#bavitz

[weaselandfriends]

Guess what? My eighth book, LEAVE LUCK TO HEAVEN, is coming soon! It will begin on August 17, 2026, with an initial release of the first 20,000 words to be followed by twice-weekly chapters after that.

This epic fantasy adventure will be long, longer most likely than any of my previous works. It will also be my first truly serial story since 2023.

What's it about? What can you expect? Read more to find out!

Hague is a niche but successful streamer and speedrunner best known for his many world records and ridiculous challenge runs across the Fire Emblem franchise. He's good and he knows it, calling himself "The Best in the World" to anyone and everyone, especially his 1,000 or so average viewers. But one day, after a particularly outrageous boast on stream—"If God exists, I guarantee I'd beat them at Fire Emblem"—God takes him up on his offer.

In a flash, Hague finds himself transported to the domain of Sophia, the cruel, capricious, and dangerously bored Goddess of Knowledge. She likes nothing better than to cut arrogant humans down to size for her entertainment, and Hague is her latest victim. She challenges him to a "game" with her, "unlike anything you've ever experienced," with no less than his life on the line as punishment for losing. Hague is undaunted. Or rather, he knows he has no way out except to do what he does best—win.

Sophia casts Hague down to the fantasy world of Perrania, a political powder keg where nations teeter on the brink of total war. The appearance of Hague, a "Summoned Hero" from another world, is exactly the spark needed to start the explosion, with every major player in the world vying either to take Hague's head or force him under their control. To survive, Hague has to navigate the turmoil, recruit underdog allies, train a ragtag army, and lead them to tactical victory against vastly superior forces. Easy right? All stuff he's done before in Fire Emblem, but now it's real, with Sophia subtly manipulating his enemies against him in a massive chess match of heroes, villains, and everything in between.

A chess match both figurative and literal. In this world, battles take the form of turn-based combat where soldiers move across a gridded gameboard. It really is Fire Emblem, and Hague knows that if anyone can beat this rigged game, it's him. The only question is, will all his speedrun tech and game knowledge be enough to win against a literal goddess?

For fans of my earlier story When I Win the World Ends, I'm bringing the same ethos toward game-mechanics-as-narrative to Leave Luck to Heaven. I see this story as the next step after When I Win, applying its ideas and concepts at a much grander and more ambitious scale. Also like When I Win, no knowledge of Fire Emblem is necessary to understand and enjoy Leave Luck to Heaven—I've taken especial care to make sure the story is legible even to a completely layman audience.

Major influences on this story include Ender's Game (the master player pushing the game to its limit and being pushed to his limit in turn), Umineko When They Cry (the epic metaphysical chess match against a cackling she-witch with humans as pieces), and Worth the Candle (the interpersonal aspect of games and the implications of a world built around them). For the past year, I've been designing the world of Perrania with great help from Lurina, author of The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, to ensure a deep, complex, and fully-fleshed out setting tightly interwoven with the story's themes, narrative concepts, and structure.

The result is something I'm extremely excited to share with you and that I think has the potential to be truly special. Look forward to August 17!

[gazemaizeisdead]

Fargo DX has begun!

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of its final chapter, great writer @weaselandfriends (Bavitz, author of Modern Cannibals, 1/X, Cockatiel x Chameleon) just started republishing a remastered version of his classic Madoka Magica fanfic Fargo as Fargo DX on AO3/Royalroad. If you've seen Madoka Magica and never read Fargo before, I strongly recommend it; I'm not even a particularly big fan of Madoka as a property and I love this story to bits, and though I've yet to reread the rewrite myself, based on everything he's told and shown me about it I fully expect that it'll be even better than the original.

Fargo was Bavitz's first story published under that name, and has done tremendously well for itself in the time since, especially given that it was posted more than a few years after the Madoka fandom had begun to wither away. (It carries the honorary distinction of having a tiny amount of recursive fanfiction about it, or at least fic written by someone who really hated the main character a lot and included them in a story they wrote to shit on them.)

