The Annex Reviews, May 2003

5/18/03 ~Original Slash Redux~ Captive (Maureen Lycaon); Captive (Ryu I and Cassiopeia); Spring (Assassin Shura); Slave to Love (Fallen Angel); The Fallen Dragon Key (Roulette); The Adored (Yaoigoddess); Playing the Game (Yaoigoddess); Ezine Review: MAS-zine

5/25/03 Cornucopia (Musker); Three Ponies (Libertine); Precious (Crimson Dragon); At the Violet Hour (Kalisha Connors); The Waterhouse (David McEntee)

5/18/03

In these reviews I return to original slash and yaoi, a genre near and dear to my heart. I suppose it's because it's the kind of literature I would have liked to read when I was a young teenager. There wasn't a lot of it around in the late 1970s, but times have changed.

Thanks to the net slash is now easily available with many different story types available for every taste, and virtual communities where fans, many of them in high school or the early years of college, can write, read, and crit stories for each other. For young women, it's one of the few outlets in which they can have fun and share with their sexuality - and go as far as they can with their (written) sexual fantasies -- in an environment that is safe and supportive. Men have always gone to strip clubs and brothels together, indulged in locker room talk, had circle jerks. Women haven't had those outlets, unless it was as whores, in a whorehouse, or as a "girl's night out" to see male strippers (a activity borrowed from the male world of sexual consumption.) It's for these reasons I support slash, even though, as writing, much of it is badly written and/or pointless. But the same can be said of mainstream porn posted to the net.

So, to indulge my inner fourteen-year-old, are the reviews.

Captivity [A]
Where found: Maureen Lycaon's Velan Archive
URL: http://members.vclart.net/Maureen/index2.html
Author: Maureen Lycaon
Type: M/M, original slash, BDSM, fantasy, first

Maureen Lycaon specializes in slash, both fur and non- fur. She is perhaps better known for her fur tales, but there's some good swords n' loincloth adventure as well.

This story is promised as the first chapter of a longer series. To ensure a continuing peace, the nomads of the plains must offer selected young males of their tribe as slave tributes to their city-dwelling conquerors. The position is both an honor and a penance for the slaves, for their new masters don't follow the taboos against homosexual relations that the plainsmen do. The story follows the adventures of one of these sacrifices, Rain, who becomes the slave of Lord Michael. The Lord is alternately affectionate and brutal in his quest for Rain's submission, and conflict comes about because poor Rain is quite straight, not to mention being confused and wanting to do good by his people:

He had thought he could bear any pain. Instead, he had been broken in the space of a single flogging.

Lord Michael had reduced him to begging for mercy, even the mercy of death, so easily. Rain would gladly have killed himself or the Lord, betraying his honor and his Clan, rather than go on enduring that lash for one more moment.

Surely he could be made to suffer like that for much longer -- perhaps for days or even weeks. The thought made bitter nausea rise in his stomach, forcing him to swallow down the bile. What would it be like to have to endure such pain again and again for the rest of his life? By the terms of the oath, he could not even slay himself to end the pain.

He could not possibly abide by what he had sworn. He would certainly forsake his vow and betray the Clans. His people's only hope was that when that happened, Lord Michael would ignore his pleas for mercy and not let him go back on his word.

It's different from the standard slash fare, and I found it intelligent and involving. A very good start to a longer tale, but as a reader I wish there had been a chapter before this one explaining how these events had come about, instead of the brief prologue the author gives. I felt dumped too quickly into the middle of the action; what could have been a well-rounded original slash story instead had all the rushed earmarks of fanfic.

Captive [B+]
Where found: Slash Cotillion
URL: http://www.cotillion.slashcity.org/archive/ archive/2/captive.html
Author: Ryu I and Cassiopeia
Type: M/M, original slash, myth

My! This is a popular theme.

Mikk, the son of the Celtic god Lugh, is captured and brought before his father's greatest enemy, Lugh Danube. Lugh is as heavy a god of war as they come, arrogantly tormenting innocent underlings and possessing great magic and telepathic power, but he senses Mikk is his near-equal in strength. This sparks a sexual tension between captor and captive with lots of cat-and-mouse dialogue play between the two. After these (rather inconclusive) mind games young Mikk rather nonchalantly offers sex as the price of his freedom, and the two then go at it in a slutty slash scene:

Gods. The boy was fucking gorgeous. Pale skin over slim muscles, flat stomach, broad shoulders, a couple of scars that added to rather than taking from the perfection of his body.

