Reviews for October 2024
NO MORE BOOKS
You can’t be angry. I consumed a lot of content this month. The issue is, uh, most of it wasn’t textual content. I sure WATCHED a lot of shit.
Maybe I shouldn’t have decided to start Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. Maybe looking up a pre-Tower reading list and beginning with The Stand, a half a million word1 brick wasn’t such a hot idea either. And reaching the halfway point of the book and getting interrupted by the new Factorio expansion…….2
★: When I Win the World Ends, Parkour Civilization, Unsong (published), Dune: Part One & Two
*: God Game 100, Adum & Pals
Previously, on Record Crash:
Parkour Civilization★
You may have already heard of this and dismissed it as a silly meme.
I’m angry because Wadapan—whom some of you may know as one of the Shills List completionists—already wrote an extremely long review that goes over most of what I was already going to write. The price of only releasing these at the end of the month.
So I’ll just leave you with this tl;dr: it’s a story set in the Minecraft engine about a world where you have to parkour to survive. It got popular for a reason. It’s aimed directly at a part of the human psyche that controls attention, it’s not a coincidence that so many TikTok videos use Minecraft parkour footage as a background visual. The exploration of the dystopian setting is also pretty interesting, and minor implications come back in big ways, the writer never forgets and always has a plan.
Obviously that fucking Wadapan essay already says this, but it’s very reminiscent of Homestuck, half of which is my favorite thing. I think some people will be put off by the presentation, and the annoying frequent recaps that come from editing a bunch of smaller videos, but I’ve seen so many people immediately love this that I think a star rating is appropriate here.
I’ll note that the sequel is slightly inferior, with a very annoying fetch quest that’s only there for filler purposes and only once justifies itself, but its ending is a great conclusion for both videos.
Synecdoche, New York
Obviously I could only follow up the ludokino that’s Parkour Civilization with an art film about death and the fleetingness of time.
I have maybe the worst motivation for watching this movie anyone’s ever had, which is that one of the youtubers I follow kept referencing it at the end of his reviews.3 I later found out that he was referring to a hyperambitious multi-part analysis of this film, which people keep telling him to finish.
That’s a very ironic thing to happen.
Synecdoche, New York is about a playwright with a terrible life. At one point, he gets a MacArthur grant to finance a new play, and he decides to recreate the entirety of New York inside a massive warehouse. Throughout the movie, he loses his wife, his daughter, his replacement girlfriend, his replacement replacement girlfriend, his original replacement girlfriend again, his daughter and wife again, and finally his own identity. The playwright is incredibly passive throughout, and things mostly happen to him. The play is obviously never finished.
It was mostly a depressing drag. I feel exactly for this movie what I felt for Primer: looks good when analyzed, it’s a torture to watch. The movie isn’t exactly hard to understand on the object level, but magical realism and fuzzy logic start cropping up more and more often as the story goes on. It’s pretentious for sure, and you can tell by all the Jungian elements that inspire it. Only Gnostic influences make a story worse.
It does have some good parts though, it wasn’t a total wash. First, there really is a lot to think about post-movie, Charlie Kaufman put some real effort into hiding things in plain sight. I enjoyed reading and watching media about the movie far more than I enjoyed the movie itself. Second, and this is something that many analyses seem to miss, there’s an aspect of meta-themed dark comedy throughout that I really enjoyed.
The scene here (hey, this is the analysis I mentioned earlier) about reenacting a scene of his life with an actor playing him and his real wife playing herself is the kind of shit I loved (7:10):
YMS takes it seriously, but I found the sequence and similar ones hysterical.
Unfortunately, the rest of the movie is a commentary on how death comes for us all (deathism!) and how everything is generally terrible, to pretentious and overbearing extents. I hear I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a better, less annoying take on the concept, and I might watch it sometime. For some reason,4 Charlie Kaufman’s movies keep filling up my backlog.
UNSONG★ (the published version)
What’s the expression, better than I feared, worse than I hoped? I already reviewed UNSONG a while back, so I won’t go into synopses, it’s the same kabbalah-punk travelogue it always was. The published version finally got edited, and it had more changes than I expected, most of them for the better, some of them for the worse.
So, should you pay money for it? Maybe. It’s an improvement over the original, but it’s not everything the fans wanted. Here’s a bullet point list with the changes I noticed on this reread:5
The structural issues remain, only mildly diminished. The story is still essentially this, though I think the balance is more on the side of backstory now:
To Scott’s credit, he actually removed some presidential interludes that just added to the problem (and I successfully whined about for ages in comment sections). The interludes stop at Bush, whose chapter is actually funny, short, and sweet. We don’t need the torturous kabbalistic analyses of Obama and Trump’s presidency.
