Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami

There are few forms of human expression lower than the fanfic.  I know people are going to get offended when I say this, but its true:  there are no good fanfics, never have, never will be.  I simply cannot comprehend the motivation to take say Cloud and Terra and write a story where they have crazy Esper sex.  Why can't people simply create their own characters?  If you're incapable of doing that, why do you think you can write a story at all?  And if you can't make your own characters, why do you have take preexisting characters and distort their personalities to fit whatever weird fantasy you have inside your dark mind.  John Milton wrote "Paradise Lost" from pre-established characters from the Bible, but he gave them personalities.  Satan is just a poorly-characterized trickster angel in the Bible, in Milton's story he is a living character full of both human weakness and even some strength.

There is no fanfic that is anything like "Paradise Lost".  They're either boring, offensively painful, or hilariously awful.  Bad, worse, or so incredibly stupid and idiotic your face melts off.  Or they are so horrible that you literally have nightmares for weeks*.  "Cloud Mowes the Lawn" is just the tip of the iceberg, there are thousands of these things.  An entire generation of young people are wasting artistic energy on a pointless dead end.  Its tragic, really.  If only there was a piece of fanfiction so insane that it could make everything better...

"Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami" is the only piece of fanfiction that is a true work of art.  The still continuing work is an incredible piece of metafiction based very loosely on the wonderful anime series, "Death Note".  The actual author is the greatest genius of 21st century literature - I am not being sarcastic here.  He or she writes as though she were an idiotic eight-year-old who has no concept of grammar, spelling, or even basic common sense.  But what results are moments where the supposed author accidentally makes ridiculous mistakes, such as consistently calling a certain character from the TV series "Light's Mom".  Or calling William Shakespeare the king of England.  Every sentence is an amazing piece of writing that is hilarious on at least six levels.  Every chapter is unbelievably funny, and it just gets funnier as time goes by.  Especially when random characters are "sexing" for no reason.  This is Absurdism at its finest.

The first chapter of "Light and Dark" begins with a typical fanfiction concept.  The author, who goes by the name of "D'arkYagam'i", creates a paper thin avatar of himself within the "Death Note" story called "Dark Yagami", who immediately is the most perfect character in the fictional universe.  Actual people actually write stories like this where they pretend to be say, the most beautiful girl in Hogwarts, or the most badass fighter in the Matrix.  Characters like this are called Mary Sues.  Dark Yagami is a cringe-worthy pun on the name of the main character of "Death Note" named "Light Yagami".  Eventually the story introduces a small village full of Yagamis all using various puns like "Dusk Yagami", "Night Yagami", and "Twilight Yagami" - which yes, is a reference to the wonderful Twilight series.  The author coyly throws "get it?" in the middle of sentences every time he makes a painfully obvious joke, just in case you somehow missed it.

At first you might be fooled and believe that the author is just another one of those fools, but even more idiotic due to his believing that "Whales is a town in England".  The in-universe author has some very strange ideas on how the world works, with ideas so crazy they cannot simply be mistakes.  At one point Near, a child character from the anime, takes part in a gun fight.  The author however believes that kids physically cannot hold guns, due to some kind of mystical law, and Near has to fight with a Nerf gun... that fires real bullets anyway.  As the story goes completely insane it becomes clear that even the most delusional and sheltered writer could never have possibly allowed the story to spin out of control as it does.  Everything is such madness, with random plot points and characters popping out of nowhere, that the only way to describe the events is in the author's own description of Chapter 10, "CAR CHASES WOOOO!"  I may be underestimating human stupidity here, but nobody can be this bad - or at least this unintentionally hilarious as it happens.

Of course, to enjoy "Light and Dark", you must immediately give up any defense of the original "Death Note" canon.  In this story Watari briefly becomes the King of England.  It couldn't miss the point of the anime more.  If you're the type who would get mad that the Shinigami eat Blood Bananas instead of apples, your head will explode when you read this.  And when that happens, film it, because I really want to see a spectacle like that.

