zyzzyva1936-blog-blog

[zyzzyva1936-blog-blog]

The wonderful @jilldoesprompts created this to illustrate a scene from my story, Paladin. Check her stuff out! (And maybe check my story out while you’re looking ;) )

[zyzzyva1936-blog-blog]

I did a story of my own!

It’s... not erotic. Or mc. The plot twisted so far in my hands that I ended up adding explicit confirmation that the protagonist is ace. But it’s a story I like and it’s soaking in historical context*. So go check it out! :) https://www.wattpad.com/625368084-paladin *It would be entirely accurate to describe it as Weird fanfic of the history book I was reading this summer.

[zyzzyva1936-blog-blog]

“The Boys of Summer”

 Published: 21 July, 2018

https://mcstories.com/BoysOfSummer/index.html

And we’re off!

Both in the “yay, more Girls(tm) stories” sense, and in the “Holy crap, phase II is finally grinding into motion” sense. We’ve been waiting on this through two Girls stories and almost exactly a year of real time (since the epilogue of Girls With Guns, natch) and it’s exciting to have plot again! ...Not in a “booo, low-stakes stories suck and I hate them” way, cause I don’t, but more because I need to fill this newshole somehow and it’s easier if there’s plot points to theorize about. ;)

So, yeah. The Boys(tm). We finally have some knock-off Girls, and wouldn’t you know it, they’re being made by Apple Revolution Technologies*, complete with all the horrible control-freak tendencies that makes Apple such a joy to use/develop for/have existing in the consumer-products space. Only, of course, Revolution has actual mind-control technology, which obviously Apple would sell their own children for makes things a bit different than in our world. Thematically, this is crying out to be compared to Girls Just Want to Have Fun, our platonic example for what and how the Girls do to people**; the opening paragraph (in each case, of the protagonist coming home from work nervous about what people might think of them getting a new sex toy, despite being rationally aware that no one else would actually know what’s going on) seems like a direct callback. But the Boy here is... very different. Eye layzors and sexy plastic bods in colours that do not appear in nature, obviously, but the attitude is totally different. The Girl in Girls Just Want to Have Fun is very cautious and deferential, even when she is obviously (to an outside observer) taking control of the situation, and the other party; whereas the Boy here just comes out guns blazing and basically romps over Cara’s consciousness. She’s calling him “master***” within, what, less than 15 minutes? Certainly not too long, even granted that there might be more foreplay that’s being compressed away for the flow of the story.

Plus, of course, the epilogue, where we get to see Cara a little while later (my guess is a week or so) and it’s... kinda scary? Like, good moderately-hot scary, but definitely a new feel for the otherwise warm and fuzzy Girls series. I’m particularly amused at how the Boy doesn’t even try to make Cara look like a normal, non-brainwashed human being; she throws out all her furniture and responds to conversation with robotic corporate slogans. I also hope that, for the sake of being interesting villains, Revolution has a bigger plan than just making its new recruits buy a bunch of crap out of short-sighted corporate greed****. Maybe the Boy using her apartment as some kind of recruiting station or something, I dunno? We’ll see, I’m sure.

So yup. Great stuff. Darkest Girls story no question - I have a feeling all of the “Boys” sub-stories are going to be much darker than average, if most or all Boy-buyers end up where Cara ends up - but quite great. I���m looking forward to the Girls finding out about this, erm, misuse of their skills, and I am very excited - as much as I ever have been for the Girls stories, I think - to see where this goes next.

*I finally get to use the joke from my superhero reviews in the Girls reviews! But seriously, Revolution is Apple. Leaving aside the reference to their packaging aesthetics and the fact that head boss Dyson from Girls With Guns has a very Steve Jobsian attitude, their logo is even a “perpetually-spinning flywheel”. ;) **Or, the previous story, Girl Next Door. I was a little down on it when it came out, since I was kinda rearing to go for this story or the like, and it is a bit oddly paced from the reading-one-story-every-few-months view. But if you look through the stories in order it does do a pretty nice job of reminding the reader of how exactly the standard (no frills or complications) Girl recruitment goes, to better contrast with the woah aggressive approach of the Boys. (Plus how much less functional poor Cara seems compared to Chandra, afterwards.) From the perspective of a hypothetical c. 2022 reader, reading the whole series as one pdf or whatever, it would probably actually fit in quite nice. ***Fun trivia fact: only one person in the entire series, so far, has called a Girl “mistress” (Fern, in Girl Crush), and she is I think the most explicitly D/s-type sub in the whole series. I think you could make the argument that Cara is also a sub, and has told Revolution this on the purchase form, and that’s why the Boy comes on so strong; and a dommy or vanilla Boy customer would have a different experience, that at least looks from the outside a little more like the typical Girl experience. But on the other hand, that’s mostly extrapolation and even if it’s true, @jukeboxemcsa made this the exemplar Boy recruitment. That means something, I think.

****Of course, short-sighted corporate greed has turned out to be basically the end boss for human civilization, so what do I know? If it turns out Revolution is just trying to scrounge up a last few billion dollars on tables and tvs before the icecaps melt and the farmland dries up and blows away the Girls run everything, I could hardly fault Jukebox for making his villains implausible.

[zyzzyva1936-blog-blog]

A Review Series I’m Not Going To Do

(Probably, anyways.) There is (probably) not going to be a @gigglinggoblin review series. I feel a little bit guilty about that, since their stuff is pretty high up the list of writers I’ve found recently and greatly enjoy*. But there’s a couple of reasons why I’m not planning to. First, basically, their stories tend to be rather longer than my usual 5-10k fare, and unlike @midorikonton‘s Lemma series, are nowheres near episodic enough to be scarfed down in chunks. Second, there’s not as much worldbuilding per chapter as in Lemma, or in either of @jukeboxemcsa‘s main series, because Third, they’ve already done great big huge lore posts up on their own tumblr. (They don’t seem to have a tag for this, or otherwise I’d be linking that***.) Also, they periodically do mini Q&As and answer people’s lore questions. So basically, there’s not a slot for me at all. I will satisfy myself by pointing my followers at them, declaring it to be good****, and moving on.

...All right, all right, one minireview. To give an idea of why I like them so much. This is a rather long and involved answer to a reader question (I told you they’ve already done my analysis for me) about trans- and other queer folk in their setting, the Cloistered Lands. Basically, it is just... great? It’s inclusive and also very thoughtful about that inclusivity. The main idea (since we have magic, let’s just ask the baby about its identity on birth) is clever and a really great way of establishing an inclusive society right off, and the examples given are great (I particularly like the bit about benedicians hating on mindweavers who come up with pet names for their victims). Also there’s a quick follow up where they talk about the actual kind of gender identities that pop up in the Cloistered Lands, and which filled me with the irresistible image of a one of the dandelion-gendered people being inspired to become a Research Benedician to experimentally determine the actual meaning of it*****. Their whole output is like that. It’s a clever and interesting setting, and I haven’t even gotten to the Reality yet! (You’ll have to read yourself to learn what that is, but I’ll say it reminded me of the backstory of @orbitaldropkick​'s K6BD, only even less deterministically straightforward, if you can imagine such a thing.) It’s just great. Go out there and archive binge.

...Right, and, like, read the stories on the literotica page too, I guess. If you’re into that sort of thing. ;P

*Also up there would probably be @devi-lacroix, who is also not getting a review series... anytime soon, at least. Get to three “Modern Azusas” stories and we’ll talk**. **Specifically, we’ll talk about the Regency and Republic condominium, which is both an excellent phrase, and which I have ideas about. ;) ***Hey, that’s it, I’ll resolve my feelings of guilt by forwarding them a list of posts for them to throw their new “nonerotic” tag on. :) ****Well, OK, intelligence reduction is not my bag, and neither is mommykink. But that’s not a huge part of their stories? (Although they clearly like them both a lot.) And in any case I’m following them approximately 75% for the lore posts anyways at this point. ;) *****Yes, this is a silly idea. No, I regret nothing.

[zyzzyva1936-blog-blog]

Lemma Index

Just a bookkeeping post for all the reviews, in reading order.

Intro, Terrifying Vision, Run Out of Stories

Prologue

The Glamour-ous Life of a Slave

Of Potions and Pimples

By the Book

A Rock and a Hard Place

Sucker for a Good Book

Beast of the (Morning) Wood

Tricks of the Trade (and Part 2)

The Witch and the Warlock

Diminishing Returns

The Choosing One

Op-arrr-ant Conditioning

Hard Truths

The Contractually Obligatory Anachronistic Beach Episode

Possession With Intent

The Last Dance

The Choice

Conclusion, Ranking

[zyzzyva1936-blog-blog]

Oh, not arguing the KJV isn’t sometimes - and probably right here specifically - terrible.* Just that it does have its finger on a lot of the traditional interpretations of things. Which is a part of why it’s sometimes such a bad translation. *KJV-onlyism is, in my opinion, pretty much the funniest heresy imaginable.

“Lemma the Librarian - The Choice”

Published: 5 May, 2018

http://www.mcstories.com/LemmaTheLibrarian/index.html

Spoilers in effect.

And here we are at the very end (almost). The Chekov’s gun doomspell Lemma’s been toting around since “Sucker For a Good Book” and which has been hanging over her head specifically since “The Choosing One” finally pays off, and it’s pretty great*.

A lot of things are paid off here, actually (they’d better be, it’s the climax of the series). Rhoda gets to be heroic, as usual***; Lemma and Iola have only been on the outs for one story but they resolve that again; Iason, big doofy slab of decency that he is, gets to sacrifice himself for the greater good; Lemma gets to finally admit that she loves Iason and rescue him from his heroic sacrifice. And they kiss, for real, for the first time.

And Iola gets to make up for “Iola Special!” and “The Choosing One”. Which is not the most important part of the plot in this story - you could, and I probably will, argue that the whole arc is about Lemma and Iason hooking up - but it’s the part that makes me the happiest. Lemma and Iason bounce back from some pretty awful shit without blinking; Iola’s been dealing with it in a much worse (put probably more plausible) way, as symbolized by the two times so far she’s refused Iason’s offer of their father’s sword out of guilt****.

