Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs Sensitivity Readers

In Which One-Liners, Shit Jokes and The Vague Specter of Gay Sex is Not Enough to Save a Narrative

Contents:

Introduction

Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die (In Which Many Dangerous and Homosexual Things Happen.) is non-binary, Canadian author Greer Stothers’s breakout novel, now - following commercial success after its February 2026 release - labelled as the first in its Legends of Larnia series. Published by Titan Books, it advertises itself with the following summary:

All his life, Sir Cameron has stayed as far away from danger as possible. He is quite frankly too handsome to die a pointless death in battle. But then the Church hands down a prophecy to his fellow knights: the only way to defeat their nemesis, the mad sorcerer Merulo, is to kill Sir Cameron. Short of ideas, Cameron throws himself on the mercy of the one person who now actually wants him to survive: the mad sorcerer.

Merulo isn’t thrilled to be babysitting a spoilt, attention-seeking knight, but transmogrifying him into a vulture is at least entertaining. Cameron, meanwhile, is on a voyage of self-discovery. It turns out he’s really, really into surly sorcerers who lock him up and tell him what to do. Who knew?

As a legion of knights surround their stronghold, the sorcerer’s poisonous ambitions draw ever closer to fruition. Cameron is quite invested in not dying, but he finds he’s also invested in Merulo. And sometimes, supporting the sorcerer you care about means taking an interest in their hobbies. Even if that hobby is trying to kill God.

Even if it might get you killed, too.

Fall in love with this laugh-out loud, genre-bending romp full of concussed elves and queer romance like you’ve never seen before.

I am often excited by seeing people's first published works. Whether they're published by the creator themselves, like the webcomics shared from DeviantArt to ComicFury, the singles on Bandcamp and Soundcloud, the finally completed novels shared in installments in the depths of personal sites and Wattpad, the Warrior Cats PMVs set to musicals I've never seen; it thrills me, to know that there are people every day putting their passion out into the world, sharing that creative breadth in the hopes it will reach someone who sees the wonder in it, too.

In this mutualistic ecosystem of sharing and being shared, it is rare that I wish something was not shared at all. Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs To Die is…

… not an exception. I think it has contributed something to the communal space, even if I don't like it personally, and even if I do not think that contribution is, at this point, even beneficial. It has said its part, and the most optimistic I can be about that statement is that I do not believe it said some of the things it did on purpose. It is definitely a queer romance unlike any I have seen before, but that is not a compliment.

I'd like to clear up a few things before getting started with the review itself, just to establish the context I'm working from.

First off, as mentioned at the beginning, I love self publishing and passion projects. I am incredibly enthusiastic about things that are often unpolished, unskilled, or unfinished, and I am delighted when they surpass those humble expectations. My standards for Sir Cameron were raised from this baseline by it having an official publication, making it available in bookstores and libraries and thus, in my opinion, available for a critical review suited to that peerage.

Second - and I consider this important to note because of the way the promotion of this book is quick to call it smut, spicy, or similar descriptors - I am a gay man, and I have read and enjoyed erotica across multiple demographics. I think it is an interesting genre, and I have a lot of respect for the authors that put their heart (or at least a genuine intention to be titillating) into erotic works. This review will include discussion of sexual content (or the implications of it) in Sir Cameron, because how could it not.

Third, I have no personal grievance with the author of Sir Cameron, Greer Stothers. I hope that, if they choose to read it, this is a review that they can take to heart.

Fourth, inevitably, is that this review will contain spoilers, including a chapter-by-chapter summary of the main plot. If you're already familiar with the book, you can skip the summary and mildly witty commentary by clicking on this text to jump ahead.

Let's get into that.

Overview: I Said This On Goodreads, So If You Don't Have Much Time -

In purely literary skills, Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die (I'll be shortening this to Sir Cameron for brevity going forward) is mediocre. It doesn't stand out from its peers in its structure or prose, and falls significantly behind in others.

Most notably, Did Cameron suffers from what I tend to call the fanfiction pitfall: not a difference in quality, but in structure, defined by fanfiction as a genre being built on a pre-existing knowledge of the source material. In practice, this is reflected by very little description of characters or exploration of the setting. In fanfiction, this is left out due to readers being assumed to already have familiarity with these things as explored by the source material. In original fiction, it results in a flat subject matter that is difficult to visualize. Sir Cameron is especially egregious at times, where character appearances are often described in one long paragraph or the description is even left out entirely until there is a change away from their base, expected appearance. This also affects the plausibility of the romance, as it means our protagonist's point of view rarely demonstrates a physical interest in the love interest the entire story is structured around. Merulo is described generally with a disparaging tone and very rarely complimentary, a sentiment enforced by the author's social media surprise that people would genuinely be attracted to him. In the final chapters of the book, a key character's dragon form is also entirely undescribed except for a line in the chapter's title, despite the surgical mutilation of her wings being an important note for her history and role in the story.

The prose itself has a deeply repetitive pacing, with most sentences following the same overall structure. This again is compounded by general pacing issues to create a story where many things happen (despite the subtitle of the novel, rarely homosexual in nature) but the events themselves feel slow. If a twist or secret information is introduced to the plot, it is explained directly in the following chapter, leaving little room for mystery or tension to build. Characters that have conflicts with each other resolve their disagreements quickly and return to a baseline normalcy within the same or following chapter, except for times when these conflicts are left fully unfinished and do not give any indication of a true resolution or any lingering effects on the characters involved. Despite the in-universe stakes for the main conflict of the story, there is little investment on the part of the reader, as the book consistently softens any potential consequence a negative outcome may have. In-universe consistency is also lacking, as there are multiple times that a preestablished solution to a different problem could be utilized and isn't, not for any added intensity or character choice reasons, but through what simply feels like the author forgetting it was an option that existed. There is only one permanent death of a major character, and there is no reason given for why it couldn't be made impermanent like other deaths, or why the circumstances of that death happened the way that they did at all when similar tolls did not occur in other magic. It is not the characters who are hypocritical, but the structure of their world and the way the author has led them to interact with and justify it.

Many of the plot beats praised as innovative by other reviews at least exist in other works within the genres Sir Cameron is a part of. Fantasy and science fiction have long borrowed elements from each other or have had setting fully in that gray area between them. While Sir Cameron's particular blend of these tropes may be unique among modern peers, the novel does not give much care to either side of the setting beyond being an ultimately irrelevant plot device, and the number of other plot devices it tries to juggle as the introductory novel to a new setting results in a shallow understanding of all of it. There is nothing Sir Cameron presents that cannot be found written with more attention in another novel.

The typical humor present in the novel is immature, often relying on toilet humor or sexual arousal rather than actually comedic writing. Sexual interest is not portrayed meaningfully, used almost entirely as either a joke or as a way to resolve conflict, again with little consequence. Often, the novel punches down at itself and the reader, as if to insult one for having interest in its premise or setting. Scenes that could evoke sexual interest are especially undermined, despite this being a gay romance advertised specifically as having a representation of a dom/sub relationship. There are many, many references to shitting.

As a queer novel, there are no relevant explicitly transgender characters; a single character in the final chapters uses they/them pronouns. The two lesbians of the story are a conservative, bigoted antagonist, and somewhat progressive but dead, respectively. The two male leads, the homosexual pairing that the novel centers around, have the first and second of their four fade-to-black sexual encounters while one of them is magically a woman. Despite magical physical transition happening to one of the male characters, this is not written in any way respectful to women or trans women, and is often blatantly misogynistic and transmisogynistic. Queer sex is most often condemned by the characters in the setting, followed by having it be made fun of, with practically no fully positive interactions relating to homosexuality. The most explicit homosexual scene (where two characters are naked and interrupted) is undercut by one of the characters interrupting them being wildly disgusted and repulsed. The concept of BDSM, despite being a central part of the book's concept and appeal, is regularly mocked and belittled for being gross, unwanted, or annoying, amplified by a lazy approach to writing a brat dynamic.

