Weird month, this one. I was heavily quoted as an authority in web fiction (???) by a relatively popular literature blogger who was himself linked on Marginal Revolution, a popular economist’s blog (???). This provided Record Crash with a lot of new subs, even a paid “pledge”.
Substack told me I could convert that pledge into money by turning on paid subscriptions. I’ve now done that, if only so I can finally officially technically become a Professional Reviewer™.1 Feel free to follow my 2 (two) paid subscribers’ lead if you’re equally rich.
This will have no effect on your experience, freeloaders. Any cash anyone gives me is a donation and I don’t have any plans to start paywalling stuff. If I ever do, you’re allowed to call me a hypocrite for whining about Kindle Unlimited so often.
In case you missed it, I wrote a full-sized review/rant for The Hundred Line, the latest visual novel from the Danganronpa/Zero Escape people:2
Finally, last month I promised I would read at least three trashy Questionable Questing fics. I read eight! And two were good!3 Let’s get to it.
★: Speed Racer, The Rehearsal, Mind Games
*: Burnt Lotus, Top Secret!, Worth the Candle Webtoon
Previously, on Record Crash:
The Ministry of Time (not that one)
There’s a popular book titled The Ministry of Time. It’s a romance novel. It has no relation to this Spanish-produced show. Locally known as El Ministerio del Tiempo, it was eventually picked up by Netflix and remade for other countries.
The show is about a perennially-underfunded and underpaid secret government agency that has to prevent the country’s history from being changed. There are doors that connect points in space and time, say Madrid in 2017 to Seville in 1492. The titular Ministry of Time is built over the biggest hub of portals, but “rogue doors” rarely (and retroactively) manifest around any human-built aperture in any territory currently owned by Spain.4 People crossing these apertures, wittingly or unwittingly, can seriously fuck things up.
The mechanics of this form of time travel are very loose,5 and the show experiments with multiple interpretations before settling on simple Back to the Future rules. This means that the government gets an early warning that something is wrong, and they have a time limit to fix it before the new past is set in stone. When the Egg of Columbus starts being known as the Egg of Lombardi because an Argentinian conspiracy theorist went back in time and decided to steal his thunder… that’s the kind of problem that needs our main characters’ help. It’s fine if they change minor details while fixing it, history is surprisingly elastic.
It’s basically “Doctor Who in Spain”,6 plus some satire of government workers and some local jokes that mostly went over my head. I don’t think it was inspired by the new version of Doctor Who, either, it’s the old one, where real history was being taught.7 It’s that aspect that makes this show watchable, since basically no one gives a shit about Spanish history and the plotlines were all fresh to me. I just learned that the earliest precursor of a spacesuit was invented by a Spaniard, for example.
The show was clearly made and directed by American film fans who need extra sleeves to wear all their influences on. There’s an episode about Hitchcock8 that apes like 20 famous film shots and keeps lampshading the whole affair, and this issue isn’t even contained to film-related episodes. One of the main characters goes by the name Pacino since people kept comparing him to the main character of Al Pacino’s movie Serpico. There are a dozen actor allusions here and there. Mercifully, there’s only one “turns to the camera and makes a meta-joke” moment in forty-two episodes.
The plot is unpredictable, and character relationships can get soap opera-y, but the unpredictability often works in the show’s favor. The vast majority of problems are caused by present-time organized crime taking advantage of the past, but there are curveballs. For example, during my favorite two-parter, Philip II takes over the Ministry of his era,9 fully changing history around him. He abuses the doors to enforce dystopian 16th-century conservatism and the Spanish Empire’s supremacy over all other time periods. He gives himself the title of King of Time, which is a Homestuck classpect if I’ve ever heard one.
The ending is Fringe’s final season compressed into a single hour-long episode, but it’s alright enough. Ultimately, I had some fun with the series, but it’s not great, and I don’t think the average reader of this blog will get much out of it.
And yes, I know there’s another European show about time travel named Dark. Will I commit to watching it? Well—
Mind Games★
Writer Slayer Anderson is best known for the Mass Effect uplift fic Winning Peace.10 I loved that and I love this, even if it’s one step forward and one step back.
Last month I mentioned My Hero Academia fics are riddled with cliches that the Harry Potter fandom managed to eventually overcome, and I hope Just Deserts and this one herald a new era in a similar fashion. Mind Games is a self-insert into a minor character of the manga, Shinso, who has the power to mind control people who respond to his bait.
It’s also a Waifu Catalog fic.
Wait, don’t go. Would it make you feel better if I told you that it’s a subversion, and the main character vows to never use the creepy features? That after 91k words the only hints of romance are excellently executed,11 and he’s only ever used even his canon power in self-defense?
Actually, I missed this myself until just now, but it’s the whole premise:
Attempt at a (mostly) Morally Good individual using the WC.
Only the interesting elements of the porn generator system are here: the points shop, and the corporation itself trying to meddle with our main character’s life.
