straightforwardly (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
straightforwardly) wrote2019-02-21 07:04 am
straightforwardly) wrote2019-02-21 07:04 am
207 | Be the First, fic recs, and Hustle Cat
► Sign-ups for the Be the First challenge have opened up! So excited for this one this year—I think I’ll actually post something for it this time, haha. For those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s a challenge where you write a fic for any canon which doesn’t have any English-language stories already written for it. Like I mentioned in my last entry, I’m planning to write for and have already started on a story for oops the web novel Who Dares Slander My Senior Brother. So excited!
► Two more last-minute Chocolate Box fic recs before reveals:
► While I’m at it, have two non-Chocolate Box fic recs—one for a canon that I’m not particularly fannish about but the story itself hit me hard in my time travel-loving id, and one for Scum Villain which made me internally shriek with glee a lot while reading it.
► I didn’t get around to talking about this last time, but, in the spirit of “finishing visual novels that I started then put indefinitely on-hold for various reasons”, I went and finished playing Hustle Cat not long after I finished OZMAFIA!!. (You can find my initial impressions on it and Finnley’s route over here, for the curious.) It’s… been some weeks since I finished it now, and I didn’t take any notes, so this is going to be short and pretty vague.
Overall… I thought it was okay? This was somewhere the reverse of my experience with OZMAFIA, in that I think I enjoyed Hustle Cat more when I first played it than I did now. Mostly, I think, it’s because I just...really hated the main character. I said this back when I first played it in October 2017, but he/she/they are essentially a compilation of a million character traits that annoy me, which… isn’t a good recipe for a character that you have to spend the whole game with.
It soured most of the romances for me too. For instance, I loved Mason, but I spent her whole route being so angry with Avery for sticking her nose in where it didn’t belong! Yes, it worked out in this particular instance—but that didn’t mean that what she did was right! Agh. Though Avery’s romance with Hayes was, for the most part, pretty cute, even if the scene where he confessed made me want to die of secondhand embarrassment.
► Two more last-minute Chocolate Box fic recs before reveals:
all that we see grows into the ground (Fire Emblem Awakening, Donnel/Maribelle, 1.4K)
On a quiet spring morning, Donnel teaches Maribelle about growth. Or maybe it's the other way around.
and i will mourn this final farewell (Hanakisou, Hanashiro/Kuroto, <1K)
Hanashiro has made his choice, and Kuroto can only watch as the world freezes and dies.
► While I’m at it, have two non-Chocolate Box fic recs—one for a canon that I’m not particularly fannish about but the story itself hit me hard in my time travel-loving id, and one for Scum Villain which made me internally shriek with glee a lot while reading it.
Midnight Once More (Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, Wei Wuxian/Lan Wangji, <1K)
no summary provided; tagged with Time Travel
Mountain Wine (The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, Shen Qingqiu/Luo Binghe, 5.8K)
Shen Qingqiu felt like a chill wind was blowing down his robes. No matter how many plot holes he filled or improvements he made to the story, nothing could save him forever from the stallion novel’s shit foundation. He remembered this storyline.
It was when Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky reached peak laziness.
► I didn’t get around to talking about this last time, but, in the spirit of “finishing visual novels that I started then put indefinitely on-hold for various reasons”, I went and finished playing Hustle Cat not long after I finished OZMAFIA!!. (You can find my initial impressions on it and Finnley’s route over here, for the curious.) It’s… been some weeks since I finished it now, and I didn’t take any notes, so this is going to be short and pretty vague.
Overall… I thought it was okay? This was somewhere the reverse of my experience with OZMAFIA, in that I think I enjoyed Hustle Cat more when I first played it than I did now. Mostly, I think, it’s because I just...really hated the main character. I said this back when I first played it in October 2017, but he/she/they are essentially a compilation of a million character traits that annoy me, which… isn’t a good recipe for a character that you have to spend the whole game with.
It soured most of the romances for me too. For instance, I loved Mason, but I spent her whole route being so angry with Avery for sticking her nose in where it didn’t belong! Yes, it worked out in this particular instance—but that didn’t mean that what she did was right! Agh. Though Avery’s romance with Hayes was, for the most part, pretty cute, even if the scene where he confessed made me want to die of secondhand embarrassment.
no subject
I think I've heard of Hustle Cat, but I don't have it (yet).