Whether it was the author's intent or not, the book is frequently sexist, homophobic, transmisogynistic, and racist, and of the few times it could possibly apply, is fatphobic and ableist as well. The setting of the world being conservative and bigoted is not challenged by any major characters, but instead reinforced by the narration and overall tone of the novel, platforming that which I can only in good heart assume it intended to criticize. A white male character turned into a bronze-skinned woman immediately offers his (the pronouns do not change nor does the character enjoy specifically being a woman) work in cooking, cleaning, and sexual favors, and is later almost assaulted after trying to seduce someone for baked treats rather than paying. A later addition to the main cast is a tawny-skinned woman described constantly as huge and muscular, violent, animalistic, and predatory. The one character who is explicitly mixed race is called a mongrel more often than she is called by her name, and her weight, height, and skin tone are emphasized as ugly deviations from the skinny, short, and usual color standard. There are man in a dress jokes. The closest thing the novel has to an outwardly transgender character who interacts with the main cast is only present in the last few chapters, a ship AI who is stated to have changed their name to two in-universe slurs (words that are also historically slurs in the real world) because then others will have to say the slurs and be uncomfortable. The overarching plot of the novel centers a return to an idealized time in history despite that time's danger to human life, rejecting all progress and current methods of survival, in a way that feels unsettlingly tied to the cottagecore pastoralism trend among current conservatives, though the premise of the novel requires an aesthetic offsetting to a technological era rather than a pre-industrial one. Despite being almost completely irrelevant to the story, there is still a pregnancy risk with no suggestion of contraceptives and a later, pro-life stance on an abortion procedure.

As someone who reads a lot of independently published fiction, my standards are often quite low for what I would consider an enjoyable story. Despite being an officially published work, Sir Cameron disappointed those expectations and then some. I would not recommend this novel to anyone; I would not even talk about it and merit giving it the word of mouth if I did not feel it truly needed a warning label. This is not a book that will respect your time or interest, and I do hope that the author is willing to read and respect the critical reviews as they continue their writing career.

Part One: A Summary of Events, Told With Enough Brevity To Make The Word Count of This Review Even Slightly More Manageable, Just Kidding, It's A Lot Of Words

The short version of the summary is this: Sir Cameron is prophesied to die to stop an evil sorcerer from killing God. He escapes and goes to the sorcerer for protection, who is mean to him and hurts him and threatens to kill him, but it's funny because Sir Cameron thinks that's sexy. Sir Cameron is turned into a vulture and shits a lot and then into a woman who cleans and offers sex a lot and then back into a man, is told that the world used to be Earth and dragons were artificial intelligences, and then he is killed and the sorcerer brings him back to life. They escape with the help of the sorcerer's formerly unmentioned sister to an abandoned theme park under the sea where technology still works because it's not on the surface, and then they do stuff there until they're ready to kill God, who is already dead, and then the sorcerer's half-sister dies preserving magic when the sorcerer returns Earth to the rest of the solar system, and is rescued by a spaceship AI that named itself some slurs on purpose. At some points in this, we as readers are led to believe Cameron and the sorcerer fuck, though it is all left to the imagination. For half of these imagined scenes, Cameron is a woman, and not in a transgender way but in ways the book actively pursues being transphobic about.

The more detailed summary is this:

The book opens with a prologue introducing our “antagonist”, the mad sorcerer Merulo, storming a meeting and declaring he will kill God. His dramatic entrance and intimidation factor is undermined by those present commenting on his boring clothes, unimpressed commentary on his magical ability, and revealing after the dramatics that Merulo has mistaken their identities but they will pass on the information to the actual people he wanted to hear it. Merulo’s violence and magical skill are a joke from the start, delivering us the character's foundation: he is very good at magic, nobody thinks he is cool, he is kind of greasy, and the idea of killing God is a joke more than a tangible threat.

Prologue ended, and forty years later (make note of this in the chapter title, as it will not be mentioned again) we meet our true protagonist, and the primary narrator of the rest of the novel: Sir Cameron. He is introduced as a man interested in his own looks, avoiding the conflict he's been enlisted to fight in, and wanting to fuck men, which we will be hearing about incessantly for the next 60 chapters. He is socially inept, struggling to recognize that others dislike him, and is forced to fight a captured construct made by the evil sorcerer of the land for the entertainment of everyone else who wants him grievously harmed for having the traits listed above. After much internal narration about how useless he is, he dispatches it, and the crowd of spectators hoping he would be killed take their disappointed leave. It is important to note that at this point Cameron's greatest sin is that he is self-absorbed and generally nonviolent, traits that have apparently earned him such a treatment. In a group conversation, we meet our first character described as a variation of fat, who is rude and eating sloppily while dripping grease down his front.

After a short conversation and a half he is collected by his friend, an elven woman named Glenda, who insists that they have to leave and leads him into the woods. We get a short explanation of the setting of this world, given through a childhood memory; ancient people made the world inhospitable, retreated into shelters, and were promptly wiped out by God, who restored the environment in doing so. Envisioning such a loss of life, and a similar experience happening to himself, struck the young Cameron with such horror that it permanently haunts him with bouts of paranoia referred to as the Fear. This is an important detail to remember for later, as it will not come up as much as you think it would.

That aside, he spends this short trip admiring her elven competence and superiority over him and his general weakness as a human, and then she reveals that he is going to die. When he asks her to explain, she initially refuses, asking for more time because it's distressing, and he agrees to wait.

The next day she does elaborate, informing him that there has been a prophecy that cements his death as necessary - inevitable, even - for the defeat of the sorcerer who wants to kill God, a man whose last appearance was the danger equivalent of harassing a Twitter customer support worker because one wants to threaten Elon Musk. Cameron is understandably distressed by having to die and wants to avoid having to die, and in a panic tries to flirt with Glenda in the hopes that it would buy him more time to figure out an escape plan. She rejects him, he accuses her of being an anti-human bigot, and while she's distressed by having their friendship broken (a friendship which she does not believe was broken by informing him she was going to kill him), he knocks her out and flees.

In escaping, he formulates a plan; if his death is what leads to the defeat of the sorcerer, then obviously the sorcerer would want to keep him alive. With knights closing in on his location, he calls out to the sorcerer for help, and one of the sorcerer's constructs picks him up and flies him to his protected castle.

Thus ends the free preview, or at least the one offered by my library's digital offerings. Having a local library that is quite limited, and not wanting to make a request for a book that I was not very hopeful about, I borrowed a family member's card for a better library, and got a copy that way. Thank you, Toronto Public Library and your six digitally available copies. This review would not have been possible without you.

Cameron is wholly underwhelmed by Merulo in person, immediately discerns that Merulo's stone eye links him to his constructs, and decides that Merulo looks suitably dirty and pathetic that surely nobody has touched him in recent memory and that he could try flirting, which for some reason is accredited as being something that would keep him alive longer, despite the sorcerer definitely having alternatives to killing him. Before he can do so, Merulo knocks him out with a spell.

