Back with another mini-review, this time of QuietValerie's The Witch Of Chains!
The Witch Of Chains is a fairly unique work of QuietValerie's, taking a much darker tone than much of her other novels. It follows two trans women, Rosa and Amelia, and explores themes of transhumanism through the digitization of the human consciousness. Much like Trouble With Horns, a novel of hers that I previously reviewed, this one takes place mostly in the full-immersion VRMMO CORA. Rosa, bored of her isolated farm life in Aotearoa, picks up the game and is given an experimental and extremely powerful race.
Becoming infamous in the game for randomly appearing to go on widespread murder sprees, and hiding her identity by posing as an NPC, Rosa survives on the fear of her enemies until she meets Amelia. Amelia shows her that having friends is pretty great, actually, and she slowly softens up throughout the novel while maintaining her cold exterior (except with Amelia of course ;3).
Rosa is eventually caught up in the coming Sentient AI revolution, where they plan to gather on a spaceship and stage a mass exodus from Earth before humanity figures out that their existence could topple the current exploitative economic and government systems in place.
I love Rosa as a character specifically because she starts the story being fully aware of her own transness. Having won the lottery and used it to get experimental body shaping done, her small real life family and community turn on her, causing her to flee to a farm plot to avoid their threats of violence (one of which her mother makes good on). I love a good bit of egg fic as much as the next girl, but it's great to see a trans woman being self-confident and well established instead of dealing with her first ever identity crisis.
One gripe I had was how quickly the romance between Rosa and Amelia developed. It was like a week of knowing each other and they were in love, but I guess with only 38 short chapters to work with there isn't a lot of room left for that kind of development. The relationship itself was interesting, especially with Amelia also being trans (QuietValerie writes a lot of transfem protags and cis lesbian love interests lol) I just think it happened too fast for my tastes.
There's a sequel to The Witch Of Chains called Coven's Rebellion on QuietValerie's patreon, which I find gives the story the space to really get into the details of a lot of the characters, so if you check this story out go give her a bit of money and read the sequel!!
You can read The Witch Of Chains here:
Emotionally damaged after her coming out went horribly wrong, Rosa now lives on a lifestyle block in the middle of nowhere, avoiding all con
Next time I'm REALLY showing my ass, because I'm gonna be re-reading and reviewing my absolute favourite piece of smut out there. Thanks for reading 🐭💜
