i disagree. it had its moments. plenty of decent fan works, too (the "official" music is more or less fan works, FWIW; i'm really glad radiation caught on with a huge audience, and i hope he remembers me when i'm famous lol).

it did run way the fuck out of steam, though. i remember someone on the MSPAF in early 2012 made a throwaway comment that maybe 2011 was the peak and i gotta hand it to them. i watched that forum die painfully in its last two years and didn't bother to follow the "refugees" because a lot of the people i liked had lost interest by then.

maybe it coulda gone somewhere neat from there. it just didn't. and perhaps we were expecting too much of hussie's ability to make ridiculous escalations of scope with astonishing frequency after problem sleuth and acts 1-4~5ish. partly to blame is that he doubled down on long passages and time-consuming flash productions. so, the ending felt like a well earned mercy killing more than anything.

and of course, his writing was kind of painful all the way through, which mattered way less before it became a heavily dialogue-driven novel with barely tolerable characters and some of the ones i liked best "developing" into worse instead of better personalities.

it doesn't hold up well as prose, i think; all the referential stuff is becoming "so last decade", thankfully, sure, but even when it was current i enjoyed it like i enjoy "one of my japanese animes"--more for the feeling and the setting than anything. i never much cared for the crowd that'd talk about "good" it was or wasn't.

the only way i'm ever giving it a re-read is if i'm translating it into easier terms for the ESL crowd.