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Let me start out by saying that I had a great time reading Sarah Rees Brennan's Long Live Evil. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a wonderful distraction in a difficult week. I will read the sequel.

I am now going to attempt to describe the experience and I want it to be understood that I mean this in the most value-neutral, non-pejerative way possible: I read a lot of recent books that have a definite eau d'AO3 about them, and it was honestly quite refreshing and nostalgic to pick up a book that instead feels like reading a longfic on LJ circa 2005.

I do not mean the plot ... well, I sort of mean the plot. In 2005 we did not yet have the thriving genre of Villainess Isekai -- that didn't really kick off until mid-20-teens -- and Long Live Evil is emphatically a villainess isekai. However, 2005 was the immediate post-Buffy era, and what we did have in spades is Quippy High School Girl Enters High Drama Fantastical Situation, dropping memes and one-liners like there's no tomorrow, to the befuddled admiration of everyone around her. Another genre is possible! We don't have to take ourselves so seriously! At least not until it's time for a big angsty scene -- and it will eventually be time for a big angsty scene, have no fear, we can have our cake and eat it too. But first, there will be a musical episode.

Long Live Evil is what happens when you take the villainess isekai plot and absolutely marinate it in this particular 2005-era sensibility. Our Heroine is dying of cancer when she gets transmigrated into a minor villainess in her favorite epic fantasy series; unfortunately because she read the books while she was dying of cancer, she has forgotten much of the plot of the first book, which does not prevent her from saving herself from imminent execution by claiming to be a prophetess with visions of the future. She then spends the next several hundred pages sailing around and encouraging the other minor villains in her orbit to be fun and campy. There are over-the-top outfits! There is a musical episode! Everybody gets to romance their favorite character, and ALL these romances have a healthy dose of angst and betrayal and situations where one of the characters has to menace the other with a sharp knife! My personal favorite is of course the one between the other transmigrator she meets and his favorite character, the agonizingly noble and uptight second lead who has Forsworn Weapons out of Fear of His Own Bloodlust, and who mistakes all the transmigrator's helpful efforts to hook him up with the book's heroine as Sinister and Malevolent Schemes that Must Be Thwarted .... and yet finds himself Strangely Compelled by him! Eventually he goes to THE ORACLE!!! and learns that this transmigrator's backstory is that he got hit by truck-kun while heroically rescuing a little child from a traffic accident at the tragic age of fourteen and then got transmigrated into an impoverished and abused child of the streets before finagling his way into his current position, and goes through a whole moral crisis. Restrained? No. Incredible? Yes.

There are also possibly more memes by volume than in the Locked Tomb series and I do not say that lightly. The one that really broke me is when one of the in-book characters is looking at his love interest and thinks the mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more. This is not even a meme unless you are on a very particular subset of tumblr. It is a quote from Ernest Hemingway's The Moveable Feast regarding F. Scott Fitzgerald. But I know in my heart that it's in this book because it circulates on tumblr, and I also know in my heart that maybe 5% of the book's actual readership would recognize it as either a meme or a quote, and there isn't even the excuse that the character in question might be actively quoting tumblr because he is not a transmigrator, so what, pray tell, is it doing here?? And I have no answer, except that this is the kind of thing that people did in 2005, on livejournal, which is to collect little in-jokes and throw them magpie-like into their fanfics as Easter eggs or something.

But, also, setting all this aside, Long Live Evil is genuinely doing everything that I want out of the genre of isekai! I get bored with portal fantasy where the characters' backgrounds do not matter to the action; our heroine's personal history is central to the plot in every direction. I enjoy when we get a little meta about isekai ethics and how we feel about fiction vs reality; so does Long Live Evil! The tension between two central transmigrators about whether the experience that they're experiencing should be judged according to the ethics of reality or the ethics of fiction is my favorite element of the book. I like when background characters matter and are significant and have the ability to throw the plot in new and unexpected directions, and so does Long Live Evil! And I also like the experience of coming across a completely absurd but inexplicably compelling fic at midnight and staying up too late to read it, and this Long Live Evil absolutely provides.

I do not like tripping over a tumblr meme every five pages and going 'again?! we are in the POV of an in-universe character now! this man has never been on tumblr and never will be!' It does break my peaceful 'it's fine, this is spiritually from 2005' suspension of judgment, because even though did not have tumblr in 2005. But you can't win them all.

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This is not even a meme unless you are on a very particular subset of tumblr. It is a quote from Ernest Hemingway's The Moveable Feast regarding F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I am familiar with the line, but had no idea it had become a meme, and therefore feel like zero percent the target audience for this book, but I am really entertained by the inexplicable transmigration of LJ.

OK, but the *thing is* it can work as meme *or* quote, and one may be amused on two levels if one knows both faces of the reference, but if you only know one part, it can still, like, *work*.

