WillyFourEyes/Waltzoid's Journal

Okay, so in hindsight, I shouldn't be surprised that A Brighter Dark turned out to be a tedious slog with very few real "bright" spots considering the author admitted to not having done much research on Fire Emblem Fates when writing the story, leading to such oddities as Corrin and Azura's skin retroactively changing color in one chapter, Hoshido being subdivided into colonies named after real Japanese cities, and a dead-end subplot where Laslow hits on his own daughter.

To cleanse my palate, I've been reading An Eagle Among Lions, a Fire Emblem: Three Houses role swap/time travel fanfic that takes place after the Crimson Flower story route. ( Major spoilers for Fire Emblem: Three Houses ) It's a very daunting read - the average chapter length starts out at around 10,000 words and grows to close to 20,000 somewhere around chapter 20, so keep that in mind if you decide to pick it up. The reason I'm calling this a "turning point observations" post instead of "halfway point observations" like I did with Dark is because Eagle is still being updated as of December 19, 2021, but Chapter 37 sounded like a good place to stop because it occurs at the same time of the big reveal in Three Houses.

( More Three Houses spoilers (and also some for An Eagle Among Lions) )

All of this covers more than 500,000 words over the first 37 chapters. It's probably not saying much since I've only recently started reading fan fiction again a few years ago, but it's probably one of my favorite Fire Emblem stories so far. There's an excellent blend of action, drama, and comedy (especially drama...so much drama), and I enjoyed seeing how Edelgard would bond with characters who either fought against her or died prior to the war in her old world. We've still got at least 30 chapters and 600,000 (!!) more words to go, so I hope An Eagle Among Lions has enough to keep me reading to the end.

Yesterday, I made it halfway through A Brighter Dark while waiting on the next installment of leliel_12 's criticism of the same.

Long story short: I don't think it's very good.

There's a lot that I feel needs to be picked apart, but in the interest of saving time and space, I'll limit my list to include a few things that stuck out to me for the first 22 chapters:

( Moderate spoilers within (and a content warning for a character's death) )

The story ground to a halt several months ago, so we won't get to see how it actually ended, but I wonder if I should incorporate the notes from "The End" if I ever get around to doing a full review. All I can do is keep reading and hope that there'll be something I can genuinely root for, but considering how frustrated I was with the first quarter of it, I don't have high hopes.