When he awakes, he is in a change of clothes because he shit himself, which is revealed in the next scene. This is, regrettably, one of many shit jokes to come (and one that, having read the rest of the book, comes off as being vaguely homophobic, as if the implication is that being a gay bottom has made him too loose to keep from soiling himself). Cameron is led to the sorcerer by a construct and promptly shackled to a wall. He immediately tries to fluster the sorcerer, who instead brands him with a truth spell and asks for the information he knows. Any potential tension of having secrets is just as immediately defused, with Cameron being forced to say everything he knows (not much) and when Merulo tries to intimidate him, Cameron gets a boner.

This is ridiculous, and the book wastes no time in letting you know that, because who would ever pick up a book about a plausibly dom/sub romance wanting to be horny? The sorcerer acts like he's dirty, Cameron clarifies he'd be consenting, the evil sorcerer replies that his consent isn't relevant (but of course he would never want to act on someone without their consent - we have to avoid any ambiguity, here!) and storms off in a tantrum. A construct checks in on Cameron to make sure he's flaccid before Merulo will return, because this is an adult book for adults about adult characters who know what sex is. There's a joke about a construct wanting to eat teeth, in case you forgot this was a book written by someone whose previous works were social media posts, they back and forth about how there is literally no benefit to keep Cameron alive (as he would just have to die somewhere other than where the prophecy showed) but there is definitely risk to keeping him alive.

Cameron is kept alive, and also turned into a vulture. A fantasy kind of vulture, which is able to talk, in case there were any concerns that maybe this would be a limiting form or humbling in any way. Cameron's adjustment to this form is off-page, dangled just out of reach with the mention that he did have difficulties we will never get to actually read about, and we are essentially reintroduced to him as someone fully comfortable with eating corpses, stealing food from the sorcerer, wedging himself through the castle, and shitting everywhere all of the time. I have never read anything romance, fantasy, sci-fi or comedy and thought I needed to have multiple descriptions of a bird shitting, because I try to read adult books for adults, but in case that was an angle I was missing in my life, Sir Cameron is eager to fill that niche.

In the chapter between the interrogation and the vulture reintroduction we get a brief aside with Glenda, the elf Cameron concussed, hanging out with another elf woman and discussing how rude it was for Cameron to accuse her of bigotry. This entire exchange is deeply uncomfortable to read, because it's every white person's justification for surrounding themselves with white people, but the elves are blue and talking about humans, which means it's a funny joke that they're talking about how they have human friends so they can't be biased against humans and why would they date humans when they've only spent time with other elves, and humans are barely educated and illiterate, and so on. Elves are also, as defined later, exclusively slim and short, graceful and aesthetically pleasing, and to Glenda the idea of being attracted to someone larger, fat, and scarred is - directly, in the text, though much later than this chapter - disgusting and horrifying, even if that person is an elf. But it's funny to have fantasy reverse racism, so the scene continues. This was the first point where I considered giving up, at a whopping six short chapters in. Yes, there is still 90% of this book left to go. Glenda's friend asks her about her drug addiction, which Glenda defends as the only way she's able to feel emotions at all. She also took extra to try and feel super emotions about having to kill Cameron. Her friend asks her to make a sobriety pledge for a week, trying to get her to stop taking it entirely, and Glenda agrees, though it won't be important as we will never hear from or about this friend again.

We will be hearing from Cameron, though. Having been permitted to fly around freely, and having taught himself to talk, he wants to find someone with enough magic to turn him human again. This is difficult as everyone's magical ability is limited, with everyone born with a certain amount that is depleted each time they cast a spell. The Church, of course, drains the magic of poor and/or untalented children to make themselves look cool with floating cathedrals, so Cameron and others of his social status (which was a Lord's son, with a castle, but I suppose not rich enough to spare his heir such treatment, or perhaps that part hadn't been written yet, or Cameron just uniquely sucked even as a child) have no magic, and those with it would be wary of using it all up on him; Merulo doing such magic on a whim is extremely unusual, especially given that he has apparently been fighting this war for decades; if you happened to miss the three words in the first chapter's needlessly long title (initially written that way to meet a minimum word count after a suggestion from Tumblr user 124pomegranates) how exactly the prologue fits into the first chapter chronologically is hard to discern, as the events within imply at least some urgency that is not shown anywhere else, emphasizing the vague, restless passage of time throughout the rest of the book. I digress. Cameron considers going to a witch Glenda was complaining about over her helping “undesirables”, and decides Glenda will tell him where that witch is. He takes a drink from a stream in the most descriptive passage of the book so far, reminding us all that birds don't have lips, almost gets eaten but it doesn't matter because he just flies away from the shuck-hound threat that we never encounter again, says enough fucks at it to merit a Hazbin Hotel audition, and goes off to find Glenda.

After three whole paragraphs of suspense over whether or not he has correctly guessed her location, he is correct in his guess, and tries to ask for her help.

Glenda is, prior to her over-emotional state before, now totally cold towards him and seems emotionless in general. She shoots him in the wing, steps on him to pull the arrow out, and then shoots him again as he escapes. Despite the fact that Cameron is really horny about everyone else being mean to him, this time he is just scared (his narration surrounding Glenda is important for later, so remember this as well). Shot straight through his gut - the arrow goes in his front and out his back - and with one wing wounded, he somehow flies back towards the castle, crumples in a battleground, and cries for the sorcerer to rescue him, which of course he does despite still not liking him at this point and Cameron's death as a vulture making him potentially unstoppable. On Tumblr, Greer has stated that this is the point where Merulo's feelings about Cameron began to change, as he realized he may actually want company. It's a shame this isn't reflected in the book itself, seeing as that is where most people read about the characters in a story, and it's a shame that this change of heart is framed by the author as the character just sucking.

Another brief aside: I read romances. I read erotica. I read things that are just badly written. I will excuse a lot of plot contrivances for the sake of fulfilling the story or the expected beats of the genre. At this point in my first read, I was expecting that, while not done well, this would eventually be tempered by later context revealing something or other about their budding relationship, given that it's the entire reason the book was written. Surely, Merulo acting like an embarrassed high schooler while being a seemingly near ageless evil sorcerer would have more depth to it later, right? Rather than spending the rest of the novel feeling like he was an offbrand version of a different fantasy story I will not name’s crusty old mean potion teacher, or perhaps a more recent franchise's edgy light-sword user, as written by a fourteen year old with an approximate knowledge of things they've seen in other fanfictions? That would be a decent standard to hold a published novel to, right? At least a part of this was answered on Tumblr as well: Merulo's 59, the part that mentioned he looked young in the prologue was just cut and age is never brought up anywhere else beyond a vague “old”.

Cameron finds himself warming up to the sorcerer after being rescued, because as the chapter title so cleanly summarizes for anyone not reading to actually want to read the book, “[...] the Shittiness of His Behaviour Makes the Occasional Non-Shitty Action Stand Out in an Almost Heroic Light [...]”, which is funny and not horrifying because it's men and one of them is horny. Cameron again understands Merulo's magic at a glance of a construct piece he's working on, but it won't be important, so don't worry about it. The sorcerer is keeping him alive because he will suffer more alive than dead, even though, again, he has no reason to keep Cameron alive since we don't know in the book’s text that Merulo likes him even a little and also no reason to hate him given that they had one interaction where Cameron told him everything he wanted and then got turned into a bird.

Hearing Cameron's explanation of events, he then accuses Cameron of having a pattern of sexual harassment, because he failed to flirt with Glenda and then backed off when she clearly wasn't interested, and because he got a boner while chained up. Cameron argues his defense and Merulo immediately threatens to kill him, and then goes into what may be his longest dialogue yet, explaining to Cameron that actually things aren't bad for him because he was born rich and pretty, being the star of a prophecy that required him to die would have made him famous, and being turned into a bird was a blessing because it wasn't something else. Cameron dismisses this, because he has been spending the undetermined last amount of time being nearly killed and also eating carrion as a bird while everyone insults him, and I imagine we are supposed to think he is wrong for not liking this (he does not ever have an emotional depth that allows actually being mad about it) because Merulo introduces the first plot device that really made me think this story was actually going to have kinky sex in it.