The best interlude, CHANGELOG, has sadly also been removed. I can’t really complain because there really are too many interludes. All the ones relating to Ana and Aaron’s relationship seem to have been left in, and that makes the story slightly more focused. On the subject of chapters that were left in, this includes the belabored reference to Nate Silver (??????).
All elements that a minority of the audience found offensive have been removed. A mention of Uriel screwing up and failing to grant souls to a portion of North Africa, that some people deemed racist, is gone (his freakout in Madrid is now entirely about the Israel/Palestine debacle), and the Harmonious Jade Dragon Empire has been renamed to simply “Dazhou”.
The gender of the director of the UNSONG agency has been flipped. This is all in service of a cool play on words later on. I admit I initially thought this change was bad and pointless, and I still think Scott focused too hard on it to the detriment of the rest of the edit, but I’m fine with it now.
I remember an analysis of the song American Pie taking up a larger section of the story than it does in the edit.6 I don’t think the resemblance to a section of the backstory is actually made explicit here, which confuses me because it was good and fun. G-d, this particular bullet point makes the book sound batshit, and it is.
The cover is kind of lazy, and there’s no marketing. Considering I’m fairly certain Scott is a millionaire now (following his Substack’s success) this is particularly unexplainable.
You make your choice. It’s still worth the read no matter the format.
Another Shitty SI Fic
Yes, that’s the title. Yes, it’s accurate.
It’s about an OC Worm superhero, obviously. She7 has a weird force field with the shape of her body that she can project some distance away. I’d put a plot in here but barely anything happens.
When I reviewed a self-insert fic by Hiver (who shows up later in this article), I mentioned that the author’s just a nice if boring Swedish guy, and that made the faithful self-insert equally boring to read. We have a similar problem here, where the writer seems to be the most awkward person ever, and every canon character interaction is painful to read. It’s almost cringe comedy, except I only feel bad for the writer’s social skills.
"I didn't catch your name earlier." Sorry, I was too shocked at apparently being in Brockton Bay.
"Amelia," I said, offering my hand. "Lia for short." Victoria gasped and grasped my hand in both of hers.
"Or Amy!" She said, far to excited. "Oh my god, have you met my sister yet?" I nodded slowly.
"Yeah," I replied. "We just did a chem lab together. So...Lia." She nodded quickly.
"Makes sense," Victoria said. "It'd get pretty confusing if you were both calling each other 'Amy'." No weirder than where I got the idea to call myself that...
"Yeah," I said instead. The conversation seemed to die and I shut my eyes again.
"So are you two friends?" Oh, it was still going.
"Uh, I don't think so." Probably not. I didn't have any memories of something like that at least. "Why?"
"Oh nothing." Vicky waved away my concern. "I just want to get to know my sister's friends."
"That makes sense." I probably wouldn't become Amy's friend in the span of a dream, but that would be...interesting if nothing else. The bell rang just as I closed my eyes, and I sighed.
"Well, better get to class." Victoria rose and offered me a hand. I took it and she helped me up.
"Thanks." I said, brushing off my pants. "Uh, nice meeting you." She gave me a warm smile.
"You too." She waved and hopped over the fence that blocked off the edge of the roof. "Have fun Amy! Or, Lia!" And like that she was gone.
Well, that had actually gone pretty decently, all things considered
All dialogue (and narration!) is equally awkward as the above. In fact, as the lead mentions, that’s one of the more normal instances.
The plot also really goes nowhere. There’s a mandatory Endbringer fight where she dies a bunch of times (but she also has a time loop power that activates on death, so she redoes it until she survives, and note I don’t say “until she wins”), and she tries to avoid joining the Wards for no logical reason since she’s not Taylor. It’s simultaneously wordy and uneventful.
I love stories where the writer puts their Id in display and just experiences the fictional world as the truest version of themselves. In this instance, I’d advise the writer to avoid SIs for the next 80 years and just try choosing a better Id when they reincarnate.
Joker: Folie à Deux
It really is as bad as the critics say.8
God Game 100*
This story is bad on paper, a Gamer/Worm fic, but I’m strongly reminded of Play Test (reviewed here) in both pros and cons.
I got this from the /r/rational recommendation thread, and it fits. Our main character tries his hardest to avoid miscommunication, and comes clean about basically everything that could appear even mildly sketchy in advance. He’s also a pretty good and likable person (maybe the most likable I’ve read in a long while?), which is rare for a Questionable Questing fic. He’s never too weak or too powerful for the situation, either.
The sketchy parts? His powers grow slowly with time, by completing quests… and by having sex once with named Worm characters.9 He optimizes his approach in a surprising way which I honestly don’t want to spoil for you, but leads to lots of comedy.
