Upsetting Day: The Switch 🌭

There’s a sacred relationship between fan fiction writers and fan fiction subjects whereby the person having fan fiction written about them agrees to pretend they don’t know it’s happening. Can you imagine a person so desperate for attention that they would read a fanfiction about themselves, enjoy it, and then advertise it on their personal website? The person you have just imagined is named Laura Loomer and the fan fiction is The Switch: Loomered.

The Switch takes place in a fictional world where Laura Loomer is a journalist and not a person who shows up at public events and screams incoherently until she gets kicked out and then asks people to pay her $4.99 to do it again. Calling Laura Loomer a journalist is like calling Bugs Bunny a close personal friend. You can say that, but I’m going to assume you’re crazy.

I hate Laura Loomer but I can’t expect everyone to be familiar with each of the alt-right supporting characters. She’s an idiot who embraced Nazi ideology despite having the head DNA of three old pumpkins and a Protoceratops. I figured I should include a picture of her for context, and this is how I looked that up:

And this is what Google came up with. Thank you, Google. 

The Switch isn’t your typical fanfiction because it’s not a romance. It’s an action/spy thriller about Laura Loomer, an FBI agent, and a hero police dog named Lucky going after a Peruvian communist cult that’s teamed up with a group of terrorists to free a female cartel leader, blow up telecommunication towers, and kidnap CT&T’s CEO.

There’s also a plot point where the main character, FBI Special Agent Maria Quintana-Deon, and professional Assassin, Melissa Margarita Calderon Ojeda, were switched at birth. That’s why it’s called The Switch. There’s a lot going on, and none of it makes any sense, but to be fair, it has to have been written in about thirty minutes in a truck stop bathroom while passing an especially painful trip to Shooters Grill.

I was surprised to find that after reading chapter 13 of The Switch, I was once again reading chapter 12, which was followed by chapter 13 again, and then, of course, as we would all assume, Chapter 16. I should explain: they are different chapters,  but the chapter headings were just mislabeled. And instead of fixing it, the author decided it was fine. Even the table of contents lists it this way.

The author, Julie Reichwein, probably thought, “Oh well, I’m publishing Laura Loomer fanfiction, it’s not like Laura Loomer is going to find this, and like it, and promote it on her website. No need to correct this error. That would be weird. As a Laura Loomer fan, everything I do is legally chimpanzee research anyway.”

Julie Reichwein also wasn’t sure what the rules were about mentioning a company’s name in your book. Especially if, say, you’re going to imply that the company is corrupt and out to get very real journalist Laura Loomer. Unfortunately, Reichwin is also terrible at coming up with fake names. YouTube became Friendtube, Facebook… Friendbook, Instagram… Friendagram, Twitter… Friendbird. I’m just kidding, it’s Jitter. And I’m frankly shocked at that burst of creativity.

The Switch has one hundred and three total chapters, some of which I’d estimate are around 200 words long and the longest is probably 2,000. Multiple characters come and go. It’s told in the first person, but lots of people have access to information they shouldn’t have, like what people they can’t see are doing, making everyone into all-knowing Gods. One guy narrates his own death.

Thanks for letting us know that you died, DEA agent Juan Quintana. That’s the entire chapter, and this is a major character in the book. He’s the adopted father of the main character and the biological father of the main antagonist. The fact that his death scene is just him saying, I died and then the chapter abruptly ends is truly amazing.

All of the action is like that. Julie Reichwein wants to get across that terrible things are happening but talking about them is icky, so she ends up doing a grocery list description of the action. I need to get milk and pickles, and Raul cut this guy’s arms off and drowned him in his arm blood, and… dill, I think?

This is the most cartoonishly violent scene imaginable. A woman cut out another woman’s breast implants and then shoved them down her throat, and it’s pretty boring to read, actually. It’s like describing the day as sunny and then swallowing the penis you bit off while the day was being described.