Mikk chuckled, hands sliding against bare skin as he slid Lugh's shirt off. "Impatient." He scratched lightly over a nipple with one thumbnail. "Delicious too." His eyes raked over Lugh's chest, his tongue darting out appreciatively over his lips.

Lugh sank his teeth into the curve of Mikk's neck, making the boy jump and moan. "You're sexy as hell and I haven't gotten any in a long time."

His captive thrust against him with a sound very like a whimper. He was already hard and obviously very responsive. "Not even," he panted, slipping a hand in Lugh's pants and stroking along the shape of his erection, "a pretty pet to suck you off?"

The story had many similarities to the Duncan/Methos Highlander fanfic I've read and I wonder if the authors didn't come out of the same fandom. It wasn't a bad read, but there was a lack of tension. Since the authors made it clear from the beginning that Mikk is in no great danger from Lugh -- and in fact seemed only to be biding his time before his seduction -- there was no incentive for me to keep reading. Since the characters didn't take their predicament too seriously I couldn't take it seriously either, and neither could, I suspect, the writers. I know I often complain about the level of brutality in some slash stories but here it's needed -- let these characters suffer some before they have their reward.

The story's future fantasy setting -- in which the deities of Earth religions are presented as larger-than- life immortals who are continuously at war with each other -- was confusing also. In this respect it borrowed heavily from anime, which has similar mythologically mixed, often illogical backgrounds; in this case, however, the anachronisms annoyed me. Lugh zipping off one-liners you'd hear in a gay bar? Not very likely.

Well, at least none of the gods were wearing boxers.

Spring [C+]
Where found: Yaoishrine
URL: http://www.yaoishrine.com/fictions/spring.htm
Author: Assassin Shura
Type: m/m, original yaoi/slash, rom

Often I'm not sure if yaoi is a subgenre of slash or an anime-influenced companion to it. Its writers and artists are synthesists rather than extrapolaters, borrowing themes, character archetypes, and mythic elements from Japan's Asian neighbors, and often from European mythic culture as well... unlike most fanfic slash, which adheres by its nature to canon (and fanon.) This accounts for the yaoi profusion of robe-wearing princes with neon-colored hair who ride winged horses and live in magical Sleeping Beauty castles. I'm exaggerating of course, but that's often how it is.

This story was about two of those princes, raised as brothers though they are not related by blood. This creates a naughty incest plotline when the two discover their attraction to each other. One is tall and robust, the other aqua-haired and fey, and most of the first chapter is given over to their day-to-day life as they try to figure out how to act on it.

This wasn't a very interesting story even given the exoticism in the setup. The lovers are sticky-sweet and undifferentiated, the seduction goes about at a snail's pace (with the usual yaoi clothing obsessions) and nothing much happens to impede the romance, or aid it. Some glaring errors ("his procession slowly wound over the dessert sands" "shinning with sweat") enlivened the going, but weren't enough to loose my usually sarcastic juices. In fact not many juices of any kind were released.

Read only if you like your lemon on the young side and overly sweetened.

Slave to Love [C/C-]
Where found: The Hothouse Archive
URL: http://members.tripod.com/evol_siren/archive/ fallen/fic/slave01.html
Author: Fallen Angel
Type: M/m, original slash, fantasy, slave

This story was found on the Hothouse Archive, a yaoi/slash original fiction site.

Young Keif is a catan, a sort of diminutive elven humanoid with pointed furry ears. He wanders away from his tribe (to "where the trees are naked") and is promptly captured by slavers. This is a yaoi tale, after all. He's put up on the auction block and nearly bought by the fearsome Lady Elsa, who likes to torture slaves to death. But a mysterious stranger ups the price and rescues him in the nick of time, and after escaping from the henchmen of the disgruntled Lady, the two flee into the wilderness. The master later frees him, but Keif, apparently infatuated, elects to stay enslaved. "Thee" and "thy" declarations of love follow.

