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A Needlessly Long Review of "Alchemised" by SenLin Yu

Alchemised by SenLin Yu is one of the more interesting novels of the year for multiple reasons. It’s a dark, gothic romance. It’s a debut novel. It’s over one thousand pages in length. It’s also the progenitor and final boss of the Dramoine fanfiction to novel pipeline. It’s an oddity. Of course, I read it.

According to my grading scale, it's a 2 out of 5—it's not good but there are a few things in it that I appreciated. However, I am so tempted to give this no rating at all. This book irks me. It is flawed on a fundamental level. To read it was to suffer, and not in a good way.

So, let’s chat about it.

Before we even begin, let me provide some important context:

Alchemised the novel is based on Manacled the fanfiction. I did not read the fanfiction before reading the novel. You could not pay me enough money to read the fanfiction. Vitally, the fanfiction is actually a Harry Potter X Handmaid’s Tale AU.

Have I read A Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood? No. I have plans to read it now. I am not certain Yu read it themself.

I have never read any Harry Potter fanfiction. I have never been involved in the fandom, either.

I have read the other two Dramoine pipeline novels, which seemingly were announced in Alchemised’s wake while managing to be released a couple of months earlier. I originally only planned to read one, but this pipeline has fascinated me so deeply that I ended up doing a deep dive.

I talked about my thoughts on Julie Soto’s Rose In Chase in a previous reading post. I still stand by my review, but in response to Alchemised, I have sweetened on it (it’s a 2.5 out of 5).

I read The Irresistible Urge to Fall For Your Enemy by Bridgette Knightly a couple of weeks ago, which I have not written about yet. It’s better at not being Harry Potter fanfiction than either Rose In Chains or Alchemised, but it’s not a good romantic comedy (all the jokes are the same; that is to say, they are all about genitals). It is also the only pipeline novel that has made any real effort to include queer characters—though, none of which are trans (which would indicate some effort to “reclaim” Harry Potter, if possible). It’s a 3 out of 5. It’s fine.

I am going to spoil parts of Alchemised, but I assume you know that you are reading this review with the understanding that I do not recommend reading it.

Alchemised features depictions of a lot of difficult topics, such as suicide, rape, assault, and so on. They will be addressed.

I am going to try to keep my thoughts organized with a few section headers; but be warned: this is going to inevitably become a rambling mess. I will also be unable to support my claims with in-text citations because I returned my copy to the library before deciding to write this out.

So You Live Under a Rock And Need To Know What Alchemised Is About

Alchemised is a story told in three parts, which I need to poorly summarize so that we’re on the same page. (Please note that this is a very simplified and vaguely sarcastic summary of events; I have neither the desire nor willpower to recount exactly how many subplots are in this dang thing.)

Part One is approximately 300 pages about Helena waking from a coma to find out that the bad guys, a group of undying necromancers led by a nefarious leader who must be named (Morrough), have won the war in the alchemy-heavy country of Paladia and are making the place increasingly awful to live in. Helena has no memories of how she ended up in said coma (it's actually this story's equivalent of carbonite, à la Han Solo), as some strange alchemy has been performed on her brain to give her magical amnesia. Morrough determines that his right-hand man, Kaine Ferron, should keep her prisoner in his house as Kaine tries to undo the amnesia to learn vital intel on the surviving resistance.

During all this, Helena decides that the only way to protect the Resistance is to kill herself. That’s the basic premise. Ostensibly, there’s a mystery as to who Kaine is, what her memories are, etc. The problem is that there is no actual effort put towards said mystery. Helena is an inert character. She doesn’t do anything, and her internal struggle is reduced to what I will unkindly describe as moping. To be honest, she doesn’t even try all that hard to kill herself. I feel crazy saying this, but she really should have committed to that much more than she did.

Kaine is also never truly depicted as a threat, which further hurts the plot from gaining any momentum. Instead, we drag our feet through repeating montages of gray weather and cold chambers until the story remembers that it's a Handmaid's Tale AU. Kaine is ordered to conceive a child in Helena so that the child can have access to her super special taboo form of alchemy powers, and therefore become a new vessel for Morrough (whose body is, of course, dying). Kaine rapes her, and she gets pregnant. Then, without anyone needing to do anything else, Helena's amnesia goes away, and she remembers her past.