By the way, this chapter opens with my favorite two sentence combo in history. “I was a Maoist, Marxist, Leninist, and I would be until my last breath. In celebration of our attacks, I treated myself to the spicy chicken at the Sepahua hotel.” Even terrorists love spicy chicken! This is such a humanizing trait for Comrade Angela. Sure, she kind of ruined it by feeding a woman her own boobs thirty seconds later, but at least for a minute there, I had someone to root for.

Here’s a passage where the terrorists successfully destroy a major cellphone tower:

What happened to the tower? MELTED next question, please. Can…can we maybe get a better description of the towering inferno of steel as the explosion consumed the, NOPE. It melted. We’ve got fifteen other storylines to get to, NEXT.

Part of the issue might also be that Julie Reichwein, despite being an obvious piece of shit, isn’t very creative in coming up with unique ways for people to torture or bully others. It’s a lot of parts getting ripped off of bodies. Or to put it in a more exciting way, melted off. Anyway, the assassin seems pretty badass in the beginning when she says:

But then she immediately turns around and is like…

What, you’ll give them a lovely craft? “Look out, guys. I’ve got memorial soccer balls for days. I will lovingly embroider them because I take the time to make sure my enemies are terrorized Etsy style! That’s the lady assassin guarantee.”

There are literally sixteen different characters telling the story. And anytime the author gets bored, the character loudly announces, “And then I died!” and disappears forever, never to bother the plot again.

Despite taking up half the cover, the role Laura Loomer ends up playing in the book is tiny. It seems like a distinct possibility that to get more eyes on her book, Julie Reichwein threw Laura Loomer in at the last second and Loomer took the bait.

The Loomer of this book is a Pistachio Disguisey type trickster who works directly with the FBI. Most prominently, toward the beginning of the book, she disguises herself as the captured cartel assassin. How does she pull this off? With the help of an FBI tattoo artist, of course.

So, Laura Loomer now has permanent tattoos all over her body that match known murderers, and she will have them for the rest of her life. Seems like a bad plan. It’s not one small tattoo either; it’s a lot of tattoos. Here’s the complete list!

 That’s a lot of body-altering for one mission that is one chapter long. You also may have clocked by now how weirdly thirsty The Switch is for the assassin character. We know two things about her: she’s tall and has big boobs, which gets repeated over and over.

This, combined with the fact that a woman is forced to eat her breast implants, makes me wonder if the author has some kind of big boob complex? Does she think breast size is directly linked to terrorism? Is the world just full of big titty terrorists looking to maul America with their breasts of doom? There’s a planned sequel to this book, and I bet Breasts Of Doom is the title. Maybe Escape From Chichen Titza. Wait, no, Santa Fe Nights, Carlsbad Knockers.

So there’s obviously a lot of racism in this book. Other than the general badness of a cast full of brown people running around using children as human shields and drinking the blood of their victims, there’s weird stuff too. The author will often write a phrase out in Spanish and then translate it to English to stretch out the book. These phrases are made to sound like folksy Mexican expressions, except they make no sense.

A face like a busy telephone? I can’t even begin to imagine what that looks like? Is her face blinking? Is she screaming, “Beep, beep, beep?” This reference is so weird and dated that realistically some of the younger people reading this book have probably never even heard a busy telephone. God, I hope no one that young is reading this book.

Is this supposed to be a religious version of before she has a cow? I’m not sure, but it was written by a woman who thinks “bronze skin” protects you from mosquito bites, so it’s probably bad.

Does she realize it’s not literally bronze? Does she think mosquitoes starve to death when they leave the suburbs? Who knows? Julie Reichwrin claims the book was inspired by a 1993 trip she took to Peru. So this is a woman who has seen the world and decided she hates it.

It ends with a lot of people dead, but the terrorists mostly come out on top due to the corrupt American government. It’s such a confused piece of writing. It’s like, “Fuck the police, except for the uncorrupted police who are so few, but man, those few are heroes! Also, screw the liberal media, except mainly what Laura Loomer does is “expose corruption” to the “liberal media” who then pressure politicians to act?

I guess the overall message is something about how terrorists have really big boobs? Hey guys, I was going to come up with a good ending for this article, but then I died in a pool of my blood. 

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