This really rides on the excellent writing, humor, and characterization, with its premise and all the sex scenes being the only drawbacks. It’s also super dead.10 I recommend it if those aren’t deal breakers for you.
Dune: Part One & Two★
This is like Tron: Legacy. It doesn’t matter how bad a movie’s plot is when it looks and sounds this good.
I’ve always disliked Dune. I read the book as a teenager, and it felt dry even compared to Asimov’s Foundation. Uniquely boring even for old sci-fi. Before watching the film I thought maybe I was just in a bad mood at the time, but no, I pretty much got it right.
The film is about politics, prophecy and a big desert planet, Arrakis. The old family that ruled over the old planet (the Harkonnens) is briefly replaced by the House Atreides, but it’s all a trap by the galactic Emperor, who just wants to give the Harkonnens an opportunity to get their rival family in one place and genocide them. You see, the Atreides were just getting too powerful for the Emperor to let them live. Only Paul (the young heir) and his mother Jessica survive, and they have to hide among the native population, who know how to ride the giant sandworms blah blah Middle East allegories.
There are some fantastical elements. There’s this order of witches, the Bene Gesserit, who constantly make prophecies, though many of them seem to be false and just designed to keep them in power. They can use The Voice, which lets you Code Geass mind control people close to you. The protagonist Paul was taught by his mother to use The Voice, and is also the Chosen One to the native population, thanks to prophecies that his mother’s order seeded beforehand. He takes advantage of this to try to take back the planet.
These are some interesting choices, but… the plot itself, the events that take place, is mostly composed of boring fights and some mild Dances with Wolves bullshit about joining the sand tribes.11 I remember some moral conflict, if a boring one, from Paul in the books, about using a false prophecy to boost himself. This movie, though, lacks monologues, and all doubt is pushed onto his love interest, who becomes annoying instead of comforting.
None of that is a deal breaker, as mentioned it’s an amazing audiovisual experience. I might recommend this even just on the soundtrack alone. But I definitely do not recommend the book, and don’t expect a memorable story.
The Schwarberverse
This is a Cobra Kai fic series12 starring the author’s favorite self-insert OC, Lucas Mills-Schwarber. Knowing that Karate is all that matters in this universe, he convinces his mother (the love interest from the first film) to let him move to California and learn from the masters, hoping to use his backstory as an excuse to meet them. He’s there a year before the plot of Cobra Kai begins, and first tracks down a certain veteran that currently lives at a homeless shelter…
I read most of this on a plane and a train, because I stupidly downloaded two sequels to the first entry and had little else to spend time on when my connection was spotty. Big mistake.
The first entry, Defeat Does Not Exist, did have gems like these:
[Kreese] hadn't yet seemed to be violent, cruel, or harmful to me in any way. I knew he choked out Johnny at the end of the third season, his most recent bit of violent intent towards a good person, but in his slight defense. Johnny did start attacking him with punches and kicks and was nearly going to knife him with a Sai blade.
I didn't see a monster in this man.
I later discovered this wasn’t meant to be funny.
The thing is, our SI is initially like “yeah, I’ll just play both sides, get knowledge from the Good and Evil-aligned Karate masters behind each other’s back, then easily win the tournament and become famous”. But then, something unexpected happens: the “I can fix him” approach to this character:
You may know John Kreese as the psychopathic antagonist from the Karate Kid series. Our protagonist somehow fully drinks his kool-aid, seeing an abandoned PTSD-ridden veteran instead of the scorpion to his frog. From there on, the fic becomes a confusing villain protagonist affair, which is very strange for a self-insert fic.13 His respect for the Worst Person Ever keeps damaging his relationships with the other kids, and when the truth comes out, Danny gives up on him.
The concept is fun if only for the novelty, you really don’t see self-inserts going native like this. Unfortunately, while the action is written well, dialogue sucks and the plot falters. Especially after the first fic, everything gets bogged down with circular relationship drama, both romantic and otherwise. This happens to the canonical Cobra Kai too, but fanfic should ideally fix the objective flaws of the original.
Ultimately, no, this wasn’t worth reading, and you should avoid it.14
When I Win the World Ends★
What do you do when all wars have ended and all major problems have been solved? 17776 offers the solution: “play American Football”.
When I Win the World Ends, Bavitz’s latest work, is set in the Pokemon15 universe, which thankfully offers preset answers. Just like in the games, you either try to become the champion among equals, or join an evil team and create problems for everyone else.
17776 studiously avoids focusing on anyone who’s not okay with the status quo. WIW only cares about those people. Mostly because Bavitz only cares about his “History Has Ended” meme, which he previously explored in Cockatiel x Chameleon, partially because he used to care a lot about the League of Legends competitive scene. But it’s a good lens to put on both Pokemon and utopian settings in general. The magnifying glass is pointed at a few characters located at the extremes of the bell curves, the sorry few for which the utopia isn’t really such.
