Fanfiction Corner: TES: Edberry Panic! (first impressions)

I have had this on my To-Do list for a long while now; nearly half a year since I promised the author of this to write a review of it. I warned him of my slightly psychotic manner of reviewing things and that I would not beat about the bush if I saw something that affronted my sensibilities. Seemed to agree to that. So here goes.



The Elder Scrolls: EdBerry Panic!

The Story
There is a very good reason this is listed as "First Impressions" rather than the whole review I promised so light heartedly. Why? Because I couldn't even finish the first chapter! The story never gripped me, I was in a complete state of non-grippedness all the time!

Let me briefly talk about immersion in story-lines. Immersion is what happens when you openly weep at the death of a cherished character in Gaunt's Ghosts. Immersion is when you feel the haunting feeling of the ring-curse in Ring. Immersion is when you sit and chew your fingernails into bloody stumps when reading something from the Cthulhu mythos. Needless to say, Edberry Panic! doesn't do this to me, in any way. Maybe it is because I am not familiar with on of the ingredients for the cross-over: the anime Strawberry Panic! ? I doubt it. Why? Because my own Space Outlaw stories have gripped people who have had no knowledge of Warhammer 40'000 to such an extent that they took up playing the table-top wargame! I have this on record! (Link valid as of 11th August 2008) So, the lack of grippedness is not due to not knowing more about Strawberry Panic! than that it is a seinen-manga/anime with a lot of yuri in it.

No, I think the non-grippedness stems from the story being so generic I already know it before the introductory exposition is over with. This is also a triple-way cross-over. According to the, by now for some contrived reason, mandatory blog-like (yet entirely unnecessary) introduction from the author, this is a three-way cross-over with Ed, Edd n Eddy, Strawberry Panic and The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind. It was the Eds bits and the Elder Scrolls promise that made me want to read it to begin with. I'll get into this later.

Anyway, the story: Many centuries ago there was some generically evil demons things in Japan (of all places!) trying to take over the world because they were evil, but some good people came out of nowhere and defeated the horrible demons which now are back for another go. Girls are girly and men are manly and nothing shifts the status quo of insipid gender roles. That's what I got of the story as far as I managed to read, but I think I can take a clever (or not!) guess at how this all ends. Now, I don't expect a work on par with Fyodor Dostoyevshky's prison diaries every time I read something, especially not at FanFiction.net, but you can at least try not to write something that has already been written umpteen times before? Oh, and it is never stated why the evil demons do this. Because they are evil, I guess! This brings me flawlessly to my whole resentment of seeing gods and demons and other clearly supernatural beings as fact, without giving any kind of plausible reason to where they came from. Even in the Space Outlaws, demons have at least a pseudo-scientific origin (warp-matter given shape by human nightmares). But then again, this is meant to be read as Fantasy, so I can dig it. Apart from that the demons have no really good reason to kill humans, apart from being evil. And considering mortals vermin? Come on! That is old hat even in such a cliché-filled genre as Fantasy. Give me something that shows that you at least put minimal brain-activity in creating the setting!

What more? Oh, yes. From the Eds point of view, this is some seven years into the future. Now, the author of this would have you believe only three years have passed. This doesn't hold up, as I have distinct memory from the first Earth2Edd forums that existed, on which Mike Kubat (one of the script-writers for the first series of Ed, Edd n Eddy) posted a list on the characters ages. The Eds were listed at 12 years old, Jonny 2x4 at 10, Kevin at 13 as well as Nazz, Rolf at 14 and Sarah (Ed's sister) at 7 or 8. In the story she is 14. Hence, more than three years must have passed.

Also, in the first chapter, Ed has an amazingly long and complicatedly described fight with a daedra-thing. At least I think it is a daedra, as the allusion to daedra is the only trace I find of the Elder Scrolls' presence in this cross-over mess. Anyway, the fight is long and show-cases what the next section will go into; the language used. But first I want to rant what actually takes place in this first fight.
Apart from it being ridiculously long, Ed pulls out some powers I don't think any human being is capable of doing, for the sheer reason it violates the laws of physics! The first thing that made me go "what the crikey?" was that Ed appeared to have sword proof fore-arms. Now, a demon, leaving aside that they don't exist, would have an inhuman strength behind their blows to start with (being inhuman), the sword was most likely not so blunt. In fact, I think even a demon warrior would look after his weapon so that it would be nice and sharp. Simple common sense says that Ed's arms would be chopped off readily enough if a demon lunged at him with a sword and the idiot chose to block with his bare arms!
Now, a few paragraphs down, as the fight is somewhere around 8 paragraphs of extremely detailed close-combat in unnecessarily long sentences, Ed pulls out jumping powers that would put current World Record Holder at the High Jump, Javier Sotomayor, to shame. And Ed does it without a run-up. And this is the point where the author all of a sudden decides that writing what Ed does is too much bother and reverts to the typical animu-method of just writing the cool name of the "attack" out instead of telling people what is going on.

Writing and language
The first thing that strikes me, in the first sentence of this train-wreck, is the constant shifting between two temporal forms in the verbs. No, I am not being a Grammar Nazi. According to the author's ID, he (I assume it's a he, because of Strawberry Panic! What a corny name that is!) is living in the USA, so I assume he was raised with the English language. This means there is no excuse, whatsoever, to constantly shift between present and past forms. As a matter of fact, it is a bloody nuisance! Sir, your English teacher deserves to die a thousand horrible deaths for letting you get away with language this vile! Okay, so I AM a Grammar Nazi! But fact still stands, doing this, when you are an English speaker by birth... Oscar Wilde turns in his grave!

