User blog:MrTyeDye/Fanfiction Review: Singled Out (collab w/ EpsilonMk46)

An explanation of the rubric and grading scale can be found here.

Also, I should point out once again that my review will contain spoilers for the story, so if you've been meaning to read it, do it now before looking at this. Here's a link.

And finally, I decided to enlist a little bit of help for this one. This review was a collaboration with fellow wiki user EpsilonMk46, the self-proclaimed lone rebel who stands against popular opinion!

Now that that's out of the way, let's dig into Singled Out!

Singled Out by Lentex
 Official Synopsis: "When Lincoln messes up big time, he angers his siblings more than ever before. In retaliation, the Loud sisters launch an all out war against him. Their goal is to make his life as miserable as possible until they believe he learns his lesson. In response, Lincoln fights back, finding himself locked in a 10 versus 1 conflict. Can the white haired boy even hope to emerge victorious?"

(After the final chapter was published, the summary was changed to: "A satire on Lola hate and Lincoln torture.")

 Full Synopsis:  The Loud siblings decide to make their parents a model house for their anniversary. The night before, Lincoln decides it needs a little extra something, so he goes down to the basement to put some lights around it. In the process, however, he accidentally drops it and breaks it. His sisters, are, understandably, quite angry with Lincoln for breaking something they spent two and a half months building. But instead of just chewing him out, his sisters decide to declare "war" on Lincoln - which, in this context, means continually tormenting him until he "learns his lesson". Lola, as the one who brought up the idea, appoints herself the leader of the war.

The torment begins with Luna blasting her stereos outside Lincoln's door, and propping them up against said door so he can't get out. He ends up having to use the window escape to get to school, and upon landing Lola splashes him with mud. Due to all the morning shenanigans, Lincoln forgets his backpack, and as a result, he fails his open-note history test (since all his notes were at home). When his parents corner him about his failure, his sisters bully him into taking full responsibility.

But Lincoln, despite being hopelessly outnumbered, decides he's not going to go down without a fight. He hatches a plan with Clyde that involves hiding angry skunks around the house and forcing the sisters into Lisa's bomb shelter. His plan goes sour, however, when Clyde double crosses him and clocks him over the head, knocking him out. As we find out later, Lola had convinced him to betray Lincoln by promising that she'd give him a chance to date Lori.

As the days go by, some of the sisters start having second thoughts about the war. Luna ends up abandoning the war effort and joining Lincoln's side. In a desperate bid to keep the war going, Lola rigs one of Albert's ramps before one of his driving stunts, causing him to crash and critically injure himself. She then blames Lincoln for the accident, arguing that Albert wouldn't have taken such a risk if not for Lincoln's actions in "The Old and the Restless", and the sisters (sans Luna) all agree with her and decide that Lincoln needs to suffer more. They corner him and prepare to lock him in a cage with one of the skunks from Lincoln's prank, but Lynn steps in at the last moment and holds the other sisters off long enough for Lincoln to escape.

Lincoln and Luna meet outside the house and try to devise a way to save Lynn (with the help of Ronnie Anne). The plan plays out as follows: Luna comes back to the house, lying that Lincoln had made her mad and that she wanted to rejoin the war effort. Meanwhile, Lincoln stows himself away inside a cardboard box that Luna brings into the house, and sneaks out of it and makes a break for Lynn's room. All the while, Ronnie Anne waits right outside, ready to hold back any sister who tries to chase after them.

In the house, they're caught by Lucy, who claims to be defecting to their side and helps them escape through the vents. This turns out to be a trick, however, as the vents lead them right to Lola. Just as all hope seems lost, however, the parents knock on the door. Lola then thinks to pin the whole wrap on her enemies, but Lynn, with her superior speed and strength, gets to them before Lola and says to them a basic synopsis of what had happened with tears spilling from her eyes.

The parents chew out the entire family for what they did, and decide that they're all going to go on a camping trip so they can learn to get along. Soon afterwards, we see that Bobby and Lori are in a bit of a fight. Bobby suggests that maybe Lori was being too nasty to Lincoln, and in response Lori flies into a rage and breaks up with him on the spot.