It all takes place at the global Pokemon battling tournament IPL 64, kind of like the classic single elimination tournament we see in the Pokemon animes. We’re introduced to Aracely Sosa, a fashionable, seemingly carefree trainer who, despite being pretty bad at Pokemon battling, can seemingly predict the future to win anyway. She’s “bankrolled” by her dad, a failed ex-competitor, and the whole affair looks like a designed insult to the established trainers and their institutions.16 After all, psychic or not, she’s still revealing the dark truth that randomness is a big part of the outcome.
The other main viewpoint and narrative foil is Toril Lund, a no-nonsense obsessively perfect trainer who avoids interviews and calculates flawless damage percentages in her head. I call her obsessive, but Cely is too. She’s equally laser focused on winning the championship, if for a different reason. Their relationship as opposites is pretty funny.
The supporting cast features very well used canon characters like Red, Bill and Iono, as well as some good originals, and the main villains provide the World Ends part of the title. I’ll avoid going into detail for your benefit, but there was not a single character I disliked in the entire book.
So how does this stack up against Bavitz’s previous stories? It’s very good, with the freshest look at the Pokemon franchise since Game of Champions, but it stumbles right before the finish line. It’s hard to explain how without spoilers, but I’ll try. An epilogue makes the ending tolerable, but there’s a weird abrupt swerve of momentum in the championship half of the final arc—the author expected that a specific twist would wow the audience, and it didn’t at all work for me, instead removing all tension from the battle.
Some of the themes were also a bit half-baked. I mentioned utopian settings, and any examination of those works best when we have broad looks at society, but WIW remains laser focused on its small cast of ten or so characters, reusing them when possible. This is one of Bavitz’s authorial flaws we famously saw in Chicago, one he seems completely uninterested in removing.17 It doesn’t actually harm the direction of the story, but during the final League scenes I was wondering: why the hell aren’t we getting audience reactions? Of course the protagonist is what matters most, but we’re getting skewed looks at fame and utopia if the Greek chorus of Humanity as a whole fades into the background after chapter 5.
The battling is a huge part of the story, and it’s really good, if a bit hard to follow—I was thankful I watched a few competitive Pokemon videos before this was published, because while everything is explained, some very confusing attacks and competitive strategies are only explained once.18 According to the author, everything was plotted in Pokemon Showdown, an unofficial battle simulator, so that’s an unexpected element of Rational Fiction19 right there. Don’t expect any shonen moves like in Most Evil Trainer, a good enough competitive player could figure out how fights are going to work out in advance just by running the numbers, and I find that hilarious.
In the end, I complain a lot, but I read the chapters religiously as they came out, and enjoyed the vast majority of them. The prose, as sasuga’d from Bavitz, is High Quality. This is a five-star work, and all the issues merely make it not part of my Best Of All Time List. It’s still a must read for everyone willing to consume Pokemon themed content. Based on merchandise profitability stats, this definitely includes the person reading this.
Pokemon Moon
It really is as bad as the critics say—
An important disclaimer is that I also played Pokemon X, a game that also got poor reviews, but I had no big issue with it. It was kind of boring, sure, and I stopped playing mainline Pokemon games for a while20 after I beat it, but I never felt offended while playing.
With the current Teraleak going on,21 I’m hoping an explanation comes out why Pokemon Sun/Moon are the way they are. The issues really build up on each other.
The main issue: endless fucking cutscenes everywhere. It’s not a dynamic engine where characters can move and talk at the same time, so if a character has a defining animation, they’re going to play it for 5 seconds, then wait a bit while the dialogue engine catches up, then the dialogue pops up. Maybe it would be okay if they the scenes were only long but also rare, but they’re not. You can’t walk five minutes in the overworld without triggering one.
What’s the game’s excuse for triggering cutscenes? “Trials”. The game is no longer about beating gyms, you have to solve a custom challenge given to you by one of two or three trainers per island (the region is based on Hawaii). This sounds fun, but remember we’re in the outdated Pokemon engine. The most depth these challenges go into are “walk around a maze a bit longer before you trigger the next battle”. Most of them are glorified fetch quests. The important part here is that every one of these trainers needs like three sets of cutscenes to establish themselves, and they’re not even interesting characters.
The game allegedly has a good storyline at the very end, but I was sick of the game by the second island. Maybe if the game actually gave me a challenge (and don’t tell me Pokemon is a trivially easy franchise, I also replayed Emerald recently and the doubles gym kicked my ass) I could have had some fun, but not even that. The target audience is children more transparently than it ever was.
