Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo are important cultural works that ignited the Philippine Revolution against Spain. They are novels that exposed to the populace the abuses and the injustices of their Spanish colonial rulers, the hypocrisy of their priests, and inherent cruelty of their class structure over the powerless masses.

Unfortunately, they rose up in the middle of the Spanish-American War, one which saw Spain lose most of their overseas colonies and decisively end as a World Power. The war ended in the 1898 Treaty of Paris, in which Spain also sold the Philippines to the USA for the sum of twenty million dollars. The revolutionary government was then crushed by the overwhelming military might of the United States and the Philippines turned into a territory. While the Philippines stands as the USA's greatest successes in nation-building, their early occupation left almost one-fifth of the population dead from combat and disease. Jose Rizal was executed by the Spanish long before knowing what might happen to his country. The world presented within The Noli and the El Fili is therefore stuck frozen in time, forever caught in that moment before a Revolution. Now let's see what happens to this nation if we give it the Light Novel treatment and jam the entirety of the Internet into their protagonist's skull and watch him try to fix things with his unfortunate tendency to sound like a supervillain.

Updates Mondays and Fridays.

Note: The Noli and El Fili have been public domain since 1946. This is completely fair game.