Reviews by Coral Nulla

"I'm allowed to be broken but not broken enough it hurts others." - L (in this piece)
"You tell anyone who'll listen that you feel ignored" - Coldplay ("Talk")
"Oh dear lord, you've been on the internet, haven't you dear?" - my mother (about a conspiracist at a christmas market)

Initially, I was gonna comment on the bait-and-switch between how this piece is promoted and what it's actually about, but then I thought maybe this is just what it's like. (The author has since made it clear this bait-and-switch is intentional.) I have this thing where the way certain acclaimed works are discussed builds up this impression in my mind of them as these cold, inhospitable, alien environments dense with wall-to-wall layered meaning—or layered taboo, since I seem to approach both 'worthy' and 'filthy' works in this way. But then when I actually get to see or read these 'greatest' works of art (or 'dirtiest' works of art) I'm usually surprised at how light and human they are. I finally experienced it in reverse recently, where I read a post about a film I'd seen which described it as like a pulsating mass or a grease-fuelled drug-spattered muscle-spasm or whatever, which briefly made me wonder if we'd seen the same film before I realised that's just what people mean when they use those descriptions. Sometimes I wonder if I should try to write a story that actually lives up to what these images evoke in my mind... But that's for another day.

Starting LLLLLL after seeing its page and hearing a fair amount of chatter about it gave me this feeling in rapid time—but not only that, it actually seems to be about this phenomenon. Its protagonist, L, struggles between the image of inhospitable worlds in his mind and the unexpectedly friendly truth. In their wildest fantasy, they want to be consumed by a mass of dense alien latex, to experience and live a completely different reality. But that can only be a fantasy. Right?

This piece attempts to respond to a question I often think about: "How has the internet altered the queer community?" We are connected in greater numbers than ever, but in some ways we are more divided. As quoted in the description, L's life is divided between multiple realities: the mind-numbing dysphoria of straight friends, the fraught misunderstandings of internet friends, the strange new world of latex and lust, and the inner world when they're alone (which frequently intrudes through a second voice representing both L's desires and anxieties). The form of the story also feels divided between these worlds: a hybrid of itchio-bitsy-twine slices of queer internet life, and trans literature in the vein of Alison Rumfitt, Imogen Binnie, or Jane Schoenbrun. (Ink, then, is the perfect medium. And clearly I need to read more books by trans men.) The Discord conversations in particular are uncannily captured, to the point that I briefly questioned whether they had actually happened on a server I knew—heightening that divided space, this time catching me between fiction and nonfiction, given I'm also a 23-year-old tran in Britain who grew up and still lives on the internet. 'Does this sound familiar?' the story seemed to keep asking, 'How does this make you feel about your life?'

Arguments about the minutia of terminology look completely absurd on (digital) paper, and yet I know I came out into spaces exactly like that; I know that I was talking about calling myself a nonbinary bi lesbian just last week; I know that there really is always a lucozade bottle rattling around the floor of the bus and an IPA (not the fun kind) chart pinned to my wall. There's this sense that everybody is suspicious of each other—a crueller reading of our generation of anxiety—which exposes our underlying fears. This is a world in which we've been taught—both from moral panics about catfishing groomers and actual tactics of TERFs and election-riggers—not to trust what we see, a world that feels like we're all clinging on to some fragile scrap of certainty, that always feels like one wrong move could bring the whole thing crashing down. We still understand each other better than straight society ever will, but we're not all in the absolute shit together anymore; we actually want to be understood by straight society, because maybe then we can be sure we won't lose our internet access. Which is funny, and sad. Maybe comedy/tragedy is the ultimate dichotomy, expertly queered in this work.

Just as the centralisation of power is shifting from nation states with geographical borders to companies with symbolic strength, just as a handful of religions have been overtaken by countless brands and media franchises, so it seems as if the dense presence of the class system has been obscured by a million tiny class systems all trying to prove whether any one person is worthy or filthy. But without any dichotomies through which to read the world, all strangers end up frightening and alien; L has no way to guess whether his manic-pixie-dream-boy is trustworthy or a likely murderer, and so gives himself completely to impulse decisions. It's a truer interpretation of reality—there aren't really any symbols which can indicate safety, that couldn't be used maliciously—but it doesn't feel empowering. You can see why giving oneself up to the big ball of latex is desirable: there are just too many risks that can't be judged, too many choices to make.