Now she’s got another group of innocent, besieged women to defend from evil, soul-eating forces, and she does so. (The destruction of Ardatlili is probably the cleverest single thing in the story; the fact that Iola and Ardatlili got a death-feud going in less than six hours beats out even Rhoda’s goodness and puppies speech for the funniest.*****) Iola is finally able to think of herself as a hero again, she’s rescued hundreds of people******, earned her father’s sword (at least in her own eyes; I’m with Iason that it was always hers for the taking), and can go off and have exciting adventures fighting monsters and saving people again. It’s great.

Iason and Lemma finally have an honest discussion about their feelings (the fact that Iason is a dom, and just has been too decent and self-concious to act on it, is a little over-neat but by this point Lemma has damn well earned it). And that’s it for the publicly available stories! There’s one more story, an epilogue, but @midorikonton​ has thankfully made this a satisfying jumping-off point. I’ll cover the epilogue (briefly) next time. 

*Back then Lemma described the spell as being really, really simple and low-power, which in this sort of thing is usually just puffery. But the description of it in this actually does bear that out, which is a nice touch. Relatedly, Vamp!Brea’s plan is never laid out explicitly, but my suspicion is that it would have been to have Lemma slag the city as soon as possible, unmaking Ardatlili** and Asmodai and Iason and Iola but “protecting” the world from destruction.

**Blink and you miss it, but she survives! Iola kills her, which really just means unsummoning, so she isn’t in Hattush when it gets unmade. So she’s still kicking around, which wouldn’t make a bad sequel hook.

***We also get a hilarious explanation of how Rhoda makes heroic demon-summoning work:

“[…]They’re evil, they can only get you if you do evil, and we’re good guys, so we don’t.“

I stopped dead in the street and stared at her.

“What?” she asked.

“You…” I sputtered. "How are you not already in some demon’s thrall?“

“Because I’m a good guy,” she repeated slowly and with emphasis. “So I don’t do evil, so they can’t get me.”

It’s usually the other way around - “I’m a good guy, so what I’m doing can’t be evil” - and that leads to lots of awful things. Rhoda’s got it the right way around, which is harder; but I suppose in a career where your soul will be eaten within 30s of your first evil deed, you’ve got what we call incentive.

****At the ends of “The Glamour-ous Life of a Slave” and “The Choosing One”, natch.

*****It reminded me of a particularly quotable joke from the always-brilliant Narbonic. “Dave… have you been battling my arch-nemesis behind my back?” “He’s our arch-nemesis now, Helen.” Incidentally, @midorikonton is also a big fan of Narbonic, as all right-thinking people should be. ;) ****** “Oh, by the way, all the kids escaped” is a little funny in its blunt contrivance - right up there with “a monster is attacking the abandoned warehouse district!” from Power Rangers. But, as the DCEU movies have been working very hard to prove, the alternative is much, much worse. Besides, I’ve spent half the review series nursing a grudge against the opening of “The Choosing One”; I can hardly complain that Jenny has since learned better. :)

When The Fuck Are We? 🤷

Hattush is Ḫattuša, the Hittite capital, probably, although there’s mostly only circumstantial evidence here. (The goddess whose temple they end up defending is Hittite, at any rate.) In the real world, the Hittites were an empire in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) that dominated the near east towards the end of the Bronze Age. Part of the reason for this was their early mastery of iron; still rare and expensive, but enough to kick off the Iron Age and give them a crushing strategic advantage. (This gets a minor shout-out in the story; Hattush is where Iason’s father had his sword forged.) Ḫattuša was destroyed along with the Hittite Empire and a lot of other places during the Bronze Age Collapse; so this is at the right time, even if real Ḫattuša left remains and not a giant smouldering crater. Still, at least we can go out on the high note of “we’re actually at the Bronze Age Collapse, huzzah!” Plus, I’ve always had a soft spot for the Hittites, all the way back to when I was first introduced to them in the AoE 1 demo.

This story, being concerned with the much-more-Christian-than-anything-else-in-the-series demons, also imports great piles of Judeo-Christian folklore. Nephilim, in Hebrew mythology* were the descendants of angels sent to watch over humanity, and the human women that they got their rocks on for. (Sometimes the women they bone are descendants of the cursed Cain, specifically.) They were giants and “warriors of renown”. People have periodically explained dinosaur bones as the bones of the Nephilim. So not a lot like the baby demons depicted here. 

Lilith, Ardatlili and Asmodai’s boss, was (again according to tradition) Adam’s first wife, also created from dirt, who got kicked out and replaced by rib-critter Eve for not being subservient to him. She is traditionally the mother of all sorts of monsters, especially sexy ones, so that lines up. Her demonic aspect probably also was something of a conflation with neighbouring Mesopotamian fertility goddesses: the Israelites were pretty industrious about making all of their neighbours’ gods into demons. Asmodeus, probably originally a god of a Syrian tribe near Judea - I told you - is the demon prince associated with the Deadly Sin of Lust, which in medieval demonology makes him Lilith’s boss, because gender roles. 

Dybbuks are modern** Jewish folklore: malicious ghosts who possess people. They’re not really demonic, just evil, but as they’ve been incorporated into broader popular culture they’ve been conflated with demonic possession pretty generally, so that also matches up. The poor victims of Hattush probably most closely resemble the “gebbeths” of A Wizard of Earthsea, though. ;)

*Which is to say, the word’s used once or twice in the Bible but all the actual details I recount come from apocrypha like 1 Enoch or just oral tradition. Ditto for all the other names, except for the ones that don’t even occur once.

**“Modern” in the historical sense: post-1600 CE or so. The word is Yiddish rather than Hebrew. That’s still enough to make it comfortably the most recent thing in the whole series, give or take a “French maid” joke.

~

Next time: brief coverage of the epilogue, and look back at the series as a whole.

[zyzzyva1936-blog-blog]

I’m going to politely stand my ground here: in the relevant texts (Genesis 6, Numbers 13) the KJV translates the word “Nephilim” as “giants”, and while I’m neither a biblical scholar nor a speaker of Hebrew, I’m going to accept that as a connection. (More recent versions tend to leave it untranslated.) More to the point, the sort of vaguely biblical mythology that you get demonologies from and that I’m talking about above is very confident about them being giants.  Man, we made it this far on good terms and now we’re in a petty squabble over religion. Being on the internet is everything I ever imagined and more! *sniff* :’D

“Lemma the Librarian - The Choice”

Published: 5 May, 2018

http://www.mcstories.com/LemmaTheLibrarian/index.html

Spoilers in effect.

And here we are at the very end (almost). The Chekov’s gun doomspell Lemma’s been toting around since “Sucker For a Good Book” and which has been hanging over her head specifically since “The Choosing One” finally pays off, and it’s pretty great*.

A lot of things are paid off here, actually (they’d better be, it’s the climax of the series). Rhoda gets to be heroic, as usual***; Lemma and Iola have only been on the outs for one story but they resolve that again; Iason, big doofy slab of decency that he is, gets to sacrifice himself for the greater good; Lemma gets to finally admit that she loves Iason and rescue him from his heroic sacrifice. And they kiss, for real, for the first time.

And Iola gets to make up for “Iola Special!” and “The Choosing One”. Which is not the most important part of the plot in this story - you could, and I probably will, argue that the whole arc is about Lemma and Iason hooking up - but it’s the part that makes me the happiest. Lemma and Iason bounce back from some pretty awful shit without blinking; Iola’s been dealing with it in a much worse (put probably more plausible) way, as symbolized by the two times so far she’s refused Iason’s offer of their father’s sword out of guilt****.

Now she’s got another group of innocent, besieged women to defend from evil, soul-eating forces, and she does so. (The destruction of Ardatlili is probably the cleverest single thing in the story; the fact that Iola and Ardatlili got a death-feud going in less than six hours beats out even Rhoda’s goodness and puppies speech for the funniest.*****) Iola is finally able to think of herself as a hero again, she’s rescued hundreds of people******, earned her father’s sword (at least in her own eyes; I’m with Iason that it was always hers for the taking), and can go off and have exciting adventures fighting monsters and saving people again. It’s great.

Iason and Lemma finally have an honest discussion about their feelings (the fact that Iason is a dom, and just has been too decent and self-concious to act on it, is a little over-neat but by this point Lemma has damn well earned it). And that’s it for the publicly available stories! There’s one more story, an epilogue, but @midorikonton​ has thankfully made this a satisfying jumping-off point. I’ll cover the epilogue (briefly) next time. 

*Back then Lemma described the spell as being really, really simple and low-power, which in this sort of thing is usually just puffery. But the description of it in this actually does bear that out, which is a nice touch. Relatedly, Vamp!Brea’s plan is never laid out explicitly, but my suspicion is that it would have been to have Lemma slag the city as soon as possible, unmaking Ardatlili** and Asmodai and Iason and Iola but “protecting” the world from destruction.

**Blink and you miss it, but she survives! Iola kills her, which really just means unsummoning, so she isn’t in Hattush when it gets unmade. So she’s still kicking around, which wouldn’t make a bad sequel hook.

***We also get a hilarious explanation of how Rhoda makes heroic demon-summoning work:

“[…]They’re evil, they can only get you if you do evil, and we’re good guys, so we don’t.“

I stopped dead in the street and stared at her.

“What?” she asked.

“You…” I sputtered. "How are you not already in some demon’s thrall?“

"Because I’m a good guy,” she repeated slowly and with emphasis. “So I don’t do evil, so they can’t get me.”

It’s usually the other way around - “I’m a good guy, so what I’m doing can’t be evil” - and that leads to lots of awful things. Rhoda’s got it the right way around, which is harder; but I suppose in a career where your soul will be eaten within 30s of your first evil deed, you’ve got what we call incentive.

