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Akatsuki of YCM: Rising Dawn

Fusion X. Denver

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Tsk tsk, Fusion, you have not read the worst fic until you've read

 

"The duel"

 

Or "the duel" with Crab's commentaries.

 

[spoiler=Young And Sweet, Only 17 - {The duel}]We turn now to The duel, a Yu-Gi-Oh! GX/5D's/something fanfic by blackhawk27.

 

Having retired to my remote hut in the forest far from Anten, Izzy, and especially Captain R, I am ready to review a terrible story without interruption. And we have an absolutely awful story ready for us today. Let's get this over with.

 

He was terribly

 

I've come back from the end of the commentary to add this comment, breaking my normal rules of blind reviewing, because I really have to say that the word "terribly" here is highly appropriate. Everything in this story happens terribly.

 

He was terribly exited to go to duel academy, he needed help and now he doesn’t know any more.

 

Passing over the numerous spelling and agreement errors in the first sentence alone (the verb tense bizarrely jumps from the past to the present at the end), I can't even figure out what this sentence is supposed to be saying. "He doesn't know any more"? Does that mean he knows nothing? Does that mean he knows everything? Does that mean he no longer needs help? Does that mean his excitement exitment will be fulfilled? Why does he need help, and what sort of help does he need, and what does all this have to do with his exitment anyhow that warrants putting them in the same sentence?

 

This is the first sentence of the story and it's already less well-written than Digimon restoration.

 

His brown air flowed in the windy breeze.

 

Full summary of all the description we will ever have of him in this story: HE HAS BROWN HAIR

 

Since he doesn't seem to be named, I shall refer to him as Jaden von Brownhair.

 

He was determined to win his entrance duel.

 

Don't make me invent a Captain O to comment on how obvious this statement is.

 

“You young lad, you must duel me now. Call me the professor young boy.” the instructor explained “Get into positions and put on this Duel disk.”

 

Apparently, Jaden von Brownhair is already at the entrance exams, which we know from the GX pilot are held in an indoor stadium. This makes me wonder what sort of "windy breeze" (as opposed to a non-windy breeze?) his hair was flowing in two sentences ago, since he obviously isn't actually outside.

 

Also, I don't care if Umbra beat me to the punch; I'm still going to refer to the instructor as The Professor Young Boy.

 

This seems like a good time to point out that, while this story does have paragraph breaks, there are no extra blank lines between paragraphs and the paragraphs begin with a tab indentation that doesn't actually show up on forums. This means that, while blackhawk29 did actually write this properly in MSWord, what he didn't do was hit the Preview button to make sure it would be displayed properly when it was actually posted. This is lazy, sloppy, and betrays an unforgivable lack of care.

 

“I’m sorry sir but I’m not wearing that, I have my own.” He lifted his arm and showed the Coal black duel disk with crimson card slots.

 

First: I love how "Coal" is capitalized. This story obviously subscribes to the Because I Say So school of capitalization.

 

Second: Aren't red and black traditionally villain colours?

 

Third: I'm sure having Jaden von Brownhair show up with a flashy-coloured Duel Disk of his own and refuse to use the lame official academy-provided Duel Disk is supposed to make him look awesome. Can you guess whether or not I'm impressed?

 

“If you mind can we start this duel” he asked.

 

No, you can't start the duel. The Professor Young Boy told you that you must duel him and instructed you to get into dueling position and told you to take a Duel Disk because he didn't want to duel you. And what's with this "if you mind" thing? Leaving aside the fact that the word "don't" has been dropped due to the author not actually being good at writing, why's Brownhair rudely saying that as if The Professor Young Boy is deliberately delaying?

 

“Okay Fine you may go first.” the instructor declared while walking into position.

 

Look, I'm sure your sixth-grade teacher told you that using the word "said" all the time was boring and handed you a list of synonyms for "said" to use in its place, but that doesn't mean you can pull random words from that list to plug into any random situation.

 

They both drew there five cards into there hands. Breton, the kids name, drew a sixth card. (Breton 8000 instructor 8000)

 

Wait, Jaden von Brownhair is named Breton? Why weren't we told his name before? If you're going to withhold his name from us at first, you need to reveal his name in a suitably dramatic fashion - he needs to introduce himself to someone by saying, "I'm Breton, and I'm going to be the King of Bicycle Playing Cards!", or have him defeat someone and then have them collapse and gasp, "Please... just tell me, who are you?" and have him be like "MY NAME IS BRETON" and end the chapter there. You don't withhold his name for - wait, how long? Are we seriously only at the end of the fourth tiny paragraph? Goodbye, my wrists - and then just have the narration say "oh btw hes breton k" as an aside. Why didn't you just call him Breton int he first sentence? The first sentence was too incomprehensible to tell us anything else, so at least that would have given it something.