The plot proper is hard to summarize. It’s about the main guy becoming an influencer in a slightly different MHA from the canon universe, with some hints that eldritch influences are taking it over. Non-diegetically, I think the writer is telling us that despite buying a bunch of overpowered abilities, the world and its threats will keep scaling up.
The strengths of the fic lie within the day-to-day scenes, though. I could take or leave the rest. Ultimately the main weakness of the fic is that Anderson hits gold with the character interactions but he still has to deal with the hooks he’s set up. It doesn’t hamper my enjoyment that much, but it makes it a mess to properly review as a holistic piece of art. Winning Peace was much more focused, and this one is more experimental, I guess?
Anyway, I highly recommend it. An inside baseball fanfic like this one would usually come with an asterisk, but I think the writer does pretty well introducing the MHA concepts to people who know nothing about the franchise.
Mickey 17
Pattinson is such a good actor, and he carried this otherwise very confused film. I say “carried” as if I didn’t still hate the end product.
It takes place aboard a spaceship on a long voyage to a new colony, and it’s about how cloning people to make them work for you is bad, basically. Also, capitalism, religion and (I assume this last one is movie-only) Donald Trump are bad too. I feel it’s too much for one movie to handle, especially given our new pope is surprisingly AI-pilled.
Mickey 17 is ostensibly a book adaptation, but I assume the book was better at walking the line between nonsense parody and serious drama. The movie was just fucking terrible at it. One main reason why I was unable to take the movie seriously was Mark Ruffalo’s really, really bad impression of Trump. It seriously took me out of the movie every time he opened his dumb mouth. Even beyond the impression, the character was nothing but a pathetically simplistic parody of a dumb politician.
I suspect huge swaths of the original novel were left out, and we’re left with a mess of jumbled scenes that still add up to 120 minutes of runtime. The movie has like six different subplots:
Mickey’s past where he and his friend owe money to a mobster. We see the anticlimactic outcome of this one in a throwaway epilogue shot.
Mickey’s painful life as an “expendable”. His lives are used up in science experiments or doing dangerous spaceship stuff no one else wants to do. When he dies, they print a new Mickey.12
Mickey’s drama with a new clone. Apparently every clone has a different personality (the main one is a pushover, the new one is an edgelord), which I can understand as a dialogue generator, but essentially removes all the cool themes around the technology. You’d think the two-clone shenanigans are the point of the film, but they’re completely forgotten by the epilogue. Might as well cut this.
Mickey’s relationship with a woman that treats him like a mentally challenged five year old who needs to be protected, but still fucks him (the movie paints this as a good thing). There’s an additional subsubplot where one other woman wants him, but the character vanishes after the next bullet point takes over…
A very predictable sci-fi tale about the mysterious animals that live on the planet their ship just reached.
Throughout the movie we see sci-fi Donald Trump alienate most of the ship, until the movie culminates in a coup as he tries to kill the (gasp) benevolent sentient aliens that just wanted to help them. Please, just let me reread Speaker for the Dead.
I genuinely can’t understand what people see in this film. Almost everyone loves it, but I only see a poorly executed, muddled satire that doesn’t even have anything real to say. I wish I had rewatched the director’s Parasite or Snowpiercer13 instead.
Speed Racer★
The trailer makes it look like a kids movie. I mean, it is, but…
I don’t think any film has ever been hurt by its release year more. CGI was at that awkward point where it looked like garbage but every movie was still expected to use it. Even then, the Wachowski Pair try their hardest to make every scene look like a Photobashed painting.
It still looks like Spy Kids every so often. But they try, and your admiration will easily let you look past the times when it doesn’t quite work.
There’s one thing that was a legitimate mistake on their part: the constant side-sweeping zoomed-in shots. You can see one at 1:00 above. I know why they do it, thematically, this way they look like you’re seeing them through a car window, racing through real life situations.14 But it’s overdone. I want to say there’s not a single scene in this movie without either one of these or a cheesy wipe transition. I’m fine with crazy artsy decisions, Speed Racer has plenty of others, but none should be reused so often they become cliches within the span of one film.
Beyond that, I don’t have a single bad thing to say about Speed Racer. The beginning montage is so breakneck and experimental that people have compared it to fucking Ulysses. There are a million clever visual things that had never been done in film before. The story is a combination of kid movie plot beats and long, detailed, realistic monologues about corporate stock manipulation. There’s a twist-reverse-twist-reverse-reverse-twist. The characters are lovable underdogs, the villains chew the scenery, John Goodman Is In The Movie.15
When I finished it, I knew it would join my all-time top 10. I instantly wanted to watch it again, I’d never felt that before. This movie gets my strongest recommendation possible, and if you don’t like it there’s something wrong with you.
Awaria
I was a big fan of Helltaker★, the creator’s previous game. That’s even more of a recommendation than it sounds like, considering how much I hate the Sokoban puzzle genre. It was more than the sum of its parts, really good gameplay/music/story/graphics synergy coming from a lone developer.