****At the ends of “The Glamour-ous Life of a Slave” and “The Choosing One”, natch.

*****It reminded me of a particularly quotable joke from the always-brilliant Narbonic. “Dave… have you been battling my arch-nemesis behind my back?” “He’s our arch-nemesis now, Helen.” Incidentally, @midorikonton is also a big fan of Narbonic, as all right-thinking people should be. ;) ****** “Oh, by the way, all the kids escaped” is a little funny in its blunt contrivance - right up there with “a monster is attacking the abandoned warehouse district!” from Power Rangers. But, as the DCEU movies have been working very hard to prove, the alternative is much, much worse. Besides, I’ve spent half the review series nursing a grudge against the opening of “The Choosing One”; I can hardly complain that Jenny has since learned better. :)

When The Fuck Are We? 🤷

Hattush is Ḫattuša, the Hittite capital, probably, although there’s mostly only circumstantial evidence here. (The goddess whose temple they end up defending is Hittite, at any rate.) In the real world, the Hittites were an empire in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) that dominated the near east towards the end of the Bronze Age. Part of the reason for this was their early mastery of iron; still rare and expensive, but enough to kick off the Iron Age and give them a crushing strategic advantage. (This gets a minor shout-out in the story; Hattush is where Iason’s father had his sword forged.) Ḫattuša was destroyed along with the Hittite Empire and a lot of other places during the Bronze Age Collapse; so this is at the right time, even if real Ḫattuša left remains and not a giant smouldering crater. Still, at least we can go out on the high note of “we’re actually at the Bronze Age Collapse, huzzah!” Plus, I’ve always had a soft spot for the Hittites, all the way back to when I was first introduced to them in the AoE 1 demo.

This story, being concerned with the much-more-Christian-than-anything-else-in-the-series demons, also imports great piles of Judeo-Christian folklore. Nephilim, in Hebrew mythology* were the descendants of angels sent to watch over humanity, and the human women that they got their rocks on for. (Sometimes the women they bone are descendants of the cursed Cain, specifically.) They were giants and “warriors of renown”. People have periodically explained dinosaur bones as the bones of the Nephilim. So not a lot like the baby demons depicted here. 

Lilith, Ardatlili and Asmodai’s boss, was (again according to tradition) Adam’s first wife, also created from dirt, who got kicked out and replaced by rib-critter Eve for not being subservient to him. She is traditionally the mother of all sorts of monsters, especially sexy ones, so that lines up. Her demonic aspect probably also was something of a conflation with neighbouring Mesopotamian fertility goddesses: the Israelites were pretty industrious about making all of their neighbours’ gods into demons. Asmodeus, probably originally a god of a Syrian tribe near Judea - I told you - is the demon prince associated with the Deadly Sin of Lust, which in medieval demonology makes him Lilith’s boss, because gender roles. 

Dybbuks are modern** Jewish folklore: malicious ghosts who possess people. They’re not really demonic, just evil, but as they’ve been incorporated into broader popular culture they’ve been conflated with demonic possession pretty generally, so that also matches up. The poor victims of Hattush probably most closely resemble the “gebbeths” of A Wizard of Earthsea, though. ;)

*Which is to say, the word’s used once or twice in the Bible but all the actual details I recount come from apocrypha like 1 Enoch or just oral tradition. Ditto for all the other names, except for the ones that don’t even occur once.

**“Modern” in the historical sense: post-1600 CE or so. The word is Yiddish rather than Hebrew. That’s still enough to make it comfortably the most recent thing in the whole series, give or take a “French maid” joke.

~

Next time: brief coverage of the epilogue, and look back at the series as a whole.

[zyzzyva1936-blog-blog]

Lemma Ranking

Sucker For a Good Book

The Choice

* Afterechoes

Hard Truths

The Beast of the (Morning) Wood

* Iola Special 2: Temporal Boogaloo

* Harping on About It

Op-arrrr-ant Conditioning

By the Book

The Contractually Obligatory Anachronistic Beach Episode

The Witch and the Warlock

* The Shelving

* Riddled With Errors

Prologue

The Last Dance

Of Potions and Pimples

* Illusions of Grandeur

Possession With Intent

The Glamour-ous Life of a Slave

* A Fairy Bad Deal

* The Di-Lemma Dilemma

Tricks of the Trade

Diminishing Returns

A Rock and a Hard Place

* Iola Special!

The Choosing One

God, there’s a lot of these. As a result, the ranking contains a lot of arbitrary choices, even more than usual.

1-7 are really great ones (and mostly because of plot or character moments; “Harping” is sort of the canonical no-flaws version of the standard story). 8-18 are more-or-less standard (“The Shelving” has great arc and character moments but loses points for having such an obviously tacked-on conflict). 19-22 are the standard story too but with enough flaws to damage them noticeably; 23-26 are ones I actually don’t like.

(You may notice “Sucker For a Good Book” and “The Choosing One” are literally at opposite ends of the list. My answer to that is FUCK CANON HEROIC HUMAN!BREA FOREVER ;P Edit to add: yup, Heroic Human!Brea. That’s why Iola Special 2 gets to be in the “great” tranche, despite not having much sex and practically no mc. ;) )

[zyzzyva1936-blog-blog]

“Lemma the Librarian” - summing up

There’s one more paywalled story, “The Shelving”, where Lemma finally returns with all her collected books and becomes a Librarian for real. There’s a conflict and all that, but it’s pretty drummed-up: the main point is to finally get Lemma and Iason to admit out loud that they love each other, and let us look at their new relationship, which is 100% a worthwhile goal. Spoilers: they’re great, and also adorable. I mostly only even bring this up for completeness, and for the sake of one last “When The Fuck Are We 🤷”. ;) So, the Lemma series. I’ve been stressing its arcs pretty hard, which might be a little misleading if you haven’t read it*. It is quite an episodic series; you could shuffle probably three-quarters of the stories without more than minor changes. But the arcs are there, and Lemma’s journey from the hot-headed, selfish asshole in the Prologue to the heroic, self-aware (although still pretty impatient) mc-kinked sub of “The Shelving” is pretty great. It’s not, like, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or anything, but for mc comedy-erotica it blows anything else (that I’ve read, at least) out of the water. 

Iason’s rather more shallow - or at least, we don’t get to see inside his head the same way we do Lemma’s. His development, inasmuch as it exists, is more a matter of his relationship with Lemma developing. Iola, honestly, has more of an arc than her brother, but it’s a pretty great one so I’m not complaining**. 

If you wanted to throw a major criticism at it, it’d probably be “formulaic”. There’s half-a-dozen individual stories that have literally the same ”Lemma gets mind-controlled, Iason rescues her” plot, and if you broaden the second part to include people other than Iason, you’re comfortably over half the series. But it didn’t get dull for me, even reading the entire series twice in quick succession while writing up this series. Part of that is just it’s in a fairly narrow subgenre - you want sexy mind-control, here’s some sexy mind-control - and part of it is that @midorikonton does a good job of varying things up in the incidentals from story to story, the drawn-out induction of “By the Book” versus the interpersonal conflict of “The Last Dance” versus the deliberately awful dumb humour of “Op-arrrrr-ant Conditioning”.

The series has some other flaws - the way the books are characterized in the first three and last stories, and not at all in the interim; also, every single thing in the first third of “The Choosing One” - and the quality of the individual parts varies, if not widely, than at least noticeably. But on the whole it’s pretty great, and I don’t regret for a moment reading it or putting my time into this series. A high recommend.

*Why in God’s name have you read two dozen reviews for a publicly available story I’ve been linking to in every post without reading the actual story? What are you doing!?

**Wasn’t she gay at the beginning? What happened to that?*** ...Also I just realized she’s so uncomfortable about knowing young Iason did it thinking about Annella because she did the same thing. ;)

***She’s been having dreams about someone she met in the Tin Islands - oh, God, both halves of the party have been paired off, haven’t they XD

When The Fuck Are We? 🤷

We finally hit Lemuria! And the port city of Atlantis, all on the continent of Mu. Sometimes @midorikonton is too cute for her own good. :P Atlantis, of course, comes from Plato’s Republic, where it’s used mostly used as a tale about the hubris of nations and how great his ideal state is. There’ve been plenty of suggestions that it’s based off cultural memories of the Minoans, who had a powerful mini-empire pre-pre-Bronze Age Collapse and were destroyed or at least crippled after a catastrophic volcanic eruption/tsunami in the Aegean; which is as good a theory as any, although my feeling is it’s as likely Plato just made some shit up. In any case, it’s been an inspiration for lots and lots and lots of subsequent fiction, and a great deal of pseudohistory and pseudoarchaeology. It traditionally is placed in the Atlantic, usually somewhere around the Azores.

Mu, like Lemuria, is much more recent. It was invented by cranks in the late 19th and early 20th C, as a singular ancestral civilization to explain “similarities” between distant cultures like the Babylonians and Mayans. (The idea that building a big honking fake mountain by pushing rocks into a pile and putting a temple at the top is very straightforward apparently didn’t come up; neither did the idea that non-white people might be capable of that whole “technology” thing on their own.) It lives in the Pacific - the longest land-bridge ever hypothesized - which neatly gives each major ocean its own lost continent.

By about the 1930s the three of them had been sort of stapled together; they even have a standard order which maximizes euphony (“Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu”). If there’s more than just at Atlantis - two thousand extra years of pop culture means it’s by far the best-known and most-used of the three - then you usually get all three. Although this is the first work of fiction I’ve ever seen that actually conflates them. ;P

Lemma’s Lemuria lives behind three “gates” in a sort of pocket-dimension, which is how it stays so isolated*. One gate is in the Atlantic and goes to the port of Atlantis; the second is in the Indian Ocean and goes to the capital of Lemuria. The third is “on the opposite side of the world” - presumably the Pacific - and leads, in the real world, to a “Shattered City” that’s a generally awful place to be. It took me a surprisingly long time to realize that that’s probably R’lyeh, duh.

