#bavitz

For now, though, I'll at least give you the title:

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...

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:

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