Fargo's is one of the best revenge stories I have ever read, and until this rewriting of the story, it's only had one big issue that would prevent me from recommending it more strongly than I already do: some of the fight scenes — especially those in the first of three arcs — went on for way too long. Coming back to this after another six (excellent, long, complete) novels, Bavitz told me he's changed almost none of the central narrative while tightening up the language and cutting up a lot of prosaic fluff, which is exactly what a lot of the story needed. According to him, he's cut out 50,000 words from the original 336,000, about ~15% of the original story! (Even as a much more novice writer, I can tell you that this is type of stuff is both the hardest and probably most important part of editing in general. They say kill your darlings and people think it refers to characters or scenes or plotlines, and it does, but often it more is talking about this, which can be just as if not more painful to work through:

He's also changed some extremely minor plot errors (there's an infamous scene where a character boils water incorrectly he fixates on a lot when talking about Fargo, which I find really funny), but it's mostly just tightening up an already awesome story.

Seriously, read it! Even if you were part of the wave that read it back in 2015 - 2016, it's worth a reread, especially now that the kinks of it being his earliest published work have been ironed out. I linked it twice in the same post! I wouldn't do that if I didn't love it.

Note 1: On Royalroad, to maximize metrics, Bavitz has made the excellent decision to rename the story Magical Girl Machine Gun (three times!) which I adore. He mentioned the idea of doing this to me awhile ago, and I initially thought he was kidding, so it was a pleasant surprise to find out that he’d actually gone through with it, the madman. I think I’d like to see more webfic/fanfic authors do this type of thing generally, have alternate titles for their stories for different websites (the same way that tradpub authors and people in other mainstream mediums will have different titles for different countries. Curious if anybody knows any other examples of this specifically in the online sphere, I can’t think of anything.

Note 2: It’s lame as hell when authors shill other author’s stories just because they hang out or are friends, this is not one of those cases, and I can say that confidently because I loved this story before I ever spoke to Bavitz and have reread it twice since my first time.

Note 3: The sequel to Fargo, Chicago, kicks even more ass, and is the prize you get for finishing it. (Bavitz says that you don't have to read Fargo to read it, and some people have done that actually, though I think this is a case where you do get a lot more out of it having finished the first book.) When I shill Chicago, I describe it as the Great American Fanfiction, and I really don't think I'm overselling it with that promise. I will add that your liking Chicago is moderately contingent on you finding political stories interesting and enjoying moderately confusing but excellent battle scenes, both of which I do very much. Chicago will never receive a rewrite, says Bavitz, as it does not need one; I couldn't agree more.

Note 4: With this rerelease, Bavitz joins a tiny fraction of webwriters who actually did go back and... edit an old fanfic they finished...

I hope to join this powerful club, one day...

[where-your-eyes-dont-go]

1 Over X is a story that invites you to view it with several different lenses of analysis. It's also a story that makes sure no matter how you're analyzing it you'll sound like Eridan Obama copypasta. No way to avoid saying shit like "After confronting Ryan (the reactionary longing for an imagined golden past) and shutting out Miranda (the explanatory projects of modernity),"

[alexanderwales]

I had the idea to do a "Letterboxd versus" where you feed a program two Letterboxd usernames, then it spits back some basic analytics about whatever movies those two users have both given a rating for. Who's harsher? What movie is most divisive between those two people? What's a movie I hate and you love, and the opposite? How large is the zone of agreement? What does the zone of agreement look like?

This seemed like a perfect project to vibe code, since it could just be a python script that wasn't hosted anywhere, all you need is to scrape the data and then present whatever is interesting about comparing these two things.

And immediately I ran into problems, because Letterboxd is protected by Cloudflare, and does not like people poking at their data, and when Claude runs into failures, he just ... guesses wildly? Writes a scraper without being able to see the page in question?? Does not inform the user of this??