R’lyeh is - but that will have to wait for another time. ;)

*My sudden theory is that the Bronze Age Collapse is kicked off by an occurrence of the quarter-second lapse in magic disaster that Lemma mentions in “the Choosing One” - that’d mess up any of the societies we’ve seen in this book, but not so badly as to be irrecoverable with a century or two of time to pass, by which time the spread of ironworking messes up any chance for magic to get a foothold again. Lemuria would drop out of history entirely; if we want to be generous, we could say the gates would break but leave the people alive and well in their parallel world.

[zyzzyva1936-blog-blog]

“Lemma the Librarian - The Choice”

Published: 5 May, 2018

http://www.mcstories.com/LemmaTheLibrarian/index.html

Spoilers in effect.

And here we are at the very end (almost). The Chekov’s gun doomspell Lemma’s been toting around since “Sucker For a Good Book” and which has been hanging over her head specifically since “The Choosing One” finally pays off, and it’s pretty great*.

A lot of things are paid off here, actually (they’d better be, it’s the climax of the series). Rhoda gets to be heroic, as usual***; Lemma and Iola have only been on the outs for one story but they resolve that again; Iason, big doofy slab of decency that he is, gets to sacrifice himself for the greater good; Lemma gets to finally admit that she loves Iason and rescue him from his heroic sacrifice. And they kiss, for real, for the first time.

And Iola gets to make up for “Iola Special!” and “The Choosing One”. Which is not the most important part of the plot in this story - you could, and I probably will, argue that the whole arc is about Lemma and Iason hooking up - but it’s the part that makes me the happiest. Lemma and Iason bounce back from some pretty awful shit without blinking; Iola’s been dealing with it in a much worse (put probably more plausible) way, as symbolized by the two times so far she’s refused Iason’s offer of their father’s sword out of guilt****.

Now she’s got another group of innocent, besieged women to defend from evil, soul-eating forces, and she does so. (The destruction of Ardatlili is probably the cleverest single thing in the story; the fact that Iola and Ardatlili got a death-feud going in less than six hours beats out even Rhoda’s goodness and puppies speech for the funniest.*****) Iola is finally able to think of herself as a hero again, she’s rescued hundreds of people******, earned her father’s sword (at least in her own eyes; I’m with Iason that it was always hers for the taking), and can go off and have exciting adventures fighting monsters and saving people again. It’s great.

Iason and Lemma finally have an honest discussion about their feelings (the fact that Iason is a dom, and just has been too decent and self-concious to act on it, is a little over-neat but by this point Lemma has damn well earned it). And that’s it for the publicly available stories! There’s one more story, an epilogue, but @midorikonton​ has thankfully made this a satisfying jumping-off point. I’ll cover the epilogue (briefly) next time. 

*Back then Lemma described the spell as being really, really simple and low-power, which in this sort of thing is usually just puffery. But the description of it in this actually does bear that out, which is a nice touch. Relatedly, Vamp!Brea’s plan is never laid out explicitly, but my suspicion is that it would have been to have Lemma slag the city as soon as possible, unmaking Ardatlili** and Asmodai and Iason and Iola but “protecting” the world from destruction.

**Blink and you miss it, but she survives! Iola kills her, which really just means unsummoning, so she isn’t in Hattush when it gets unmade. So she’s still kicking around, which wouldn’t make a bad sequel hook.

***We also get a hilarious explanation of how Rhoda makes heroic demon-summoning work:

“[...]They're evil, they can only get you if you do evil, and we're good guys, so we don't."

I stopped dead in the street and stared at her.

"What?" she asked.

"You..." I sputtered. "How are you not already in some demon's thrall?"

"Because I'm a good guy," she repeated slowly and with emphasis. "So I don't do evil, so they can't get me."

It’s usually the other way around - “I’m a good guy, so what I’m doing can’t be evil” - and that leads to lots of awful things. Rhoda’s got it the right way around, which is harder; but I suppose in a career where your soul will be eaten within 30s of your first evil deed, you’ve got what we call incentive.

****At the ends of “The Glamour-ous Life of a Slave” and “The Choosing One”, natch.

*****It reminded me of a particularly quotable joke from the always-brilliant Narbonic. “Dave... have you been battling my arch-nemesis behind my back?” “He’s our arch-nemesis now, Helen.” Incidentally, @midorikonton is also a big fan of Narbonic, as all right-thinking people should be. ;) ****** “Oh, by the way, all the kids escaped” is a little funny in its blunt contrivance - right up there with “a monster is attacking the abandoned warehouse district!” from Power Rangers. But, as the DCEU movies have been working very hard to prove, the alternative is much, much worse. Besides, I’ve spent half the review series nursing a grudge against the opening of “The Choosing One”; I can hardly complain that Jenny has since learned better. :)

When The Fuck Are We? 🤷

Hattush is Ḫattuša, the Hittite capital, probably, although there’s mostly only circumstantial evidence here. (The goddess whose temple they end up defending is Hittite, at any rate.) In the real world, the Hittites were an empire in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) that dominated the near east towards the end of the Bronze Age. Part of the reason for this was their early mastery of iron; still rare and expensive, but enough to kick off the Iron Age and give them a crushing strategic advantage. (This gets a minor shout-out in the story; Hattush is where Iason’s father had his sword forged.) Ḫattuša was destroyed along with the Hittite Empire and a lot of other places during the Bronze Age Collapse; so this is at the right time, even if real Ḫattuša left remains and not a giant smouldering crater. Still, at least we can go out on the high note of “we’re actually at the Bronze Age Collapse, huzzah!” Plus, I’ve always had a soft spot for the Hittites, all the way back to when I was first introduced to them in the AoE 1 demo.

This story, being concerned with the much-more-Christian-than-anything-else-in-the-series demons, also imports great piles of Judeo-Christian folklore. Nephilim, in Hebrew mythology* were the descendants of angels sent to watch over humanity, and the human women that they got their rocks on for. (Sometimes the women they bone are descendants of the cursed Cain, specifically.) They were giants and “warriors of renown”. People have periodically explained dinosaur bones as the bones of the Nephilim. So not a lot like the baby demons depicted here. 

Lilith, Ardatlili and Asmodai’s boss, was (again according to tradition) Adam’s first wife, also created from dirt, who got kicked out and replaced by rib-critter Eve for not being subservient to him. She is traditionally the mother of all sorts of monsters, especially sexy ones, so that lines up. Her demonic aspect probably also was something of a conflation with neighbouring Mesopotamian fertility goddesses: the Israelites were pretty industrious about making all of their neighbours’ gods into demons. Asmodeus, probably originally a god of a Syrian tribe near Judea - I told you - is the demon prince associated with the Deadly Sin of Lust, which in medieval demonology makes him Lilith’s boss, because gender roles. 

Dybbuks are modern** Jewish folklore: malicious ghosts who possess people. They’re not really demonic, just evil, but as they’ve been incorporated into broader popular culture they’ve been conflated with demonic possession pretty generally, so that also matches up. The poor victims of Hattush probably most closely resemble the “gebbeths” of A Wizard of Earthsea, though. ;)

*Which is to say, the word’s used once or twice in the Bible but all the actual details I recount come from apocrypha like 1 Enoch or just oral tradition. Ditto for all the other names, except for the ones that don’t even occur once.

**“Modern” in the historical sense: post-1600 CE or so. The word is Yiddish rather than Hebrew. That’s still enough to make it comfortably the most recent thing in the whole series, give or take a “French maid” joke.

~

Next time: brief coverage of the epilogue, and look back at the series as a whole.

[zyzzyva1936-blog-blog]

Breaking news: they were apparently created in collaboration with @jukeboxemcsa‘s friend @thrallflower. So an extra round of applause for them, too. :) And are apparently based off Grant Morrison’s stuff, which I have to admit I haven’t read. :S Although I’m slightly more inclined to do so now. (“So what got you into Doom Patrol?” “Online text-only mind-control-porn-parody. You know how it is.”)

“Pussy Liquor”

Published: April 14, 2018

http://mcstories.com/PussyLiquorJukebox/index.html Back to @jukeboxemcsa! And the superhero stories again. This one is pretty fun. Eris, from XOXOX, has had her civvie friend Julia kidnapped by the sinister Doctor Zoltanus*, and needs to get her out before he can capture her too and use her chemical-synthesis powers to help take over the world. (Spoilers: she in fact also gets captured but eventually escapes and defeats him. Well, not really really spoilers, that’s just how superhero stories have gone since long before Jukebox got into the game. ;P )

As I said, Eris has shown up before, as the secondary non-viewpoint heroine in XOXOX, and I think that this is the first time we’ve had a secondary characer move front and centre? No, I lie, Professor Psyche is a minor character in Show Don’t Tell before she leads Left in the Dark. It’s still a nice way of filling out the world rather than just having a dozen disconnected stories. Eris wouldn’t have been my first choice for superhero side characters to get their own piece**, but in practice she gets an interesting and entertaining characterization - professional, by-the-book, a little contemptuous of her less-tightlaced colleagues, to cover up an apparently pretty hyperactive seam of anxiety. So a definite success there.

Speaking of less-tightlaced collagues, Iridescent Killing Machine and the Sequined Ragestorm, holy fuck. :D Two, um, for lack of a better term, superheroes. They’ve got hypnotic light and tasmanian-devil spinning respectively, along with “self-replicating sequined jacket technology”, a phrase it will take me quite some time to tire of saying. They have a full-time job livestreaming their costumed vigilantism, a ludicrous disregard for collateral damage, great names, and a Patreon page***. They also have a fun little dynamic with Eris, or at least Iridescent Killing Machine does - both sides dislike the other’s approach to superheroing, but Eris has a little bit of a crush on Iridescent Killing Machine anyways, and ze in turn is hinted to like Eris back - at least enough to make their relationship interestingly more complicated than “colleagues who don’t like each other’s styles”. (I like complicated.****) Both Iridescent Killing Machine and the Sequined Ragestorm are nonbinary - the first such people to appear in Jukebox’s stories, IIRC, although I think he’s done some tumblr flashfic with an nb protagonist before. All of that and I love them both so much and it’s kind of a pity to note that the story makes them come across as really _terrible_ superheroes, being (slight spoilers) captured and brainwashed by Doctor Zoltanus* before the story even begins. I imagine that, like Adventure Girl, they’re better at their jobs when they’re not under the iron lash of starring in mc erotica.