 

This revelation of the protagonist's name is so stupid that I'm going to pretend it never happened and will continue to refer to him by the name I made up his true name of Jaden von Brownhair.

 

Duel Start

“I’ll summon Dragon Summoner Monk, in attack mode(atk/1100 def/200. Nest I’ll activate double summon and summon Boney Blader in Attack mode(atk/1500 def/200). Now I will Synchro them together and summon Moon-blade Dragon in attack mode (atk/2100 def/2500) Now for every Dark attributed monster in the grave yard my card gains 500 Atk.(2100 adds 1000 equals 3100) I set one card face down and end my turn.”

 

I've been trying not to mention the spelling and grammar too much, since it's kind of boring to complain about that, but since this is a duel and is therefore really boring, I am forced to re-emphasize how terrible this is. This goes far beyond a lack of proofreading; to produce something so consistently bad, the original typing of this passage must have been plagued by the monitor not actually being turned on and the keyboard's keys being unlabeled and partially scrambled.

 

Incidentally, if this is a GX Duel Academy fanfic, including Tuners and Synchros is a major continuity error.

 

The instructor now facing a dark dreadful monster, was afraid.

 

I was afraid because I had just realized what a terrible story I was in.

 

No, The Professor Young Boy, I'm not having any guest commentators in this review. Get out of here.

 

Gladly. I really don't want to be around for the next two sentences.

 

Good, now scram. Wait, what's that about the next-

 

So afraid he couldn’t think straight.

 

no

 

no

 

NO

 

That never happened.

 

The Professor Young Boy a professional Young Boy Professor with a Masters in Duelology. He duels for a living, teaches people to duel for a living, and has been dueling countless opponents his whole life - and, based on his status as a The Professor Young Boy, he's very good at dueling.

 

Now, here he is at the entrance examinations dueling applicants, and he's, um, scared out of his mind to the point where he can't think straight and thus can't duel properly because his opponent Summoned a big monster (a move, you will recall, in a card game that is not a Shadow Game and on which The Professor Young Boy has nothing staked) of DARK Attribute.

 

This is awful. This is unspeakably awful.

 

Never in any duel he has seen a combo worked out so well.

 

Look, I know anime duels don't follow the same standards as real-life duels and such, but is it really that impressive? He spent three cards to get one big monster out. That's weak by real-life standards; that happens once per episode in the actual anime series; and what makes this combo so awesome anyhow? He uses Double Summon to, um, double Summon and then Synchro Summons. It's hard to imagine a more basic combo than that. I mean, sure, the Synchro Monster got an ATK bonus from having the DARKs in the Graveyard, but again, why is it so astonishing that someone could have the brilliant brilliance to figure out that a monster that gains ATK from having DARKs in the Graveyard works best if you have DARKs in the Graveyard?

 

Actually, it's worse than that. If you scroll down to the bottom of the story and open the images of the custom cards used, you'll see that Dragon Summoner Monk can Special Summon itself without help if you control a Dragon-Type monsters. If Jaden von Brownhair had been smart enough to actually use it with, say, Dragon-Type monsters instead of the Warrior-Type Boney Blader (a Normal Monster with lame ATK, of course), he wouldn't even have needed Double Summon. Anyone who can read cards can see a far better combo that doesn't require Double Summon, but The Professor Young Boy is still amazed.

 

Bear in mind that The Professor Young Boy has dedicated his entire life to studying dueling, and that, despite the name I use for him, he's actually the one who calls Jaden von Brownhair a young boy, which means that he's fairly old (we're not given any description of him because this is a terrible story, but that seems like a reasonable conclusion) and has had a long life of studying dueling and he still hasn't seen anything better than "I use Double Summon to Summon twice. I put DARKs in my Graveyard so that my monster that gains ATK from DARKs in my Graveyard gains ATK."

 

Remember back in the Digimon restoration review when I asked you to try to come up with something worse than it? blackhawk29 has risen to the challenge and produced something far worse. Digimon restoration may have looked like it was typed by an epileptic cat dancing on a keyboard with a strobe light in its face and may have featured "OOPS WE ACCIDENTALLY LOST THE COSMIC KEYSTONE THAT STOPS THE WORLD FROM COLLAPSING MY BAD", but it still wasn't as terrible as this story, whose awful spelling and grammar actually impairs understanding ("He doesn't know any more"???) and in which every sentence makes me wonder if the author has ever had contact with human beings, let alone with the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise. This is the worst.

 

And so, to continue tempting fate, I shall pose the same question once again: what is worse than this?

 

He drew his new card.

“I summon a monster in facedown defense position, with one card face down.” the instructor was so terrified he could barely hold his cards.

