Reviews for May 2024
I'm not reviewing Eurovision★ but you should watch that next year, it's very fun
Welcome back. I read a couple Celestial Grimoire stories this month, and even two “tech demo” stories by an author trying out his brand new Celestial Reliquary system.1 They were mostly terrible and my reviews would be boring, so I think what I’m going to do instead is eventually write a post about the whole Celestial zeitgeist, like I did with Pokemon fics a while back. Stay tuned for that.
Let’s review the rest of things I watched, played and read instead. God, too many of these are self-inserts. I’m sorry.
I’m also trying a new thing this month, adding a black star ★ if I strongly recommend the item to everyone, and an asterisk * if I strongly recommend it… but with an asterisk.2 Maybe it’s only for fans of the original media, or has a potential dealbreaker. I’ve heard many people just skim these posts and read what jumps at them, so this will make that easier. Unfortunately, this month mostly sucked for me, so I won’t get that much use from the stars. I’ll see if I can retroactively add them to previous posts.
★: Let Me In 2, Furiosa, Groundhog Day, Fight Club, Let the Right One In
*: Friday Night Funkin’, The Last Vampire on Earth
Previously, on Record Crash…
These are the Voyages
Worm fics are usually the most predictable stories ever. Taylor gets a different power, maybe fights Lung, maybe dates Amy despite being straight, definitely meets Tattletale who displays a vulpine smile at some point (the specific word is important). And it escalates from there.
This fic is fairly unique, though. Taylor doesn’t even have powers. This is a sequel after the end of the original story, but instead of being sent to a different Earth, she’s sent to the Star Trek universe.
The story begins some time after that’s happened, skipping over the boring discovery process, and presenting us with some interesting mysteries instead. Why did Taylor go through a court martial? Why did she decide being a member of ship security was to be her life’s mission in a moneyless utopia?
This is pretty much “just” a slow burn character study, if a decent one. There’s an actual plot, just (I think) intentionally boring: Taylor is part of a mission to recover and fix up some old ships after the continuous wars of Star Trek canon have dwindled their numbers.
However, the focus is all on Taylor, her personality, and how she deals with things. It wasn’t my favorite fic this month, but I liked it. It’s a hard sell if you don’t care about her, so I’d have to say don’t bother if you don’t like Worm, and if you don’t have at least some minor knowledge of Trek.3
Kris Simulator
I reviewed Incidence (another Deltarune fic) last month, and saw this recommended in the comments.
“Hmm,” the reindeer thought. “Maybe we could get some drinks. That’ll calm us all down.”
I’m not editing anything, all the dialogue is in italics, like the writer’s a child with no knowledge of literary standards. Judging by how terrible the rest of the story is, I’m probably right. Fuck that commenter for wasting an entire hour of my life as I waited for it to get good.
Friday Night Funkin’*
Zoomer content ahead (and behind, I guess?). Friday Night Funkin’ is a love letter to the Newgrounds era of Flash animations, created by people who weren’t even alive back then. The genre is rhythm game, Stepmania/DDR with a storyline, and the story’s about a teenager who wants to bang his girlfriend but her demon parents won’t let him. There’s frequent crossover levels with other characters of Newgrounds fame.
It’s fairly good within the constraints of the premise. Good animation and music, even if the gameplay is hard as balls. The game has been in development hell for ages, mostly because they want like 50 levels and they took years to make 8. I gave them money for it on Kickstarter, too, because I’m an idiot (I famously gave money to the Homestuck grifters back in 2013). They recently and surprisingly released an update, so I replayed the entire thing. I had a lot of fun doing so.
I recommend it if you’re into rhythm games. If you’re just into the ancient Flash culture, watch the cutscenes on Youtube or something.
Groundhog Day★
I’m sure there were time loop stories before this, but Groundhog Day definitely pushed them to the mainstream.
The plot hasn’t aged super well, or maybe I’m tired of “a successful romance means your life is fixed” style plots (why did whatever force controls the loop not let him out after he intentionally saved multiple people’s lives, and instead waited until he creepily lucked into the one 24 hour run that made a girl fall in love with him?), but the film really works as a compilation of funny scenes built around the premise of being stuck in a single day.
I’m going to leave it here, as enough has been said about this movie over the last 40 years, I’d say. I recommend it.