The villain, Doctor Zoltanus*… well, he works, ish. A little grosser than perhaps is necessary - I’m down with a certain amount of squick or body horror in the service of sexytimes, and I don’t even mind blood per se, but “anaemia from continuous blood loss” kinda crosses the line for me from “interesting twist on vampirism” into “actual medical stuff that’s just queasymaking”. He also has a bit of a voice problem - the bit at the end where Eris’ generic-brand drugs wear off before he’s expecting is pretty hilarious, but he’s previously been talking rather distinctly (in my head he’s substantially older than the rest of the cast) and he suddenly shifts to the same slightly foul-mouthed register as, say, WildRose. Who, I’m sure, does her best to never misgender anybody, but aside from that her dialogue in this situation would sound exactly like Doctor Zoltanus’*, which is a pity because it should have been a great opportunity to colour in his character with language choices.

Normally a bad villain is death for a superhero story (and his villainous plot, while it makes sense on its own terms, is a wee bit silly), but as far as I’m concerned this is Team Glittery Death’s story and they certainly rock this one up to the high side of the superhero stories. Also it has a great title and Eris makes fun of Gwyneth Paltrow’s newsletter o’ quackery. What’s not to love?

Next time: depending on who gets to press first, either the Girls™ get adversaries and a huge new plot arc, or Lemma blows up more Hittites than King David and the first Age of Empires game put together. Either way: exciting times ahead.

*Not a real doctor.

**That’d be Sangria, who is admittedly a villain, but lots of fun in her appearances.

***There’s probably secret-identity issues up the wazoo, but that does seem like a better way of monetizing your superhero work than the traditional one, to wit, selling pictures of youself to an angry man with a Hitler ‘stache. ;)

****Relatedly, I vote that Julia figures out that Tara is Eris. Maybe even “has figured out” previously! Not that it matters to this story and I imagine it will be at best a while before we see Eris again, but hiding your superhero identity from your friends isn’t as fun as hiding your superhero identity from your friends except one who knows, and neither is as fun as hiding your superhero identity from your friends and there’s one friend who knows but you don’t know they know and they try to help cover things up for you but without revealing to you that YES I KNOW I HAVE A PROBLEM OK? :P

[zyzzyva1936-blog-blog]

Sudden thought: Iridescent Killing Machine and the Sequined Ragestorm are basically 90s comic antiheroes filtered through a really distorted lens of early 21st C political/cultural changes. They’ve got the bad attitude, mercenariness, and (ok, not quite 90s-grade) murderous ultraviolence; but also are both genderqueer and social media creatures and full of radical left politics. The names really sum it up: “Killing Machine” and “Ragestorm” would fit into any given Rob Liefeld comic, but he wouldn’t touch adjectives like “iridescent” or “sequined” with a pouch-covered ten-foot pole, let alone put them into a character name. Dunno if that was @jukeboxemcsa‘s conscious intention, but I think it’s neat. ;)

“Pussy Liquor”

Published: April 14, 2018

http://mcstories.com/PussyLiquorJukebox/index.html Back to @jukeboxemcsa! And the superhero stories again. This one is pretty fun. Eris, from XOXOX, has had her civvie friend Julia kidnapped by the sinister Doctor Zoltanus*, and needs to get her out before he can capture her too and use her chemical-synthesis powers to help take over the world. (Spoilers: she in fact also gets captured but eventually escapes and defeats him. Well, not really really spoilers, that’s just how superhero stories have gone since long before Jukebox got into the game. ;P )

As I said, Eris has shown up before, as the secondary non-viewpoint heroine in XOXOX, and I think that this is the first time we’ve had a secondary characer move front and centre? No, I lie, Professor Psyche is a minor character in Show Don’t Tell before she leads Left in the Dark. It’s still a nice way of filling out the world rather than just having a dozen disconnected stories. Eris wouldn’t have been my first choice for superhero side characters to get their own piece**, but in practice she gets an interesting and entertaining characterization - professional, by-the-book, a little contemptuous of her less-tightlaced colleagues, to cover up an apparently pretty hyperactive seam of anxiety. So a definite success there.

Speaking of less-tightlaced collagues, Iridescent Killing Machine and the Sequined Ragestorm, holy fuck. :D Two, um, for lack of a better term, superheroes. They’ve got hypnotic light and tasmanian-devil spinning respectively, along with “self-replicating sequined jacket technology”, a phrase it will take me quite some time to tire of saying. They have a full-time job livestreaming their costumed vigilantism, a ludicrous disregard for collateral damage, great names, and a Patreon page***. They also have a fun little dynamic with Eris, or at least Iridescent Killing Machine does - both sides dislike the other’s approach to superheroing, but Eris has a little bit of a crush on Iridescent Killing Machine anyways, and ze in turn is hinted to like Eris back - at least enough to make their relationship interestingly more complicated than “colleagues who don’t like each other’s styles”. (I like complicated.****) Both Iridescent Killing Machine and the Sequined Ragestorm are nonbinary - the first such people to appear in Jukebox’s stories, IIRC, although I think he’s done some tumblr flashfic with an nb protagonist before. All of that and I love them both so much and it’s kind of a pity to note that the story makes them come across as really _terrible_ superheroes, being (slight spoilers) captured and brainwashed by Doctor Zoltanus* before the story even begins. I imagine that, like Adventure Girl, they’re better at their jobs when they’re not under the iron lash of starring in mc erotica.

The villain, Doctor Zoltanus*… well, he works, ish. A little grosser than perhaps is necessary - I’m down with a certain amount of squick or body horror in the service of sexytimes, and I don’t even mind blood per se, but “anaemia from continuous blood loss” kinda crosses the line for me from “interesting twist on vampirism” into “actual medical stuff that’s just queasymaking”. He also has a bit of a voice problem - the bit at the end where Eris’ generic-brand drugs wear off before he’s expecting is pretty hilarious, but he’s previously been talking rather distinctly (in my head he’s substantially older than the rest of the cast) and he suddenly shifts to the same slightly foul-mouthed register as, say, WildRose. Who, I’m sure, does her best to never misgender anybody, but aside from that her dialogue in this situation would sound exactly like Doctor Zoltanus’*, which is a pity because it should have been a great opportunity to colour in his character with language choices.

Normally a bad villain is death for a superhero story (and his villainous plot, while it makes sense on its own terms, is a wee bit silly), but as far as I’m concerned this is Team Glittery Death’s story and they certainly rock this one up to the high side of the superhero stories. Also it has a great title and Eris makes fun of Gwyneth Paltrow’s newsletter o’ quackery. What’s not to love?

Next time: depending on who gets to press first, either the Girls™ get adversaries and a huge new plot arc, or Lemma blows up more Hittites than King David and the first Age of Empires game put together. Either way: exciting times ahead.

*Not a real doctor.

**That’d be Sangria, who is admittedly a villain, but lots of fun in her appearances.

***There’s probably secret-identity issues up the wazoo, but that does seem like a better way of monetizing your superhero work than the traditional one, to wit, selling pictures of youself to an angry man with a Hitler ‘stache. ;)

****Relatedly, I vote that Julia figures out that Tara is Eris. Maybe even “has figured out” previously! Not that it matters to this story and I imagine it will be at best a while before we see Eris again, but hiding your superhero identity from your friends isn’t as fun as hiding your superhero identity from your friends except one who knows, and neither is as fun as hiding your superhero identity from your friends and there’s one friend who knows but you don’t know they know and they try to help cover things up for you but without revealing to you that YES I KNOW I HAVE A PROBLEM OK? :P

[zyzzyva1936-blog-blog]

“Pussy Liquor”

Published: April 14, 2018

http://mcstories.com/PussyLiquorJukebox/index.html Back to @jukeboxemcsa! And the superhero stories again. This one is pretty fun. Eris, from XOXOX, has had her civvie friend Julia kidnapped by the sinister Doctor Zoltanus*, and needs to get her out before he can capture her too and use her chemical-synthesis powers to help take over the world. (Spoilers: she in fact also gets captured but eventually escapes and defeats him. Well, not really really spoilers, that’s just how superhero stories have gone since long before Jukebox got into the game. ;P )

As I said, Eris has shown up before, as the secondary non-viewpoint heroine in XOXOX, and I think that this is the first time we’ve had a secondary characer move front and centre? No, I lie, Professor Psyche is a minor character in Show Don’t Tell before she leads Left in the Dark. It’s still a nice way of filling out the world rather than just having a dozen disconnected stories. Eris wouldn’t have been my first choice for superhero side characters to get their own piece**, but in practice she gets an interesting and entertaining characterization - professional, by-the-book, a little contemptuous of her less-tightlaced colleagues, to cover up an apparently pretty hyperactive seam of anxiety. So a definite success there.

Speaking of less-tightlaced collagues, Iridescent Killing Machine and the Sequined Ragestorm, holy fuck. :D Two, um, for lack of a better term, superheroes. They’ve got hypnotic light and tasmanian-devil spinning respectively, along with “self-replicating sequined jacket technology”, a phrase it will take me quite some time to tire of saying. They have a full-time job livestreaming their costumed vigilantism, a ludicrous disregard for collateral damage, great names, and a Patreon page***. They also have a fun little dynamic with Eris, or at least Iridescent Killing Machine does - both sides dislike the other’s approach to superheroing, but Eris has a little bit of a crush on Iridescent Killing Machine anyways, and ze in turn is hinted to like Eris back - at least enough to make their relationship interestingly more complicated than “colleagues who don’t like each other’s styles”. (I like complicated.****) Both Iridescent Killing Machine and the Sequined Ragestorm are nonbinary - the first such people to appear in Jukebox’s stories, IIRC, although I think he’s done some tumblr flashfic with an nb protagonist before. All of that and I love them both so much and it’s kind of a pity to note that the story makes them come across as really terrible superheroes, being (slight spoilers) captured and brainwashed by Doctor Zoltanus* before the story even begins. I imagine that, like Adventure Girl, they’re better at their jobs when they’re not under the iron lash of starring in mc erotica.

