In All Their Glory by Lee

It is rather challenging to summarise the plot, since it’s less a story than a series of sexcapades.  However, the series of somewhat related scenes goes like this:

The newly-married Elizabeth prepares to have sex with her husband.  He turns out to be a closet nudist (and no, this is not an AU wherein she’s married to … not Darcy), which strikes her as a bit odd at first.  She quickly gets over it.  This being their wedding night, they have sex.  Then they have more sex.

Why you should read this: Well, I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say In All Their Glory is so bad it’s good, but at any rate it’s so bad it’s funny.  Also, it’s technically canon-compliant, which somehow makes it funnier.  The lulz, they never end.

No, really.  There’s a sequel.

Why you might not like it: It’s bad.  It’s aggressively, unapologetically, unfalteringly bad in every possible way that something can be bad.  It’s not even bad in a particularly interesting way; when I say that there’s no plot, I don’t mean that the plot is jumbled and incoherent and makes no sense.  I mean that there is no plot. It’s not just the usual wedding night porn, either, because it goes on for four chapters.

Four chapters of Darcy and Elizabeth sitting around with their clothes off, inevitably having boring, repetitive, improbable sex over and over and over again. And Elizabeth is so utterly ignorant that she seems to think that her parents found her and her sisters under the hedgerows.

That would make a rather more interesting story than this one.

Even the hilariously overwrought prose may not prevent you from pulling your hair out or driving sharp spikes into your eyeballs, so consider yourself warned.

Regency, Canon-Compliant, Complete, NC-17 at Austen Interlude

 

This story has nothing resembling reason, taste, commentary on the original, recognisable characters, or a plot.  It has Darcy/Elizabeth and sex, and if you consider those redeeming qualities, then those are the ones you’ll have to be content with.

In its defence, however, I will add that it’s not merely uninteresting.  Oh, no.  I would have simply stopped reading it and gone on to something else if it did nothing except make sex boring.  It made me laugh.

As a member of Austen fandom, I’ve stumbled across a considerable amount of badfic, some more offensive than others.  (In All Their Glory is, for all its faults, largely inoffensive.)  As a reader of romance novels, I’ve read disturbing sex scenes, boring sex scenes, amusing sex scenes, and even the occasional interesting sex scene.  I’m used to bad writing.  However, there’s bad writing and then there’s bad writing, and at some point around Chapter Three, the latter started to take over.

For your enjoyment/horror, I offer Darcy’s compelling ruminations on the morning after:

Later that morning, Darcy awoke and immediately went to grasp his erection only to find it was not erect.  What a singular occurrence! He could not remember that last time it was not hard and throbbing when he awoke as usually every night he had erotic dreams of her.  Recalling that his activities of the night before where not dreams, he realized that his manhood, too, needed some rest.

Approximately thirty seconds later:

Darcy fondled himself as his thoughts drifted.  He was a Darcy and therefore was expected to exhibit honor and decorum at all times but he was a Fitzwilliam on his mother’s side.  Fitzwilliam men were known for their lusty ways and overactive libido.

For everyone who wonders what Darcy thinks about when he masturbates . . . now you know.  Nothing turns him on like thinking about how he inherited his sex drive through his mother.

At some point, he notices that he’s in the same bed as his wife.

He only hoped his libido was active enough now to sustain her appetites since he believed he had awoken a sleeping tigeress.

I couldn’t make this up.

I considered mentioning the technical problems, but that’s really just icing on the cake.  There’s nothing good about this story.  It’s not the pure, unfettered enjoyment of My Immortal or Plan 9 or things like that, but somehow I took a perverse pleasure in it all the same.

So, for that alone, I’ll give it one quill.