Hammerkind
A Homestuck fangame, released the very year the comic started, before it got popular, which is fairly impressive. I had to replay it recently for a soundtrack archiving project, and for the first time I actually enjoyed it. Despite being a Game Maker game, the momentum-based combat has a surprising level of depth and a high skill ceiling. There are also a bunch of secrets. Give it a try if you’re a Homestuck fan, but only if.
The Pixie of the Hidden Leaf
Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. Tanya fics just never run out, apparently.
This one is one of those where Tanya is almost never the viewpoint character. It’s actually more of a “main team with a different sensei” type of Naruto fic than a crossover.
It’s competent, without any big flaws, and it kept me entertained, but Tanya wasn’t nearly as wacky as she’s supposed to be. It’s more of a cosmetic self insert than anything deep. Check it out if you’re in the market for more Naruto, I guess, but it didn’t blow my socks off.
Let the Right One In★ + Let Me In 2★
There’s this popular-ish rational fic called Let Me In 2. I’ve been hearing that it’s good for years, but that it definitely requires watching the movie first. I, of course, assumed that the fic would be based on the original movie, and not the shitty american remake starring Chloë Grace Moretz. That’s confusing, so here’s a helpful diagram:
I watched the Swedish movie. It’s obviously better than the remake according to everyone who’s watched both, and based on my quick check of the American remake’s plot, this is a much much darker take on the story. Here’s the trailer of the movie I actually watched.
Our main character is a kid relentlessly bullied at school. This would already be bad enough if he wasn’t living in the most dystopian location on Earth, with short days, permanent snow everywhere and a shitty Eastern European-tier apartment building as a home (it’s just Sweden but the director loves filming it in the most depressing way possible). Our main character loves to fantasize about finally fighting back against our bullies, stabbing trees while saying things like “who’s the pig now?”.
Anyway, he’s definitely not in a good headspace. Then a serial killer and a vampire girl his age move next door. The killer is merely obtaining blood for his “master”, and he’s really incompetent about it. The girl starts befriending the kid, which the latter eats up even if something’s off, because no one else cares the slightest bit about him.
The plot continues developing extremely slowly as everyone tries to cover up their crimes (I consider this a big weakness of the movie, no matter how interesting the subject matter is,4 ten-minute static shots will bore anyone), but the kid eventually finds out about the murders and some details about the girl, but he doesn’t even care that much, leading to two separate highly violent climaxes. I guess it was foreshadowed that he would have no issues becoming a school shooter given the opportunity.
I don’t want to go into the details of the ending, as this movie is worth watching if you like slow burn movies. It’s pretty well shot, the acting is shockingly good for child actors, and there are some cool twists on the formula, even if I was often bored by the pacing. I think vampires are a bit done to death now, so I’m sure it was even better back in the day.
Let Me In 2 is a different animal, quickly becoming one of my favorite fanfics of all time. It starts from the exact point the American remake ended (I wasn’t lost by the differences), which is the same in both adaptations, and deals with the manhunt, as well as the human protagonist’s attempts to make the vampire girl happy.
Beyond a slow part around 30% in (a period with a notable lack of Alvirez, an excellent original cop character), I have nothing bad to say about this, which is rare. The author watched the movie over and over and over until he got it, judging from his postscript’s analysis, and the result is not only a good fanfic, but a perfect sequel, answering payoffs I didn’t even know were set up by the original book and both movies.
Good dialogue, good original elements (people often say Let the Right One In is the best piece of vampire media, but you haven’t seen the vampire stuff in this one), and an amazingly well foreshadowed ending. It’d be a crime to spoil you on plot details, so just trust me that it’s worth it. Watch either movie, and jump right into this.
Fight Club★
I’m going to tell you to watch this film now if you haven’t already, no matter your background.
I hear the world wasn’t ready for this movie when it came out, leading to zero Academy Awards. It’s not a super focused movie, in a good way, but it concerns a disenfranchised man dealing with late 90s office culture by starting a fight club and eventually an anti-society cult. A lot of violence and general irreverence for popular culture. Awesome, funny dialogue, music, and, barring a SINGLE segment in the middle where jokes stop and Fincher tries to drag out the main mystery a bit too long, perfect pacing.
