Reviews for November 2024
The prophecy is fulfilled at last
I think I’ve mentioned I’m getting through some of Stephen King’s work so I can understand The Dark Tower better. I’m on book 3/15 or so of my reading list, and I think I will save a fuller review for when I’m done after all. But don’t worry, I always have time for web fiction, as I’ll show you thirty seconds from now depending on how fast you read.1
★: Puella Magi Madoka Magica + Rebellion, Who are you, Prof. Umbridge?
*: Duellist, This Is How I Disappear, Factorio: Space Age, The Meta Liberation Army Makes Some Good Points, Bad Education, A Sheev in Brockton Bay
Previously, on Record Crash:
Atma's Variant Gauntlet Starting Jumper
This is a very weird title that needs unpacking. Atma is the real-life creator of the Variant Gauntlet Challenge, a special starting condition for a Jumpchain:
To complete this challenge, a Jumper must complete 1 to 6 Gauntlets before taking their first true Jump.
It’s a bit like naming your story “Fantasy Novel Protagonist”. For our purposes, it means it starts with an extended Naruto tournament arc where the main character is supposed to be challenged… but the writer munchkined even those rules to the point they’re no challenge at all, and then breaks himself further. To put it in context, he turns a bunch of (tournament clones of) Naruto characters into “chakra fruits” and eats them to gain their unique abilities, on top of the challenge rewards.
Questionable Questing user Upset puts it this way:
So broken lol. It'd be a fun read just for character interactions and typical power fantasy being broken over his knees.
Our guy is then inserted into Naruto’s body at the start of canon, with his ill gotten perks and powers retroactively baked into the lore. What follows is the opposite of a gauntlet.
I will say that it’s got some decent and often funny character interactions (like Upset foresaw), and all fights have a different broken gimmick in the spotlight, which makes the fic less boring than it would otherwise be. I would also give it some bonus points for actually being a Jumpchain. According to the chapter list, he’s gone through Naruto, WH40K and Skyward Sword so far.
Of course, I also have to remove infinity points because it turns weird, and not in a fun way. I dropped it after a baffling arc where the Sage of the Six Paths forcefems Sasuke so he can fulfill his gay crush on our heterosexual self-insert, who by then was summoning Pokemon for some reason?2 It went fully off the rails because, I would venture, the writer ran out of things for a broken main character to do. Many such cases.
This Is How I Disappear*
This brand of fic is hard to review: an expert if short execution of what the premise says, nothing more, nothing less. Death Note’s Light Yagami is caught before he kills L, and marked for execution. L has to be the one to deliver the news and handle Light’s last requests.
There isn’t any of the trickery you expect from a Death Note fic. This is but a character study of only slightly different versions of the two characters. I think it’s technically flawless, but it also doesn’t try anything too difficult, and is probably only interesting to fans of the original story. A soft recommend is in order, I guess?
Don't You Worry Child (the Seven have a plan for you)
Wow, what’s with these long names now?
This is an A Song of Ice and Fire time travel self-insert starring the unlikely Margaery Tyrell, who does little in canon besides being married to men who are terrible, terribly young, or both.
The gimmick makes for an initially interesting story, since she’s only a young girl who has no physical skills and not that much influence. She thinks (and is probably right in this fic’s canon) she’s been chosen by the Gods to destroy Cersei, who got her killed in the original timeline.
I say initially interesting because what I can only define as “bullshit” starts cropping up. Margaery just gets lucky—her plans succeed due to sheer happenstance and authorial fiat rather than her own agency. For example, Robert happens to force Stannis to get married when Margaery is in King’s Landing, which slots into her plan perfectly. Stannis also happens to be out of character (but in the usual fandom cliche way, a lot of GoT writers turn him into some tortured bishie with autism for some reason, don’t ask me why).
