An Ode to Otherside Picnic
I originally posted the following post to the website cohost around a week after finishing the eighth novel of the book series Otherside Picnic, in the middle of September 2024, as a more spoiler-oriented piece than my general recommendation to read the series.
It is a short poem for said volume 8 of Otherside Picnic that is spoilerish in somewhat cryptic but meaningful ways on things you may prefer to discover by yourself. Read at your own risk.
I want to put how I am feeling in a bottle, so that it can shine within me again in heavier hours.
I have ended the eighth volume of Otherside Picnic. I am not the same.
I have wolfed it down in less than 24 hours. It is incredible. It is beyond everything I expected. It rings truer on the difficulties and the beauty of relationships than anything I have ever read, I think.
This was already a specific interest, and my favorite ex-aequo yuri series, to file as its own winner of the "it's really weird but it's wonderful" category. But now, it's ascended to probably my favorite lesbian fiction, period.
(the other contender being the diptych We Know the Devil/Heaven Will Be Mine. There are parallels to be written. I will write one.)
It had been tremendous for a long while, by introducing increasingly realistic elements on trauma, abuse, and queerness. Volume 7 had been the acme of that. It was wonderful. It resolved in extremely meaningful and striking ways a heavy part of the main plot.
But communication in a complicated relationship was the most obvious dangling thread left afterwards. And I've always been burned by the gap between my expectations and the execution, regarding that, in general media.
I expected something nice. I hoped for something beautiful.
I got something true.
This eighth volume is all the nuance I have ever hoped to see in romance fiction.
I have not recovered.
I don't think I ever truly will.
I have spent the next day after this read with the intoxicating feeling of my brain being stuck there, behind the blue veil, in the eye of the storm of the Otherside.
That feeling is slowly receding, but I can still conjure it at will.
Because now, when I close my eyes, I see these two forms unraveling in blue in that bedroom
And
Born of talks and compromises and trial and error
I see a Nue.
Now, when I close my eyes, I feel this glow inside
And in ways that cannot be put into words
I feel seen.