This story wasn't very good. It was also poorly written; past and present flowed together, with willy-nilly changes of POV. The main character of the catan was a girly little creature ("...beautiful light blue eyes, blond hair, brownish complexion, a rare catan no doubt. Mostly he heard that catans have light wood colored skin, so he guessed this one was a late bloomer. He wears nothing except a short skirt made by animal skin and a rope to hold it together, covering his private parts") given to childish temper tantrums (" 'NO!' Keif shouted. 'I don't wanna be his slave, I don't wanna!' As he began to remove the collar, he twisted and turned, but he could not remove it... He just slumps to the grass and cries.") I know yaoi requires a certain amount of prettiness and passivity from its love objects, but this is going too far.

Aside from the atrocious writing and unconvincing characters, the problem I had was that there was absolutely no reason for the master to free a slave he paid upwards of 60,000 monetary units for -- which in the context of the story is a small fortune -- and absolutely no reason for the slave to stick with him after being given his freedom. The supposedly shared infatuation didn't convince, and that's the purpose of yaoi, right?

The Fallen Dragon Key [A]
Where found: Palace of the Keys
URL: http://www.ravenswing.com/~keys/myth/ fallen_dragon_ch1.html
Author: Roulette
Type: M/M, original yaoi/slash, fantasy, slave

Since I last reviewed the Palace of the Keys site (1/24/03 Reviews) two new games have started up, one featuring keys based on mythological creatures (phoenixes, dragons, chimeras) and another on types of magic (black, white, scrying) This story is one of the first of the Mythological keys.

Things start with a Neil Gaiman tone as the eternal incarnations of Torment and Delight, a brother-sister pair of gods, discuss with their father Fire about what to do with the recalcitrant Zoreem Atulan Fetim, once the Great King, an arrogant, rapacious warlord sentenced to eternal torture until he recants his misdeeds. He hasn't so far, so it's decided that he will be reincarnated into the body of the fey, twinkish Kasander, a skinny, mistreated whore of the Palace, where he will receive sexual abuse as his lot in life. This doesn't seem to do the trick either, so Torment himself visits in the guise of Kukuluth, one of the mysterious dark knights common to these keyfics. Kukuluth takes on the job of mastering Fetim in a loving way: he makes sure that every day he eats healthy meals, exercises, and cleans himself thoroughly, both inside and out:

"You will place a little of this oil on the tip of the hose." He demonstrated what oil he meant and how much.

"Then you will insert the tip."

He ran the oil-slicked nozzle down the cleft between Kasander's ass cheeks, and rubbed the pucker hidden there. A shudder ran through Kasander at the light probing. Kukuluth gently pressed the small tip into Kasander's body.

He heard Kasander's hiss. Kukuluth looked at him with no sympathy.

"I told you not to fight. You're just making it worse on yourself." He paused. "Then you'll turn on the water."

Kukuluth turned the water on to a decent trickle.

"You *will* tell me when you're full." he commanded. He had no intention of being sprayed in revenge.

Finally, Kasander started gurgling something and Kukuluth shut the water off and removed the tip.

"You will wait until you can't hold it anymore, and then you will release the water in the toilet."

Hmm, this seems a little out of place for a yaoi- oriented pretty-boy keyfic... not to mention that daily enemas are now frowned on in the medical community as damaging to the body, loosening certain muscles so, uh, what's inside slips out at awkward times. And bringing the body's colonic chemical balance out of whack, or whatever. Nevertheless, there was a lot of good BDSM in here, not presented in scenes but rather hinted at, such as the coyly underdescribed furniture that doubles as torture devices, a musical ballgag, and a wall of mirrors facing a wooden cross. Later chapters will tell if any of it is put to good use. The writing was good, too, the yashiness (an amalgam of Yaoi and slash) in full flower, lush and cruel.

More than that, however, the writer seemed to be doing some very interesting things within the genre, presenting the slave as a rather nasty, powerful being under a compulsion to obey, which will somehow serve as his redemption. It's an inverse of all those fics where the key is a helpless being tortured for no reason at all; here the key has every reason to be tortured but isn't, his Master acting to improve his life instead. It was different, and the story promises to unwind in unexpected ways, too.