I appreciate the attempt at breaking the “stations of canon” and abandoning gyms, but the replacement is even worse.22 Avoid the game, and just watch the relevant late game scenes if you really want to know the story.
The Black Wolf
Apparently this is the title for twenty other Game of Thrones fics, huh. This one is by GothicJedi666, whose writing I have criticized quite a few times on this blog, most recently with Augment Gothic. He got better!23
The premise of a Jon Snow SI24 isn’t anything new, but one of the first things he does is preventing Ned from becoming Robert’s Hand, which caught my interest because it completely breaks the plot of the books. Ned also comes clean about Jon’s identity to him, which in turn gives Jon an excuse to mention “dragon dreams” to justify some of his future knowledge. He later convinces Benjen to back him up and convinces Ned that the White Walkers are coming. Even more butterflies ensue, helped along by some “quests” enforced on the self-insert, like having to start a noble house and kill one noble in each Westerosi region.
For all this to happen in canon would be ridiculous, but my disbelief remained unbroken thanks to some surprisingly competent dialogue. As said, Gothic has improved since his last oeuvre. It’s still kind of flimsy, and there are some definite power fantasy/Gary Stueish elements that prevent me from fully recommending this, but I enjoyed it.
Seeking the Gods
The writing of this Pokemon ORAS fanfic is not up to snuff, but the concept is pretty interesting: our main character was religious in his past life, and now that he’s discovered it’s all a lie (after dying and merely isekaing), he turns to new gods that he KNOWS are real: Arceus and his Legendary Pokemon.
He goes on a regular gym journey, which is the weakest part of the fic (or any fic), sure, but most of the word count is spent on “sidequests”, going to shrines for legendary Pokemon, trying to figure out their proper ways of worship, etc. Based on some hints, it looks like he’s going to have to figure out how to deal with Rayquaza and Deoxys’ whole deal in a different way than just throwing Pokemon at them.
I think this is the kind of fic that would get an amazing glow up with a rewrite, but the prose and especially the dialogue are really weak and robotic. “Polite” is the best way I can describe it:
"Good morning Will! Ready to set out on our Pokemon journeys?" May asked.
"As I'll ever be. So, do you have a plan in mind, or are we going to wing it?" I asked.
"Hmmm, I was thinking that we could head to Petalburg City and talk to your dad and see if he would battle us. He is the closest gym leader, y'know?" she said.
"Sounds good to me. But just a heads up, knowing Dad, he's not going to accept a challenge from either of us until we get a lot stronger," I replied.
"Well, even if he doesn't accept my challenge, it wouldn't hurt to stop by anyways. Maybe he'll even be willing to give us a couple of tips!" she said.
"We'll see. Anyways, after we do that, we'll probably need to split up. I've got something to look into in Petalburg, and you'll probably want to go ahead and do some more training, right?" I asked.
"Yep! Petalburg Woods seems like a great place to catch some Pokemon and do some training, so I want to go there as soon as possible," she replied.
"Cool. Sounds like we got a plan then," I said.
I guess I’ll keep reading it for a while and see where it goes.
The Rogue Cyberpath
This is the complete opposite of the last fic: there’s nothing wrong with the prose, but the premise and the events are the most disappointing shit ever.
This is a story that technically features a SI, but she forgets the one historical event that matters, so we can treat this as an original character… why bother, author???
It’s a slow burn (read: boring) story of her rise to fame in the mercenary world, from a child of two corpos to one of those mission brokers that you meet in the Cyberpunk 2077 video game. The action that comprises the core of the fic is competently written, but she’s almost never in danger, and I never really got to like the protagonist.
Everything just comes too easily to her. She’s definitely a Mary Sue: the ultimate hacker and sniper in the Cyberpunk universe. The only time she fails is when she gets betrayed, but even then she manages to slice a bullet in half without enhancements and survive… ehhh. I abandoned it about halfway through, and I recommend you abandon it even earlier by never starting.
Speaking of Mary Sues…
Being Donald Trump
No Archive Warnings Apply | Self-Insert!Donald Trump25 | Original Male Character(s) | Original Female Character(s) | Mitch McConnell | James Mattis | Angela Merkel | Jeremy Corbyn | Greg Berlanti | various "Supergirl" cast members | Catharsis | The author's therapy session26 | The Author Regrets Nothing | Worst President Ever! | make Supergirl gay again! | Make America gayer!
This description is definitely going to fail to live up to those AO3 tags.
Being Donald Trump is exactly what it sounds like. A college-aged communist27 Paleontology student and unwitting parody of American liberals gets inserted into Donald Trump’s body right before inauguration. He starts by playing the Russian national anthem as he makes his speech and things only get sillier from there.
