Tales of Magesterius University (frequently referred to as ToMU) is a coming-of-age story featuring the freshman Mackenzie Blaise as she attends college.
But MU is no ordinary school, and Mackenzie is no ordinary girl. MU’s classes are attended by skirmishers, necromancers, illusionists and clerics. Its hallways feature elves, golems, centaurs and nymphs. Its professors can teleport, evoke fire, read minds and contact other planes of existence.
And Mackenzie Blaise just happens to be a half-demon.
Debuting in June 2007, ToMU has captivated one of the largest online reader audiences, and its popularity is well-deserved. The author, Alexandra Erin, manages a diverse cast of characters, featuring multiple races, psychological profiles, histories and motivations. The serial touches on themes of racism, sexuality, religion and spirituality, morality and gender. Ms. Erin, often referred to as AE, is a brilliant writer, capable of action, comedy, horror and eroticism, all within the same chapter at times.
AE is a truly gifted writer, with nuances and details to spare in her rollicking tale. No one could question the imagination at work here, regardless of whether or not readers can agree with her viewpoints. And the debates in the comment section can be even more entertaining than the chapters themselves!
If I have any complaints about ToMU, they are on a personal, subjective level, and have nothing to do with the quality of writing. My favourite characters are side characters, like the golem Two and the subterranean elf Dee. They have unique voices and interesting character arcs. Things that seem important to me as plot developments, like Mackenzie’s demonic heritage and hellish potential for evil, seem to be less important to the writer than her love life, which is the least realistic thing about the story. At last count, she had three committed lovers of varying species, and at least four other people interested in her. Not bad for a self-proclaimed anti-social repressed "nerd."
(My personal theory is that Mackenzie’s demonic powers affect the people around her, but that is yet unproven—if that turns out to be the case, what seems unrealistic will suddenly make sense. I’m mercurial, I am. However, her scent has been confirmed to cause responses in others.)
Mackenzie, Two and Dee are dynamic characters, changing over the course of the story. Amaranth, (a nymph) and Steff (a half-elf) are particularly static characters, spinning in circles within their own personalities and affecting Mackenzie and the plot as a result. Chapters featuring them tend to bore me. It’s not Amaranth’s fault: she’s semi-divine and unlikely to change unless she gives up her divinity to become human. And Steff is frozen in place by past trauma, a victim of abuse. It just gets boring to read about them for years and know only a few months have passed in "story time."
AE has recently skipped the story from Mack’s first semester to sophmore year,and all that’s really accomplished is to gloss over the plot developments of the previous year and give us a fresh dose of Mack adjusting to her classes. So far, despite flashes of brilliance in each indiviual chapter as writing for writing’s sake, the overall story has a lot of wasted opportunities regarding its massive cast and numerous subplots. The story lacks focus, and jumping from freshman year to sophomore seems mainly to have left a lot of those threads dangling.
ToMU is a work of art, and it inspires debate and conflict and admiration. I used to say that if you read nothing else online, it’s worth your time. However, the longer things go on, the less that seems to be true. I’ve stopped reading it because after four years invested in the story world, nothing of great significance has been revealed about Mack or the direction of her life, and the characters that are the most interesting get less and less screen time. I don’t want to waste another four years finding out if it goes anywhere.
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I want to like Tales of MU. There’s a lot of promise here—the world Erin has created is compelling, and her abilities as a writer are not wanting.
The trouble with this story is that I can’t be convinced that the story is anything more than Laurell K. Hamilton at her worst—all sex and angst with no plot or back story.
The idea of a half-demon as a central character is gripping. And yet though the author gives lip service to her heritage, little aside from her abilities with fire illustrates her demonic nature. There is little to no back story that reveals who Mack is, and as a result, I find it very difficult to be interested in her. I want to know about Hell, her parents, what it means to be a demon. The last is most notably lacking, since Mack seems terribly ashamed of being a demon, yet we don’t really get any idea of what is precisely so awful about it. We’re left instead with what amounts to a very slow moving porno.
I went into this novel expecting some sex. I was not expecting to be beat over the head with erotica on nearly every page. I’m no prude, but on the other hand, I read fiction as an escapist way to engage my mind. When I find myself getting jolting out of the writer’s world because of unnecessary and explicit sexual reference over and over, then the story has failed to meet my basic requirements.
In sum: good premise, poor execution. Unless you have a particularly high tolerance for graphic sexual content, find something else.
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Tales of MU definitely started out as entertaining, and I appreciate how Alexandra Erin brings non-mainstream sexualities and genders to the forefront through her main characters rather than through supporting characters or cameos. I think this kind of openness is instrumental in getting non-mainstream sexualities and genders on the radar, because honestly, for most people they aren’t. Some readers might be put off by it, but others may feel their perspective shift as they read about colorful and interesting people trying to figure out their own lives. This story was a catalyst for my own understanding of these issues.
A five-day-a-week update schedule has a certain allure, but even as a slut for detail, I found the sheer amount of information presented about every day (or even every hour) of Mac’s life overwhelming. I also feel like the quality of the writing has suffered for it, though Erin has both talent and an eye for dialogue. I enjoyed the twists on classic fantasy concepts, though at other times I was turned off by the extreme parallels to the modern, industrialized world. That’s a matter of preference, though, not quality.
I eventually stopped reading just because of the inordinate detail and my flagging motivation to wade through it all to "find out what happens."
I think Tales of MU is worth a look, and is noteworthy for its role in the webfiction movement.
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