The villain, Doctor Zoltanus*... well, he works, ish. A little grosser than perhaps is necessary - I’m down with a certain amount of squick or body horror in the service of sexytimes, and I don’t even mind blood per se, but “anaemia from continuous blood loss” kinda crosses the line for me from “interesting twist on vampirism” into “actual medical stuff that’s just queasymaking”. He also has a bit of a voice problem - the bit at the end where Eris’ generic-brand drugs wear off before he’s expecting is pretty hilarious, but he’s previously been talking rather distinctly (in my head he’s substantially older than the rest of the cast) and he suddenly shifts to the same slightly foul-mouthed register as, say, WildRose. Who, I’m sure, does her best to never misgender anybody, but aside from that her dialogue in this situation would sound exactly like Doctor Zoltanus’*, which is a pity because it should have been a great opportunity to colour in his character with language choices.

Normally a bad villain is death for a superhero story (and his villainous plot, while it makes sense on its own terms, is a wee bit silly), but as far as I’m concerned this is Team Glittery Death’s story and they certainly rock this one up to the high side of the superhero stories. Also it has a great title and Eris makes fun of Gwyneth Paltrow’s newsletter o’ quackery. What’s not to love?

Next time: depending on who gets to press first, either the Girls(tm) get adversaries and a huge new plot arc, or Lemma blows up more Hittites than King David and the first Age of Empires game put together. Either way: exciting times ahead.

*Not a real doctor.

**That’d be Sangria, who is admittedly a villain, but lots of fun in her appearances.

***There’s probably secret-identity issues up the wazoo, but that does seem like a better way of monetizing your superhero work than the traditional one, to wit, selling pictures of youself to an angry man with a Hitler ‘stache. ;)

****Relatedly, I vote that Julia figures out that Tara is Eris. Maybe even “has figured out” previously! Not that it matters to this story and I imagine it will be at best a while before we see Eris again, but hiding your superhero identity from your friends isn’t as fun as hiding your superhero identity from your friends except one who knows, and neither is as fun as hiding your superhero identity from your friends and there’s one friend who knows but you don’t know they know and they try to help cover things up for you but without revealing to you that YES I KNOW I HAVE A PROBLEM OK? :P

[zyzzyva1936-blog-blog]

“Sin”

Published: 20 January, 2018 http://www.mcstories.com/SinKallie/index.html

Going off on a little bit of a tangent for this one - it’s by an author I haven’t talked about before (hi, @kallie-den!), and it’s a one-off. But it’s a great story and I wanted to ramble about it. Kallie’s written several stories, and they’re generally of pretty high quality. This one, however, is the best. Or at the very least it hits so very many of the things I value in stories, which (since I’m the one writing the review) is basically the same thing. If you’ve read this far in my review series you’ve probably got a bit of a feel for what I like: complicated, unusual, or role-reverse-y interpersonal dynamics. Leaving the reader questions to think about, deep and meaningful or just “I want to imagine what the protagonist will do next.” A little bit of ambiguity about characters or events for the reader to fill in for themselves as the mood takes them*. For the actual erotica part, the dom/me - ok, I’ll be honest, domme - should fall somewhere between performatively cruel in a sceney BDSM-type way and actually evil. The sub should get something concrete out of it - personal improvement, or interpersonal improvement, or at least a happier take on things - even if the ending isn’t “good” by real-world ethical standards. Everyone involved should also know or learn what’s going on, even if it doesn’t “help” them; the characters’ knowledge is an important thing for me in itself**. And, of course, some good ol’ catharsis is always nice. So let’s take a look at Sin and watch it hit every one of of those buttons, more or less. :D Spoiler warning in effect. 

Ji-Ha is a young trans woman who has just (like, in the last few hours) come out to her conservative Christian family and been kicked out onto the winter streets. (This is just a review of a piece of erotica, but it’s worth taking a moment to note that this is a real and awful cause of LGBT homelessness.) She meets a woman succubus named Zaryssia, whose voice is in a fairly literal sense irresistible. She plays with Ji-Ha, takes her back to her penthouse (which she used her demonic sex powers to get, natch) and reveals herself. Ji-Ha of course freaks out, but Zaryssia’s still in control, and the sexing up begins. Ji-Ha is in a pretty bad way at this point, between dysphoria, fear of what the succubus is doing to her, and her upbringing welding those first two together into a vortex of self-loathing. Zaryssia, of course, doesn’t give any kind of fucks about any of this, and basically drags Ji-Ha out the other side of her crisis. They have positive enthusiastic sex, and Zaryssia disappears into the night. So yeah, basically all the checkboxes. What I particularly like about this is that it’s a very positive story - Ji-Ha comes out unharmed with some personal growth, validation, and a freebie apartment - but still has a bit of an edge to it. Zaryssia really is just toying with her, in all likelihood. Zaryssia is where all the ambiguity lives, of course: she could be a basically-human-with-superpowers person who legitimately takes a liking to Ji-Ha and tries to help her out (in a slightly cruel way, because it’s more fun like that), or she could be a terrifyingly inhuman monster who helps Ji-Ha entirely by accident, mostly by virtue of demonstrating to her that it’s possible to give no fucks whatsoever about any of the things that are tearing Ji-Ha up. Or anywhere in between***. I really like that sort of ability to decide for oneself just exactly what kind of story it is.

So yeah. It’s a fun and hot story and a warm and fuzzy story and a story that can be read a couple of different ways, which is always a nice bonus. I’m quite looking forward to reading whatever Kallie puts out next. :)

*Looking back through my reviews, those first three tend to get lumped together under the somewhat groping-for-clarity adjective “interesting”. If you see that word, it usually means some or all of the above. **Corollary - memory-fuckery is bad, but memory-play can be a lot of fun - @jukeboxemcsa‘s Voyeur being a good example of the latter working perfectly for me.

***Or other directions entirely - obviously being trans is not a sin, but I personally don’t think Ji-Ha has done anything wrong at any point in the story, even the “banging a succubus” business, and if you want you can give Sin a cosmology that agrees with me. Not that there’s evidence in the text either way, and demons in fantasy usually implicitly come from a Medieval Catholicism With All The Stops kind of setting where they are all basically inherently evil, but the reading where Zaryssia is doing right by deliberately trying to liberate Ji-Ha from her harmful upbringing - whether she goes along with Ji-Ha’s terminology of “sinfulness” or not - isn’t just my own idea. ;)

[zyzzyva1936-blog-blog]

“Lemma the Librarian - The Last Dance”

Published: 14 April 2018*

http://www.mcstories.com/LemmaTheLibrarian/index.html

“The Last Dance” brings an end to the episodic nature of the series. Everything from here on out is welded quite tightly into the main plot - or, rather, the main plot constitutes what happens in the last three stories. Spoilers for “The Last Dance” from here on out. What seems like a straightforward get-the-book smash-and-grab (which involves Lemma and Iola going undercover in a harem, because @midorikonton knows which side her bread is buttered on) turns into the return of fairy murdergoblin “Red” for his third and final confrontation with Lemma. Red loses, although mostly thanks to Iason and Rhoda and Rhoda’s Machamp rage-demon Sonneillon. (Rhoda being, of course, the person Lemma used the ghost last time to call for.)

Lemma’s desire to be enslaved is something she’s been dealing with, more or less successfully, up until this point, but it’s something Iason and Iola don’t actually know about yet. That reticence is now coming back to bite her in the ass. The most important conflict in this story isn’t the fight against Red, or Lugal’s** magic clothes; it’s between Lemma and Iola over what the right course of action while trapped in the palace is. Lemma wants to give in, of course, but Iola’s experience with mind-control has been a lot more traumatic than Lemma’s, and she has a very strong personal/cultural “go down fighting” ethos, and she doesn’t seem to have this particular kink on any level anyways. We were reminded just last story of all of Iola’s trauma around the whole magical mind-controlled sex thing. But unlike that time, Lemma, for strategic reasons, doesn’t feel like she has to room to let Iola do her own thing. So she doesn’t just go along with the enchantments, she actively throws her magical weight behind glamouring Iola too. Iola doesn’t know the actual reasons Lemma did this, but I’m not sure it’d make a difference anyways: she would understand it, correctly, as just as awful a betrayal either way.

The party - now up to four with the addition of Rhoda - is off to Hattush to find the last, most apocalyptic book, and it’s all very dramatic. But what sticks with me the most about the end is Iola’s refusal to tell Lemma everything’s ok.

*Look, it was supposed to be out this week, but the EMCSA (my canonical reference for links and dates) is on a one week break, I’m travelling next week, and its been posted to Tumblr now. Also it’s been burning a hole in my drafts folder for nearly a month now. ;P

**His death at the hands of Red is a little abrupt, but he’s enough of a controlling jerk I can’t brink myself to feel too sorry for him. Plus, you know, dying abruptly is a peril of kingship. (If Red had murdered, say, poor Simta, I’d be a lot angrier; but Jenny seems to have learned her lesson since the Vamp!Brea business***.)

***Yes, I’m still mad. ;P

When The Fuck Are We? 🤷

For the first time, we’re further back in time than the Bronze Age Collapse! “Possession with Intent” is set in Khemeth, which is clearly K•m•t, Egypt*. Ancient Egypt is one of those things everyone at least knows a little about** so I’ll focus on two slightly more obscure points.

