AAN:
Oh boy, it's Rapture. Guess I might as well do him.
For the record, I have NOT played any Bioshock games, and I'm only going off what little I know about the series in order to judge what's essentially a Bioshock fanfic. With that out of the way, I think it's only fair that I - having seen the user multiple times throughout the years I've been on NS, both on the original Rapture and on Alkdoria - give my totally not biased thoughts on TRR.
First, let's begin with noting the good: it's detailed on the cultural and governmental fronts, for one, something that you don't tend to see in most NS nations in general, which tend to prefer speaking about aspects of how oh-so-great their military is or how glorious they are. It's definitely a bit of a model for everyone else to look at, even if just on the structural level of things. As for why I say this? Well, let's just say that the good really ends here, because oh boy, there's a lot of things to trudge through.
So, point number one: TRR (or rather, John Mercer himself) feels a bit... Mary Sue-y, to say the least. I'm not going to recap the history of Rapture (an Ayn Rand-inspired entity, I should add) during Andrew Ryan's reign, but what I will say is that the post-Civil War lore (which is what I assume are the bits that are truly original) is... oh boy, would saying "completely screwing up what made Bioshock be Bioshock in the first place" be too excessive, or would it be fitting? Because, let me tell you this: how the fuck do you manage to go from an Ayn Rand-y republic to what's essentially a totalitarian dictatorship, without, say, Sofia Lamb (an important figure of post-Civil War Rapture in the original games) and her religion gaining any sort of prominence whatsoever? Oh, and let's not talk about something very blatant: the fact that "Atlas" (or Frank Fontaine, in the original lore, a figure that was a scumbag who wanted to enrich himself and his business) is replaced - with no sort of HINTS towards why - by TRR's OC, John Mercer.
Oh, and let's not get into the fact that Mercer, somehow, manages to do what nobody else does: getting rid of ADAM addiction. THAT'S RIGHT! He (somehow) gets rid of the main source of problems (at least in Bioshock lore) with the gene rewriting substance that is ADAM. Thus, do you know what he essentially made? A version of ADAM with no sort of problems? Does anybody see the problem here? It's essentially making the very thing that led to the Civil War in the first place an OP tool that essentially loses whatever source of conflicts (something every author ever will need to create a compelling story) could've arisen from using such a tool.
But it's not like that matters anyways, because the main sin, from my perspective, it's that TRR stops being consistent with the original lore's focus on biotechnology in order to go directly to magic (just look at Mercer's factbook, please... if you can bother going through the plethora of big grammatical and spelling mistakes) with no sort of explanation as to why in the first place. You know, something that just doesn't fit in with Bioshock lore at all? You'd think that a fanfic would at least bother to be consistent with the source material's focus. It'd be like suddenly giving magic to the Terrans of Starcraft, or giving MBTs as we know them to, say, Tolkien's hobbits. I'm pretty sure the fans of those two examples would, at the very least, be scratching their heads a lot as to why the fanfic author decided to do that.
I could also go on a bit of a tangent about how weird the choices for TRR's portraits of his OCs are (especially Ariel's, seriously), but at this point, I think the post has already said what I had to say. In conclusion, go back to the drawing board, and rewrite a lot of TRR, because oh boy, it's a bit of a stinker as it is right now, and it feels like a slap to the face to those who have some interest in Bioshock.
AN:
With all due respect, it's just poorly-written, both in the lore side of things and in the linguistic side of things. Seriously. It's one thing to write long paragraphs, it's another to write actual, single-sentence, walls of texts with no spaces between commas nor any sort of line-breaking that would, I don't know, make GUS actually readable. Not like it's worth reading in its current state anyway, it really just feels like your average and generic yankwank with no sort of compelling things to hook anybody on. I'm not saying it's impossible to write a compelling alt-hist US, but this one, chief? Ain't it, and likely will not be for a long time, unless the user really decides to work further on their lore and, perhaps more importantly for the sake of readability, studying the English language further.
