axelmania

fightin ajw butch flight since 1987

  • they/them

18+ only but not a porn account


In the past couple of days I started two new book series, the Imperial Radch (Ancillary Justice) and Clem & Wist (The Lowest Healer and the Highest Mage). I'd easily give the first a 4.5/5 or a 5/5 but the latter is a little harder to quantify, because it is fulfilling the desires of a specific genre niche much in the way of fanfiction or isekai. I'll talk about that first.

I've been looking for a very long time for western books or comics that feel like yuri manga do. The western publishing industry favors very specific book structures and lengths, which makes it so almost all lesbian books either 1) have no real romantic element or 2) strictly follow the Romance Writers of America formula. I can enjoy unromantic books about lesbians but it's not all I want to read, and I cannot for the life of me ever enjoy the formula. It feels contrary to everything I have ever learned about how romance works, that it requires complex characters and interesting barriers between them.

Clem & Wist is able to deliver the interesting type of romance I want. Because it's self-published. It's disappointing but I've given in now to the fact that pursuing queer art means Amazon and Itch.io.

In the first book we enter a society stratified not by sex but by one of two innate abilities, to perform magic or to heal magic users and prevent them from going beserk. This has created a heavy social and legal obligation for healers to pair bond for life with a mage and continue to heal them regardless of abuse or even risk of death. The main character, Clematis, thought she had beaten that societal expectation. Her lover Wisteria was a mage and yet didn't want to force her into a bond. Not only that, but Wisteria was the most powerful mage in the world, and submitted to Clematis totally in using that power to manipulate their government closer to fairness. Until one day she suddenly didn't and turned Clematis over to the police for sedition and put her in lifelong confinement, without even a look back at her or a word.

Many years later as the story begins, Wisteria returns to her broken and deprived of magic. Clematis can gain parole by healing her, something Wisteria desperately doesn't want. Clematis immediately accepts the government's offer because she takes pleasure in tormenting and guilting Wisteria as much as she can. We get to start to discover what their old relationship might have been like, and what the mysterious and extremely stoic Wisteria might have been thinking all this time. It's tropey slow burn with some incredibly evocative horror imagery as well. I loved it and highlighted tons of passages that gave me that great romantic thrill. If you're reading this and not forged through the irons of long hours lurking on LJ and Ao3, maybe it won't be for you, but if you were...


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