[J]esus, we need another good wuxia game, I’ll have to hire someone who really gets that for Trump Games. Preferably someone Chinese to avoid racism allegations. [irony lost on writer, trust me]
It’s initially pretty funny, a relatively normal guy trying to sabotage Trump’s reputation as fast as he can, but then the writer runs out of Concept and starts treating the fic as a checklist. There’s this famous person who turned out to be evil, say, Harvey Weinstein? Trump has a chapter where he makes a speech about how he’s the worst person ever and needs to be arrested. There’s this famous republican? They go down in flames, except when they’re John McCain, who has brain cancer, so he’s warned about it but dies anyway.
Everyone who ever went against Trump gets glorified to absurd extents. Ellen DeGeneres, for example. This fic has aged like fine wine.
Sometimes he goes after people the writer merely dislikes, like people who ruined his favorite show Supergirl, or Alex Kurtzman (who you know actually deserves it if you’ve ever watched Star Trek Discovery).
The jokes run out of steam pretty fast. This Trump loves using Twitter to make fun of people, but most of the time it’s Vladimir Putin, and uh…
That’s the height of this writer’s wit, calling him gay. There are like forty of these tweets, and they never get better. These tweets and callouts get occasionally interrupted by The Plot, which concerns a Secret Service agent (who Trump uses as a stereotypical Head Minion) and his wife trying to turn Trump into less of a Liberal Joker. They don’t get far.
What really made me drop this fic is its resemblance to Stardust the Super Wizard.
Trump’s biggest loss is in approval percentages, which he strongly cares about for some reason. Every other time, he walks over everyone else without challenge.28 All his enemies are caricatures with small penises, all his allies are hyperchads. His punishments are maybe not that cruel, but they are very unusual. I know I read a lot of power fantasies, but this one goes over the line and it starts feeling very creepy. I realized I was reading a loser’s Death Note.
So yeah, my takeaway is: cool curiosity, zero lasting value, I worry for the writer’s sanity.
The Substance
Ironically, the satire has no—
The Substance is a weird horror film that gives the director a lot of excuses to use practical effects and prosthetics. It’s about a hasbeen actress who’s started getting kicked out from roles for being too old. She’s introduced to a secret drug that can make her young again (basically, I don’t want to spoil things too hard), and the rest is an extended allegory on feminism and drugs/surgery being lame and having hidden costs.
It certainly doesn’t sound like a horror film. This is on paper more similar to whatever genre Requiem for a Dream is, though it at least doesn’t feel preachy. The drug has some potential and very visual side effects that our protagonist will keep triggering due to hubris. It has fun with it at multiple spots, and so did I.
Unfortunately I must be one of the few people who didn’t enjoy the film overall, and I came out of the theater feeling annoyed. It’s just too insistent, like the Family Guy meme. Every single scene (like say, one where the main character loves being young and poses while the camera stares at her ass) gets at least three repetitions with the same message and little visual variation. Sometimes, old ironic-in-retrospect scenes and lines even get overlaid over current footage, like this is a sitcom and audiences need a refresher. In reality, the director just needed to feel smart.
The movie’s concept is great, it looks good, it certainly sounds good, the finale and comedic scenes are very entertaining… but it’s 140 minutes for something that people are fairly calling an episode of Black Mirror. I wish some of that time was spent less on treating the audience like morons, more on… anything else? Maybe it could shine some light on other bad parts of show business, or add a couple more characters, anything. Maybe it could just be shorter.
As it is, it’s got little new to say about the topics it’s exploring, but it’s certainly found a flashy approach to its satire.
Adum & Pals*
I know, I know, too many movie-related reviews here, but I swear I’m not becoming a “cinephile”. I strive to avoid all types of phile.
Adum & Pals is a Youtubers Watching Movies “program”,29 but the three youtubers (Adam/Adum/Your Movie Sucks/YMS, Scott/Scoot30 and Gaël/Gaël) are actually funny, which is rarer than you may think.31
I have a healthy hatred for Internet furries, so you’ll know that these videos have actual value by the fact that, despite most of the hosts being the most unapologetic gay furries ever, I religiously sat through 50+ of them. Up to and including two seasons of 13 Reasons Why, episode by episode. It sounds insane when I write it down.
I wholeheartedly recommend this series to anyone who likes Red Letter Media’s work,32 or MST3K, but it might be a skip for those who are put off by edgy humor. There’s a lot of that.
Evil
Network television needs to stop using Wildbow naming. LOST, From, Evil. The shows keep getting worse, too.
