ECB versus Kids vs Wizards (Harry Potter fanfiction sponsored by the KGB)

[Arakawa]

Since Russia has recently taken over Crimea, we are going to be covering this thing, in a horrendously futile and doomed attempt to understand the KGB's propaganda line. Mostly we will just stare at strange prose in vague confusion at how someone could have come up with this.

The cover art:



Yes, feast your eyes on "Kids vs. Wizards", all the way back from 2005. This is aimed... I suppose at kids 12-16 years old or thereabouts? It has some definitively adult bits, as we will see... um... yeah. Trust me, we're going to get to that.

The book claims to be by the popular Greek author "Nikos Zervas", acclaimed at the non-existent European book convention "Mesogia-Logotechnia" [sic], the first in the series "Science is Victory" (my attempt to render the bad grammar of the series title...). I suppose we could also call the series "For Great Science", at that rate. It is published in Russia by Loubyanskaya Square Book Company.

(A... curious name for a publishing company, seeing that Loubyanskaya Square is famously known as the location of the headquarters of the FSB, aka the artists formerly known as the KGB.)

So, it's a Harry Potter bashfic, sponsored by the KGB. Wrap your head around that.

It being technically fanfiction, along with the copious amounts of Evil present inside the cover, makes it valid ECB territory; and trust me, it deserves it. This is not only propaganda aimed to get children indoctrinated with Russian nationalism, but it is outrageously, curiously bad. Trust me when I say that the Soviet Union did this kind of stuff better.

Because this is a full-length novel, and there are only so many years in my life, I will only translate the most bewildering excerpts of the actual book, and summarize the rest; if you're morbidly curious for more, I suppose you can run the actual text through Google Translate or something.

I'm going to work my way through this ECB very gradually, perhaps a post a week; more often if I'm feeling particularly stressed. (For me, this is merely stress relief. Besides which, the book is fatal in large doses.)

Ordinarily the author would get a copy of the review and the chance to send one response, but since I don't know how to contact the KGB and am not interested in finding out, we will have to forego this time-honoured ECB tradition.

Special thanks go to alethiophile for doing a quick pre-read of these.

Chapter Index

• Chapter 1, in which Wizards can't tell the difference between past and future tense

[Arakawa]

Chapter One -- In Which Wizards Can't Tell the Difference Between Past and Future Tense

So, just to get a flavour of the thing, I'll translate the first few paragraphs instead of summarizing. Any italics in the quotes are mostly used to draw attention to things that are particularly bewildering.

We open with a Bible quote:

Truly I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.

- Matthew 18:3

Okay... so I assume this is going to be a theme of the book, right? The power of the innocence of childhood, or something? Keep that quote in mind, we're going to have plenty of reasons to come back to it....

Part One. THE INVASION

Chapter One. The Young Specialist

... There seems to be more and more of this filth around. Probably here preparing a raid... see? some of them got muskets, clacking their spurs, shaking their swords... We haven't had this much trouble in the Russian land even from the Tartars.... that bunch is not gathered here for any good purpose, I can tell you that.

-- N. V. Gogol, The Frightful Vengeance

So, first we quote the Gospel of Matthew, then a fantasy novel by Russian writer N.V. Gogol; when torn out of context like this and plopped in front of this particular novel, the quote gives a vaguely racist impression, but we'll let that slide; there's far more grist for that mill up ahead.

The witches were gathering for their Black Sabbath: sporty coupes roared into the parking lot on Palace Square; the limousines of the head sorcerers, resembling nothing so much as freshly lacquered coffins, assembled beneath the torch of eternal flame at the monument to the Unknown Sorceress.

In the fall of 200.. the World League of Sorcerers opened its hidden war on the Russian front. On September 1st, the great white mage Gandalfus Trampledore ....

sound of record stopping

The who the what now?

... Gandalfus Trampledore [sic] gave his history-setting talk detailing the successful beginning of the invasion. Above the island of Loch-Horrog [?] spotlights lit up the cliffs with crimson splashes of illumination.

So, I suppose we can tell from this already that not only does the author not like Harry Potter, he is also probably not a fan of Lord of the Rings. Good to know.

Also: if I recall correctly, Loch is Gaelic for 'lake'. It's a bit odd that they'd name an island that... but you will soon see that the Greek author of the book is fairly ignorant of the English culture he's parodying. That's excusable... except that he's oddly ignorant of Greek culture as well, but we'll get to that. We'll definitely get to that.

Meanwhile, over a thousand kilometres to the east,

Wut, scene change?

...

Already?!

