rate_review Reviews

Part 3

For the target audience, this is where this story pays off, finally delivering on everything it's promised through the previous chapters.  For me, though...

I've made a number of joking and semi-joking references to this story (having unpleasant flashbacks, sending Luzurial hugs, etc.).  I'm generally afraid to talk about how emotional I got over a story on the internet; I worry I'll become an instant target for mockery, for being a wuss and so on.  I generally put up at least a token shield of humor.

But I'm going to go for total honesty here.  No more comic exaggerations or other defenses.

This chapter hurts.  Luzurial reaches Woobie status when the chains are driven through her palms and that just intensifies through the rest of the chapter.  There's a technique you use here (it's been used all through the story, but it's really impactful here), where you describe how tough and strong and, frankly, badass Luzurial is while she's in agony, like how you mention, as the skin is being flayed from her back with a fiery bullwhip, that the sheer pain of each strike would have killed a human outright, and that she endures ten of them before she starts to scream.  There are also little descriptions of cool abilities she has that, by rights, ought to free her, like focusing all her inner light onto the chains, heating them up so much that they glow white and the burning metal sears her flesh.

I'm not sure what effect these moments had on the target audience, but for me the emotional torque was pretty brutal.

Her brown eyes were dark. Eparlegna sensed the remains of her power within her, guttering like a candle. Her scalded body was vibrantly red, unable to heal itself from the full extent of the torment.

I don't really have any analysis of this line or anything.  It just makes me sad.

It also occurred to me while rereading this that there was layer of cruelty in the orgasm denial torture that I hadn't noticed before.  The part that contains the "guttering like a candle" line shows that Eparlegna doesn't need Luzurial's cooperation to impregnate her, so why does he go to all the effort of making her beg?  As far as I can tell, it's just so that she'll feel ashamed of herself afterward; so that she will suffer just that little bit more.

"You are my whore. I am your master. Say it."

"I... am your whore. You are my Master."

The words trembled with emotion, a terrible mixture of lust and total, soul consuming, despair

"Your name is whore. You will never have another. You have never had another. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Master."

"What do you want whore?"

"Fuck me, Master! Give me release!"

Eparlegna gave his Archangel slut her desire. Her tore her hymen with consent and filled the Archangel's virgin channel with his demon spike. She wrapped her arms and legs around him as he brutally fucked her.

For the target audience, that's probably the hottest moment in the entire story, but for me it's absolutely heartbreaking, partly because it represents the complete disintegration of Luzurial's self esteem, but in no small part because that's just such a human reaction, simply wanting to not hurt anymore, just for a little bit.  My heart went out to Luzurial so many times during this chapter (any time she's crying from how much pain she's experiencing, really), but that's definitely one of the more wrenching moments.

In addition, I should mention that the first time I read this story, I didn't cry.  I was surprised, because I'm kind of sensitive like that, and I came close a few times, but when I reread it, I did tear up, because when I read this line...

"Please... creator... have mercy... if not on me, on humanity. Do not let this creature be spawned of my body and his."

...I realized what the wording implied.  If you reverse the order of those words (if it's "if not on humanity, on me"), then it sounds selfish, but with the order they're in now, it hammers in that even as she's experiencing pain so intense that she genuinely thinks it will kill her, when she has every right to beg for relief, she phrases that prayer so that her relief is a secondary concern.  Even now, Luzurial's primary focus is the safety of the mortals she came here to protect.  Even after being tortured, raped and made to call herself a whore, she hasn't really lost who she is or why she's here, because she is a good person.

Finally, there's the ending.  For those of you reading this in the future, just realize that the story originally ended with "Every second hurt like eternity."  I said in my review of The Slumber Party of Evil Doom that I can't agree that Luzurial deserves what happens to her, and I'm going to have to reiterate it here.  The line about the stars growing cold implies the heat death of the universe, and since star formation should be able to continue for about 100 trillion years, that's the minimum time she has to spend locked away, every single moment agony beyond human comprehension.  This is the kind of thing the damned go through, but they have to earn it.  The serial killers, the child predators, the genocidal monsters, they all earn it.

Luzurial may be on Earth, but she has been condemned to effectively eternal torture worthy of Hell...because she came here to help us.  Pride is a sin, but given what we've seen in the rest of the story, there's no way she earned this.

Now, I want to clarify that in spite of how this may look, this is not a negative review.  I can't say what this story did for its target audience, but it made me want someone to break open the statue, hug her and tell her everything was going to be okay.  I can count on one hand the number of fictional characters I've felt as bad for as I do for Luzurial, and that takes talent, a talent for establishing the character and for communicating her sadness, her humiliation and her pain.

So while I can't say this story is fun to read, and I'm not rushing to put it in my Recommended Reading section the way I did with You!, I do believe that your gifts as a writer are on display here.

I checked this story out after reading the sequel by InBrightestDay and it was clearly worth the time even if I think the story could have worked just as well without some of the gore content .

Stylewise I think the story is pretty close to japanse hentai of the classic kind. The villian is pretty much standard bad guy, but with much more clever abuse than the all powerful tentacles often featured in the hentai anime. This make the story much more interesting.

The actual mechanics of the darkness with connection to sin is the one detail that impressed me the most. All poweful angels that suddenly get defeated for no logic reason at all is an old and boring trope. Your setup both manage to have a really innovative mechanics for the evilness of the darkness and explain why the angel comes into battle weakened so that defeat is plausible.