Okay, fair warning — Your Mileage May Vary, wildly. Ornstead is a writer who evokes powerful love/hate responses in readers. Skysaber is gleefully over-the-top, yet somehow he comes across, most of the time at least, as fun rather irritating. And Ornstead's story ideas are often entertaining from the get-go. Unfortunately, like many of Ornstead's works, Otaku Three is uneven, cycling from Crowning Moments to cringeworthy ones, and eventually goes off the rails and implodes under its own weight, after he dovetails a bizarre fused Slayers/Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure world onto what appears to be an otherwise complete Evangelion story. So why am I recommending it? Because Skysaber fights with tropes in this story. Faced with the nihilism of the Evangelion world, he attacks by invoking and embodying every classic 1960s-1970s-1980s giant mecha anime trope he can, literally attempting to subvert the reality of the world he's in to replace it with his own. It is, as far as I know, a unique approach to the usual Evangelion self-insert Fix Fic. And when he's at the top of his form, Ornstead's writing is fun, funny, and audacious. It's worth the disappointment of the author rants and the collapse at the end.
Looney Toons' review
Okay, fair warning — Your Mileage May Vary, wildly. Ornstead is a writer who evokes powerful love/hate responses in readers. Skysaber is gleefully over-the-top, yet somehow he comes across, most of the time at least, as fun rather irritating. And Ornstead's story ideas are often entertaining from the get-go. Unfortunately, like many of Ornstead's works, Otaku Three is uneven, cycling from Crowning Moments to cringeworthy ones, and eventually goes off the rails and implodes under its own weight, after he dovetails a bizarre fused Slayers/Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure world onto what appears to be an otherwise complete Evangelion story. So why am I recommending it? Because Skysaber fights with tropes in this story. Faced with the nihilism of the Evangelion world, he attacks by invoking and embodying every classic 1960s-1970s-1980s giant mecha anime trope he can, literally attempting to subvert the reality of the world he's in to replace it with his own. It is, as far as I know, a unique approach to the usual Evangelion self-insert Fix Fic. And when he's at the top of his form, Ornstead's writing is fun, funny, and audacious. It's worth the disappointment of the author rants and the collapse at the end.