i read this like last year, all the way through the first part? arc? whatever they call it in this one.

and man do i really wanted to like it... i truly do, my SO sings praises about this manga and urged me to read it for months and i finally decided to sit my ass down and give it a try... look at my rating, you know where this is going.

this is a character-based story with characters that are utterly, absolutely, decidedly unlikable. there's not a single character in this manga that i even remotely tolerate, except MAYBE aki, on a good day. if you mouth to yourself "but that's the point", yes i'm aware, i get it, doesn't mean it's enjoyable for me to read 90 something chapters about characters that makes me pop a vein every time they show up.

what a damn shame too, the art is PHENOMENAL. i would be lying if i say i hated it, because it's just that good. but this, this ain't it chief.

the only thing i feel bad for for not liking this is that my SO seemed sad that i didn't enjoy their recommendation. and oh how i wish i did.

i used to be an avid reader of the scp foundation, and only stopped because one of the writers on the site has been outed as a massive egotistic creep (if you're curious, this is a good place to start).

i've known about the original version of this story for a long time, just never gotten around to read the original published version. then, color me surprised, i found out that the author's got an opportunity to trad pub his work, and the fact that it was already out! so i took it as a chance for me to revisit the (strand of) universe qntm has crafted.

in my opinion, this is THE definitive edition of the antimemetics saga. compared to the original (which is still up and you can read it right now), this version obviously has the serial numbers filed off, as the scp foundation, copyrights and monetization has had a complicated relationship. but outside of name changes, the prose has been through a professional editor, and it shows! certain scenes are expanded, focusing on motives and characterizaitons to really flesh the core characters out. very notably a lot of sentences are rewritten to be less... internet forum speak. i don't know how else to put it.

the synopsis is mildly vague. so the basic premise is that there are memes which are ideas that can be instilled, forcefully or otherwise. antimeme is the literal opposite of that, in which ideas are stripped away into functionally non-existence, because it can no longer be perceived, even if it does still exist. there exists an organization that is in the know of all things supernatural and extraordinary, and their MO is to contain them in order to keep watch so the rest of us regular folks get to live our regular lives.

this does mean that this is a sci-fi work that involves very speculative concepts and from what i've seen, that's a no for a lot of people. and while i'm very familiar with scp foundation's style, i'm actually unsure if this story would work for other people. but if the above and the synopsis does sound interesting i implore you give this a try by reading the original online serial and getting a 'feel' of the plot, before getting the ebook.

i'm not gonna lie reading this got me down a scp reading rabbit hole again and it was honestly nostalgic. other than the fact that we're in the 9000's now (i quit around 4000's contest...), a lot of it reminds me of a time of internet and human creativity, that on hindsight with the Current Ongoings, it was nice, refreshing and left me with a fuzzy feeling.

positively 4.5/5, there's a lot of stories on the scp foundation that are no less good than this! if you've read this and wanted more, you know exactly where to go to get more.

bonus: during my scp dive, i found some newer articles that are beautifully written stories and i want to share here.

scp-8557 - again, narcissus? tw: self-harm. the image can be gnarly but it's a short and straight forward read. scp-3930 does not exist tw: gender dysphoria. not to be confused with the actual scp-3930. this is about someone that works as a guard for the scp itself.

dnf @ 22%

i think this is my first dnf of the year? congrats to this book for that honor! pretty good run, however i genuinely can't bring myself to read any more of this.

not sure what the author is cooking in their acknowledgements, because they talked as if they wrote something cathartic but this is just a published fanfic, or at the very least, being incredibly generous, heavily inspired by another existing, massively popular media.

everything checks out, and i regret to inform that, despite my vigilance in the past ~3 years, even the greatest warrior must fall. i read a fucking baldur's gate 3 fanfic. you know, 439k steam reviews and counting, 46k players right now as i'm typing this, game of the year for 2023, bazillion awards - that game?

initially, i thought this was an astarion fic, which in itself is groan worthy enough, but by the time i decided to dnf i almost wished that was the case. no, this is a fucking dark urge fic. for those of you without context, astarion is a Hot Vampire with Sad Story, which has been written to death and will continue to be until the heat death of the universe. the dark urge, however, is something more specific. i will elaborate.

i'm pretty confident in my claim, and i could tell this was a bg3 fic because of, in no particular order:

→ pet names like 'little love', which was used for a total of 60 times throughout this 200 page story. this immediately tickled the neurons in my brain and why i initially suspected this to be an astarion fic. → aurelion is described to be amnesiac, with no memories of where or how he got all the wounds, scars, and gore of others on himself. → the sypnosis said, and i quote, "as one of many devilspawns" calling something a spawn isn't exactly a dead giveaway in fantastical stories with demons, but devilspawn? as in bhaalspawn? which leads me into... → aurelion having a deity-like being as his father. using lucifer as a stand-in figure for bhaal is diabolical in a way that i can't even begin to describe. → aurelion describing his murders as his 'art'. also not a giveaway on its own, but combined with everything else is very telling. → minor thing the paragraph of aurelion going off about the clauses in his contract. beat by beat how mizora describes her pact with wyll. you ain't slick. → the first real sex scenes between aurelion and celio. the way it's set up to be gory, edgy and depraved, and yet still somehow comes off as vanilla and not freaky enough considering the premise? dark urge fics are littered with this. you read one of them, you've read all of them. → this also applies to fanfics of other fandoms, but overusing describtors instead of just using the name of the characters. what i mean is examples like, 'the second son of the saint-orlant family', 'the shorter man', 'the priest', on and on, once you start seeing it you will never stop seeing it. idk why fic writers are very against just simply writing names to denote who the speaker is or who the paragraph is describing. → the quality of the writing itself. the author forgets that they have already described something as being in the scene, and proceeds to describe it again in the same way two or three pages later. calling it 'the church of sanctuary' every single time it gets brought up, despite the fact that there hasn't been any mentions of other churches so far, so 'the church' would've served the purpose of describing this particular church. → the fucking dialogue oh my god. the 'banter' between aurelion and celio is so painfully familiar to me. here, have an example:

"Needy, (...) Have I been letting you starve?" "(...) You've been abusing me, Little Love—I'm starving. I need you, I want you. All of you." "Then have me."

you might not think much of this but this kind of 'sexy' talk is abundant in both astarion and dark urge fics. again it's trying to be sexy but genuinely just not freaky enough to be. to be blunt for a moment, it reads like someone who's only experience with 'freaky' media is baldur's gate 3 (which isn't even that freaky!), not even the rest of the forgotten realms, and who has only read other bg3 fics so this is all they know how to write.

i would know. i wrote those fics too. i said the writing is familiar, because this is how i used to write. i pledge it takes one to know one, and my own writing has only deviated and improved once i left the fandom behind to write other kinds of stuff. i have no intentions of selling my writing ever, but this book is a published work, and unfortunately that means i retain my right to scrutinize it, as opposed to if i randomly stumble across this on ao3 instead.

(also, i'm not seeing why this story has to be set in a victorian era france. aurelion comparing his art to that of mozart's made me cackle out loud. i would've judged this less harshly if this was a completely fantasy world.)

giving this 1.5 stars, because i don't completely hate this, i only feel sad because i spent 100k words amount of time writing for the bg3 fandom lmao. i'm glad i don't go there anymore.