Fanfic Comment by guessmyname
Seconded. This fic is awesome. I haven't even seen the anime, and I still think this is brilliant.
Fanfic Excellent.
Easily one of my top 10 fan fics. Not to say the story is perfect. Hardly. But that's really part of this story's charm. The main character is absolutely insane, beyond the shadow of a doubt. Most the criticism's against this story stop holding merit once you realize this. This guy is absolutely nuts, and as such, his narration is...unreliable.
Is Crystal Tokyo as bad as he says? Did the purification really kill the heart and soul of humanity? Was his resistance just casually and brutally murdered as he claimed? Does he just have the rosiest tint to ever rosey on his rose tinted glasses? Or is he just bitter because he wanted a different outcome, but he's fought so long that he bought into his own propaganda? Who knows. That's the beauty of this story. Make up your own answer to these question, because there are no hard answers to be had in this story.
Don't let the negative reviews put you off this story. They're not entirely wrong, I just believe they're missing the real charm of the story: A ride along with a crazy man, and deciding for yourself just how much you believed him.
Fanfic Dear Lord....
Utter trash in every conceivable way. We're never shown why Crystal Tokyo is so bad...
Emerald, the so called "Protagonist" is even less sympathetic than Kratos from God of War, and is a Gary Stu of so many varieties I'd be wasting my time typing them up...
The writer completely ignores relevant facts (Queen Neo Serenity didn't "Take the throne" on her own - she was ELECTED), all just to make his power wank fantasy go up.
Honestly, I hope the author got some SERIOUS mental help after this.
Fanfic Meh
In which the entire canon is thrown out for the sake of wangst, the author is going through his rebellious phase, characterization is ignored, and misogyny reigns. The fundamental problem is that we never actually see what happens to make Crystal Tokyo so bad, other than the Stu's telling us that it is, and then sneering at everyone who believes the senshi. Ultimately, it's hypocritical, attempting to be intellectual and failing miserably, and badly written. Suffice it to say, if you actually like the show or the characters, you might want to avoid it.
I'd probably hate it less if it wasn't actually popular.
Basically, YMMV.
Fanfic Comment by zero_traveler
Another recommendation from zero_traveler; as good and awesome as I think Emerald is in this story, it's one of Setsuna's lines near the end that make the story for me. "Pluto met her gaze. "I did nothing, Mars. Absolutely nothing." She raised her Time Key, before adding, "That was the whole point."
Fanfic Comment by Marlee Cross
Thirded by Marlee Cross. The way this fic sucks you in is amazing. Emerald is an excellent OC and I really wanted him to succeed in his mission and I was happy to find that he does. It's not a particularly happy story as mentioned above, but still an amazing one that I could read again and again.
Fanfic
I can appreciate this story in the sense that it offers an alternate perspective of the established canon and as a "what if" fic, but ultimately, I don't really see what makes this so popular. The story does little to establish Crystal Tokyo is as bad as Emerald seems to think it is and at the end you have to ask the question "what was it all for, really?"' was it really about saving the world from what you see as a dystopia or was it just about you winning, even at the cost of your existence? In the end, Emerald basically doomed the world to an eternal ice age since the sole person who could have reversed it is now powerless to do so. I just don't see Emerald as somebody to root for and I think it would have been better if he had lost in the end; it would have certainly fit the tone of the story if he had.