For my first fanfic review, I’m going to analyze Loneheart’s Gadget in Chains. Why choose this particular fanfic? Because I hate it. It embodies everything that is wrong with angsty fanfiction driven by its appeal to the author’s own perverted mind, and yet it is undoubtedly the pinnacle of its art. Gadget in Chains is a work of dark and twisted genius, from which one cannot easily look away. One admires it against the protestations of the conscience, sort of like Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens.

One of the first things you will notice about Gadget in Chains is that it is long. Really, really long. In fact, it’s almost twice as long as Moby-Dick, or over four times as long as Moby-Dick.

The Man Behind the Madness

Gadget in Chains is the magnum opus of Loneheart, supposedly an unpublished writer turned calling center employee. I don’t know if that’s a factual biography or not, but he’s undoubtedly the Adolf Wölfli of Rescue Rangers fanfiction. It took seven years to write Gadget in Chains; you can read it on fanfiction.net in a somewhat shorter period of time.

Alternately, on the Acorn Cafe you can find a version edited to comply with their restrictions on content. This version is much more succinct and has a good bit less in the way of fan (dis)service, you can get a copy here.

As mentioned previously, the contents seem to be largely dictated by appeal to the writer and it gets rather repetitive. One could be forgiven for thinking that the work was an attempt to refine prose descriptions of Gadget being strip-searched or beaten to high art. I’ll be honest, just reading some of this made me really uncomfortable. For the sake of brevity, and also because this is an illustrated review and I’d rather dislike earning myself a spot on a certain particularly infamous Encyclopedia Dramatica article, I’m going to skip most of that.

Still, Gadget is on the receiving end of so much suffering in this story that one gets the impression that the author originally meant to write a much shorter story, Gadget in Pains, wherein the titular mouse gets stuck on a glue board and must gnaw off her own leg to escape (and, probably, her clothing as well, since this is Loneheart we’re talking about), but then he saw The Shawshank Redemption.

Speaking of which, Gadget in Chains is laden with references to prison movies and literature; for example it has a lot more in common with Les Misérables than just the obvious facts that Gadget and Jean Valjean share a prisoner number and that both books are really long. This is by no means a bad thing; in fact, finding references was probably the most fun I had reading it. Then again, that’s probably just the kind of person I am.

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