Very good reading for fans of the movie and the strange mythos of Tommy Wiseau, but can occasionally get into way flowerier language than is necessary ("The deep cherry red of emergency," Jesus Christ)

This is a perfect book.

On the whole I’ve heard it described as a kid’s book, and content-wise I suppose I can’t object save for some pithy fantasy violence and mentions of alcohol, but in terms of keeping up with the complexity and the characters, I would think it best to read it as an adult.

Though much time is taken in describing a long journey—the kind of adventure one dreams about in childhood—the comforts of hearth and home are still frequent and provide frequent reprieve. It’s interesting how little happens; you could summarize it in an hour, but it’s the detail and the attention to things like songs and fictional culture that let you dawdle and feel lost. It is a pleasure to read and all should make an effort to do so.

Absolutely atrocious. This would be one star if the art weren’t so unforgivably good. The worst part of the political angle is that it was plausible until Robin was a zoomer from the 2020s who absolutely does not fit into the Civil Rights motif that Harvey and the rest of Burnside represent. The politics of the current age, while they are descendent from the past, do not get to anachronistically go back to try representing the zeitgeist of “89”, much less the anachronistic universe that the Burton movies created. The worst part is that a story about Harvey Dent and inequality is baked into his character concept perfectly, and they still fucked it up—managing only to get his design and his insanity sequences (and the art overall, I cannot stress that enough) right.

This book is as aggravating as it is great. If ever a book earned a middle-of-the-road score, it would be this one.

It is hard to hate the authors who have finally taken an analytical lens to things like Tommy Wiseau's The Room and creepypasta and even less colorful Internet trolling like the "Delete System 32" meme. Such a thing is possible only by natives of this digital age, and when it came to many things I was familiar with, I was very impressed with how well they understood and tracked the source material. Their comparisons to historical precedent are hit-or-miss. I can buy memes and the comparison to Xeroxlore and folklore. I'm less inclined to buy comparisons of Trump to violentincensed politicians of the 1800s, particularly given that this book came out before the January 6th insurrection attempt. I wonder if the authors ever regret they couldn't have published this work in the wake of that...

On the other hand, the constant bias was infuriating to deal with if one had any familiarity with the topics at hand. For example: When reporting on 4chan to start, they bifurcate their arguments to strictly /b/ and /x/, as those are simply the more interesting ones. There's no mention of the site's history, its start on SomethingAwful, and some of its more good, if ambivalently motivated, activism. The "Don't Fuck With Cats" territory, some of earlier Anonymous's work against Scientology, and so forth. This is by-and-large intentional on the authors' part, frequently citing the principle that to restate or give an in-depth overview of something is to proliferate it, and the authors felt uncomfortable doing so. Fair enough. So why are all of Trump's racially charged offenses given light? Why is there a painstaking beat-for-beat transcription of all of "Trump Effect" given? The portrayal there is completely ambivalent (save for pithy, and irritating, quips pleading with an imagined international audience for the book not to judge all Americans when it came to the democratically elected President) and incapable of swaying anyone who wasn't going to be swayed in the first place. It's proof the authors CAN do it if they apply themselves. So why don't they? At the end of the day, what it infuriatingly belies is that the writers simply failed to do the prerequisite research, and this faded half-picture of the complete truth, if not an outright misrepresentation, is going to be what gets cited and, itself, proliferated.

This is a frustration I have because when they do know a topic and they are passionate about it, it is presented with an impeccably traced lineage, notable offshoots, and the occasional connection to greater rhetoric or a historic precedent.

The interjections from the authors' lives hover on the 3-star borderline themselves, for as the reader, you recognize these are the people who are writing the book. When they do well, you identify the circles you both share (A fan of The Room, an interest in creepypasta, some bemused horror at the fact that, oh Jesus, there used to be Erin Esurance inescapably in banner ads and Newgrounds) and when they do poorly, the more insipid banalities of their lives grate on you, like (for lack of a better word) the millennial smugness at putting "FUCK" in every book because a presumably WASP-y upbringing frowned upon it but now that they're "adulting" and have a degree or two, they get to make the rules. It's an entry-level faux-punk post-Mormon/Catholic running into a tattoo parlor to get an oh-so-original pentagram tattoo. You're not as cool or edgy as you wish you were, and considering the trolls and slur-slinging laissez-faire ambivalent people you're reporting on, you should second-guess why you would even want to be. It's pathetic. That childishness seeps into every noncommittal half-assed overview of a more complex topic, whereas that same person or persons can write something demonstrably good when they apply themselves.

I don't want to come off overly schmaltzy and give this too high a score, but it was just so charming from start to finish. I don't think there was a single moment where I wasn't smiling at either the comedy or the drama.

This might be a me thing, but sometimes I can't tell the characters apart, and the action is a little hard to interpret at times. A colored version might help, to be honest.

