#stmpd reviews black lagoon fanfiction

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Recommends Black Lagoon Fanfiction: LowkeeWB's Apotheosis

In my first Black Lagoon fanfic review for Bullets, I said that some Lagoon fics make you think, make you cry, make you cringe, make you smile. I was thinking of some fairly specific ones when I made that comment.

Many make me cringe, of course. Were one to manifest all Black Lagoon fanfiction as physical material, there would be warehouses of Cool Ex Special Forces Original Character adventures (though there are a handful of good ones in that sub-subgenre by one particular author, I'll get to that) saturating FF.net (not AO3 so much. Different heydays of different sites, if you know what I mean). This annoys me, because rarely (again, that one exception) are these characters interesting or worthy of our time. BGC fics suffered this problem, too, so what the hell. Let's give the Super Cool OC genre a pass for now, and instead talk about a fic that is... Jesus.

I think it might be one of those very rare perfect fanfictions? One of the few that does everything it sets out to do within a reasonable amount of time (75.6K words, only). One which crackles with new, creative ideas that are all laid out one after another without too much bloat between them? One that has actual goddamn themes? Oh. Oh yeah.

In short, Apotheosis is the Black Lagoon fic I wish I knew how to write.

In essence, Apotheosis is about the last days of Roanapur as Rock knows it. Sure, the hypercriminal institution will remain, but the old powers are dying as the history of the late nineties runs its course. The 1997 financial crisis is one little knife in the side of the leviathan; Russia's ailing economy is another; Hong Kong being returned to Chinese control and hurting Triad business there is yet another. The end of history that Hiroe has alluded to Black Lagoon being about is, itself, ending.

Rock knows this. Maybe the rest of Lagoon Company does, too, but none of them want to admit it. A constant theme in this fic is whether or not Rock's addicted to the thrill of poking at the power structures of Roanapur post-Blood Trail, the kind of action he now needs that the Lagoon Company's regular work can't provide.

Anyway, along comes a job, where they ferry a mysterious client heavily implied to be Osama Bin Goddamn Laden to safety. Rock has a strange conversation with the mystery man about the nature of the end of the world, and following it, decides to cash in, handing information over to Eda in her capacity as a CIA operative. Soon, he's working as a double agent for the Agency, even though the powers that be (Chang) know very well who and why. Soon, Revy's in on his weird little plot, too. There's a trip to New York where Revy finally explains who she was to Rock and it's beautifully painful. Honestly, every part of this fic is beautifully painful. Sure, it's not a fic for fight scenes, but it's not about fight scenes. It's, well, it's about Apotheosis. The end of everything.

I wish I had more to say, because this fic has been influencing how I'm writing the quieter parts of Bubblegum Black immensely. It's almost hard to reread because I know it's so good, because I know I can't measure up to it because of the way I write with an eye towards reaching the next goofy fight scene.

But you? You, dear reader, should read the shit out of it. You should have no shame in loving this fic.

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Reviews Black Lagoon Fanfiction: BigCountry75's Redneck of Roanapur

This one was recommended to me by a dude on the Black Lagoon subreddit, and I clicked on it somewhat reluctantly. It started well enough, I flipped through a few later chapters and it was pretty cool, but it's 288K words, folks. Moby fucking Dick is 209K words. And while it's true that many, many fics are longer than Moby Dick, or indeed most officially published works, there was just something about it. I was reluctant to read an OC-centric Black Lagoon fic, though, because new-guy-comes-into-town-and-fucks-shit-up rarely works in BGC fanfic, so why should it work in this case?

I needn't have worried. Redneck of Roanapur is well-written, fairly competently characterized, and like Bullets, my previous review, relentlessly fun. Reading it over the past two weeks on-and-off has been a fairly good experience, and, too, an exercise in how (in my eyes) to make a fic defined by one Cool Original Character really work.

In that light, if I want to talk about RoR, I have to talk about its main character, a dude from the boonies of Michigan known as Country. No, really, that's the name he gets, nothing else. And, well... okay, the one thing that might sink this fic for you is that when it's told from his first-person perspective, his, uh, accent is written down in the prose. This can be annoying at times, but in all honesty it isn't as annoying as you'd think it would be, because as far as quasi-authorial inserts go, he still describes things clearly enough to make everything work. His spelling's intentionally off, but his grammar isn't. Ergo, I can read it without being annoyed.

So: Country is an ex far-right militiaman who ditched his former comrades in True Patriotism, and in his effort to leave the country stole a goddamn WW2 B-24 and hightailed it blindly to Roanapur. Yeah. That's it. That's his backstory. He gets his hands on another WW2-era fighter plane later, too.

Okay, so compare that to other various OC-centric Lagoon fics which will not be named, ones starring ex-CIA operatives and elite soldiers with more conventionally troubled pasts and their skills mostly centering around the shooting of guns. They're cool in the loosest sense, but I find most of them incredibly boring, and the fic has to work harder to get around that more often than not. (Success is possible, but I've only seen like one guy pull it off.) Country is more interesting to me because a) his backstory is more out-there but still plausible, it's a backstory you don't see every day, and b) he has a unique set of skills that other characters in Lagoon don't have to the same extent.

