Latent Heat of Sublimation

This thing right here is either a really quite well-written academic pop-cultural critique framed as a surreal horror story, or (as some other readers put it) "incomprehensible word salad" and "insufferably condescending" - depending on your preferences, attitude towards 20th century French philosophers and general willingness to accept fanfiction as a medium for social commentary. It may help to think of it as a crossover between Fate/Grand Order and The New York Review of Books. It is tempting to immediately write it off as pretentious pseudo-intellectual garbage, but "pretentious" implies that the writer is pretending to be something they are not, and that does not seem to be the case - this is really some pretty high effort academic shitposting. The background here is that someone on Beast's Lair took a prompt for a Fate/grand order lemon fic and instead of just writing some smut they chose to express their frustration with the entire Fate franchise, waifus and late capitalism in general - in narrative form.

It's really quite impressive, but "highly divisive" probably doesn't even begin to cover it. Actually enjoying these 17000 words of literary nerdrage requires no real knowledge of Fate/Grand Order (other than "it is some grindy phone game with loot boxes and anime"), but you probably need at least some familiarity with the humanities and a tolerance for certain academic writing quirks and terms, such as "always-already", German and French philosophical terms left untranslated, "&c.", biblical references, lengthy tangents about East Asian cultural history, and so on and so forth. On the other hand, if you start cracking up at the line "In pursuit of a littoral hermeneutics" in a fic that is pretending to be an anime beach episode, then this might be right up your alley.

It is narrative in form but the story itself is kinda beside the point, it is simultaneously funny and vaguely unsettling, it mixes ivory tower academia with the trashiest pop culture, and it is really sick of you and your waifu. I've always enjoyed savage high effort nerdrage, and so I enjoy this. I'm not even joking. I don't dare to try to recommend this for the library, but I really felt like I had to share my fascination for it with someone.

If you don't read anything else, at least read the chatlog-style part at the end of the first part (bottom of the first post in the thread) - it's concentrated academic salt, and it's hilarious. Provided you don't immediately nope out at something like this, that is:

 

For all that it's basically just an anti-Grand Order rant clothed in layers and layers of deliberate obfuscation and/or academia (which is probably worse), I imagine you could still have a wank if you wanted to.

Bit more seriously: I don't really agree with its central point of GO SUCKS REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE, but I can definitely appreciate the writing chops put on display.

 

I thought the central point was that waifuism is basically a step on the path to necrophilia? That said, the writing gave me a headache until I stopped trying and just went "You're just ranting aren't you?" and decided to start skimming the blocks of texts.

 

Bit of an odd rec: Groundbreaking Science: The Guide to Ki - Son Gohan by Breazytealy.

Basically, in one of the many, many DBZ games, it was revealed Gohan wrote a manual about how ki works, after the series ended. This is that manual. It's an "academific", meaning it attempts to mimic the feel of a textbook. It's mostly a whole lot of headcanon and justifications, with the occasional more personal touch or story or whatever. This detracts from the textbook feel, which you might consider a positive. YMMV. This does mean there's no real story or plot, as such. It's not complete yet, either.

Personally, I'd rate this about a 3/5. So far, it's achieved what it set out to do, which is present the author's headcanon in a digestible manner. In this sense it's kind of similar to Taure's rants. That said, the absence of actual plot makes sure it's no page turner, it's not really that captivating a read. Good for wasting some time, though. That, and it's nice to see a DBZ fic not solely about a more Twilight-y version of Vegeta/Bulma or gay porn, which for some reason also tends to revolve around Geets.