The bulk of the story is occupied with their romance, which isn’t something the tags or synopsis prepared me for, because I didn’t read them. I hate to spoil the end of a story, but it’s really stupid: the main character gets lucky again by being in Winterfell when the royal family visits it, and easily exposes Jaime and Cersei’s incest in front of the king. None of this comes from foreknowledge, none of it was planned. She was just there.
Cersei is instantly executed by Ned, a war begins…. nope, nevermind, end of story. Just as it was getting mildly interesting.
I guess I should have expected boring dei ex machina from the title.
The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special
I’m not an MCU fan at all, but Guardians of the Galaxy is better than average, and I had this downloaded for like two years before I decided to suddenly watch it. My reasoning at the time: “it’s short”.
I mostly enjoyed it. There are a lot of Christmas songs and the concept of a Holiday Special is played surprisingly straight, with a lot of songs and heartwarming morals, but overall it’s just funny, with Drax and especially Mantis taking over the runtime. The plot is definitely of the “excuse to put characters in fun situations” variety and I won’t even bother recounting it here, it’s a definite weak point.
As a consequence it’s kind of irrelevant, both to GotG and the medium of Kino. There are better funny movies you could watch with only twice this runtime, and I’ve already forgotten most of it. Watch it if it’s on TV, I guess, or if you really must consume all GotG and/or MCU media.
Duellist*
The story starts with some awful torture porn3 and stepmother/son incest… and that’s not the main bad part!
This is one of the classic Gregfics: the one nerdy male character that’s readily available in Worm, who can just gain a power that he didn’t get in canon and make references to all the anime the writer watches. Obvious choice for many a fan.
Originally, I suspect the writer just wanted to write porn of both torture and classic variety, and in fact I’ve known of this story for years and intentionally avoided it based on that. Repeated recommendations made me get past the awful part this time, and I guess I didn’t regret it.
Maybe I should actually explain what it’s about? Greg gets a reality warping superpower that works based on “virtual duels”. He sees a marker over someone’s head with a difficulty rating, he challenges them, and he gets transported to a parallel dimension where he has to fight them with whatever he has at hand.
Win or loss, the other person won’t remember anything (though in harder difficulties, the simulated person might remember previous duels!). It’s all in Greg’s head, and he can retry over and over as long as he stays around the person and waits for the cooldown to end.
If he wins, he gets bonuses. If the person isn’t a cape, the bonus is usually just loyalty and potential romance (see: the bad start to the story). If they are a cape, he gets a really, really shitty version of the cape’s power (see: the good rest of the plot), though it gets slightly stronger as the duels get harder…
As you can imagine, 90% of this story is composed of those simulated fight scenes. Every character has 3 to 6 duels and they must all happen onscreen. It’s not as awful as it sounds—in fact, I think this author writes Worm-quality fight scenes, with Greg using his smarts and really weak powers (one of them being he can control ONE bug, and you wouldn’t believe how he munchkins that) to get past increasingly unfair challenges. Everyone else gets a sword or a gun, he gets a Swiss knife.
Alas, too much of a good thing… it starts bad and only gets worse, to the point my advice is: don’t feel bad about skimming. Just do it. Yet another challenge where he just has to remember patrol patterns? Skip ahead until he wins or loses.
It gets a bit better whenever he gets a new power he can play with, but this is not at all an “OP Gary Stu” fic, and the simulated fights adapt to his new power level fairly fast. It’s always a tiring struggle to get anything done,4 which stands in sheer contrast to every other Greg fic on Earth.
Of course, as a Questionable Questing-exclusive fic, there are quite a few sex scenes interspaced throughout, which I also recommend you skip. I’ll give the porn-brained author this though, some of the relationship dynamics are actually pretty interesting and a more normal author would have never thought of them. If you’re asking yourself, “what’s left if I skim the fights?” that’s the answer, fun character stuff with an increasingly sociopathic character.
