What are you reading?

[Dracos]

Does that fic go anywhere worth following?  The randomness of the start drove me immediately off.

Pretty much the only fic he has that doesn't feel weirdly prescribed is the Wind themed Kurama one.

[Jason_Miao]

Too early to say.  "Chapter 4" is essentially chapter 1; the first three chapters are really character introductions.

[Dracos]

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10225608/1/A-Demon-Among-Devils - updated.  The Demon ball commenced.

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10254848/38/Meh-I-can-take-them-all - updated a while ago.  Kind of an okayish One Punch / Worm crossover.  The only okayish One Punch fic I think exists at the moment.  It has a real problem with tackling almost everything in first person, and since it is primarily told by a person who pays little attention to the details and doesn't really follow who people are, its combat scenes are on terribly confusing.  Having reread it yesterday I would not be able to tell you who was involved in either of the two big mix-em-ups that was covered entirely.

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/7347955/1/Dreaming-of-Sunshine updates, but I haven't read it yet.

And yeah, I finally got around to reading this https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/rwby-the-gamer-the-games-we-play-disk-five.341621/.  Which was pretty awesome.  Lots of Overpowered Main but whatever, the story is really about that anyway.  Think it updates what...every week?  Every 2 days?  Not sure.  Pretty fast.

[Merc]

The RWBY/Gamer fic updates every day with half of a chapter. So you could say it updates every two days for a chapter, but there is still something every day.

I'd originally only been following it on ff.net, so finding out that it was much further ahead on spacebattles, updating regularly and had an index was neat.

Some thoughts, after catching up...

Spoiler: ShowHide

I'm not that much of a fan of Autumn bits, it weirds me out how much time is spent on the MC and others making kissy faces at a plant that can't hear or see. Maybe that will change now since it seems Autumn may be turning into an actual character.

I was also a bit disappointed that Jaunne never actually worked a sword+board fight style into his main ID. One of the things suggested early on was that would be the plan, but he never did anything with those techniques and pretty much abandoned it and just stuck to doing whatever he'd never shown off as his faunus ID. It's a well written fic still, but I kinda feel like it starts suffering from the 'Lets make the MC be OP by making him nothing like the MC' bit.

Jaunne's become a lot more pragmatic/cold here, and while he's still recognizable and the author did spend the time developing him to get to his current mentality, its still a bit weird to not keep something like that.

Mind you, thats only an issue if you've not followed the base series (which I almost didn't since the art style does nothing for me), and even there not that much -has- happened, so there's a lot open to interpretation, so it might just be my gut reaction to seeing the OP MC behaving differently after too many Ranma or Naruto fics doing that.

Ryuugi did spend time on character development, but I really do have trouble seeing the main character as Jaunne.

Edit: To make a parallel, since the characters actually do compare fairly well, normal Jaunne is Shirou from FS/N, while Ryuugi-Jaunne is Archer.

There's some things that make the characters be the same, because Archer used to be Shirou and Ryuugi-Jaunne used to be normal Jaunne, but they're still so different that nobody really considers them the same either. Those fundamental differences in their motivations and how they view the world changes things dramatically. Even having read through the character development, it's a bit jarring to see 'Jaunne' in chapters instead of his alter ego Jian Bing, because it doesn't feel like Jaunne, it feels like this Jian OC. You typically don't see an Archer-centric fic and have everyone call him Shirou. So it's weird.

[Anastasia]

[spoiler]

I think that's the entire point of the story. It isn't really about how powerful Jaune is, who he's facing or any of that. It's about the games he plays, just like the title. Be it playing as Jaune the healer, Jian Bing the legendary martial artist, Jaune the father to Autumn, Jaune the good friend of Adam, he's constantly playing games and wearing different masks.

Canon Jaune's still in there, just changed and hidden beneath all the roles he plays. After all, his life is a game.

[Dracos]

Spoiler: ShowHide

huh, I thought Jaunne was just an OC.  See I don't know RWBY pretty much at all, and he felt like one.  Looking at it, he's waaaay far from the base character just at start.  Basically, aside from the seven sisters thing, almost every part of his initial setup is from whole cloth.  His dad, mom, grandma all seem to be OCs.  His seven sisters are as well, but are at least referenced.  The story starts with him never getting there, so he never even begins the original tale and he starts off with the massively character warping Gamer power.

While some were visible takes on rbwy, I've just taken that both Gamer and RBWY are more flavor and setting takes then actual hard introductions.  I honestly think the story reads better seeing Jaunne as a total OC then it does relating him to his apparently inferiority complex original source material.  Reading the wiki article on him I hardly see any relation to Jaunne in the fic, who was a video game addict who leapt onto driving terrorists around as a failed signal grad.

