Literary Demerit

Chapters 4-6 of Forbiden Fruit: The Tempation of Edward Cullen. This week we go to the beach, attend a high school talent show, and learn about why Ewdard is promised to Bella (it's because he made a promise). In our closing segment we discuss the first season of the My Immortal webseries.

Content warnings: there are more references to sexual assault this week (as stated before, it’s not something we can avoid talking about with this story), though nothing as explicit as the previous episode. There's also a brief mention of self-harm.

Chapters 43-44 of My Immortal.  We’ve reached the end of the story! This fanfic has a rather abrupt conclusion, so we spend some time discussing what that might mean. For our closing segment, we take a look at some decade-old reviews of this story to get a sense of what the critical reception was around the time the fic was written.

Content warnings: self-harm is mentioned once again, we talk about the rape scene from an earlier chapter, and there’s an instance of homophobic language.

Chapters 40-42 of My Immortal. As we close in on the end of the story, the chapters are getting longer and we’ve got more to talk about — plus, we had to take a quick aside to cover our favorite AITA post of all time. This week we’re again jumping backwards and forwards in time as things appear to be building towards a climax. We also get to meet Voldemort’s ex-boyfriend, who might not be who you expect! In our closing segment, we take a look at an article from 2015 that speculates on My Immortal’s authorship and provides some context about the cultural phenomenon surrounding this fanfic (we have some Thoughts about this article and they aren’t exactly positive). 

Content warnings: as always, self-harm is mentioned, and there’s also some discussion of rape (talking about the attempted rape of a character in a previous chapter) and pedophilia (talking about Ao3). There’s also an instance of ableist language in the article we read for the closing segment.

Chapters 34-39 of My Immortal. We investigate the mystery of Lucius Malfoy’s missing arm, watch a movie that definitely isn’t The Exorcist, and attend yet another concert (Marilyn Manson), before taking a closer look at the “troll chapter” of this story in which Tara’s account was allegedly hacked by another user.

Content warnings: self-harm gets mentioned yet again, and there’s a bit where we discuss Ebony and Satan trying to give each other magic roofies.

Chapters 26-33 of My Immortal. We’re getting into the Real Plot of this fanfic, in which Ebony travels back in time to seduce Voldemort to prevent him from becoming evil. This week we sexily jump into the Pensieve to meet Voldemort back when he was a sexy goth boy, learn about the addictive properties of truth serum, and (as usual) listen to some My Chemical Romance. In our final segment, we hunt down quizzes similar to Tara’s “are you a goff or a prep” quiz that has sadly been lost to time.


Content warnings: self-harm per usual, a scene in which an adult threatens to rape a teenage character, and some references to (fantasy) drug/alcohol addiction.

Chapters 18-25 of My Immortal. This week we learn about the proper way to smoke heroin, meet several new characters including “da coolest fucking teacher ever,” and attend yet another MCR show. We’re getting close to the point where the actual plot of this fanfic kicks in (yes, it has a plot). In the closing segment, we finish our deep dive into Raven’s fics, including one she co-wrote with Tara.

Content warnings: self-harm again (as per usual with this story), a couple brief mentions of rape, and some ableist & homophobic language.

Chapters 12-17 of My Immortal. We learn about what really happened to Draco, attend an MCR show with an unexpected twist, and investigate the saga of Tara and Raven’s fight. Viower excretion advisd! Finally, we take a look at the first few chapters of one of Raven’s fanfics, I’m Not Okay.

Content warnings: more self-harm mentions as well as a very brief mention of rape and another brief mention of necrophilia.

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.