Merulo pierces him with a spell, a needle buried in his back that he describes as the consequence for Cameron's fearless disrespect. It chains him magically to Merulo, and inflicts pain on him when Merulo wills it. This is demonstrated when Cameron is slightly rude when asking about how he's supposed to stand on Merulo's shoulders given his size as a vulture (a reasonable question, all things considered), and Merulo hurts him for it. When Cameron does try to get on his shoulders obediently and still can't fit, Merulo instructs him to stay quiet and follow behind so he can make a pickup of mysterious items. Merulo sits side-saddle like a woman, of course, though as there's no description of a saddle and his legs are described as “dangling”, I have to note that I don't think research was put in to how side-saddle is ridden; that is, with something to hook your leg around so you don't slide off. Cameron shits again, inconsequentially.

Because Cameron is being brought on a chain as a bird to a meeting with a bunch of the people who potentially want to kill him for no reason other than Merulo wants an excuse to hurt him I guess, he has once again a reasonable concern about being attacked. Merulo pulls a dragon scale from his cloak - the body parts of now-extinct dragons provide a magical wellspring that would be used before the user's personal magic, surprise - and uses it to give Cameron magical armor that will last until sunset. Dragons here are also noted to have not been seen alive in over a century, again muddling how fast early events of the book happened; Cameron's prophecy required very specific dragon parts to cast it, so surely that was done when dragons were still alive, but then why wait this long to kill him? Surely the prophecy could have been fulfilled as soon as they were sure he was the person in it, if it was done recently, but that would mean the dragon heart had been in storage for a hundred years despite that being impossible with the timeline? Or that if it had been cast years prior, he would have been kept protected since childhood and not sent out to potentially die in battle before his prophesied death? With later context, this particular dragon's parts were from a dragon alive and known from around fifty years ago. Having completed the book, I do not expect a coherent timeline to emerge, and yet I hold out hope for it anyway.

Merulo's army of constructs faces off against the group of religious knights, neither side does anything but look at each other, and Merulo approaches the man he's there to get books from; old, white haired, dark skinned, and rich clothes that are “making even his paunch look deliberate and masculine”. This treatment of fat characters will continue. I'm sorry.

Merulo barters by explaining how much he needs these items really badly or his entire plan will fail, because as we all know Bartering 101 is to always make sure the seller knows how desperate you are to get what they have. The Chancellor, who is a man of importance but whose personal identity and geopolitical ties will not be relevant in any meaningful way, agrees to get him the missing texts anyway, despite the whole plan to kill God thing, and Merulo presents the relic he will exchange for the books. This exchange is our first concrete hint at the reality of this world, which I will leave vague until the point it is truly revealed. We're in Chapter 8 of 60, for reference.

In exchange for books whose covers are strange, realistic paintings coated in a peeling film, Merulo gives the Chancellor a rectangular metal device, “sporting a glass front with a curved opaque handle beside a grid of neatly aligned squares. An odd rope dangled beneath the object, like a grotesque umbilical cord”. Cameron has referred to these as relics; Merulo says as they're making the exchange that they are ancient technology that no longer works, the latter half of which Cameron can instantly tell is a lie. It has been two line breaks since the mystery of what the object is was introduced.

Merulo then brags about having Cameron as a bird with him, because, again, the best thing to do when you're scheming to end the world is to tell your enemies exactly where you've hidden the key to their success. Cameron then talks to the Chancellor as well, and the consequences needle put in him directly to be consequences for not listening is not used, because why would it be. Away from the meeting, Cameron then asks if Merulo is okay with homosexuality, which the Church is against, and Merulo gets mad about the question and gives Cameron the silent treatment until the construct passes him a book. I'll include the cover description, to keep you up to speed with the mystery.

“The glassy cover looked worn, peeling at the edges. A shiny red apple served as the focal point, beneath a shooting star. Two youths completed the scene, their mouths open in exaggerated awe, hands clasped to their cheeks. Though terribly ugly, the painting was extraordinary in its realism.”

Merulo explains in the next paragraph that these are books about physics, forces which ruled the world before God intervened and presumably by extension no longer do, or at least nobody's bothered to figure all of that stuff out again because science is against the Church. While this does raise a lot of questions (is there still the ability to transfer heat between objects? Has gravity been working this whole time? Do they have a magnetic north to navigate by?) it does, I suppose, offer one answer: if time no longer exists, of course the pacing would be like that.

Chapter 9 returns us briefly to Glenda, who has brain damage from being concussed and hates hearing medical jargon. The “heretical words being thrown at her. 'Neurofibrillary tangles,' 'white matter,' 'shearing';” are well known to elves, who still actively practice the ancient knowledge that Merulo just claimed on the page before was relentlessly sought out and destroyed for being heretical and is only preserved by those that hate God. If you think this could be building up to a plot point, it isn't, so don't worry about that. What's important is that Glenda hates Cameron for giving her a disabling brain injury, and said brain injury and drug withdrawal brings her desire to kill Cameron to a laser-focus. She has started a plan to drain the magic of a group of fifty young mages who have spent their whole lives studying in order to get one attempt at breaking into the fortress to get Cameron. I'm not sure how one would “drill incantations” without casting them and thus depleting their internal magic, or why they wouldn't put those resources towards finding materials like dragon parts to offset the cost, but again, the Church is bad and evil so it's torturing children somewhere else, just conveniently not anyone we have to care about.

We go back to Cameron for Chapter 10, who is the person we do have to care about, and he has decided to try and fuck his way out of problems again, as a vulture, hoping that seduction, as a vulture, will work and make Merulo turn him human again, to fuck.

Which is why Cameron asks to be turned into a woman.

Cameron's justification is that the prophecy showed him as a man, so being a woman would be just as safe as being a vulture, the current shape that was chosen specifically to torment him rather than provide him any form of safety. Merulo agrees this would be true, without contesting that any physical change would also make the prophecy (which made specific details present including his “long eyelashes for a boy”) inaccurate, like for example changing eye color, or maybe removing one of those teeth that were threatened earlier. Cameron brings up his nipples again, because this is an adult book for adults, and birds having a gland that produces oil for preening that's close to where a butt would be surely must be comedic.

Regardless, Cameron wants to be a woman, so he pleads his case: he could start cooking, cleaning, decorating, and having sex with the sorcerer. That's not an unflattering summary, that is the list presented, in that order, in only slightly more words. Because that is what women do. Now, obviously, we are in this story from Cameron's perspective, which has the plausible deniability of “maybe Cameron is just really sexist, because his society is”, and I'll grant it that. The problem with that defense is that it's not a sexism he displays with the only woman he's interacted with so far, it's not something the text itself ever challenges, and Cameron does not really continue with these tasks after being returned to his normal, human form. This is not a writing choice that mocks sexism, it is one that enforces it, and this trend will continue through the rest of the novel. The sorcerer agrees to make him a woman for the purposes of cooking, cleaning, and decoration, none of which Cameron has any particular talent in, but rejects the seduction, again. Pushing someone's boundaries is funny when it's gay men.

