Name: With This Ring
Author: Mr Zoat
Genre: Adventure
Rating: M
Status: WIP
Link: Spacebattles main thread, spacebattles story only thread
Summary: Self Insert lands in the Young Justice universe with an Orange Lantern ring and becomes a founding member of the team. He himself has general knowledge about DC and its characters but none about Young Justice the series at all.

So, while the concept of the story has several red flags, it is actually a well crafted story with good writing and almost none of the trap-falls you'd expect, imo. It gives me this nostalgic feeling of older Harry Potter stories at times, but not in a bad way.

The SI is a likeable guy and rarely crosses the line of becoming preachy. He is, of course, OP in some regards, but then again, there is something extremely pleasant of reading about a Lantern ring user who is not an idiot.

I like how he deals with problems, how he makes connections with other characters, heroes and villains alike, and especially his relationships (not as shipping) with Wonder Woman, Alan, Guy, Danni and Luthor.

In fact, the author makes good use of many DC characters, several of which I did not know at all, or knew very little about. John Constantine, for example, features prominently, who really seems to be a smoking Harry Dresden. Atlantis plays a larger role, and the people living within. Wonder Woman, of course, while not a main character is a prominent secondary character, someone who was barely present in Young Justice. The Green Lanterns, of course, all four of them, play bigger roles, some more than others. Those are a few, but probably the main ones. Then, of course, there is the team, although, while it wasn't a problem for me, Kid Flash and Robin are getting the short end of the stick in terms screen time.

Cool gimmicks are the usage of hotlinks and coloured parts of the text. The hotlinks are entertaining and informative for someone like me, who has not all that much knowledge on who certain DC characters are. So, when the author mentions them and makes their names a hotlink to either a picture or a wiki entry, or references stuff about comic book story lines, it really helps, seeing that the DC universe is so vast. Of course, at times there are also links to sound effects, parodies and whatnot. Some might find that distracting, but then again, you don't have to click on them.

A character, for example, tries to beat telepathy by thinking about the rickroll song. Stuff like that.

Far better and valuable in terms of story telling, is the colouring. As the Lantern corps have a huge impact on the story, so do the emotions of the people, some of which are powered by certain Lanterns. So, when someone expresses something or acts, that phrase, word or verb is coloured with the colour of the specific emotion, which I find to be a really great gimmick that I haven't seen used outside of spacebattles. I guess it comes from the comics, but still, really like that. For those, like me, not all that familiar with DC lore, here is a quick run-down.

Green is willpower, Blue is hope, Orange is greed, Yellow is fear, Red is rage, Pink/Violet is love, Purple, I think, is compassion, not sure.

When someone speaks how suddenly someone appeared that might heal them and then their text is suddenly blue with hope. That's a nice use of the forum mechanics you don't have on normal fanfiction sites. Same with the use of hotlinks.

It's pretty long and unfinished, but it seems to be getting regular updates since 2013. So far, they seem to be wrapping up season 1, and I kinda hope the author will continue with season 2.

So yeah, not perfect but definitely a good read. At times, SI can get a bit preachy, or self-righteous, the story at times spends too much time building weapons, artefacts, armour, whatever, something I blame the spacebattles influence for, but that never really becomes too boring. And at the end, it dragged a bit on with a subplot that I wasn't entirely interested in, and I have to say, the renegade bits can become annoying when you want to read the main story line and get interrupted by them, but nothing really major.

Blasted through this story in 2-3 days and I enjoyed it very much. It drags on, at times, at the alternative timeline, the renegade timeline, as it is called, does read like a bad indy Harry fanfic at times, but it does get better. And it can be skipped as it is not canon.

4/5

 

To be honest, this is the first SI that I've truly enjoyed.

Only on page 3 of the story only thread so far. There were some errors here and there that I noticed in passing but nothing majorly distracting. The thing he's got going for Superboy at the moment is a bit meh to me, but it was said to drop off later so I'll give it a pass.

4/5

Edit: I've stalled at Page 10 of the story only thread. Invictus' post explains why. https://forums.darklordpotter.net/showpost.php?p=807994&postcount=24

3/5

 

Spoiler

Superboy starts dating Miss M later on, just as in the series and they never date, and yes, as more and more characters join, Superboy, and the fondness that the SI has for him are pushed in the background but he never stops caring for him. And I quite liked that bond between them.

But yeah, no romantic and/or sexual relationship with Superboy.

So far, at least.

 

I've been reading this for ages (its been getting daily updates at around the same time almost without fail for over a year, it's scarily consistent) and I vaguely remember recommending it in a thread here when someone was looking for SI fics. It definitely has it's shortcomings, generally the usual spacebattles stuff, but overall I really like it.

There's something to be said for being able to check the thread daily and read a new update. Just make sure you don't read any of the comments while you do it, a solid 80% of the time it's just shipping discussion.

4.5/5.

 

Another detractor is the pseudo-phonetic(?) spelling the MC does. I really just wish he'd type out the acronym or spell out the numbers but it's not bad enough to make me drop the fic.

 

This is probably the most enjoyable story I'm currently following. I know almost nothing about YJ in general, so the usual complaint of not diverging enough doesn't bother me at all.

 

There is a story only thread, where only snippets are posted, with no discussion. I put it in the OP

 

How did I not know this is a thing. Cheers!