If none of this sounds like a deal breaker, and you’re not a completionist, there’s plenty in here to like, so give it a try. But don’t be like God Game 100 readers and complain I didn’t warn you. I absolutely did.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica + Rebellion★
Madoka doesn’t really need an introduction, but I’ll try: it’s babby’s first deconstruction of the magical girl genre, wherein a bunch of teenage girls transform into frilly-dressed teenage girls and save the world from… something. I’ve honestly only watched a bit of Sakura Cardcaptor and I’m no expert, but this allegedly deconstructs the genre in a massive rugpull. One of the main characters dies violently, for example, and mentor figures are continuously unreliable.
The anime is not edgy, though, and the angst is reduced to the minimum viable product. It could so easily cross the line, but the creators behind it are fairly competent perfectionists. Some great art, and great if repetitive music accompanying the silliest moments makes you forgive them. Its core plot is at this point a bit played out (seemingly every web serial these days apes this brand of twist), but it’s no Dune or Tron where you’re only watching for the audiovisuals, you’re kept engaged.
The movie5 (Rebellion) is two steps forward in that department, with notorious fanboy Bavitz calling it an “every frame a painting” experience, which isn’t true but gets close. Unfortunately, the plot takes a step back. It’s less complex and more complicated, and worse, stops the high stakes action dead so Kyubey can deliver exposition at the camera for what might honestly be 20 continuous minutes.
The first half is so unashamedly good, though, and the second half is tolerable on rewatches, at least once you’ve read the totally canonical sequel Fargo and know what’s going on.
Maybe Madoka’s relevance will continue to wane as everyone gets sick of deconstruction and goes for le epic new sincerity, but I don’t really see anime going as hard as this scene6 anymore, especially with actual meaning behind it that this Youtube video is sadly too narrow to contain.
I recommend everyone here to give it a try, up to at least episode three of the anime, or… half of the first recap movie? If you don’t like it by then, don’t bother.
Marionette
The dead speak! We thought alt-power Worm fics were gone, but nothing ever truly is. Marionette brings it all back with a story that’s exactly like Worm, except Taylor is a cyborg. To add to the extreme originality, she becomes fast friends with Tattletale, who keeps smiling vulpinely.
Yeah, I don’t even want to talk about this. It’s not bad, exactly, but absolutely everything in this fic has been done before, and there are no real highs. I dropped it too late and I really should have seen the signs.7
Who are you, prof. Umbridge?★
This has been on my radar for a long time, but it’s slowly being translated from its original Russian,8 and I decided to wait until it got to 70k words, my usual threshold.
On paper, this seems almost standard. It’s a self-insert into a canon character, the evil Professor Umbridge, and takes place during the fifth book as she becomes a professor at Hogwarts.9 The twist is that it’s unapologetically Russian in narrative, in the characters and even the specific wording choices that make it across the translation. This is the first paragraph of the story, and we can already tell its unique (for Harry Potter fanfiction, anyway) style:
Marina Nikolaevna woke up, as usual, at half past five in the morning. She could have slept a bit longer, but she preferred to take her time with exercise, a shower, and getting ready without rush, so that she could account for traffic and still arrive at work before the start of the day, ready to tackle tasks without any chaos or hurry. After all, being late was something only the bosses could get away with, but ordinary employees like her had no such luxury.
Other choices, like avoiding “reaction interludes”, or having our fake Umbridge actually care about order instead of falling prey to Potter favoritism, contribute to the outsider art feel of this fic. Umbridge goes out of her way to make Hogwarts more like a traditional school, because she likes it that way.10
It’s not perfect. It’s not always in character, least of all the adult teachers like Snape or Dumbledore. The translator often screws up and leaves Russian idioms in the text. The character is often weirdly self-defeatist about women’s ability to compete with men, despite the fact the Wizarding World is pretty equal on that front. And there’s one weird fetishy scene that I can’t explain (you’ll know). But I haven’t read anything that felt this fresh in a long while, and I think this might be a good experience even (especially) for readers who hate Harry Potter as a franchise.11 It’s just a wild approach to it.
