Quill Reviews: Thanatosian Love (Majin Syeekoh) · 2:21pm Jan 4th, 2016
So for those of you who don't know, I like reviewing stuff. I do it a fair bit for the Writeoff Association, where I like to think I have a reputation for going into way too much depth in my reviews and just rambling on for more words than the story I'm reviewing. For a long time, I've been uhming and ahing about writing reviews outside those competitions, not quite sure if it felt quite right to provide the same sort of feedback outside of a workshop-like environment.
Today I got a bit bored and decided to do it anyway. So, without further ado:
Thanatosian Love
Read the story here!
When someone sends me a link to a story on Skype, saying "Hey Quill, I think this is a story you would like (also I wrote it)", my first instinct is usually to type "link me", or something similar. This is usually followed by a moment of brief happiness, as I think "Aww, someone thought of me" while the page loads, and then usually a moment of confusion as I read the story description and wonder just why they thought of me in the first place.
In this instance, the moment of confusion hit in reading the title, although that's probably because I had no idea what thanatosian meant. In my defence, I don't think it's one of the most common words in the English language, and it took a bit of googling to figure out precisely what was going on (I'm actually still not convinced I've got the definition right—I'm working off bastardising a definition of "thanatosia" and going from there.) Turns out it's derived from the ancient greek daemon of death, Thanatos, which is something I really should have known from my Smite-playing days, and means something like "to do with putting to death."
If I'd done this tiny bit of research before reading, I probably wouldn't have found the piece quite as surprising as I did. The title Thanatosian Love brings to mind images of desperate, crazy stalkers—the If you won't love me back, I'll kill you and then kill myself sort of thing—and in a way that's exactly the tone that this piece has. Syeekoh very carefully crafts a narrative voice that feels out of place, an isolated outcast on the fringes of society. But despite that distance, their focus never falters, never wavers, even as the world around them is crumbling... and at the end of the day, that's exactly the sort of narrative voice a title like Thanatosian Love should bring to mind.
Of course, because I'm me, I want to talk for a bit about how Syeekoh creates this voice through one of the most obscure vocabularies I've seen on this site. Right off the bat, the story opens with a description of Sunset Shimmer as "resplendent", followed by the phrase "I cannot communicate this to you"—here, the deliberate choice of polysyllabic, formal phrasing immediately gives a sense that our narrator doesn't quite belong in this High School environment, which is a stylistic decision that continues through the piece. But we also get another decision introduced this early on, too, and hammered in with immediate repetition:
... with your horn of white and your wings of powdered gold.
There's a formality to this choice of construction, and I don't think it's just because you need an extra word to pull it off. By placing the adjective after the noun in this way, not only do you hint at an old-fashioned way of speaking but you also shift the focus of the sentence: it ceases to be a focus on the horn as white and instead has this dual-focus, firstly on the horn and then on the fact that it is white. And while I'm not wholly sold on the idea yet, I think this is a fantastic way to describe Sunset Shimmer in this scene, because there should be some focus on the fact that she has a horn and wings in the first place. Beyond the simple fact that this is not Sunset's natural form, it's also a really important moment for our narrator, who we later find is only now realising that they "had no hope of ever residing within her", and that Sunset had changed too much to ever accept them now: in many ways, the very fact that she can have this horn and these wings without them is a symbol that Sunset doesn't need them any more, and so they should be as much of a focus as the beautiful adjectives that come attached.
At the same time, I think that there are examples where this construction doesn't help—of course, it still gives that formalised, old-fashioned tone that gives our narrator such an isolated voice, but there are times when this split focus really takes away from the intended meaning. Consider, for example, the phrase "when the rainbow of harmony split us in twain". I post the whole phase here because I'm a huge fan of the use of "twain" here (google literally defines it as "an archaic term for two", which pretty much sums up how our narrator is talking), and I think it's important to remember that changing "rainbow of harmony" to something that seems more colloquial probably won't affect the overall tone of the phrase. The focus at the moment falls mostly on "rainbow", and if you ask me I think it should be falling on "harmony"—after all, there is an entire section of the piece where our narrator systematically rejects each of the non-magical elements of harmony, and establishes that harmony is their antithesis. By going with "harmony's rainbow", I think you'd have the right focus here: you can almost imagine the narrator spitting out the word "harmony" when it falls in that part of the sentence, whereas if you try to stress it in the current construction it feels almost sarcastic.
Still, I think that overall Syeekoh's choices of construction have worked well for this tone, and that the piece really benefits from this style. I have two minor observations that I wanted to bring up: firstly, that the style is almost introduced in the title through obscure language (because let's be honest, who else had to look up "thanatosian"?), and that I think this is really cool; and secondly, that the matching of style to content is fantastic—I was particularly impressed by the description of the students as "the unwashed masses", which just perfectly describes that outsider tone whilst adding to it (in much the same way that the disgusted "extradimensional hell-beasts", "prison of addled flesh" and "bags of meat" do) a sense of superiority.
And it's this sense of superiority that really sets the tone of this piece apart from your standard If you won't love me, I'll kill you and then kill myself things. The callous disregard for others is in a way what makes this narrator so frightening—after all, it is this disregard that allows them to not even consider the other casualties in their destructive plans—but also in some ways doesn't quite come across as right. The language used to establish that disregard and tone of superiority comes across as almost spiteful and hateful: instead of using dismissive phrasing, Syeekoh has used repulsed, almost angry language ("the unwashed masses", though a great way to establish that superiority, does suffer from this issue, almost seeming like our narrator wants these people gone.) Instead of becoming a story where the narrator is so focused on Sunset to the exclusion of others that the destruction of reality itself can be dismissed, there becomes this hint in the subtext that maybe our narrator is doing this because they actually do hate all of reality. To me, this is probably one of the most damaging issues in this piece, as it doesn't really hold up with the message of the final line: "Even if it involves the destruction of everything" sounds almost regretful, like our narrator doesn't really care about the world but would rather not destroy it, which isn't really what their hateful language suggests.
One final thought: contrast. This piece thrives on juxtaposing the narrator with both harmony and Sunset herself, and I just wanted to take a moment to appreciate some of that. Throughout the piece it creates a sense of conflict and also self-conflict, as we are told that the narrator wants nothing more than "to be Sunset Shimmer", which gives our narrator an almost tragic downfall (helped along by their assertion that Sunset was "far beyond my influence precisely because I had tried to influence her.") Now it should be said that I am a sucker for tragedies, but I did also really enjoy that aspect of this piece because of how it further built up the stalkerish tone: the constant contrast brought the focus of the piece solely onto Sunset (and, to a lesser extent, harmony, though it is hinted that our narrator has started to see the two as one and the same) which really creates an almost obsessive undercurrent to the piece. And if nothing else, that's this story's most remarkable achievement—to really bring to life this dangerous obsession, to make it feel real and unhealthy, and to really get inside the head of this character. I really, really enjoyed that, and though there were a few bumps in the road (and I haven't even mentioned the handful of typos 
) I think the piece pulled it off in the end. Well done, Majin!
Want me to review something you've written? Or, hell, something you've read? Comment with your suggestions, though be warned that I'm not likely to read things with an M rating, let alone review them. And let me know if there's anything you think I can do to improve—I'm always looking to get better at treading that fine line between providing useful feedback for an author, and writing for an audience.
A new challenger arrives!
Quill Scratch!
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Ooo, ooo, does this mean I can get you to do my hoersramblings now?
I know you read Crystal Legacy for the writeoff almost a year ago (holy carp has it been that long already?)... so why not sink your teeth into the story it was partially intended to build upon?