Two Detectives, one horrible fanfiction (season 4)
I think this is the season in which I forget that Sephy90 isn't a foreigner. Maybe I never really noticed it before, but this season especially had enough grammatical mistakes to make me wonder if the author does not simply outsource the writing of his fanfiction to someone who's first language wasn't English. I'll go into deeper detail about it as I sit down today and regale you all with the continuing adventures of Gary Stu and Mindless Love Interest- at least so I can have something to talk about other than how overwhelmingly dull this arc was, as per usual. If there's anything our author is, it's consistent, and nowhere in this season does he attempt to wow us with either a riveting tale of love, mystery and intrigue OR colorful, grammatically-sound prose. That's good ol' Sephy90 for you, not even putting fourth any effort, even for his own personal romantic fantasies.
Let's not forget that, throughout the entire story, the author insists on not being specific about anything at all. Nowhere does he feel at all necessary to explain exactly what the "gifts" his characters are buying or the "routines" they go through. It leaves the reader feeling lost, I'm sure, when they are left to assume the countless details that Sephy90 insists on leaving out. I'm certainly not requiring him to be at all purple with his prose, but right now we hardly venture past the black and white- the bare bones of writing! Things happened and thus the characters did stuff can pretty much sum up just how deep the author went in to detail the doings of our protagonists. Not that anything interesting happens, of course (I mean, what were you expecting, really?) but at the very least could you go into detail about the bland and mundane goings on in the not-so-romantic lives of Robert and poor, lobotomized Yako.
Of course, I'm delaying the inevitable, let's get on with the review, which starts with our heros enjoying New Year's Eve... morning. Wow, right out of the gate and we're already stumbling over ourselves. It's just called New Year's Eve, you don't have to throw the "morning" part in there, it really confuses the phrase (or at the very least say "on the morning of New Year's Eve" or something a little more, I don't know, sensical?). Anyway, I'm nitpicking here, Robert and Yako wake up, buy stuff and have a party to ring in the new year, only pausing to tease that new characters will be introduced. Nothing else is really thrown into the mix, no promise of a mystery, no Neuro coming in to tease the readers of something possibly interesting coming. There's actually no build up at all to the token, thrown-in-mystery. We just sit back and try not to fall asleep as we're subjected to the author more or less just listing off stuff his characters do every day before the thing that's supposed to make this seemingly endless trial of nothing all worth while happens unceremoniously.
The aforementioned new characters arrive by plane, cloaked in mystery and the most ridiculous run-on sentence since, and I quote, "I felt alone and sad wondering about what awaits myself because of solving the cases I know where I live and ever since my folks were away on a trip that they didn't tell me about" (Detectives of Two Worlds). There's really no way to properly convey just how much this sentence exhausts the mind, so please excuse me simply just pasting it here as a quotation. "Meanwhile on the plane, a black-haired girl is currently asleep with her head on the lap of a blonde-haired man alongside another blonde-haired man with a ponytail wearing regal clothes that kept watch with the blonde-haired man that is wearing military-like clothes as he keeps watch how far till the plane reaches where the terminal at the airport where the 6 of us are waiting in as we have a chance to explore where we are right now." And, while it's refreshing to get something that mirrors an actual description of something, it's totally overshadowed by the fact that the sentence above would make any English teacher weep. I'm not sure who in the world reads this author's potent, agonizing shlock, but whoever they are they aren't doing our dear author any favors by not telling him of the wonder of the mighty period (holy be it's name).
The characters are revealed to be named Krista (an original character of a now obligated reader) Jack and Ludwig, and as far as what they look like and what they're wearing we are then told zero about them and learn nothing of their personalities other than that they dare to be in our main couple's presence. This brings up the topic that character development is all but present in this series, and has been sadly absent since chapter one, now that I think about it. It is assumed that we know the personalities of the characters already from canon, so Sephy90 feels that he doesn't need to go into detail about how they act or speak at all- So much that none of them actually display any of their actual in-story characteristics: such as Neuro's constant ridicule of anyone and everyone, Rena's awful sociopathic behavior or even Yako -the girl we are to assume our author would know the most about- and her overwhelming love of food and outstanding empathy. They're all just a bunch of cookie-cutter characters that you can't tell one from the other based on how they act or talk. Our author doesn't do them justice, doesn't do his friend's original characters justice- hell, he doesn't even give his own over-glorified Gary Stu any attention at all. They're just there to fill up space, eat meals and buy things for one another, all in a robotic, overly-common way.