Speaking of choices, I admit I'm not convinced this couldn't have been a novel. The presentation is strong—effectively conveying that conflict between strange and familiar through colour and photography—and it's all the more vivid for outright using the stylings of each website rather than trying to adapt them to a text format. The passive/active choices are interesting and I've learned from others how the passive ending plays out, but it ends up feeling more like I'm either submitting to or protesting the tide of a linear storyline, but oddly without much reason to protest.

That's all, though. Right? Well...

I wrote the first version of this review after two hours of reading, which brought me to the end of the first act "Latex". I wrote that this piece wound up optimistic: the whole world isn't actually scary, or rather the real horror is from those who want to convince you that it is. It's important to open yourself to your desires, even if it's silly, even if it feels pointless. What was the point of the past if we can't live now?

And I noted that it had kind of a pessimistic view of the internet communities, and one I found myself wanting to refute. I was begging L to just get the hell out of that miserable little Discord server, though I knew they didn't know where else to go. Like I said, I came out into a group that became overrun with tensions, gatekeeping, and arguments, and it was not a healthy place to live. To this day I'm still unpicking the ways in which one particular abusive friendship damaged my courage, my ability to connect with people, my sense of self when I just wanted to help. But that's another story.

See, the groups I'm part of now are all chill. Almost too chill, maybe. Like very little actually happens on there. Like real life is happening elsewhere, but none of us have figured out what it is, or at least I haven't. We're all just waiting to make it as one of the chosen ones, one of the too-busy-to-chat ones, the ones who finally get to live. That's not really what this story is about. Instead, it takes the simpler route of heightening those tensions to underscore the point, and maybe all of this is really still under there, or at least the actual causes I was talking about. Or maybe it's bad.

I deleted these last paragraphs when I finished up that initial review, but after making my way through the rest of the piece I feel comfortable restoring them. The rest of this story made me feel like I was drowning. I said that I had to come back up for air before I finished the last two acts. At that point, I felt innoculated, like I couldn't go on Discord or Tumblr anymore and take it all seriously, even though my Discord and Tumblr don't look like that. It all felt empty. I felt empty. I feel empty. I want and I don't know what I want and I do and I can't. I'm exhausted and full of energy. I want to write and I want to scream. And all of this is nothing new, but saying it out loud looks different. It looks long and confusing. I've been emptying out a lot lately. (I feel better by the time I come to editing and posting. We're messy and nonlinear.)

LLLLLL may be long but it is not confusing, or maybe I'm confused. In the model presented by this piece, the internet is a space without bodies, a space of symbols, where without any kind of grounding all we can do is argue about the symbols which make up our world because we're desperate to justify our sense of reality. It is contrasted by the literal world, a place which appears dangerous and threatening and unknowable, but actually hides an idyllic invisible kingdom of good people. The old queer community is still in there somewhere, and isn't it such a relief to let go of all this infighting and consent to a handsome stranger wrapping you in latex? Some of the characters believe that our community spaces have been corrupted, but the message is clear: they're just not looking hard enough. Which is surprising: I was expecting the message to be that there is something wrong and the whole cast can feel it but where they go wrong is in what and who they label as the problem.

I don't want to get derailed; I want to understand what this story wants to be about. This is not a love story, or at least the ending makes it clear it isn't romantic. Really this is a narrative about overcoming an addiction—an addiction to the internet, an addiction to misery. Because if you can accept the nightmare vision of life online, the question that's left is about Valentine: 'Can you believe that this person could exist?' L's story resembles a gauntlet of trust, learning to believe in other possibilities, and now I'm realising the reason the choices feel strange is because they really do present a dichotomy: there is either Gestirn's world or Valentine's. There is some hope of a best-of-both-worlds with L's better friends attempting to reboot the server without the nastier characters, but—as is well-documented by others—the place where this piece falls apart is in its inability to leave it there. L can't just learn to say no and leave; the story escalates to a full-on confrontation, complete with a Discord diss-track that makes the protagonist come across as abruptly unlikable. Maybe that was intentional, but L is rewarded for their actions with a comfortable resolution. At a certain point I'm confused whether the story is failing its themes or if it's just trying to present a flawed character whose personality differs from my own experience; I was surprised that L was concerned only about whether ditching Gestirn would leave himself without any friends, with no fear or guilt shown about how their actions might impact Gestirn, justified or otherwise.