LJ itself may now be a lost garden, but the imprint it left on our minds ... that will never fade.

Oh this explains a lot of why I bounced off it when I tried reading it. xD Maybe I'll try again later when I'm in the mood for that vibe!

Yeah, I think it's a book that'd be very easy to bounce off of and I might well have done so in the wrong mood! But as it was I was a thousand percent in the right mood.

I thoroughly enjoyed it. I really hope she can complete the trilogy.

I hope so too!

I was reading the wrong livejournal fic.

Me too, lol.

How did you miss all the quippy protagonists?!

have you read Scum Villain Self Saving System? someone I know had a full "has no one else made this connection" moment about this book and SVSSS (and one character from a different book by the same author, lol), not that it was full plagiarism or anything but deeply baffled at the similarities not being clocked by anyone else :o

lol, I have and the one thing I knew about the book going in was that people had said it was an SVSSS-alike! So I was actually expecting much more of a Scum Villain riff than it turned out to be -- I can see the plot beats that align but all the characters' vibes are soo different. (Though it is also baffling to me that she mentioned MZDS in the acknowledgements and not SVSSS.)

YEAH friend called one of the main characters a Xue Yang type so maybe that's why??

Ahh I actually thought it was more of a tumblr-influenced book than an LJ one ("your poor little meow meow is built like a brick house"), but that might be because I wasn't on LJ much. I had a ton of fun with this, though I did call the big twist and I can see ppl bouncing off because of the campy style and tone.

re: your favorite pairing YES they were so funny! Absolutely loved how Marius and Eric would walk away from every interaction with two completely different interpretations of what had just happened. Also loved Rae and Eric's mini-shipping war over who should get with Lia.

The memes are tumblr-esque but the campy style and tone felt so old-school to me! A classic structure refurbished with new and updated memes.

I really enjoyed this precisely for its romp factor until the last chapter when suddenly things took a turn of mood. What did you think of it? I keep thinking about what the sequel could possibly be like and coming up baffled.

Honestly, the sudden dark drop at the end honestly is part of what gives the book fic vibes to me -- I feel like fic often has this quality of being funny and quippy right up until the chapter when it's time to Get Angsty at which point it will abruptly ramp up the drama for all it's worth.

... the fact that I recognized it as a meme is very what were you doing at the devil's sacrament.

(have not read this yet, looking forward to it, duly warned; it would be very funny if memes were the thing that took off from The Locked Tomb but without doing the thing that it's doing.)

I know! I know. I know. I felt the same.

(I ALSO HAD THIS THOUGHT.)

Aaaaah this sounds so fun... maybe I will have to power through the early cancer chapters to get to the rest of it. (And duly scream at you on Discord when another non-transmigrator inexplicably spouts a meme.)

It's only like one mere chapter of cancer before it's time for VILLAINOUS CAMP!! (and PLEASE DO)

a book that instead feels like reading a longfic on LJ circa 2005.

I have to read this book, and fortunately the library has a copy. The 2005 LJ longfic mood nostalgia is strong in me.

if there ever was a time the time is now!

Well, I am absolutely putting a hold on this! I cannot deny that I am well-suited to pick up the memes.

I think it's even odds whether you have a great time or bounce off it sky-high and I'll look forward to seeing which!

I was really interested in reading this and for some reason bounced right off it. The evil seemed....not that evil? and the plot rather predictable. But maybe I was just not in the right mood.

I think I also bounced right off LJ fics that were very quippy yet fantastical With Teens In, or at least I can't remember reading any of them. But I never read the Draco Trilogy, frex, which is like the only example I can think of like that.

I think the Draco Trilogy is the ur-example of this sort of fic, and Sarah Rees Brennan (IIRC) was part of that fanwriter circle, many of whom have gone on to have successful origfic careers doing the things that made their fanfic so popular.

Yeah, I think it's definitely a book where either you are like 'this is so silly!' and have a great time or are like 'this is so silly!' and bounce off it immediately, and it's a fine line between those two states; I could easily see myself as having landed on either one.

I bounced off this book so hard, despite loving her previous work and also many trusty people's recommendations! Sigh. It's on my "maybe try it again sometime" list, but we all know how often THAT actually happens...

There are so many books in the world to try that you might not bounce off! (I am not at all surprised to hear it tbh, as much as I enjoyed it I think it's extremely bounce-able for a lot of extremely good reasons;

genarti also read two chapters, put it down, and never picked it back up again.)

I started this but had to pause as it didn't really work too close to the end of the year and general world stuff as the tone of flippantly evil plus cancer is odd. Its a well written book so I'll definitely go back into it, but it feels like it needs just the right mood.

Yeah, I think for me it definitely was a combo of right mood and right time!

I have only enough brain for an "I love this review" comment, but: I love this review.

Read this book based on the review and it did not disappoint.

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