It also doesn't help that no one says a word of dialogue in this entire season. I'm fucking serious!
So suddenly it's Valentines Day in Robert-land, despite the fact that, just the other day, it was January. But we might as well move on to the holiday of love so we can have our main couple do a bunch of mushy, self-indulgent things, right? I mean, this is the chance to at least show how Robert and Yako are in love, right? Like, that was the whole point of the series, I think. But NO, Valentines Day is handled just as awfully as any other chapter, and it's just a list of activities the characters did. Not a single "I love you" is exchanged, not a single kiss is stolen, not even a motherfucking HUG is received. The characters just go to a festival because, say it with me, festivals are ALWAYS happening in Japan. What weirds me out about this entire series of events is that Neuro decides to take part in what I assume to be both the gift-getting and the festivities at the festival. Why the fuck is Neuro taking part in a holiday embraced by couples and based off of companionship and love? Why in the holy hell did we feel it was at all necessary to throw Neuro in here when he's been neglected throughout the rest of the entire story? Why HERE, in the most irrelevant place for Neuro to willingly decide to go!? Because he was "curious of the holiday"? That makes no fucking sense. Why the FUCK would NEURO be curious about VALENTINES DAY? He'd probably be up in his office, turning all of Yako's chocolate into living rodent entrails or something while he mocked the holiday, not ACTIVELY TAKING PART IN IT.
This also raises the question just who the fuck he bought the gift for. We're never told who bought what for who, so I can only be left to assume. Was it Rena?
It's during the Valentines Day chapters that I started to notice the weird choices the author made in the wording of his sentences. It sounds like he was trying to be eloquent, but it all ends up sounding oddly redundant and like he doesn't actually fully know the language he's trying to speak. A few choice exerts include, "Me and the guys each got gifts, so does the girls", "... we each gave gifts to the people each gift is given to and managed to have dinner going as great as usual" and, "...when night fell is that we headed to the park". One has to wonder if these actually look okay to Sephy, or he just typed whatever the fuck came to mind, and while doing it he forgot mid-sentence what tense he was writing in... or what the fuck he was writing... or what proper writing even was. Mind you this fine gentleman is older than me, and manages to write like a confused eight-year-old foreign retard. This is also the guy who wants to be a meteorologist, but doesn't want to take the education or any other steps required to be a meteorologist, but that's neither here nor there. I'm just getting so infuriated with this guy's immature writing that's it's making me resort to just go off topic and bitch about him for no other reason than to let off steam. I mean, "talked about several topics that sounds very interesting to listen in on"? REALLY!?
The big reveal of this season's antagonist starts with a snore- literally. Our hero's hear a loud noise while fucking around doing absolutely nothing (as per the usual), like something large had fallen from the sky, and they decide to not check up on it because the media would most likely swarm the crash site and instead go home and go to bed. The fuck you guys, way to be totally proactive detectives- I mean, when those giant ice pillars suddenly sprang up, or when bird-related items were being stolen from the museum, you didn't decide instead to just go home and sleep! Why is this time so different!? I think you have enough clout now that you could probably part reporters and police like the motherfucking Red Sea! Now get out there and actually do something minorly interesting!
And, I dare reiterate that this ISN'T A MYSTERY! A mustached man dressed in pink falling from the sky and causing traffic does not a mystery make. This doesn't even make him a criminal! I mean, he didn't even DO ANYTHING!!!! At least Rena DID SOMETHING, at least Ghetsis DID SOMETHING, at least even the motherfucking PENGUIN did something. This guy? He just fell from the sky and suddenly he HAS to be brought to justice for... appearing I guess. I mean, the uncolorful cast of characters do their weird magical deduction thing where they take the most minimal amount of evidence (or, in today's case, fucking EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS) and suddenly know everything about the culprit and what he's set out to do, but even then they just figure out he's a mercenary "of a whole different sort". But that doesn't really make him EVIL. This is literally our author scraping the bottom of the barrel for "reasons why this character is the bad guy", because what this season's villain is here to do isn't even explained. Not one single bit. At the very least it is told to us that he was going to maybe steal something from what is only described as a "store" but... really? The town police force could handle petty theft.
