Bidoof’s Summer Solstice 2026 Marathon Results
| Title | Medium | Playtime | Characters | Pages |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 Fate/Stay Night |
VN (browser) | 11h12m | 147.025 | 1.718 |
 Fatal Twelve |
VN (Steam) | 2h49m | ~37.000 | ~430 |
| Total | Only VNs | 14h01m | ~184.000 | ~2.150 |
The results of Fatal Twelve have been extrapolated through the fact I thought I was using a similar pace to F/SN and there’s no way to look up the script of the game
Fate/Stay Night
…is a visual novel I’ve been bouncing on and off for the longest time: I might have played it on everything, including on a phone on Android back a decade ago or aomething 
I really like the characters from the novel and I’m not surprised that it was possible to build an entire media empire built on top of that
I have a running joke that F/SN will become compulsory reading in literature classes in 2050 in Japan and I have no reason to believe it’s not true so far xddd
I accidentally clicked an option at the end of day 3 that was consistent with Shirou’s characterization and I thought it was obvious that he’d do it, and it ended up leading me to bad ending, and then the bad ending was a fakeout and it turned out not to be an ending, it probably still is bad though xddd
Fatal Twelve
A yuri visual novel, that has a lot to like and pretty cute world characterization! One thing I immediately liked about the game is the protagonist, how outgoing she is and how well functioning she appears!
Unfortunately, I still have a feeling it just hits an anime trope after an anime trope, so even though I think it’s probably better than, say, Worldend Syndrome, it will not become a cult classic ^^
I’d be really happy if I could finish it one day and I see only my laziness going in the way of finishing it!
Thoughts about reading
Malinkal reflected in his study log that:
I can vouch for some of this feeling, yesterday might have been one of the first days where I was like
*checks phone in english over the break*
*puts on a timer*
*gets back to reading in japanese*
*doesn’t even realize that the language changed between those two actions*
I think the thing I’m the happiest about is that usually when I get to reading in Japanese there is this warmup period where I look at the characters and they don’t form sentences and I go like “I can’t read in Japanese” for the first 15 minutes of me doing so - that wasn’t the case yesterday and I could pretty quickly understand what’s been going on
When I switched over from F/SN where I could rely on plentiful lookups (thank you 言峰綺礼!) to Fatal Twelve, I realized that there are a few words where I know the three potential readings for the word, I know only one of them is correct, and I don’t remember the meaning, and it was making me a little >:[, but it didn’t get into understanding the plot, luckily
I’ve done a lot of progress over the last year in terms of both reading speed and understanding what I’m reading, but I still feel like there’s lots to go, and I need to just smash novel after novel after novel after novel to eventually get there.
State of yuri in 2026
I genuinely do feel like Fatal Twelve is doing a lot of things right and allowing yuri to breathe a bit, but I would be lying if I said I consider the prose even remotely comparable in terms of enjoyment between Fate/Stay Night and Fatal Twelve, so let’s find out in 2027 if I still feel the same way about yuri there ^^
Since then I’ve become a patron of Galette and I’ve been reading a lot of Comic Yurihime, so I’m a bit more on a yuri train than I was 12 months ago.
On neurodivergence
Over marathons past I’ve been making remarks that I’m getting better at listening to my body and understanding where I’m hitting my limits, aaand no I’m not.
Marathons for me should come with an upper limit in addition to the lower limit of reading time, because of course I can read even longer, and of course I’ll be there in the moment, it’s only when you wake up you realize your throat is very dry, your head is spinning, your sentences are mixing up between languages, and you don’t realize that in a given moment.
The six breaks I’ve made over the course of the marathon are not optional and I really need to just jump on a bike, flex my muscles, look at something in the distance, and if anything, I think that they might have not been long enough, especially the one before the final block.
Which is why, once again, I’m insanely impressed with @Akashelia’s winter marathon score this year and I will not be trying to challenge the score.
Good luck to everyone reading and let’s smash the marathon records together! C: