Posted by Astronommy 3 years ago Report

*rolls eyes* Perfection. Again with the perfection!
*So* predictable.

Beautifully set up, with a new location that's closest to Claire's core, the opposite of romantic for anyone else, but just right for them, just like their togetherness thing!

Alison's terrible advice had laid down the first part of the solution to the love riddle -- the one that Claire needed -- and Claire repeated those arguments, and even employed Alison's Fatalism Shredder to get through to her skittish little man -- but then she had to present the other half to Adam, and she did it imperfect-perfectly; the current circumstance of their meeting, the environment, the earlier pertinent conversations all traced forward to this moment, lending their momentum and significance to it.

I'd wondered if the mention of otherkin in the chapter the ultimate Claire look was revealed would turn up, and it's been so smoothly integrated with Claire's inner beast explanations, that it almost doesn't feel like new thing. It's more of an inverse state of the otherkin idea: not a non-human trapped inside a human shell, but the only authentic, honest representation of one's humanity manifesting in the character. And I guess that would also be the strictly materialistic interpretation of the phenomenon, too.

It was necessary for everything to work that Adam would still try the petulant asinine kink segregation argument, but Claire explained how that notion fits into the way he's broken -- or incomplete, rather; not living his best life, as it were.

Even though the power dynamics are reversed in this story, related to the usual romance patterns, but it's important that Adam is the mildly successful friendly guy being possessively pursued by Claire the proud starving artist woman with a lot going on on the inside. It probably wouldn't have worked any other way, which adds to the uniqueness of the relationship.

The vore-related element of the relationship is elegantly and meaningfully integrated with the personalities and the personal challenges of the two, and it's a brilliant rehabilitation of the typical asocial, emotionally cowardly appeal of characters eating each other: it's not the gratification of sex followed by the partner being discarded, transformed directly into the afterglow, without the trouble of managing a relationship past that point -- it's devourment as a pledge of commitment, a marriage of sorts. It a very specific and rare context you've conjured that make Claire's hungers not only be satisfied, but enjoyed by her "victim", and projected over the looming decades of happy ever after.

The theme is also expressed throughout the novel in other ways, of course, as dealing with dangerous possessive urges, pushing of personal boundaries, accusations of Claire of having predatory intentions, the role-playing, etc.

It is both disrespectful of me, and tempting fate, to be talking about this pivotal chapter as if the curtains are about to close on the stage already, when there's no doubt a thrilling twist or two yet in store! At the very least, the narrative logic still calls and allows for something like a one-year-after Halloween reenactment of the first Adam's family gathering, with Claire winning over everyone with her costume designs for the kids, and possibly even earning a grudging nod from Angie (but more likely, and more satisfyingly -- a glare of impotent, marginalized contempt), and with the couple upstaging Adam's parents as the most excitingly expressive (but family friendly!) bonded pair of the scene, which would be glorious.

In any case, I'm still excited for the story's continuation!

Posted by 4ofSwords 3 years ago Report

> It is ... tempting fate, to be talking about this pivotal chapter as if the curtains are about to close on the stage already

Not at all - we were definitely leaning into the denouement at the end. :) But I don't know if I could write Claire winning over Adam's family - I have to draw the line somewhere between fiction and fantasy. ;)

Posted by Astronommy 3 years ago Report

Yeah, neighborly appeasement isn't the Claire way, you're right.

Posted by Astronommy 3 years ago Report

Oh, and Claire exposing herself -- showing her old place at its least flattering, and choosing her filters-off demonic incarnation over a formal restaurant dinner, running out of breath and hydration in an effort to convey her covenant and her plea uninterrupted, erupting into innocent joy upon being accepted -- that was all appropriately heartwrenching, endearing and awe-inspiring, thank you!

I've also missed two opportunities already to mention that this story can be very therapeutic for people whose main hurdle on the way to attaining happiness is the belief that they are uniquely unlovable. Granted, Adam and Claire did luck out with finding each other, in the one-in-the-billion kind of way, and their manner of connecting to each other is unusual, but read in perspective, this also captures a scenario of how even the weirdest and unlikely cases can work out, often because of their participants' complementary weirdness, and empathetic capacity with tolerating and accepting such.

Posted by 4ofSwords 3 years ago Report

> ...this story can be very therapeutic for people whose main hurdle on the way to attaining happiness is the belief that they are uniquely unlovable. Granted, Adam and Claire did luck out with finding each other, in the one-in-the-billion kind of way...

This was a tension I wasn't sure how to resolve, or if it should be resolved. The theme of the story might be that love is a broader experience than we typically portray it, but the expression of it is two characters unrealistically matched to each other landing in eachother's laps. We could look at Alison for evidence that love doesn't have to be consummated to be real or meaningful, but then she got her happy ending, too. So I dunno. It's a romance - even if it's subverting the love rules along the way, it still has to follow them in structure, I suppose.

Posted by Astronommy 3 years ago Report

It's a case study -- an extreme case, because it's aimed-to-please fiction, after all -- but all the general and specific observations on love hold true regardless of likelihood of their application for this one exact grandiose scenario; it's certainly more honest, balanced and grounded than any of the mainstream Cinderella stories that can't explore love outside of their fantastic boundaries.

And besides, the story breaks down the idea of Disney-love as well as the settled-for-each-ever-after prosaic interpretation of it, so it is impossibly stuck between having to match two mutually exclusive concepts -- and it does that, with its wonderful crisscrossing relations of personal and social power between the mains.

This novel's convincing deconstruction of Adam's cagey conservatism notwithstanding, personally I still hold onto my similarly drab theories on love: that it's a cultural ideal that has led more people to misery than to happiness; that it's the same kind of roundabout, obfuscated romanticization of physical attraction and fleeting affections as vore is to nonconsensual intimacy; that it's contingent on material circumstances to an extent that leaves most of the poverty-stricken world only dreaming of it; that it's an excuse for emotional manipulation when not explored and communicated properly; that being able to adapt to someone else's specifics while making hard concessions of your own *while also* keeping true to your core values (kind of your story's interpretation) is a (rarely encountered in full) generally applicable skillset that doesn't correspond with the traditional spontaneous definition of love; that it's just plain hard to do right, especially when you don't know where to start.

However, that said, reading your story has definitely made me think a lot about the subject, and had made me rearrange my positions slightly, paving the way for future changes.

I think the biggest trouble with love that it's eighteen definitions all rolled into one, with the overall concept becoming incomplete if even some of them are redefined as separate phenomena.

EPIPHANOUS CLARITY TIME! Eureka! etc.

Your story is about what to do when *an opportunity for finding true love presents itself*, either over the course of a long search, or by auspicious happenstance -- believing it's possible, believing you're worth it, putting in the effort, dealing with setbacks and self-doubt -- and as such shouldn't be judged on the rarity of those opportunities (which is considerable, realistically speaking).

And, like I said, it is valuable as a beautiful and intelligent meditation on the subject, and an invitation for the reader to go on pondering it in their free time.

Posted by 4ofSwords 3 years ago Report

> I think the biggest trouble with love that it's eighteen definitions all rolled into one, with the overall concept becoming incomplete if even some of them are redefined as separate phenomena.

Yes! That is something I wanted to try to capture in the conversations. There is a singular popularized, commercialized quasi-definition/category, but it takes any number of different forms. And then I wanted to wrap it all up in one new definition and tie it with a pretty bow. Which is a bit like stepping into the argument with the blind men grasping the elephant's tail, trunk, and knee, and suggesting that if they'd just step back, what an elephant is is a body wrapped in gray skin. :D

Posted by Astronommy 3 years ago Report

Aye, all that murky ambiguity could be traced back to the time those bloody men in a cave were looking at the shadows being cast by love and guessing at what its true form could have been, whereas we people of today know for certain that love actually looks like an ever-shifting, glistening pitch-black blob.

The basic takeaway from "Adam Smasher" is everyone has their own kind of love, and the real meta-love is striving to match and adjust those personal loves to form a functioning macro-love that is both the sum of its constituent sub-loves and a transcendent by-product thereof -- the power of love -- but that is only achievable if the two enter into a proper love-a-rhythmic equation with each other. Simple!

Posted by 4ofSwords 3 years ago Report

The fact that love is organic chemistry should be warning enough for those who remember how hard that course was.

Posted by Astronommy 3 years ago Report

The mechanics of basic photosynthesis alone has been known to drive high school students operatically mad, to say the least; I understand that being forced to write biochem papers on hormones is internationally recognized as a form of torture.