I like how smoothly the series has transitioned from comedy to more high-stakes conflicts, though not without slight growing pains (much like the plot itself.) I trust the plan, though—it’s clear everything happening is deliberate and leading to an exact resolution.

An absolutely haunting ending to the volume, and the turning point of the series, it feels like.

The art feels like it’s received a colossal bump in quality and settled into its own, although the forms of the Lunarians and what they’re supposed to be is still confusing sometimes. The air of mystery is fine, it’s the physical that confuses me.

There are great story masterstrokes—Phos’s decaying memory is used to reveal backstory the reader is otherwise not privy to. The species doesn’t physically mature, so the story shifts to adapt its metaphor of growing old and leaving behind childish ambition and innocence in a way consistent with its own lore.

All in all, the best volume so far.

Coming off of the 1997 animé and a vague handful of memes and knowledge that this was peak edge fiction, I was actually seriously worried I wouldn’t enjoy this, and I figured any criticism wouldn’t be well received. Not only that, but my biggest concern with the animé was the sharp pivot to magic, where the series had been strictly realistic beforehand.

Honestly, those concerns were completely unfounded and I ended up taking this series for what it was. No one ever talked about Puck (which I suspect is a side effect of needing to tout this as peak edge fiction) but he was a fantastic comic relief character and really offset a lot of Guts’s immense darkness and uncaring attitude. Guts is hard to like here, plain and simple. He does good things and he is a fascinating character to follow; you know what he’s after is a greater evil, but the obsession with doing so has made him callous and hostile. Puck softens the blow and honestly was my favorite character, though as we near the story the 1997 animé was set in, that will likely change.

Oh God.

I got this for a Goodreads achievement, but also because I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone and read something I don’t normally read. And for a really long time, I thought I stumbled upon something special. Though it was not perfectly for me, I respected it. At first.

The initial sins were innocent enough—namely, that things are subtly alluded to, which feels great, and then explicitly confirmed with zero room for interpretation. That’s less great. When a character is an alcoholic, we see very subtle clues and we feel smart for picking up on them. If a character is a lesbian, more sharp-eyed observers could see the parts of that identity hinted at. If a character is a cheater, we get small glimpses of it. Unfortunately, all such mysteries are always confirmed in due time with no room for ambiguity, as the rest of the narrative depends on the explicit reveal in order to continue. Anyways, this is fine, and wouldn’t have cost too many points in the end. It’s just what takes this from a simple in-vogue book to something that could seriously have become a modern classic.

The narrative whiplashes between past and present were a bit of a struggle to contend with at first, but I was fine by the conclusion of Part 1. I would say about, ooh, 75%? of the book is incredible. After all of Part 1’s buildup, Part 2’s descent into chaos is perfectly delicious. I had to put the book down during moments that were so awkward that I couldn’t bear to keep reading without a break. There is this moment that is not explicitly identifiable in the text, but so much goes so horribly wrong that it ceases to be a drama and starts to be a comedy. This is the book chugging at maximum efficiency, and I started to look at the other books on the achievement list by Taylor Jenkins Reid and visualizing myself going, “No yeah, Taylor Jenkins Reid. I mean I just happened to pick this up with no expectations. Crazy good repertoire already and crazy good future ahead of her too.”

But the line couldn’t hold. Telling off a deadbeat in lengthy prose becomes absurd wish fulfillment where a man with zero respect for women is somehow cowed into silence by one woman with a very bad day, even when in between he starts lamenting that his son is “pussy-whipped.” Random ACAB commentary meanders its way in as awkwardly as it leaves. I am relieved that of all the many left-wing talking points, the lesbian coming out of the closet is done very subtly, with buildup, and has a very kindhearted resolution; one that, in the midst of a stressful series of events, served as a much-needed reprieve.

The ending is nice, and I love how the meaning of the foreshadowed fire in the beginning becomes redefined. But it doesn’t change the fact that many of the book's flaws begin compounding near the end. That rotting midsection became the undoing of the whole building, which was once a 4-star score.

Overall, there are worse things to be sure, and it’s not a dispassionately written book. I just think some of it could have been better off with more subtlety and a consistent throughline.

The premise is the premise, and the express purpose of slightly trashy stuff like this is to get to schmaltzy scenarios and humorous entendre, so it's an unnecessarily steep battle to get us to like the main character by having her basically start this off as sextortion. That very quickly fades into the background and you can turn your brain off and just enjoy the lovely drawings or the stereotypical flustered BS that accompanies these things.

What throws a really gutpunching left hook is the homophobia sequence, and the other character realizing that they contributed to that inadvertently. A lot of the dialogue there is very plainly written but in a way that's somehow even more crushing to read. I really liked that and thought it elevated this beyond just some throwaway timewaster. Pretty great. Picked it up out of curiosity and was 60 pages in before I could blink.