Also, the character is Mercenary Tao from Dragon Ball- a fucking assassin. I mean, after the mind-rape of a character reveal that was the Penguin, I'm not all that shocked by an anime character showing up but GOD DAMMIT, HE'S AN ASSASSIN!!! What are you doing having him steal shit from a "store"!? At least have him do the thing he is described to do! An assassination attempt would be fucking AWESOME, why didn't you use that!? Would that have been too complex? Would it be harder to stop a man's assassination attempt in two goddam sentences like you did here!? I want to take the author and just violently shake him for totally ignoring a perfectly good reason for this guy to be noticed by Neuro and the gang- maybe kill a person or two, at least- and just demote him to the guy who fell from the sky to steal items we are told nothing about from a nondescript place of retail!!!! The only thing that makes him a bad guy is the fact that, in his own universe, he's a bad guy! So that gives our heros reason enough to beat him senseless and eat a mystery that THIS GUY PROBABLY DIDN'T GENERATE!! This is probably the farthest thing from a mystery, the farthest we have ever gotten, in fact!! I just... I don't think I'll ever get over just how dumbed-down everything is slowly becoming! This fic is slowly dissolving into an unintelligible pile of sludge, folks!!
AND SUDDENLY IT'S SPRING!! WASN'T IT VALENTINES DAY A FEW DAYS AGO!!? Forget what I said about consistency, our author doesn't even properly observe the passing of time correctly!! Yes, I know I completely skipped over the reveal of some mysterious shadowy figure watching our heros do absolutely fucking nothing, possibly hinting towards some sort of over-arcing plot element- but I'm way too distracted by how poorly handled everything in this season was! It's like, he stumbled at the starting line and just tripped all the way to the end! It's just an notorious trial of poorly written gobbly gook from beginning to end, and it only leaves me fearing for what's to possibly come. The future is certainly dark for "Two Detectives..." I'll tell you that much. But I'll end my horrible ranting here, or else I'll probably never stop. I will simply leave you with the closing statement from our author for you all to mull over. "In the meantime, since the springtime has happened that the seven out of the nine of us have some romantic time in three different ways while Neuro and Rena watched till we came back and decided to go on with the day as peace is restored to the town, for now."
Fucking beautiful. Just... fucking beautiful.
Let's not forget that, throughout the entire story, the author insists on not being specific about anything at all. Nowhere does he feel at all necessary to explain exactly what the "gifts" his characters are buying or the "routines" they go through. It leaves the reader feeling lost, I'm sure, when they are left to assume the countless details that Sephy90 insists on leaving out. I'm certainly not requiring him to be at all purple with his prose, but right now we hardly venture past the black and white- the bare bones of writing! Things happened and thus the characters did stuff can pretty much sum up just how deep the author went in to detail the doings of our protagonists. Not that anything interesting happens, of course (I mean, what were you expecting, really?) but at the very least could you go into detail about the bland and mundane goings on in the not-so-romantic lives of Robert and poor, lobotomized Yako.
Of course, I'm delaying the inevitable, let's get on with the review, which starts with our heros enjoying New Year's Eve... morning. Wow, right out of the gate and we're already stumbling over ourselves. It's just called New Year's Eve, you don't have to throw the "morning" part in there, it really confuses the phrase (or at the very least say "on the morning of New Year's Eve" or something a little more, I don't know, sensical?). Anyway, I'm nitpicking here, Robert and Yako wake up, buy stuff and have a party to ring in the new year, only pausing to tease that new characters will be introduced. Nothing else is really thrown into the mix, no promise of a mystery, no Neuro coming in to tease the readers of something possibly interesting coming. There's actually no build up at all to the token, thrown-in-mystery. We just sit back and try not to fall asleep as we're subjected to the author more or less just listing off stuff his characters do every day before the thing that's supposed to make this seemingly endless trial of nothing all worth while happens unceremoniously.
