So.

There’s no helping the actual story here, the point of this whole thing is to ask such deep questions as “but is it really rape, I mean, really?” So instead, let’s just pretend, like the author, that the core of this isn’t made up of festering rot. Let’s discuss the lure plot like it’s the real one instead.

Compressing the time would help a great deal. Instead of having most of a year pass while Rhine lazes around and talks about how everything’s pretty, have it be, oh, maybe three months, at the most. Maybe just one?

A big deal was made of the triple wedding, but it never amounted to anything, so when Rhine arrives, Cecily’s already there. She can be as far along on her pregnancy as the plot requires that way, instead of the book treading water for eight months. Rhine’s window is smashed during a storm early on and she tries to escape, and she makes various other attempts. There’s a strong focus on her exploring her environment – do you know, I still have no idea how big the house even is? She says there are many floors, but she only ever mentions three. And all we know of her garden exploration is that she wandered “aimlessly” and always got so turned around she ended up back at the house. Instead of that, she actually pays attention to her surroundings. And she’s better educated instead of the book saying it’s her brother who knows things, she just likes the pretty pictures.

Changing the plot from swooning prettily at things to escape gives a lot more to do. She tries to pick locks, figure out the elevator schedule, climbs trees when she’s outside, makes excuses to hang out in the kitchen so she can see when trucks come in…Oh, and the hologram is over the gate, not near the house. That’s why no matter how high she gets she can’t see an end. It’s basically a reverse ha ha. Yes, that’s the technical term, blame the French. And then blame the British for not changing the name when they adopted the concept. She figures it out because there’s a power surge that cause it to fail.

Do we need Gabriel? I don’t think we do. If for some reason he’s included, he actually helps her escape instead of being a selfish dick who wants her to stay for him.

Rhine’s character development is moving from wanting to escape to wanting to take the other girls with her when she escapes, even though it’ll make her own chances worse. When Jenna dies, she realizes she has to take Cecily.

It might be nice if evil mad scientist and the rapist were killed, but I don’t know how that would work. But if feasible, burn them.

There’s a number of things that can be done to try to make the gatherers thing make more sense. I have no interest in setting up valid apologia for the rapist, so let’s not bother with explaining how he doesn’t know. As for the rest of it, stealing girls is illegal, the brothel thing doesn’t happen, and the marriages aren’t to save the human race, they’re just the rich bastard equivalent of buying a prostitute for their son’s birthday. Most of the girls kidnapped are sold, then the minority left are killed so they can’t go to the police. They’re not used as servants because it’s too time consuming to keep kidnapped servants under guard like the wives. The gatherers aren’t everywhere, the majority of people will never encounter them, but they’re such a horrible fate that everyone’s terrified of them. Also, they specialize in grabbing mature girls, while younger ones like Cecily are those expected to actually get pregnant and are just bought straight from orphanages like servants.

Now, let’s consider the setting separately. The question of how people might react to this is a good one. Humans are very much based around the concept of having elders to pass on information and having a long period of learning. What would we do when we lost the former advantage and could no longer afford the latter?

Assuming lowered technology – let’s just say that there were no superbabies, this is some sort of disease and we can’t find a cure – how would we handle transitioning to a world where we have to breed like rats to keep going? You could get by with only the older ones getting pregnant, but the problem is the older teens are the most valuable. Maybe have them involved in administrative duties they can do while pregnant. Otherwise, you’d want the younger ones to get pregnant as soon as it was safe, because they’re not doing anything else useful.

A major issue is going to be replacement rate. How many pregnancies per woman are needed to maintain the population? If there’s low death, then only two pregnancies is pretty manageable, one at, say, fifteen and another at eighteen. Or, if the time of death can be predicted quite well, women might get pregnant ten months before it – if they’re dying either way, they might as well put the risk off until then, and it means not having to deal with any long term complications.