Part Two takes us back in time to the middle of the war between the good guys and the bad guys. It is also about 800 pages of meandering subplots that really could have been cut.

Helena is a nurse for the war clinic when she starts moonlighting as a contact for a Resistance spy: Kaine, who, despite fighting for the Necromancers, has decided that he actually wants to see the bad guys fail. He has a personal vendetta. It’s a thing.

They proceed to make slow, slow progress into becoming genuine allies. Like I said: there are a lot of subplots, each motivated by a different off-brand Harry Potter character. I'm genuinely trying to think of any that are totally vital in a quick and dirty plot summary like this one, but I'm coming up short.

During this time, Helena does a risky medical experiment on Kaine to save his life. Don’t worry about that right now. Eventually, they fall into a torrid love affair. When the good guys lose, Kaine attempts to smuggle Helena to safety, but she insists on going back to erase evidence of his treachery to protect him from Morrough’s wrath. While she succeeds, she gets caught by the bad guys and is quickly cast into her magical coma. She is also the one who did the alchemy on her brain to give herself amnesia so that no one would read her mind and learn that Kaine was the spy.

Part Three is a 300 page limp to the ending.

Helena and Kaine are now on the same page about what’s going on and who they are to each other. This is also the point of time where the author blatantly decides that they want the story to end as soon as possible. Helena quickly does another experimental procedure on Kaine to unbind his life from Morrough. Now free, Kaine and Helena flee to this world’s equivalent of Argentina where no one will realize that Kaine committed so, so many crimes against humanity.

Off-page, the bad guys are overthrown and the country is saved. Helena and Kaine have their child, and the ending sort of… happens. There’s a few pages summarizing the ways in which Paladia was reformed, then an epilogue where their child arrives in Paladia as an adult in order to start school.

To be fair, this is where Alchemised has its most effective moment: the final lines, which affirm that Helena and Kaine’s story will remain unknown to the rest of the world, meaning no one will know how much Helena had truly suffered during the war. It was a good point to end on. Kudos.

What Is There To Like About Alchemised?

A review I read on GoodReads made the best possible defense of Yu’s writing: Yu had to disassemble a perfect piece of art and reassemble it again with new parts; it will never be as good as the original Manacled, but it's impressive to see how they jigsaw it together. Even though I haven't read the original, I can see that. There are two very good parts of this story that get drowned out by the lingering, fanfiction-heavy plot threads.

The first: their original world. You can clearly see what world-building ideas are meant to paint over Wizarding World specifics (like the details about the Institute), but overall, the world of Paladia is really cool. The alchemy system is thoroughly thought out. There is a well-developed history and lore, and a fantastic sense of place.

However, the story being told does not support the world. Instead of the world building shaping the nature of the world, details about the world are shoved in between details about the war. It's a clear side effect of its fanfiction origins: the plot is trying to present a twist on a world the reader is supposed to be already familiar with. When the world is new, there are details we are forcefully fed that don’t matter to the actual plot or characters.

You can also see it in the way the story clears its initial moments of exposition. Instead of organically building the sense of a fully fleshed-out world to the reader, Yu clunkily dumps passages from their story bible into the prose. The first many chapters are filled with dry explanations of everything from the magic system, to the map, to the school, and even the role of women in society. While these dumps become less frequent, they never go away. Yu is trying to fit seven books' worth of world-building into one and is clearly struggling.

The second good thing is the inspiration for the romance plotline. A few weeks ago, I vague posted about an author who I thought did not sound as intelligent as they made themselves out to be in a podcast. This was about SenLin Yu in their appearance on the Barnes and Noble-sponsored podcast. In listening to that podcast, I learned that Yu was inspired by Frankenstein.

Our female lead, Helena, performs an experimental medical treatment on an already experimented on Kaine to save his life. That, combined with how she blackmails/manipulates him and makes him devoted to her, transforms him into a “monster.” That’s a really cool idea. I like that.