Meanwhile, over a thousand kilometres to the east, a heavy Airbus plowed through cloudy weather over the western border of Russia. One and a half hours later the plane received permission to land in Moscow's Sheremetyevo-2 airport; the Russian soil cringed* and received a thin, almost frail black-haired young man with the antiseptic smile of a movie star and the black gaze of a hired killer.

* The expression in Russian is more subtle, but yes, the very soil of Russia apparently cringes from this character. If you want to be painfully obvious with your description, learn from this author! See, it's marvellously efficient -- one sentence in, and you can tell this is a bad character, already, because he has 'the black gaze of a hired killer'. Oh. and the very soil cringes when he walks on it.

Yeah. This is going to be that kind of prose style.

He name is Leo Ryabinovski -- one of the best graduates of Merlin's academy. He has been sent to Moscow with an unusual and very important mission. For Leo this was merely the equivalent of an internship -- counting for credits in offensive magic. But the leaders of the League knew that Leo was not just a front line scout; not just a boy with a magic wand. A lot of money was being invested by the League in this project. This autumn, he was going to become the most popular young man on the Russian television screen, the Russian Harry Potter.

It was Leo's task to blow a hole in the so-called Russian shield, which the League of Sorcerers has been trying to defeat for more than eleven centuries.

...

So, about this point I'm picturing Daniel Radcliffe with greasy Snape hair and a crooked smile. If he had a moustache, he'd be twirling it compulsively.

Oh, wait, the guy is pictured on the cover art (see post above). Never mind.

So, what is this mystical Russian shield that the sorcerers have been trying to crack for over eleven centuries? If you can't guess already, the author certainly isn't going to tell you now! Instead, he's going to open up the fourth wall and deluge you with this patronizing bullshit*:

(* the fic is going to be swearing a bunch of times, so why should I hold back?)

While Leonard Ryabinovski, shaking his curls, is passing through passport control, the author must make an important declaration. My story -- is not a fantasy. [Arakawa: wut?] And although I did not personally witness the amazing events on the island of Loch-Horrog, I had the chance to thoroughly interrogate those who were able to escape alive from that picturesque castle. In the first place, my own children Cassandra and Stavros, as well as the Russian boy who goes by the name Ivan Tsarevich. During a recent visit to Moscow I had the chance to visit the well-known building on Loubyanskaya Square, where the cheerful lady from the Special Division Against Destructive Cults showed me an album with curious, albeit frightening photographs. These photos also helped my work on this novel. The author is also grateful to the police of Loch-Horrog County for providing a video cassette (part of which was recently shown on Greek television) recording the moving speech of the sunlike [sic] Harry at the closed meeting of the League of Sorcerers. The desk in my office contains American satellite images mapping Loch-Horrog, and a map of the underground infrastructure of the sorcerers' academy personally drawn by Ivan Tsarevich on a paper napkin. I am glad to be able to include a copy of the last item in this book.

Where... do I... begin....

Okay, first of all, you've just divided your audience into two groups: small children who are ignorant enough to buy this foolishness (as someone who spent months searching for the original Morgenstern edition of The Princess Bride, I commiserate)... and everyone else, who is going to feel incredibly patronized that you wasted a paragraph claiming that something that obviously isn't real, is real.

Second of all, now that I mention The Princess Bride, when Goldman did this kind of idea, it worked, because it resulted in the frame story that allows the author to explore what it was like to have a favourite story growing up as a kid, and how children are not used to certain narrative conventions the way adults are, and all kinds of stuff like that.... Here, the end result is merely that the author's blandly written kids are going to show up at one point and contribute mostly nothing (so, this is very nearly a self-insert fic? joy), and the reader's intelligence is vaguely insulted.

Third of all, the author plays a ball-and-three-cups game with verb tenses that comes across as sloppy even in Russian (and Russian is somewhat more lax with tense conventions). In the exact moment Leo is at the airport about to initiate the plot, the author feels the need to make an announcement that all the events of the book that already happened at that moment, were actually real (except they weren't) and already thoroughly investigated with the aid of the cheerful smiling lady in the well-known building on Loubyanskaya Square.

(Fourthly, about the cheerful smiling lady in the well-known building on Loubyanskaya Square......... absolutely no comment.)

Fifthly, american satellite photos in his desk? I'm kind of sure they had Google Maps in 2005... well, it just launched then, I suppose.

So, by now in the fic we've introduced one character who causes the earth itself to cringe, confused a lake with an island (albeit in Gaelic), broken the fourth wall for no good reason, and tied the story timeline into a Klein bottle with our sloppy tense usage.

