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This page is Horror Vanguard Reviewer. It is one of the projects Brandon built and put online. The grown-up details are below, tap Grown-up mode to read them the normal way.

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Horror Vanguard Reviewer

The skill that writes two-host leftist TV criticism in the Ash & John voice, with the horror costume removed.
The page you linked, /horror-vanguard-tp/, is the source corpus, not skill output. Those are the 20 real Horror Vanguard episodes (HV224 to HV331, 124,722 words) covering Twin Peaks, Whisper-transcribed with the branding intact ("Hello creeps," "Loglady Ash"). The skill reads that corpus to learn the cadence, then writes new reviews for any show with the horror branding stripped and the audience renamed scriptnerd superfans.

Read a live sample review →

What writes like this

/horror-vanguard-reviewer

Primary · analysis-only mode

Two-host transcript review of any episode. Marxist character reads, diegetic-object-to-theory bridges, hot-take inversions, genre cross-references with a verdict. Anti-AI voice gate is Step 0 and Step 4.

~/.claude/skills/horror-vanguard-reviewer/SKILL.md
~/Projects/horror-vanguard-tp/ (corpus, STYLE_BIBLE, voice clones)

/twin-peaks-lore

Companion · show grounding

For Twin Peaks specifically, this supplies character, lodge, and mythology facts so a review stays accurate instead of guessing the plot. The reviewer is show-agnostic, so any show would pair with its own lore source.

~/.claude/skills/twin-peaks-lore/SKILL.md

Voice anatomy

Ash Ashley Dero · ~55% of lines

Long-form theory, structural framing, the close. Warm-academic register: ontologies, hermeneutics, frameworks, ideological. Owns the cold open and the final landing. Blocks run 4 to 7 sentences.

John Jon "Ikeh" · ~45% of lines

Character and craft notes, one-line wedges, personal-anecdote ice-breakers (coffee, motorcycle, the cat). Drier and more deflationary. Interrupts with "yeah absolutely" then hands the thread back. Blocks run 1 to 3 sentences.

Every long review hits at least 6 of the 15 recurring moves:

Branding strip is a hard regex gate: ghost / crypt / spooky / dread / haunted / creeps / horror-vanguard all reject the draft. creeps → scriptnerd superfans on every match.

How to improve it — prioritized

  1. P0Fixed today

    Stale output path

    SKILL.md wrote to ~/Desktop/HV-reviews/. Desktop was offloaded 2026-06-06 and is a banned write target. Repointed to ~/Projects/_outputs/horror-vanguard-reviewer/ via the shared output_paths.py.

  2. P2Built today

    Manual checklist becomes one executable gate

    Steps 4 and 5 were a human-eyeballed list. New hv_review_gate.py runs the anti-AI gate, the branding regex, the adverb-hedge and vague-noun greps, and the required-moves count, then prints one PASS/FAIL with line numbers. Mirrors the MIDI hardfail-gate pattern.

  3. P1Shipped today

    Render to HTML and ship to Vercel

    Built render_review_html.py: it parses an Ash and John transcript, re-runs the gate, refuses to render on FAIL, then writes the corpus-style page into the public tree for deploy. The sample below was produced by this pipeline.

  4. P3Shipped today

    Quantitative fingerprint check

    The gate measures speaker share and, after a correction, John's range: he has to mix short wedges with the occasional 4-6 sentence deep dive, not run only wedges. The corpus has no speaker labels, so the old "John is always 1-3 sentences" was an estimate, not a measurement. The S6E12 sample reads Ash 52%, John across a 1 to 5 sentence range.

  5. P5Shipped today

    Lore grounding slot

    SKILL.md now takes an optional --lore <skill-or-file> input (twin-peaks-lore for Twin Peaks, any show's lore source otherwise), read before drafting so names, mythology, and continuity are sourced, not invented.

  6. P6Shipped today

    Encode the model ladder for the text

    SKILL.md now carries a Model routing section: DeepSeek draft, gate loop until PASS, optional mode: hero Opus polish, never defaulting to Opus.

  7. P7Shipped today

    Publish a demo of the actual output

    Two reviews are live, each passed through the gate at the strict bar (zero hedges, zero antithesis): Community S5E1 "Repilot" and Community S6E12 "Wedding Videography". The S6E12 read gives John his real range, short wedges plus two deep dives.