katalepsis review (humor balancing blog)
Jun. 7th, 2025 03:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaybeeSo, I read this webnovel and was left with pretty conflicted feelings about it. Overall- I didn't like it and felt actively frustrated a lot of the time. But that distaste was only made more unpleasant by the glimmers of meaning and very moving writing that showed up just often enough to keep me hooked in moments when the cast, their relationships, and their adventures all fell short of anything I would want or enjoy. I'm going to be pretty mean to this story here only because those fleeting incredible narrative beats made it feel as though so much more could be expressed. At least it's better than Worm.
To start there's the opening thematic spice of the story. It begins by being about girls being sad and gay and using magic that hurts them really badly. It transitions to being about self-harm through the nagic that hurts them really badly. And finally ends up at how the self-harm becomes liberatory and good for you. This is an unfair and overly harsh simplification, but it's not wrong. Some of the best work in the early story is the utter physicality of it. There's something nearly sensual in the vomit and full-body harm that the cast undergoes everytime they trespass into spaces and places not meant for humanity. It's intricately tied to trauma and disability and the spectre of pain left by those long dead. The issue comes when the characters adjust, and become more at ease in the unnatural, because it loses that universal grounding rod of pain. It's all downhill from there. The descriptions of the Outside tend to blend and smear together because it feels so... bland. The Yellow King's castle was yawn-inducing for how over-described it becomes whenever Heather visits. The strangeness, the warping, the ~incomprehensibility~ all just fades into a bland background hum and especially so without the physical harm such places initially brought to the cast to act as a grounding rod.
Heather's a real interesting little protagonist. Too shameful-bottom-horny for my tastes, but at least she's got something going on. Evelyn is the best character in the whole book, mostly because she's grating to the rest of the cast and is willing to start fights and be a source of conflict when the rest of the house tends to roll over for Heather's desires eventually. One of my biggest and earliest problems come from these two clashing- Heather, as the POV character, is hyper-aware of Evelyn's disability. Attention is drawn to her missing leg and twisted spine, her wheelchair, her wounded hand at near every opportunity. This is made all the more odd because by all accounts Heather herself is also disabled- or 'was'. In one of the most distasteful choices of the book, Heather's schizophrenia- responsible for a lifetime of being institutionalized and over-medicated- is revealed to be: not real! She's actually completely neurotypical and normal, and she just sees all the magic stuff that nobody else does. But a lifetime of traumas being shrugged off just for her to ogle a disabled girl and walk on eggshells without the slightest bit of solidarity feels so cartoonish and shallow.
Anyway that's all just small potatoes against my biggest problem with the entirety of the book of Katalepsis. It's a romance story, at its core, and it gets bored of romance. I can't think of any other way to describe it. It became so consistent and clear by the end of Heather's polycule formation I was sure it was going to come up or matter in some way or another. Nah. The effort put in the buildup, the courting, the beginning of her relationships with women- it's easily some of the best writing in the book. There's a broad spectrum of feelings and conflict caused by different characters really complicated feelings about Heather dating multiple women that feels like it brings out the best of the entire cast. And that only makes it feel more incomprehensible when the moment Heather locks in and is actively dating a woman all of that grinds to a screeching halt. Zheng runs offscreen every time there isn't actively a fight scene to the point I could predict the moment Heather would awake from her latest bout of unconsciousness to find her handsome zombie gone. Sevens is even worse because Heather, as narrator, continually notes that she's treating Sevens incredibly poorly but doesn't actually lock in or pay more attention to her- Sevens ends up getting another girlfriend (we'll come back to this.) that just serves to get her offscreen and out of Heather's hair more! It's maddening! One biting scene does not a relationship build. I liked the Gunner mask a lot. One of those fragments of meaning buried in a mess of a book I mentioned.
This problem only stings more because it feels like the finale of Book 1 understood the issue and was INCREDIBLE when it was fixing those issues. A sequence of Heather at her lowest, in an aslyum, forced to recommit to all of the people she loves while trying not to lose her mind. It's so good I actually liked Raine because of how evocative the scenes are! But that just makes the story trailing off into a mess of dream-logic and Heather too in her own head to be able to pay attention to the women she cares about anymore suck ass. It sucks the last real conversation with Zheng is her disabled and in agony and lacking, only for her to become all better offscreen. Its even worse she doesn't get any conversations with Sevens and just hands her a sword, turning the girlfriend-into-fight-scene pipeline into the most straightforward its been the entire book. Raine's weird half-dreaming issues go unaddressed and get solved offscreen too when Heather just walks away from the women she loves. It's even more annoying because I like the initial winning over of the Eye, but it doesn't feel like something that required the dropping of every thread and emotional connection being built before it.
