Shifty Reads Gladiatrix of the Galaxy, Chapters 1-2

We all get some thoroughly strange things marketed at us on Facebook. The algorithm knows I like my board games, so it tosses me every third bloated Kickstarter mess (including something called OverBattle: The All War). For a few months after I made an angry post on my old blog about the rules surrounding blood donations, Zuckerberg decided to taunt me by advertising the latest blood drive every five seconds.

This one, though, was especially baffling. While scrolling through my feed, I came across the following ad copy:

Game of Thrones ending got your knickers in a bunch? Try my series The Chronicles of Jegra. It has all the blood, sex, dozens of characters, and most of all...ENDINGS that satisfy!

And then a link to the author's web page.

Now, fair play, I do like my SFF, and, though I don't watch Game of Thrones, I've read the books and enough about the show to know that the ending was... not well-liked. "I could've done better" has become a somewhat common refrain among a certain subset of fans, but this ad still struck me as something of a flex, especially given that the series it was advertising had a whiff of the self-published about it.

The dread plague of Same-Face is alive and well in the Dagon Empire.

So I dug a bit deeper. I read the synopses. I read a few of the weirdly glowing reviews. In one of these reviews, I read the words "sci-fi space opera sex comedy". Less than a minute later, I was the proud owner of the Kindle edition of The Chronicles of Jegra: Gladiatrix of the Galaxy, by Tristan Vick.

I was three pages in when I got to the following paragraph.

She was amazed by her transformation; her arms had grown thick and powerful, her legs became strong and muscular, and her every ab swelled with raw strength. Even her scant C-cup bra size ballooned to a full 42 J, and they weren't just ornaments; her breasts could now literally deflect steel-tipped arrows.

And that was the moment I decided to start writing this read-along.

Let's start with a blanket content warning. This book is heavy on violence, much of it committed both to and by women. While it's light on actual sex, there is a lot of sexual content here, including some sketchy consent stuff and a lot of what I can only describe as sweaty depictions of feminine bodies. There are some descriptions of alien biologies which often come across as transphobic. If anything else potentially nasty comes up, I'll try to put a more specific warning in the relevant post, but those are the main points of caution. Also, the sheer volume of alien titty means that this entire series is going to be NSFW.

Fortunately, Mr Vick was also thoughtful enough to include some content warnings of his own on the Amazon page.

Note: Contains a pansexual heroine, her transsexual girlfriend, and her bi-sexual polyamorous blue-skinned alien husband, some scenes of brutality, a bit of galactic alien sex, puritan knights of an ancient holy order, and giant glowing space squids made of nuclear energy that eat starships for breakfast.

Right.

I think that's enough preamble. Let me take you on a journey to the heart of the Dagon Empire, where our heroine, Jegra, the titular Gladiatrix, is preparing herself for another bout.

Chapter 1

Jegra stepped out of her chambers and tossed her long, brown hair over her shoulder. The wooden soles of her leather-wrapped sandals clapped against the sandstone floor as trumpets bleated a level above her announcing to the whole amphitheater her pending arrival.

The punctuation in this quote is unchanged. There's only one comma in the entire first paragraph, and it probably shouldn't be there.

Jegra is a human, and indeed the only human in this story. We learn that she fought her way up from slavery to become the most famous gladiator in the galaxy. She does her pre-fight warmups and takes inventory of her combat outfit, not that there's much to catalogue. Scale mail bikini (actually described as such), tunic, leather belt, and some bracers of armour +2. She doesn't wear proper armour, you see, because it just gets in the way of her superhuman strength.

Oh yeah, that. Jegra, real name Jessica Hemsworth, was a mild-mannered librarian abducted by the Dagon Empire and injected with a chemical cocktail which

quite literally transformed her into the She Hulk.

Is this the Ready Player One thing where we pretend that namedropping a pop culture thing counts as evoking it? Also, did She Hulk have arrowproof tits? (This is a rhetorical question, but I bet there's an official Marvel canon answer.)

Point is,

The prudish, timid, cowering Jessica Hemsworth was no more. Only Jegra the Masterful, Jegra the Merciless, as they called her, remained.

Yes, "Jegra the Masterful, Jegra the Merciless" is her full moniker. It's what the announcer calls her two paragraphs later.

We also learn at this point that Jegra is sleeping with Emperor Dakroth, 'ruler of most of the known galaxy', and has established herself as a cut above all sixteen of his wives, whose breasts are presumably smaller and much less resistant to projectiles. She's also undefeated in seventy-two consecutive gladiatorial matches. She has achieved all of this in one and a half years.

Jegra appears to thunderous applause, and then we're introduced to her opponent: Abethca Agnar, who retired champion two years ago, but has come back for vengeance because

"You killed my lover, the Angorian named Kel'Zellion, you vagina-toothed whore!"

Abethca is probably trying to go for a vagina dentata thing here, but the phrasing is... unclear. I choose to assume that she's accusing Jegra of having vaginas instead of teeth.

It transpires that Jegra apparently killed Kel'Zellion not in the arena, but in bed. With her vagina, or possibly her teeth. He had a fatal heart attack mid-bone and now Abethca wants justice for his infidelity, and I guess for his undetected cardiovascular health issues - but Jegra has no recollection of having met Kel'Zellion, let alone slept with him.