Also, learn to punctuate properly. Some of it is just plain weird, like the commas out on a field trip at one point. And the periods just disappear at times. They just smegging disappear!

Secondly, it is spelled "asphalt", not "ash fault". This took me thirty seconds to check on an online dictionary, or even better, the built-in one in Linux or Mac OS X. Even Microsoft Word comes with one! Not that hard to check if you are in doubt over its spelling. Even better; if you can't deign yourself to use a dictionary (they come as brick-like books too, you know!) use a synonym instead. In this case, tarmac would fit the bill nicely.

Now, remember I mentioned that Ed's fight with the Daedra was drawn out and slow to read? Just generally clunky? Well, this is because that fight, and the build-up for it, was so riven with what is known as purple prose, that it became hard to read. Purple prose is what happens when people with little experience in writing try to make their story more epic by using overly complicated words for pretty mundane things. Instead of writing "The demon had now walked up to Ed so that he could clearly see it" and then follow with a fairly straight-forward description of the demon's physical characteristics, we get something about "the distance being bridged" and an incredibly, and internally contradictory, physical of the demon. I dunno what causes this behaviour, but I put some blame on Eragon and a lot on Tolkien! Tolkien's language was one of the reasons I wanted to put the Lord of the Rings away and never touch it again, no matter what his fans think. You can nothing but admit that although Tolkien could write good descriptions of nature, he could not write a good battle-scene. This is not opinion. It is fact!
Edberry... suffers from the same problem. If a battle is to work in writing, the writing has to be succinct and punchy, literally! It doesn't do with half-baked descriptions of martial art grips and stuff, not when the sentences are laden with too many adjectives and are too long in the first place!

Now, the true thing in this writing that made me stop reading: the mish-mash of Japanese and English for "authenticity". Apart from the occasional word or title, this method should NEVER, EVER be used, for any language. Especially not if you're a teenage American anime-nerd. Why? It reduced the level of intelligence in your writing drastically every time you use it. It is stupid! Again using my Space Outlaws as examples, I only ever use this technique for words of affirmation (The High Armageddon Jawohl!), titles (Moskvanian naroddny kommissar) as well as those instances when alien tongues are spoken and the (main) characters listening don't understand what they are saying, as well as for some names.
In Edberry... we get a wonderful mix of Japanese and English in lines like this:

"YAMEDAE-KUDASAI, IT HURTS! LET ME GO, ONEGAI, LET ME GO, IT HURTS LET ME GO-KUDASAI, LET ME GO-KUDASAI!” Hikari cried and begged the man.

That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is a mess! That can't, with the best of will, be called English! Besides, the Japanese and English grammar doesn't translate well into each other, so the Japanese words are used pretty wrongly as far as their position in the sentence is concerned.

Also, the author mentions background music, from some band I have never heard of. This is moronic, no other way to put it. This is a short-story, even if it is fanfiction. If you don't see why this is dumb in the extreme, you are a lost case with no taste. Or an idiot. Possibly both.

Oh yeah, and to round off the language bit: the (bleeping) of the more unwholesome cuss-words. Here's a handy guide: If you are going to use the harsher words of the English languge, use them. Do not turn the fic into a David Letterman-show. This is the Internet, it is okay to curse. Either that, or chose to use only weaker ones, or none at all. Choice is simple. Either you omit them or you go the whole hog. Don't pussy-foot around! The story is rated T for Teen anyway!
I just don't get the logic behind it.

Three way cross-over is INSANE!
Phew! This was long! But I had so much bile to went after attempting to read this for uptowards an hour and getting nowhere. So we will round off.

In the mandatory introductory exposition, author-on-a-soap-box, the author asks the, obviously, rhethoric question whether he is mad to attempt a three way cross-over. I want to answer that question with a resounding YES!
Now, using the Elder Scrolls, with its rich background work, well-filled-out world and smoothly functioning "physics engine" as it is an RPG-setting, is no dumb idea. It is a spliffing idea! No problem there. As long as you don't reiterate the game plot! I can't stress this well enough. I didn't hang on to the plot long enough to see any, ANY, Elder Scrolls references at all, so I felt kinda lost, and put out.
Combining TES with the Eds? Fair enough. It works, I did something similar when I wrote the Space Outlaws (which are more of a semi-cross-over, as I practically only use the "physics engine" of WH40K). But to add a Yuri-manga to the mix? A story which starts out being about the Final Battle of the World quickly dissolves into some romance-story with girl-on-girl pairings? What the crikey?
So, mixing three ways is crazy.

Oh, and you write this without profit in mind (I certainly hope so!), you don't have to worry about the proprietors for the fandoms suing you. Why should they bother with the cross-over tripe of a second-rate writer on fanfiction.net?

Conclusion
This was, as mentioned, only a first impressions thing-a-magig rather than a full-blown review, because I couldn't get past the first chapter. It was too badly written, didn't hook me and felt just awfully generic. I don't expect every story I read to be a revolution, but it could at least try to mix things up a bit.
As it is, The Elder Scrolls: Edberry Panic!, which has a horribly misgiving name as there is precious little Elder Scrolls in it, is a mediocre story on a site full of mediocre stuff. It doesn't stand out in any manner, has serious glitches in grammar and is totally unoriginal in every sense, even in how the gender roles are portrayed (aged and boring!). The only original aspect of the story I can think of is that it tries to mix an anime, a Canadian cartoon and a Canadian video game.

I guess that is admirable. In a retarded kind of way.