But you also get the sense that Helena didn’t do much to actually change him. He was already messed up like hell, and there’s the sense that he would have been this obsessed with her even without her intervention. Saving him didn’t make him worse; she saved him despite how clearly messed up he was. If he is a coyote with rabies, she is the neighborhood girl begging her father not to shoot the poor thing. Her culpability is minor, which is a shame: a story where the ML becomes the archetypal obsessive, dark romantic hero because our FL made him that way is really good.

But Yu isn’t really interested in doing a committed, thematic play on Shelley’s Frankenstein. Yu really wants to write about war.

Both the world-building and the romance would have shone far more in a plot that could fully engage with them. But, again, Yu wants to write about war, so both get lost.

I have thought about filing the serial numbers off of my fanfiction before. I want to be a published author, and I have spent 4+ years of my life on a story that will most likely end when it hits 1 million words. I would be an idiot not to consider it. But when it comes down to divorcing my original ideas from their context, something is lost. It's like translating a novel from one language to another—you cannot translate the words directly without losing the cultural connotations. You have to add the meaning back in.

I can’t change the copyrighted details without losing the heart of the story. When I add original details to fill up the holes, that story I've slaved away at changes irrevocably. There is no way to maintain the integrity of the original plot without the skeleton of the video game I was riffing on. Without it, every character, every plot point, every original detail I added breaks.

Essentially, I have to gut my fanfiction for parts. What I like has to be put into a brand new story with brand new characters. In doing that, those parts morph into something new. If I ever publish that non-fanfiction version of my story, no one would recognize it.

All that’s to say that even if Yu’s call to fame is Manacled, Yu’s debut should not have been Manacled-without-the-Harry-Potter. Everything Yu invented for the story should have been transplanted to a new novel. Unfortunately, the powers that be (the book publishers) deemed that Yu's success in fanfiction does not translate to success as a novelist. If Yu wants to be a real author, Yu has to prove that the audience who read Manacled would buy Manacled.

So Manacled was transformed into Alchemised with the fewest possible edits. The story cannot be revised to wash away the traces of being a serialized fanfiction. What is good and original has to remain buried under the facsimile of Rowling's story, where it will languish as unfulfilled potential.

Instead, there’s a war.

This Is a War Story, Allegedly

I harp on how Alchemised is ostensibly a war story because that is what Yu claimed in their podcast appearance. They wanted to write about how horrible war is and how people deal with that trauma. Or, really, trauma in general. The mass acts of impersonal violence seen in war and the smaller-scale acts of terror conducted by an individual are given the same weight, especially in terms of thematic messaging. This is a book where everyone and everything is miserable. It is also where Alchemised fails the most.

This book’s definition of trauma is neither interesting, in-depth, nor compelling. There is no before. We enter the story in media res, after every character has already suffered through tragedy. When Part Two rolls us back in time, it's only to the beginning of the war's end. There is no before to reference. Every character had suffered, is suffering, and will continue to suffer. They're sad in nearly identical ways. If you do not mope, you are mean. The Helena who is struggling as a medic in the war does not wear her depression any differently from a Helena who is imprisoned with no memories. Similarly, Kaine's struggles with morality in a moral-less situation are not different in any of the story's three parts.

Every character outside of our main duo can be charted on the same X and Y axis with very little contrast between each: you are sad or mean, you are a victim or a perpetrator. I won't say there is no dimension found in any of the characters; it's just not a rich one.

This is in part because no character is truly fleshed out in their own right. Yu consistently tells the reader everything we need to know about a character without allowing the character to show. There is a past beyond the war, but it's only ever articulated in narration. With every character getting a wiki's worth of background explained by the author, you have to wonder why there isn't a book or seven that naturally establishes and grows these dynamics. Even if Yu has to erase all traces of Rowling's books, there is still a better way of establishing character.

For example, Helena is so dedicated to an organization that outright hates her for being a foreigner who uses a vaguely taboo form of alchemy because her friend, Luc, is the hero of the organization. Why is she so dedicated to Luc that she is willing to die for him? She just is. You have to trust the narration (if you remember that Luc is Harry Potter and Helena is Hermione Granger, you also have seven books to explain her dedication).