Sir Cameron is turned into a woman offscreen, lest we encounter something compelling about the magic system of the world, and the chapter after this secret transformation opens with, of course, a lengthy subtitle making jokes about having huge tits, and then Cameron “self groping” because it's impossible to move with huge tits unless you are holding them in place. In a choice I can only assume is a feeble attempt to mock Cameron's cliche hero appearance, Cameron as a woman is slim and unmuscled, depicted boobs first and everything else later. Cameron's first requests of the sorcerer after becoming a subservient woman are for clothes that fit and for the punishment needle spell to be removed because the sorcerer could just hit him instead.

This is where I seriously considered ending my reading, a whopping eleven short chapters in. It was a level of sexism comparable to A Spell For Chameleon, a Xanth novel in which the titular Chameleon becomes stupid and beautiful or ugly and intelligent as the moon changes phases, gradually moving back and forth between the two extremes each night. I need to be very clear here: the Did Not Finish list for my entire life can be counted on one hand, and one of those entries is Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead when I was 11*, a book that I still read more than half of. Sir Cameron halted me far before the halfway point, leading me to message my friends hoping their support could revive my flagging dedication. But even then, I wanted to believe in this book to follow through, to establish character development and changing perspectives that would align to a conclusion that was more satisfying than the current chapters implied. I have been surprised in similar ways before, finding myself genuinely engaged with a piece that was a slog to start.

Sir Cameron did not do this. But we have a long way to go for that.

Merulo uses the torture needle to shut him up, and Cameron insists if he doesn't go clothes shopping right now he'll flash Merulo. Merulo obliges, scratches “a round shape of intricate outline” on the ground, and away they portal. Cameron starts crying as he experiences being around people who don't want to hunt him, as both of them have also been magically disguised, changing their clothes. This is especially baffling to introduce as a spell option given that the reason they are here at all is because of clothing problems, but because the narrator is an idiot when it's convenient, the text never has to address this. By the time Cameron is looking at himself, he has stopped crying, as obviously the emotional impact of anything in this story ends as soon as there's a flashy enough distraction. Cameron also elaborates on his plan: use physical touch as a woman to get the sorcerer to restore his “handsome man-body”, all memory of the prophecy and the reason for his disguise completely discarded despite the fact he was thinking about it a page ago. Merulo, again, threatens to kill him.

Cameron sees his new body for the first time, and there is little I can say that the direct quote would not already inspire in anyone who has ever respected a woman:

Hovering in translucence over a rack of display shoes, a woman gawked back at me with familiar amber eyes. Ringlets of gold fell to her chin, a lion's mane about a face that glowed bronze from the sun. Her lips were pouty petals, her jaw slim and graspable, her breasts heaving under an unremarkable brown dress.

"Well," I said. "Aren't you the pervert? Look how delectable you made me!”

Merulo threatens Cameron because Cameron didn't let him get run over. They clothes shop, and Cameron openly longs for the fancy dresses there. (“Is it a queer romance with closeted trans representation?” You might think, and the answer is, at least in this book, absolutely not. It is to make a man in a dress the butt of jokes.) Cameron wants to walk around some more, Merulo lets him go without supervision despite protesting that he's being hunted for execution, and because Cameron has no money, he decides to seduce men so he can get a snack. Not, of course, to try and charm someone selling something into giving him some, but to try and flirt with a knight so the knight will buy him things. Because this is what women do.

This is where Cameron experiences sexism for the first time, as he chooses a man he enjoyed the company of while he was a man but who is forceful and overbearing with him as a woman. I will skim this section because I think it is an awful choice in basically every way: Cameron is taught a lesson about sexism because he is almost sexually assaulted while drunk, in a bar where the only other woman - we don't get to know her fate - is similarly under the influence and with a leering man. Merulo intervenes to save Cameron while claiming to be Cameron's brother, Cameron regrets having ever done this to Glenda (he did not get her drunk and try to assault her, though in earlier, cut versions of the book's opening posted on Tumblr, he did offer time with her to other men as a bribe), and Cameron sobs because he's also learned that everyone hates him. He also points out that there's no reason for Merulo to care if he's been injured when Merulo hurts him all of the time, which Merulo ignores.

And then, mere paragraphs after Cameron's tearful realization that forcing yourself on someone is wrong, he forcefully kisses the sorcerer, who gets hard about it while they roll in the grass. You'd almost think there would be sex at this point, but because this is the book that it is, someone who overheard the sibling lie accuses them of incest, which is always funny. Testosterone is cited as the reason for violence, and Cameron gets his hands on someone's sword in the literal sense and buys enough time for Merulo to finish a knockout spell that collapses Cameron's would-be rapist.

He farts because he's knocked out. Aren't the standards of adult fiction high?

Merulo has to find a new town to get supplies in despite being already in a magical disguise, they fight about how annoying and useless Cameron is while he's too drunk to see straight (cannot emphasize enough, he was about to be assaulted minutes ago) and then the chapter ends.

Because following through on this tension would be expected, we go back to Glenda for Chapter 12 instead. She is interrogating the knights that were involved in the fight. There are more jokes about the incest lie. Glenda immediately knows the “sister” was Cameron in disguise, and Cameron's assaulter is distressed, says “I almost kissed a man?”, and is irrelevant again. Glenda is in drug withdrawal, so she continues to be cold and murderous.

Cameron being assaulted makes Merulo remove the torture needle, the thing that would keep Cameron leashed to him and the plot point that would have been fitting in a genuine depiction of BDSM but of course is not used here, and Merulo proceeds to avoid talking to him - again, after he was almost assaulted - but gives him supplies to clean, a second set of clothes, and bedding, which he has not had until this point. We hear about vulture shit again, because it's everywhere. While Cameron does all of this cleaning by hand, he makes note of the toilets not needing to be cleaned because they magic human waste away, again not ever really thinking about why the rest of the mess still exists if it can just be cleaned automatically, presumably because the plot needed something for a woman to do. After these three days, Cameron catches Merulo in the library, and here, in chapter 13 of 60, Merulo proceeds to explain every possible mystery the setting has, in a few brief convenient paragraphs.

Merulo wants to kill God because its arrival, the Descent, “perverted this world”. Its previous state was toxic, with unbreatheable air and daytime hot enough to kill. Merulo wants it turned back because it could have hypothetically been fixed with enough time given the technology of the era, and because their world is cut off from the universe it used to be a part of. He projects a diagram of the solar system into the room. He points out the sun and their planet, and explains that people also lived on their planet's moon and on Mars. God's arrival made their environment safe, but also rendered technology and the sciences inert (except some sciences the elves still use, I suppose, but that's not important) and introduced magic. Dragons were artificial intelligences before the Descent, and ruled countries. Merulo also took his eye out for an unspecified spell. Cameron falls asleep for not really any particular reason as it's only evening, and wakes in the morning with his blanket over his shoulders but still in the library. This is the first act of kindness that Merulo has done that could not be confused for poor plot memory.

Cameron asks more questions and is instantly answered in Chapter 14. Elves used to be celebrities and influencers who got surgeries, though it's not clear what surgeries merit the transition. Merulo avoids saying anything about his plans for after he kills God. Cameron misses Merulo being mean to him, so he spills and breaks things in the hopes that Merulo will stop treating him like someone capable of thought, as now that he's been prompted into lore dumping, it is all he talks about or focuses on. Merulo eventually notices Cameron is breaking things on purpose, threatens him with serious consequences, and Cameron breaks another thing so the sorcerer forcefully flings him against a wall. There is no discernment between this and his near assault beyond the fact that we know, in Cameron's perspective, that he's doing this to be hurt on purpose. Cameron kind of eventually gets around to implying out loud that he wants to be hurt on purpose, Merulo plays along on purpose, and just when you thought there would actually be the promised spicy sexual tension, Merulo starts lecturing him about how he's shit at cleaning and how breaking his things is not appropriate communication. Cameron begs for a truth spell, says he's doing everything badly on purpose and that he won't apologize for anything he's done because it turns him on, which is a fascinating undermining of everything he “learned” in his last chapter about boundaries and consent, and Merulo magically mutes him. Our first fade to black sex scene is this: Cameron as a woman, chained to the wall, muted because he's annoying and won't shut up.

