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waltzoidThe next time someone tells you that they've experienced something "so bad it hurts to play/read/watch", ask them if playing/reading/watching that thing made them go to bed in a fitful sleep because their blood pressure ran too high.
That's what happened to me a few days ago when I'd finally checked out of reading The Savior King, the Master Tactician, and the Queen of Liberation.
The effect wasn't immediate, but the result of reading the story over the course of six months and driving myself crazy over the nonsensical characterization (Dimitri's long conversations with his head ghosts, Byleth's repeated "magical burnouts"), erratic pacing (the first 16 chapters cover half a year of the in-game story, while the Cindered Shadows arc from Chapters 17-26 is finished in just over two weeks), sloppy fight scenes, awful spelling and grammar, and the author turning the Crest-bearing characters into something akin to the mutants from X-Men as a way to shut down any in- and out-of-universe debate over the subject (with the side effect of removing the main reason Edelgard opposes the Church of Seiros in favor of flattening her into a caricature of your standard "evil emperor" character). And when the author isn't trying to smash together a "war for the fate of the world" plot with a "make the main characters kiss" plot and having them fight over what gets to be the main focus, she just straight-up spoils major secrets that aren't revealed until near the end of most of the story routes (Claude's half-Almyran heritage and Dimitri's experiences during the Tragedy of Duscur are spoiled in Chapter 1, and a large chunk of information about the cult known as "those who slither in the dark" is casually spoiled in one of the mid-30s chapters, or about one-third of the way through the story) and robs them of their mystery and mystique.
And in those mid-30s chapters, we had Dimitri witnessing the chaos in Remire and snapping on the mind-controlled villagers (murdering them in a shower of blood and gore with the same vigor he killed numerous rogues and mercenaries in Abyss), Felix's brother Glenn somehow being alive despite Dimitri confirming his death at the beginning of the story (and talking to ghostly versions of him, King Lambert, and his stepmother Patricia for every chapter he'd been the focus of up until that reveal), the person who revived him being a defector from "those who slither" (an original character named Atra, a 13-year-old grunt in the enemy army who somehow knew enough advanced healing magic to save Glenn from death and has enough high-level dirt on her former leaders to bury him again), and said defector being invited to join Jeralt's mercenary company by Byleth even though it's not in Byleth's capacity to do so because she's on the church's payroll and not her father's. That last part doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things because Jeralt still dies almost the same way he does in Three Houses, and what was originally the biggest gut-punch in the game has all of the emotion sucked out of it by having Atra describe the incident to everyone instead of the author writing it in because it happened during a chapter where Byleth wasn't the focus.
Oh, and you know Marianne's Crest of the Beast? The Crest that has made her miserable her whole life because she's had to deal with nasty rumors about her ancestors turning into bloodthirsty beasts? Well, at the beginning of Chapter 41 (the chapter right after Kronya and Solon are anticlimactically killed off in the wake of Jeralt's murder), while the heroes are fighting the remnants of Solon's army, Marianne briefly transforms into a Demonic Beast completely out of nowhere. She wasn't using a Hero's Relic at the time, and nobody had mind-controlled her or fed her an incompatible Crest Stone when no one was looking. It just...happened. Why? The whole point of Marianne's character arc and her supports with others in Three Houses is that she doesn't need to hate herself because of the rumors about her ancestors. But because of the author's apparent love of Crests and the desire to amplify the Crest-bearing characters' abilities with actual superpowers (Dimitri's super strength being ramped up to Herculean levels, Bernadetta being able to shoot multiple arrows at once, Felix and Hilda being able to shatter armor and wooden doors with one stroke, and Yuri's ability to turn invisible on command), it looks like she decided "why not weaponize Marianne's trauma and turn her into a literal beast?"
Ugh.
I didn't read Savior King in detail past Chapter 32, and had only skimmed parts of later chapters to find something to latch onto that might...*ahem* save the story from getting the easiest 1-star rating I've ever given, but found no indication that the characterization, the spelling, the plot, or the romance that's central to this fic's popularity on Archive of Our Own would improve. I wouldn't be so harsh on the story if not for the fact that the author tagged it as a "fix-it fic (of sorts)", implying that her retelling of Three Houses' events and interpretation of its characters was superior to the game from which she was adapting. Well, after I'd gone to bed a few nights ago and suffered a fitful sleep over how badly it's handled Dimitri's character (he's supposed to be the lead character, but Claude and Byleth have been given much more agency in the plot than him while he gets yelled at for being dumb and/or useless) and the mountains of other annoyances, I decided to delete the PDF I was reading because my blood pressure had spiked and I wasn't about to risk my health, physical or mental, by getting angrier over reading any more of it. Even if it does eventually reach the conclusion it appears to have been stuck on since July, that awful first-third won't make the other two-thirds of the story even close to worth reading.