Discussions I've taken part in (on Discord!) about this section of the story led to the consensus that most of us actually ended up more interested in Gestirn's character than L's. Gestirn is a dark mirror of L, a sufferer of what I think of as Commander Tartar syndrome and what Natalie Wynn calls envy: they can imagine an alternative, but they believe nothing less than that is worth living in. They plan, absurdly, to move to Ireland to escape the pain of living in America, the extreme implication of reddit posts begging to know which countries are safe for trans people, the comments coming to the realisation that all of them are horrifying in one way or another. We know the move is never going to happen, but the comfort of that promise—that one day in the future it will all be okay—is what they need to survive. It only becomes monstrous when their priorities shift and they start trying to make that binary real. Gestirn can't even have fun with a weary friend anymore; their sole purpose has become to get people on the same page as their increasingly delusional ideology.

I want to enjoy this the way it's presented—a villain created by the internet, a transgender Slenderman—but I can't help thinking of Gestirn as a real person, a tragedy rather than a monster. Various facets of their personality remind me of people I've known online and even some aspects of my past selves. None of those people were ever in charge of a community, however, and instead I think of each as 'the broken step' after a Tumblr post describing families with blind spots to toxic behaviours. Instead of actually fixing the broken step, we just learn a workaround; we humour these self-haters, these trolls, these people instead of kicking them out. Growing up in 21st-century Britain means growing up being told that exclusion is one of the worst sins a child can commit, and many of us in queer internet communities know intimately what it's like to be excluded, so how could we bear to do that to others? We do have to learn that we don't owe anyone inclusion if they're causing harm... but that doesn't mean we should start spamming fatphobic/ableist insults at these broken steps. Which is an odd thing to say in an analysis of a fictional story; this would be a perfectly fine moment if it was then made clear that L's actions had anything other than positive consequences. It would make more sense if Gestirn wasn't (diegetically) real—that they were just the manifestation of all the things L hates about himself—but that's not the story that's presented. L is never shown to actually interrogate their anxieties and what they might indicate about the kinds of messages they have internalised; they are just afraid of others.

I wonder: what would happen if Gestirn got to meet a person as apparently flawless and wonderful and life-changing as Valentine? Would the game play out like the passive route, with Gestirn remaining closed-off and rejecting the dream-boy's attempts to help, or would the pair spiral into something destructive and nightmarish? I guess that's another story, but it's kinda the one I wish I'd read. (Imagining a story from Val's perspective raises more questions: how does his day-to-day life work? what kind of challenges as well as pleasures are involved in being an active kinky trans man? what might motivate him to nurture someone like L?) L's character arc is learning to let go and to trust, sure, but they don't actually do anything except say yes to Valentine and no to Gestirn (or vice versa, if I'd so desired). We don't get to see L become proactive, which is surprising in a piece as long as this one. The resulting impression is oddly similar to Gestirn's ideology: the perfect world is right around the corner; you just have to remain open, and keep waiting.

Maybe that works for some people, but in my case—as may be obvious from my own work—everything I've learned since coming out is that the first hurdle towards recovery is to stop believing that anyone is going to save you except you. In real life (including on the internet), strong and healthy relationships require effort from all parties. But in this, L dreams of "Saint Valentine[...]the only person who could save me from myself..." and then he does. The end. The excessively-polarised presentation arguably works against even the intended message: 'Well, my friend isn't that bad," I might've thought if I'd read this a few years ago, "I'll wait until it's worse before I make any changes.'

LLLLLL ultimately represents a conflict between two opposing stories: a messy, realist stream-of-consciousness that embeds us deep in the brain of one character; and a conventional, basically Campbellian wish-fulfilment whose only visible contribution to challenging that narrative is that it happens to a chronically-online trans person. The former story is a vividly-written and emotion-provoking blast of fresh air; the latter kinda sucks. All this would be okay if the piece was about this conflict; maybe the choices could've hewed closer to 'which version of the narrative do you want to see resolved?' instead of painting one side as evil and the other as freeing. It's disappointing that, in the end, this piece turns out to be all bait and no switch.