In the following chapter, it's revealed that Lola convinced Lori to break up with Bobby, assumedly because he and the Santiagos would be a threat to the war effort. Not only that, but she went the extra mile to make sure that Lori and Bobby never get back together. How? By maliciously filing a false report to the ICE and getting the Santiagos deported to Mexico.

Back at the camp, Lincoln eventually convinces Luan to join their group after he learns that the only reason she was in the war in the first place was because she wanted to get back at him for barely ever laughing at her jokes. Once Lincoln and Luan make their way back to the campsite, they stage an act where they are somehow even more mad at each other than before, much to Lola’s concern, as she wanted them to make up and become closer together. Right after this, they, along with Luna and Lynn, meet up to discuss their next move while Lola and Lisa eavesdrop on them.

Later, Leni asks Lori why she hasn't been texting Bobby. Lori gets overly defensive and insists that she's just teaching him a lesson for being "too controlling". Just to prove it, she tries to call him; but to her horror, he doesn't pick up. In a fit of insecurity, Lori hijacks Vanzilla later that night and sets a course for the Santiagos' house, unaware that they've been deported.

Speaking of Bobby, he and his family are later seen traversing the desert lands of Mexico, headed to the one place they could seek for refuge: the house of Mr. Santiago, Bobby and Ronnie Anne’s father. There, they are brought in and settled in his not-so-humble abode, a mansion tended to by countless servants. But just as things are looking up for Bobby and Ronnie Anne, Mrs. Santiago pulls them aside and tells them that her estranged husband is secretly an evil scientist, and that his servants are "drones" who were brainwashed into being his slaves.

Back at the camp, Lincoln uses a bomb filled with glue to use as a surprise attack towards Lola. However, Lola pulls out an umbrella, uses it to shield herself from the bomb, and taunts Lincoln for being so simple minded into thinking that a simple trick like that would work against her. But in the middle of her gloating, she feels a violent shock course through her body as she sees Lincoln shock her through her umbrella with a dangerously high voltage joy buzzer. His cohorts then berate him for his actions as they had not been informed about how Lincoln planned to electrocute Lola. Lincoln tries to defend himself by saying that he knew that Lola had been eavesdropping on them and that he needed to keep a secret from them so Lola wouldn’t see the second attack coming, but the trio (more specifically Luna and Luan with Lynn showing a tad bit of concern for Lincoln) don't want to hear him out and subsequently head off to think about what he did.

Fortunately, however, Lincoln makes up with the team and they are later joined by Leni and Lana, who want to end the war out of the disdain for all that had happened throughout the course of the conflict. As such, Lincoln takes command of his forces, and he is dubbed the king of Team Resistance, a group whose sole goal is to put an end to the fighting once and for all.

The next day, Lola meets with Lucy once again to reprimand her for her betrayal and to blackmail her into cooperating, using Lucy’s little “obsession” as a means of keeping her under Lola’s thumb. Meanwhile, Lori is reported missing and the parents walked to the nearest police station in order to find her. Later, Lincoln gets a call from Lori herself, saying that she was in Michigan and that she only wanted to make things up with Bobby. She then implores Lincoln to keep it a secret from the rest of the family and she says that if he doesn’t, she’ll tell everyone that he told her to go back home and grab his comic books, thereby making his family extremely mad at him. On the drive back to the camp, she gets attacked by a ragged-looking man, who turns out to be Hugh, Lincoln's old tutor.

That night, Lola and Lisa are meeting at the docks where they discuss about the moral repercussions about their actions. Lola admits that she doesn’t feel a single ounce of guilt and Lisa says that she might be a sociopath. After that sudden reveal, Lola meets with Lincoln to discuss terms of surrender. But things take a different direction in the meeting and Lincoln reveals that Lisa told him about Lola’s condition and she subsequently breaks down and asks if she’s going to be cured. Lincoln then comforts her and Lola simply smiles at the thought of getting treatment for her illness.