That's what happened to me a few days ago when I'd finally checked out of reading The Savior King, the Master Tactician, and the Queen of Liberation.
The effect wasn't immediate, but the result of reading the story over the course of six months and driving myself crazy over the nonsensical characterization (Dimitri's long conversations with his head ghosts, Byleth's repeated "magical burnouts"), erratic pacing (the first 16 chapters cover half a year of the in-game story, while the Cindered Shadows arc from Chapters 17-26 is finished in just over two weeks), sloppy fight scenes, awful spelling and grammar, and the author turning the Crest-bearing characters into something akin to the mutants from X-Men as a way to shut down any in- and out-of-universe debate over the subject (with the side effect of removing the main reason Edelgard opposes the Church of Seiros in favor of flattening her into a caricature of your standard "evil emperor" character). And when the author isn't trying to smash together a "war for the fate of the world" plot with a "make the main characters kiss" plot and having them fight over what gets to be the main focus, she just straight-up spoils major secrets that aren't revealed until near the end of most of the story routes (Claude's half-Almyran heritage and Dimitri's experiences during the Tragedy of Duscur are spoiled in Chapter 1, and a large chunk of information about the cult known as "those who slither in the dark" is casually spoiled in one of the mid-30s chapters, or about one-third of the way through the story) and robs them of their mystery and mystique.
And in those mid-30s chapters, we had Dimitri witnessing the chaos in Remire and snapping on the mind-controlled villagers (murdering them in a shower of blood and gore with the same vigor he killed numerous rogues and mercenaries in Abyss), Felix's brother Glenn somehow being alive despite Dimitri confirming his death at the beginning of the story (and talking to ghostly versions of him, King Lambert, and his stepmother Patricia for every chapter he'd been the focus of up until that reveal), the person who revived him being a defector from "those who slither" (an original character named Atra, a 13-year-old grunt in the enemy army who somehow knew enough advanced healing magic to save Glenn from death and has enough high-level dirt on her former leaders to bury him again), and said defector being invited to join Jeralt's mercenary company by Byleth even though it's not in Byleth's capacity to do so because she's on the church's payroll and not her father's. That last part doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things because Jeralt still dies almost the same way he does in Three Houses, and what was originally the biggest gut-punch in the game has all of the emotion sucked out of it by having Atra describe the incident to everyone instead of the author writing it in because it happened during a chapter where Byleth wasn't the focus.
Oh, and you know Marianne's Crest of the Beast? The Crest that has made her miserable her whole life because she's had to deal with nasty rumors about her ancestors turning into bloodthirsty beasts? Well, at the beginning of Chapter 41 (the chapter right after Kronya and Solon are anticlimactically killed off in the wake of Jeralt's murder), while the heroes are fighting the remnants of Solon's army, Marianne briefly transforms into a Demonic Beast completely out of nowhere. She wasn't using a Hero's Relic at the time, and nobody had mind-controlled her or fed her an incompatible Crest Stone when no one was looking. It just...happened. Why? The whole point of Marianne's character arc and her supports with others in Three Houses is that she doesn't need to hate herself because of the rumors about her ancestors. But because of the author's apparent love of Crests and the desire to amplify the Crest-bearing characters' abilities with actual superpowers (Dimitri's super strength being ramped up to Herculean levels, Bernadetta being able to shoot multiple arrows at once, Felix and Hilda being able to shatter armor and wooden doors with one stroke, and Yuri's ability to turn invisible on command), it looks like she decided "why not weaponize Marianne's trauma and turn her into a literal beast?"
Ugh.
I didn't read Savior King in detail past Chapter 32, and had only skimmed parts of later chapters to find something to latch onto that might...*ahem* save the story from getting the easiest 1-star rating I've ever given, but found no indication that the characterization, the spelling, the plot, or the romance that's central to this fic's popularity on Archive of Our Own would improve. I wouldn't be so harsh on the story if not for the fact that the author tagged it as a "fix-it fic (of sorts)", implying that her retelling of Three Houses' events and interpretation of its characters was superior to the game from which she was adapting. Well, after I'd gone to bed a few nights ago and suffered a fitful sleep over how badly it's handled Dimitri's character (he's supposed to be the lead character, but Claude and Byleth have been given much more agency in the plot than him while he gets yelled at for being dumb and/or useless) and the mountains of other annoyances, I decided to delete the PDF I was reading because my blood pressure had spiked and I wasn't about to risk my health, physical or mental, by getting angrier over reading any more of it. Even if it does eventually reach the conclusion it appears to have been stuck on since July, that awful first-third won't make the other two-thirds of the story even close to worth reading.