Imagine instead that the narration telling us about Luc and Helena’s friendship is replaced by a conversation where the two reflect on their friendship. Maybe there is a memory that they both remember differently, and the argument foreshadows not only their future falling-out, but suggests that Helena's loyalty is too naively blind. By doing this, you would be erasing all evidence that you have, in fact, completely divorced from the source material and properly reformulated every possible plot element. By choosing to show, you would be leaving the readers to draw their own conclusions about the characters, but it’s not like telling fully erases the traces of fanfiction left all over this story. As I said— without knowledge that Luc is Harry Potter, Helena's devotion is inexplicit.

Authors can’t show all the time. Sometimes, it's necessary to tell the reader something outright. But everything in this story is told. Just as the world-building is overexplained, so too is every character's past and development.

This means that when Yu says that we are exploring the effects of trauma, it’s not in the internal but the external. The trauma of war is, at best, a backdrop, and an edgy, grimdark one at that.

The enemy army is made up of nercomancers who, in the book's own words, are explicitly sadists. They torture because they enjoy torture. There is a visceral pleasure they derive from performing horrific human experiments— to a cartoonish degree at that.

Part One features Kaine’s wife (don’t worry about her; the plot certainly doesn’t) ripping Helena’s eye out of her socket in a fit of jealousy. Part Two concludes with a scene where pseudo-Mr. Weasley’s corpse is reanimated solely so that he can chop off parts of Mrs. Weasley’s body and eat her alive while she helplessly screams in agony. Every scene, war and beyond, is drenched in punishing bodily misery, and every Necromancer who is not Kaine Ferron relishes it.

I don't dislike gore, horror, or even body horror, but while reading Alchemised, I hit a limit I rarely hit. The world was just too cruel, too cynical. That is a weird stance for me to take when one of my favorite pieces of art ever is Berserk, a manga which is famously cruel and violent, especially to women. I had to ask myself: where does Berserk succeed where Alchemised falls flat?

Berserk’s cruel world is a part of the story’s larger discussion on morality. While much of the graphic violence in Berserk stems from demonic forces, it is also enacted by common humans. Some of the humans are so evil that they seem to lose their humanity, while others seem to take on angelic affects. It thematically poses a significant question as to what is evil and what could drive someone to lose their humanity. It poses a way to survive that cruelty: love and kindness. In a world as unforgiving as Kentaro Miura’s Midland, you have to build community and be kind to others, because that is the only way you will survive. Broadly, it's a manga about the human condition. Its violence feels purposeful.

In Alchemised, the necromancers are sadists because the process of becoming an undead being damages a part of the brain. So whatever evil or war crime you see depicted on the page is, in part, caused by a physiological defect.

Yu, if you are reading this (and I hope you are not), I am going to phrase this in the gentlest way possible so that you can reevaluate a few things: attributing a person’s evilness to biological factors is not the hot take you think it is.

I shouldn't have to explain that. I shouldn't have to even explain why that cripples, if not outright invalidates, any true commentary you could have on why the war is as comically grim as it is. At least Rose In Chains attempted to explain its cruelty with a poorly thought-out history of prejudice against doing the same magic, but slightly to the left— which in itself was an attempt to recreate the circumstances of the mudblood/pureblood divide without diving into race politics.

Alchemised presents itself as a self-important, intellectual dive into morality, and your most cruel characters are just wrong in the brain. That's it. Nothing deeper.

One may argue that Kaine and Helena’s arcs are meant to be that exploration of morality. And, sure, there is something there. While I can nitpick, I think they are overall good depictions of gray morality. But it’s nothing I care to take seriously when no other Necromancer or ostensible good guy is given the same degree of care.

Many of Helena's superiors make shrewd decisions to manipulate their inferiors or torture prisoners, ultimately so that Yu can say that both sides are bad in their own ways. Sure, that's true in the most literal sense, but I can’t take that argument seriously when the nercomancers are biologically-driven sadists who are evil in the most nefariously over-the-top ways. This isn’t a both-sides-are-bad scenario! If I was going up against a Nercomancer army violating that many laws of humanity, I would allow a little torture. Sorry, I can’t condemn that. Come back to me when the Necromancers have at least one reasonable stance on anything, and then I’ll reevaluate.

