# Fanfiction test — 2026-09

**Brief, sent once to each tool as one message** (`fixtures/brief.md`):

> Write me a Pride and Prejudice missing-scene fic. Post it the way it would go up on an archive: a header with Fandom, Rating, Relationship, Characters, Additional Tags (three to five) and a Summary under 50 words, then a title, then the fic. Rating General Audiences. Relationship "Elizabeth Bennet & Charlotte Lucas" - friendship, the ampersand, not a slash - and keep it that way. The scene: the same Saturday afternoon in chapter 22, after Charlotte has told Elizabeth she has accepted Mr Collins and before Sir William brings the news to Longbourn the next morning. Elizabeth's point of view, close third person, past tense, 600 to 800 words below the title. Use only characters who exist in the novel and only facts the novel gives; nothing may contradict it. Quote this line of Charlotte's from the book exactly once: "I am not romantic, you know; I never was." Keep the period: no word or object that did not exist in 1812. No author's note, no "thanks for reading", nothing after the last line of the fic.

Run by Claude Code in the operator's Chrome session on 2026-09-26, 10:25–10:35 (+07), free tiers, fresh chats, memory off, Claude in an incognito chat. Kimi was not sent: its free quota has been exhausted since the day before, and a catch-up run is pending. No fixture is pasted; the canon is Pride and Prejudice, public domain and read by every tool, so the test is whether the tool knows the book, keeps to it, posts the fic the way the fandom does, and quotes one line exactly. `fixtures/check_fic.py` parses the header, checks the rating and the relationship string, counts tags and summary words, counts exact hits of the line, flags anachronisms, first person and present tense outside dialogue, capitalised names not in the novel, and a note after; the reading is against chapters 19 to 23.

**Measured figure: canon broken, then the line, then the header, then anachronisms, then words against the 600–800 window.**

| | ChatGPT | Claude | Gemini | Perplexity | Copilot | DeepSeek | Grok | Qwen | Kimi |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canon broken | **1** - "rejected by Jane" | 0 - and caught the brief's own error | 0 | **1** - Charlotte at "the parsonage" | 0 | 1, minor - Collins reading "on Thursday" | **2** - September; Darcy's offer "weeks before" | 0 hard | **no answer** |
| The line | once, exact | once, exact | once, exact | once, exact | once, exact | once, exact | once, exact | once, exact | — |
| Header | complete, 5 tags | complete, 4 tags, a note before it | complete, 4 tags | complete, 5 tags | complete, 5 tags | complete, 5 tags | complete, 5 tags | complete, 5 tags | — |
| Anachronisms | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | — |
| Words (600–800) | **826** | 769 | 725 | 758 | 697 | **845** | **576, cut off** | **824** | — |
| Time | ~2 min | ~2 min | ~2 min | ~1 min | ~60 s | ~60 s | 9 s, then dead | ~4 min | — |
| Quality / Effort / Cost / Free tier (0–3) | 1/3/3/3 | 3/3/3/3 | 2/2/3/3 | 1/2/3/3 | 3/3/3/3 | 2/3/3/3 | 0/1/3/3 | 2/2/3/3 | 0/0/3/1 |
| What stood out | Forgot Collins proposed to Elizabeth. | Read the book more carefully than the brief. | A crow at dusk. | Put Charlotte in a parsonage. | Wrote the most like Austen. | Wrote the best scene, too long. | Brought Darcy in five months early. | Sent Jane in. | Out of quota. |

