I liked her demise anyway. It was creative, not particularly violent...at least the violence wasn't described in-story. *shudders* Now that I think of it, I hate to know what happened to her when she went to face Sauron.

But at least she had a choice, like you've said before. My heart did soften a bit at the end, when she said "thank you", before she met her...fate. She did acted like Lúthien should have, at times, but I guess she was too off to even make that up, and then there's the whole "if-that's-the-real-Lúthien-some-key-characters-couldn't-exist" thing.

Ah well. She was too stupid to have taken the opportunity to live, and we can't change that. Or can we...? (But that's highly unlikely to happen. Actually, scratch that. She seemed too determined to face Sauron.)

~Autumn

First, I find the pacing and immersion in his works to be very poor. Every time I felt like I was finally getting into the plot, I was thrown out by a series of songs or poems or Tom Bombadil being quirky or time suddenly slowing to a crawl or what have you. (I may be misremembering this, but wasn't there something like twenty years between the birthday party at Bag End and Frodo actually setting off?) The songs and such were great for building the world, don't get me wrong, but they really dragged the story down for me. It did not help that in places his works felt more like a place to show off all the languages he made as opposed to actually tell a story.

I didn't much like the characters either. I found the vast majority of them to be dull and uninspiring. Maybe that's just because I've been overexposed to the traditional high fantasy types of characters, but I recall thinking that even back when I was reading LOTR for the first time.

That sort of ties into the final point I'll get into here: I'm tired of high fantasy in general. Too many creators nowadays jump into the groove that Tolkien carved without any thought of putting their own spin on things. The mystical and superior elves, the low and ultra-masculine dwarfs, the wizard's tower, and what not. I enjoy fantasy stories that take liberties with that material, like with the Discworld's cheeky satire, the grimy noir-like setting of Eberron, or the urban mingling found in the Dresden Files.

To put it short, Tolkien bores me. It's ponderous and slow. It's not my kind of fantasy.

I mean, Mortic explained some of it, but that just made me even more confused. The bread was apparently spawned from the not-there-in-canon castle having a "rustic beauty", and... nothing else. I checked the spot in the badfic, just in case I was missing some context, and it said nothing about the "Pain Rustique" that, from the mission's point of view, was all too visible. I know what pain rustique is now(Thanks, Google!), but I just didn't understand why it was there.

I mean, the Word World is impressionable, but it seems to have more of a "grasping at straws" sort of mentality than the "let's look for the most obscure definition that could apply here" mentality. Less work for it when it's already exhausted by badfic, and potential joke material made when it decides to cut corners and start taking things literally. "Rustic" might create a rust-covered castle, or a castle that looked as though it was owned by hillbillies, but again, I have no idea what the link is between "rustic beauty" and "the whole thing is made of bread".

I was going to just have my post contain that commentary, but now that I've spent a while on it, I'll add in some brief review commentary, as well.

I didn't like Agent Huinesoron. Don't get me wrong, I liked his role in the story, his retroactive importance in DOGA's history, and the like, but he seemed like the sort of person I would generally not like spending time with. In a way, though, that's a good thing. If there's enough personality present in his first major appearance for me to make an opinion on him as a person, it's good use of character.
Mortic was more enjoyable, though, particularly in the parts where he intersects with the progression of the story. I was particularly fond of the scene where he convinces the character replacement Luthien all is normal by improvising dramatically and making up Rohirric names for his and his partner's disguises on the spot.

There was a lot of the agents discussing what the story was doing wrong, but not a lot of actual badfic quotes backing that up and providing context for that commentary. For example, during the the bit where Agent Huinesoron mentions how OOC it was for Eomer to not know who Morgoth was, there was no connection to the original badfic at all, and I would've thought that it was a reference to one of his previous missions if he'd had any records of them, since deprived of context it seemed more like a "but I've seen worse mischaracterization on this one, oh yes" than a comment on something that only happened a few seconds ago. This got better in the second half, though, but there are still bits like "Only after the dialogue was over did they comment – to each other, on the fact that Eowyn seemed to be falling in love with Luthien" where I wondered where it was coming from and what in the badfic prompted that assumption, and then said assumption was never mentioned again.

I liked the varied forms of the time skips. At the beginning, it's treated as though they're no big deal, but as the badfic goes on and the time skips get longer and the agents have had to deal with more of them, the story treats them differently. The bit that Irish Samurai mentioned earlier, where the time skip is marked by the "it" having no attached punctuation, and the time skip itself only being represented by a tilde, was actually my favorite of the time skips. It felt fresh, and really got across the suddenness of the temporal alteration in a way that "(Agent's name) almost threw up" tends not to.

And three more miscellaneous bits: 1) Why does Mortic have a CAD on the first page, when he scans the two "princesses" with it, but then mention thrice later that neither he nor Agent Huinesoron has one? It's possible that he might be using one of the TOS-era CADs when there were two or three different devices that measured different parts of the canon, and he only brought one of them, but if that's the case, why wouldn't Agent Huinesoron bring the others? CADs are standard PPC equipment, after all. Or alternatively, Mortic could be using the modern CAD and this could just be a continuity error.
2) The agents at different times say that the author has done none of the research, and almost enough research to make the scene canonical, and don't even seem to notice the dichotomy. That just bugged me. It feels like a continuity slip-up of some sort.
3) It's good that you added in the section where Mortic and Agent Huinesoron realize what sort of a mess the badfic is making of Middle-earth's timeline. In part because it drives home exactly what sort of damage this fic could potentially perform unchecked, and in part because I'd been wondering since the first mention of the fic's defining offenses why WhatThe was involved here when it seems to be much more the DTO's speed. True, possible total collapse of the timeline is also something that the DTO would be interested in, but the rationalization still holds.

Wasn't Swan's Egg already over and done with?

The lead admin of the agency is not Agent Cassie Young. I don't actually know what her full name is, I've just generally attached the name "Cassie" to the mysterious figure. Which I think is a decent alias, but can be extended if you like. Cass Zandra maybe, I kinda like the sound of that.

I do not think she can be referred to as a Miss of OFUM; Miss Cam didn't give me any permissions regarding the University itself and I'm reluctant to assume any authority in that setting which wasn't expressly given.