Title: mulberry down!!
Author: Nicole Kornher-Stace
Published: 2022
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 60
Total Page Count: 563,705
Text Number: 2130
Read Because: chatting with the recipient of an exchange fic, published online but had to track this down via the Wayback Machine
Review: I live in longing, and it's no small part of that draws me to portal fantasies; the longing here—a second person narrative about a "you" haunted by dreams of another world and the other—is bitter and consuming, vengeful and weaponized, and profoundly evoking; I adored this, each word. Genre inversions are more common and less shocking than people writing those inversions seem to think; frankly, these themes are to some extent present in all portal fantasy; but who cares, because there's a reason the genre elicits them and I always crave more. The confrontational, internet speech-style and unusual address is vibrant, intrusive, and demanding, and this has teeth where other takes of the genre don't; call it wretched, wrenching.
... and it's kind of hilarious to read from within the alterhuman community, because ... I just know these people: parallel lives, hearthomes, soulbonds, we got it all, and in the protagonist's search for the explanations or even possible connection the oversight feels oddly glaring, which isn't how I normally feel when my little community of weirdos goes rightfully overlooked.
Author: Nicole Kornher-Stace
Published: 2022
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 60
Total Page Count: 563,705
Text Number: 2130
Read Because: chatting with the recipient of an exchange fic, published online but had to track this down via the Wayback Machine
Review: I live in longing, and it's no small part of that draws me to portal fantasies; the longing here—a second person narrative about a "you" haunted by dreams of another world and the other—is bitter and consuming, vengeful and weaponized, and profoundly evoking; I adored this, each word. Genre inversions are more common and less shocking than people writing those inversions seem to think; frankly, these themes are to some extent present in all portal fantasy; but who cares, because there's a reason the genre elicits them and I always crave more. The confrontational, internet speech-style and unusual address is vibrant, intrusive, and demanding, and this has teeth where other takes of the genre don't; call it wretched, wrenching.
... and it's kind of hilarious to read from within the alterhuman community, because ... I just know these people: parallel lives, hearthomes, soulbonds, we got it all, and in the protagonist's search for the explanations or even possible connection the oversight feels oddly glaring, which isn't how I normally feel when my little community of weirdos goes rightfully overlooked.