How far are we into the first chapter? Ugh, six paragraphs.

Okay, synopsis time, I can't take much more of this prose style today.

So, in yet more awkward present/future-tense-swapping prose, we learn that Leo is a prodigy, a graduate of the Merlin Memorial School of Magic, the University of New Age Arts [sic], doctorate of occult sciences, etc., etc., and he's in town to whip up some support for the forces of Evil. This involves holding joint press conferences with obvious caricatures of well-known publicists that the author of the novel does not like (e.g. Andrei Kuraev --> "Osip Kuroyedov"; note, "Kuroyedov" is a bad pun on "Chicken-Eater", ha-ha-ha).

And also going to a school, which we will see in the next chapter.

We get back to our initial scene with *snicker* Trampledore addressing the Order of the Round Table [sic], in Parseltongue for some reason, apparently (I think? it's not made very clear. I guess the purpose is to convey that they're evil), announcing that the Laboratory (with a capital L) has successfully experimented on five Russian orphans and neutralized the Russian shielding on four of them. Armed with the new method, their agent Leo is going to go to town on the unsuspecting Russian population.

We are told that the story will not be about the League of Sorcerers; the story will be about a boy who challenged the League on their own home turf, and defeated them with no magic of his own.

He did not fly around on vacuum cleaners; he did not talk to cobras and vipers. Usually, whenever he met a cobra or viper, he would just silently kill it with a shovel.

Wait, what?

he would just silently kill it with a shovel.

Okey dokey then....

You see, children can tell the difference between Miracles and Magic. And no matter how cool Baba Yaga or Kaschei the Immortal (well known Russian fairy tale villains) try to be, they will never be cool, even if they are sixteen year old teenagers. Or so the narration tells us, approximately.

The author manages to throw in jabs against everyone from television mediums (the kind that try to bend your spoons over long distances), to people who watch the Harry Potter movies ("the author of the well known movie series about the witches Lolita [sic] and Hella"), to... Jews who work in journalism?

"Ah, my young friend, have you finally found a weapon against that horrid Russian shielding that we are all so tired of?" slightly softening his R's, as though dipping them in soap, asked the balding reporter Edward Mylkin.

For those unfamiliar with Russian stereotypes, the author is informing Russian-stereotype-savvy readers that Ed Mylkin is Jewish. Yes. In case you didn't know, Anti-Semitism is a thing in Russia. Very much a thing. There is a small minority of people who will even take this so far that, if a brick falls on them while walking down the street, they will suspect the brick of being Jewish.

If you were hoping this book to be even vaguely politically correct by western standards... yeah, those hopes are going to be unfounded.

Moving on to more pleasant topics, such as....

... a paragraph promising us gun porn describing top-secret helicopter project Ka-56UM ("The Black Wasp"!).

We are also informed for no apparent reason that a Russian "Amur"-class submarine has left the "hero-city" [sic] of Sevastopol and set a course for Istanbul, and a paratrooper colonel by the name of Viktor Telegin, forced into retirement due to "an unpleasant story", has reluctantly signed a six month contract with "Russia's mighty intelligence services".

Again, why we need to know this, the author does not deign to explain.

There is also a brief and confusing mention of teenagers with assault rifles standing in front of a banner depicting Alexander Suvorov. I won't bother to explain, because we'll meet these characters later. I just wanted to convey how incoherently Zervas fumbles the attempt to... set up a Chekhov's Arsenal with literal guns, I guess.

Yes, the narration is exactly this disjointed. There is absolutely no structure to this prologue as it jumps from topic to topic like a whack-a-mole on crystal meth.

Then we get this bit:

Leo loves his appearance, his intellect, his genes. He is young, an early bloomer. He's young: young moustache, young arrogance in his hair-rimmed eyes [sic].... The talented sorcerer Leo Ryabinovski advances towards the ornate doors, where he is already awaited by the principal of the school -- Nonna Semyonovna Gantelina [note: 'Gantelina' is a pun on 'Dumbbells'], a gaunt, tenacious woman with a slightly exalted look in her eyes.

Leo loves his genes.

...

Well okay then. I think we're done for today.

With that, the assault of awkward present-tense narration ends, and we are exactly two percent into the book. It's just going to get weirder and weirder....

Join us for the next chapter, where Leo advances the cause of Evil by tattooing bad words onto an unsuspecting schoolgirl's forehead.