 

What is so terrifying!? It's a card game! It's not a shadow game! The Professor Young Boy doesn't have anything riding on victory! The cards can't hurt him (except perhaps by giving him paper cuts)! And this is an entrance examination where the applicant gets in if he wins, which means that The Professor Young Boy should be expecting to lose several of his duels if he wants Duel Academy to actually have any students this term (and thus if he wants to actually get paid).

 

But maybe the answer is hidden in the cards. Scrolling down to the custom card images reveals that Dragon Summoner Monk is not in fact a regular Tuner but a Dark Tuner. Why he can be used in a positive Synchro Summon is a mystery to me - the Moonblade Dragon lists 1 "Dark tuner" [sic] instead of 1 Tuner in its requirements, but Dark Tuners still don't work that way normally - so maybe Jaden von Brownhair is a Dark Signer or whatever and is radiating fear (despite this not being a Shadow Game) to sabotage his opponent. That's right: our protagonist is so bad at Duel Monsters that he needs to cheat by using magical fear powers to make The Professor Young Boy play badly because without doing that he can't pass an ordinary high school entrance exam. Or - and this is an infinitely more probable theory - maybe this story just sucks.

 

“Hahaha that won’t work I activate Sanguine Swamp,

 

Sanguine Swamp, for those who don't feel like turning to the Wiki, is a real Continuous Trap that prohibits the activation of Set Spells and Traps. The drawback is that Sanguine Swamp will self-destruct if the user at any time controls another Spell or Trap. Since I've seen the start of the next sentence, I know that this will be a problem.

 

Now I activate Pot of Greed

 

And suddenly Jaden von Brownhair controlled another Spell. Did Sanguine Swamp self-destruct? Of course not.

 

Also, the anime has obeyed the real-life banlist since sometime in the middle of GX. This story contains cards from 5D's. Pot of Greed has been quite rightly banned on the real-life banlist for the past several years. That makes Jaden von Brownhair, our protagonist, an even more blatant cheater than the actual Jaden and Yusei. And that's terrible.

 

and Play the spell card Mage power on my beast giving it 500 ATK for every spell and trap I control.

 

And suddenly Jaden von Brownhair controlled another Spell. Did Sanguine Swamp self-destruct? Of course not.

 

Now I play two cards face down

 

And suddenly Jaden von Brownhair controlled another two Spells or Traps. Did Sanguine Swamp self-destruct? Of course not.

 

and activate Fairy meteor Crush.

 

And suddenly Jaden von Brownhair controlled another Spell. Did Sanguine Swamp self-destruct? Of course not.

 

(Moon blade 3100 adds 2000 for 5100)

 

Or maybe it did. Fairy Meteor Crush, Mage Power, Sanguine Swamp, and two Set Spells and Traps total five Spells and Traps because 1+1+1+2=5 because that's how math works - incidentally, this sort of arithmetic is also useful if you're trying to calculate how many bullets remain in a gun after it has shot a chandelier, a door, Mr. Boddy, and a singing telegram - so Moonblade Dragon's ATK should have increased by 2500, not 2000. Since it only increased by 2000, perhaps Sanguine Swamp did self-destruct and we just weren't told about that because the author is a moron and Jaden von Brownhair only activated it when he was just going to destroy it anyhow because Jaden von Brownhair is a moron?

 

Now attack that defense position monster.” in seconds his monster was blown to smithereens and broke in millions of pieces. It had no effect because it was Thousand eyes idol the trap was supposed to save himm but he was wrong, and now the instructor took 5100 points of damage.

 

...except Sanguine Swamp was apparently preventing The Professor Young Boy from using his Trap, so it seems that it didn't self-destruct at all. Also, The Professor Young Boy uses Thousand-Eyes Idol because, as a Professor of Duelosophy who has studied card games for his whole life, The Professor Young Boy has no clue how to actually play this game.

 

It may sound odd that I'm going to complain about "himm" having that double-m at the end, considering how atrocious the typing in this whole story has been (not to mention everything else), but this is the first problem I've come across that actually should have been fixed by MSWord's spellchecker. Since all the previous misspelled actual words didn't produce wavy red underlines in my Firefox browser and the paragraph indents made it clear that this was previously typed in an actual word processor, I had assumed that blackhawk29 had at least run this through the MSWord spellchecker before posting it, but we now have proof that that isn't actually the case and that I'm an idiot for lending this pathetic excuse for an author even the slightest benefit of the doubt.

