The Cleveland Heights LGBTQ Sci-Fi & Fantasy Role Playing Club has a nice premise: group of queer pals, some of whom are very different from each other, get together weekly for their D&D sessions. Most of the real world characters and issues have a generally cliché but still cute quality to them. Ben is one of the main characters, he’s gay (or at least prefers men), college graduate (degree in history) who lives with his parent and makes spending money selling pop-culture paraphernalia online. He feels like a loser, which makes it a challenge when a cute and gay new guy joins the game club. To make matters worse, said new cutie, Albert, is dating Ben’s ex (a relationship that seems to have traumatized Ben). A significant part of the book is from Ben’s perspective and how awkward he feels and how much of a loser he feels.
The back blurb says “The connections and parallels between the real world and the fantasy one become stronger and more important than ever.” This bit felt forced to me, like the role-playing fantasy sections when everyone is (mostly) in character were intentionally and overtly designed to reflect issues in the real world group. Ben’s character is killed and the game then has to figure out if it’s possible to save him.
The other character who gets a decent amount of page time is the Mooneyham, who on the outside seems much more likely to be the sort of guy who would harass the likes of Ben (he does give Ben some grief) being a banker bro, but Mooneyham is a game-geek who lives with his boyfriend Huey. Mooneyham is not out to his bro co-workers, and he has to figure out how to balance his home, game, and work lives, especially when they start to overlap.
The female characters don’t get as much development, and that’s kind of a shame since one of them, Celeste, is the game-master who really works hard to keep the game together. We do get a little bit of her backstory but it’s done in a way that focuses more on her pre-transition self which feels a little icky, and Valerie and her current girlfriend Penny have little history other than they’re underage and don’t seem to want quite the same things out of their relationship. This becomes apparent with the presence of High Lord Varnec, head of the local vampire/Goth (?) cosplay group {there’s probably a more accurate term for this but it’s not my geekdom}.
The grand climax of the story deals more with a way to get-back at the probable harassers of Huey and the bar said harassers appear to frequent. One the one hand, this works out as a mostly happy ending, but there are so many things left unresolved or unsatisfactorily addressed like Ben’s feelings of loser-dom, the D&D sequence continuation, the Valerie-Varnec problem, how the final scene comes about, several details about Mooneyham’s work situation, and Celeste who really got no development at all.
Like I mentioned, the premise could have been really cute cozy reading, but the uneven characterization, and the plot parallels being too forced just doesn’t let the story really come together and work. Honestly, it all feels more like an excuse to preach about social stuff, and even that could be done with more style, or at least a better sensitivity reader (if one was consulted at all).
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