The next morning, Lola wakes everyone up, turns on a projector, and shows her siblings that both of their parents are being held hostage at the police station. With Lisa at her side, Lola demands all of her other siblings to line up and get injected with microchips that will force them to obey her every word - the same microchips, we learn, that were used to create Mr. Santiago's drones. If they refuse, Lola will order the policemen - now under her control because of those microchips - to kill Rita and Lynn Sr. Faced with an impossible choice, Lincoln reluctantly agrees to being injected as Lisa walks up and plunges a needle full of the chips into him. But just before the process is completed, Lucy springs in through the vents and drags him with her to safety.

Predictably, Lola is very mad as she then orders Lisa to implant the rest of the siblings starting with Lynn. But just before they even get the chance, Lori breaks down the door, having been driven back by Hugh, and is horrified at the scene before her. She then grabs Lola by the neck as she makes her tell her everything that had happened. Lola then maniacally tells her every detail of her plot and a bunch of metallic hands come out of nowhere and restrain Lori into place. As she tells Lori, the plot began when she put one of the microchips into Hugh's drink during the events of "Study Muffin", and then sent him off to Mexico to infect Mr. Santiago. She then implanted the chips into ICE agents and had them send Bobby and his family into the waiting hands of the now-chip controlled Mr. Santiago, just to get Bobby out of the picture and keep Lori in the war.

Just as all hope seems lost, Lincoln and Lucy burst into the scene as Lucy swats the needle full of chips out of Lisa’s hands, and Lincoln savagely bangs Lola’s forehead straight into the floor numerous times.

Then, Lola literally takes off her face, revealing herself to be Satan all along! Lucy then opens a large book, shouts out an incantation, and Satan is banished to the underworld forever. Thus, Lola Loud is no more, and Lincoln must work to repair all of the damage that she’d done.

So that's the story in a nutshell. Let's break it down!

Story: 

MTD: First, let me make one thing explicitly clear; I didn't make up a single thing in that plot synopsis. I don't think I could have if I tried.

But before I can really get into how ineptly written this plot is, there's something I have to address. Lentex tried to retroactively claim that his story was a "satire" of Lola- centered hatefics. Here's the problem: it's clearly not. Before the twist ending, there are several scenes that attempt to paint Lola in a sympathetic light, like the scene where she confides in Lincoln about her sociopathy. The first few chapters also include scenes of a younger Lola bonding with Lincoln, and Chapter 8 starts with Lola suffering from a guilt-induced nightmare about almost getting Albert killed. If Lentex was trying to satirize hatefics, there'd be no reason to include scenes like that.

And that's the biggest problem with this story; Lentex just can't decide what he wants it to be. It starts out as a contained, grounded family drama, only to suddenly take a left turn into science fiction with the ridiculous Santiago subplot, before finally concluding with a scene straight out of Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny. Even before the twist ending, the story takes so many bizarre, out-of-nowhere turns you'd think that Vince Russo was ghostwriting it.

EM46: From the beginning, I knew that I wasn’t a subjective fan of stories that involved Lincoln being singled out (excuse the pun) by his sisters and him being subsequently tormented in a manner that makes the show’s treatment of him pale in comparison. However, with Singled Out, it didn’t seem like it was going to be that needlessly cruel of a story, because it actually made a good decision in having Lincoln stand his ground and fight back instead of just whimpering helplessly in a corner praying to God that his evil sisters from Hell would finally grant him mercy. As such, I was willing to set aside my petty grudge for stories of the genre and actually give it a try.

But then it got completely insane in its making, and then I began to hate it on an objective level. The reason for this? It’s simply because it is a giant cacophony of subplots, rushed exposition, butchered characters, and all around madness created by an unplanned plotline. Honestly, I actually feel bad for this story, because it really did seem like a good idea on paper if it had been executed properly.

MTD: Oh, yeah, speaking of subplots, there's something we left out of the synopsis. Throughout the story, Lincoln has a recurring dream about growing up to be a millionaire comic book writer, and his family chewing him out for growing apart from them and hardly ever calling them. We left it out because it has no bearing on the plot whatsoever. The dreams don't influence Lincoln's actions in any way, and the theme of putting fame and money before family has nothing to do with the story's conflict.

