There's not enough bitching

[Brian]

FFFFFFffffffffffff

"Yeah, you should talk to your mom again!"
"Things are going better?"
"She hardly drinks at all anymore!  She's almost like a normal person!"

Got into work late.  Have step-father as co-worker.  Maximum awkward points/miserable day. :|

[Jon]

Went to jiujitsu tonight. Now my everything hurts.

[Jon]

Whoever wrote the ending for Mass Effect 3 needs to have all his bones broken so he can never write anything again. It's not just a lazy ending. It's actively shitting on the entire 2.9 games that came before it.

[Arakawa]

So, got around to watching Genesis of the Daleks. Cool.

Got around to watching Planetes. Mega cool.

Feeling pretty good about myself, for having cool stuff to watch.

From good feelings about myself arises overweening hubris to anger the gods!

The gods punish me by allowing me to attempt to finish reading a fic that I'd given up on previously out of boredom. Namely, Partially Kissed Hero.

I get exactly the same amount of chapters in (~50 or so), and give up for the exact same reason I gave up the previous time. (Namely, the things that would turn most normal people off the fic by chapter 5 have accumulated by chapter 50 to completely break my brain. I think the "longbows > guns" chapter is the part when my brain starts noticing something is off.)

Then I get this weird nagging to check in what context it was originally mentioned on SR that I found out about its existence.

Namely, a link to this page:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/FanFic/PartiallyKissedHero

Only after actually reading the post that gave the link, and the tropes page, do I finally find out who 'Perfect Lionheart' is, and why the fic was eventually so bewildering.

So to summarize. After taking the time to read 50 chapters of the fic in question, twice.

（╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

_{Grass! I was attempting to eat grass!}

Good god, having squick blindness sucks.

[Brian]

I don't think I could handle PKH.  Weirdly enough, I did read all of Chunin Exam Day, and surprisingly enough, being familiar with Skysaber ... it didn't bother me that much.  It does help that most of my biases line up, but even I thought that the sharingan-bashing was kind of brutally over-the-top. <_<;

But, yeah.  We know him well, unfortunately.

...

Tesla batteries.

[Yuthirin]

（╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

_{Grass! I was attempting to eat grass!}

This is actually what I do whenever Skysaber/Perfect Lionheart/Phoenix/Whatever writes a new fic. I just start throwing furniture and eating grass. Because it makes more sense.

[Arakawa]

Tesla batteries.

I... I seriously don't want to know.

I think part of the problem with Skysaber is that there's just enough interesting stuff in what he writes that reading it I wanted to like the rest of it. Which is, sadly, utterly impossible. If he was just a raving lunatic, full-stop, nobody would have wasted quite so much time with him.

PKH has good points: some neat worldbuilding. A deconstruction which happens to plausibly explain why HP canon felt kinda morally abhorrent in and of itself.

But not as abhorrent as PKH (pot, kettle). Example: everyone in Skysaber's universe is either a Good Guy or a Bad Guy. Good Guys are morally justified in mind raping and torturing Bad Guys, but not vice versa. This is possibly okay until... they fool Bellatrix into working for them. Because Bellatrix is working for the Good Guys, she must be a Good Girl! You can see Skysaber tries to write it differently, but his brain won't let him.

Worst part? Feeling cheated like this results in me feeling a psychological need to go back and analyze what exactly is so bad about PKH, which nevertheless sailed past my radar, so that I'm never tricked that way again.

Ugh. Is there a non-horrible Harry Potter deconstruction out there? I'm losing hope.

[Jon]

It rather depends on what you're looking to get out of a deconstruction. Unfortunately, the inconsistencies in canon mean a lot of writers have tried their own responses to them.

You might like The Lie I've Lived, which I think might be what you mean by a HP deconstruction.

[Dracos]

I wanted to like the guy's stuff too, a decade or so ago.   As I understand it though, his writing is worse today then it was back then, namingly as it reflects more of his mental issues in them.