The Adored [A/A-]
Playing the Game [A/A-]
Where found: Yaoigoddess
URL: http://www.yaoigoddess.com/originals/adored.html
URL: http://www.yaoigoddess.com/originals/playgame.html
Author: Rochelle
Type: M/M, original yaoi/slash, SF, rom

As slash writers spawn multibook fanfic epics, complete with PWP interludes, sidebars, character studies, and bios, so do yaoi writers, though it's less common because there are comparatively less of them. Some yaoi sites I visit must contain hundreds of thousands of words, which is not so surprising considering the anime tendency to do the same thing, particularly in Gundam Wing, Patlabor, Dragonball, and Gathchaman series. Fanfic, being a child of the shared media experience, always imitates that media to some degree, along with the content of that media.

This story was from one of those epic sites, which contained a lengthy story series about a science fantasy world known as Rhepsadi. Rhepsadian society is divided into the Makers (the overlords), the Chosen (the elite), and the proles (everyone else) with the Chosen having enhanced physical and mental powers that lets them rule. However, they are forbidden by the Makers to marry or have children, so, in "The Adored," a male and a female scientist (who may or not be incestuous siblings) create the synthetic Lyle Frost, as a surrogate son. In "Playgame" Hadal Ruby, the telepathic prole companion of the Queen (disparagingly referred to as "gene trash" by the Chosen) is forced into the role of assassin when he is sent to kill the boy-prince of another city. He is thwarted at the last minute when he falls in love with his target in a scene more shonen-ai than yaoi.

Both stories were chock-full of exoticisms like "His lashes are long and dark-silver; his hair is like platinum blended with talc" and "he presented me and Rhea with ornately carved silver-and-ruby rings, our passes to Titania Palace's Chamber of Decisions" which gave it a lush Michael Moorcock (the science fiction author) flavor. The writing was good and the author sketched out some memorable characters in this beautiful yet oddly bloodless world. My only criticism is that, even though both stories were at the beginning of the series, I still felt like I had jumped in on the middle -- there was little explanation of exactly how this society worked, for example. But that's common in many published SF and fantasy stories as well, where it's a given that the main characters are the ennobled aristocracy who rule the contemptible masses. Though it's now a netfic cliche, character bios and a world guide would have been helpful.

In sum, interesting shounen-ai with no sex, though there may be some in later chapters. But the world was intriguing enough to make me want to return.

Ezine Review: MAS-zine [A+]
Website: http://www.mas-zine.com

You pretty much know original slash has arrived as a genre when ezines begin to spring up. Although fanfic slash has been around for decades in printed, web, and ezine form, MAS-zine is the first continually published 'zine of original slash I've seen, and it's also one of the first to come out in CD-ROM format (an intelligent alternative to the high priced printed 'zines with their high production and shipping costs.) It's available for $10 per issue from the site, and the fiction is very good. The strongest stories are as fine as anything you'd see in mainstream published fantasy like a Terri Windling anthology, but with the addition of slashy sex. And what is the focus of that sex, exactly? The editors say it best: "M/M romance with non-consensual elements. The stories we feature are daring, controversial, very intense, and emotionally gripping." Which means angst, abuse, rape, and all that other good stuff.

The stories range from under to 1,000 words to 100,000, with the emphasis on longer and multipart works. Most are set in science fiction or fantasy worlds, or altered realities that are set off enough from this one to accommodate the concept of legalized slavery or cloned sex toys. A sampling from the first three issues reveals many excellent gems from authors who have been busy honing their craft in this very specialized niche; all of them know the type of material they're producing and how to wring out its jollies.

Heather Elizabeth Peterson has produced the outstanding jewel in "Debt Price," the story of a young terrorist in a medieval world of lords and peasants who is sentenced for his crime to a brutal form of sex slavery at the hands of his victims... and his eventual redemption when he is freed by the brother of one of them. The story is one of tallying one's karmic debts and paying them off; it also explores the justification for extreme punishment and why it may or may not work, and the relative nature of guilt and innocence. Slash more in its subject matter than its sex scenes (which are brutal and not really played as erotica, skirting sensationalism without quite falling in) it's a very dense, fascinating read, well worth by itself the $10 price tag, at least for someone of my tastes.

Also excellent was Francesca's "Lynn" which was typical of the longer pieces on the site. The tale of an unemployed architect and the genetically engineered sex slave he rescues out of pity, it was set in a mythical Kafkaesque European state that's a socialist cautionary tale come true. This piece was not so much slash as playing with slashy themes -- the architect was not some swooning feyboy but a real 20th century man concerned with his image of maleness; he alternates between contempt and compassion for the slave, who is again more three-dimensional than he first appears. This novel was very long, dense, and lovely, and all the more impressive because the author's native language is Swedish and not English.