The Kernel
This is also pretty wild, but in a derogatory way. I haven’t reviewed Micro Gates here yet, but this is the same brand of flat, obsessively hard sci-fi with more physics and none of the fun. It’s about a guy or robot guy exploring a giant Dyson Sphere built around a black hole. It seems to have been abandoned by its original inhabitants. Here’s an excerpt:
The gravity, which in geometrodynamic units obeys the equation g=(M(r)/r2)/(1-2M(r)/r), has remained at one gee from shell to shell. Going in, the perceived mass is increased by gravitational blueshift between levels, but drops back abruptly on crossing each shell. Clearly, the Builders have adjusted the spacing, down to 4.0x1010m at the bottom, to keep the gravity constant.
It is easy to see that r>3M here, because light rays in vacuum no longer curl around the globe and flatten it into a plate. With care, I can measure the actual curvature.
There are 111,000 levels in this sequence, and average of 7.0x1010m apart. At the bottom, times runs 3.8 times more slowly than in the universe outside. I have descended vertically 0.8 light years from an initial radius of 1.0 light years at the top, down to 0.5 light years now. General Relativity again.
What the hell is this, The Legend of the 10 Elemental Masters?
Now, I try to be fair when I find something that’s clearly made for a very different target audience. But I don’t think this is even a good execution of its idea. The ending to the already barely-existent plot is anticlimactic, there are no non-scientific themes, and the prose is drier than an actual scientific paper.
I’m not going to stop the Nobel Prize-winning physicists reading this blog from reading this. But I will stop everyone else. Yes, I mean you, hands up.
The Meta Liberation Army Makes Some Good Points*
I’m feeling very conflicted about this one. The idea is nice: the usual My Hero Academia isekai, but the main character is stuck in the body of an ugly rat. But this is not like that awful Mineta fic I will never shut up about, no. He’s truly stuck, and, to cope with how terribly society treats him, he starts a blog.
This brings him to the attention of the Meta Liberation Army, who don’t really agree with his message, but very much agree with how marketable his story is and how it whitewashes their terrorist aims.
They contact the protagonist, and offer him money to be a spokesman. He wrestles with the morals of taking money from people he knows are evil, but he needs an escape from his abusive family. The rest of the fic is his falling into the slippery slope until he becomes a Malcolm X-like figure.
As said, a nice, original concept, with good execution, and it has minimal superhero fights or stations of canon like we can usually expect from MHA fics. Sadly, the theme of this month seems to be “nothing is perfect.” The ending shits the bed, hard.
The writer admits this in the post-script. He was writing by the seat of his pants and unsure of how to end it. He authored a somewhat predictable finale, Spacebattles hated it, and he went back and overreacted. Here’s some of the final chapter:
In the great stage play of life, Rat, played by Junichiro, played by Andrei, exits via a trapdoor. Off to star in other stories, to be reborn, to live, to die, and to be reborn once again. A cycle of Samsara so utterly ordinary it needs no description. But in the story he exits, the lights stay on, and the curtains refuse to drop. Its actors continue to spin across the stage.
Let’s open the script, and read all the endings and beginnings.
If we skip towards the middle of the second act, we find that Todoroki has aged. He wears a mustache and an eyepatch. Hunched figures surround him as he points towards a map.
[…]
The Todoroki in the script and the Todoroki on the stage stamp their final orders.
The set designer has placed three picture frames on Todoroki’s spartan desk. Inside the frames are photographs, photocopied from historical documents.
[…]
Blocktext signals the end of the flashback. The rest of the third act needs no review.
To be clear, the rest of the fic was nothing like this. This pretentious theatrical shtick is just annoying, and defuses the emotional weight the ending could have. When you’re writing an emotional ending like that, the last thing you should want your readers to think is “gimmick”. At least The Flower that Bloomed Nowhere reserved it for interludes, when it did something similar.12
Regardless, I recommend the fic. I think it does require at least basic MHA knowledge, and you WILL roll your eyes at the end, but I recommend it.