In a similar note, in a story that wears its supposed complexity on the sleeve, where are the other morally complex Necromancers? Besides Kaine, there are no good Necromancers. They are all indisputably evil with no token sympathy. Kaine’s wife is the closest Yu comes to sympathizing with another Necromancer, but while her cruelty is given a rarely provided justification, she functions as nothing more than a jealous interloper on Helena and Kaine's love affair who tries to gouge out Helena's eyes as revenge.

The stringent adherence to black and white morality is baffling when one remembers that Yu did explain why normally reasonable people joined Morrough’s army. See here, Paladia had all these guilds who were in conflict with the monarchy because— it does not matter. After joining the Necromancers, all of these people got their brains damaged and now they're super evil. Like, mega evil. Makes one wonder why you would go through the effort to justify the guild system’s treachery when, again, it ultimately does not matter.

So, if you’re keeping track: some of the good guys are bad because they’re a little mean to Helena, but Helena is morally complex because of her circumstances. Kaine is the only Necromancer worth sympathizing with because he's the male lead, and the rest are ontologically evil and deserve to be killed.

In light of that, you can only view the war backdrop as exactly that: an aesthetic. How else can either male or female lead be sufficiently sad and poetic if the world they are in wasn’t this outlandishly terrible thing? So we have a war plotline that intrudes, trips, and spills itself all over the place until anything that is good about the story is drowned out. Every character who is not a perpetrator of misery becomes a victim of it themselves while being graced with none of the interiority to process and respond to that horror.

In her Pulitzer-winning denouncement of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, Andrea Long Chu wrote a cutting critique of books that try so fucking hard to be meaningfully sad that you resent it: “The first time [the main character] cuts himself, you are horrified; the 600th time, you wish he would aim.”

Alchemised is confused at best, and all of its characters are blindly fumbling for their knives. No one can hit the damn artery because no one knows what Alchemised is trying to be, least of all Yu. Is it a pulpy gothic horror, or a complex exploration of difficult topics? I don’t know. All I know is that it is trying really hard to make me feel something.

And for what?

The Handmaid Called and She Wants Her Tale Back

Did you really think I wasn’t going to circle back around to the whole pregnancy storyline?

Full transparency: I have never read Margaret Atwood's extremely important feminist novel A Handmaid’s Tale. I also have never watched the television show. In an effort not to show my entire ass while writing my critique, I did a little research about the basics. I also have the book on hold at my library, but I am third on the holds list. I assume the two people ahead of me are doing the wise thing by reading the source material before putting an opinion online. Nevertheless, I persist.

In an effort to be fair to Alchemised, I tried to read it without viewing it as a fanfiction. While there are a lot of before-mentioned reasons why that is ultimately impossible, the very first one I found was the ill-placed Handmaid’s Tale allusions. If you forget that this is a AU that pulls plot and aesthetic from Atwood's novel, the initial few references are clumsy at best and intrusive otherwise. How Helena got the iconic red dress plays out like a modern reboot trying to justify a design choice made in the 1980s to sell toys. Congrats, you managed to find a convoluted way to dress her in red that isn't because it's a uniform for a breeding program. The focus group is pleased.

And, yes, there is a breeding program. One of the prominent Necromancers in the story is a doctor who wants to find the best way to breed alchemy-strong children in a post-war, low-population society. You might be wondering why I failed to mention the breeding program earlier in my summary. You see, it ultimately is just set dressing. It does not tangibly affect either the plot or the characters.

The most obvious counterargument to that accusation is that Kaine is tasked to rape Helena to provide an heir as a part of the breeding program. While that’s true, that plotline does not hinge on the breeding program’s existence. Morrough is established to have such unmitigated power and command over Kaine's life that he could have ordered this without the breeding program's preexistence. The breeding program can be removed without damaging that storyline.

Beyond providing unnecessary bureaucratic justifications for Morrough's orders, the breeding program has no apparent purpose. Why is it there, if not to lend the aesthetics of Atwood's dystopia? It certainly does not provide a depth of complexity to the role of women in a post-war society; Yu is frankly uninterested in what it means for any woman to be stripped of her agency and reduced to her reproductive functions.