It’s almost, almost the perfect movie. I like The Matrix more, but this is top 5 at least. Glad I rewatched it this month, because it’s even better when you’re the right age.
Harry Evans and the well-lived death
True fans will remember when I reviewed that one “Pokemon Joey self-insert with a Rattata-based team” fic. This one is by the same writer. I expected some crack from this, but I couldn’t be more wrong.
From paragraph one, you can see why:
All stories have a beginning. The issue is in determining where it lies. Does the life of a tree begin with the conception of the acorn, or when it becomes a sapling? Do the characters of a book already exist before the first chapter is written, in the mind of the author? Where does one draw the line between the blurry boundaries of continuity when looking at something as complex as a human life?
Why the fuck is this so pretentious? It’s 2024, you’re writing Harry Potter self-insert #2598538. Get over yourself, Rattata guy.
For the first 25 or so chapters the narration is like this. Convinced of its own greatness and seriousness, while the content of the fic is only average coming-of-age stuff. However, this an Alternate Universe with plenty of changes to HP canon, and that’s a fun element.5
In fact, to my surprise, as the story went on, I found myself more and more interested. The author was visibly getting better at writing every chapter, and they seemed to be developing a flair for page-turners. It never gets great, and it’s not super original, for sure, but it becomes good popcorn fiction.
I admit I was even tempted to pay money to read advance chapters, which is really rare for me, but in the end this is solidly guilty pleasure territory. I wouldn’t even recommend this unless you can still stomach scenes of people slowly learning Harry Potter magic.
A Gensokyo Transmission
Once in a while, I try something completely out of my comfort zone. I’ve never listened to Welcome to Night Vale, the 2013-Tumblr-beloved kayfabe radio show, and I’ve only played a Touhou game for like a couple hours in my life.
This isn’t a crossover, exactly, but it’s basically the former’s approach to the latter, plus an unhealthy amount of slice of life shenanigans. The author is transported to the Touhou world, and decides to hire fairies and use some magical devices to report on the incidents currently happening in Gensokyo, in an artsy and eclectic style that I assume comes from Night Vale.
His objective isn’t just to shoot the shit, he’s subtly trying to exploit the belief-based mechanics of the Touhou universe whenever he can, to make the individual fantasy entities less mad at each other and at the unlucky humans living in fairy land.
The concept is neat, but in practice it devolved into unfunny anime slapstick/slice of life whenever it found the slightest excuse to do so. While the broadcasts of our main character often accompany the beginning of chapters, the brunt of the word count is other people’s reactions, which is okay when it’s the first time, but gets boring when it’s the 20th Patchouli chapter about her sitting around and not doing anything about them. Heavy “cute girls doing cute things” energy coming from this.
I’m sure the fic has an audience that will enjoy it, probably the same people obsessed with the Touhou characters and lore, but I’m not it.6 I don’t regret checking this out, though.
A Second Sunrise
The subtitle “Taiwan of 2020 sent to 1911 with its modern technology” says it all. Unfortunately it says it all.
The characters and plot are dreadful. Like, the author seems to be completely obsessed with the logistics of the military curbstomp that ensues, and cares about nothing else. This is a writer playing with his toys and forcing you to watch. Skip.
The Last Vampire on Earth*
Neil Breen movies have been consistently disappointing in the “being able to understand the plot” front,7 so this was a breath of fresh air.
The story is simple. It’s just so stupid. The title tells you a lot, but it plays like a cheap ripoff of Twilight in college, with our titular vampire studying Hematology (classic major) and our main heroine suffering from AIDS.
You didn’t misread that, and no, this isn’t an intentionally bad movie. The writer thought they had something going there.8 At one point our vampire is almost burned at the stake by Jehovah’s Witnesses while sad music plays.
The cinematography and editing are unironically decent, while every other aspect of production like acting and especially sound fucking sucks. My theory for this disparity is that they hired a good music video director and they gave the areas he was weaker in to complete amateurs.
Assuming you can get past the terrible sound, this is one of the best “so bad it’s good” movies I’ve ever seen. Watch it with friends and don’t tell them about the AIDS.
Technomancer in MCU
May I quote the top Royal Road review?
Promising idea,9 but badly written. 1.5/5.