Chapter fifteen is uneventful. Sixteen has Cameron using his diminished feminine strength (you know, since he was getting a lot of physical strength avoiding anything that made him sweat too much as a man, and has been doing heavy cleaning ever since being turned into a woman) to clean more. Merulo's dramatic magical battles involve him standing outside and visually doing nothing. Cameron does a not all knights about how the people who are agents of the Church out to kill him are mostly just there for a cushy retirement, which is a perspective that is also not ever contradicted and definitely not uncomfortably close, likely on purpose, to justifications made for cops or participation in the military. It is important to note that satire does actually have to make a point; something that just repeats the exact same sentiments and then moves on is only repeating those sentiments to more people. Cameron says something about Merulo being only human and Merulo responds with a subtlety I would expect from a five year old who tried to shoplift a chocolate bar, given that it's also blatant enough for Cameron to notice with the interpersonal awareness of a rock. Just in case you missed it, Cameron repeats that they're both humans, for suresies.

Seventeen; Cameron thinks Merulo is mad at him for real and decides It's because Merulo is ugly and Cameron is beautiful. Our second fade to black is vividly explicit: “no further reading would be accomplished that day”, end scene.

Eighteen; Glenda meets the person who sold Merulo the physics textbooks. It's funny because he's done so much tax evasion, murder, fraud, and so on that he doesn't even know he's in trouble for selling things to Merulo. He gets imprisoned because the Order needs his money.

Nineteen; Cameron gets a period. Cameron doesn't know what a period is and Merulo gets a book for him instead of just telling him. Cameron's mother couldn't explain them to him because she died in childbirth and Merulo bonds with him because he also has a dead mother. Merulo reveals, also, that Cameron could have gotten pregnant this whole time and didn't say anything about it or offer any form of birth control, and Cameron reasonably freaks out about this and insists he be turned back into a man. Merulo can't fathom anal sex, and Cameron won't allow himself to not be blond because he's most handsome when he's blond.

Cameron takes one last chest fondle, in case he misses having a woman's body, and we get our transgender worldbuilding in a brief aside that Cameron is unusual for being transformed so many times when people wanting to change their genders would have to save up half their lives to afford it. The spell requires blood that Merulo takes from Cameron's arm with a knife, a sentence after Cameron describes how much period blood is on him. And then Cameron is turned back into a man:

Then came the tear of fabric as a muscled man's body erupted through my slim linen dress. The corset held until I sat up, then snapped with a crack that resounded through the library.

The relief was immediate. I could wash, I could change, and I would never again experience whatever the fuck that was.

"Well. That's done with." I flexed the new breadth of my shoulders. It felt unbelievably good to rise to my full height and see the sorcerer shrink.

My calm restored, I felt ready to talk about things in a more sensible manner. “Does that really happen to all of them?”

Cameron is finally free of his tiny, frail, emotional woman's body, full of relief. This, and the frequency of the jokes about Cameron having been a man pretending to be a woman, undermine any attempt at gender nonconformity and especially any transfeminine readings of the character. This is a novel, and an authorial intent, that thinks it is funny that its protagonist is sometimes feminine in attitude but looks like a handsome generic hunk, and that is something I cannot forgive. This is not queer diversity, this is not genderfuck goals, this is transmisogyny, and it will continue to be transmisogyny.

Merulo also doesn't know anything about menstruation, despite having been alive for about sixty years and while having books about the subject. At this point, that's barely of note. And Cameron is better at cleaning now because he's strong and can carry more things as a man. Which is also, alarmingly, becoming barely of note.

At this point, while I am writing out of order, I have passed eight thousand words, and have reached the 45% mark of the book, with some leeway for forewords and afterwords and quotes and all of that, which the library counts as pages. There are things I will skim from here on out in the summary; the criticisms I've made note of so far are repeated throughout the rest of the novel, incessantly, and I would like to give some respect to the time of those reading this review and not detail every individual instance. Do not mistake its absence in the summary for an absence of it in the text. I wish the things I'm criticizing were absent. I really, truly do.

Chapter twenty; the first sex a man has with another man, its lurid appeal evident in the single line “well, more than a minute would pass.”. Merulo is upset that Cameron is distracting.

Twenty-one: Merulo gets some fossils out of a beach. There are areas outside of the Church's influence where Merulo could have been this whole time so he'd be left alone, and that Cameron would be safe in. Merulo admits killing God will destroy his body. Because Cameron doesn't want Merulo committing suicide, Merulo tells him to leave the castle. I don't think the fossils ever come up again.

Twenty-two: Cameron leaves, comes back, confronts Merulo, is told again to leave, packs to leave, goes back outside, changes his mind, goes back in while Merulo is away, and is promptly attacked by Glenda, who can break in now because she used a lot of magic.

Interlude: As said before, I've read a lot of romances. I've read a lot of erotica. I understand the miscommunication conflict tropes, the “I have to force you away from me because keeping you close makes me feel too much”, and so on. I appreciate them, in fact, I love seeing what justifications a character can have for isolating themselves and what makes them reconnect afterwards. However, that requires the characters to visibly, on the page, care about each other consistently. There has to be a risk, that they have something concrete and genuine to potentially lose. With Sir Cameron, we see little of Merulo caring for Cameron beyond sex, and Cameron appreciates Merulo equally shallowly, simply because Merulo puts up with him and indulges in his desire to be degraded. The threats of violence and the repeated physical harm, the intrusion on boundaries, the lie of omission about pregnancy risk, the repeated disregard for Cameron's safety especially when there are quite large plot events related to him being killed; these would be deal breakers for any relationship meant to be taken seriously in the context of these genres. This writing is not BDSM. This is not romance. This is an elaborate joke about how funny it would be if these two men wanted to fuck, and it cannot dare to take itself or its genres more seriously than that, to its own detriment. Cameron isn't even a well-written brat.

Return to twenty-two: My opinions on the unnecessary workarounds to make Glenda less appealing as a character will be held until later in the review.

Twenty-three: Cameron captured. God’s depiction is a writhing tentacle monster covered in eyes, not for any particular reason. Breaking into the castle's defenses is the perfect time to have grabbed Cameron, rather than all of the times he was outside of it. Glenda admits to Cameron that she takes drugs so she can feel any emotions at all. Cameron argues for bringing the polluted world of the distant past back because then they'd be in space properly. Cameron is stabbed through the throat, and takes a while to die.

Twenty-four and twenty-five: completely empty, as Cameron is dead.

Twenty-six: Glenda is attacking the sorcerer's constructs. Because she needs to be fully evil, she uses Cameron's corpse like a flag being carried into battle.

Twenty-seven and twenty-eight: also blank.

Twenty-nine: Nothing stops Glenda in the castle, and she finds Merulo in a spell circle. While he could have cast it at any time, he waits so she hits him so he can reveal to her face that he's a dragon, and his spilled blood activates the spell to rewind time.

