What are you reading?

[Brian]

Strength of a Horse has unexpectedly updated again.  This time it's got ... lemon?  Not ... really sure what to make of that.

[Kt3]

It injected some believable drama that accelerated the story.

With that said, I don't think he particularly needed to actually spell out what happened to advance the story.  However, with that said... when he (assuming it's a he) wrote out the lemon scene, I was mostly reading between the lines and noting a lot of affection from Anko, so yeah.  If it was just skipped over, I think I wouldn't have been able to pin down as certainly that it wasn't just a fling, so it did, in my opinion, serve a purpose.

[Brian]

It still does a lot of the timeskip stuff.  I was really shocked that

Spoiler: ShowHide

Ranma killing people was totally glossed over.

I also liked the Ranma/Naruto interaction, though unfortunately a great deal of that was glossed over, too.

[Dracos]

Cast in Gold updated a little bit ago.

www.fanfiction.net/s/7057744/1/Cast-in-Gold

I think I'd rather he just get through the trapped in mind-space chapters, but apparently Eva fanfics really like having those.

[Dracos]

Strength of a Horse has unexpectedly updated again.  This time it's got ... lemon?  Not ... really sure what to make of that.

That...was a terrible chapter.  I admit I totally skipped the lemon since it was hard to appreciate anything sexy in the whole "We're grinding two people into the ground".  Reading the story, I now feel like I'm reading a bunch of bullet points rather than a tale.  It sort of glosses over everything.

Spoiler: ShowHide

Agreed on the whole glossing over Ranma killing thing.  I actually had to check the chapter again because I'd missed that it happened entirely. 

And nobody gives Ranma and Anko shit about being unreliable and unprofessional and mooning over each other for months?

The Hokage certainly isn't sparing any blows for someone who was giving Anko special treatment at the start of the fic.

I could rant on but disappoint.

[Empyrean]

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6354319/1/Late-Arrival

Old cuteness.  Ranma ends up in narutoverse and steals Team 7 by accident.  Light comedy.

I just read this. It's pretty fun. Team 7 putting aside their differences to survive their Bastard Sensei's training reminded me pretty strongly of Motivation.

[Dracos]

She is trying to kill us! 

Even after we're dead!

[thepanda]

Mass Effect: Human Revolution updated

Mass Effect: Glorious Shotgun Princess updated back on the 17th.

I'm enjoying First Contact but the nonlinear storytelling is annoying. Would have preferred they'd focused on the contact.

Herwald von Einzbern and the Chamber of Secrets recently updated. I need to read it.

EarthScorpion's The Fearful Void and A Green Sun Illuminates the Void have both been enjoyable, the former more so than the latter.

[alethiophile]

I enjoyed the premise of the Herwald von Einzbern stories, but I found them to be really clumsily written, enough so that it isn't really worth it. Could wish someone would write a similar premise more competently.

[Anastasia]

EarthScorpion's The Fearful Void and A Green Sun Illuminates the Void have both been enjoyable, the former more so than the latter.

Green Sun is interesting, but I don't care for the world building he's doing. It just doesn't quite click for me.

[thepanda]

The Romp Effect

Some grammar problems, but still amusing.

[Dracos]

Finally read a few chapters of Green Sun.

Kind of found it a muddled unclear mess.  I agree with Dune, the worldbuilding doesn't click.  More than that though, the individual scenes don't flow together well.  I feel like I'm almost jolting from instant to instant with the headmaster acting as periods with a "It is my will!"

Unlike random foreign words kind of worked in the AC/Louise fic, they very much just added to the disorienting writing here.  Just found it unpleasant.  Mixing in dream sequences and prophecy did not help.  I think overall the story reflects the worst elements of Exalted: Strange Fey creatures of Unreality with fanciful long titles, imaginary kingdoms, and unknowable armies seemingly placed without context of the world around them.

[Arakawa]

Unlike random foreign words kind of worked in the AC/Louise fic, they very much just added to the disorienting writing here.  Just found it unpleasant.  Mixing in dream sequences and prophecy did not help.  I think overall the story reflects the worst elements of Exalted: Strange Fey creatures of Unreality with fanciful long titles, imaginary kingdoms, and unknowable armies seemingly placed without context of the world around them.

Hm, this is the one where the neomah is inside her? Saw that a while ago. It's not just the worse-than-Lovecraft baroqueness, but the constant

Spoiler: ShowHide

<Neomah> let's sex him/her/it up, Louise!
<Louise> gah! the only reason I'm not going all Akane on you right now is that you don't have a body I can mallet!

got to grate a lot as well. If you're not going to actually do something with that angle, why harp on it constantly?

[Anastasia]

Finally read a few chapters of Green Sun.

Kind of found it a muddled unclear mess.  I agree with Dune, the worldbuilding doesn't click.  More than that though, the individual scenes don't flow together well.  I feel like I'm almost jolting from instant to instant with the headmaster acting as periods with a "It is my will!"

Unlike random foreign words kind of worked in the AC/Louise fic, they very much just added to the disorienting writing here.  Just found it unpleasant.  Mixing in dream sequences and prophecy did not help.  I think overall the story reflects the worst elements of Exalted: Strange Fey creatures of Unreality with fanciful long titles, imaginary kingdoms, and unknowable armies seemingly placed without context of the world around them.

I'll disagree about the flow being muddled. It's just that it's more focused with building things up instead of telling a story. Some of the story ideas here are neat, but I'm not interested in 100k+ words of worldbuilding with a story thrown in as a secondary concern. I'd give it a 5/10; Green Sun is a flawed fic that still has high quality and good ideas mixed in with the deeper problems.

As far as the neomah goes, I figure that's more of playing to the Exalted mythos involved. Louise is sort of repressed and stuffy in the canon and it's a decent enough conflict point.

[Arakawa]

You know, something that occurs to me: Louise is implied in a couple of places in canon as being very religious (in a way that might be above average for even the medieval world she's in). I rarely see a fic that bothers to even bring that up, let alone explore that portion of her character, particularly with the fact that she suddenly finds out she inherited her religion's founder's school of magic. But it's not explored in canon either, so... yeah. (She's just always the one that says things like "this place is very important to the Brimiric faith".) Would be purely a 'nice to have' thing for once.

The only major instance where religion qua religion seemed to be plot-relevant was the Madoka crossover fic where magical girls were being pursued as being liches. And that's just a shallow 'bring in the Spanish Inquisition' kinda thing.