Released: October 2024; Complete
Notable tags: Spiderfini, compact future
In 2557 about 99.999999% of terrans were brought under the fold of the compact and everything's become pretty great ever since. The year is now 2612. When Abel, a curious terran from a well off asteroid colony gains a new special interest about the history of how it all happened, she goes to investigate her father's home-planet looking for answers. Turns out knowledge comes at a price, even within the compact.
In musical terms, an etude is a piece that exists primarily to drill or train a certain musical technique. Anyone who's played piano probably has their complaints about Czerny's, but a lot of etudes manage to be beautiful or outright iconic. Speaking of which, She Wants You!
Lagnia wrote "She Wants You" to practice writing descriptive prose, and it shows in all the most lovely ways. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but there are so many beautiful pictures painted with words in this story. Pictures of things that couldn't possibly exist, even.
The subject matter is very well-chosen for that purpose. We find ourselves half a century after the domestication of the terran accord, with a terran who harbors an innocent curiosity and wants to know how the domestication campaign went. Who almost immediately gets clocked as a seed by a curious affini. The world is beautifully alien in ways many other stories aren't, and features some exploration of the effects cultural Domestication might have on a society. It's a brave new world, and watching country bumpkin Abel pinball her way through a major city designed primarily for affini and their florets is a true joy. The story manages to paint a thoroughly reasonable picture of someone picking up feralist ideas even so long after the fall of the accord, which is also not easy.
The ways She Wants You plays with the non/dub-con elements of the setting is great. After all, if the compact has been in charge your whole life, why would you have any compunctions about an affini just... claiming you? Everyone knows florets are incredibly happy. It's an honor to be claimed, really. Even if, for some reason, you don't really want it. The affini might seem a little scary, but they definitely have your best interests at heart.
It's also incredibly hot. Miss Vatia is not subtle about what she wants, and not subtle about how quickly she can tell that Abel wants it too. There are plenty of scenes in this story that I am unbelievably normal about, from the core-thread silk to the enclosement to the oviposition... It's really fun, creative, hot stuff.
Now, if you've seen this fic in the past, you may remember there being some issues with grammar and dialogue tags. If that dissuaded you in the past, I have good news: there's a new, edited version that just dropped, and also, Lagnia has started working on a 9th chapter, so... we've got that to look forward to.
Also, while I personally have not yet read Pride of Her Garden, I have heard from many of my correspondents that it's incredible, and it's absolutely on my reading list, which is roughly as swollen as Abel's belly by the end of the story.
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