NOTE: After a discussion with the author, I offered to give them a new review. Normally I don't do this, but the onus was really on me in this case. I wasn't as fair as I should've been. I own up to that.

Title: Gintama* (read: Gintama Pointer)

Author: TheEvilKoala

Genre: Fanfic/Parody

Quick Summary: I did laugh a bit

Thoughts:

I read all of the XXX arc for this review, and lessons 6 and 7 - I'm not entirely sure if they were part of an arc or not.

This is a piece of work that almost requires that you know anything about the source material. I don't. When I read this, I just see a lot of random humor and callbacks to an anime that I've never watched. And certainly, there's enough openness in this text that someone who HASN'T read Gintama can read this. But the other obstacle to get over is the sort of humor used.

Which is really the big problem here. This has a combination of random humor and stupid humor, and while I did laugh at times like I'm supposed to, most of the time I just kind of raised an eyebrow and moved on.

The other problem here is it is... SUPER hard to review this kind of work? It's hard to know exactly what I'm supposed to focus on. Was it funny? I mean, yeah, at some points. Was it good? In this case, that's quite an subjective question to ask. It's something to read if you had a really shitty day and want to laugh at something, but I wouldn't pick this for a session of leisure reading.

I will say - and perhaps this is just me - the use of images was super distracting. I'm sure it works for Gintama readers and people who like images in work, but I read offline so they're just white boxes that break up the prose at inopportune times. It's distracting.

I gave this another shot like I would, but it's really hard to review a work of this nature.