FimFiction Link - Short ID: 371039/magic-school-days
Published: Apr '17 — Mar '21
In a sentence, MSD is literary mush that doesn't know what it wants to be. At first a simple story, it develops into over a dozen inter-woven plots that fail to integrate on a tonal level. Every chapter, the escalating gags and deepening gravity compete to undermine eachother, with initially-competent characters being buried under idiot balls while cartoonish ultraviolence and sexual harassment takes an increasingly sinister tone. Not to say the comedy is good anyway, given how the jokes alternate between boomer-tier sitcom with the adults and tiringly absurd antics for the CMC. Tiringly? The same jokes are repeated again and again at the same "volume" so that individually zany exploits blend into an unremarkable mass. It would be my estimation that the story is better appreciated as a weekly episodic if it weren't for the fact that it's near impossible to keep track of all the plot threads without a pile of notes.
Moving on, the prose is a painfully mediocre pattern of pretentious narration interspersed with talking heads who only occasionally possess enough character to be distinguished out of context. The author radiates pure reddit energy with his aborted attempts at cleverness: gratuitous latin, hamfisted evopsych, infantile politics, and fedora atheism abound. It is also jarring how the attempts to depict British culture stand out in a sea of unacknowledged Americanisms. The only good things I have to say about it is that the story had a very strong start, a cathartic courtroom scene, and an admirable determination to see the consequences of events through.
All in all, the story isn't worth the read unless you're desperate for interesting ideas - of which it admittedly provides a few.