The aforementioned new characters arrive by plane, cloaked in mystery and the most ridiculous run-on sentence since, and I quote, "I felt alone and sad wondering about what awaits myself because of solving the cases I know where I live and ever since my folks were away on a trip that they didn't tell me about" (Detectives of Two Worlds). There's really no way to properly convey just how much this sentence exhausts the mind, so please excuse me simply just pasting it here as a quotation. "Meanwhile on the plane, a black-haired girl is currently asleep with her head on the lap of a blonde-haired man alongside another blonde-haired man with a ponytail wearing regal clothes that kept watch with the blonde-haired man that is wearing military-like clothes as he keeps watch how far till the plane reaches where the terminal at the airport where the 6 of us are waiting in as we have a chance to explore where we are right now." And, while it's refreshing to get something that mirrors an actual description of something, it's totally overshadowed by the fact that the sentence above would make any English teacher weep. I'm not sure who in the world reads this author's potent, agonizing shlock, but whoever they are they aren't doing our dear author any favors by not telling him of the wonder of the mighty period (holy be it's name).
The characters are revealed to be named Krista (an original character of a now obligated reader) Jack and Ludwig, and as far as what they look like and what they're wearing we are then told zero about them and learn nothing of their personalities other than that they dare to be in our main couple's presence. This brings up the topic that character development is all but present in this series, and has been sadly absent since chapter one, now that I think about it. It is assumed that we know the personalities of the characters already from canon, so Sephy90 feels that he doesn't need to go into detail about how they act or speak at all- So much that none of them actually display any of their actual in-story characteristics: such as Neuro's constant ridicule of anyone and everyone, Rena's awful sociopathic behavior or even Yako -the girl we are to assume our author would know the most about- and her overwhelming love of food and outstanding empathy. They're all just a bunch of cookie-cutter characters that you can't tell one from the other based on how they act or talk. Our author doesn't do them justice, doesn't do his friend's original characters justice- hell, he doesn't even give his own over-glorified Gary Stu any attention at all. They're just there to fill up space, eat meals and buy things for one another, all in a robotic, overly-common way.
It also doesn't help that no one says a word of dialogue in this entire season. I'm fucking serious!
So suddenly it's Valentines Day in Robert-land, despite the fact that, just the other day, it was January. But we might as well move on to the holiday of love so we can have our main couple do a bunch of mushy, self-indulgent things, right? I mean, this is the chance to at least show how Robert and Yako are in love, right? Like, that was the whole point of the series, I think. But NO, Valentines Day is handled just as awfully as any other chapter, and it's just a list of activities the characters did. Not a single "I love you" is exchanged, not a single kiss is stolen, not even a motherfucking HUG is received. The characters just go to a festival because, say it with me, festivals are ALWAYS happening in Japan. What weirds me out about this entire series of events is that Neuro decides to take part in what I assume to be both the gift-getting and the festivities at the festival. Why the fuck is Neuro taking part in a holiday embraced by couples and based off of companionship and love? Why in the holy hell did we feel it was at all necessary to throw Neuro in here when he's been neglected throughout the rest of the entire story? Why HERE, in the most irrelevant place for Neuro to willingly decide to go!? Because he was "curious of the holiday"? That makes no fucking sense. Why the FUCK would NEURO be curious about VALENTINES DAY? He'd probably be up in his office, turning all of Yako's chocolate into living rodent entrails or something while he mocked the holiday, not ACTIVELY TAKING PART IN IT.
This also raises the question just who the fuck he bought the gift for. We're never told who bought what for who, so I can only be left to assume. Was it Rena?
It's during the Valentines Day chapters that I started to notice the weird choices the author made in the wording of his sentences. It sounds like he was trying to be eloquent, but it all ends up sounding oddly redundant and like he doesn't actually fully know the language he's trying to speak. A few choice exerts include, "Me and the guys each got gifts, so does the girls", "... we each gave gifts to the people each gift is given to and managed to have dinner going as great as usual" and, "...when night fell is that we headed to the park". One has to wonder if these actually look okay to Sephy, or he just typed whatever the fuck came to mind, and while doing it he forgot mid-sentence what tense he was writing in... or what the fuck he was writing... or what proper writing even was. Mind you this fine gentleman is older than me, and manages to write like a confused eight-year-old foreign retard. This is also the guy who wants to be a meteorologist, but doesn't want to take the education or any other steps required to be a meteorologist, but that's neither here nor there. I'm just getting so infuriated with this guy's immature writing that's it's making me resort to just go off topic and bitch about him for no other reason than to let off steam. I mean, "talked about several topics that sounds very interesting to listen in on"? REALLY!?