Awaria isn’t a puzzle game. It’s hard to pinpoint its genre. I think the best I can do is “the rare stressful parts of Overcooked-style time management minigames”, or, maybe, “Binding of Isaac boss fights but you can’t fight back and die in one hit”.16 And that’s the whole experience: you run between machines, spinning plates while dodging enemy attacks. There’s a clip above so you see what that’s like.
It’s down to luck. Sure, you can master the dodging, and I am already pretty good at that due to my thousand hours of Isaac experience. But the machines you need to fix seem to break down at random times, and that can lead to either the level playing itself or being borderline impossible to beat.
Worst of all, even when you get lucky, or even when you play flawlessly, you’re not having that much fun? Maybe the “story” could help there, giving you a goal to aim for, but it’s too simple. Helltaker’s similar plot worked because it was charmingly novel. I’m not getting anything from a repeat.
It’s a weird miss from someone I’d have bet would continue on making bangers forever. At least the soundtrack is still good.
Fun fact: 4chan absolutely abhors this game, but only because the fluorescent green design of every ghost girl “makes the porn look really samey”.
Rogue Trader
I hoped Gothicjedi666 would continue his redemption arc after going from Augment Gothic to The Black Wolf, but he’s regressed instead.
In a way, Rogue Trader is a combination of both stories above. It begins as a lazy high concept “Warhammer 40k ship transported to the Star Trek universe” story. His protagonist has a Celestial Codex that gives him Warhammer-themed powers based on the fic’s word count. Later on, he unlocks “a feudal world”,17 which is, of course, Westeros.
There are a couple interesting elements before that happens. Our protagonist’s ship is initially grabbed by the Caretaker from Star Trek: Voyager, which we get an extended riff on. He isn’t a true believer in any of the WH40K space religion garbage, but has to pay lip service to the Emperor cultists that actually run his giant ship. All this while somehow staying friends with the Federation.
I still found the second half, the Game of Thrones part far better, because our boring protagonist is almost never the focus. Whenever he is, dubcon sex shit crops up.18
I think the Celestial gimmick really helped the writer here. You see, he can either write 10k words where the protagonist is still weak, or write an interlude and have him get powerful offscreen with no significant real time passing. You can guess which one he picks most often.
"How did they make you younger, Kevan?" Tywin asked.
This reversal of ageing was something that greatly interested him. If it were something that could be purchased, then his family would pay well for the treatment.
"They call it rejuvenat," Kevan said. "Lord Thrax's healers used it on me. I am ten years younger than I was—maybe more. No Maester's leeches or potions could ever accomplish such a thing. And they can do the same for you, brother".
A younger, stronger body—yes, he could see the temptation. Yet there was always a price for favours.
"You said you travelled to his star fortress?" Tywin asked.
Kevan nodded and sipped his drink before speaking again.
"They call it The Endless Endeavour. It orbits our world—or so I was told, I confess I didn't understand their explanation of what that meant," the younger brother said. "The world is a globe, I saw that much, the Maesters are right about that".
"Their flying carriages, which are sometimes called shuttles or landers, can go up there and travel anywhere on our world. I saw it with my own eyes," Kevan shard "Tywin... the stories we tell about dragons and magic are nothing compared to what I saw while beyond the sky. They have these giants in blue armour that the Imperials treat as if they are divine warriors of their god. They're supposed to be unstoppable on the battlefield".
A long silence fell over the solar.
"Lord Thrax is going to take this world," Kevan stated "I don't mean conquer Westeros, like he did with the Iron Islands, although I think he could, but he will rule over us. He spoke to me about a position: planetary governor. Someone who would rule in his name, like the Hand of the King, but for the whole world. You are one of the people Lord Thrax is considering for the position".
I previously reviewed a similar Stellaris/ASOIAF cross, The King in the Long Night. I think it tried too hard and was too repetitive besides. For this story, it turns garbage into entertaining popcorn. This helped me make it to the current end of the story and conclude that I still don’t recommend anyone else reads this. It’s definitely the worst thing I read this month, and that’s saying something.
Nin-to-Five
WORLDBUILDING!!!!!!!!!
That’s basically all this story has to offer. Do you want to know how one of those Naruto average-with-a-gimmick ninjas lives his day to day life, how he deals with low stakes missions and earns money? This is the story for you.
There’s just nothing else to it. It’s technically a self-insert, but the protagonist stays on the sidelines and wants nothing to do with canon, and even if he did the titular Naruto hasn’t even been born yet. It’s certainly not getting to that point any time soon, considering the plodding pacing.
The threads for Nin-to-Five are extremely active, but 90% of the discussion is about unrelated aspects of canon and potential romance instead of in-story events. This phenomenon happens on all forum-based fiction sites, and keeps making me pick up stories that aren’t that great, since one of my initial metrics is “does this have many replies and thus readers?”. Usually, I’m able to diagnose these Potemkin Stories a couple chapters in. Usually.
I don’t want to claim this is bad, because it’s technically well written,19 but the author has his priorities skewed. I don’t think his fic is for me. I’m close to slapping an * on this one and saying it’d be fun for background lore addicts, but I can’t really guarantee that either.