For the purpose of this literary review and to stop making things so confusing for me and you, I'll just refer to the supposed author as "the author".  He's just as much a character in this story as anybody else.  Read Dark's Twitter feed here, its just as wonderfully weird as anything else.  Lately he seems to believe that Neptune and Uranus are the same planet because they look similar.

From the start, things are incredibly weird and only get stranger.  The author starts with the entire cast of "Death Note", at least at first acting like their anime counterparts, aside from a few weird quirks like one character being known as "The Desk Lady" and another "The Girl From the Bus".  (At no point does the author ever try to find out these characters' names.)  Then the author introduces an "Everything Note", a magical book that not only can instantly kill people like Death Notes can, but does... everything.  Everything.  Dark Yagami soon enough becomes the king of the world and grows giant.  He writes things down in the Everything Note using a nuclear missile, referred to in the story as simply a "nuclear".  Did I mention that this story might have a few factual flaws?

Lately an evil king named "BLUD" has sent out a rocket that summons all world's nuclear missiles and dropped the entire payload right on the Yagami House.  But then the characters had a Shield Note, so nobody got hurt (though the attack did do an amazing job baking cookies), except Near, who the author absolutely despises for whatever reason.  Near is constantly tortured, all the way to Dark stealing Near's legos on Christmas (;_;).  Dark Yagami was killed, but luckily his ghost was so awesome he took over the body of Light.  As for Light, he was brought back using a cloning machine, but he's a dog now because "OH F-CK I PUT IT ON DOG MODE".  This is all explained through weird insane run-on sentences that throw in random details that mean absolutely nothing but show the weird kind of view of the world the supposed author has.  For example:  "'Now were where we?' she [Naomi] said as she zipped her motorcycle jacket down and led the desk lady into a quiet closet that was almost empty except there was a mop in there and also some paint that the janitor used to paint things with."  Yes, the janitor does use paint to paint.

There are dozens of sex scenes, including an early example where the entire Yagami family seems to have sex with each other.  But the author never actually goes into any kind of detail whatsoever and seems to actually not know what the human body looks like naked.  Night Yagami, a female clone of Dark sneaks into an evil base naked and is able to pass herself off as a man by wearing a sign that says "Im a guy" ...and it works. There's a lot of action scenes, but its all written without any kind of descriptions or imagery.  This a story that can only tell, never show.  But occasionally the author seems to forget that he's writing in text, like one time when he describes a fight that happens so fast that we, the audience can't see it.  This story is so wrong it doesn't even know what media its being made in!

If this story is being written straight, it can only have been written by an alien with a very limited concept of humanity.  But he knows we like lesbians, he has that much at least.

There have been other stories like "Light and Dark", such as the more famous "My Immortal" which remakes the Harry Potter universe so that it follows some lame goth cliches.  There was also a "Final Fantasy VII" fanfic where Tifa gives birth to a Chocobo.  Those stories simply exist to troll a fanbase.  "Light and Dark" is so insane that it doesn't have any negative intentions at all - it exists purely as an attack upon all logic.  In fact, "Light and Dark"'s very existence may disprove logic itself.  There is not a law or rule it doesn't break.  This isn't mere absurdism, its anarchy, beautiful literary anarchy.

"The Adventures of Dark Yagami" is an incredible work of either brutal parody or amazing advant-garde literature.  If this thing starts some kind of new school of writing, I wouldn't be surprised.  If the actual author turns out to be a Literature Professor, I'd be less surprised.  This is genius mascaraing as foolishness.  I cannot recommend this insane little story enough, nor can I wait for the next update.  And if you don't care about art-stuff, it is the biggest train wreck of a story I have ever seen.  This is not So Bad Its Good, its So Bad Its Art.

Thank you, D'arkyagam'i, thank you.  You have truly expanded the horizons of human expression.

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* Yes, there was a fanfic that gave me nightmares.  I'm not going to say what it was, because I don't want to link anybody to it.  Nobody should read that thing.  If you have, you know what I'm talking about.