Abethca pulls out her knives and the showdown begins. The weirdly detailed mid-fight banter reveals that Abethca has also slept with Jegra, because

"I didn't believe him when he said you were the best. I had to prove him wrong."

A couple of lines later, Jegra remarks that

"This is by far the weirdest conversation I've ever had,"

As always, the best way to accentuate wackiness is to explain it.

Abethca scores first blood, which is apparently unexpected, as Jegra then stabs herself with a discarded spear just to check that she's still as steel-skinned as ever - she is, but the magic space-metal of Abethca's knives trumps her everything-proof shield. Despite this, though, the narrator informs us that Jegra's used to taking a beating, winning fights through endurance rather than prowess, and that this gives her a certain 'underdog charm', which you'd think would be eroded at least a little by seventy-two consecutive wins.

Then, oh shit, Abethca turns invisible, and starts whaling on Jegra with her anti-everything-proof-shield knives! Jegra tries to counterattack, but finds only the 'vapid air'. Presumably that's either air that's inclined to waffle at dinner parties on nothing of substance, or, more likely, air that's been making a bit too much use of a thesaurus.

How can our heroine triumph against such a foe? We'll find out almost immediately as we head into...

Chapter 2

More banter! Abethca won enough fights to earn her freedom, but kept fighting anyway because she enjoyed it too much. The crowd's loyalties start to shift as Jegra gets visibly cut up for the first time ever, but she's got a trick up her sleeve:

Leaping into the air, Jegra shot high up into the hollow of the amphitheater and then came straight down. Landing on her knee and hammering the ground with both fists, she impacted with such a force it kicked up a fearsome sandstorm.

This extremely anime move pays off. Jegra can now see Abethca outlined in the dust and proceeds to wear her down, as the dust storm somehow robs the everything-proof-shield-piercing properties of the knives. From there, Jegra basically has it in the bag. A thrown spearhead (which is also an arrowhead, according to the text), a few punches, and Abethca goes down and calls for mercy, but...

She reached over and grabbed Abethca by her right wrist and dragged her lethargic body to its feet. Holding her wrist, Jegra shouted out, "Your returning champion! Abethca Agnar!"
...
Breaking the long silence, the sport broadcaster came onto the comm system and announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, we have just witnessed something unprecedented! Two champions, going head to head, battling fiercely and ending in the first ever draw!"

So, even if you've very obviously defeated your opponent and have them begging for mercy, sparing their life counts as a draw? Or did Jegra make it a draw somehow with that gesture? And this is the first time this has ever happened in the 75-year history of these games? If so, why is there an approved hand sign for mercy?

And, in any event, Jegra gets to take her defeated opponent as a prize anyway, much to Abethca's surprise. And she makes it very clear what kind of prize:

Jegra glanced at Abethca's fingers and then looked down into the green woman's shallow blue eyes. "These fingers will better suit me in other ways than lying cold and dead upon the sands of the arena."

Cue the sleazy bass line. (This is also the first time I've seen a pair of eyes described as "shallow".)

Abethca, bruised, bleeding from the fucking spear wound in her shoulder, moves to comply, because

instead of killing her, Jegra had shown her mercy. By the laws of the arena, whether she liked it or not, she belonged to Jegra now as her servant - to do with as she saw fit.

Wait... if this is part of the "laws of the arena", then why was she surprised to be dragged off?

In any event, she comes around to the idea quickly enough and they start making out, but the 'sultry tango between open mouths' (title of my new prog rock album) is interrupted by a thunderclap from overhead: the report of an FTL drive. Specifically, the FTL drive of Emperor Dakroth's personal battlecruiser, which looks like a 'predatory shark'. Thanks for specifying, Mr Vick, but I'm a little disappointed. A spaceship shaped like a basking shark would be raw as fuck.

Dakroth beams down to speak to Jegra, and we learn that their relationship is not all sunshine and roses. In fact, he's 'psychotic' and a 'dedicated Sadist' (capitalisation Vick's), but Jegra knows that she has some degree of power over him because she knows 'his every dark little secret'. Also the sex is good. It doesn't come up that he's, y'know, the emperor of most of the known galaxy, so she couldn't exactly back out even if she wanted to. He invites them to dinner aboard his ship and then leaves.

Jegra notes that Abethca is inexplicably terrified, and explains the situation:

"He broadcasts the manifestation of your worst fears into your subconscious when you are in close proximity to him. He can cause you to see things that would make you go insane, even gouge out your own eyes. It's how he keeps everyone in submission. It's one of his many powers."

Okay.

Why?

Like, driving people literally mad with fear doesn't strike me as a very sustainable way of keeping subordinates in line. Maybe he's just flexing, though the narrator still insists that Jegra knows he's 'a man of discipline and self-control'. So that's alright then.

Abethca asks Jegra why she called Abethca her concubine to make sure Dakroth didn't hurt her. Jegra replies by showing Abethca her carpe diem tattoo and explains the meaning of the phrase in totally inconspicuous, non-portentous terms. Basically, she protected Abethca because YOLO.

The two of them leave the arena and head off to dinner, and... that's where I'll call it for now.

In its favour, I'll say that Gladiatrix of the Galaxy certainly doesn't keep you waiting for the good stuff, for a certain value of "good stuff". It certainly doesn't spend as much time on food as ASoIaF did, which is a mercy. But we're really just scratching the surface of what Tristan Vick has to offer us.

Next time: bruise massages, vomit, orientalism, and death.