 

The pacing stays about the same as the begining, as far as I've read. I haven't actually seen the show, but it seems an awful lot like "The Young Justice cartoon, but with this other guy on the team", where each set of chapters is an individual episode.

IIRC, it's said at one point early on that he's almost 30, but for pretty much completely unexplained reasons, everyone seems to think he's 17-18, and when asked, he goes with it and pretends to be in his late teens (also for completely unexplained reasons). It makes very little sense to me, so I've mostly just headcanon'd it as him being 18.

 

I'm not really fond of the near-constant use of colors and fonts instead of actually writing out what the character is feeling.

It's like opening a story and seeing:

It, at least in my opinion, makes the author look like he/she has a lot of trouble writing emotions, or trouble indicating who's speaking in a conversation.

 

I couldn't tell you if he's actually changing anything or not, what with not knowing anything about Young Justice canon. I was purely referring to the pacing, which has been pretty consistent so far. Things move at a fairly moderate clip through a series of events that are mostly self-contained/episodic with the occasional reference to an overarching "season plot" that ultimately comes into focus for a climax. Much like how most TV shows work.

That said, from the feel of it, I get the impression that the major plot events of the show don't deviate much from canon, but I can't be bothered to confirm that one way or the other and it doesn't bother me at all because I don't know canon. I could easily see someone more familiar with the setting being turned off by that though /shrug

True, but as it doesn't meaningfully come up in the story (as far as I've read anyway) and doesn't make much sense, I just ignore it all and just pretend he's 18 anyway. It makes the whole thing vastly more sensible.

 

Well, as I said in the OP, he involves a lot more DC characters than the show does, and makes way more use of most of the characters that the show already had. That's a reason to read it right there.

Then, it also takes a bit more realistic view on some of the consequences that get glossed over in canon. For example, there was an episode where some magic users split the earth in 2 realities, transporting all people over the age of 18 in one, and all below 17 in the other and what that would truly mean.

That all said, there are deviations from canon story wise. Characters get arrested that are free in the show, some things play out differently, and that should impact stuff later on, especially in season 2, but true, so far, story wise, the split to canon is not that big, but it set up a lot of changes that's bound to pay off somewhere along the line.

Especially since he says that he plans to write for the whole six year period of the show, with no time-skips as the show did. That's an impressive claim but I am unsure how that is going to work out. Story started in 2013 and he covered like half a year of canon, sticking more or less relatively close to the source material, while still taking huge liberties and introducing other characters and plot lines.

If he takes 1 - 1 1/2 years for half a year of story, and plans six years, he is going to be busy for quite some time and while he has shown an incredibly update rate so far, don't know if that is realistic to expect that he can finish this as the plan stands.

So, there is a lot more to it than canon, and there are deviations but it didn't change so much that the episodes became unrecognisable.

To the age thing, yeah, that's weird, think the reason he is an adult is because then it becomes a bit more reasonable to roll with his plans and interactions than it would be to believe them when he is a teenager. As to why he doesn't join the Justice League, well, yeah, that's actually a good point. Guess it's just one of these weird choices an author makes.

Same as Ag, I do here the same I do in nearly every Naruto fanfic that I've read. Pretend they are a different age than said in story, i.e. 18 or so. Never read a Naruto story that sold me that these characters are 12-13, not even canon. Always rolled with the assumption that they are actually 15-16-17.

 

I've read about as far as the day after the first fight against a supervillain.

To attempt to answer some points of discussion:

Miss Martian is apparently 48 (apparently martian development is slower than earth human development such that Miss Martian is a teenager in terms of development).

Orange Lantern is 29, but because he desired a younger and more muscular body, the ring changed his body at the beginning of the story (as soon as he got the ring).

EDIT: (Spoilers) later in the story it's revealed that Orange Lantern is on the youth team, and he lies about his age so that he stays on the youth team.

 

M'gann's 48 but she's a Martian Teenager and has the mentality of a teenager.

 

Does anyone know what the red star image at the url http://i.imgur.com/HCV9YvU.png refers to in the story? I had thought it might indicate an 'omake' but I'm not completely sure?

 

It's from Mass Effect, signifying a 'Renegade Interrupt', which means that the protagonist has done something abrupt, violent, or ruthless. The so-called Renegade snippets eventually branch out into their own alternate universe.

 

It's from Bioware's Mass Effect game and symbolizes the players choice to take a Renegade, a morally "evil" or dishonest action, as opposed to the blue Paragon action, which is being nice and honourable.

The choices in the game could get a bit simple in their duality. So, here, it symbolizes also the harsher, morally wrong actions the SI takes in the non-canon renegade snippets

 

Read through this whole thing and I am impressed. The authors attention to detail with the DC characters really adds something to the Young Justice genre that you dont usually see. It is slow to diverge but by the time they get to the Louisiana Bayou its pretty much split off. They do follow the general missions of the team from there but its clearly moving in a new direction.

Didn't like the after effects of the training mission and found myself skimming large portions of the posts for those scenes. The phonetic spelling of things also irks me a bit. The issues with unclear character speech does make issues to know who says what in a conversation.

Overall I give this a 4/5.

Also for those interested in avoiding the AU renegade options, if the date and time are in red the post is one of the AU ones.