Among the others, Madame Hydra's "Black Feathers" was a amusing twist on the typical cliched yaoi plot: instead of a some lord capturing a fey, angelic being for sexual use and abusing him, we have a fey, angelic being who captures a prince, and controls him sexually, for reasons of revenge, with the aid of feathers from his wings. (I won't give away more of the plot than that.) "Pathfinder" by Rushlight also went against cliche by having its young protagonist, who's periodically kidnapped and abused because of the psychic gift he has, to be rebellious and resourceful in handling his predicament rather crying buckets like a lot of other yaoi leads seem to do, or moping around resigned to their fate. The latter story also managed to be a fast- moving SF adventure tale -- I could almost imagine it as a movie with Samuel L. Jackson and Keanu Reeves in certain roles -- and a touching emotional drama as well. Intensity of a different sort exists in Remy's "Expulsion." In the near or not-so-near future slavery is once again legal and poor Joran, once the pampered son of a wealthy businessman, is thrust kicking and screaming into it through a legal loophole when his father dies. Most of the story is taken up with his descent into domestic-servant hell, where he's abused by the kitchen staff and the household staff in a "Gosford Park" role-reversal scenario gone terribly awry. Though gripping in a Russian-gulag way it seemed less unified than the others, without the initial character and background setup that would make it a fully rounded story and not a thematic exploration. Overall, though, the writing quality of all the stories here was excellent, and if some were pointless or weak, they were balanced out by the strengths of the others.

The layout of the 'zine was professionally done in Adobe Acrobat, the editing light to leave the authors' voices intact. Some of stories featured pictures in the anime/yaoi vein, but as I am not a visual reader (I have a hard time getting into graphic novels, for example, though I will happily read comic fanfic) they didn't add anything to the experience for me. When it comes to nude males, I tend to like more realistic art; I also have the vision of male beauty that is Mr. Cyrrh to look at whenever I want, so yaoi art doesn't really yank my crank, in other words, though anime lovers should enjoy it.

All in all, highly recommended if you want to read some good stories in the original slash vein.

5/25/03

Cornucopia [A]
Where Found: The Writings of Leviticus
URL: http://195.15.95.67/wol/leviticuscornucopia.htm
Author: Musker
Type: F+, BDSM, ncon, slave

I said I was going to stay from BDSM slave fics, didn't I? I guess I'm going to have to eat my words.

Madame Rouso is an elderly dowager given to sipping tea in her luxurious study, but underneath her cultured exterior is an experienced domme. Her adventures were catalogued by the author in a previous story, "Omens," but you don't have to have read it to enjoy this one. Madame has broken four uppity slaves at her last years' Halloween party, and given one of them, an exquisite black girl named Charlene, to her friend Prince Ackman for further treatment, detailed in a letter and snapshots he sends:

[Madame] gathered up all the pictures that his highness had sent her and leaned back into her soft leather chair. In one hand was her fermenting green tea, in the other was a color photo of a blindfolded and spread eagle Charlene. She was arching her back quite dramatically over a lavishly decorated bed as if she was in the thrones of a wonderful orgasm. An orgasm brought about by a petite dark skinned woman huddled between Charlene's legs with her face practically buried in Charlene's crotch.

The story was all the hotter for being told, in the letter, in the rich tones of the Arabian Nights. The POV was unusual and the prose well written, and interesting in that it concerned the business of an elderly domina. Worth looking up.

Three Ponies [A]
Where posted: ASSM
When posted: 05/17/03
Author: Libertine
Author website: http://allme.com/stories/libertine/?nsg
Type: F pony, wife

Here's a another slave fic, this time a pony one. It was written by Libertine, an author with a prodigious output of work which has been collected on the AllMe erotica archive website.

The story was short but very evocative. The narrator has just gotten married to an Italian man who is a member of the neo-fundamentalist Conservative Christian political party, and on their honeymoon he takes her to an Aegean island retreat where the miscreant wives of other party members serve them in sackcloth. And when they want a tour of the island's holy shrines they are pulled in a surrey by three well-harnessed ponygirls, television journalists who made the mistake of criticizing the CCP and were made to "disappear."

