Someone New
is a friend insert fanfiction of Muv-Luv by luckychaos and BakaSmurf, starring the former and written by the latter. Lucky's self-insert character, Juyo Janai, replaces the protagonist of Muv-Luv in a story that follows the events of Extra, Unlimited, and Alternative. The feels are just as heavy as in the original, and it serves as a good introduction for those unfamiliar with the series.
As a Friend Insert, Lucky went into the project completely blind, allowing his actions and reactions to be completely organic as Baka described what happened. As such, in order to keep that blindness, open spoilers were not tolerated in the thread where the story was shown to the audience.
As of November 6, 2021, Someone New is complete.
Someone New contains examples of:
- The Ace: What the Alternative cast saw Juyo as at first due to what they saw as an impossibly skilled and talented soldier. This caused Alternative's version of Squad 207 to look up to him and consider him a banner to rally behind, which greatly improved their effectiveness. Gradually transitioned into Broken Ace once it became clear that Juyo lacked the emotional support he needed thanks to his squad having idolized him to an extent, coupled with the trauma that he had accumulated by that point.
- Awesomeness by Analysis: One thing that Juyo started with that the canon protagonist Takeru lacked until much later. Due to being a more mature individual from the start, he's capable of picking up on and acting on more subtle cues. However, he was just as prone to missing obvious things if he's too focused on something.
- Blessed with Suck: Come Alternative, Juyo quickly discovered that he was in possession of memories of all Unlimited and Extra timelines. While it was a priceless ability initially, the negative effects began to rear their ugly heads more and more. As while it granted him the memories of every possible timeline prior to Alternative, those memories included everything up to his death. Furthermore, if he focused on any one set of memories too much, it was possible to overwrite the current timeline to an extent, causing potentially irreparable damage to those around him.
- Broken Ace: Subtle at first come Alternative's arc, but became increasingly obvious as time went on that Juyo only barely had everything together. He broke completely as of the most current chapters.
- Failed a Spot Check: On numerous occasions. In Extra, he failed to put even the most obvious pieces together as to why Meiya had an attraction to him or what she held dear, forcing her to spell it out for him and causing that cycle to end early. In Alternative, his inability to abandon his memories with Meiya from the Unlimited timeline nearly screws him over as he doesn't follow up on the plot point of Sumika being a disembodied brain at the end of Unlimited until his incompatibility with Alternative!Meiya drives an irreconcilable wedge between the two.
- Fish out of Water: Happened twice: First Juyo is dumped into a life not his own, causing him to flounder about for nearly the entirety of Extra. Then he gets hit with this again come Unlimited as he is shifted from a happy, if cliche civilian life to a desperate military life. Neither scenario is played for laughs. Averted for the Alternative timeline, as his military training makes him more prepared for life than that timeline's version of his own squadmates.
- From Bad to Worse: Juyo starts off in the relatively cliche, yet happy go lucky Extra timeline before suddenly finding himself stuck in a desolate wasteland as his introduction of Unlimited. Then, after the failure of Alternative IV in the Unlimited timeline, he finds himself dumped into the Alternative timeline...
- Genki Girl: Sumika is a textbook example. Tamase qualifies as well.
- Genre Shift: Started off as a jaunt through a cliche harem anime story. Abruptly shifted into a depressing war against space aliens the moment Juyo got comfortable with the former.
- In the End, You Are on Your Own: Combined with Dying Alone for a double-whammy. It is revealed midway through the Alternative arc that Juyo's Mental Time Travel is as much a curse as is a blessing, as it regales to the readers in graphic detail how the Unlimited version of Squadron 207 gets picked apart by BETA and man alike in the aftermath of Alternative IV's failure. It goes without saying that this version of Juyo does not outlast his squad by much.
- Improbably Female Cast: Played with in Extra where most of the cast is female and few male characters are shown. Gradually shifts to averted in the Unlimited and Alternative timelines where more male characters are introduced. However, this is still played darkly straight to an extent in the latter two timelines as it is explained that the male-dominated military system had been decimated by the BETA during the initial invasion, to the point where virtually every surviving government needed to start drafting women en-mass to have anything resembling a fighting chance.
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Iron Woobie: Juyo in a nutshell come Alternative. Unlimited had slung plenty of stones at him during his run in that timeline, but Alternative seems to go out of its way to kick him even harder. Somehow, he still manages to soldier on. - Mental Time Travel: The story of Alternative features this as the premise. Not only does Juyo experience a Peggy Sue of Unlimited, he does it with the memories of every possible version of himself that went through the scenario, as if he had lived through near-infinite loops but can remember them only now.
- Not as You Know Them: The Juyo inserted into the story replaces the version native to Extra. While he was able to keep up appearances for the most part, he could not fool Sumika. She's torn between relief at how Juyo's personality appeared to have performed a one-eighty, and concern that he's functionally the Juyo she knew in name only.
- Nuclear Option: The US tried this against the BETA once conventional weapons failed, but it didn't work.
- At the end of the Unlimited timeline, Juyo discovers that Alternative V, the last-last-ditch plan for after Yuuko's failed, is to send the cream of humanity into space to colonize a different world while simultaneously wrecking the surface of the earth with G-bombs. While the evacuees survive, as expected, the bombs fail to wipe out the BETA, serving only to make Earth uninhabitable for humans.
- Off the Rails: Given how Juyo is not Takeru in any way shape or form, this was bound to happen. From a story standpoint, Alternative is still this to Unlimited, as it is the point at which Juyo's Mental Time Travel advantage is nearly completely negated, forcing him to instead rely on his own cunning to get by.
- Trapped in Another World: Juyo is explicitly from a timeline divorced from any of the canon Muv-Luv timelines, so this ends up happening a grand total of three times as opposed the two in canon.
- Tsundere: Averted. Sumika was this towards Takeru in the original Muv-Luv Extra, but Juyo completely defuses the violent aspect of her personality simply by not being a jerk to her. What she sees as a sudden change in personality comes as a shock to her, but it significantly improves the relationship between the two.
