by Jessica (link)
Genre cest, romance, science fiction, mpreg
Pairings Isaac/Nikki, Taylor/Natalie Taylor/Sam Farrar, Tike, Zac/Kate
Length 30 chapters
Status Completed
Considering the subject of our fandom and how popular underage, incest and underage incest have been in its history, it’s surprising that hanfic really isn’t as strange as some other fandoms. The odd kinks and cracky plots that exist in other fandoms largely don’t in hanfic. The exception to this rule is The Winding Road.
Mpreg–short for male pregnancy, if you couldn’t figure that out–is a popular trope in the fanfic world, but rarely is it explained well, if at all. In The Winding Road, Jessica attempts a “secretly aliens” explanation, but even that doesn’t make Walker and Diana’s acceptance of their teenage sons’ marriage and subsequent pregnancies easy to swallow. It’s all just far too idealized to believe. The least of this story’s problems are the abbreviated but over the top drama brought on by Taylor’s miscarriage, drug use and cheating.
A ridiculous plot can be believable if written well, but in this case it just isn’t. The story covers way too much time without much explanation for the missing months and years, as if Jessica hoped to just hand wave that away in the same way that she made time move faster in the story’s secret “realm.” It just doesn’t work. On top of that, the writing is so sloppy that I can’t tell if I’ve just missed important bits of plot or if she hasn’t written them at all.
By the end, I honestly can’t say whether or not I would have enjoyed the plot of The Winding Road had it been written better, but I’m leaning toward no. There are just too many problems here; by the time all of them were fixed, it wouldn’t be anywhere near the same story at all.
Review by Bethany (website)