The first is Iason’s reference to Khemeth being “the breadbasket of the Inner Sea”, which is both true and false in an interesting way. Egypt, being spectacularly fertile, essentially one-dimensonal, and laid out on a lazy, easily navigable river, is indeed just about the optimum imaginable setting for extracting massive food surpluses with ancient technology and governance. But it wasn’t a big export from Egypt (Egypt’s main ancient export was papyrus, thanks to its ecologically-enforced monopoly). Rather, it was mostly used to pump up Egypt’s own population, and in particular the showpiece capital cities such as Memphis, Thebes, or Alexandria. In the ancient world, having an unnecessarily - nay, infeasibly - large capital was a point of pride, which is where Egypt’s actual role as a breadbasket comes in: after it lost its independence in 30BCE, the Romans told Alexandria to get stuffed and began exporting Egypt’s wonderful easy grain surpluses to Rome, instead***. But of course, there’s not much here to imaginably suggest that we’re in the Roman Empire, timeline-wise.

Which brings us to the other point: the party being around for the invention of pyramids is obviously just for the joke, but even discounting that Egypt is old. The usual comparison is to note that when Augustus began redirecting the Egyptian grain surplus to Rome, the pyramids at Giza were already older than Augustus is now. The Egyptian state that survived the Bronze Age Collapse was the already declining New Kingdom, third of the traditional old/middle/new kingdoms division of ancient Egyptian history; it’s the heir to a polity stretching back into the 31st C BCE. Egypt is old. 

“The Last Dance” takes us to the one city-dwelling society even older than Egypt. Lagasch/Lagash is a Sumerian town, and Sumer (the south end of Mesopotamia, so modern-day south-central Iraq) has recognizable cities all the way back into the fifth freakin’ millennium BCE, and a historical record stretching patchily into the late fourth. Lagash ceased to exist as in independent city-state in the late third millennium*****, so about as long before our stop in Etruria as that was before Mercia, or Mercia is before the present day (and this story doesn’t seem to be taking place at the end of Lagash’s time as an independent polity, either). Based on some truly shoddy historical research******, we might slap this with a date of 2500 BCE - old enough to actually start getting close to the invention of the pyramids.

Sumerian, like Etruscan, is a language that seems to be unrelated to every other known language. (Before you come up with a brilliant theory that will revolutionize ancient history - no, they don’t seem to be related to each other, either.) Unlike Etruscan, we have such a huge corpus of text that we can translate it fairly reliably. (It helps that Sumerian remained in use as a record-keeping language for centuries after it had stopped being spoken - rather like Latin in Medieval/Early Modern Europe.) I’ve already mentioned the problems with king lists and such, but one of the great things about Mesopotamia is that unlike the logistical records of Mycenae, or the glorifying propaganda of Egypt, we have all of that and also preserved letters, and that lets us look so much further afield into the culture, you don’t even know. We even have recognizable preserved jokes: a regional administrator writes the central palace complaining that his requests for supplies to repair a dangerously deteriorating wall have been ignored, and it’s going to fall over and hurt someone. He demands supplies again, “and if you can’t send those at least send a doctor”.

Also, despite what Neal Stephenson will tell you, Sumerian is not glossolalic and you can’t use it to mind-control people.

*Look, you try transliterating Coptic into Latin characters! Like its distant relatives the Semitic languages, Coptic is based around consonantal root-words, into which vowels are slotted to make verbs, adjectives, and so forth. It makes for somewhat awkward transliterations.

**He says, and then panics trying to figure out how much people who aren’t actually historians have read about ancient Egypt. Tutankhamen’s weird Sun cultist dad is common knowledge, right?

***Rome’s peak in the Augustan period at a couple of hundred thousand, maybe a million****, was almost entirely on the back of the annona, a massive subsidized bread ration distributed to the Roman civic populace, and supplied in large part by Egypt. (It’s not terribly comparable to modern food stamps or other social welfare; in an ancient context, it’s more like spiking the football.) The population cratered between then and the burned-out husk the Goths and Byzantines squabbled over in the 6th C CE, but not because of the “fall of Rome”. Rather, the 4th C CE founding of Constantinople and the redirection of the Egyptian grain surplus there (so the new capital would bulk up to an appropriately prestigious population) was what really did it for Rome; and all of that happened when the Roman Empire was still riding high. The state of Rome was closer before and after the Visigoth sack than either was to Augustus’ city of marble. 

****The brilliant if wildly opinionated historian Colin McEvedy had a great turn of phrase arguing for 250,000. (He has a great turn of phrase for everything, you should read him.) After laying out the more archaeological arguments about land use and suchlike, he notes that the one solid literary record for the annona we have, around the time of Augustus, gives a little less than a quarter of a million rations, and “who ever heard of a dictator who put a smaller figure on his largesse than he needed to. If [Augustus] had fed a million Romans he would have said so.” 

*****We can peg it to exact years relative to related dates - the Mesopotamians were pretty through chroniclers, so we know how long kings ruled, in what regnal year they went on what campaign, and so forth, but they’re floating around in a little bit of a void. There are a couple of different possible chronologies depending on which recorded astronomical events you make line up with which calculated astronomical events.

******To wit, googling “Lagash king list dates” and looking for names that resemble “Lugal”. My historiography prof just shuddered and doesn’t know why.

~

Next time: the thrilling climax! Oh, man, does Lemma do some climaxing.

[zyzzyva1936-blog-blog]

“Lemma the Librarian - Possession With Intent”

Published: March 17, 2018

http://www.mcstories.com/LemmaTheLibrarian/index.html

Another paywalled one skipped, “the Di-Lemma Dilemma”, in which the party returns to Iason and Iola’s hometown and discovers that strange things are afoot*! It’s pretty good, although it suffers from a kinda fuzzy villain and a complete lack of embarrassing childhood stories. Like Lemma, I demand to hear about 6-year-old Iason defending the village from frogs and trees and a particularly scary-looking rock! ;)

Our actual story today is Possession With Intent, and it has one of the absolute highpoints of the series: specifically, Lemma and Peri’s conversation about the invention of the pyramid, which is one of the most Terry Pratchett things I’ve read that wasn’t actually Pratchett: and not in a crude copy sort of way, but legitimately hitting the same vein of lightly absurdist humour**. If you’ve read Terry Pratchett, you know that’s high praise; if you haven’t, stop wasting your time reading “porn reviews” on “the internet” and read the best damn humourist since Wodehouse died. Do it! Now! Right, sorry, the actual story. This one suffers even worse than “Di-Lemma” from the fuzziness of its villain - it was never clear to me at all if Peri was accidentally responsible, deliberately doing this, or just a victim like everyone else. But the conflict is pretty great despite all that - Lemma, Iason, and Iola all fighting being possessed by restless dead*** in different ways: Iason with his usual heavy-duty Will Save, Iola the same but failing more and also with an edge of trauma from the whole Brinksmoor business, Lemma, inevitably, by folding completely (although she’s getting better at justifying it to herself****). The character relations - both the “real” party and the ghosts - are complicated but explicated very clearly, and it makes things a lot more interesting than the usual “Lemma & co vs cartoon villain.” The resolution is also great - the story helps you forget that Lemma is a pretty damn powerful sorceress, and when she gets a moment of clarity to remember that she wraps the whole thing up right away. With less fire than might have been expected! Less fire immediately, at any rate. She casts at least one spell before opening up with the fireballs, what more do you want from her?

There’s a couple of bits tied into the main arc: as I said, we get Lemma being a sub but also becoming better at justifying it against her dawning realization that she should recover the books and Do Good in general - and, push come to shove, she decides to go for helping free the people at the Project rather than sink into self-gratifying submission. We’re reminded of Iola’s trauma, and she also notices that Lemma has the hots for Iason something bad (Lemma’s response is, as always, blanket denial of everything). 

And, Lemma uses the ghosts to pass along a message to someone she doesn’t identify to the reader in preparation the ominous spectre of the last two books. From here on out, no more episodic adventures, it’s all tying plots off and blowing things up... 

*Turns out to be sexy mind control. I know, I was shocked and surprised too. **The name of Lemma’s book this time is a more direct Pratchett shoutout. Ironically, this story doesn’t remind of of Pyramids at all, since Pratchett makes fun of ancient Egypt from an extremely different direction in that one.

***We’re in ancient Egypt. Everything is about death.

****Slight snark aside, the bit where Lemma and the courtesan are aligning are definitely pretty excellent. It’s the first time that I recall that Lemma really explains what she gets out of being a sub besides “plot-relevant magical orgasms” and it is just exactly correct. How @midorikonton wrote that and din’t realize she was a sub is beyond me. ;P (Well, ok, as she says, it’s because it was welded to other sex-and-gender stuff she didn’t have an epiphany about until later. It’s still a great description.)

When The Fuck Are We? 🤷

“The Di-Lemma Dilemma” is set in Iason and Iola’s hometown of Iardanos, and if you try to argue that this is the actual Greek village of Iardanos, and not Iolcus, the mythological Jason’s hometown, I will fight you to the death.

So: Iolcus. On the coast of Magnesia, about halfway up the eastern side of Peninsular Greece. Conveniently enough, most of Greek mythology is set in a vaguely-defined Mycenaean mishmash, so calling this 1200 BCE is as good as any other date*. When Jason was a child, his father the king was overthrown by his uncle Pelias (although in a feud/coup kinda thing rather than a Hamlet dealie), and Jason was bundled off to hiding. When he reached manhood, he returned to Iolcus to reclaim his throne, which Pelias agreed to... as long as Jason proved his worth by journeying to Colchis, on the far eastern shore of the Black Sea, and returning with the Golden Fleece**. Jason was surprisingly agreeable to this challenge, and assembled a dream team of mythological Greek heroes, including Hercules, Orpheus, and Theseus, and a ship called the Argo, and set off.

Jason and the Argonauts had many adventures getting there and back, including a fight with the most beautiful stop-motion animation skeletons you ever did see, but in Colchis successfully got their hands on the Golden Fleece. In this Jason was helped - ok, basically handheld through it - by Medea, sorceress, interesting female character, and (thanks to Aphrodite) Jason’s mind-controlled love slave***.