 

“Now I sacrifice my monster and discard my whole deck and you take my monsters Atk points as damage times 2 (Breton 8000 Instructor 8000-5100-10200=0)

 

Moonblade Dragon's effect would be almost strictly weaker if it simply read, "If you have four or more DARK monsters in your Graveyard, you win the duel". I know anime cards are frequently broken and whatnot, but this guy's effect is so unspeakably overpowered that I really must protest. Compare it to Dark Strike Fighter. Note that it is several times stronger than Dark Strike Fighter. Recall that Dark Strike Fighter broke an entire format over its knee before being banned at the first opportunity.

 

If you're trying to show off what a great duelist Jaden von Brownhair is, you're doing a lousy job. So far, he's won by cheating with banned cards, cheating with broken cards, cheating by ignoring cards' negative side-effects, and cheating with what I can only assume is fear-inducing magic, and a simple glance at his cards' text reveals that he could do far better if he were to actually read them. The Professor Young Boy's thoughts make it clear that we're supposed to be impressed, but right now the only thing I'm impressed with is my own endurance in reading through this monstrosity without downing a whole bottle of sleeping pills and then shooting myself in the face.

 

The dragon bursts a ball of fire at the instructor sending him flying straight into a wall crushing his back, obviously.

 

Because the ordinary holograms used in these duels can obviously do that. Obviously. In the canon, people may shield their faces from holographic flames, act like they're feeling attacks, or maybe even stumble and fall over backward while recoiling from what looks like an incoming attack, but if it's not a Shadow Game (which this wasn't, or the arena would be filled with dark purple smoke or whatever; Shadow Games aren't exactly subtle once Duel Monsters enters the series), it can't have such a drastic effect as sending someone flying several feet backwards into a wall and crushing him. That just doesn't work.

 

The instructor new this kid was dangerous,

 

Indeed, he is, in the sense that this kid is central to the existence of this story and this story is dangerous. I think blackhawk29 is actually a CIA operative who is using us as a preliminary test of his new enhanced interrogation technique, which consists of reading this story to people until they break down and confess.

 

but school rules promised a spot for who ever beat the instructor so he was allowed in.

 

I don't think entrance exam regulations trump concerns for the health and safety of everyone at the school. Letting Jaden von Brownhair, terrible-duelist-flagrant-cheater-and-dangerous-breaker-of-the-laws-of-physics, into Duel Academy seems sort of like telling a chemistry student he needs to stay and finish performing a titration when the whole bloody school is on fire.

 

I'm always big on the cardinal rule of Show, Don't Tell, so let's compare what this story Shows versus what this story Tells. We're Told - by The Professor Young Boy - that Jaden von Brownhair is an amazing duelist. We're Shown that he's an awful duelist who can only pass a routine entrance examination through several counts of flagrant cheating.

 

Which are we meant to believe? blackhawk29 wants us to believe that Jaden von Brownhair is an amazing duelist. blackhward29 himself believes that Jaden von Brownhair is an amazing duelist. But ever since I looked up and realized that the word "gullible" was not actually written on the ceiling, I've known better than to fall for such pathetic lies. The same cannot be said of this story's author, who is so busy lying to us that he's managed to fool himself.

 

I would like to conclude by comparing this story's positive and negative qualities.

 

On the negative side, the writing is atrocious (without so much as a proofread or spellcheck) to the point where not every sentence is understandable even after being scrutinized, the plot consists entirely of a single duel, we're expected to think that the protagonist is really cool and a great duelist when he's actually pretty lame and is awful at dueling, proper second-grade mathematics and card game rules are cast aside as unnecessary, no characterization or world-building is presented, the sole antagonist is an insane cowardly moron (despite his status as Professor) who isn't even given an actual name and whose thoughts make absolutely no sense whatsoever, and I'm sure I've forgotten plenty of other hideous problems in this mess.

 

And on the positive side... well, uh, I suppose it's mercifully short?

 

I wasn't joking about what I said in the middle of my review about this being worse than Digimon restoration and being the worst of all possible fanfics. The question I pose is not one to which I readily have an answer: What is worse than this?

 

 

 

WORST

 

FIC

 

EVER

 

 

Altho I like the Professor Young Boy.

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"He was terribly exited to go to duel academy, he needed help and now he doesn’t know any more."

 

 

"He was terribly exited to escape this horrible fanfic, he needed help and now he doesn't know anymore."

 

 

Oh, and Fusion, almost done with reviewing your fic >:3

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Fusion X. Denver Newbie

Fusion X. Denver

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Cortez, more like 100 times.

 

Everytime he posted it was "You guys read Naruto yet?", "Hey guys, new Naruto is out!", or "C'mon guys! Read the new chapter!"

 

=.=

 

You make it seem like getting a club to talk about its main topic is stupid or something =___=

That fic was absolutely terrible, but the one I posted is still worse.

Did you guys read that yet, it's terribly nasty.

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