EM46: The best way I can describe the subplots of this story is that I believe that Singled Out is 3 different stories spliced together as one. But you know what? On its own, the flash forward into Lincoln’s future was actually a pretty good standalone story. However, as a part of the coherent plot, it simply was just distracting because it kept playing on in the parts I actually wanted to read in favor of something I never even came for in the first place. But what makes this even stranger is that in the author’s notes, Lentex seemed to be hinting at the idea that they would lead somewhere grand when in reality, they lead virtually nowhere; they could’ve just been edited out entirely and the main story wouldn’t have suffered in the slightest.

That being said, I don’t think cutting that subplot out would’ve necessarily helped the story either, as there was an absolute myriad of bad characterizations and all around screwed up plot points that sent the entire story plummeting down in terms of quality. The first example of this is, undoubtedly, the fact that Lentex had Lola rig Albert’s stunt which ended up in him getting hospitalized. I...I had to reread the chapter numerous times to see if I’d missed something because there was no way that that seemed possible. Lola going completely sadistic and sacrificing Albert’s safety just to make Lincoln suffer even more? Do I even need to describe how out of character that is??? ….Wait...wait. I’ll restrain myself on that for now until we get to Adherence to Canon. Back to you, Tye.

MTD: Thanks, Eps. Granted, the reveal at the end does sort of explain why Lola would resort to such sadism. Unfortunately, it also raises a plethora of other questions, including:

- Why would Satan want to take the form of some random six-year-old girl in the suburbs?

- If Lola could blackmail Lucy with the knowledge that she was a witch, couldn’t Lucy just as easily blackmail Lola with the knowledge that she’s the devil? Actually, if Lucy knew how to vanquish Lola, why didn’t she do it earlier?

- If the microchip plan was set in motion just to keep Lori in the war, how could Lola have set it into action during the events of “Study Muffin”, long before the war even started?

- If the microchip can be implanted in someone just by slipping it in their drink, why couldn't Lola do the same thing to all her siblings? What was the point of forcing them to line up and get injected?

- How did Lola “force” Lisa to obey her? And if her satanic powers are that great, what was the point of using the microchips?

- What did Lola/Satan have to gain from tormenting Lincoln? Doesn't the Prince of Darkness have better things to do than make some random eleven-year-old miserable?

- Was Lola an ordinary girl who was taken over by Satan, or did Rita somehow give birth to a normal girl (Lana) and Satan at the same time?

And keep in mind, so far we've just covered the really big problems. If you follow the story closely, you'll see several other, subtler instances of sloppy writing and plotting. For example, it's implied (and later shown) that Ronnie Anne has already moved in with the Casagrandes, and yet her house is somehow still within walking distance of the Loud house. And it's never explained how Mrs. Santiago knew about the microchips and drones, given the fact that the chips were sent out after Mr. and Mrs. Santiago parted ways.

EM46: This kind of writing is the end product of when authors employ what I like to call the “I am too lazy to fix the flaws in my storytelling, so I’ll just sit here hoping that nobody notices the plot holes and hopefully learn to just roll with it” mindset. Well, spoiler alert; we do notice. And I will be the first to admit, I have almost fallen victim to this trap myself. There were times where I’d just look over my writing, see a few plot points where I may have glossed over some crucial details, and tell myself a few times to just let it go and hopefully nobody will ever notice. Nevertheless, I always manage to push myself to go the extra mile to ensure that my material is coherent and that it makes sense. And trust me when I tell you; sometimes, all you have to do is add maybe one or two lines of dialogue. That’s 15-30 words, and that is not a big deal at all. However, because Lentex couldn’t put in the effort to actually fix his plot devices, his storytelling and clarity in flow suffer greatly as a result.

MTD: Honestly, the story is so ineptly put together, and the ending was such a shameless kick in the balls, that for the first time since I started reviewing I'm going to have to give it a negative score.