An Oasis Gilded in White Silver
I just (negatively) reviewed a similar fic last month, featuring someone’s waifu transported to the Cyberpunk universe and becoming the ultimate (ly boring) assassin. This one has Tanya from Saga of Tanya the Evil as the protagonist, which instantly makes it better.13
It’s also not really an action story. As usual for Tanya fics, it combines a surprising percentage of slice of life with light comedy. There’s some wanking over gun specifics, but the writer seems to know his shit, with frequent diagrams, and that makes even the process of Tanya getting a random tech certification interesting to read.
None of the usual pitfalls are there, but there is a big problem in one arc. Our main character gets a hit placed on her because she threatens a gangster… and the story is told backwards. We know what happens at the very end, with our character hurt but alive and no one important dead, and we keep going backwards in the timeline and through different viewpoints as we learn more details.
But if we know nothing too bad happens, this just defuses the tension, completely! It’s the wordiest arc, too. The story gradually lost my interest and I ended up dropping it, even after I trudged through the bad arc and beyond. I think the edges were fraying in general, because the story lacked a solid goal for Tanya besides “getting richer”. The first couple arcs are entertaining enough, but you should aim higher. Don’t be like me…
Factorio: Space Age*
Factorio is an engineering game for people who engineer, a bit like this comic:
The original is great, and this highly anticipated expansion brings a bunch of gameplay improvements and new content, like outer space and planets. I know I’m supposed to review things here, but what can I say?14 You crash on a planet and have to research technologies and make factories to build yourself back up. It’s the type of pseudo-puzzle game that causes a Tetris Effect, and then you’re thinking of how to improve a fictional factory all day, even after you force yourself to uninstall it.
It’s just fun and highly addictive. I highly doubt anyone who’s played the original doesn’t already have this, but if you don’t, it’s well worth the buy. Took me around 130 hours to beat it, and I’m pretty good.
Alternate Season 6
It’s taken me years of searching, but I finally did it, I found one LOST fanfic that didn’t suck... too much.15
You’ll notice a lack of a star next to the title, and that is because I only liked it marginally more than not. It had some really cool ideas, and I especially appreciated its efficiency. What do I mean by that? Since the ideas are the good part, I’m not going to spoil them, but just to showcase what it does well… with a single revelation, the fic managed to resolve all these plot holes from the original show satisfactorily:
Mystery Wet Walt16
Mystery Goodwin's Wife17
The Whispers18
Why the Others wanted Walt, show up so often around the Whispers, and seemingly know everything
Why that one video said DHARMA studied parapsychology
This is one scene, but the fic is determined to give better explanations to the Smoke Monster, the nature of the Island, and more. It sometimes does this with copious flashbacks that are presented out of order, which is a bit annoying, but other twists are more organic.
The character writing is definitely weak, especially Jack and Kate’s, who get their own subplot of walking around the island semi-pointlessly.19 Some parts are just rehashes of the actual Season 6, like Lapidus and the spare characters trying to get the Ajira plane running again. But there are these little awesome moments here and there that made me feel exactly like I felt when I watched the original show, and that makes this a one-of-a-kind fic.
It reminds me a bit of how Homestuck split its epilogue into two, with Meat representing “cold hard plot” and Candy representing “fluffy character interactions”. I feel the real final season focused entirely on characters, to the detriment of the plot, while this one did the exact opposite. Maybe one day we’ll get an ending that does both.
It’s very unlikely anyone here will enjoy it as much as I did, so I’m not really recommending it. My defenses were probably lowered after so many failures, but I think my endless search technically paid off.
A Young Girl's Fair(l)y Contentious Pokemon Journey
Another Tanya fic. While in the Cyberpunk entry she’s pretty far from her game self, owing to a new upbringing, in here she’s just isekaid from the battlefield, sent right next to a Team Flare base, and instantly captured by the bad guys of Pokemon X. Her characterization is just like it was in the anime, a misunderstood sociopath.
