Story Discussion: March 7th "Love in The Name Of Power" by AWhoopsieDaisy

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

I wanted to explore a very specific dynamic between two very distinct characters. It's quite difficult to summarize but I'll give it a go:

The old king dies without any heirs and an emergency council elects a court wizard who notoriously dislikes dealing with other people to replace him. Adding the caveat that in order to gain autonomy as ruler he needs an heir in order to keep history from repeating itself. The wizard decides the only logical solution is to get himself an arranged marriage and kill his spouse as soon as the first heir is born so he can go back to being a recluse.

The spouse he ends up with is something of a social Butterfly. Incredibly charming and actively volunteered to marry this asshole. The wizard spends a majority of the time convincing himself he's not going to get attached to someone he's clearly already in love with.

It's 11k words so far and the part that is published is part one of a maximum of 3.



[Link to the Story here]



I mostly want to know if this is something people are actually interested in reading. Especially given that its 11k words and only 2kish of that is explicitly pornographic. With most of the sex happening towards the end. Is this an interesting enough read to hold your interest when porn isn't happening?

I'm very interested to hear what people think of Victor as a person. Does he sound like he loves Lazu or does he come off as a manipulative bastard?

 

[HectorBidon]

The write-up in your post does indeed sound interesting, and there's certainly nothing wrong with an interesting story being plot-heavy, especially in Sci/Fi-Fantasy. So I took a look.

I think this is a case where your story might have benefitted from being beta-read, or at least put in a drawer for a week or two and then pulled out and reread with fresh eyes. The writing is competent, but It was hard for me to follow what was going on. I'm not sure I would have understood everything without the synopsis in your post. The introduction is rather disjointed: Victor is such and such, the king's informants form a council, the council leader would earn half the power, Victor finds himself elected, oh, by the way, Victor was on the council. I finally worked out that there are different races, although I don't yet have any idea how this affects the personalities of the characters or the way I should think about them. (I'm afraid I didn't read past the first page.)

Part of the pleasure of reading a story like this are the intellectual twists and turns that make the fantasy situation hold together. This takes a good imagination, but also a precision of expression. Sometimes your twists and turns didn't come through all that clearly. For example:

"Pay lots of money on a regular basis and destroy the entire merchant trade, or simply not conquer one (1) smaller nation. Yup, Victor would rather go broke than end his conquest for a silly bride."

I didn't get exactly what you're trying to say here. Why would disrupting trade routes with one small country destroy the entire merchant trade? Does Victor see this as a good thing (advantageously weakening the other countries), or as a bad thing (because of repercussions on trade in his own country)? Does "end his conquest" here just mean give up looking for a bride, or does it mean give up his dreams of conquering the world? Why are these the only two choices? I realize that this is intended to show Victor's rationale for making his decision, and that it must have a clear meaning in your mind, but that meaning didn't come through to me.

It also wasn't clear how tongue-in-cheek you are trying to be. Themes of love and power are certainly serious, and some of the story does try to establish a higher, serious register. But other times it seems to descend to camp. "He doesn't have time to go on dates." I can't imagine a knighted wizard of Tolkein's even being familiar with the concept of dating.

There were several times where plot points seemed to have been shoehorned in without too much regard for verisimilitude. Lazu's first appearance, rushing forward but being stopped by the queen before he and Victor were able to see each other, even though Victor and the queen had been speaking together face-to-face in the center of the hall just a second before. That seemed contrived. As did the fact that what the newlyweds talked about on their walk down the aisle was the "opinions of the governed."

The main turn off for me was the fact that Lazu is a prince, not a princess. That wasn't what I was expecting, and it killed any erotic interest for me, as I imagine it will for many other readers. Plus he's supposed to give Victor an heir. That means that there must be some kind of gender-bending shenanigans (or, as now I see by reading the tags, "fantasy reproductive anatomy.") That just makes the story even more detached from normal human emotions. I can empathize over a broad range of human feelings, but cat plumbing just doesn't particularly spark my interest. (I might also might wonder if the whole fantasy setting is really necessary at all. If your theme is power and love, there are certainly stories that could be told in the real world without wizards and fur.)

So, anyway, I think you're a very decent writer, but you might pay a bit more attention to your storytelling and "cinematography." Reread your work, or maybe listen to it read by a text-to-speech app like Google Translate. Try to hear it the way it will sound to a naive reader. Does the story come through? Does it develop in a way that is cogent and interesting? Are your scenes vivid and understandable? Do the characters come to life, not just through the labels you ascribe to them but through their own words and actions?

All this, or course, should be taken with a grain of salt. But do please keep writing. That's the main thing.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

This being a story written by myself, a queer woman, taps into a lot of the fundamentals of gay culture. Camp is something a staple in the gay community and in my opinion, can be just as artful and heavy with meaning as purple prose. It's intended to explore a queer specific experience with the themes of love and power. Victor is distinctly meant to parallel someone in a position of power living in the closet, grappling with internalized homophobia. Not something I expected straight people to get intuitively but, I certainly didn't think it would be a turn off on it's own.

The fantasy reproductive anatomy and the tongue in cheek nature of referring to it aren't hiding literally alien anatomy (it's good old-fashioned vagina in Lazu's case) but instead meant to hint at the idea that Lazu's culture doesn't use gender to describe sex at all. Boy and Girl in his culture is literally whether the Marsu has stripes or not. It's a fun jab at Gender as a social construction. I vastly overestimated how much non-queers would pick up on, so that one's on me.