Thirty: Time rewound, Merulo rescues Cameron in dragon form, and has used up all of his magic forever by rewinding time, despite using externalized dragon blood to power the spell and having an entire body's worth of parts to sacrifice to avoid that outcome specifically. He then has to cut off a toe in order to make a video call, (spoilers: the biggest spell of the climax will only take an arm and a leg from him.) This video call is to his sister. Cameron addresses her with “Please, sir, or … ma'am?”, which will give even more reason to grimace in the next paragraph. She's a much larger dragon than Merulo, because sexual dimorphism that makes men small is also funny.

This is Hydna: Merulo's sister, and the second relevant woman in the book so far, introduced halfway into it. She is huge, supremely muscular, enjoys violence, eats messily, gets compared to a dog, apparently sounds like a man, and is, of course, a darker skinned woman with a “wild mane” of hair. She will also be more thoroughly discussed later in the review.

It's important that Merulo mentions Cameron gets horny when someone is mean to him, and because the book expects you to not actually process anything for yourself, Cameron also pauses his escape to safety to explain that Merulo is saying he gets a boner, and then teleports to safety…

…to an underwater theme park in a glass dome where technology still works, a place they supposedly could have gone whenever to protect Cameron. Technology still works because it's under the water, because ”God's infection thins out beneath sea level”. Magic also still works under the water, and obviously the dragons are fine here as beings of pure magic, so don't try too hard to puzzle that out. (spoilers: if magical beings and magic itself can exist in an area with reduced or no magic, as long as they were created in a place or with objects that did have magic, why would things stop existing as they are if technology and connection to the universe was restored?) What is generating the electricity is also unimportant, even though it would have been pollution-era technology, unless it was built in the current world, which if it was, how. Also the theme park is full of corpses because their food ran out, but I guess the last survivors didn't try eating the corpses either? And Merulo and Hydna have established a base here, together, but have only cleared out some bodies despite having near-infinite magic or at the very least time on their hands. Merulo says they're the last dragons, looks at a fish, and then says he lied and there's another dragon who is his mother's biological child rather than one found as an egg like he and Hydna were. This lost sister, Domitia, is a follower of the Church who is kept from him.

With all of that dumped in the reader's lap at once, Hydna returns with Merulo's books, knocks most of them on the ground, and then casts a simple spell to return them to a previous state (shelved) without rewinding all of time. Hydna laughs at Cameron for wearing a dress as Merulo's maid. Cameron sees Merulo sleep for the first time ever, after Merulo explains that there is "[...] Only the truth of my work and the lies of the Church”, though the church hasn't really lied so much as said things from the past aren't allowed any more.

That's all in chapter thirty, by the way. The exact midway point of numbered chapters, though four of them contained zero words.

Chapter thirty-one: this is a Glenda chapter, but mostly we spend it learning about Domitia, because as she's been revealed to exist one chapter ago the thorough explanation for anything mysterious about her circumstances can now be written out in excruciating detail. Domitia is half-elven, known more frequently as the mongrel witch than as her actual name, was surgically corrected at birth to better resemble an elf, and her dragon mother was killed for trying to ruin the elf she seduced when he saw the horrific visage of his mixed child. (Why even use surgery, when the dragons we know are capable of taking human form, and get two scenes total as dragons?) The elves blame her draconic nature for her chosen isolation from the Church, which she now has little contact with as she chooses to help “undesirables” that seek out her Baba Yaga-esque walking house (Cameron considered finding her, as a vulture, if you recall). She is a fat woman, skin reddish and dark, with one unfocused hooded eye, a “sharp tangle of teeth”, and scars that reach to her armpits (the other end of their path is unspecified, but from one line later in the book, I assume its from her hand along the length of her arm), but she has a pretty voice and offers to heal the venom scars Glenda supposedly got in the fight against dragon-Merulo and hasn't mentioned at all yet. This also heals her head trauma, which Domitia asks her to explain when Glenda can only say that a man did it to her. Glenda is also weird for being an elf that thinks all of their secretive elf knowledge is evil because of the Church. Is the subtle metaphor of her motivations coming through yet?

Thirty-two: Hydna is described in racist ways again.

Thirty-three: “You can't hit me it's my birthday” joke, and then a baffling claim that time works differently underwater, where daylight still reaches, because there are no seasons or weather. I was excited that this would be a physics vs magic thing, but it never seemed to actually be. Cameron has some self doubt about whether he actually likes Merulo, which would be compelling if there had been any doubt leading up to this, any actual expressed desire for Merulo personally rather than a general constant desire to fuck, or any prior evidence that such things would have any kind of tension or payoff. He talks to himself out loud for this, not so he can be conveniently overheard, but seemingly just so it's easier to tell that he's arguing with himself. Hydna steals clothes off of someone she threatened because it's Cameron's birthday present, and that's how you're supposed to write a dark-skinned woman. The clothes are also too small, but Hydna can fix them with magic, an option seemingly unavailable to Merulo, perhaps because Merulo is not a woman and thus not innately drawn to domestic tasks (despite the inverse sexual dimorphism implying a subversion of gender roles, even though humans have very little dimorphism to begin with - that's a worldbuilding tirade that would require Sir Cameron to care about its world and logic, but it doesn't, so I'll spare the details.)

Thirty-four: Glenda continues calling Domitia a mongrel and retrieves a sword to track Cameron.

Thirty-five: There's a lot of corpses in the theme park, not eaten when people were starving to death and not actually disposed of when the dragons were cleaning up, which is only really important because it gives Cameron the creeps. Their cause of death is now life support failure instead of starvation, but who cares. They'll also apparently rot now that the power is back on, but it's implied the dragons have been here for years, and we certainly didn't get to see anything about the power being out, so most likely that was a plot point that got edited and it's consequences remained, much like the earlier versions of the first chapter. Cameron gets his sword back because items of personal significance are easy to summon, but nobody on Cameron's trail tries to do this despite also knowing him. Hydna offers to fight, we get another reminder that doing that makes Cameron horny, and because Hydna is a giant brutish dark-skinned woman, she beats Cameron easily and then acts like she's going to brutalize him and possibly her brother for real (Her teeth were as sharp as fangs, parted and wet. "I could do whatever I want, to either of you.”) so that he gets a boner she can laugh at. The sexual implications of the situation against Cameron are also applied to Merulo by her threat, but that's irrelevant. Merulo is designing prosthetics for when he removes his arm and leg, which he has to do early and keep in storage rather than doing it when he casts the spell to kill God, and also that are in human form because I suppose it doesn't matter the quantity of flesh, though more blood is more magic and in that case wouldn't Hydna be the smarter choice to lose a limb since she's so much bigger as a dragon, or they could each give one? Merulo and Hydna also expect to be turned into computers when the world is transformed, despite the fact that computers have to be built and they were hatched from eggs. Cameron hopes that Merulo fails, and is just mutilated by his missing limbs and their replacements instead of dead, but of course never losing a limb at all is the ideal outcome for reasons not specified in a world where a magic prosthetic changes very little about one's life.

Thirty-six: Merulo tries to kick Cameron out again. They instantly resolve it because Cameron doesn't want to fuck Merulo's sister even though he implied it the chapter before. This chapter may or may not be a fade to black; it is genuinely so vague and has so little sexual buildup that it could be either way.

