorly tries to keep him on track, even though he’s often manipulated to just get one thing slide, and then Harry will actually kill Voldemort.
June 24, 1995 (Death counter = 3)
Harry didn’t even wait for Dumbledore to speak. He lunged for the Headmaster’s desk, grabbed the handheld device, and pressed the button on the side. His heart thumped madly as it took a few seconds to power on. What he saw made him feel physically ill:
QUEST FAILED: KING OF THE WORLD (Win the Quidditch World Cup.)
“NOOO!” Harry screamed with all his might. He threw the device as hard as he could against the wall, shattering it into a million pieces. “DAMN IT!! I WAS RIGHT THERE!”
“It was incredibly close,” Dumbledore said with a patronizing smile. “Instant replay confirmed that the Snitch’s shell avoided flesh contact before you died. I tried to petition the International Federation to award you the win posthumously, but they wouldn’t allow it.”
Harry continued to spout every curse word he knew, throwing objects around the office as hard as he could. He hadn’t even been this mad the last time he trashed Dumbledore’s office during his first life; right now he legitimately wanted to break everything in sight. He ripped books from their bindings, smashed Sneakoscopes like brittle candy, upended Dumbledore’s desk like a flimsy toy. He even yanked the Sword of Gryffindor out of his glass case and began stabbing portraits of the highly-affronted former Headmasters.
Dumbledore calmly waited until Harry had run out of objects to destroy and energy to continue his rampage. “I don’t want to say ‘I told you so’, Harry,” he said cautiously. “But you would have had a much easier time winning the World Cup if we’d defeated Voldemort first.”
Don’t expect tight plotting, just many really funny situations, and it’s actively updated to this day. Heartily recommended on that basis.
Accio Butterflies
Another Potter original character self-insert. Made slightly original by the fact he just goes to Dumbledore and tells him everything.
Made extremely boring by the fact he just keeps his head down for the next seven years and doesn’t do anything useful.
Made slightly original again by the fact the writer is autistic, and writes that into his self-insert.
"Have you gone to Madam Pomfrey? You might be ill or cursed or something. I've never heard of anything like that, but I suppose it could happen..."
Bill trailed off as I shook my head furiously.
"No, I know what's wro— I mean, what the cause is. I might actually go and see Madam Pomfrey about it, maybe magic has thought of something Muggles haven't. Anyway, it's... an effect of something called autism. It's pretty misunderstood even among Muggles, though maybe there's a different name for it here?
He ends up needing remedial lessons at potions and astronomy. But the disorder just allows the writer to go ham with avoidance of social interaction and makes this incredibly boring to read.
It doesn’t apply as universally as Yudkowksy thinks, but his old adage “if you give Harry a lightsaber, give Voldemort the Death Star” applies here. There’s no reason for this to be a story in the first place, with so little challenge, and no reason for you to read it.
Understanding Does Not Presage Peace
Look, I know there are a ton of self-inserts in this review, but sometimes I like to read a few in a row, you’re going to have to deal with it.
This one takes us to the world of Naruto. But not to any known character, nor any ninja OCs. To the body of a random merchant with no powers, who decides to uplift the setting.
Unlike the previous fic, he doesn’t use this as an excuse to avoid interacting with canon. Naruto barges into his life, and our MC, knowing the setting, knows to treat him more nicely than the rest of the village. The Hokage realizes this and it eventually leads to the MC presenting his ideas on how to fix Konoha to its leaders.
The fic doesn’t have crazy action, but it has many fresh scenes. It reminds me more than a fair bit of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. If it seems interesting to you too, by all means, read this.
Silent Partner, Unfinished Business★
Death Note Spoilers warning.
We’re ending this with the best. This one is new, I swear. No self-inserts. No Harry Potter, no Worm. Still fanfic I guess.
This author made a rewrite of, and really gets, Death Note. One of the victims of an early arc, Naomi Misora, survives with brain damage in the form of aphasia, and has to figure out who Kira is, and avenge her attempted murder.
Every Death reader usually has the same issue with the manga, which is one of the best characters permanently dying halfway through the story. This fic dodges that awful plot device, and spices up the arc immediately before that. Then it does its own thing.
Beyond the original elements, Naomi is pretty much an original character due to her brain damage, and very creatively written. Her struggles to communicate add some very cool dynamics with the main cast, and Misa in particular gets butterflied into growing an actual personality. Misa’s also involved in a romance that is only slightly hamfisted, but it adds to the motivations for some big heel face turns, so I’ll allow it.
The strongest part of this fic is the mystery plotting. All the mind games from the original are in full force, with some new tricks that not even the original author thought of. While there is ONE action scene that gets way too long for its own good, most of the time this is a pageturner that completely avoids boredom, with an amazing mix of character drama, logical challenges and action. I’m completely ruined by Danganronpa, Umineko, Zero Escape and other mystery fiction, and I still felt that I was slightly too dumb to grasp some twists until I thought very hard about them.
Anyway, I enjoyed this so much that I added it to my permanent recommendation list. If you’ve read Death Note, I recommend it. If you haven’t, I recommend Death Note and then this.
These have gotten really popular recently. Some things you can google are “Celestial Forge”, “Celestial Menagerie” and “Jumpchain”. Great writing tools for novice writers, often bad reading tools for everyone else. 2024 update: I actually ended up writing an essay about these:
One of the funniest things you can do with this fic is try to reconstruct the fans reactions just from the Author’s Notes she keeps leaving. Early on, she mentions she’s going to make Tom Riddle aromantic, and as she increasingly ignores that because she really wants to fuck Voldemort in real life, her A/Ns become increasingly defensive.