Literary Demerit

Part one of part eight (the final part!) of Dirty Laundry. After Keith stole a car belonging to two lawyers and fled to go sulk at McDonalds, Lance and his family have to try and make things right and repair the relationship… but it’s not Klance time yet; first it’s time for Keith and Rosa to discuss how they really like the part about the bees in The Secret Life of Bees. We also decided it’s time to once again compare this story with another, better, Klance fanfic, so we read Just Static by ao3 author Jessadilla. Content warnings: usual Dirty Laundry warnings, nothing unique to this part of the story. Just Static has a fair amount of gore/violence but we don’t discuss it it much detail.

Chapters 46-48 of Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami. We’ve done it, we’ve reached the end! Technically the fic was already over, but we’ve got three(!) epilogues to cover, in which the author answers all of our burning questions about the story. Per podcast tradition, we’re taking a look at the reviews this fanfic got in our second segment, and then finally it’s time to announce what we’ll be covering next!Content warnings: The usual for this story.

Chapters 43-45 of Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami. This is the end of the fic, sorta! We’ve still got the epilogues (there are three of them) to cover next time, but we’ve reached the end of the story proper. There’s also a big, awesome, epic twist that the author would like to remind you is very epic and awesome, so you’d better look forward to it. For our second segment, we’re getting into the spooky season a little early and taking a look at Darker Yagami - Dark Yagami gets Dark, a side story which is far far too scary by far.Content warnings: You know the drill by now.

Chapters 39-42 of Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami. We’re nearing the end of the fanfic, so naturally there’s some sort of epic showdown happening and the cast is killing each other more than usual. We also listened to Death Note: The Musical during our hiatus, and we’ve got a lot to say about it (including some Frozen 2 hot takes, mostly unrelated).Content warnings: As usual for this story.

Chapters 35-38 of Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami… except that according to the author, these are chapters 32-35, since he wrote himself into a corner and had to back up to an earlier point in the timeline. Will things play out differently this time? Will any of it make any sense? (No.) In the second segment we continue digging into the author’s Twitter account to look at some EPIC fanart and even read some poignant quotes from the author himself.Content warnings: As usual there's some mild cartoon violence and some vague references to nudity and "sexing."

Chapters 31-34 of Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami. As usual, there’s a lot going on in this story: we’ve got mind control, Lego coffins, time-traveling trains, a cyberspace adventure, Soichiro Yagami going to McDonald's, a chapter allegedly so sexy you will get too turned on and die, and so on. We also discovered the author’s old Twitter account, so for our second segment we read through a choose-your-own-adventure story told through Twitter polls.Content warnings: Same as usual for this author, plus we spend a little time investigating a Death Note parody that’s mostly just a series of fat jokes.(Additional music credits for this episode: "The Beast" by Shiro Sagisu from the Neon Genesis Evangelion Original Series Soundtrack © Milan Entertainment, Inc)

Chapters 27-30 of Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami. Intermission is over! We’re back to the world of Death Note, and the cast is disguising themselves as other characters, killing each other, and “sexing” as per usual. However, we’re not quite done with Metroid High School yet, either — it’s time to check out 111SAMUSRIDLEY4EVA2006-chan’s final story, Tio Juan: Fusion.Content warnings: Usual warnings for Light and Dark (cartoon violence, death, mild sexual content, etc.). Tio Juan: Fusion is a little bit weird about the main character being Mexican, as in Metroid High School, but probably nothing too egregious.

The second half of Metroid High School! Again, this fic is full of surprises (and politics! and maybe even themes!) and maybe it’s best if we don’t spoil it by attempting to summarize what happens this time around. As usual, we finish up by having a look at the reviews for this story and discussing the reception it’s received from the fanfiction.net userbase over the years.Content warnings: There’s a sentence or two in this story that gets weird about one of the side characters being Mexican. Aside from that, it’s just cartoon death/violence.

We’re taking an intermission from covering Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami to check out another fanfic, Metroid High School by 111SAMUSRIDLEY4EVA2006-chan. This isn’t a very long story (this episode covers roughly half of it), but there are a lot of, well... let’s just say "unexpected twists and turns." We’re also looking at a shorter story by the same author called The Metroid Conspiracy: Pasts of the Sin." Content warnings: This fic revolves around high schoolers and includes some pretty vague talk regarding the sex lives of said characters, as well as some similarly non-explicit "sex scenes," if they can even be called that.

Chapters 23-26 of Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami. As usual, any attempt to briefly summarize this story in the shownotes would be futile — lots happens, none of it makes sense — but we do have a lot of badly machine-translated Japanese this time, so that’s fun! Plus, now that we’re about halfway through the fic, we have an announcement to make… and after that, it’s time for us to finally give our thoughts on Death Note (we ended up having more thoughts on it than expected!). Content warnings: As is typical with this fic, there's a lot of cartoon violence as well as vague mentions of "sexing" happening but no actual detailed descriptions of nudity or intercourse. Additionally, this chapter has some allusions to incest when discussing the mechanics of clones, but no actual incest.

Chapters 19-22 of Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami. We didn’t plan it out like this, but this episode is sort of a Christmas special! Also, we find out about Shakespeare’s shinigami, and a character we thought had died comes back to life (it’s actually a twist this time). Finally, it’s time to check out more of D’arkYagam’i’s body of work; this time we’re reading The Hunger Note Games. Content warnings: Usual warnings for this fic and author including cartoon violence and whatever the equivalent of that is for sex.

Chapters 15-18 of Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami. You know the drill by now; this fic’s basically impossible to summarize because so many things happen yet so little of it matters to the plot (is there a plot?). From what we can gather, the chapters we read involve samurai swords, gay marriage, and clone sex. We’re still working our way through this author’s other fanfics, so this week we read Who Is Voldemorts Dad? The Tales of Vernon Dursly!, which doesn’t appear to directly connect back to Light and Dark but I guess anything could happen at this point. Content warnings: Same as for previous episodes covering this fanfic.

