This is the series I point people at when they ask what the checkpoint system is actually for.
82/100 at chapter two. 49/100 at chapter sixty. If I had reviewed this once — at either end — I’d have written something that was confidently wrong. The early chapters are genuinely great, and I stand by every part of that first score. The problem is that they were great in a way that couldn’t scale, and you can only see that in hindsight.
Why the number moved
Thirty-three points down, and the shape of the fall matters more than the size of it.
Pacing collapsed first — 18 to 8. That’s the axis that was carrying the whole thing. When the momentum went, everything downstream of it went too, because not much else was holding the structure up.
Art is the one axis that held. 16 down to 14 across sixty chapters is barely a slide, which is why this gets Wasted Potential as a build label rather than a straight pan. The craft is still there. There’s just nothing underneath it.
Payoff fell furthest in relative terms — 17 to 7 — because the early chapters were visibly setting things up, and by chapter sixty almost none of it had been collected. The escalation had replaced the structure rather than serving it.
What it didn’t do wrong
It never got lazy about the joke. The early humour is precise, the timing is good, and the hook is one of the strongest I read this year. A series can be genuinely excellent for twenty chapters and still not have twenty more in it. That’s not a failure of effort.
Where it could still go wrong
Nowhere. It’s already there, and this is the clearest argument on the site for scoring as you read rather than once at the end.