I mean, think about it. Those two elements are what make an interesting Black Lagoon character in the actual franchise. Roberta with her FARC training and maid getup; Balalaika's Soviet paratrooper glory days and how far she's fallen; Ginji the yakuza who can literally deflect bullets. There's something that makes all these characters more than just ex-spooks or mercs with training. Some eccentricity. Some wackiness. Some small amount of historical grounding. Country has that, even if his backstory isn't super important. Country has his WW2-era planes, which are fun as hell to watch him and Lagoon Company use. So, he fits right in.

Anyway, Country lands in Roanapur, gets hooked up to the Lagoon Company to use the B-24 as a courier aircraft, and pretty quickly things get weird. See, not only does Country piss off the head of a non-canon crime syndicate pretty quickly in a bar fight, but said syndicate head is tied to a nameless Doctor and his equally nameless Benefactor, who are searching for guinea pigs to do immortality / resurrection experiments on. The Doctor resurrects Hansel and Gretel successfully, they escape, they wind up at the airfield Lagoon Company now occupies. So they're hanging out, raised by the team to not be total murderous monsters, and eventually they attract the attention of the Doctor and his Benefactor, who turns out to be a powerful American politician with ties to Extra Order, the Not-Executive-Outcomes PMC from the first arc of Lagoon. Pretty soon, Lagoon Company and their patrons are duking it out with that one non-canon syndicate and EO in short order, culminating in an epic battle for the fate of the city, all of which is just incredibly fun to read in its sheer paramilitaristic ultraviolence.

Anyway the fic swings between that violence and a lot of surprisingly cutesy shipping. Country falls in love with Sawyer, for one, and that doesn't feel weird, doesn't feel self-insert-y, it makes sense for how the characters are being written in that context... Rock and Revy finally get together... Shenhua and Lotton get together, which I'm kinda iffy on but what the heck... Chang and Balalaika hook up in secret... Even Eda and Dutch pair up as secret agents! So everything is very slice-of-life-y when military planning and blowing things up isn't the order of the day. Oh, and Leigharch comes back towards the end, which is great because I always liked him. In fact, I think that's the main flaw in the fic: the ending feels way too cute and tidy for something like Black Lagoon, a franchise where endings, I feel, need to be ambiguous at best and depressing as hell at worst. It undermines the fun one has reading Country and the Lagoon Company operate a bomber to blow the everloving shit out of a PMC submarine base, or drug fields, or mansions, or whatever. It's an ending that feels at once natural for the fic, but not as earned as it could be.

But beyond that, Redneck of Roanapur is a simple, long, but super-fun thrill ride. If you're looking for something silly to read over the long summer months, flip through this and enjoy yourself.

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Recommends Black Lagoon Fanfiction: Ragna Crimson's Bullets

Oh. You didn't notice? Over the past two months or so I've gotten really into Black Lagoon. Like, to the point that I'm working on a BGC crossover fic with the franchise. The Knight Sabers in Roanapur... whatta concept.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about! That can wait! Instead, I'm trying to get my creative mojo back by talking about a fanfic I just finished reading last night, but which is unfinished, and oh boy it's a blast. That's the only adjective which fits Bullets: A blast.

Look, I think the author summarizes it perfectly in the FF.net description, anyway:

We are moving away from murky, emotionally strong stories and dark plots. This story is about a bunch of characters doing crazy shit, where anything can happen.

So. Lot of people, specifically those in the Lagoon fandom, like Black Lagoon for the murky emotionally strong stories and dark plots. And Ragna Crimson, who seems to speak Spanish as his first language (Bullets is in both languages), is acknowledging that. Okay. Good.

But... Crimson also is 'moving away from that'. Which is an interesting challenge, because as much as the fandom likes the dark stuff in Lagoon, plenty of people who are just anime fans seem to find those parts... annoying? The parts where Revy goes ranting about how the world has no kindness and all one can do is keep on killing because otherwise you'll be killed in turn? Yeah. Those parts. I've always held that as much as they tell us a lot about the franchise's philosophy - which I don't necessarily track with all the time - they tell us more about Revy and how she's put herself in this nihilistic hole that's just as bad as Rock's own naivete, as if both characters' morality is more their own thing than it is a gospel truth. Well. Whatever. Moving on. We have to move on, because Bullets doesn't give a shit about any of that.

It is, after all, a story about a bunch of characters doing crazy shit where anything can happen.

Which... isn't that when Lagoon's at its best, anyway? Larger-than-life characters with big guns, pulpy people doing pulpy things? And that is the essence of Bullets. More than that - Bullets distills and amplifies that devil-may-care sense of things. It's action, yes, but it's also nonstop comedy of a sort.