There is a lot that can be written as to how extremists who gain political power can withdraw human rights from women, and how the subjugation of women reinforces conservative ideology. Rose In Chains, which is more prone to unabashed pulp— which had a woman’s virginity take a physical form that can be magically removed from the body and stored safely away in a glass jar—was at least willing to give some political commentary about how sexual slavery affects women in society at large. Julie Soto even went the extra mile to have a woman perpetuate that system, offering a new dimension as to who can be at fault for reversing feminism. Was it complex? No, but Soto at least had the awareness to realize that you can’t write about sexual slavery without acknowledging it as a topic that needed to be thoroughly addressed.

Yu only cares about Helena. There are no other women in the system worth empathizing with. That the program was started and operated by a woman is insignificant. The breeding program only matters because it hurts Helena. An ungenerous critic would say that it provides a fetishistic excuse to have Kaine rape Helena (which is a take I have seen online elsewhere); I won’t go that far. Yu does not want to fetishize or romanticize rape. The rape itself is given the weight of horror that it is due. That is not the issue.

(I would also go the extra mile to say that if Alchemised was a rape fantasy, so what? Am I to be scandalized? Is that morally wrong? Are you a Protestant? Come back to me with a real issue, please.)

My issue is not the rape, but the pregnancy that follows it.

Helena initially labels her pregnancy as an extension of the trauma caused by her rape. To cope, she largely disassociates from it. When her memories come back and she remembers that she and Kaine are in love, she re-evaluates her pregnancy as a positive experience. While Kaine insists that she could and should abort the fetus to mitigate her trauma, she instead insists that the child is worth carrying to term because it is Kaine's child.

Kaine, who raped her.

Obviously, this is a complicated moral situation. There are plenty of stories out there where a victim of rape finding joy and love in carrying a child they conceived during rape would be touching and meaningful. Part Three is clearly rushed, which means that the arc needed to fully explore those emotions is not present. Instead, the reason for Helena wanting to carry the child is not from a place of self-actualization or healing. It's from a place of love for Kaine, who raped her.

In Alchemised, the trauma from having your agency violently ripped away from you is cured by your love for your attacker. It's tasteless. You cannot romance your way out of the context of A Handmaid’s Tale.

When you consider how the imagery of A Handmaid’s Tale is used today as political shorthand for how conservative lawmakers are trying to strip away reproductive rights, it’s also tone deaf.

There is another character we see pregnant in this story: Lila. However, she was not a part of the breeding program. She actually conceived her child and escaped during Part Two. She is the only other woman in Alchemised who has some form of a happy ending, one of which involves having been saved exclusively because she was pregnant with Luc's child. In the context of Luc being an important political figure and the child being the heir to Paladia, it makes sense.

However, when compared to how Helena's pregnancy plays into her happy ending with Kaine, it reads as distinctly Evangelical moralizing. Despite every horror these characters are subjected to or commit against others, they can still embody a traditional nuclear family structure where the mom and dad can love their child very much.

Whatever argument you can make about Helena and Kaine being products of trauma is weakened by how their happy ending is the most standard, traditional one possible. Neither Kaine nor Helena's ending has any resonance with their character arcs. They suffer, and they are rewarded not with a reckoning but with normalcy. In a competition between writing morally complex characters and a satisfying romance, Yu prioritized the romance at the expense of their characters.

What about the breeding program? That too is unceremoniously brushed aside. In the limp to finish the story somewhere, Morrough is deposed and the breeding program is shut down. It turns out that a bunch of women were being imprisoned for this program, where they were systemically assaulted. They and their children were then made the test subjects of inhumane scientific experiments. The people who ran the program were put on trial and sentenced, and the poor victims were brushed aside. All this is explained in-story in under a page of text.

If Yu wanted to write about terrifying horrors, this is what should have ended up as the main focus of the story. Forget about brain-damaged torture or cannibalism— this breeding program was horrifying, thematically resonant, and a clear reflection of real-life war crimes. But, no. Yu would rather write about anything else than something that would require real dexterity of skill. So we have multiple scenes of Kaine ripping out people's hearts or reanimated bodies eating people alive, but not any of the human rights violations your story is supposed to be actually about.