Yeah, if even Royal Road gives it 1.5 stars, you know it’s fucked. It’s about a Gary Stu who saves everyone during the alien invasion of the first Avengers movie, then styles on the Hydra illuminati in a really cringe way. There’s really nothing of worth in this fic, which honestly I should have gathered from the title.
But sometimes there are hidden gems everyone but me misses…
The Other Brother: Adam Dallon
Worm features the Dallon family, superheroes with a public identity, most notably technically-adopted future incestuous supervillain Amy, as well as the future horrible-sequel-protagonist Vicky. This adds Amy’s OC biological brother to the mix.
He’s got a low level power that he can’t figure out how to really use. He awakened it really late, and his family has always treated him like a black sheep for not being able to join them in patrols, so he’s hiding his power from them. He’s got a ton of issues, honestly, the most over the top edgy teenager you can think of, which is a deal breaker for most readers. In fact, half the forum thread is people complaining that he’s unlikable, and you can’t have an unlikable protagonist.
I disagree, though, because the fact he doesn’t know what’s good for him is the only reason he takes a criminal path, very slowly building a gang from the bottom up. There are a lot of scenes featuring shitty low level crime and the personalities around it, reminiscent of the best parts of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad and the like.
Now, don’t get too excited by that comparison. The writing of this fic is merely average. Adding to that, if Amy was into incest (well, technically she’s not biologically related but you know what I mean), this protagonist is way worse. He seems to have a bizarre complex regarding every female family member, and while Worm is actually more explicit than this fic so far, I think the writer of this is eventually magical realming us. Just a weird experience overall. I still enjoyed the crime parts, but you’ll have to put up with the weird author/protagonist.
The Emperor’s Soul
I made a deal years ago. Someone would read Ever 17, the best visual novel of all time, and in exchange I’d check out a Brandon Sanderson book,10 a writer I’ve bounced off like five times by now.
I was a bad person and ignored the deal even after the other person played the game, but I was reminded of it recently, and I decided to finally regain my honor.
The Emperor’s Soul was a good choice because it’s a novella, a mere 31k words. It takes place in a world where there’s a specific type of magic themed around Forgery. Have enough knowledge of a material, item, or being, and you can alter them or turns something else into them.
The main character is an expert forger who’s used her talents to steal and little else, leaving fakes in place. She’s eventually betrayed and caught, and the palace court, hearing of her skill, hire her. They have a big problem, the king had a massive injury that left him braindead after a murder attempt, and they don’t want a new king that would replace his advisors. They task her to forge the king into perfect health before anyone finds out. She’ll need to learn every single detail about the king’s life and personality in hopes the magic will stick.
Of course, they wouldn’t want the secret getting out, so she has to find a way to escape in the meantime, before her time limit is over.
I thought it was fine. There’s something about Sanderson’s prose that always fails to keep me interested, and this still applies here. If it wasn’t so short, I probably wouldn’t have made it to the end. The concept is great, but the execution, featuring a lot of sequences about the characters saying how good art is (while we’re staring at words on a page) failed to measure up.
If you’re a Sanderson fan, sure, go for it, but you probably already have. Sanderson fans will read anything.
Mischief Siriously Managed
Okay, so a reader of the Harry Potter books gets put in Sirius Black’s body. This could be a funny idea for a fic, but…
The fic’s biggest issue is its logorrhea. Whenever it’s trying to be funny, the ceaseless redundant internal monologue keeps ruining the comedic timing. Case in point, though feel free to just skim it (bolding mine):
Sirius flopped into a chair in front of Barty's desk, his grin widening as Barty's glare intensified in chilliness, brrr. "Barty, I can call you, Barty, right?" Sirius said, rushing right past the opening of the tosser's mouth, where he was no doubt rushing to say something ridiculous like, certainly not, or, you may address me as Director Crouch. Yeah right, "I need a favor, mate."
Look at that, his eloquence had rendered the man speechless, with his literal jaw dropped and everything, he even had an eye twitch. "Are you having a stroke? Is your nurse around? You old folks got one of those, right? To help you get around, and such?" Sirius blithely continued to piss the man off. In some ways, it's how Barty Crouch Sr expected him to act, so he was almost obliged to entertain himself thusly, and in others, it was much easier to deal with the man when he was knocked straight out of his comfort zone.
