Bad Fanfic Review #1 As Death Gives Life

This is the review I started to started to write April 9th and gave up as the pain of reading the story that I was reviewing grew to be too much. I started to just delete this after I wrote the post about how I'm going to try to do more general articles instead, but then I reread it and liked what I had said too much to just toss it, so here is the unfinished review.

Here is a link to Wiki's article giving the background on Inuyasha but you shouldn't really need it.

I was going to give a link to a fanfiction dictionary as promised earlier but I can't find one I really like. Either they are specialized for their particular fandom, or they leave important stuff out, or there is at least one outright error. So, if there is a word you don't understand then either ask me what it means or Google it yourself. Just put in "word definition" or "word wiki", replacing "word" with the actual word, and you should find something in the first few hits.

As Death Gives Life by Rinseternalsoul
Series: Inuyasha
Rated X so if you are under legal age, scat! If you are over legal age don't get your hopes up that reading this will give you a thrill unless you are really easy to excite.

http://kagsess.pixelled.com/fanficread.php?fid=2865&cid=1

There will be spoilers for the story in this review but not much for the source series since the writer blithely ignores most of the events in the last two years + of the series. It may be that it has taken her that long to write it even though the final chapter was posted in February so I won't pick on it too much even though she states that her work is supposed to be canon not AU.

We've been talking a lot about Mary Sue and her brother Marty Stu over at WASIF. If you don't know what a Mary Sue is here is our discussion on it:

http://forums.delphiforums.com/canwrite/messages/?msg=633.1

And here is the author's own introduction of her main character:
I present to you all, my latest creation, staring Lord Anubis, the sexy Egyptian God of the Dead! Enjoy!

Okay so that's not enough to mark him as an MS but it gets better (or worse depending on your POV).

This story is an epic 41 chapters long but fortunately the chapters are short. The review however will be long. If you are still with me get comfortable.

The premise is original; the Egyptian god Anubis is bored and decides that he needs a vacation from gathering the souls of the dead. He has wanted to sire a child for some time as an antidote to dealing with death all the time and he gets permission to leave his post and search the Earth for the perfect woman to "bare" it.

It's obvious that the author relied on spell check alone to proof her story since misused homonyms abound. These days I guess I have to give her points for using spell check at all and I'm hardly one to cast rocks about how someone spells since I can't do it myself but this is where having a good beta reader comes in.

A problem with the writing process is that the author is too close to things to see omissions and errors that someone else will see easily. Even if you don't have a problem like dyslexia it's always a good idea to get someone who will be honest to read over your work. I wish I had someone to do that for this blog but that would take away the spontaneity of it wouldn't it?

Anyway, I don't usually pick on errors like this but it's really hard not to with this story since often they create unintentionally humorous images in my mind. Especially when Sess takes Inuyasha insulting him as his "queue" to begin a fight. I immediately imagine this line of people ready to take on my favorite hanyou. Would Sess wait patiently in line behind Kouga, or would he rudely skip ahead?

Back to Anubis. He searches the entire planet and just as he is about to give up hope he finds Kagome. Beautiful? Check? Virginal? Yep. Good heart? Double check. Power enough to deal with bearing (or baring) a demigod? Apparently.

Now that he has found his perfect woman he materializes before her in the form of an incredibly sexy dog demon and introduces himself. It doesn't hurt that he is possessed of an aura that acts on Kagome like a drug. They are interrupted by Inuyasha before too long but that's okay. Anubis needs to do some research to make sure that she IS the one.

Meanwhile Inuyasha brings Kagome back to camp where she stares into space with a goofy expression on her face and is admittedly intoxicated from being in Anubis' presence. If the author didn't already give away the fact that Anubis eventually succeeds in getting her knocked up in the description of the story on her profile page, then awake readers will pretty much figure it's already inevitable unless her companions do something more than be vaguely concerned. But then according to Inuyasha if "That Bastard thinks that he’s gonna take you from us, he’s got another thing coming!"

Unfortunately that wasn't a typo, I've seen it before from other young writers more than once and it's driving me up the wall. IT'S THINK!!! He has another THINK coming. The saying makes no sense at all if it's another "thing". Yes, it's grammatically incorrect, that's part of the joke. *ahem* /rant mode.

After doing his research Anubis finds that there is a threat to Kagome so he needs to find her a protector since he's a charter member of the 4F club and is really only interested in Kagome for a couple of rolls in the hay and as an incubator. He has no plans to stick around for dreary things like pregnancy, birth, actually raising his child, or a relationship. He'll find someone else to do that so he can get back to work. In 16 years or so he'll seek out his offspring who will be oh so thrilled at meeting dear old dad finally. Asshole.

So we have an original character (sort of), who is more powerful than anyone else in the canon universe, showing up in a moment of deus ex machina and sweeping one of the main characters off her feet and into bed despite a strong relationship with another canon character. He is unusually good looking, and has a special background (being a god). Not Sue enough for you? It gets better, just wait.