Anyway the true sin of Katalepsis. The pedophilic wizard woman with a loli demon girl bound to her. Crazy fucking sentence, but that's just text. It's how she's introduced (actually she's called a 'pederast' which is just the complete wrong word, and I still don't get it and just assumed it was a british-ism or something). A pretty shocking offhanded inclusion, but I could immediately see at least some of what it could be going for- wizards are fucked up, as Evelyn oft repeats. Or an inverse of Heather's abuse at the hands of the Eye as a child, of an adult human wielding that same harm over a demon as some statement of power dynamics or whatever. None of that is in the book, because eventually when the pedophile comes up again halfway through the book, it gets walked completely back. She's actually just a normal sad woman and the demon child is just her sponsor in the AA sense. She's then safely shunted off into a boring love triangle with two other (adult) side characters that don't actually matter, whatever and her demon girl starts dating Heather's girlfrined Sevens, whatever. But introducing that space, introducing the concept of that type of violence and pain into the world only to rugpull it away and go "JK JK JK" feels incomprehensible. That's what I'm most frustrated by- it was stupid to ever introduce the concept if there wasn't actually anywhere the author was willing to go. I just didn't understand. I still don't, at all. Felicity doesn't matter, really, she truly isn't important to the narrative in any way, she doesn't NEED to be there. But the introduction of her was placing a loaded gun on the table only to "um, eto, bweh" when it's actually loaded with blanks. I have a distate for any stories that don't treat SA and similar cruelties with immense care and this is just about the most unbelievable usage of it I've read. Left a bad taste in my mouth. Blech.
I also read Necroepilogos. And, almost surprisingly, I liked it a lot. Way more than Katalepsis. It hones in on what the earlier webnovel does best- physicality, pain, and intense conversations between women- and bases the entirety of the world the cast awaken into around these things. It's really good (aside from using the r-slur and SA as a threat a lot, which, blech) and I felt a setting more completely steeped in the unnatural does a lot of favors for a baseline of weirdness that gives Necroepilogos more room to grow, like some sort of living meat mech, perhaps. Unforch it suffers from the same issues of relationship atrophy. I'm not asking for romantic dates in a dead and rotting apocalypse but I felt crazy when Elpida goes arcs and arcs without talking to certain members of her crew squeezed together in her living-tank-little-brother at all. Yes, the ensemble is ever-growing, but when Amina and Ilyusha's perspective and focus chapters are given such love and care only for them to be reduced to a couple of additional background voices in group scenes it feels so shallow. It's just hard to sell building a community if the narrative skips forward in time past any chance for everyone to change and grow and even just talk. This feels mildly alleviated by the willingness of the narrative to stray from Elpida's perspective but it could absolutely go so much further. Oh, for one last pro, though: I think whatever the fuck Elpida and Yola have going on rules. Weird fascists developing psychosexual feelings for communist protagonists deserves to be a time-honored webnovel tradition (its happened twice, so, two nickels). But s'my feelings. Despite my harshness I know im just gonna remember the sprinkles of meaning and swag in Katalepsis fondly. So time will continue to plod steadily onwards and mellow out my feelings. At least it's better than fucking Worm.
To start there's the opening thematic spice of the story. It begins by being about girls being sad and gay and using magic that hurts them really badly. It transitions to being about self-harm through the nagic that hurts them really badly. And finally ends up at how the self-harm becomes liberatory and good for you. This is an unfair and overly harsh simplification, but it's not wrong. Some of the best work in the early story is the utter physicality of it. There's something nearly sensual in the vomit and full-body harm that the cast undergoes everytime they trespass into spaces and places not meant for humanity. It's intricately tied to trauma and disability and the spectre of pain left by those long dead. The issue comes when the characters adjust, and become more at ease in the unnatural, because it loses that universal grounding rod of pain. It's all downhill from there. The descriptions of the Outside tend to blend and smear together because it feels so... bland. The Yellow King's castle was yawn-inducing for how over-described it becomes whenever Heather visits. The strangeness, the warping, the ~incomprehensibility~ all just fades into a bland background hum and especially so without the physical harm such places initially brought to the cast to act as a grounding rod.
Heather's a real interesting little protagonist. Too shameful-bottom-horny for my tastes, but at least she's got something going on. Evelyn is the best character in the whole book, mostly because she's grating to the rest of the cast and is willing to start fights and be a source of conflict when the rest of the house tends to roll over for Heather's desires eventually. One of my biggest and earliest problems come from these two clashing- Heather, as the POV character, is hyper-aware of Evelyn's disability. Attention is drawn to her missing leg and twisted spine, her wheelchair, her wounded hand at near every opportunity. This is made all the more odd because by all accounts Heather herself is also disabled- or 'was'. In one of the most distasteful choices of the book, Heather's schizophrenia- responsible for a lifetime of being institutionalized and over-medicated- is revealed to be: not real! She's actually completely neurotypical and normal, and she just sees all the magic stuff that nobody else does. But a lifetime of traumas being shrugged off just for her to ogle a disabled girl and walk on eggshells without the slightest bit of solidarity feels so cartoonish and shallow.