Anyway, this was pretty frustrating, and any idea I had of doing this at scale was completely abandoned, mostly due to Cloudflare (plus it's arguably not nice to scrape someone who doesn't want to be scraped, though in this case it was my data and that of one other user for testing purposes). The final solution Claude came up with to bypass Cloudflare is to open up a visible Chromium window, since headless wasn't working. It's ugly as hell, though I've hand-written some ugly scrapers in my time. The program has been run only once, with my 2026 movies and those of @weaselandfriends. It probably won't be run again, mostly so I don't get in hot water with Letterboxd. They do have an API, but it's very closed, requiring an email, and this sort of project is explicitly something they would decline at this time (part of a long laundry list). But here are the results, if you're curious:

⚔ LETTERBOXD VERSUS ⚔

alexanderwales vs La_Belette

📊 Overview

Films rated by alexanderwales: 161 Films rated by La_Belette: 1,492 Films in common: 20

🎯 Agreement

Exact same rating: 4 (20%) Within half a star: 8 (40%) Average difference: 1.10 ★ Pearson correlation: 0.35

alexanderwales averages 3.55 ★ on shared films vs La_Belette's 3.00 ★ — alexanderwales is the more generous rater.

🥊 Biggest Disagreements

(ed: my ratings first)

Megalopolis (2024) — ½ vs ★★★½ (gap: 3.0)

The Last Stop in Yuma County — ★★★★★ vs ★★ (gap: 3.0)

Jennifer's Body (2009) — ★★★★½ vs ★★ (gap: 2.5)

One Battle After Another — ★★★★★ vs ★★½ (gap: 2.5)

Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc — ★★★★★ vs ★★★½ (gap: 1.5)

Good Time (2017) — ★★★★★ vs ★★★½ (gap: 1.5)

🤝 Perfect Agreements

★★★★½ Perfect Blue (1997)

★★★ Mank (2020)

★★½ Smile (2022)

★½ The Loft (2014)

[escherflesh]

The Limit Of All Human Knowledge

[winterorbisthedevil]

Part 1, due to the Tumblr image limit. The bibliography is in part 2, available on the blog. Correction: There are 2.5 sexist comments in the story, rather than 1.5. The other is Domino referring to fake suicide attempts as "'girl try to kill herself'" (c14).

[eikopilled]

you should read 1 Over X if you like horror/really strong prose/strong themes/general high quality writing. bavitz is an author who's almost never gone wrong for me and this is a straight banger already---get on the train while its still going

it's about X the everything app, and also about schizophrenia, and about horror (the genre), and about horror (the feeling), and about alchemy, and pumpkins

it's one of the most claustrophobic things i can remember reading and the character dynamics are as strong as theyve ever been in a work by bavitz.

bavitz loves to create mirrors and foils, characters with an absurd amount of parallels to each other, positioning everything in these thin rickety structures and then tapping at their bases until they all fall down and blend together; he likes to look at you as an author and ask you to think about the work. rare is the didactic bavitz work

1 Over X works this theme of mirrors parallels symmetries into the work itself; 1 Over X is about 1 Over X (the book inside the book) but it is also about 1 Over X by Bavitz himself. ive had genuine moments where ive questioned what is actually part of the work, on what level its reality is 'real;' the mixing of reality and fantasy common to Bavitz's pieces takes on a different and altogether more horrific hue in this light as you suddenly become never quite sure what is actually real, what is happening; it is about itself in such a very interesting way and i think everyone who's a fan of good stuff in general should take a look (at it or at the rest of his catalogue)

[lesbianboyfriend]

"What if," she says morosely, "there's nobody? There's nothing. You're yourself and everyone is everyone else. This impermeable wall between you. Oh, God. Nobody understands. Nobody ever will. We're shouting into the dark. There's no such thing as love. It's delusion. Am I the only one who gets it? Love! It makes me sick. Happy people only make me sicker. Ignoring reality. Projecting themselves onto this other person to tell themselves they're the one. Soul mates. Unnggckh! Only stupid people believe that. Stupid people have simple souls. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I hate this stupid world. I hate myself. I hate myself for having a soul nobody else will ever have. I hate being alone. Why can't everything be simple? There are just so many things. So many parts and pieces. The sum of all human knowledge in a single stupid"—she holds up her phone—"library. And it hurts to even try. That's the worst part. It hurts to even try to make enough sense of it so you can find someone else who makes the same sense of it as you. Nobody understands me. I don't understand anyone. And it keeps getting worse. Oh, God. It gets worse and worse."

1 Over X, Bavitz