-1/5

Prose: 

EM46: The prose of this story is...average, at best. However, I have found several instances where it seems like the author is making certain feelings of the characters so completely obvious that it honestly comes off as diminutive in its making. Here’s an example:

Chapter 21: ''“Lola’s eyes widened. That was definitely not what she expected to happen.”''

…...Yeah, ya think? I mean, we are pretty smart, so I don’t think it was all that necessary to point that out so conspicuously. This type of prose kinda makes me feel like the writer is talking down to me, and I for one really don’t appreciate it when a writer doesn’t respect me as a thinking person and thinks that I can’t figure out simple thoughts.

MTD: I noticed that too. There are more than a few instances of the narrator telling rather than showing, or reiterating something that should have been obvious. To cite another example:

Chapter 5: "Luan gave Luna a light shove backward. She didn't need her sister's judgemental [sic] finger poking her."

And another:

Chapter 21: "Rita paced back and forth, clearly very nervous. Two of her children were lost in the woods, so obviously, the mother was very concerned."

But it has its moments. For instance, Lentex does a pretty decent job painting a vivid but concise picture of Lincoln's adult life during the dream sequences. I particularly liked this excerpt here:

Chapter 15: "Now standing in front of the main entrance, Lincoln took a deep breath, and opened the door. He ran outside, and started his usual morning jog. The man was never a fan of exercising as a child, but Lincoln came to love jogging in his older age. It was nice to get some fresh air, and it was a good break from his stressful days in his office. Even though he didn't work as much as he used to, it was still nice to take a break from the constant phone calls and number crunching that he endured on a daily basis."

Overall, though, the prose, while not awful, tends to suffer from too much telling and not enough showing.

2.5/5

Mechanics:

MTD: For the most part, okay. It's pretty shaky at first, as in Chapter 1 he doesn't start a new paragraph for each new speaker (though that problem is only confined to that chapter). Also, punctuation is often placed outside quotation marks, but other than that, I didn't find any serious recurring formatting errors. I did, however, see a few spelling errors here and there; "judgmental" is misspelled in Chapter 5 (seen above), and in Chapter 15 "latter" is spelled "ladder".

EM46: Actually, I had a hand in helping make sure his grammar was on point.

3.5/5

Adherence to Canon:

EM46: Oh boy. Oooooooohhhhhhhhh boooooooy, this subject. Where...where do we even begin?

MTD: Well, let's start with the positives - which do exist. Lincoln is written quite well throughout the story. Much like in canon, while he's not the strongest or smartest member of the Loud family, he's durable and persistent. He's the man with the plan, and even when the odds are stacked against him, he never admits defeat. He's understandably nervous about being appointed the leader of the resistance, but he still takes on the role with a brave smile, knowing that he doesn't have any other choice.

EM46: On top of this, I also really like how the story handled Lynn. I.e., she isn’t seen as an irredeemable bully, but rather a person with a soul who is able to see how the war is wrong and ultimately decides to go with her brother when many other writers probably would’ve kept her against him all throughout the story. This kind of portrayal of Lynn is very refreshing and I applaud Lentex for actually painting Lynn in an impressive light for once.

And yes, while Luna and Leni were among the first ones to side with Lincoln, a cliche that’s been done to death already, they don’t do it because they just happen to be the favorite sisters of Lincoln, and their motivations for quitting do fit into their personalities. For example, Luna is quite a chill girl and is very easy going. She only wanted to participate in the war just to teach Lincoln a lesson with little no malicious intent. And the moment when the war escalated and everything went violent for Lincoln, she opted out almost immediately. As for Leni, while she may have rejoined the war, she would’ve been understandably ticked off that Lincoln broke their model house, and the only reason she believed the story that Lincoln caused Albert’s accident was because she doesn’t really know that much better in terms of common sense and logic, which perfectly aligns with how she’s portrayed in canon.