The Rehearsal★
Nathan Fielder is a genius. You might know him from Nathan for You★,20 which I always thought was a shitty sitcom until I actually tried watching it.
The Rehearsal is almost undefinable, but the title hints at it: it’s about helping real-life people (not actors) rehearse hard situations before they actually attempt them. This sounds like a serious concept for a show, and the real people certainly think they’re starring in a serious HBO documentary, but Fielder turns it into a surrealist comedy due to the ineffable nature of his approach. He’s paradoxically simultaneously subtle and over the top, always drilling into people’s weaknesses while claiming to help them.
Covid messed with the first season of this new show in many ways, partially in that it ruined the concept of “one topic per episode” three episodes in.21 For most of the season, Nathan was stuck in a house with an insane religious woman as they fake-raised a real-child (this was still pretty good). It also meant that many people don’t even know he made a new show.
I can’t spoil this second season because it’s a batshit premise with an even batshittier execution. It’s roughly as good as the first one and he sticks the landing, that’s all I’ll say. I’m hoping to make a difference here by telling you to just trust me bro, watch it.
Nathan For You might be a good prelude if you haven’t watched him yet, it’s a great introduction to his artistic-comedic style and it’s got more laugh-out-loud moments for sure.
Bunnies, Land Sharks and the Path to Becoming Champion
This one is a bunch of gimmicks piled on top of each other:
Self-insert
But the self-insert doesn’t remember anything except Pokedex data
But the self-insert isn’t the main viewpoint
The viewpoint is Pokemon Diamond Champion Cynthia as a teenager, with the self-insert being her traveling companion
As I write “Traveling companion” I know every Pokemon fic reader is rolling their eyes, and they’re doing so correctly. Yes, it’s only a mildly above-average Journey Fic,22 where the story being cancelled before they make it to their third gym is all but guaranteed.
Something that’s also almost a deal-breaker is the annoying writing style. This writer loves short, redundant sentences:
It stopped, large, glossy eyes focusing on their unfamiliar figures.
Cynthia felt herself relaxing at the sight.
For any trainer overconfidence was dangerous.
In Eterna forest it could be downright deadly.
But a lone Wurmple?
Even if she was being generous, it still wasn't even remotely a threat.
They have some skill in other areas, so this is less incompetence and more an absurd lack of taste. The style might work for short comedic segments or action scenes, but no, it’s spammed everywhere, and ironically makes the story feel slower-paced than it already is.
The region isn’t common in fanfiction, the two leads have real chemistry, the plot SOMETIMES goes somewhere other than “get the next medal”… but right now and at its absolute best it’s still only a popcorn fic I barely avoided dropping. Meh.
Sacrificial hero blessed by primordial luck
What a title.
This fic marks many firsts for me, but the most impressive one is this: it’s a story I heavily suspect was AI-assisted23 that I was nonetheless able to keep reading.
The writing is ridiculously “punchy”, showing many of the tells nostalgebraist mentioned in his AI fiction analysis. It’s suspiciously uneven. Perfect grammar, advanced vocabulary, similes and complex metaphors everywhere… but characters are very simple, the metaphors are a bit out there, it’s often repetitive on both the scene level and the macro level… the writer’s non-story posts always seem written by a different, dumber person… and the fucking title…
The repetition is the oddest part, for sure. Here are some excerpts:
What threw me off more was the way he looked around, like the lockers themselves were whispering threats in his ears. Constant flinching. Eyes darting like he was scanning for snipers. It wasn't normal. I'd seen paranoia before, but this was something else.
I was pretty sure he thought the shadows were out to get him.[…]
He looked like he hadn't slept in days, eyes darting between the windows and the corners of the room like he expected the walls themselves to lunge at him.
[…]
He was chewing the end of his pen and glancing toward the windows like whatever was bothering him might actually just climb in and say hello.
[…]
He kept glancing at me, then around the room like he expected the ceiling to collapse.
All of these are from the same chapter, about the same character, but paragraphs apart.
Maybe I should give you some grounding. This is a Percy Jackson fic, a franchise I know absolutely nothing about except that its fans will suffer terrible live adaptations forever.24 I thought I’d be fine reading this, since the protagonist of this one is an isekai’d rando that has nothing to do with the titular Percy. The plot of the books surely couldn’t play into it too much either, since this starts off with a road trip from Alaska to New York,25 and our main character has the Celestial Grimoire, giving him new powers every few chapters.26
Yeah, the setup is slop. Is the writing *AI* slop? Even after catching up I don’t know for sure. Charitably, it heavily reminds me of the (worst) books I read during my Young Adult fiction era (when I was a Young Adult). So maybe our guy is taking a lot of “inspiration” from them but lacks skills of his own, accounting for the unevenness?
I’m definitely not claiming the entire story was made by AI, that wouldn’t make any sense. It’s internally consistent if episodic, and obviously you can’t have the AI do Grimoire rolls. I think what’s more likely is the guy is typing first drafts on his phone that he then tells the chatbot to “lightly” punch up before publishing.