I've ignored his works largely since his plagiarism of Shade ...in probably the beginning of that there fic, but it could be another harry potter fic of his.  The last I looked was his front page where he had his shockingly crazy challenge that had spun all over the naruto fandom (shockingly really).

You are correct that he has a policy that good guys can do no wrong, bad guys can do no right, hated characters must remain around indefinitely for constant humiliations and punishments (Akane, Dumbledorf, Genma, Other), and generally instead of taking refuge in suspension of disbelief, he takes a specific prodding of elements that are non-sensical in his fic, drawing them into the light directly.  These are elements of his writing that go back a decade and some.  It's just how he writes.

[Arakawa]

The saddest thing is that there's parts in PKH I can see where he's trying to add some nuance to his writing, struggling with the notion, and then failing miserably and writing exactly what you describe anyways.

[Yuthirin]

I've ignored his works largely since his plagiarism of Shade

Oh nostalgia. The ranting letters. The insanity. The hours spent alternatively laughing and shaking our heads in confusion.

[Brian]

I don't think Skysaber really tries to add nuance as much as just originality.  Give the man his due -- while what he writes is typically not very good, and frequently outright retaliatory to people who offer him legitimate advice -- he can come up with interesting, original ideas.  Quite frequently.  Alarmingly quickly, in fact.

Where he falls apart is having those neat ideas actually stick together into a cohesive whole.  Everyone has their own points for where things failed (to them) when reading Skysaber's work.  For me, it was Mirrors Multiplied.  Most everyone failed it at the 'Tesla Batteries' point, if not a few chapters before.  I lost all respect for the work as an original thing once the crossover abundance hit a critical mass, somewhere around Robotech.

Some people didn't get that far.

Being able to read his original MM side-by-side with the re-write, I read the original first, then slogged through the remake; he was actively adding extra plot threads that he'd fail to follow up on, while doing nothing to close out what later became dropped threads.

While the pages are all gone, the sheer volume of 'Bet' fics he contributed to probably outweighs anything done by Gregg Sharpe.  If you're not familiar with 'the Bet,' basically a bunch of gods watch Ranma's adventures in Mimmir's well, and they mess with Ranma's life in 'one small way' to produce an AU or divergence.  Thousands of starts/ideas that aren't full fics.  They allow the ideal framework for Skysaber to work with, as they demand interesting setup, and nothing in the way of follow-through.

As others have said, Skysaber's only redeeming value is audacity, and the moments where his writing seems most successful is where it is isolated from anything else in the fic, entirely.  So, Skysaber's a terrible writer, but also an interesting one.  He generates brilliant ideas that he can't execute, and manages to even share a few of them from time to time ... just don't expect _him_ to write an amazing story, even if he can puzzle one out, and only really imply it between the chapters from some other, vaster (and less cohesive) attempt.

[Dracos]

I don't know if they still do (or are), but Gregg and Sky were good friends at one point, and it was less Skysaber writing a lot of original Bet-fics (though he wrote some) but more them collaborating.

Gregg Sharp really does deserve the credit for the bulk of them.  He definitely did write or at least co-author most of them that occurred, and his specific style of constantly spinning off slight divergence ideas is still seen today over on the addventure.  His writing has various other problems (whose doesn't?), but the bet really was his thing and the amount of basic setups he did off it were ridiculously large.

The framework basically is one that Gregg still uses to today (look at many of his recent works and you'll still see a start point of Toltiir meddling fairly early and thus being used as a grounding for a dozen or more fic concept pieces).  It's just something that they both share, though of the two, Gregg is more likely to finish a work in some fashion (or was anyway).

[thepanda]

Man, I can't even remember which one Mirrors Multiplied was. You peoples memories are way too good.

(Is it the one where the American Revolution failed, Japan became a super power, and Ranma megamaned his skills from Ranmas from other people's fics?

Or is it the one that kept inexplicably turning into a musical/song fic at random points in the narative?

Or the one with Dr. Where?)

[Brian]

Yes.