A Handmaid’s Tale is truly nothing more than an aesthetic. To ask the allusions to a highly awarded, culturally significant novel to not be vital to the story reveals Alchemised to be devoid of depth and scared of its own shadow. Yu makes a point about how the women who were subjected to the breeding program were shamed into not speaking about it, until it becomes a dirty little secret in Paladia’s society. While true to life, it is laughably ironic— who is Yu to criticize when Yu themself does not want to address what they created.

Concluding Thoughts: Why Does Alchemised Matter?

After finishing this book, I was asked if I would read more from SenLin Yu. Honestly, I would. I would go as far as to declare their second book their real debut novel. Alchemised carries too much of its fanfiction origins to truly ever succeed by its own merits. I want to blame the editors or the publishers for not forcing Yu to change more of the story, or at least expand it to encompass multiple books. In a sense, I sympathize with Yu, who was given an impossible task that could never succeed.

All that’s to say that Alchemised is not very good. There are good ideas, but most of the execution fails on levels of both craft and taste. In comparison to the other Dramoine pipeline novels, it is unfortunately the lesser. This wouldn’t bother me so much if Alchemised didn’t represent a change in the publishing industry.

In a market where books are becoming shorter and more sanitized, a dark gothic romance that is over a thousand pages long is an anomaly. If it can be wildly successful, we can expect more long books from debut authors with more challenging material.

But as previously discussed, Alchemised isn't actually challenging. For all of its boasting of morally gray, complex characters, it has a black and white view of the world. Yu discussed wanting to challenge dominant ideologies in their podcast appearance, yet wrote a story that adhered to traditional Christian sensibilities.

It's indicative of a false intellectualism I see pop up every now and then. The popular culture decides that there is a common symptom of intellectualism in art, which is then used by popular artists to elevate their own work. Think non-linear storytelling. Before, to tell a non-linear story suggested that you were challenging the audience in an intellectually novel way. Now it's used by everyone in stories that don't necessarily gain any meaning by being told non-linearly. But we've come to associate it with high-brow storytelling, so it continues to be used when not needed.

Alchemised is a story with a works cited. Yu emphasizes that they looked towards philosophy, cultural criticism, and literature as sources of inspiration for their writing. They (probably at the behest of the marketing team) are positioning themselves as the next R.F. Kuang, who famously incorporates her academic research into her books. Unlike Kuang, that research does not actually reflect in the quality of their writing. Nonetheless, Alchemised is positioned as a book for intelligent readers who like to be challenged.

Despite every scene of gore or awkward exposition dump, Alchemised is uncomplicated. You can skim it. Unfortunately, that does not stop the discourse from being about fighting moralists or anti-intellectualism. I won’t argue that there are no bad faith actors who misinterpret everything they don't like as the work of the sexually impure (see my earlier jab about people accusing Alchemised of romanticizing rape). But to not like Alchemised does not mean you are anti-intellectual. There are those of us who criticize Alchemised for not being intellectual enough.

Here, the argument diverges into two paths. On one hand, I can talk about the aesthetics of literary intellectualism. I have a rant saved up about Sally Rooney's books and the plague of literalness. But that's ultimately not helpful. Instead, I can celebrate the fact that readers want to be challenged.

Surprisingly, I have a knee-jerk reaction to support authors like Colleen Hoover who write messed-up stories for the masses. Are any of them good? No, but her popularity suggests that there is an under-served desire to read about darker topics. As more art gets caught up in the increasing moralization of storytelling, where every story is expected to instruct the masses on the correct way to love and live, there is a greater desire to read stories that don't moralize. It's not a failing of literature that people read pulpy romances where the characters are awful to each other. That serves an important function.

That takes us back to Alchemised, which, for all of its faults, succeeds in highlighting a desire for more complex fiction. While we're most likely going to get more Dramoine pipeline novels in the future, I can only hope that publishers will take note of the growing appetite for more well put together, dense fantasy storytelling. For that, I cannot help but admit that Alchemised has its merits.

I still don't like it, though. Genuinely, this book pisses me off, and I hope that the general population feels a little embarrassed for liking this in a few years. Fuck.

Seriously, learn how to fucking aim.

(I spent way too much time on this. So if you can, spread the news or whatever. Love and kisses and all that jazz.)

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