User blog comment:Derpyspaghetti/A Review of 'We R Leejun'/@comment-24101790-20161231015521

Before I get into my spiel, let me thank you for taking the time to read and analyze my novel. Let's just go through this and unpack everything bit by bit (critiquing the review is the epitome of navel-gazing, but you spent time on this so I feel like I should as well).

"C: It's easily on of the best stories on the site." Lies! I would strongly recommend people check out The 50 Foot Ant series if you're looking for something truly amazing. I enjoyed writing this novel, but I think there are other series that also deserve recognition and focus. Of course I have to give a shout out to John Dies at the End, a novel by David Wong as it was a heavy inspiration for this story. If you enjoyed We R Leejun, you will definitely enjoy his novel. It is an excellent marriage between Lovecraftian horror and comedy. I'm not ashamed to admit that reading it before heading off to Nicaragua heavily influenced my writing of this novel during the Peace Corps.

"side note: at the time I read it, I had never heard come sail away. I looked it up a little while ago, and it is easily one of the worst songs for a zombie apocalypse" Styx's Come Sail Away is in fact the worst song for an epic zombie/body snatcher/vampire brawl. Back when the novel was a really small idea, I was trying to come up with a soundtrack for a zombie movie I had in mind, but was coming up short. In frustration, I decided to scan through the radio and the first song I came across would serve as the showdown music. Wanna guess what goddamn song was the first one I heard?

"We R Leejun is all around ridiculous story full of boner jokes, baseball bat puns, crazy men in churches, and fighting zombies to the song 'come sail away" You forget the most important scene which is- boners, boners, boners, boners, boners, boners, boners, boners, boners, boners, boners, boners, boners, boners, boners, boners, - and that scene was essential to understanding what We R Leejun is all about.

"We R Leejun runs rampant with themes of social isolation and outcast running rampant throughout." Glad it's been noted. A lot of my idea for this came from a singular event in the Peace Corps when a good friend of mine jumped from the roof of the hotel we were staying at into a pool during our post-graduation celebration. At the time when it was a group of around 50 volunteers I remember cheering, but afterwards we both realized how terrible that idea had been (the pool wasn't deep, the roof was about fifteen feet up, and we had been drinking). I decided that the group mentality influenced him. He wouldn't have climbed up on the roof to jump in if he'd been alone or there were only a few of us. The decisions we make in a group aren't always the best. It really helped form my ideas for Legion/Leejun, an entity whose intelligence/reasoning is reduced by the more people he assimilates/infects. The people are influencing it as much as he is infecting them.

I'll wrap this up quickly by saying, thank you for taking the time to read and write out a review for my story. If reviews existed for all my novels, I'd be writing out all my inspirations and sources. (For The Quarantine: So there I was huffing all the paint thinner I had in my house...)