I don’t know how I would rate this. It’s smack-dab average for a Tanya fic, and above average for Pokemon, given that there’s no pointless gym journey. It’s about her survival and her attempts to expose Team Flare, with some side quests that make her grow closer to her strange slave monsters.
While that’s not a bad premise, it’s both repetitive in its approach and unclear in direction and that makes me wary of recommending it.20 I just can’t see this fic ever reaching an ending, and nothing is particularly memorable as is.
Bad Education*
Tom “Voldemort” Riddle goes back to school after he gets tired of his continued failure to find any good horcruxes. This is not a good career move, and now he’s got to deal with teaching a bunch of children without even basic orientation.
This is very much a comedy, and that’s where the quality is concentrated, with an effortlessly funny narration that occasionally reminded me of Seventh Horcrux.21 I will say all the best jokes are frontloaded, and the fic gets increasingly (if very slowly) worse as it goes on. It’s dead and unfinished, so the silver lining is that the inevitable descent never crosses into Bad territory.
A different, but also incrementally-worse and mood-whiplashy22 aspect is the Actual Plot, which involves a dark witch, a false Dumbledore and possibly the entire nature of reality. I suspect the author planned almost none of it, and it shows. Worst of all, it’s somehow still predictable. I was just left annoyed after one part was resolved.
Taking away the bad, which isn’t that much of the word count, we’re left with a reasonably funny Harry Potter fic that I think most of its fans will enjoy, so there’s that.
A Sheev in Brockton Bay*
Fuck, I already used up the Episode 9 reference on a different Worm fic.
This fanfic is exactly what it says on the can, and it’s finished! That said, it’s not the (comparatively) serious Palpatine that we see in the movies, it’s more of the fandom meme version that we can see in This Video★:
Meme Palpatine just loves being evil. What a good character.
In this appearance, he joins the Protectorate as he pretends to be a weak old man with mild telekinesis powers (who nonetheless keeps ranting about those kids who blew up his Death Star), but it’s all a front, he’s taking over the city behind the scenes.
As you can imagine, this is a crack fic. These are usually very easy to write and get old fast, so there are a lot of trash instances. This one is fine, short and sweet, though it might only be funny if you’re an expert in both Worm and Star Wars lore. And despite what the site might imply, there are no sex scenes… or are there? Quoth the writer:
I'm leaving the door open for a single horrifically graphic and wholesome sex scene with Sheev. This is a threat, and it is non-negotiable.23
Do you have any recommendations for my December reading list? My backlog is getting pretty anemic,24 so now’s your chance.
Warning: lots of comedy stories this batch. I’m starting to suspect that’s the aspect I value most in literature.
This is what you miss out on when you go to a “Book Store”.
When he starts out, he has no powers and his options are just picking up a knife and stabbing people, or locking people inside a house on fire. The more abstract the fight scenes become (as he gets access to new abilities), the less “torture-porn”y they feel.
Some of this is an intentional consequence of how Greg’s rewards are designed. It seems he never gets an offensive power at all. Worm isn’t The Boys, and superheroes aren’t usually bulletproof by default, but Greg can’t carry anything inside the duels, so that’s not an option either. It means a lot of challenges rely on staying away until he can find a weapon in the simulated environment, then use trickery to finish them off with it (in one memorable instance, he can’t harm someone at all, so he just traps them with containment foam and waits three simulated days until they die of thirst). If Greg had some kind of laser power, 99% of these challenges would be finished within seconds.
New viewers are confused by the fact Madoka has three movies, but the first two are summaries of the anime’s twelve-episode plot. They might honestly be worth watching more than the anime, since there’s a lull in the latter’s middle I’m certain the movies skip.
Shout out to this comment. Homura using regular guns will never stop being funny.