Anubis reasons that Kagome won't want to leave Japan and a human wouldn't be powerful enough to protect her so he checks out the rulers of the 4 youkai kingdoms for their suitability. Never mind that this is supposed to be a canon fic and the 4 kingdoms are fanon. Or that Kouga somehow becomes a great daiyoukai lord and ruler of the East instead of prince of a scattered collection of wolf clans, it's not AU. Really.

Anubis finally visits Sesshoumaru's fortress. That Sess has a fortress is another bit of fanon. Rumiko Takahashi has stated in interviews that he does not have a real home and is a wanderer but how boring is that? Someone like Sess should live in a palace so even the best fanfic writers have given in to the temptation to give him one. I can't really blame this writer for following the herd, just for doing so but still trying to hold on to the idea that this is even remotely canon.

Despite his research Anubis doesn't seem to know that Sess is Inuyasha's older brother. He has observed Sess being all fatherly with Rin though and thinks that he will be the perfect sucker, er foster father, for his own as yet unconceived child. This even though the interaction observed was Sess giving Rin an awkward pat on the head in his usual emotionally constipated way. I like Sesshoumaru, I really do, but he has all the warmth of a full blooded Vulcan and he has leather bound volumes when it comes to relationships with others.

Did I mention that the author proclaims her obsession with Sess on her profile page? Did you know that this is ultimately supposed to be a Kagome/Sesshoumaru story? It's really the only way to make sense of Anubis' picking him so keep both facts in mind.

He bribes Sess into being his baby sitter by promising to restore his missing arm and telling him that his sources say that a great threat is scheduled to destroy "The House of the Moon" in 16 years time but that the yet to be concieved child will have come into his power by then and will save them all.

"The House of the Moon" as the name of Sesshoumaru's clan/kingdom/whatever isn't canon. It was created by Resmiranda in her story Tales from the House of the Moon. When I asked Resmiranda what she thought about her idea being used without attribution she said that it's being used by several writers now and she's accepted that it's become fanon. That's very gracious of her but it doesn't excuse any of the writers for not taking 10 seconds to put something in their author's note acknowledging her.

At this point remember that nobody has consulted Kagome about any of this.

Anubis generously decides to let Kagome get to know him for a few days before seducing her. He has no doubts that he will succeed because according to him gods are known for their skill in bed and no human will be able to resist him. Just being a Mary Sue would normally suffice but it's good to know he's got that extra god thing going for him.

According to the story it's been four years since the search for the jewel began, which conveniently makes Kagome at least 19 and therefore the story will not break the rules at FF.Net which say that they will not accept stories with underage sex.

Despite how long it's been, somehow her relationship with Inuyasha has not progressed at all. The development in the manga has seemed glacier because the series has been running for 9 years, but within the story it's been less than a year for the characters. When you look at it that way there has been a lot of progress. Even though Inuyasha seems to feel he isn't free to make any kind of direct declarations of love he did tell her that "You'll always have me" and even Kagome's friends are starting to think he's decent boyfriend material.

But this is a Sess/Kag story so ignore that, Kagome has to be able to drop the man she's been devoted to for entire run of the manga like a hot rock as soon as Sess deigns to pay attention to her. Therefore also ignore Sessy having tried to kill Kagome a couple of times in the past, Sess' disdain for any human who isn't Rin, and his iron control over his emotions to the point that he barely raised an eyebrow when he had a long talk with a topless Kagura, a mature and very well endowed woman.

In Chapter 6 you will need to forget that Sess has increasingly found excuses not to fight his brother dispite still claiming he intends to kill him one day. There is a lot of fan speculation as to why this is but the trend is obvious.

In this chapter Sess seeks out Inu with fratricidal intentions just to try out his new arm. He grabs Kagome and licks her and feels her up in order to goad Inu into not holding back in the fight. Usually just taunting Inu with the fact that he will never measure up to a real demon because of his tainted blood, is soft for humans, and has no manners is good enough but for some reason in this story Sess has to taunt him with not having gotten around to bedding Kagome and threatens to do the job himself. It's a bluff but he finds that he is so captivated by her taste and smell that he almost gets distracted from the fight because he's getting turned on.

She's especially arousing because being roughly held and groped a bit by Sesshoumaru, a man who is threatening to rape, or kill her, or both, in order to strike out at the man that she loves and hurt him, gets HER excited and Sess can smell it. We are told that her excitement is due to being a virgin and unused to being handled like that. Yeah, getting sexually harassed and physically abused turns all the young girls on. Ask any fratboy.

So following this logic, when Miroku stroked her butt for the first time way back when, and she jumped away and grabbed onto Inuyasha for protection, she wasn't offended she was just trying to drag Inu off for a quick lay? To bad it didn't work.

We are soon treated to the first lemon in this X rated story, Sess having a date with his hand after waking up from a dream about Kagome. This scene raises several questions, primarily how does one get semen stains out of silk in the 16th century?

Here endeth the part I wrote months ago. I only read another chapter of the story and skimmed around a bit. Enough to find yet another original character, this one female, who is another obvious MS and to decide that if I read any more I'd loose brain cells that I couldn't spare.