Medea is hard-core, man: she kills her own brother to cover their escape from Colchis, and when they get back to Iolcus murders the hell out of Pelias too. Jason, having gotten all he wanted, promptly spurns Medea for some other woman, and so Medea kills her as well, and leaves Greece for good. (She has other adventures afterwards, usually resolved by magical killin’, because ancient fanfiction writers knew this character was solid gold.) Jason, for being an ungrateful little shit, gets a particularly great death: he has a nap under the shade of the beached Argo, and a piece falls off and crushes him.

Iason doesn’t line up all that well with Jason beyond the general outlines of “mythological hero” - he’s way less of a self-centred jerk, to start - but Lemma’s not the worst imaginable match for Medea. They’re both foreigner sorceresses, with a somewhat itchier trigger finger than is probably good for them, and have episodic adventures all over the world. If I were her family, I’d think carefully before eating her Thanksgiving potluck, is all I’m saying.

I’ve totally blasted through all my history space here; we’ll, uh, we’ll get to Egypt Khemeth next time around. :/ ;)

*Not that timelining Greek mythology is a task for the timid, even compared to timelining Lemma. Look at who the bride in the Apple of Discord story is, then try to work out how old Achilles is during the Trojan War. Yeah.

**This is traditionally depicted as what it sounds like, a sheepskin made of solid gold. But there’s a probable origin for it that’s kinda interesting: the Caucasus mountains have gold deposits, which, since everyone likes gold, have been exploited since prehistory. One way to get gold out of rivers, much more efficient than the steryotypical prospector swirling pan business, is to weir the stream with sheepskin: the grease in the wool traps particulate matter, and after a few days or weeks you collect them, toss ‘em all in your smelter, and burn off everything but the gold. Hence, golden fleece.

***I’d usually describe it a little differently than that - since “Aphrodite made ____ fall in love” is usually just the Greek poetic way of saying “____ fell in love” - but in the context of this review series it’s obviously going to be sexy mind control all the way. ;) The guy who does the litbrick comic had a similar joke, though I can’t find the exact link now:

SAPPHO: Oh Great Aphrodite! I’m in love with Erinna, but she doesn’t love me back!

APHRODITE: Don’t worry, I’ll make her love you, whether she wants to or not.

SAPPHO: Wait, what?

APHRODITE snaps her fingers. ERINNA (glassy-eyed): Oh Sappho. I love you. So much. Please have sex. With me. Now. SAPPHO: Augh! This is awful!  APHRODITE: Spurn my gifts, do you? No matter, I can fix that too.

APHRODITE snaps her fingers.

SAPPHO (glassy-eyed): Oh Erinna. I love you. So much. Please have sex. With me. Now.

APHRODITE looks smug. ATHENA sticks her head in from the edge of the panel.

ATHENA: What the fuck is wrong with you?!

~

Next time: the party goes east and I go into the deep past. 

[zyzzyva1936-blog-blog]

Yeah, but I’d mostly forgotten that when I wrote this, and Hot Lemma On Iola Action is always worth a note. Let me shill your damn books for you! ;P As for the Forest People, there’s just not enough evidence to really say anything. (By which I mean they’re so obviously Hallstatt Celts as to not be worth the effort of saying out loud, clearly. ;) )

“Lemma the Librarian - The Contractually Obligatory Anachronistic Beach Episode”

Published: March 3rd, 2018

http://www.mcstories.com/LemmaTheLibrarian/index.html

We skip another paywall’d story: “Afterechoes”. This one is substantially more frustrating to skip than the last three, since, coming right after the dragon episode, it’s one of the more interesting steps on Lemma’s arc. Her two main struggles are going from a pretty self-centred, violent person to one who is willing to put things on the line to help others (which in this series usually means with mc-related problems); and becoming aware of just how kinked about mind-control she really is. These two trends finally collide in “Afterechoes”, and it’s pretty fascinating to watch*. This’d be the one I’d recommend buying if you’re only going to get one.

The actual story I’m covering is surprisingly less silly than its title would suggest, although the title has a couple of different jokes packed in**. The most obvious thing about this story is that it’s broken up into chunks and the chunks are out of order; on a reread, it’s clearer that the odd numbered-sections run backwards in time from the chronological end, and the even-numbered ones run forward from the chronological beginning, and at the end of the text they meet at the middle of the story. I’m of two minds about this. The structure does let @midorikonton sort things well by tone: the chronological beginning/end are jokey, the middle is the usual hot-but-serious mc business, the very last thing that we see is, if not quite the climax, then at least a reveal about how Lemma worked her way out of this that’s fairly satisfying to have come last.

The downside is that playing with chronology in a more complicated way than just the occasional obvious flashback*** is a delicate business. The section headers are a little blunt about the timestamping, but absolutely necessary; I read the Patreon version, which was basically the same but didn’t have them, and it was so much harder to follow you don’t even know. (Nobody wants to be mentally tracking odds and evens while reading erotica.) In an ideal world, they somehow wouldn’t be necessary; but as is they’re probably the best concession to the audience that doesn’t involve three years of careful feedback and polishing.

Ignoring the (dominating) structural aspects, it’s a decent story. Person-eating murdergoblin “Red” is reintroduced (or, if you’re only reading the public stories, introduced), and there’s a selkie****. And the way the reveal is structured is pretty nice. (I read it in-order too, just to see; it’s definitely more anticlimactic that way.)

*Also, Lemma gets to second base with Iola.

**It’s a reference to the cartoon/anime tradition of having an episode where everyone goes to the beach and hangs out in swimsuits for no damn reason, as indeed happens here. (The party’s anachronistic swimsuits are described in loving detail.) It’s also a story whose mc method centres around contracts, and it’s presented achronally, as I describe above. It took me an embarrassing number of reads to notice the latter two levels.

***As, for instance, the Prologue to this series, which technically bounces around in time but is easy to follow for anyone with even a modicum of reading experience; the first Yri story has a more complicated structure, 4-1-5-2-6-3-7, but because both of its threads are running forward and nothing plot-important happens in the later one until the earlier one catches up, it’s also easy to keep track.

**** @eths-skin is great but sadly on long hiatus.

When The Fuck Are We? 🤷

Like how it has an interesting step in the character arc, “Afterechoes” also has some infuriatingly mixed up interesting geography. Since that’s presumably not the reason anyone - even me! - would seek out the story, I’ll consider a brief historical cover along with TCOABE to be in the bounds of fair reviewing. ;)

“Afterechoes” takes place in Qart Hadast, which is to say Carthage, a Phoenician colony in what is now Tunisia that quickly became the most powerful Punic-cultured state in the world, and ruled the western Med in the 5th-3rd Cs BCE, until it was brought down by the Roman Republic in an apocalyptic sequence of wars*. Except that it’s explicitly located just barely on the eastern side of the strait of Gibraltar, which means we can’t even say that it’s actually a renamed Gades. It’s also several centuries old and controls the strait, which means probably no earlier than the mid-5th C BCE. Super-far-west Carthage would probably run Gibraltar sooner than real Tunisian Carthage did; on the other hand, “over the centuries it grew” is a hard phrase to argue around. We’ll say it’s 450 BCE and as usual ignore the fact that Punic Qart Hadast still is so in touch with its Sea People origins that the Dorians Iason and Iola are immediately conversant with its customs.

TCOABE takes place in Italy - @midorikonton lays out her most explicit geographical description yet - and we get a few more placenames. Motya is another (Phoenician) Sea People colony, at the western tip of Sicily; the Rasni, primary inhabitants of Italy, are the Etruscans (Rasna***). Etruria was a collection of city-states in Tuscany**** which flourished from about the 9th C BCE until it was conquered piecemeal by the expanding Roman Republic over the 5th and 4th centuries. They influenced the Romans - a suggestive, if nonconstructive, way of thinking about their culture is to imagine the Romans lying midway between them and the Greeks - but for all that they remain, compared to their Gallic and Latin neighbours, relatively mysterious to this day. Part of that is their language: we have a decently large corpus of inscriptions, in the Latin alphabet no less, and even some bilingual ones; but we’re more-or-less unable to translate it. We do know that they didn’t speak an Indo-European language, if for no other reason that if they did we’d probably have translated it by now; they don’t even seem to have spoken a language connected to Basque, the only surviving non-Indo-European language in Western Europe. 

The town the party visits is pretty generically Roman, though of course the Romans don’t get a look in*****. We’re given almost literally no details except “on the coast with a beach”, so I’m going to assume Herculaneum. If you’re going to visit an ancient Italian resort town, you might as well pull out the big guns, right?

*Hannibal, of elephants-over-the-Alps and “Cannae, most brilliant tactical victory of all time” fame, was Carthage’s chief general in the middle of these, the Second Punic War**. Rome was clearly on the rise by this point and probably objectively much stronger than Carthage, which is why Hannibal’s existential threat to the Republic was so impressive; he brought it closer to destruction than at any time between the Gallic sack of the tiny, unimpressive city-state of Rome two centuries before and the collapse of the Empire more than six-and-a-half centuries later.

**Punic being an adjective meaning “Phoenician”, which the Romans used for Phoenician-descended states like Carthage as well. Rome technically fought wars in the Phoenician homeland too but by that time was so much more powerful than everything else that they don’t even have individual names, just “part of Pompey’s conquest of the East”.

***The Lemmaverse is a lot better than the real world for respecting endonyms. Pretty much the only name that doesn’t seem to be taken from an actual local name for themselves is “Sea People”, which conveniently enough is the name covering up the seam between Greeks and Phoenicians.

****There’s actually an etymological connection there, Etruscan -> Tuscany.

*****Rome and Carthage were contemporaries, of course, and we spent “Afterechoes” in Carthage; but Western Europe owes quite a lot to Rome and almost nothing to Carthage, so it’d be a lot more obvious to the casual reader if the former was being used as a base for a fantasy culture.

~

Next time: Iason returns with the Golden Fleece and slays the usurper Pelias! Wait, no, that’s not quite right.