Is that tolerable? I guess, since I kept reading. AI writing is morally acceptable to me, my only issue is if it sucks, and it seems to have helped here if anything. Uh, not that I would recommend you read it.
Hopemaxxing
Hey, I had never read a Superman fic before,27 unless Red Son counts, or playing a couple rounds against his Injustice version in a fighting game tournament. Both of those show up in this fic, luckily.28
A young Clark Kent gets an invitation to attend the Japanese school from My Hero Academia, whilst he wrestles with control over his powers Smallville-style.
This fic marks many seconds for me—it’s actually by the same guy who made the previous, potentially AI-assisted fic.29 I wrote that review before reading this story, so I’m not rewriting my uninformed speculation above, but Hopemaxxing’s thread contains a very useful clue.
He further claims he doesn’t use AI, but I don’t believe him. I think this is the answer: the guy writes a fully unedited block in Portuguese, tells a good AI to translate it, then gives it a final editing pass himself. Whether he gives the instruction to attempt to punch up the narration or the AI does it on its own because it thinks it’s an improvement, the end result’s the same. That would account for pretty much everything odd going on.
There isn’t much else to say about this story. The focus on canon-if-unexplored MHA situations grounds it, at least compared to the Percy Jackson fic. It’s less crazy and less sloppy, and as I mentioned last month I’m desperate for utopian stories with good aligned characters now that I’ve run out of Star Trek.30 A Superman story does the job.
The Lighthouse
Pattinson is such a good actor, but… uh, in this one movie he’s putting on a variety of terribly fake accents and playing second fiddle to Acting GOD Willem Dafoe.31 I can’t embed a video example, because A24 seems to have draconian policies about that, so just click here.
The film is about a guilt-ridden Pattinson as he tries to survive his month long shift at a lighthouse in the middle of nowhere. His only company is a cantankerous, possibly crazy old man. It’s a claustrophobic situation, and only the two get any speaking lines in the whole thing. It’s only okay.
I swear I’m not trying to be a contrarian here. I understand what people love about this movie, and I overall enjoyed it, but I consider it fairly forgettable and kind of unimpressive? The (literally dark?) comedy is a strong positive, for sure, but not quite good enough to justify the 110 minutes of runtime.
Maybe this director puts a lot of effort into historical realism and symbolism32 that do absolutely nothing for me. On the object level, if we looked only at the script, this would obviously be classified as Horror, but it’s not scary in practice, just loud and weird.
I don’t recommend against it, either. It’s completely possible you’ll enjoy this if you’re the same type of person as Eggers. For me, this was only a damning indictment of his filmography.
Worth the Candle Webtoon*
There’s now a comic adaptation of Worth the Candle, that one amazing web serial about a guy trapped inside a mishmash of his own RPG settings. The comic is basically as faithful a retelling as it gets: 1. it’s VERY wordy, and 2. it starts with the worst arc ever.
This means that, despite the overall pretty nice quality33 combined with a reasonable weekly update rate, it’s definitely not going to be as popular as the other “webtoons”.34 This is a bit of a shame, since I don’t want it to be cancelled, so I’m reviewing it a bit early—Grak, the final member of the core cast, just got introduced—as a rare example of blatant shilling.
(Speaking of shilling, ancient work by the same writer Dark Wizard of Donkerk ALSO got a comic adaptation, but I didn’t get around to reading it yet.35 It’s my second favorite novel by him, it’s wayyy more traditional and accessible than WTC, and, unlike its webtoon, will not even get continued if it doesn’t pass this “Canvas” test round. It seems metrics like follows and comments are what matter there.)
The people who make this webtoon are mostly unknown. There is only one personal fact I know for sure: Fenn Greenglass is the waifu of at least one team member. She’s featured more often than the main character, she gets the most detailed facial expressions, and, while Juniper’s lines often get cut or abridged for pacing, I’m pretty sure Fenn gets close to a 100% verbatim rate.
I’m enjoying reading each new chapter every Wednesday, but I mostly recommend it to existing Worth the Candle fans. If you’re not one, you can give it a try if you really want to, but be warned the zombie arc at the beginning really, really sucks. The quality jump once it ends reminds me of Parks and Recreation Season 1→2’s, it’s that sheer. It’s my personal dream that Alexander Wales George Lucases the hell out of it in the inevitable anime adaptation.36
Top Secret!*
I’m embedding that specific trailer because it has “Peter Cushing” in the title. A guy who shows up for maybe one minute of runtime. Imagine being a Star Wars fan.
This is a follow-up (not a sequel) to Airplane!, which is one of the funniest movies of all time. I’d say they’re roughly equivalent in wit, but the first specializes in funny dialogue and this one in genius visual gags. I seriously admire the latter,37 but I have to admit I’m more a fan of the former.