The sword and board and Blake were both pretty long dropped plotlines which the fic would be better for doing something with.  Amber really was a thing of irrelevance for a very long time and still could basically be removed entirely with almost no notice.  Gou has been sidelined since he showed up, but at least had a bit of weirding out other characters.

Power scale is clearly an issue as really, the way its introduced, both of his parents should be fairly top tier, but they have some students being competitive with them in power level.  That's a mistake really and in part left a lack of room for the author to play around with as there's just enormous power gaps between high level hunters and... high level hunters.  This sort of weakens the 'oh god ???' since there's so little sitting in plausible proximity to it.  It's not like level 100 is the start for really strong hunters or something, because you've got 'we haven't graduated school yet' 45-70s.  It's basically being handwaved that casual simple hunter students are 'Win Every Time' level versus international terrorist lieutenants (as they appeared at the start of the fic).

[Merc]

Spoiler: ShowHide

The power level scale is another thing that does bother me, yes. The sisters all being more powerful than the mom and dad slightly bugs me, but I could live with it since they did note that they were trying to show up their mother. Still odd that -all- of them are more powerful, but whatever. The senior students though? Even some of the juniors? You had professional hunters that were lower level. Hell, Adam at level 38 was a credible threat amongst the White Fang and to other professional hunters that weren't supposed to be top tier. That's a pretty big disconnect when characters at level 60+ are all students, as you also noted. And while some of that is supposedly addressed by the disconnect between skills and power level, it still feels odd.

Back to Jaunne, him jumping into situations way out of his control or ability to handle is fairly normal for the character, so the terrorist parts or his motivation to help with that first big mission, I still felt like it was all based on the original character. I think the turning point for me was when the Mistral arc got introduced. It's the first time that we really see Jaunne acting arrogant about his gamer abilities, showing off and such. Then afterwards, we have his dad die with everyone hammering in that things are not a game...yet it seems like he's treating it like even more of a game. Some of it -is- for show, as Dune's said it's a mask or role he's playing, particularly in Haven, but...I dunno. It doesn't all feel like a mask when he's wearing it all the time?

In theory, they'll all end up back in Vale within the next 10 chapters due to the competition between nations, and I'm kind of hoping interactions with Blake kinda show Jaunne how much he's changed, not necessarily for the better. Unfortunately, none of the other Vale characters could really drive that thought home for him. If not...well, I guess I can just keep reading it as if he was an OC. It's entertaining enough even then.

[Dracos]

Spoiler: ShowHide

Jaunne and Cinder Fall are kind of an odd interaction, probably made worse by I think trying to ride on an unfinished plot arc with a villain that's sorta mainly placed for convenience to the RBWY plot focus, so most of his arrogance alongside that is sort of just playing off a very weird 'why are we even caring in this kids game focus'?

It's not bad, but I think its poorly founded there.

[Merc]

I'm not actually reading this, but Dune mentioned this was happening and I just saw the fic's ff.net description/title and just went "..."

Stepping On Worm » by Perfect Lionheart Worm is a grimdark superhero universe where anything that can go wrong, will. It's nasty, and would require whole books to adequately describe how screwed up it is. But even appearing there with no powers, it is still possible to fix that mess. So, appear penniless and powerless in that environment.

Not gonna even provide a link.

[Pensive Rumination]

After years of silence Ozzallos has posted something in Crapspace: Where Fiction Goes to Die! https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6439399/36/Crapspace-Where-Fiction-Goes-to-Die

Also, this little light of hope from the Author Notes:

So if your eyeballs haven't bled out by the time you read this, yes, i'm working on stuff. Not just stuff, relevant stuff you may or may not enjoy. Stuff with the words 'hild' 'kunai' 'crystalfuckingtokyo' in it. other stuff with the words 'kodachi' 'konatsu' and 'garlicbuttersauce' are also fairly prominent, but between my job life and a three year old, it's been slow going. But, yeah. I live.

Again.

...and of course some idiot in the comments is screaming about why he isn't updating one of his more popular stories...*facepalm*

[Yuthirin]

Ozz had a kid? That explains absolutely everything.

[Dracos]

It's the internet.  Some child is always screaming about why they didn't get the toy they wanted.

Always.

Good to hear he's still around.

[Anastasia]

Yeah, glad to know he's still in there. Life's tough sometimes.

[Jason_Miao]

From https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11016559/10/One-Eye-Full-of-Wisdom

He took a deep breath, and let it out. "That said, you are also not completely to blame. You have been training with the Inuzaka, who are famously viscous fighters who also famously tend to be lose, if effective, cannons, and who use their emotions as a source of strength, letting their inner animal out to fight."

Fic itself is one of those "What if X did things right?" stories.

[Anastasia]

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8872034/26/Fate-Reach-Out

Fate/Reach Out updated. The premise is that Shirou Emiya takes the place of the hero from Persona 4. Shenanigans ensue as shadows happen and worlds collide.