Title: A Young Woman's Political Record
Author: jacobk
Rating: M
Genre: Humor /
Status: WIP
Fandom: Youjo Senki or The Saga of Tanya the Evil
Pairings: None so far
Length: 32k as of 05.08.2018
Summary: With the war over and her military career in shambles, Tanya von Degurechaff has to forge a new path for herself. Fortunately, she finds an opportunity to get involved in the political scene. A safe, easy job has never been closer at hand. What could possibly go wrong?
Link: Spacebattles

This is a fun story which I have been hesitant to put on here, mainly because it's still in its very beginnings but jacobk does generally go to a decent length and he is a solid author so what the hell, why not. This is for all the Youjo Senki fans here, all me of them.

Basically, this is set way after the anime or lightnovels. The Empire has lost the war, Tanya lost her career and now in a broken nation Tanya has to carve out a new place and so she decides to get into politics.

What works is that the story really manages to hit the tone of the source material where much of the humor comes from the protags inability to gauge what anyone is thinking and for others to misread the same with Tanya leading to everyone having just wildly different views on each other.

For those completely unfamiliar with the source material, the author is providing a short summary in the first post which I will shamelessly steal and quote right now:

Spoiler

The same tone is carried over. Tanya seeks out a comfy political position but by now she instead is close to being in charge. The personal highlight was when Tanya told her old team that they should not expect to win the election, because she is running on nonsense, extremist "let's do another war on the notfrench" platform but what her team took from it was that they should not expect to win legally so they might have to do a violent coup and are on board with that because they trust and believe in her, because they don't see her as someone who just wants an easy life but rather as a die-hard patriot who would do whatever it takes to win.

It's a fun story, not super serious and really mainly for people who know the anime/light novel. Honestly, the anime is way better than it has any right to be. It's fun, no fanservice and some solid military action. Quite like flight mages, Tanya is a fun and interesting character and it's a really enjoyable ride and so is this story so far.

4/5

 

It's a decent read, and definitely the best Youjo Senki fanfic out there, but it feels like it's too early to give a review for. Even though there's been 32k words, it still feels like we're in the introduction. I'm interested in seeing what happens when jacobk runs out of the easy parts of the premise (probably dropping the fic). I'd give it a 4/5 if I was forced to due to the dearth of readable Youjo Senki fics, but I'd rather wait and see if it keeps updating first.

 

Pfft, I was on the fence before but now you've drawn me in.

 

Tanya the Evil could have been fantastic, albeit in a somewhat odd way, if not for the unnecessary loli. The switch to text means that the unnecessary loli is lesss intrusive, and so my interest has immediately doubled. I just finished reading Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment, so I'm in the mood for a satirical military fiction, too.

This was a fun read. It captured the sincere-but-surreal feel of the anime, and the protagonist had a wonderful frothing-at-the-mouth sense of passion compared to the milquetoast supporting cast. The farcical hatred of communist scum seemed a little too Americanised in places, but it was more silly than bad.

Definitely better than I would have expected out of this fandom.

@Nemrut @Callagan @South of Hell y'all need to rate the thread. Top right corner. Itty bitty stars. Gogogo.

4/5

 

So is this basically Tanya filling Hitler's shoes?

 

I finally got around to reading this. I'm going to give it a 4/5 but it could easily go up or down depending how how it goes. My only real gripe is how Tanya hasn't noticed her obvious parallels to Hitler.

 

So this is still updating and roughly at 100k right now and I am still having an absolute blast. Tanya is still such a delight to read about and everything about the story is just fun. I even read the comments in the thread some times, simply because from time to time, someone says something interesting and some of the omakes are actually fun. At the very least it doesn't make me want to kill myself even more like comments in a worm story do.

So yeah, if you like entertaining and charming stories and a main character who succeeds by trying to fail, backed up by some really solid writing, then yeah, give this one a try. Loving it.

 

I admit when I first saw that summary and the place where it was posted I expected little more than some thinly disguised nazism or at best the typical wehraboo military glorification and whitewash. Instead it turned out to be quite the entertaining story that indeed reminds me of works liek Flashman or the Commissar Cain books. Tanya works surprisingly well as a PoV and the author manages to hit the right tone of humour and avoids getting bogged down in problematic details which prevents the story from becoming what I initially feared. Hell, even the plot is entertaining and progresses at a steady pace so i feel comfortable with giving this 4/5 stars.

 

So I saw the thread and how highly regarded it looked and I decided to watch the anime up to episode 8 so I could have a bit of background to compare it to. After getting to that point I felt I had a good enough grasp to read the fic and I can only concur with what's been said in the thread. It's a genuinely good and enthralling read that I blitzed though in one sitting. According the author we've only arc left in us so hopefully it will be finished sometime soon.

Despite being on SB and being in the Isekai genre there's no really egregious things that come about it. He knows in general what kind of things are valued in the 21st century and when he sees the option to steer the country towards those instead of dead ends he takes the chance, but it doesn't have him going out and saying "Sloped armour on tanks is the future, implement this etc". There's also a lot of omakes that aren't trademarked, they're actually pretty high quality compared to most omakes I see usually, a lot are excerpts from history books and the like which scratches my itch for characters talking about the OP without having to be shoehorned into the main story.

5/5.

 

Jacobk does a great job of giving us an active protagonist drawing from their otherworldly knowledge without feeling too heavy-handed about it. He goes just deeply enough into particular details of the planning/scheming that the reader feels like they understand why things happen, but not so deeply that it feels like rationalizing. I also really appreciate that the main character has a layperson's idea of warfare in the 21st century (i.e. cold war to modern era), expert knowledge of WWI (having participated as Tanya), and only the vaguest idea of how to bridge the 50-70 year gap.

After devouring this on SB, I looked up the author and realized that jacobk also wrote a very similarly structured ASOIF fic that I enjoyed a great deal: Blackfish out of Water. It also uses the SI format to deliver realpolitick & military history/strategy.

5/5

 

The summary quote on the OP is broken.