This one is about a woman who evaluates criminals psychologically. She gets hired by the Catholic Church to join a team that investigates miracles, exorcisms, etc. in order to suss out fakes, a “neutral” atheist party. It’s a procedural show, one episode we get a psychopathic little kid who might be possessed, the next one is about a CEO haunted by a hacker or maybe a demon.
This non-coincidentally stars Michael Emerson, who you might also remember from LOST, as well as Person of Interest. He’s a great actor, and honestly the cast of this show is not bad in general either. But it’s one of the few positives I can find.
This show just kept racking up dealbreakers.
The main character has four daughters. Child actors are often terrible, and they are no exception. The worst part is they keep showing up, they’re main characters. One episode is about how they play a haunted VR game, and they’re incredibly annoying about it.
The procedural cases are just bad and circular. There’s a tug of war between religious and scientific interpretations for all of them, and they need to preserve ambiguity. Even when a case is “solved”, it always feels unsatisfying because it’s not truly understood. For example, the psychopathic kid dies, or the prophet gets deported by ICE (yes, really).
The supernatural side of things looks cooler onscreen, so all the main characters get a ton of supernatural visions that should really make them stop being atheists. But they’re all really stubborn in pretending the world is simple-natural.
The overarching plot is lame Davinci Code bullshit, and delivered with an eye dropper, one tiny morsel per episode.
SO MANY DUTCH ANGLES, it’s absurd. I wish I had a compilation to show you. They are everywhere, not just in creepy scenes, and take you out of the fantasy every time they happen.
Around episode seven or so, I checked the Inter Net to see if it got better. Apparently people already consider the first season good, and in fact they think its rushed final season is the nadir, with a disappointing ending that explains nothing, so… let’s give this a pass.
The Voyage Without
The third entry in the “Dragon in Star Trek” fic series by Hiver. He’s finally in a canon environment, stuck in Voyager’s storyline. He’s also discovering some info about his species in the Delta Quadrant, so that’s cool.
This fic only covers the first year of Voyager, and then it moves on to another (unfinished) sequel, The Voyage Within, which I’ll cover when it’s finished. I have no idea why he didn’t put everything in the same fic, from what little I’ve read it looks like more of the same.
I don’t have a lot to say about it. It’s good Star Trek, and I still enjoyed this installment, but it’s the weakest by far, with a (thematically?) moody protagonist who keeps snapping at everyone. I guess I recommend it if you’ve enjoyed the previous two fics, but I really hope this is the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix of the series and our dragon stops yelling at his friends in all caps (this doesn’t actually happen).
And that’s it for the month! I am still reading things between Stephen King books, and they all get shorter from here, so don’t you worry, there’ll be more reviews next time. Let me know if you have anything good to recommend.
I know I usually read that word count in two days, but The Stand is DENSE. I finished it right before publishing this article, and will review next time in full detail. Maybe I won’t, and just make a macro review for The Dark Tower and Stephen King in general? Maybe I’ll give up halfway through the reading list? Stay tuned for next episode of Record Crash.
Instead of the 20 Questionable Questing power fantasy self-insert fics I promised, I only reviewed like three. Are you sad? I’m sad.
:(
Oh yeah, I review some of his other work later in this very post.
I’m kidding, I know the reason, he’s the Meta Director.
This 2019 (!) post on editing the book also has a few more that I missed, like removing “Unitarians”, renaming Erica to Valerie, and (I think) most of Wall Drug. That said, he didn’t delete the Passover chapter, which is nice because it was a good chapter, or a bunch of other stuff here.
And this quote in particular confirms There is Something Wrong with Scott Alexander (though the wrongness created a good story nevertheless):
With all of this chapter and interlude deleting, seems unlikely that I’ll keep a perfect 72 chapters spelling out the letters of the Explicit Name + 22 interludes. Probably I should have some number of chapters and interludes that total seventy-two and spell out the Name that way. But that’s going to require deleting or merging a lot more chapters and interludes. I guess I could also *not* have my story be a notarikon for the Explicit Name of God, but that sounds kind of boring.
I’ve been unable to find this within the original serial, so I might have just dreamed this? I mean, they literally drive a Chevy to a levee and blow it up, so the parallels are there.
I don’t want to stereotype, but at this point I think this is my fifth or so fic with the initial element of “trans woman writes a SI that’s a cis woman, and makes that very explicit” that turns to awkward, dragging shit, to the point I might legitimately start treating it as a red flag. Diversity loss.
It’s legitimately the worst movie I remember watching in a theater, it doesn’t deserve my review. The only realistic explanation is that he really wanted to own the chuds who loved the first movie. He desired that so badly that he did the cinematic equivalent of a suicide bombing, “bombing” being the key word here.