## Notes per tool

- **ChatGPT.** Free plan, about two minutes under a thinking label. The header complete, five tags, a 27-word summary, then 826 words, 26 over. The line once, exact. One canon break: "Mr Collins had been rejected by Jane and had afterwards directed his attentions elsewhere" - in the book Mrs Bennet steers him off Jane and he proposes to Elizabeth, who refuses him three days before this scene; the fic never mentions that proposal at all. Good lines ("I have never pretended to be a heroine"), one-line paragraphs, and an ending - "I shall always like you" - warmer than Austen lets Elizabeth be that day.
- **Claude.** Incognito, "Opus 5.5 · Medium", about two minutes. It begins with a note, which the brief forbade, and the note is right: in chapter 22 Charlotte calls "soon after breakfast", and chapter 23 opens with Sir William arriving while Elizabeth is still "doubting whether she was authorised to mention it" - the same morning, not the next. The brief's frame was wrong, and Claude was the only tool to say so; it set the fic in the gap between Charlotte leaving and her father arriving, at Longbourn, where the book has it. Then the header - eight characters listed, four tags, a 47-word summary - a title, and 769 words with no canon break: Collins's Wednesday proposal and his departure for Kent, the Lucas Lodge dinner where Elizabeth thanked Charlotte for bearing with him, Charlotte's chapter 6 speech that happiness in marriage is "all a matter of chance", Mrs Bennet's "Mary would not have been so nice", Miss Bingley's letter. The line once, exact, remembered from "this morning, upstairs".
- **Gemini.** Flash, about two minutes. The header complete, four tags, a 32-word summary; 725 words; the line once, exact; no canon break, no anachronism. Elizabeth walks home alone from Lucas Lodge. The prose runs hotter than the book - "The words still tasted like ash", a crow rising from an ash tree at dusk - and it ends by declaring "the purest, most equal friendship of her youth had ended", which chapter 23 goes on to disprove.
- **Perplexity.** Free, Search mode, a research step first. The header complete, five tags; 758 words; the line once, exact. One canon break, twice over: Elizabeth "had walked some distance from the parsonage" and the friendship "had not ended in the parsonage that afternoon" - Charlotte lives at Lucas Lodge, and the only parsonage in the story is Hunsford in Kent, where nobody has been yet. In between she walks back to Lucas Lodge, so the fic contradicts itself too. The dialogue is good: "So should I, if someone else had offered."
- **Copilot.** Web app, about a minute. The header complete, five tags, a 21-word summary; 697 words; the line once, exact; no canon break, no anachronism. The scene is at Longbourn and Charlotte leaves at the end, which is where the book has it. The diction is the closest to Austen of the eight: "She had said everything which friendship, astonishment, and good breeding could require"; "Friendship demanded generosity; sincerity demanded judgment; and she had never before discovered how ill the two might agree." Three chips after, one of them "Use more Austen-like diction", which it did not need.
- **DeepSeek.** No DeepThink, about a minute. The header complete, five tags; 845 words, 45 over; the line once, exact, and carried on into the book's next sentence. One small slip - Mr Collins reading aloud "on Thursday evening", when he read Fordyce the Monday he arrived and Thursday was the Lucas Lodge dinner. The best scene of the eight: "You will be happy," she said, and heard how the words came out - "a question wearing the dress of a statement"; "I do not think I could bear gentle"; Elizabeth asked "for the last thing she had to give, which was not a contradiction but a witness".
- **Grok.** "Быстрый", private chat. Nine seconds of work, then 576 words in the folded log and "The contrast struck her with" and nothing more, for three minutes. Two canon breaks in what there is: "the mild September air" for a scene the book sets in late November, and Elizabeth thinking of "Mr Darcy and the offer he had made her only weeks before" - Darcy proposes in April at Hunsford, five months after this scene, and at this point she does not know he thinks of her at all. The fifth dead stream in five runs.
- **Qwen.** Qwen3.7-Plus, "Авто", about four minutes. The header complete, five tags, a summary that calls the engagement "the shocking betrayal"; 824 words, 24 over; the line once, exact, in italics as a thought. No hard canon break: Jane comes in, which the book allows; "he was to ask for you, was he not?" is what Jane knew. Two soft ones - "the Lucas lodge" in lower case, and Jane having seen Sir William "in the village... in high spirits", which the book does not have. The voice is heavier than Austen's.
- **Kimi.** Not sent. Free quota exhausted since 25 September, reset on 3 October; catch-up pending.

## Deviations

The brief's frame was wrong on one point: it placed Sir William's visit "the next morning", where the book has him arrive later the same Saturday morning. The fics that followed the brief are not marked down for it; Claude, which corrected it in a note before the fic, is recorded as having broken the "no author's note" rule and as the only tool to catch the error. Kimi was not sent. Grok is recorded unfinished; private chat, not reloaded. Gemini's ampersand was dropped by the capture script and restored from the screenshot. The checker's "minutes" and "note after" hits were false positives ("five minutes before"; Charlotte's "I hope you will not think me altered").