Considering that the only times in his life that Barty Crouch Sr would ever get a hard on about something - was for the rules, and that he probably measured said hard ons to make sure they were a lawfully and societally approved erection to boot - It would be of no benefit to Sirius to hold a calm and logical discussion based only on facts. He needed to piss Barty off, so he'd use something else other than ice cold logic for once.
Just as he saw fury building up in Crouch's face, Sirius interrupted again, the director of International Cooperation didn't even seem to notice that his nails dug into his desk as Sirius talked over his attempt to speak, "You see, mate, we really are just the same you and I." Sirius said - with a butter won't melt in my mouth kind of smile, "We're forces for stability and order, people that understand that the Ministry must be a stable and unwavering institution, or we lose the ability to properly guide the British people."
Sirius propensity for bullshit truly was his number two most useful attribute, number one being his suave charm and good looks, of course.
Sirius finally let silence reign long enough for Crouch to get a word in, and the man immediately did so, face reddening, voice harsh, "Stability? Lord Black, I fail to see how you are an advocate of that! Order? Don't make me laugh!"
Just a complete refusal to show and not tell, this fic will always do both.
There are some interesting ideas. Since this is set early in the timeline, we get to meet a few members of the Black family, as Sirius takes it over and gets the main plot started. There’s no Voldemort yet, but he thinks magic society has bigger problems, like widespread racism and so on, so, his goal? Running for Minister of Magic.
This is a very good concept for a fic, but once again, kneecapped by the author’s long windedness and subpar writing. You need snappy, maybe even quippy dialogue and narration if you have Sirius Black as a protagonist, and this author writes like he’s an aged director passionately explaining the character to an actor in the middle of filming.
Get Your Games On
I previously reviewed a Yu-Gi-Oh! fic, of the same installment as this one (GX), I think. It read like nonsense and assumed you had already watched the anime and were an expert in the card game, which are honestly reasonable assumptions to make.
This one was friendlier to the rando reader right off the bat, though. The author makes sure to explain what every card does and why the strategy they’re using works. I was able to catch up to the current chapter without feeling like I was missing anything.
Based on some googling, I think the plot is pretty much a ripoff of the original anime with a self-insert pasted in (guy in magic card school is sent to the class of the losers and has to work his way up, with a shadowy conspiracy trying to attack the school behind the scenes), but it’s fun to see someone repeatedly beat children with cheap tricks.
It’s not the best story ever, but it was an unambitiously decent and enjoyable experience.
A Grafting Guide for Dummies
This is the rare Elden Ring fic, which I thought I’d check out in advance of the upcoming expansion, coming this month!!!1111
I read way too many self-inserts recently, I think. I looked for other stories, I swear. At least this one is original, it’s into the body of a guy who looks like this:
Yeah. He gets a trinket at some point that lets him temporarily become normal sized, but he’s not escaping the premise. In fact, for some bizarre reason, he actually gets into “grafting”,12 his body’s biggest hobby. He also tries to check out what’s going on in the rest of the world I guess.
I struggle at finding more things to say about this story. It really has a simple premise and zero direction or long term goals, which made me drop it eventually. It’s not terribly written, but I don’t see the point, and the circumstances are more than a little depressing. This has been my experience with every single Souls fic I’ve read.
Groundhog Day★
I’m sure there were time loop stories before this, but Groundhog Day definitely pushed them to the mainstream.
The plot hasn’t aged super well, or maybe I’m tired of “a successful romance means your life is fixed” style plots (why did whatever force controls the loop not let him out after he intentionally saved multiple people’s lives, and instead waited until he creepily lucked into the one 24 hour run that made a girl fall in love with him?), but the film really works as a compilation of funny scenes built around the premise of being stuck in a single day.
I’m going to leave it here, as enough has been said about this movie over the last 40 years, I’d say. I recommend it.
Escape from Somnium
I saw the creator release the sprites of this visual novel to archive.org with a permissive license, which was cool of him. I thought to myself: if he did this, the game is probably damn good.
I found an extreme-inside-baseball shitpost instead. This is a crossover between Zero Escape, AI: The Somnium Files, and Punchline, all works by Kotaro Uchikoshi. The latter is an very obscure and very bad anime that was meant to promote a game (also very bad).