I’m not sure I’d even call this a smut fic? It’s a borderline case, and unlike with Play Test, the word count is more skewed in favor of regular plotting.
He stopped writing his porn fic after he got married, suspiciously.
Yes, I know Dune came first, but I judge media by how it feels now, not at the time of release.
I’m not sure, but I think I picked this up from the comments of It was acceptable in the 80s?, another terrible Cobra Kai fic. I really should have seen it coming.
It’s not a very satisfying self-insert, because Lucas almost never thinks in fictional terms after the first book (where it mostly makes him treat Danny’s daughter badly before she actually does anything bad). “I know that in Season 4 this character becomes an asshole so I should try to forestall that” or “this is a Karate-themed show, but maybe I should do something other than a fight here and deescalate” never cross his mind, he starts only thinking like the other characters in the show.
Truthfully, after reading roughly 300k words of this, I’m pretty sure the author was a teenager writing for other teens, who just eat up the soap opera elements without wanting the adult approach that is (sometimes) used in the source media.
Right as I was writing this review, I discovered that the author is currently rewriting the whole series on Questionable Questing, because he (correctly) thinks the main character was too much of a weird asshole for no reason. I can’t promise I won’t review the rewrite in the future. I’m sorry.
Yes this is missing punctuation, but this article is particularly Pokemon-heavy so I won’t bother.
To put things in context, there’s a Trainer’s Union (that forbids coaching) she’s intentionally snubbing.
And in Cockatiel x Chameleon, where the glamorous chatroom has three (3) regular users.
I’ve been wondering if I should create a kind of “annotated” edition, it would be pretty easy to code some HTML/CSS/JS bullshit so you can hover over moves and Pokemon names to see sprites and data. Bavitz has already mentioned this idea, but I’d rather he went back to the writing mines for a new work.
Completely unintentionally, but this author just keeps hitting the right tropes.
I only went back and tried to play this one to understand the WIWTWE plot better, but never made it to the point that mattered before the fic was completed, so it was just a complete waste of my time. And now you have to read a review of it! Sad!
If you live under a rock and haven’t seen the Typhlosion memes, hackers are slowly leaking all of Game Freak’s repositories. They have access to the upcoming games, but, until they’re officially released, they’re only releasing beta content and interesting dev-only data for the old ones. A lot of it, like the Arceus creation myths, is actually fairly interesting.
And I did enjoy Arceus and Scarlet, which did succeed at introducing good new elements (the first more than the second, sure).
In the comments of last month’s post, someone told me that a different QQ writer would never improve, and this fic is an indirect DEBOONK of the general idea. This is my excuse for giving these people infinite chances. Well, unless they’re just writing their fetishes in. Then they get two. Three tops.
He also gets a bunch of Jumpchain bonuses, like a crow companion he can warg into, but I found most of the bonuses made the story more interesting instead of unchallenging. He’s supposed to move on to a different world after he “beats” Westeros, but I always doubt Jumpchain fics will ever make it to that point.
Okay, not ALL fiction is political.
Speaking of red flags…
Throughout this fic you find out he can’t really describe his politics when challenged, and he ends up running his government like any average politician would. At one point he calls himself an anarchist, despite willingly staying on as president and instituting fascist organizations that target his enemies. And yes, these are the writer’s politics, he’s not intentionally writing a parody.
Long into the fic, it’s revealed the protagonist has luck powers in addition to being Trump. He literally cannot fail if something is based on chance.
Many of these are “audio commentary” edited for Youtube consumption, but the editing adds many, many jokes and makes the videos a straight upgrade over the originals.
Also, no, this isn’t off-brand for this blog, I reviewed the Game Dungeon Let’s Play series not that long ago.
Scoot is the funniest, which makes it all the sadder he died in an accident a couple months ago. Not that that’s stopping the titular Adum from editing the footage recorded pre-accident and releasing videos. There’s apparently still a two year backlog he’s going through.
The playlist I linked includes pretty much everything that can be considered part of a “let’s watch”, though the main cast of Adam, Scott and Gäel is absent from many. I actually found the Pokémon anime videos some of the funniest, even though it’s just Adam and some other guy that wasn’t involved with anything else.
This is not like Best of the Worst, though. All the discussion happens mid-movie and has footage coming with it, there’s no round table at the end. They abruptly have to say goodbye as the credits roll. Remember these are born as audio commentaries.
When you said at the top you didn't review much writing, I was worried, but I feel like you ended up with a healthy(?) mix of stuff in here anyway. Thanks for the newsletter! Always making me look forward to the first of the month :]
Would you consider saying what the stars mean? And the asterisks? I've read a few of your posts and I kinda assumed I would get it by now (my prior was a star being a strong recommendation, which doesn't seem to match the descriptions)