Fortune_Lover_(TGS Beta)(SARU_rip)[T+Eng0.75_Sincere].zip
is a 2020 one-shot My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! fanfic written by Leaty, using the form of a Creepypasta to tell a mundane story. It can be read on Archive of Our Own.
The year was 2017. In an unnamed discussion forum, a female gamer called Parasite_Ib from the US shared her experience of playing a pirated copy of the Romance Game Fortune Lover of unknown provenance—which, unknowest to her, was quite different from what she knew about Fortune Lover. As she traced the origins of this copy, she uncovered some seldom-known facts about the Fortune Lover fandom...
Fortune_Lover_(TGS Beta)(SARU_rip)[T+Eng0.75_Sincere].zip contains examples of the following tropes:
- 20 Minutes into the Past: This is a 2020 novel about the Character Narrator narrating in 2017 about her experience of the titular Game Mod, which was supposed to have happened in the early or mid-2010s.
- Ascended Fanboy: Atsuko, herself a big otaku of otome games, was rumored to have become a famous Visual Novel developer.
- Bewildering Punishment: The basic premise of the fic is a Fortune Lover mod (implied to be created by A-Chan) in which the Katarina Claes of Fortune Lover is replaced with the Katarina Claes of My Next Life as a Villainess, while everyone else's dialogs and event flags are left unaltered. The result is Katarina being labeled a villainess despite doing nothing on-screen to deserve it, being denounced for crimes that she never committed, and finally killed or exiled for absolutely no reason. Katarina even has lines in the mod in which she asks why this is happening.
- Bilingual Bonus: If the story itself doesn't clue the reader in enough, let's say the kanji used as "Atsu" of "Atsuko" can mean sincerity.
- Character Narrator: Parasite_Ib narrates her experience in playing the Sincere's mod and trying to trace its provenance.
- Color-Coded Speech: According to Parasite_Ib, speech in Fortune Lover is colored by the hair color of the character.
- Creator Breakdown: Discussed In-Universe. Parasite_Ib suggests whoever wrote the Sincere mod must be heartbroken and in grief. Given how the writer was almost certainly Atsuko, the monkey girl's best friend, she's probably correct.
- Creepypasta: This story is written in a form similar to a video-game-based creepypasta, but the story itself is completely mundane, if emotional.
- Cry for the Devil: In-Universe. Because Katarina in the Sincere's Mod is modified to act more like the Katarina in the source material, yet the rest of the cast continues with their script, or in other words, treating an All-Loving Hero as if she was an Alpha Bitch (as in the Fortune Lover canon). This makes Parasite_Ib find Katarina rather lovely and start to hate the rest of the cast, Maria included.
- Dummied Out: In-Universe example. The Nicol route was not included in the Fortune Lover beta demonstrated in the Tokyo Game Show. This extends to Sincere's mod as it is a mod of that beta; any attempt for Parasite_Ib to trigger that route makes the game crash.
- Escapism: The reason why Parasite_Ib downloaded a pirated copy of Fortune Lover of unknown provenance. While she played the game to completion previously and knew its endings, at the time the story happened she was forced to dump her boyfriend and felt rather "bummed" for it, so she "decided to lose myself in Fortune Lover for the umpteenth time."
- Fan Translation: In-Universe. Fortune Lover was never released in any anglophone country, but a group of fans called Sorcier Translation Project made a fan translation for it. It is the translation Parasite_Ib used to play and intended to obtain from her college dorm.
- Game Mod: The version of Fortune Lover Parasite_Ib played in this piece is a mod created from Sincerenote from the leaked Tokyo Game Show betanote , by modifying Katarina's behaviour from that of an Alpha Bitch to one that is similar to the novel's Katarina. Parasite_Ib suspects Sincere also included character art that didn't appear in the original spritesheet, as well as turning off her voice acting.
- Guilty Pleasures: Parasite_Ib describes Fortune Lover as this to her, despite its "kind of a cliché plot (and a painfully heterosexual one, to boot)".
- In Spite of a Nail: Played for Horror. What this story amounts to is Katarina's worst nightmare, a world in which all her attempts to evade her doom are in vain and she is still condemned to exile or death even though this no longer makes the least bit of sense.
- I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: In Sincere's mod, the scene where Katarina attempts to stab Maria in Fortune Lover was modified into Katarina giving Maria a banquet of flowers, implying she's this regarding relationships between Maria and Geordo or Keith. Not that it prevents her being murdered though...
- Meaningful Name: Parasite_Ib mentioned how to read the name of the eponymous file she downloaded: "Fortune Lover, leaked Tokyo Game Show beta release, transferred ("ripped") from physical media into ROM files by SARU, 75%note translated into English by Sincere." Eventually she realizes "SARU_rip" does not refer to any person who "ripped" the data, but simply, "Saru (i.e. the "Monkey Girl"), rest in peace."
- Memetic Mutation: In-Universe. The "Monkey Girl"'s story became a meme among the Japanese otome fandom, to the point that every time when tree-climbing, monkeys, or even a female otaku appears in an otome game, there will be someone who claims this as a Meme Acknowledgment.
- The Mourning After: A probably platonic variation. It is strongly implied (but not explicitly stated) that the mod played by Parasite_Ib was created by Atsuko long after the "Monkey Girl"'s death, indicating she still couldn't get over it.
- Named by the Adaptation: Subverted. In most My Next Life as a Villainess fanfiction, authors would usually make up a name for the "Monkey Girl" when necessary, since she is Only Known by Their Nickname in the source material. In this one, however, she is only known as Saru-chan; "Saru" is (correctly) explained in the story to be Japanese for "monkey."
- No Export for You: In-Universe. According to Parasite_Ib, Fortune Lover was never officially released in English, but its manga adaptation did. And because the manga was localized, there existed a visible fan group that translated the game itself. That's the version Parasite_Ib intended to download.
- Painting the Medium: According to the author, she wrote her CSS stylesheet to format the text, which makes the text formatted like a forum post.
- Pastiche: This is a pastiche of Creepypasta.
- Recursive Fanfiction: "What did I do to deserve this? I only wanted to help...", a 2023 fanfiction, is explicitly stated to be inspired by Fortune_Lover_(TGS Beta)(SARU_rip)[T+Eng0.75_Sincere].zip by swapping to Katarina's (as reincarnated into Sincere's mod) point of view. The title is a reference to this fic; it's one of Sincere's additions to Katarina's lines, lamenting at her Bewildering Punishment.
- Shout-Out: In-Universe and out. Parasite_Ib's forums username is an obscure reference, combining the titles of two Japanese horror games: Parasite Eve and Ib.note Her forums avatar, accordingly, depicts the protagonist of Parasite Eve, Aya, edited to have the color scheme and rose motif of the latter game's protagonist, Ib.
- Sudden Name Change: Towards the end of the Jeord and Keith routes, there were some major changes to Katarina's speech boxes. Specifically, the text is no longer in her hair color but in white, and the name is changed from "Katarina Claes" to "Saru-chan".
- Title Drop: When Parasite_Ib mentions the file she downloaded. She then followed it with a detailed explanation of the naming system used in pirated ROM files.
- Unconventional Formatting: When Parasite_Ib mentioned the titular file, the filename is centered and changed to a fixed-width typeface.
- What If?: This fic presents what happens if Katarina's assumption about her world—that the other characters are just pieces of code and so she will meet her doom—was correct, but in a very unusual way—it's presented in the third person on Earth, through a Fortune Lover hack probably created by Atsuko under extreme grief.