This VN has no gameplay, mostly consisting of a bunch of crossover-based jokes, some of which are incredibly saucy for no good reason. I’m one of the hundred people who’s actually consumed all of Uchikoshi’s media, and the exact target audience for it, but even then, I only thought it was somewhat amusing. I can’t imagine anyone reading this review will fit my demographic, but… I guess, if you miraculously did, you can get a sensible chuckle from these 30 minutes of gameplay?
What a Wonderful View
This reminds me a bit of the Back and Forth fic I read a while back. This is a My Hero Academia story, featuring an original character with a neat power (mostly a Vista ripoff), and it lives and dies on that premise.
Sadly, the original character is originally annoying. It feels like sometimes the writer will have her act stupidly or obnoxiously to other people just to generate artificial conflict and scenes. It’s something I expect from soap operas and other shows that don’t have the privilege of long term planning, but the author of this could just sit down and imagine better plots.
On the other hand, Vista’s power was really underused in Worm canon, and it’s nice to see it used to its full potential here. There aren’t nearly enough fights to recommend it on that basis, though. It’s not a copy of canon, since she takes the recommendation exam, and she actively tries to fix Deku’s horrible personality and goals, but I found all the original elements of this fic merely okay. “Merely okay” sums it up.
Furiosa★
This is the prequel to the Mad Max: Fury Road film, which featured a mysterious Furiosa character. This tells #herstory.
I liked it as an action movie, plus as a worldbuilding compendium that fleshes out the previous film. A solid 7.5/10. Why is it not higher? Well, let me use the rest of this review to whine.
Lots of repetitive action: there is a scene where a single vehicle has to climb a very steep sand dune or mountain, making some pursuers lose traction and fall down, and then the protagonist uses the climb as a shortcut. Wait, a lie, there isn’t a scene, there are like four of them. Filmed in the exact same way. A lot of “small vehicles chase big vehicle and break down one by one” scenes, but I guess those were in the original film too, if less noticeable because it was all one big action scene.
Bad character study: the movie is about how revenge is bad, but it tries to have its cake and eat it too by having a revenge fantasy at the very end, which may or may not have happened. Most of the movie is also not in any way relevant to the themes, which is fine by me, but then it tries to make a long, nonsensical dialogue sequence about the themes the climax, which just felt a bit flat to me. Furiosa is not a great thinker13 and neither is the main villain. She also has a proper arc in Fury Road so she can’t have a full one here. I suspect this would make for an awesome double feature, but I’m reviewing the one film here.
Good worldbuilding, but it often merely serves as the background of a scene, rather than being used in clever ways to enhance the action. There’s a minor fight at the new Gas Town, but it feels like every other fight in the movie. Beyond a single shot of a waterfall of bullets at the Bullet Farm, the fact that bullets are made there becomes effectively irrelevant.
But yeah, go watch it anyway, I’m nitpicking a bit. I’d actually recommend watching this one before Fury Road if you haven’t watched the latter yet, might enhance the experience.14
Cerulean Stars
This is a Star Trek: Deep Space 9 crossover with Mass Effect. Only technically one, as the only element that carries over from ME is our self-insert protagonist’s alien race. The story’s subtitle is “An Asari Security Officer in Commander Sisko's Court”,15 and yeah, that’s a fair summary.
It’s less schlocky than it sounds. The species’ quirks mean that the main character is a single mom at the start of the story, for example, which is very original for the self-insert genre.
Unfortunately, all elements in this fic (including that one)16 are a bit half-assed. Remember she’s a self-insert, so she should know how DS9 episodes go. One might even say that’s the whole point of self-inserts. But our protagonist conveniently forgets the details that would most alter the direction of the plot, keeping the stations of canon firmly on rails (yes that’s how the expression works).
Sometimes she does something cool and derailing, like save Kai Opaka’s life. But then Opaka dies anyway to an assassination three chapters later. Some episodes are avoided completely thanks to her improvements to station security (like, basic cameras). But those were already one-offs. You’re missing the wide scale alterations than knowing the entire plot in advance would logically cause.
In the end, I think this fic is mostly an excuse to revisit DS9 and have some novel character interactions, which is alright enough (we never got the DS9 movie and the end of the show sucks, so fans are perennially salty). But I wouldn’t read this fic if you haven’t watched the original show. There’s nothing of value here for Mass Effect fans or general readers.