MTD: Now that we've covered the positives, let's talk about… everything else. Or rather, everyone else. The biggest problem is obviously Lola, who's so far off from canon that she couldn't even see her canon self with a telescope. But she's far from the only character who gets whacked with the OOC stick.

Take Luan, for instance. In the first few chapters, she makes it clear that her reasons for continuing the war go far beyond the model house, claiming that Lincoln's "always been a considerable pain in the behind". Her reasoning is that if they continue torturing him, he'll "clean up his act" and stop making mistakes. Not only is this completely unreasonable - to err is human, after all - but it's also not something I can see coming from Luan. In "Funny Business", even after Lincoln blew her off and came crawling back, she invited him onstage to perform with her, and later conceded that she shouldn't have been so hard on him. She's not a vindictive person in canon.

And that's not even getting into what happens during the previous chapter. She forces Lincoln to carry a ton of party supplies all the way to the city while wearing a ridiculous clown outfit, and calls him "a weak, sorry excuse for a brother" when he starts to tire. That, and she doesn't tell him until it's too late that they're going to the Casagrandes' house, just to humiliate him by making Ronnie Anne see him dressed as a clown. I'm sorry, what is Lincoln supposed to learn from this, again?

EM46: However, I will give Luan this. Out of all the OOC characters in this story, she is the one who is given at least some form of redemption. But does it work out well for her?

Eeeehhhh...kinda...sorta...no.

When she and Lincoln are out collecting firewood and get lost in Chapter 14, Luan reveals the real reason she she entered the war, as well as the reason she goes insane with pranks during April Fools Day, is because she tries desperately to make people laugh at her jokes when she only receives groans from her own family. As such, she does both of these actions as a way of getting vengeance on those who wouldn’t dare laugh at her puns. Sheesh...and I thought she couldn’t handle criticism in “No Laughing Matter”! This is downright petty, childish, and most importantly, nowhere even close to justifying the pain and misery she put Lincoln through in the rest of the story.

MTD: Especially since it doesn't explain why all her resentment is directed at Lincoln, specifically. Her sisters don't laugh at her jokes, either. Why is she siding with them over him?

But that's enough about her. Let's move on to Lori, who has all of her negative traits dialed up to eleven while her positive traits are glossed over. In canon, Lori has anger issues, and she can be pretty insecure. In Singled Out, she's a vindictive, choleric beast who's ridiculously insecure. When Bobby calls her out for her brutal treatment of Lincoln, she lashes out at him for not supporting her when she's "obviously right", and dumps him. Then, just to prove to Leni that she still has Bobby wrapped around her finger, she calls him, and when he doesn't respond, she steals Vanzilla and drives all the way back to his house. I realize that we've seen Lori be overly possessive of Bobby before, but it doesn't quite work in this context, considering a) it's played for drama, while in the show it's usually played for laughs, and b) she's the one who dumped him.

EM46: But even then, those two absolutely pale in comparison to the biggest characters who are OOC in this story. One of which being...Lisa. Okay, as one of the very few people you will meet who actually has Lisa in their top 3 Loud sisters, I have only this to say. What in the world have you done with Lisa, Lentex?! In the show, Lisa may be the least compassionate one of the siblings, but she still has a sense of humanity within her, and she never truly wants her family to get hurt, per se. But in this, she’s been transformed into a soulless, ruthless, empty machine who shows little to no human emotion whatsoever and couldn’t care less about who gets hurt in the process of her getting what she desires.

In addition, she even has this nationwide network of microchips that she created and possibly sold to Mr. Santiago, as well as God knows who else, to mastermind a country full of unthinking droids she can command at will. What is Lisa supposed to be? Some kind of all powerful lord of all things psychotic and evil? If anything, I’d argue that she’s the true sociopath of this story; not Lola, and she’s supposed to be SATAN!!! But worst of all is the fact that in the very end, she gets away with absolutely EVERYTHING! Yeah, I am not even kidding. All she says is, “Oh, I’m sorry! The big bad Lola was forcing me to do all of those horrible things,” and she gets off with absolutely zero punishment whatsoever.

MTD: Well, she did deactivate the microchips at the end... though we're never told how.