It's a dandy setup, and it's a pity the author didn't do more with it as it was more interesting than the usual pony fodder (sorry for the pun.) In fact, I could see a whole novel detailing the narrator's adventures with her husband, the ponygirls, the island, and the sexual punishments of the religious right

Precious [A]
Where posted: ASSM
When posted: 04/17/03
Author: Crimson Dragon
Author email: dcrimson@yahoo.com
Author website: http://members.tripod.com/files/Authors/Dr/wwwagon_Of_Crimson/
Type: F, city, introspection, angel

Crimson Dragon is one of those prolific authors with many different genres under her belt (on the website, there's XX, and SF/BDSM, a genre I respect immensely.) plus she does reviews, too, not unlike myself. But not all her stories are porn. In this one, which she says "defied classification" a put-upon girl alone in the big city receives a visit from an angel who keeps her from throwing herself off the roof of her apartment building.

The sex in here took the form of an encounter with a leering, sweaty boss and unemployed layabout boyfriend, and if the heroine's travails were just *too* much even for one singularly lousy day, they also made it easy to sympathize with her. I had the feeling there could have been more of a punch at the end -- one of the firefighter rescuers says something pithy, or the angel reveals her (its?) supernatural glory. But for a character/encounter story (rather than a sex story, as the author says) it was handled well, in spite of the bathos.

At the Violet Hour [A/A-]
Where posted: ASSM
When posted: 05/15/03
Author: Kalisha Connors
Author email: kalishaconnors@yahoo.com
Type: F/F, M/M/F, M/F, goth, rom

A woman who hangs around in goth circles goes to her friend's party, where she meets the usual "Bella Lugosi's Dead"-playing crowd with blue hair, monk's robes, and omnisexual appetites. Feeling slightly estranged, she fixates on a attractive stranger who beckons her over and tells her two tales about her friends' sex lives that or may not turn out to be true; the last tale is about herself and the old friend she meets and goes home with.

This was a story that surprised me, because I was expecting the narrator and the storyteller to get together at the end. The tale-in-a-tale structure was different, giving the story a supernatural twist (who was the stranger, really? Was he foreseeing the future, or creating it?) that wasn't, unfortunately, reflected in the gothic theme, which seemed merely like window-dressing. For goths, they were awfully restrained. No cursing, no addictions, no bottle smashing. This isn't to imply that goths are lowlifes, only that the average goth is edgier and more rebellious than the crowd presented here, which might be sipping tea at the Elephant & Castle Victorian tearoom. Or perhaps it was author's use of language that made it seem so.

That's as maybe, but the story was still entertaining, and the sex scenes were nice in a romantic, non-exploitive way. A shame we didn't get to see more of the storyteller, though.

The Waterhouse [A]
Where posted: ASSM
When posted: 05/16/03
Author: David McEntee
Author email: gr8old1@earthlink.net
Type: M/F rom

Quian is the neglected young wife of the Lord of Waterhouse, an aquatic farm set in an alternate-world version of Regency England. She's accustomed to going for swims every morn and evening, and on one of these she is intercepted by Treece, a commoner she has sparked a flirtation with:

"And what seems to be in his master's waters on this lovely morning?", Treece asked by way of greeting. "'Tis an unmanned vessel."

"Good morning, Treece," Quian said sweetly. "Do you think yourself man enough to sail me?"

"My lady," Treece went on suggestively, "I am an experienced sailor. I have tamed many vessels. A skillful helmsman am I."

"Many vessels, eh?" Treece seemed more familiar today than he had been previously. "If I am a vessel, how would you guide me?"

Swimming closer, he just about rode up over her. "'Twill be a challenge, but you have three helms from which I could control you. Here," he kissed her right nipple through her shift, "here," he kissed her left, "and here," at last he kissed the tuft of hair between her legs.

I was all set up for one of those Regency rape/seduction scenarios, but at the last moment Quian decides Treece is being too insistent, and whups the hell out of him on the terrace of her house (no shrinking violet, she.) Her older husband sees approves, and forgives ("Had you said you sought love, I would have been sorely grieved. But you sought pleasure. Considering your age and ... your ... passion, this is no surprise.")

As a sex story goes this was kind of mild, but I did like it a lot, for its language, its marvelously evocative summertime setting, and its going against the grain. I will be looking for more from this author in the future.