Seriously, Let Me In 2 was so good. I wish I found something that quality every month. Maybe I should read fewer self-inserts and more movie sequel fics…
So I myself can keep track, they were Weasley is our King (HP), Folklore (Worm), The Celestial Reliquary (BTFS) and Amazing Relics And How to Use Them (HP). I also saw a “Celestial Roulette” fic which combines all the existing celestial systems. But it’s only like 10k words in, let’s just let em cook.
This is technically a Star Trek Online fic, written by an obsessive player. But I found almost none of the game details important to the plot. Mostly it’ll be ship and alien species names you’re kind of meant to know (but critically, the one species that matters is fic-original anyway).
After I looked into the novel, I found they dialed back or removed most of the more unique shit, so that’s a shame. The serial killer is a pedophile and it’s the only reason he’s helping the little girl vampire in the first place. And the little girl… well, check the synopsis after the movie is over.
Some of the elements, like Harry’s last name being Evans because his father is not known (yes, probably for the reason you’re thinking), add to the overall grimdarkness, though.
Note: yes, I was once part of a Homestuck-shitpost-based music team and ended up making a Touhou/Michael Guy Bowman★ crossover song (very long story that this margin is too narrow to contain) which referenced like twenty of the games’ silly titles, but I’m a fake fan who heavily used Google.
I watched Double Down, his first movie, this month, but it’s nothing to write about, literally. He was already hard to understand before he brought dream scenes to the mix. Fateful Findings is still the only film of his I’d recommend watching, obviously still for so-bad-it’s-good reasons.
Red Letter Media★ go into the movie’s potential backstory. The movie claims to be based on a book just like Twilight, but the book reads like a copy of the script and might not have existed beforehand.
Is it? Is it really?
Holy fucking shit, I’m jumping the shark. What’s next, Infinite Jest?
Nah I’m not getting paid for this, do check out Dollar Shave Club★★★ though.
In Elden Ring, you can just graft body parts of different humans or even magical creatures (see his left arm there) to yourself with no issue.
Which makes it bizarre that she’s able to make herself a robot arm. She worked a crane and then drove cars for years, so I would expect some engineering skills, but I don’t think that lets you match current roboticists with inferior resources.
Though it might remove some of the effect of discovering the War Boys and Immortan Joe for the first time? I don’t know, I’ve only watched them in one order and can’t light that firework again.
Why make her a single mother if her kid has showed up all of thrice in 30 chapters? You could have created some fic-original episodes from this…
Hi, I am the woman who wrote "Escape From Somnium" (and made the reddit post)!
I am glad you got a chuckle out of it, even if it wasn't what you expected. Thank you for the shout-out!
For a bit of context - EFS was released on April 1st, and my initial pitch was that we would say "WOW! A ZERO ESCAPE X AI THE SOMNIUM FILES CROSSOVER?!" and then it was just... a weird shitpost. Problem is, the /r/aithesomniumfiles and /r/zeroescape mod teams (which I am part of) actually has a relationship with Spike Chunsoft's PR team. We got a review copy of AITSF2 so we could remove spoilers, for example.
Anyway, as a member of the mod team, it would be weird for me to - even jokingly!! - announce a Zero Escape x Somnium Files crossover game. So my hand was forced to announce it as a "fan game", even if that kind of ruined the main joke.
EFS was also done to learn Unity and the Naninovel visual novel engine - my previous experience was with Ren'py, and since we made EFS in less than a month, we didn't have time to implement actual, you know, escape rooms.
Anyway, I hope that explains why the tonal dissonance between what you expected and what you got, even if it doesn't excuse it. Thank you for the feedback and the shout-out, and I hope you have a lovely weekend!!
Sorry I just saw this — I genuinely did not expect anyone to actually talk about this game. I'm amazed!!
Jordan Kurlan Brown "Robotortoise"
It is crazy you bounce off Sanderson when you will literally read anything. Sometimes I feel like Sanderson is writing fanfiction about his own universe, all his characters are tropes and he’ll put them into different AUs, like Sunlit Man being Mad Max, Tress and the Emerald Sea being Princess Bride, and How to Wizard being Die Hard or whatever.
I liked Emperor’s Soul since I unknowingly read it the same day that I visited the National Museum in Taiwan and saw the stamps and scrolls, which is what inspired him to write that novella.
Good movie recs this month. I like the star system.