I thought someone on the Alexander Wales Discord was recommending it, but when I went back to check it turned out they had merely said “first chapter is promising”. And it is, to a misleading degree, the first chapter has more effort put into it than the entire rest of the fic, with some hilariously detailed and accurate details of the logistics of self-surgery.
A fic being so good that it gets translated is already a green flag. Unless it’s Xianxia, I guess.
Though she actually beat the Defense Professor Curse and is staying on for another year. It’s unclear if the writer doesn’t know that the curse is real, or if we’re meant to assume whatever placed the SI there also got rid of it, which is lame.
But this isn’t a crack fic where we reenact Matilda from the villain’s point of view or something. She’s realistically normal, and often does things like fight for the rights of Muggleborns in plausibly deniable ways.
What’s that saying? It’s a bad Harry Potter fic, but a good story about modernizing a magical school?
I still hate it there, though.
I don’t know what causes this effect. It’s not a selection thing based on who watched Tanya, because people who watch anime are if anything statistically worse writers. There’s some mysterious X factor causing Tanya fics to be better than average. I’ve reviewed quite a few already, and what, there were only one or two I really disliked?
I could say that Gleba fucking sucks and Vulcanus worms are a joke, I guess? But it’s all been said.
I probably skipped this fic a million times because of the terrible title. If I had to give it a real one, I’d go with “Heaven’s Door”.
Look, just watch LOST and you’ll understand.
Literally no one remembers this character’s name. The entire episode feels non-canon.
“But wait,” you say, “the Whispers were already explained in the show”. Nope, this writer retcons ALL of Season 6, including all the revelations. Jacob’s brother isn’t even a character, and Jacob is also not a mystical “hippie” as the writer puts it. Quite a bit changes retroactively, which really helps the plot twists land.
Maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on that, given “Sawyer, Juliet, Miles and Faraday walk around” is the plotline of the first half of Season 5.
The premise begs Tanya to just talk to the authorities, but she’s convinced the Team Flare leader has everyone in his pocket (this is not really true, it only happens to be the first sheriff she talks to plus a couple more important people) and everything makes her look like a Pokemon thief even if she tried. This does mean she could just give the evidence to someone else and have them report the secret base… but the fic would be over. There’s a tension there that goes ignored so the writer can just write more action and heist scenes.
If Seventh Horcrux is a 10 this is more like a 7 or 8, don’t get too excited.
It’s not merely that we’re intercutting the comedy with drama, this fic is also a slow Redemption Arc for Riddle, and he seems to regress in all the big plot scenes for seemingly no reason. It really feels like a different, worse story whenever that happens.
Spoiler alert:
I’m even considering the Reddit Concept of watching Die Hard during the Christmas season.
If you’re looking for recommendations, definitely check out anything by cliffc999 and Ideas-Guy. They both have solid writing. I reread Unconquerable and Risk it All last month and enjoyed them a lot.
I also tried Cold Blooded Perspective (a Ghost Spider SI) on SB last month. It’s pretty good overall, but there’s a plot point midway through that might not sit well with everyone.
For something lighter, Acid Trip [Dragonball Z Cell Junior SI] was absolutely hilarious and surprisingly clever. It’s not super long, but it’s self-contained and worth the read.
I went on a hunt for Arcane fics this month, but honestly, the pickings are slim. The most popular one I found on QQ (Arcane Curiosity Explored) was pretty bad—like, straight-up vile. Fingers crossed the good authors are just starting to dig into the fandom. On the bright side, my search led me to Super Randomizer Lux on SB. It’s a League of Legends fic, and for a Wiki Warrior story, it was surprisingly fun!
Enjoyed reading the reviews, as always. If your backlog is getting low, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on "The Young Lady is a Reborn Assassin" on spacebattles. I think it's got really strong action scenes and fairly well-done characters, and on a technical level is well written. Despite its clichéd setting I'd call it extraordinarily uncliche for the most part, which really intrigued me when I first started reading.