I guess a disaster movie is also easier to follow than whatever the fuck this is. It starts off as kind of an anachronistic Nazi spy movie mixed with an Elvis parody (???), but it goes places. I can see the nonsense plot being abrasive to many viewers, and I often felt myself tuning out of the musical numbers and exposition about whatever the bad guys are doing. Yes, there are always gags in the background, but you can just… have both? Good, entertaining writing AND funny background stuff?
Still warrants a soft recommend. I think it’s a bit hit-and-miss but it’ll be more often a hit for most of you.
Look What You Made Me Do
A self-insert into the Scarlet Witch from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, right before she becomes relevant to the plot.
It’s a frustrating read. I will give it one thing: it’s one of those Gender Inserts but it doesn’t devolve into a myriad of awkward conversations and zero plot advancement.
If anything, this has too much plot? The issue is that the self-insert is really histrionic and incompetent. She tries to fixfic everything, but always makes snap decisions born from fear, which end up having dire consequences. These big decisions happen every single chapter.
She started out by making an enemy out of every magic user in the world. By the point I dropped the fic, she had actually managed to leverage her godly knowledge into making the Ultron situation worse than in canon.
Someone recommended this one in the comments. I went back to look and they called the story a “tragedy”. I don’t think it goes that far, the word implying a degree of intent I’m not sure is truly there. To me, it feels more like the premise (one of the most powerful MCU characters knows everything that happens) is an auto-win, but the author desperately wants to keep the story going.
It’s like a comedy of errors, but not actually funny.
Can A Drug Dealer Be a Superhero?
I’m not sure he can. This fic is strange.
It’s bad, I can tell you that right now. But I find it impossible to evaluate what the writer was going for with the protagonist.
Our guy’s superpower is generating small amounts of chemicals from his skin,38 so it’s understandable he ended up as a drug dealer. He starts off as a criminal (obviously) who happens to save a superhero on his way to prison. He’s like “I don’t hate this” and ends up joining the group that becomes the Teen Titans, that one DC teen superhero show with Robin and Raven.39
So far this is almost standard. A good excuse for the main character to previously be evil, a good excuse for him to become good… but the execution is bizarre. This guy is messed up, evil in the most pathetic ways. He chooses his room’s floor to maximize the chances he sees the team’s girls naked. He obsesses over his appearance after a single villain calls him ugly. He tries to manipulate others to like him really incompetently and transparently, like he’s quoting How to Win Friends & Influence People.
The thing is, he keeps getting pushback for most bad things he does, and when he actually does good (often accidentally) everyone is so nice to him in response. I just don’t know if the creepy shit he does is a diegetically pathetic trait that he’ll get over when exposed to good people for long enough,40 if that makes any sense? He has so many insecure internal monologues.
"Scanning…T-01 Robin. T-06 Law."
Ah, the T must stand for titan…wait, why the hell was I number six? I mean, if we're going by who joined first and shit, wouldn't I be like five cause I was before Starfire?
My next thought was that it was sorted by strength, but that can't be right. Robin being number one? That's a funny joke. Not that he wasn't strong or anything, but some of our other teammates were just powerhouses on their own.
Then again, Robin was the one who helped put the Zeta Tube in the Tower…what if he made the list himself? And put himself at the number one spot? Did that mean he thought of me as the weakest member?
Cause if so I'd be happy to correct such delusions. I was top three at bare minimum. Physical strength wasn't everything after all.Oh god. What if instead of strength, it was who Robin though was the most attractive?
…On some level I would be both offended, and relieved that he wasn't gay. I mean…when he was starting out, he wore some pretty revealing tights-
There’s definitely an ambiguously intentional element of “the main character thinks he’s hot supervillain shit but he’s clearly in denial and desperate for positive attention” like in Worm. I just don’t know who the person with the most damage is, the writer or his character. It’s 100% possible the writer has the traits I’m diagnosing his blorbo with and he’s unaware he’s owning himself.
Zooming out, even if this story was a masterpiece of characterization, it underperforms in every other aspect. The writer also opens a Patreon halfway through the fic and the pacing slows down to a crawl as he tries to extract capital. Don’t bother with this one.
Burnt Lotus*
This is the Undertale to Focused Fire’s Deltarune.41 If you don’t get that, don’t worry kitten.
A rare Legend of Korra fanfic, this is about a guy from our world being raised as kind of a bodyguard for the Avatar. He ends up getting sick of dealing with her womanchildish attitude (very relatable), dumps her, and sidegrades into becoming the first media mogul of the developing ATLAworld industry.
It’s got a bunch of improvements over its weirdquel: a better cast of OCs, actual stakes, a lack of weird sex stuff… and it’s very funny to see him introducing predatory marketing tactics stolen from real-life gachas to an almost Victorian world.
It’s *almost* great, but the main issue stays: we’re seeing the interesting story from the viewpoint of… everyone who’s not him. Although everyone who’s watched the original show knows Korra is one of the most unlikable characters ever, he comes across as whiny when he’s unable to truly articulate why.
I lightly recommend the fic nonetheless, at least if you’ve watched the first season of the show.
