8 Jude

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

Sort of an experiment.Kind of a bummer.Probably offensive.

cover art by fiverr.com/patigonart

Information

Status
Hiatus
Year
2024
Author
Falstaff

Tags

TRAGEDYDRAMAHISTORICALSLICE OF LIFEMULTIPLE LOVERSPSYCHOLOGICALMALE LEADMALE GAY ROMANCE

Royal Road Stats

Rating
4.5/ 5.0
Followers
7
Views
6,141

Chapters(26 total)

Reviews

No reviews yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!

Community Reviews(3)

  • Ellen TaylorRoyal Road
    ★★★★★ 5.0
    This was a great read. You're getting two different stories in one, weaved in an artistic fashion. I'll go through each section and explain my ratings.
    Grammar is always an easy five stars from me. As long as there aren't any glaring issues that pull me out of the story, I always give five stars. This story, as far as I could tell, was fine. I didn't notice any mistakes.
    Style was great. We follow two different stories, one in first person, the other in third. It's a great way to differentiate the two stories. As they are two stories, it was also clear when the switch happened, and I was never confused in that regard.
    The stories themselves, taken individually, were great. The one story you have a gay teenager in 2008, going to San Francisco. It is his struggle of finding himself, of feeling broken, finding love, and finding purpose. The other story is about a fantasy realm built off of Adam, Eve, and Lilith. There was mana, familiars, Godfather Adam, it was all an intricate world that I found fascinating. The only reason why I knocked off half a star is because sometimes, as with a lot of stories that have two stories in one, I get too attached to the other story right at the end and then get used to the other story before getting attached and having to reattach to the other story. It happens frequently when the two stories are so different in genre. For me, it gets exhausting.
    The characters in each of the stories were done well. Sabastian, the teenager, was an intriguing character simply trying to survive and find himself. The fantasy story, too, had a young girl with her familiar and the bond they had. The characters were deep and rich, with familiar problems in both of their societies.
    Overall, a great read!
  • b33fyRoyal Road
    ★★★★★ 5.0
    This is not a Neverending-Story-esque narrative where the real-world story frames the fantasy story. Instead it is two narratives existing in parallel. The fantasy story is about a family's fight for survival amid great political forces and environmental catastrophe, and the real-world story is a queer youth's coming of age amid great personal struggle. There is certainly overlap, but neither story is presented as more "real" or more important, and the fantasy is not simply a metaphor for the ups and downs of the real world. This makes the way this story is told quite unique.
  • fachefaucheuxRoyal Road
    ★★★★★ 4.5
    I'm always excited to see more queer fiction on RR, especially stuff that's outside of the usual litRPG/isekai genre that the site favors.This story is for sure not RR's standard fare, but definitely worth checking out if you're interested in a different mode of storytelling and willing to dip into the mingled pain and beauty of the real world along with that of the fantasy world that mirrors it.
    The strongest part of this story, the core of it, is the way that the fantasy story written by the first person narrator of the real-world story that frames it morphs and grows along with the narrator. In the first chapter or two, I had trouble seeing exactly how the fantasy story mirrored the life/experiences of the first person narrator, but by chapter three, I was really starting to see the connections. How the prose in the fantasy story got stronger as the first person narrator became more experienced and better educated, what details were highlighted within the fantasy, how aspects of the fictional characters were being mirrored by experiences the first person narrator was having in the real world .
    This was really compelling, though I wished at times that the connections were more explicit and that the two halves of the story balanced and spoke to each other more. Sometimes I found myself wishing the fantasy portion would be lingered on longer, sometimes I found the real world portion dragging and wanted to get back to the fantasy. I get the impression that the weight of each half is meant to mirror the need at that point in the story of the first person narrator to either escape his reality by jumping to the fantasy world or his need to use it to process/understand what he's experiencing in the real world, but it could be tightened up a little yet.
    The other aspect of the story that could use a bit of development, or maybe a bit of tidying, is that there's a certain sense of distance in the first person half of the story that I think gets in the way of the immediacy