The big reveal of this season's antagonist starts with a snore- literally. Our hero's hear a loud noise while fucking around doing absolutely nothing (as per the usual), like something large had fallen from the sky, and they decide to not check up on it because the media would most likely swarm the crash site and instead go home and go to bed. The fuck you guys, way to be totally proactive detectives- I mean, when those giant ice pillars suddenly sprang up, or when bird-related items were being stolen from the museum, you didn't decide instead to just go home and sleep! Why is this time so different!? I think you have enough clout now that you could probably part reporters and police like the motherfucking Red Sea! Now get out there and actually do something minorly interesting!
And, I dare reiterate that this ISN'T A MYSTERY! A mustached man dressed in pink falling from the sky and causing traffic does not a mystery make. This doesn't even make him a criminal! I mean, he didn't even DO ANYTHING!!!! At least Rena DID SOMETHING, at least Ghetsis DID SOMETHING, at least even the motherfucking PENGUIN did something. This guy? He just fell from the sky and suddenly he HAS to be brought to justice for... appearing I guess. I mean, the uncolorful cast of characters do their weird magical deduction thing where they take the most minimal amount of evidence (or, in today's case, fucking EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS) and suddenly know everything about the culprit and what he's set out to do, but even then they just figure out he's a mercenary "of a whole different sort". But that doesn't really make him EVIL. This is literally our author scraping the bottom of the barrel for "reasons why this character is the bad guy", because what this season's villain is here to do isn't even explained. Not one single bit. At the very least it is told to us that he was going to maybe steal something from what is only described as a "store" but... really? The town police force could handle petty theft.
Also, the character is Mercenary Tao from Dragon Ball- a fucking assassin. I mean, after the mind-rape of a character reveal that was the Penguin, I'm not all that shocked by an anime character showing up but GOD DAMMIT, HE'S AN ASSASSIN!!! What are you doing having him steal shit from a "store"!? At least have him do the thing he is described to do! An assassination attempt would be fucking AWESOME, why didn't you use that!? Would that have been too complex? Would it be harder to stop a man's assassination attempt in two goddam sentences like you did here!? I want to take the author and just violently shake him for totally ignoring a perfectly good reason for this guy to be noticed by Neuro and the gang- maybe kill a person or two, at least- and just demote him to the guy who fell from the sky to steal items we are told nothing about from a nondescript place of retail!!!! The only thing that makes him a bad guy is the fact that, in his own universe, he's a bad guy! So that gives our heros reason enough to beat him senseless and eat a mystery that THIS GUY PROBABLY DIDN'T GENERATE!! This is probably the farthest thing from a mystery, the farthest we have ever gotten, in fact!! I just... I don't think I'll ever get over just how dumbed-down everything is slowly becoming! This fic is slowly dissolving into an unintelligible pile of sludge, folks!!
AND SUDDENLY IT'S SPRING!! WASN'T IT VALENTINES DAY A FEW DAYS AGO!!? Forget what I said about consistency, our author doesn't even properly observe the passing of time correctly!! Yes, I know I completely skipped over the reveal of some mysterious shadowy figure watching our heros do absolutely fucking nothing, possibly hinting towards some sort of over-arcing plot element- but I'm way too distracted by how poorly handled everything in this season was! It's like, he stumbled at the starting line and just tripped all the way to the end! It's just an notorious trial of poorly written gobbly gook from beginning to end, and it only leaves me fearing for what's to possibly come. The future is certainly dark for "Two Detectives..." I'll tell you that much. But I'll end my horrible ranting here, or else I'll probably never stop. I will simply leave you with the closing statement from our author for you all to mull over. "In the meantime, since the springtime has happened that the seven out of the nine of us have some romantic time in three different ways while Neuro and Rena watched till we came back and decided to go on with the day as peace is restored to the town, for now."
Fucking beautiful. Just... fucking beautiful.