The age of May 2025 is over. The time of the June 2025 has come. Make sure to continue sending me your recommendations and I may review them next, unless they’re The Count of Monte Cristo.
This is the exact plot of 2003 extreme sports video game Tony Hawk’s Underground.
Screenshots of this review somehow keep making it to 4chan threads about the game. It’s not me doing it, and it’s pissing the True Fans off. It seems it’s partially because it’s very negative; partially because including 4chan screencaps in one’s reviews breaks the Masquerade, not just the APA guidelines.
I guess I accidentally stumbled into trolling gold. I just wish it was intentional.
Absolutely the best time to review these now that I have a bunch of new Ivory Tower High Lit subscribers.
The Ministry is founded at the end of the Middle Ages, after a Jewish man gives up the secret of the hub to the Spanish monarchs to buy his family protection. It’s never directly stated, but the few times we look at the underlying “science” it contains Kabbalist diagrams. My guess is we’re meant to conclude Jewish people living in Spain before getting expelled came up with some kind of pact with God to make doors appear. That or they’re reality hackers right out of Unsong. The whole topic might sound iffy, but the show pulls no punches and always takes the interpretation of history that paints Spain in the worst light.
The show is science-fiction, but inconsistently so, with fantastical elements cropping up here and there, just rarely and understated enough to be annoying without shifting the genre. Maybe once per season. It’s very kitchen sink too, from a dreamwalking poet to a guy who can see through walls.
The Ministry of Time starts with a cast made out of 1. a modern day paramedic, 2. the first Spanish female university student from the 19th century, and 3. a very traditional knight from the 16th. The knight is the funniest character in the show, constantly complaining his team is led by a woman before, over four seasons, slowly developing into a modern Wife Guy. In Doctor Who terms, this would be an entire cast of bumbling Companions, which changes the scene-to-scene dynamics significantly.
As opposed to whatever the fuck is going on now. The last episode I watched was the one based around the Eurovision Song Contest, and there was no mention of the UK getting nil points for the last thousand years, so it was clearly not peer reviewed.
“But wait, the doors only go to what counts as Spanish territory during the specific period”. Actually the episode is about his visit to the San Sebastian film festival to present Vertigo, it checks out.
All Spanish kings and presidents are told about the existence of the Ministry, Harry Potter-style. Obviously this is dangerous, but they still need funding. They could abuse time travel to get it, but the Subsecretary position is nearly always given to sticklers.
He has a pretty long list of fics but they range from short to terrible. I wasn’t able to find anything readable before his last two bafflingly stellar fics. Even after his last two fics he’s written one Waifu Catalog/Harry Potter crossover that (barely looking at it) seems to be 95% exposition and 5% the most morally questionable shit ever.
It’s somewhat reminiscent of Desperate Times Call for Desperate Pleasures, minus crack. Weirdo sociopaths recognizing each other, real attraction unspecified.
To their credit, they explain why they don’t just make 9000 clones. There are cultural reasons why that specific use of the cloning machine is banned, and cloning in general is banned by the end of the film.
"But Snowpiercer is even more in your face about its morals!” Yeah but it’s also actually a good action movie.
Other people disagree, though. This video and some Discord guy told me it was meant to emulate a specific quirk of the anime of that era.
Also Jack from LOST, for some reason. I think this and Bone Tomahawk might be his only two memorable Hollywood performances? He’s not a stellar actor, but he makes the best faces.
Admittedly, “normal mode” gives you a mercy revival timer, but I think hard mode is the intended experience. Admittedly, I also just described a couple Isaac challenge characters.
It’s really funny to me that a roll of the dice can effectively change the genre of your story. I suppose Gothic could have just ignored his new perk?
Did he REALLY need two stories where his self-insert bangs a human version of Seven of Nine? Also, virtually every relationship he has in this fic is this scene:
Other readers have told me that the story is redeemed by the cool story art the author keeps drawing, which makes the world feel alive or something like that. I’m not convinced in the slightest.
He also made that show with Emma Stone, The Curse, which was too cringe-inducing for me to finish. I didn’t really enjoy it.
The second season does something different. All the rehearsals are unique, but they’re all somehow tied into the theme of Airline Safety. It’s impossible to explain why this is still good.
What makes it extra annoying in this instance is that the story starts with Cynthia investigating some ruins, but once she meets the main character it turns out she’s just taking a short break from going through the Gyms. Jebaited.
I’m sorry, but I’m fascinated by generative AI and I just can’t look away from Medusa in this situation. If AI truly gets good enough to compete with the high standards of Questionable Questing, it may continue to crop up here. Feel free to hit this button:
I had seen complaints about the casting, but a commenter mentions that the new TV show is actually pretty good. I guess I know zero things about Percy Jackson.
As of the point I’ve caught up at, the main character’s only interaction with Percy Jackson has been a friendly spar. Their respective arcs seem completely unrelated, to the point that, barring the Camp Half Blood stuff, you could get away with assuming this is an American Gods AU.