If there’s a high death rate, that’s when things get bad. As soon as kids can get pregnant, you get them pregnant. Bear in mind the girls are worth more than the kids, since they’re the ones who’ve had more than a decade spent raising them, so I’d expect they’d induce labor early, especially if the fetus is reaching full size. (you’d also make sure to feed the girls very well during their whole childhood) As I mentioned, eight month premies have pretty good survival rates, and that’s just an overall statistic. The larger a fetus is, the more likely it’s finished development, so inducing labor for full sized ones would be relatively safe. Five kids per girl would be more than double replacement rate, enough to make up for a lot of deaths.

Although people often forget this, it can’t be pointed out enough that you don’t need the twenty year olds to actually fuck little girls. Artificial insemination exists and it’s what we’d be using here.

If we’re capable of maintaining current technology, I think it’d be all artificial. You’d implant mostly female fetuses, because a population that’s, say, 70% female would need fewer total pregnancies to keep up the replacement rate no matter what it was. A lot of effort would be done about how to safely have twins or triplets or even more. If we’re at higher than normal technology, I think we’d cut humans out entirely and just start stuffing embryos into cows or something.

If we’ve lost the ability to maintain various technology, that’s were it starts going bad. We’d be left to rely on traditional methods to reshape ourselves. That is, we’d need to start selecting for girls who grew fast and hit puberty early, and depending on how desperate things get, causing puberty with hormones. Forget thirteen year old Cecily, we’d be aiming for single digit mothers. This would probably have some bad selection pressure on the babies as well, since the main limiting factor is the head so we’d be selecting for smaller brains that can fit through small pelvises. But the more technology fails, the bigger a proportion of the population is occupied keeping what’s left running, and the less you can afford to be picky.

You may notice this doesn’t have a plot. That’s because it’s just a very creepy setting. A story that took place with this as a backdrop would be suitably alien that it’d make a good future tale, but it doesn’t lend itself well to a story focusing on it because those sorts of stories either need to fix things (and for this to work as a setting it has to be that it’s necessary and people have to deal with it) or else, as we see in Wither, you get a self-centered piece of tripe about how it’s only bad when it affects the protagonist.

Now, as we know, the author’s on record as waffling about if this is rape, and her exact comments make it clear that she does have an opinion, it’s just she has enough shame left to not outright say she thinks it isn’t rape, or more likely, she doesn’t want to disagree with her readers who noticed it’s rape because she has no shame at all and wants the money to keep rolling in. One of the comments on facebook is interesting:

I am thoroughly engrossed in Fever. But I have learned to take these books in steady doses now. I read the first one in a few hours time. Bad idea. I couldn’t sleep that same night and spent weeks with the feeling of my skin crawling. Fever is going much better. Just a very difficult subject for me to grasp but one at the same time that I cannot ignore. Do you have a problem with someone having a love/hate relationship with these books?

To which she responds that everyone has their “personal reaction”, which is weaselwords for saying she has no idea what’s wrong with them.

What this suggests is that some fans have a much better grasp of how fucked up this is, though there’s also people talking about poor Linden-chan. So let’s check out the fanfic. Do the authors show greater awareness than the writer of the book? Do they seem infected by the sexism? Currently, there’s seven stories. Going from oldest to newest:

7. Being Brave Jenna oneshot. “I want to be the girls in these books. Tragic and tortured and caught up in a desperate struggle.”

This is an odd one, and as it has only a tenuous connection to what Jenna mentions about the books she reads, likely is more a reflection of the author’s feelings. Part of it seems reasonable – Jenna wishes to live in a world where there was room to worry about things other than morality.

The other part of it is But then their knight comes through at the last moment, and they remember that they are girls. They remember that they have hearts. and We are brave. I like to think that. Locked up in our tower, we have fierce hearts and the kind of power that starts wars. But we’re too late. There are no men to come and set us free, or to love us. in which she laments the lack of magic healing cock. This seems to be being presented uncritically by the story, which makes a degree of sense given it’s not a reasonable extrapolation of Jenna’s behavior and so almost certainly is more of an insight into the author’s head.