[KLSymph]

For most ECBs, the narrative is that the reviewer is reading a work and commenting on passages as they occur to the writer, but you're commenting to the audience.  I'm not sure if you should rewrite it to match the usual narrative style, but your review is quite a lot harder to follow than most ECBs.  For example:

Keep that quote in mind, we're going to have plenty of reasons to come back to it....

there's far more grist for that mill up ahead.

except that he's oddly ignorant of Greek culture as well, but we'll get to that. We'll definitely get to that.

Yeah. This is going to be that kind of prose style.

(* the fic is going to be swearing a bunch of times

You should consider cutting back on the comments that call forward to what happens later.  As a reader who knows very little about Russian literature or Harry Potter, the original text is impenetrable to me, but your review is not structured to make understanding what's going on easier.  Instead of taking early examples and hinting that a similar pattern reoccurs later, you might give a broad summary of the points that you'll make for each chapter and then go into details.

Or you could rewrite it so that you're ranting at the author, as in a classic ECB.  You could also rewrite it as a non-ECB summarizing review.  As it is, it feels more like you're trying to explain to me what's bad about this work line by line, which is hard to get into since I don't know anything about the work.

edit: removed leftover word

[Dracos]

In general, an ECB tries to avoid look-ahead.  One, because it lacks succinctness on hitting the targets if you're saying the target is up ahead repeatedly, and two because it removes the mockery from context.  Having not read it, I'm only briefly getting the context that the author is mauling concepts from plenty of better works, but usually the best thing to do there is directly lampoon that each and every time, thus building a rhythm of mockery: "Oh, and did he also wonder curiously when he was nine feet tall?  Always great to pepper a work with references to other works, in lack of substance of your own."

A book seems a vast target to hit, even if terrible.  I've seen it done for Twilight before, but it's a real long hit, and you usually want to go paragraph by paragraph.  Not including most things makes it hard to follow though.

[Arakawa]

Or you could rewrite it so that you're ranting at the author, as in a classic ECB.  You could also rewrite it as a non-ECB summarizing review.  As it is, it feels more like you're trying to explain to me what's bad about this work line by line, which is hard to get into since I don't know anything about the work.

Hmm. I'll have to think about how to handle this. I should probably have asked more explicitly in IRC what distinguishes an ECB review from just a vitriolic review. If this style is not an ECB, then I suppose I'll just edit the topic to stop calling it one. So, can you list the style criteria for an ECB review, so I can decide unambiguously if I'm going to be able to meet them or not?

A side motivation of writing this was that, to develop a story idea I posted earlier (where the main character is an Internet reviewer in the year 30,000) I wanted to get a grasp on the particular style of commentary used in Internet review videos. Clearly, I have room for improvement here, for instance with the call-forwards (which some Internet reviewers do rely on), which I've evidently overused and misused. I'll go back and delete most of them, then.

As for knowing what's going on in the fic... well, I would be glad to summarize what actually happens in Chapter 1, except that basically nothing happens:

• Leo is introduced; he makes the earth cringe and has some content-free conversations with some characters who will never appear again.
• Trampledore gives a boring speech to a faceless council of villains about how they've broken the "Russian shielding" on a bunch of orphans. What this "shielding" is, why they want to break it, how they did it, none of these things are explained in the slightest.
• There are a lot of non sequiturs thrown in that have nothing to do with anything, some of which I have mentioned above, but none of them connect to each other in any discernible way.

All of this is told in the most out-of-order and incoherent narration style you could possibly imagine. Moreover, the fic basically presumes that the reader is familiar with the Harry Potter world, at least on a pop culture level. Which, given that it's marketed as something you would give your children to read instead of Harry Potter, is a very strange decision.

So, when the thing develops a plot, I will be able to actually summarize it.

[Dracos]

Was going to go find the twilight one for a reference, but can't put my hand on it today.  Bleh.

[Arakawa]

A book seems a vast target to hit, even if terrible.  I've seen it done for Twilight before, but it's a real long hit, and you usually want to go paragraph by paragraph.  Not including most things makes it hard to follow though.

Yep, if I follow through on this, it is going to take a while and be a gradual project (small bits of time here and there). I really do want to pummel this book into submission, though.

Paragraph by paragraph is not going to be feasible, because I have to do translation on everything I do include... I'll have to think about how to keep the reader oriented once things actually start happening. As I noted in my response to KLSymph, Chapter 1 really was just a rambling incoherent pile of nonsequiturs, for the most part.

[Arakawa]

Instead of taking early examples and hinting that a similar pattern reoccurs later, you might give a broad summary of the points that you'll make for each chapter and then go into details.

I think this is good advice for what I'm trying to do, which I will do my best to follow.