thaliarchus

@thaliarchus

The poet they probably shouldn’t have sent. I watch anime and am sometimes accused of reading books. I'm writing a long gay giant robot story in verse—probably this millennium's best yuri mecha epic poem, through lack of competition.

'Now praise those names on tombs of steel engraved | And toll this rotting country’s countless bells.'

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thaliarchus
@thaliarchus

Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright Book I is out now.

A few months back I set out to see whether you can write about giant robots in long-form verse.

Still not sure I know the answer, but you can now grab the first book of Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright on itch.io.

Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright features:

  • More space-operatic scope than you can shake a hyper-stick at.
  • Poetry that’s at least competent, with a robust spine of blank verse and various other forms used for inset lyrics.
  • Shameless borrowing from Ideon, UC Gundam, the Aeneid, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, and more broadly a good steeping in both classic mecha anime and 1300 years of English verse.
  • Technically it is gay? I don't want to oversell this (and haven't tagged it), because this is not a story about kissing.

It's free, & I expect it'll stay that way. I doubt it's especially good, but I've been enjoying writing it.

At present, you can read the first clean draft of Book I, 'Burning Foldspace'. Book I is around 800 lines long. I'll add further books as (if?) I finish them; Book II is progressing well at the time of writing.

You can also grab a short afterword which discusses things like the naming conventions, the metre &c.

The afterword also lays out some reasons why it's on itch, one among those being that the idea of a long poem being on itch is very funny (to me).

The image at the top of this post, and the cover image for the poem, is a detail from London, British Library, Royal MS 20.D.i, f. 154r, a mid-fourteenth-century miniature depicting Troy by an anonymous artist; the image has generously been made available under a CC-BY license by the British Library. The whole manuscript has been digitised, if anyone's curious, and the full miniature can be found here.

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