I've checked it out, but it being by Coeur Al Aran puts me off a bit. They're a decent writer, but I feel like College Fool has a negative impact on their writing and plot, sometimes. It can be very frustrating.

 

His writing is kinda weird in my opinion. The ideas are somewhat decent, however his characters act like a mimicry of the concept for human interaction and feel flat.

 

Whenever he is writing comedy it is straight garbage. He doesn't understand that crack destroys the reader's SoD and therefore needs to be kept short. If you have enough jokes, then a stupid premise like Jaune as a stripper can work for maybe 20k words. But he isn't as funny as he thinks he is, and no way am I going to read a 200k story whose premise is that Jaune's forged transcripts got misplaced to have him accepted as a professor.

Unfortunately, that is what the rubes who pay for fanfiction want, so that is what we get from him.

 

Yeah, just ugh on that story. It got creepy and weird fast.

This story just started awkward as hell; the most cliched inner voice of Yang I've read. Second chapter showed a bit of promise with the idea being svelte but inwardly neurotic Jaune being the main character, but I have doubts he can pull it off.

What has this author done that's worth readying btw?

 

Basically anything that isn't Professor Ark or The Entertainer is at least worth a peek.

I rec'd Not This Time Fate earlier, but I am also a fan of Forged Destinies, which is a massive AU where the whole world functions like an RPG. Despite the AU, he does a really good job keeping to the characters as they are in canon.

One Good Turn is pretty good, it struggles early but improves when they leave Beacon and fight a war with the Grimm. On the plus side it is completed.

Despite me trashing his comedies, From Beyond is okay. I check up on it every few months. Jaune falls to his death during initiation and haunts Blake, her suffering is exquisite.

I am not a fan of Stress Relief, but that may be worth checking out. The reason I dropped it was that he never made me feel remotely sympathetic towards Cinder, which was a problem since she is the main character.

 

I liked Stress Relief for the most part. I don't think Cinder was supposed to be sympathetic and it was refreshing to see an unlikable character played relatively straight in a romance.

The last two chapters made me want to claw my eyes out though. That was one of the most half-baked cop out endings I've ever seen and it left a sour taste in my mouth about the whole story.

 

Know I am repeating myself here, but for some reason, the comedy in Professor Arc does work for me, and apparently for enough other people as well. The story uses a lot of tropes that I hate, like the harem-esque shenanigans of Jaune somehow being able to attract all these women who are better at practically everything than him but for reasons I am unable to understand, it remains funny, engaging and endearing.

It has a lot of repeating jokes, but the wording is different and the author is skilled enough to never really make them feel too similar and keeps enough space between them to keep them fresh. It probably helps that I am reading it one chapter at a time with each update, rather than reading it in one go. There, I can see the jokes getting stale, via repetition.

As fun as it is, though, it is a crime that Professor Arc is the only updating RWBY story of quality atm.

 

Have you tried Arc of the Revolution? It is a similar enough kind of story.

 

The references are killing me. They just make me want to sock the author in the face and tell him that going "look at ma Metal Gear Solids!" is not good writing.

 

Jupiter

This is pretty damn good. AU, where Jaune uses two family swords on a different team. He is still incompetent as hell in the beginning, but he grows extremely quickly into a leader. Has a legitimate reason why he doesn't have any real training is a plus as well.

The author seems to be taking it into another director from canon, with the Grimm being a lot more active.

Slow burn Jaune/Weiss.

Should mention that it takes a little time before the story really takes off. So, try to read more than the first chapter.

 

I tried to read more than one chapter, but after he used a "For Oum's sake" I went into a ten minute long rage and couldn't continue. I realize how unfair this is. The author probably doesn't even know what reader immersion is, so judging the entire story based on one mistake is silly. But I can't continue. It's too stupid.

 

Yeah, i know what you mean. It usually drives me insane as well. But thankfully the author barely uses it. Unlike in Zweihandlers, where its in every paragraph.

I'm honestly wondering if i should just start downloading the stories, replace all the Oum/Monty parts with God, and then read them.

 

I don't know how any of you guys can sit through a Jaune-centric fic.

 

CleanRag Haze

I wrote a little script that replaces 'Oum', 'Monty' and 'Monty Oum' with 'God'.

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/23843-ffn-no-more-oum

e: Use it with Tampermonkey in Chrome or Greasemonkey in Firefox.

 

Can someone explain to me what is so monumentally wrong with "for Oum's sake" that you stop reading the fic?

I get that it is cheesy, repetitive, and overdone. But how is one sentence out of literally thousands in a story enough to make you stop reading? To me that just seems like an overreaction. Especially if you don't even mention a single other thing that is wrong with the story.

CleanRag went into a "ten minute long rage" about one phrase. But what about the characters, the plot, the dialogue, and the grammar? I mean, that's kind of the point of this thread isn't it?

And Download, what is Jaune-centric? TGWP, Technician, Professor Arc, An Affair or Something all have different Jaunes as their focus. So what exactly is Jaune-centric?

Do you hate Jaune in stories that give him canon traits? That is a comic relief/incompetent goofball. Or the ones that don't? In which his personality is different. Do you hate Jaune when he is shown competent? Or Jaune with a different back story? Do you hate Jaune In Name Only stories?

Saying a story is Jaune-centric tells me as little as saying it uses "for Oum's sake". I can make inferences that if a story is Jaune-centric then the author will probably tweak Jaune's character to make him an interesting protagonist. And that if a story has "for Oum's sake" a few times then it probably isn't top of the top-tier.

To me, those should not alone be any reason to stop reading the fic. But it seems that saying a specific phrase or focusing on a character that isn't actually one character is enough to make the story, for the vast majority of people, shit. Why?

Edit - I'm not talking about Jupiter. I haven't read it yet. I can't tell if it's shit or not. I can tell you it probably isn't shit for being Jaune-centric and having "for Oum's sake."

 

He doesn't like Jaune-centric because it isn't his yuri pairings and they're usually very poorly done. As for the Oum thing, it's annoying as all hell and breaks immersion.

 

Better yuri than the usual Jaune/harem shite you see on FF.net.

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In all seriousness Jaune is annoying as fuck. You have to make him incredibly OOC to make him tolerable.

 

Monty Oum isn't an established deity in RWBY (compare: The Emperor in WH40K or Elune in Warcraft) and swearing on his name feels wrong and reads badly.

 

Debatable, but I can see where you're coming from. With how often writers play up Yang's puns, I have trouble reading about her too.

 

A character isn't bad because they're often handled badly in fanfics. Having Yang overdo the puns, Ruby eat NOTHING but cookies or having Weiss call every single person and thing dolt are all the mark of a really shitty author.

As for Jaune. He should always start out as an incompetent fighter but with leadership qualities and quite a lot of balls. I mean, seriously. Without any particular skills, he voluntarily puts himself up against literal demons because he thinks that's the right thing to do. Because it's a fight worth fighting.

If that isn't protagonist material, I don't know what is. Problem is, it has to be fucking earned and almost none of the crap authors (or even the pretty decent ones) seem to have the patience to do that.

Mostly, I find all of the core characters in team RWBY more interesting and compelling, shipping or no shipping.