Anyway that's all just small potatoes against my biggest problem with the entirety of the book of Katalepsis. It's a romance story, at its core, and it gets bored of romance. I can't think of any other way to describe it. It became so consistent and clear by the end of Heather's polycule formation I was sure it was going to come up or matter in some way or another. Nah. The effort put in the buildup, the courting, the beginning of her relationships with women- it's easily some of the best writing in the book. There's a broad spectrum of feelings and conflict caused by different characters really complicated feelings about Heather dating multiple women that feels like it brings out the best of the entire cast. And that only makes it feel more incomprehensible when the moment Heather locks in and is actively dating a woman all of that grinds to a screeching halt. Zheng runs offscreen every time there isn't actively a fight scene to the point I could predict the moment Heather would awake from her latest bout of unconsciousness to find her handsome zombie gone. Sevens is even worse because Heather, as narrator, continually notes that she's treating Sevens incredibly poorly but doesn't actually lock in or pay more attention to her- Sevens ends up getting another girlfriend (we'll come back to this.) that just serves to get her offscreen and out of Heather's hair more! It's maddening! One biting scene does not a relationship build. I liked the Gunner mask a lot. One of those fragments of meaning buried in a mess of a book I mentioned.
This problem only stings more because it feels like the finale of Book 1 understood the issue and was INCREDIBLE when it was fixing those issues. A sequence of Heather at her lowest, in an aslyum, forced to recommit to all of the people she loves while trying not to lose her mind. It's so good I actually liked Raine because of how evocative the scenes are! But that just makes the story trailing off into a mess of dream-logic and Heather too in her own head to be able to pay attention to the women she cares about anymore suck ass. It sucks the last real conversation with Zheng is her disabled and in agony and lacking, only for her to become all better offscreen. Its even worse she doesn't get any conversations with Sevens and just hands her a sword, turning the girlfriend-into-fight-scene pipeline into the most straightforward its been the entire book. Raine's weird half-dreaming issues go unaddressed and get solved offscreen too when Heather just walks away from the women she loves. It's even more annoying because I like the initial winning over of the Eye, but it doesn't feel like something that required the dropping of every thread and emotional connection being built before it.
Anyway the true sin of Katalepsis. The pedophilic wizard woman with a loli demon girl bound to her. Crazy fucking sentence, but that's just text. It's how she's introduced (actually she's called a 'pederast' which is just the complete wrong word, and I still don't get it and just assumed it was a british-ism or something). A pretty shocking offhanded inclusion, but I could immediately see at least some of what it could be going for- wizards are fucked up, as Evelyn oft repeats. Or an inverse of Heather's abuse at the hands of the Eye as a child, of an adult human wielding that same harm over a demon as some statement of power dynamics or whatever. None of that is in the book, because eventually when the pedophile comes up again halfway through the book, it gets walked completely back. She's actually just a normal sad woman and the demon child is just her sponsor in the AA sense. She's then safely shunted off into a boring love triangle with two other (adult) side characters that don't actually matter, whatever and her demon girl starts dating Heather's girlfrined Sevens, whatever. But introducing that space, introducing the concept of that type of violence and pain into the world only to rugpull it away and go "JK JK JK" feels incomprehensible. That's what I'm most frustrated by- it was stupid to ever introduce the concept if there wasn't actually anywhere the author was willing to go. I just didn't understand. I still don't, at all. Felicity doesn't matter, really, she truly isn't important to the narrative in any way, she doesn't NEED to be there. But the introduction of her was placing a loaded gun on the table only to "um, eto, bweh" when it's actually loaded with blanks. I have a distate for any stories that don't treat SA and similar cruelties with immense care and this is just about the most unbelievable usage of it I've read. Left a bad taste in my mouth. Blech.
I also read Necroepilogos. And, almost surprisingly, I liked it a lot. Way more than Katalepsis. It hones in on what the earlier webnovel does best- physicality, pain, and intense conversations between women- and bases the entirety of the world the cast awaken into around these things. It's really good (aside from using the r-slur and SA as a threat a lot, which, blech) and I felt a setting more completely steeped in the unnatural does a lot of favors for a baseline of weirdness that gives Necroepilogos more room to grow, like some sort of living meat mech, perhaps. Unforch it suffers from the same issues of relationship atrophy. I'm not asking for romantic dates in a dead and rotting apocalypse but I felt crazy when Elpida goes arcs and arcs without talking to certain members of her crew squeezed together in her living-tank-little-brother at all. Yes, the ensemble is ever-growing, but when Amina and Ilyusha's perspective and focus chapters are given such love and care only for them to be reduced to a couple of additional background voices in group scenes it feels so shallow. It's just hard to sell building a community if the narrative skips forward in time past any chance for everyone to change and grow and even just talk. This feels mildly alleviated by the willingness of the narrative to stray from Elpida's perspective but it could absolutely go so much further. Oh, for one last pro, though: I think whatever the fuck Elpida and Yola have going on rules. Weird fascists developing psychosexual feelings for communist protagonists deserves to be a time-honored webnovel tradition (its happened twice, so, two nickels). But s'my feelings. Despite my harshness I know im just gonna remember the sprinkles of meaning and swag in Katalepsis fondly. So time will continue to plod steadily onwards and mellow out my feelings. At least it's better than fucking Worm.