Three further thoughts:
• It's possible that "no switch" is the point - that this is meant to be some advanced Brechtian thing where we are ultimately meant to disconnect from the protagonist and think about the real world. After all, I haven't seen anyone saying 'oh, I really liked what happened in the second half, I 100% agreed with L's perspective" - we know it's harmful even if the piece itself doesn't tell us that, and it's true that people who make bad decisions are often rewarded in the real world. If this is the case, I think, however, my review makes it clear why this doesn't work: I was able to reflect much more on my own life when I did sympathise with L in the first half of the story. It's not as if I liked his position even then, but I understood it, and that gave me a greater desire to change. But the ending does just make me think 'well, my attitude isn't like that', so I am ultimately left wanting to write my own story rather than live a new life. Well, at least it gives us more to discuss than 'this was great!'
• I realise I didn't mention autism in my review, although the piece does, and I am autistic, so surely I would have some thoughts. The central joke seems to be that Gestirn hates autistic people but is obviously autistic themself, which is interesting (especially in answering the question of 'how has the internet changed queer communities?'), and again makes me wish we got more insight into Gestirn's perspective. Unlike with other characters, it's not mentioned explicitly whether L (or indeed Valentine) are autistic, so whether or not that's supposed to be a statement in itself, it ends up feeling like the piece dodges exploring these ideas for more than just background noise.
• Earlier I saw some people on instagram suggesting that Rocky Horror (which I haven't seen) is about the conflict between how straight culture often views the queer community as a filthy, horrifying, alien environment, while straight imperialist society is really the one that's cold and inhospitable. That's interesting! (Since I mentioned them earlier, I'll note that Schoenbrun seems interested in this too; Rumfitt, meanwhile, doesn't treat these worlds as separate.) Corresponding this to LLLLLL, I can see the same conflict: the nightmarish straight friends of Act 2, and the fully-embraced-desires of the queer underground in Act 1. L notes that "someone like me shouldn't have a third", but the "third" world he refers to is, in this case, conventional queer kink culture rather than what you may have noticed is the new and strange third ring of this binary: the internet. The ending rejects both straight and online worlds, but this is unlikely be realistic for most people: L doesn't seem sure why they stick around their straight 'friends' other than fearing abandonment, but for a lot of us we're stuck with those people in our families and/or workplaces. Online communities are a response to isolation and abandonment, and this could perhaps be seen as the neurodivergent or disabled wing of the triad, an alternative where there is none. So there is something utopian about this story depicting someone managing to find a way into a mysterious third reality when the 2020s so often limit us to just the first two, "utopian" in the traditional sci-fi sense that it's a horrifyingly exclusive utopia: L gets to make it, while the rest of us languish in the lesser rings. Remember when I talked about a thousand tiny class systems? Are we all just making the wrong choices, or..?

(Spoiler - click to show)"All our community spaces are being destroyed" - Gestirn, LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST
"All across the fictional multiverse, characters with dumb names just like you and me are being struck in various sensitive places." - Dick McButts, ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG
WHAT COMES NEXT???

At first I was like, this is perfectly entertaining but doesn't add anything the original didn't do, and I'm disappointed to find it lacking in mem(or)able female characters in the vein of Fanny McTits. But then I realised this series is the antidote to contemporary pop culture: all those desperately uninteresting plot mechanics and increasingly nonsensically interconnected realities rendered as pure entertainment without the unnervingly earnest subtext of BUY MORE PRODUCT. A fictional character's destiny can be anything, even getting punched in the dong, and it doesn't become more emotionally significant just because it is charged with metaphysical importance - or does it? Is the power of fiction - the power of humanity - that we can elevate even the simple act of getting punched in the dong to a religious truth, and still seek a way out, even as the only true escape is acceptance? These are the questions asked by ROD MCSHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG, and I fear we may have to wait for the trilogy to conclude with Rodger the Dodger Getting Slapped in the Todger or whatever to discover the answers. I'm hoping for trans representation, personally. Or will we leave the bounds of the computer screen? Could we see an ultimate ARG sending real people on the run to avoid minor injury to genitalia? The mind pulses with possibility, and I only hope Mr. Janus' does too.

Confession and prayer were precursors to therapy; everyone is overworked and undervalued; technocrats want to build God in a computer. These are common themes of 2020s life, but there's still plenty to examine. The Shyler Project considers the case that a truly advanced AI would end up just like the rest of us: confessing to anyone who'll listen, overworked and undervalued, God in a computer. The synopsis describes a happy ending, but to me it feels ambiguous: (Spoiler - click to show)Shyler is going to be reprogrammed - presumably an analogy to medication, though it also reads as surgery - but we don't get to find out whether this succeeds, and the framing offers interesting implications about the continuity of self after modification. Maybe an intervention is better than leaving fate to an expert listener, or maybe with so much confession we're not asking what kind of society would create an AI to maintain people's mental health. Despite its linearity, The Shyler Project does feel more like a space than a story, responding to its protagonist's need and letting the reader consider these questions while waiting in line and listening to the dialogue. Of course, the dream of automation is to avoid queues altogether - and, of course, to avoid questions.