Chapters 11-14 of Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami. Once again there’s a lot going on — characters turning into other characters and dying and coming back to life. You know, business as usual for this story. We’re also once again taking a look at another fic by the same author; this time it’s The God Of Time With No Name Light’s Real Name! which is a follow-up to the story we read in our last episode. Content warnings: Same as previously - death and cartoon violence, vague sex, and whatever is going on with Roger the creepy dude and his dog.

Chapters 7-10 of Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami. Lots going on this week as Dark dies, becomes king of the shinigami, attacks New York, comes back to life, and has a car chase in France. In the second half we take a look at another fic written by the same author, Pain Note The Ressurekshun of Ray Pember. Content warnings: This story is steadily getting more and more over-the-top and absurd, and so the content warnings this week are basically the same as last week except crazier. There’s more sex and death and incest and it’s all completely ridiculous.

It’s our 50th episode and our 7th season! This time we’re covering Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami by D’arkYagam’i on fanfiction.net, a very silly Death Note trollfic in which characters are constantly disguising themselves as other characters. Also, neither of us have seen Death Note all the way through and we need to rectify that, but we spend some time talking about what we do remember about the anime (and the cultural phenomenon surrounding it) in the second half of this episode. Content warnings: Well, it’s a Death Note fanfic, there’s naturally a good amount of death in the story but nothing really graphic. This story also has some sexual content, and while it’s overall very mild there are a couple incest jokes and also a sexual scene involving Light’s little sister Sayu, whose age isn’t clear in this story but who is introduced to us in the anime as a young teenager.

Chapters 10 and 11 of Love Knows No Race. We did it, we reached the end! The final two chapters of this story are every bit as strange as you’d expect, but, at the same time, nothing that happens could realistically have been expected. We spent a lot of time trying to make sense of this fic and ultimately I don’t think we succeeded, but perhaps we still learned something along the way? To close out this season of the podcast, we take a look at the reviews this story received, and then it’s time to reveal what we’ll be covering next! Content warnings: Again, there’s a lot of incest in this story, and we do have to keep talking about the incestuous date-rape that took place in a previous chapter. This time there’s also domestic violence, self-harm, and suicide. As before, none of this is particularly explicit, but it certainly isn’t handled well.

Chapters 8 and 9 of Love Knows No Race by Carlotta Valjean. Zim and Dib are now parents, and, well... this is where the story begins to truly go off the rails, and, as before, we don’t want to spoil it. We also covered the second half of Unbroken Dreams by the same author, and that wasn’t very normal either. Content warnings: Incest again, but worse this time, as there’s a scene where a character uses drugs to trick a relative into sleeping with them. While, again, there’s nothing that explicit in here, the subject matter is plenty unsavory on its face and the way the story handles it is bad too. Unbroken Dreams has more in-universe homophobia and also since it’s a Harry Potter fanfic we wind up having to talk about the house elf slavery thing a little.

Chapters 6 and 7 of Love Knows No Race by Carlotta Valjean. In this part of the story we get a shocking (frankly, baffling) reveal that dramatically changes the nature of Zim and Dib’s relationship yet also arguably doesn’t mean anything at all, and… well, you’ll just have to listen for yourself - we don’t want to spoil this. We’re also taking a look at Carlotta Valjean’s other story on fanfiction.net, Unbroken Dreams, which is a Harry Potter fanfic (Drarry, specifically). Content warnings: Hoo boy. So from this point in the story onwards, it’s basically impossible to talk about Love Knows No Race without also talking about incest. Thankfully there’s still no explicit content, but the way the fic handles this topic really isn’t great, either. Also, in one scene the characters discuss a previous sexual encounter that might not have been totally consensual, and another scene has some mildly gross descriptions of pregnancy/childbirth. Unbroken Dreams has a brief reference to self-harm as well as in-universe homophobia and homophobic language.

Chapters 3 and 4 (and 5, but it’s just an author’s note) of Love Knows No Race. After finding out that Dib is Irken, Zim and Dib are summoned to meet the Almighty Tallest so that Dib can become a proper Invader. We haven’t gotten to any of the truly insane stuff in this story yet, but already there’s plenty to say about how little sense this story makes. We’ve also both completed a rewatch of Invader Zim and spend the second half of this episode discussing the show itself (both of us love this cartoon and we’ve got altogether too much to say about it). Content warnings: Per the author, this is where the “mild lemon hinting” comes in. (That is, there’s implied sex in this part of the story. Nothing explicit, thankfully.) Additionally, this is technically a ZaDR (Zim x Dib) fic, which is a ship with a canonical significant age gap, and thought this doesn't really matter because the author has changed their ages to be the same, it still bears mentioning.

Time to start a new fanfic! We’re reading Love Knows No Race, an Invader Zim fanfiction written in 2002 by fanfiction.net author Carlotta Valjean. This one’s considerably more obscure than previous stories we’ve covered, but both of us have a Lot to say about it — we’re only covering the first two chapters this week and we still talked about it for well over an hour. We also have unfinished business with KingAurthr2, so it’s time to conclude The Quest for the Holey Grail. Content warnings: Love Knows No Race is a ZaDR (Zim x Dib) story, and we do have to be clear that canonically Zim is an adult while Dib is a child. While that doesn’t actually matter to this story (like a lot of ZaDR stories, Love Knows No Race treats Zim and Dib as though they’re peers), it’s not really something we can avoid mentioning. The way this author handles Zim and Dib’s relationship is going to require additional content warnings later, but… we’ll get there.