But now let's get to the (apparent) spawn of Satan, Lola. Good lord, is she awful. As far as I can tell, she's written in a way that would only make sense to you if the only episodes you watched were "Sound of Silence" and the first half of "A Tattler's Tale". The author's assertion that she's a sociopath who's incapable of feeling empathy is completely contradicted by numerous moments throughout the show - like, say, the ending of "Undie Pressure" when she buys Lincoln his victory undies even though he lost the bet. And that's a gesture she had nothing to gain from, since nobody would blame her for not doing it. The only reason she did was because she felt bad for Lincoln.

That'd be bad enough, but Lola's characterization isn't just contradicted by canon; it's contradicted by several moments in the story itself. Aside from her aforementioned guilt-induced nightmares about Albert, there's a scene where she confronts Lisa after the latter reveals that she built a brain liquefying device, and confesses that she's considering using it on herself. Lola is visibly distressed by this, and begs Lisa to never even think about killing herself.

There's just nothing about her character that's consistent or sensible. She keeps insisting that the war is for the greater good, and that Lincoln will experience "salvation" by the end, but we never find out what she means by that. And no, the reveal that she's secretly Satan doesn't make any of this make any more sense. If anything, it makes less sense (as we covered in the "Story" section).

EM46: That ending was absolutely the biggest cop out I have ever, EVER, witnessed in any form of popular media. But what really sucks so much about it is the fact that Lentex had absolutely no possible way of tying up all of the loose ends created from Lola’s actions and decided to just throw in the biggest deus ex machina of all time just to make his story end a little bit faster. But in doing so, he not only sacrificed the quality of his work, but also threw any and all sense of humanity (well, whatever small piece of humanity was there to begin with) that Lola had left completely straight down the drain. If you seriously have reached a point where the only possible way you can make Lola’s action even remotely acceptable is to say that she was not in fact Lola and that she was an evil deity the whole time, you really should consider rethinking your choices in writing the story. That just made all of the development that Lola received in the story, all of the potential motivation that could’ve led to a big, dramatic climax for absolutely nothing. So yeah, you know you have a very bad character when Satan himself is the only way you can justify their actions.

1/5

Immersion:

MTD: This one's… tricky to gauge. I'll admit that for the first half of the story, I was legitimately invested in it. I wanted to see Lincoln beat his sisters and come out victorious, and I was curious how the family could possibly reconcile after everything they did to each other. For the second half - basically, everything following the deportation - I was still engaged in the story, but for entirely different reasons. I wanted to see how bizarre it could get, how much higher Lentex could keep raising that bar. And in that regard, I guess he didn't disappoint. EM46: I felt pretty much the same way, for I too was interested as to just how insane the story could possibly get. But...even with that working for him, I do not believe that that was ever his intention from us, the readers. He genuinely wanted us to enjoy the story for what it was and not for just the fact that we read it out of bile fascination. As such, I think that Lentex saw us reading the story as doing the right thing...for the wrong reasons.

MTD: Well, yeah, until we get to the last three chapters, when Lentex just throws up his hands, says, "Screw it," and stops trying to make the preceding events make sense. And as a word of advice from one author to another, the "it was a satire all along" defense rarely, if ever, works. Just ask Tommy Wiseau.

2/5

Story: -1/5

Prose: 2.5/5

Mechanics: 3.5/5

Adherence to Canon: 1/5

Immersion: 2/5

FINAL SCORE: 8/25

EM46: Hmm...y’know, after reading this story, I want something to get Lola back on my good side. You feel like binge watching all of Lola’s good episodes, Tye?

MTD: Sure, why not? Lemme go queue up "Out of the Picture" and we can get started.

MrTyeDye's Review Scorecard:

Popcorn Flick: 23/25 [Great]

Lori's Birthday: 21.5/25 [Great]

Luan's Problem: 18.5/25 [Good]

A Night to Forget: 15.5/25 [Okay/Good]

Singled Out: 8/25 [Mediocre]

Lincoln is Done: 2/25 [Garbage]