Anyway! The plot. Rock doesn't want to stay with the Lagoon Company, so he decides to be a bartender for Bao at the Yellow Flag, despite the fact that said bar gets destroyed in almost every arc of, well, everything. This seeking peace doesn't last long, though. First we've got a redux of the Roberta arc, and then Hansel and Gretel show up... only this time around, they're working (sort of) for Balalaika, and promptly slip her grasp to fuck shit up with grenades. By chapter four, they take mercy on Rock and agree to call him 'Boss' (Gretel wants to do it more than Hansel, and in fact constantly calls Hansel the more psychotic one. A change from canon - these two bicker incessantly). Only, they've, uh, blown up most of Hotel Moscow and Chang's base already. Including Balalaika's toilet specifically. Hansel blowing up toilets because he's bored, specifically Balalaika's toilets, becomes a running gag.

From there, the fic can be split up into various arcs where Rock and the Twins work with the Lagoon Company, Hotel Moscow, and the Triads to varying degrees. In one, they break a Triad boss from a Taiwanese prison by sneaking in through the sewers and also hosing the entire place down with a minigun. In another, the Washimine-gumi comes to Roanapur and Ginji immediately decides to get in a fight with Revy at Rowan's nightclub. And so on and so forth. You might call the whole series a remix of canon, with familiar locations and characters, but unfamiliar ways everything plays out.

Okay, so it's not entirely unfamiliar. If anything, the familiar is amplified. More swearing. More stupid jokes. A few instances of leaning on the fourth wall (calling other people 'side characters', Rock calling Revy tsundere to Ginji, one Bakemonogatari reference). More weird ambiguous romantic-ish feelings between Rock and Revy. And, uh, Rock's great in this one.

I mean, holy shit, folks. He's still the boy who can plan and / or talk his way out of any situation, no matter how ridiculous. And this time, his manipulative gambits actually pay off, and all the while he becomes more and more... villainous, I guess you might say. More and more of a thrill-seeker, willing to do not-great things for fun. More and more willing to tease Revy so they can have a nice bicker. Also, he helps the Lagoon Company sink an entire cargo ship run by Koko Hekmatyar (from Jormungand, the great and terrible We Have Black Lagoon At Home) using plastic explosives. So you start to root for Rock being less wishy-washy about where he's at in life, and hoping that even when he does dumb shit he'll get away with it, the scamp. That's hard to do - get us to root for a character like that and not bemoan Rock's descent into the darkness - and yet Ragna Crimson does it!

In sum... Man. Fuck. I dunno. Read the fic. Some Black Lagoon fanfics make you think, some make you cry, some make you cringe, but few make you grin and laugh the way Bullets does. I guarantee it.

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Recommends Black Lagoon Fanfiction: Girlycards' A Chance Encounter

So this is going to be something a smidge different than my usual reviews. The fic's under 20k words, and I decided to poke at it after girlycards reblogged my last review joking that she couldn't wait to see what I said about her fic.

I was a little reluctant to do so, not gonna lie. She writes short snippets of Balalaika and Revy being cute-ish with one another, at least as cute as those characters can be with one another being who they are; I write over-the-top explode-y cyberpunk adventures. But I decided to take it as a challenge and give one fic she poked my way a go. A Chance Encounter was that fic.

And, dear reader, it's really good! So let's talk about Balalaika and Revy and why this fic works.

The setup is right there: Lost and free from prison in NYC, Revy tries to mug Balalaika, not knowing who she is. It doesn't go well, of course - this is fucking Balalaika we're talking about - but Balalaika allows her to live, allows her to follow her to her hotel room, and in time to Roanapur. And in time, Balalaika starts to care for Revy. Simple as that. I actually don't want to spoil too much.

In that regard, it's something of an origin story, even retelling the time when Chang shot Balalaika a few times and almost sparked an intersyndicate war. Rock's nowhere to be found, and who cares? This is about two lost hyperviolent women with attachment issues figuring out how to start to attach to each other.

And it works! As Goethe would say, it succeeds in what it sets out to do and it was worth doing. It's funny, too, because BalaRevy has always felt like it would be fundamentally a toxic relationship to me, and the one fic I've tried to read where that relationship is explored - It Will Come Back - never disabused me of that notion. Like, Balalaika is Balalaika. Domination and control is her drug of choice, and someone without a private army at her back, like Revy - what can she do but struggle in the Russian's grip? I'm still hashing out the details of her romance with Celia in Bubblegum Black, but her attachment to her rusalka... well, you've seen how I write it, dear reader. I hope.

So I think what works here is that as much as Balalaika starts keeping Revy by her side initially out of pity, she also sees the woman she once was, the criminal she is now, in a warped way in Two Hands. Oh, Balalaika is still pretty cold even right up until the end of the fic, but one feels like she's getting somewhere. Compare that to It Will Come Back, which I struggled a lot more with because it felt like Balalaika never showed that key moment of intimacy and it was more one-sided pining on Revy's part (couple that with the fact that the author clearly didn't like Rock that much and I really wasn't feeling the fic because, in case you can't tell dear reader, I like playing around with Rock as a character). That mutuality was what made the fic - and the ship - feel possible for me. As such, I encourage you to read it! I think you'll like it.

Now what should I review next, hmm... Last thing I want to do is review YT2032 anytime soon, heh...