The category is not making a good showing here. It is, however, still doing significantly better than the book in that it’s acknowledging the rapist does not qualify as one of those saviors and that they’re trapped in a terrible situation they need to escape.

6. The Girl Who Screamed The title is self-explanatory.

You might think a focus on the bad portions of the world would be an improvement, but the book was quite happy to say the kidnapping part was horrible. This one says the girl is Jenna’s sister. She worries about how she’ll handle living with Jenna gone, then discovers she won’t have to.

I close my eyes, welcoming the calming promise of death with open arms, knowing I’ll never have to sell myself for a meal again.

This begs the question of if the book is skewing viewpoints or if it’s that people who already agree with the book are just the ones who would go write fanfic for it. Tip – people who would rather have sex for money than die don’t usually appreciate you choosing “die” for them just because you think they’re ruined.

5. O Jerusalem Jerusalem Korey is a feral child, a street-rat in the flooded Cradle of dead New Orleans, too busy about surviving another day to worry about the next five years. And then…an unexpected offer. Please R&R

This one is what the book should have been. The character is selfish, but it’s explained why and in a way that makes it clear she does have feelings for others, just not the luxury to act on them. Instead of being kidnapped, she’s offered a deal to become the guy’s wife, which lowers the degree it’s fucked up quite a lot. Hardly perfect, but you read this and it just seems like a regular story, not an uncomfortable look into the author’s skull.

4. In Another Life “And in another life I would make you stay…” Songfiction. Rhine thinking about Linden. Forgive the shortness.

About what you’d expect, but still displaying a better grasp of things than the book: Even though he kept me captured, I know he didn’t think of it that way, nor will he understand why I ran way. is a more reasonable sort of sympathy than the book’s endless dodge around the fact.

3. Sophisticated Wren Blossom is the beautiful daughter of two wealthy first generations. So she’s blindsided when she and her little sister Leaf are kidnapped and married off to a wealthy young man. All because he didn’t want to marry some “filthy animal” off the street.

This is an interesting one, because it’s very close to a repeat of the book, down to the guy being nice enough to take no for an answer, and yet it does manage to be somewhat better in that it has the main character considering this really weird and significantly better in that the guy isn’t going after her little sister at all. It’s all done in accordance to the usual fanfic tropes, which may not be perfect but still have a better grasp of morality than what we saw in Wither. Probably going toward kidnapper apologia, though.

2. Blossom and Burn A continuation of the story until Fever comes out. Gabriel and Rhine are on their way north to find Rowan. Switched to third person, may move back and forth between Rhine/Gabriel’s story and Linden’s.I will consider suggestions. A teetery T rating.

The bit about Linden sounds quite bad, but the single chapter doesn’t contain that. Instead it involves Rhine having a nightmare about Vaughn raping her and then a narrative rant about how Gabriel can’t understand what it’s like to be female in a world like this, which puts it well ahead of the book.

1. Whimper Death is imminent. I’m in a situation much worse. Escape is impossible, but I have to try- for both myself and my little sister. My name is Wren, and this is my story. Read and review PLEAAASE!

I sat down in front of the vanity. I felt sick, but I spoke anyway. “My name is Lawrence. And if you think I’m going to make your time working here easy, you better think twice.”

This one has only two chapters, so it’s hard to say, but the protagonist is aggressive and hating those around her, so there it’s doing better than the book.

Oddly, there are no M-rated fics, although the one with the rape scene should be. If the series becomes more popular and gets more fic, it may be interesting to see what develops.

Finally, after all the other stuff we’ve trudged through this month, I’ll recommend Chain as a story with similar subject matter that is extremely disturbing in an intentional way instead. Extremely, extremely disturbing. If the opening section upsets you, stop reading because it gets a lot worse, but you should read it if you’re at all capable of doing so because it’s a very well done story.