Title: Compelled to Play "series"
Author: Hotpoint
Rating: T
Genre: General/Adventure
Pairing:
Status: Four books Complete and Still Ongoing
Summary: I play this game, it's pointless and annoys me, but I do not like the score so I am compelled to play again...
Link: Twisting the Hellmouth Author Profile
Twisting the Hellmouth Series Link
Fanfiction.net Author Profile

The review has Spoilers. For the spoiler free version, just go with "this story rocks" and go read it to see how.

Alright, unto the more indepth review with slight spoilers.


This story is a very well thought out and written piece revolving around Illyria fucking up everyones plans by gathering as much info as possible going back many years and then going back in time and DRASTICALLY changing events and how they play out, all the while building up a multibillion dollar company to finance things in order to build up a well trained and armed Slayer army. This is both a very well done character and plot driven story.

The plot revolving around the time travel portion is done in response to Jasmine building up an army of billions/trillions of fanatical insects who have declared Jihad on the multiverse, alongside the First Evil finally taking on corporeal form, building up his own demonic army of Turok-Han that numbers in the billions. Both the First Evil and Jasmines forces fuck up everything, creating an apocalyptic war that leaves a good chunk of the multiverse either enslaved, dead, or radioactive.

Suffice it to say, it's one of the longest and most awesome Buffy stories out there, and it keeps true to the Character of the Buffy-verse while stile staying entertaining, intelligent, and awesome.

There are currently four completed books of this series with the fifth currently being worked on, with a compilation of sidestories on the authors site over at Twisting the Hellmouth (Tales from the Compelled 'Verse, which is linked to).

Checked by Dark Syaoran, June 5, 2014.
Four stories in the series are complete, but the fifth is incomplete and has not been updated in years.

 

This is bloody epic.

5/5 atm. On book 2.

 

I agree, best buffy fic I've ever seen.

I think the writing could definitely use some work, the author doesn't have the greatest grammar, and tends to talk to the reader a bit too much, at least as of book 3. But it has improved a lot since the beginning, and the plot, characterization, and all that type of stuff is great.
I'd give it a 4/5.

 

I've been reading this series for a while, and I love a lot of it. The only real problem I have with the series is the Illyria/Faith/Wesley triangle: it feels too much like a soap opera. The rest of the story simply rocks. It's long, detailed, creative, and the author really thought through the plot threads. Everything hangs together. The OC's, especially, are fun and interesting.

5/5,

 

Ah the threads you see when you stick your username into google

Thanks for the Rec Robo Jesus!

In defence of the Fic it's actually pretty difficult to do a storyline partially based on Arthurian Legend without the Arthur/Guinevere/Lancelot triangle.

I do make a joke about the soap-like elements of the sub-plot within the main story as it happens (since Illyria is involved a character wisecracks about "Eons of our lives") but it's not particularly trite or angsty for the most part honest.

 

Yes, this is really rather good. Wes is one of the main characters, which is always great, but I'm not sure I liked the

Spoiler

introduction of their future time travelling daughter and the general pussyfication of Buffy.

But still, these are minor quibbles at best, and certainly don't stop me from giving it a 5/5. Definitely worth reading.

 

The introduction of the wesley/faith pairing bothered me a bit, since it seemed a bit out of character for wes, and introduced far too quickly. Wesley has always seemed fanatically devoted to one person, but at the same time, it can make sense with the whole retelling of the Arthur mythos theme in the story. Still I felt it was too sudden. Enyo annoyed me at first but is gradually growing on me. I can't wait for the next part of the series.

 

I started off liking this fic but, now that I think about it, I actually really dislike a lot of it. It just started to get to me when some random douche-OC called Stephan decides he's fallen in love with the lesbian minor character Kennedy which conflicts with his love of yet another OC girl, this coupled with some OC foreign legion dude training a bunch of OC fourteen year old slayers into crazy war-machines and some random OC daughter of just about every main character coming back in time made me stop reading.

It's a good series, but to me it seems like Hotpoint wants to replace the original characters of the series with OCs who fill all the niches and... Wait, that ain't right. Replace original characters with original characters? Erm... replace the actual Buffy/Angel series characters with completely new ones who can fix just about everything the Buffy/Angel crews got wrong.

Basically, I started wanting to see what the actual Buffy/Angel characters were up to, rather than just their reactions to the changes that Illyria and these multitude of new characters were putting into place. I get that it's an Illyria/Wesley focused story and I'm not saying that the whole fic is just OCs interacting, but it just annoyed me so I stopped reading.

3.5/5 <- it's still an awesome fic, but my own opinion sours it for me.

 

Faith and Wes first kiss in Chapter 27 of the third story in the series and there was occasional foreshadowing of Wes/Faith way back to the early chapters of the first... if several novels worth of Fic is really "far too quickly" then I hold up my hands to it

It wasn't Stephen that decided he was in love with Kennedy it was Connor and there wasn't another girl involved at all. I don't know quite how you misread that so much?

Fair enough.

No, you had it right with "fill all the niches". There isn't really any replacement going on at all, all the original characters play roles that the canon ones don't, the latter weren't replaced although they do admittedly get less face-time in the third story in particular because the Pylean War required a different approach that the Scoobies and Fang Gang could generally bring to the table.

 

Oh god... Yeah, fudged up that one. My bad. I enjoyed a lot of what I read, but the little extra relationships and the mass of OCs or characters I didn't particularly care for taking the forefront just built up and chipped away at the will I had to read on. I think I was in a mood when I wrote that post^ and it turned into more of a rant than I wanted.

I really like your Fallout fic though, so it isn't all bad.

 

A couple opinions of mine:

Buffy isn't so much pussified as acting more or less like herself, among a bunch of characters that have been brought over to Illyria's way of thinking. She is often portrayed in a negative or humorous light, but most of the viewpoints in the story are on the other side of the moral divide. Buffy has historically been fairly stubborn and difficult to influence ever since the the whole Initiative debacle.

The OCs don't really grate on me much, not even Enyo really. I mean, they're there, they're OCs, I can deal with it. They've sort of been mixed in well enough with the canon characters that I can manage to care about them. I actually like the presence of Enyo, as she is a natural consequence of the escalating Time War that it seems Compelled is headed towards, and I always like me a good future-foreknowledge flingin Time War.

A last note for anyone about to read the series: If you fancy a drinking game, drink every time Hotpoint writes "deadpan". He's no master wordsmith, and it can show at times, but the sheer epic of the fic more than makes up for it.

5/5

EDIT: Revised Compelled Drinking Game:
Drink every time Hotpoint introduces a named OC.
Drink every time a Slayer is newly seen with a Scythe.
Drink every time Hotpoint writes "deadpan".