It’s not per-thousand-words, it’s a weirder variant. He gets a curated subset of Celestial powers (usually the ones that are already somewhat Greek god or bard-themed) every time he achieves something. Achievements are not pre-defined, which means this is down to author fiat. Readers are constantly complaining about this, but I think it makes the story better (comparatively), so I don’t give a shit.
Right before releasing this article I remembered the excellent Metropolitan Man. Oops. I guess that’s another marked second.
Also an “Ultraman”. I thought that name would be trademarked given the giant Japanese guy, but apparently it’s a real thing:
Incidentally, this is exactly how I looked when I reached the current end of Mind Games and realized I would have to wait for the next chapter.
You might think I’m insane for picking up ANOTHER story from the same guy, but can you blame me? I wanted to solve this mystery.
I’ve just started the Star Trek Resurgence video game, though. I didn’t check it out earlier because I had to become a Peggle Grand Master and uninstall the fucking game from my life first, you see.
Previously seen Acting As God in Poor Things.
The Prometheus “““symbolism””” is definitely on-the-liver. Birds are literally pecking at a guy after he tries to steal a light.
I’m really not picky about webcomic art, but I think it’s pretty nice. The writing is virtually always ripped straight from the book’s pages, you can tell whenever it isn’t—like when a two paragraph reference gets replaced with a single Skyrim mention that fits inside a speech bubble.
There is one real issue, with whoever is in charge of coordination. They keep screwing up, and every chapter there’s at least one mistake where, say, the wrong line gets attributed to a character. We’ll never know what color Arthur’s hair is either, since it keeps changing. More annoyingly, these don’t get fixed once people point them out. I really wonder what the hell is going on behind the scenes. Website limitations?
If you’ve never heard the word, they’re basically a mainly Korean format of webcomic designed for mobile tele-phone scrolling.
I hear good things about the Practical Guide to Evil webtoon, to the point I’ve seen people say it’s better than the original, so I guess the medium has potential. Or the original PGTE really is that bad. Probably the latter.
It feels somewhat sacrilegious to even adapt it in the first place, which may be why I haven’t picked it up. It’s as close as it gets to a perfect traditional fantasy novel.
Just imagine the Whiffle or Chthonic EZs instead of yet another Our Zombies Are Different scenario.
Recent masterpiece Hundreds of Beavers went all in on the visual gags and I did really enjoy it. Maybe “all in” are the key words here. Top Secret missed the last 20%.
He needs to know and understand their formulas, and he’s not immune to their physical traits, so his supervillain potential is kind of limited until he starts getting his hands on superhero chemobabble.
I think it’s mixing a bunch of DC canons together though, there’s a lot of Young Justice stuff and I think everyone is generally aged up.
Speaking of which, next month is definitely going to include that review.
Since that last line makes it clear you appreciated my recommendation so much that you're desperate to hear another one from me, I'll put forward The Lonely Lioness, an amusing Cersei Lannister quest on sufficient velocity where the thread makes every important decision with the wit and wisdom of a metagaming cucumber, and the QM is actually willing to make them face the consequences for it. It's also complete.
I too am weirdly fascinated by AI writing-- every so often I see a scandal float by where someone discovers "this self published romance author LITERALLY was too lazy to remove the chatGPT 'certainly, i can write that scene for you' header" and it makes me wonder just how much is getting out into the world where the author is not stupid enough to leave that in lol.
For self published amazon stuff where it is 'release a new novel every 3 months or fall off the automated rec system', i have to imagine there is a lot of it getting through. High pressure + financial incentives + readers not known for having particularly picky taste in prose would definitely make it fertile ground. At least us web fiction authors are publishing voluminous amounts of garbage out of sheer unpaid love of the game, rather than making any money.
I have played around with chatGPT to see how well it "understands" fiction-- it's actually shockingly decent with medium length (<100k words) text these days. It has some minor utility as a "rubber duck debugger" writing tool + the fake out social engagement of typing your thoughts to "someone" who will respond which i will admit can really help with motivation to keep going sometimes , but I keep having to yell at it to stop suggesting specific lines to me because its prose is unbearably bad lmfao
as far as recs, a genuine "this is imo really good" plug for The Stone Gryphon Chronicle ( https://archiveofourown.org/series/15017 ). It is a rare example of Chronicles of Narnia fic that has something to say. The good parts of it are a WW2 spy story [the bad parts of it are religious philosophy; it's a CoN fic though so par for the course ]. Caveat that it is unfinished, and although it updates randomly into the present day, it will likely never be finished in a satisfying way, as the author wants to write random short stories instead of a larger plot. Part 2 (Queen Susan in Taashban) is the best segment by far-- it's the most tightly woven/satisfying plot-- and it's a bit downhill from there. But that part is astoundingly good imo. I know this is coming off as a bit of a mealymouthed rec, but I'm trying to expectations set lmfao-- if I don't do that, I end up saying "this is the best fic i've ever read" (true) in a way that disguises the true nature of the thing haha. I read it years ago and it was a massive inspiration to me.
Anyway, thanks for the reviews as always! See you next month!