Thirty-seven; Glenda's pursuit takes time because the mongrel witch doesn't like portals, so they have to travel in magic, very fast vehicles instead. Glenda doesn't like that Domitia looks like a tall, fat elf because elves shouldn't be fat or tall, and she cares so much more about making sure everyone knows she's the better example of elfkind that she's taken by surprise when Domitia blasts her way into the outpost a spell is leading them to. She attacks one of the knights - the one Cameron stole a sword from - and pins him until the knight says he's not Cameron but was a victim of Cameron's. At this point, Domitia has been lead to believe that Cameron violently assaulted Glenda for no reason, and now that Cameron has taken advantage of a knight. She is working under the belief that Cameron is an abusive predator. The knight claims Cameron deceived him by pretending to be a woman, and Domitia, because she's trans-positive I suppose, claims that if he transitioned it wasn't deception and rebukes the knight's pronoun usage to “she”. Glenda explains to the witch afterwards that Cameron turned back into a man so it doesn't count, and because we are supposed to dislike Glenda and the Church all of the time, she asks Domitia if she helps people lie by transitioning all of the time. Transition, again, is a procedure that has already been discussed in the novel as something possible for people to do if they can afford it, with little backlash noted until now.

"There is no lie." Domitia spoke with a hostility that made Glenda recoil. The witch visibly worked to calm herself, before speaking again. “You're quite invested in religious norms.”

"As we all should be!"

"Even when they cause people to deny themselves?"

"Deny what, objective reality?" Glenda giggled nervously. Seeking to recover the situation, she said, “Listen, [...]

Queer fiction, everybody; Cameron can be a victim of transmisogynistic hate, but it never needs to be confronted because he's a man the whole time and making jokes about having worn a dress is funny. Glenda can say the same bigoted shit, but she's a narrator and the woman she's with is polite so she'll never have to refute it.

Domitia recognizes Glenda's drug abuse and suggests something healthier, which Glenda rejects because Cameron is the scum of the earth for not wanting to die and then running away, I guess. It's a disproportionate hatred even with the flimsy excuse of Glenda's emotionally-charging addiction. (Also, can magic not cure a physical addiction, if it can cure brain damage?) Domitia comments that “nobody is beyond redemption” and then, in case you missed that Glenda assumed that was being applied to Cameron and not her, the dialogue tags makes sure to mention that from her perspective and in her own narration, she didn't notice the implication that said narration just told us about.

Thirty-eight: Merulo is making a wand that he will fill with his own dragon blood so the magic of the blood can be used to cast spells. He can't use it while it's inside his body, I suppose, though this is not a consistent rule as we will see later. Recurrence of the joke about periods. Hydna is at least allowed to be smart as well as an example of racism, and her motivation for killing God is because she wants to be able to talk to people about science and technology, because talking about science and technology is banned by the Church, which we have already been told has a limited scope and there are existing regions on this planet that lack the Church's influence and two all-powerful dragons have just avoided going there at all.

Thirty-nine: Cameron takes Merulo on a walk and is anxious about doing mundane things together as if it's the first time he ever has, which it might be since we never see them bonding in other chapters. Merulo struggles to climb a ladder so they can look at a picture of a dragon in a ruined bowling alley (why collapsed and rusted? There's no weather or people to disturb it.) but Merulo is unmoved, so there's no consequence. Corpse pile cause of death is back to starving instead of shut-down life support.

Forty: Glenda meets Cameron's dad, who hates him, and gets a childhood toy that can be used for magical tracking from his brother, who doesn't.

Forty-one: Merulo finds Cameron's written down list of plans to keep him from killing himself to kill God, is upset, it resolves in a few paragraphs.

Forty-two: Merulo and Cameron have a beach date and Merulo explains the stars haven't changed in the thousand years that their world has existed even though they should have, which means the sky is fake and colonies still probably exist on the moon and on Mars. There's also another line that acts like the Church is the only belief system when, again, we have already been told not everyone follows it. When Merulo questions why people think he's mad, “they're haters” is used verbatim. They almost kiss, and Merulo reveals that Glenda said Cameron loathed him while he was dying, and for some reason chose to believe this and didn't say anything for all of those other chapters in between, because if anyone spoke like adults in this novel it would be a potentially coherent story. He also apologizes for the torture needle, which is nice given that it was mostly unimportant.

Forty-three: Glenda gets lesbian feelings about Domitia while thinking she's an ugly half-breed. These are the only women who have both been relevant and interacted with each other, by the way. In case you hadn't noticed. Domitia says she's old enough to be Glenda's mother, which Glenda is turned on by, because this is a book written by someone who wants to be quippable by Tumblr users. It's also not true, as said on Tumblr, as they're about the same age which you'd think Glenda would know as it would mean the mongrel witch story would have been created within her lifetime. Also confirmed in this post, no woman is allowed to look over thirty-something.

Forty-four: Hydna surgically removes Merulo's arm and leg. Dragon blood’s logistics as a spell component or magical reserve replacement is muddled again.

Forty-five: Merulo's prosthetics work perfectly and can feel touch, and his stone eye can also still see, but he stumbles a little so you can't call it an ableist perfect replacement. Because he has a magically strong prosthetic arm now, he can do kinky sex for real (a brief tirade about physical weakness and disability being tied to celibacy will be opened later.) “Some degree of pain or restraint that will shame you” is perfect for the “matched set of freaks”, and the chapter cuts before Cameron even has his shirt off.

Forty-six: Domitia possesses a sea monster to find Cameron underwater. She wants to give them warning of her attack, because it is honorable, and also because it means we can think it's really funny that the call interrupts the middle of a bondage scene that otherwise we wouldn't get to know anything about.

CHAPTER 47, In Which I Will Not Describe the Preceding Events out of a Sense of Demure Politeness, but You Can Be Assured that It Was Some Real Freaky Shit, Some Real Satisfying You Know What, Which Involved Magic and, No I Shan't Say, and Wow Am I Glad to Have Absolute Privacy in This Underwater Bedroom, I Sure Would Hate to Have Any of This Observed or—

He's hung upside down and they're both naked. It's not sexy at all, because they're being interrupted. This is as explicit as it gets anywhere, and they aren't even going at it, they're just in the position to do so.

Forty-eight; Glenda calls our romantic leads sick, twisted degenerates, Domitia tells her to shut up and expects to die in the upcoming battle, Glenda insults her weight, and Domitia portals Glenda away for being a murderous asshole.

Forty-nine: Merulo and Hydna set off their plans and somehow forget they need two of the three body parts Merulo sacrificed, so Cameron has to fetch them and gets to take the wand with for defense. Merulo is briefly sad because Domitia looks beautiful like his mother, “except blue”. Finally, a compliment for the poor woman.

Fifty: Glenda is willing to frame her banishment from the area as an assault, while deeply emotional, because that is what women do: mislead others about assault and cry and want men dead.

Fifty-one: Cameron crosses paths with Domitia, who tries to convince him to stop helping Merulo. She gets a much kinder description from Cameron here than she did earlier, and she offers to return to him the childhood toy used to track him. Cameron uses the wand to cast the only spell he knows, the one used to lift the cathedral that drained his magic as a child, and Domitia floats away. I presumed this meant she hit the dome and was killed with how quickly the confrontation ended, but she didn't. It's not really clear how she got into the dome at all, so presumably it has no magical protections and she just portaled in once she could see it. Which she doesn't like doing but just presumably did twice.

Merulo and Cameron portal around doing spell things very quickly, and stop in a desert, where Merulo does more spell things and they essentially say their goodbyes. Merulo casts the spell to locate God, and finds nothing.

Fifty-three: The chapter subtitle informs us that Domitia has shifted out of a dragon form we have never seen, mentioning clipped wings that we also never see. There is literally no description of her dragon form at all, which is really disappointing. She did all of this to help Glenda because she thought Glenda was cute, of course, even though Glenda was a hateful bigot the whole time and Merulo and Cameron look like the kind of people who would usually come to her for help (she narrates this, I'm not filling in the blanks here). But she's bitter that she'd performed an abortion the day that time was rewound, since she had to perform the abortion again, and she considered that a necessary evil because even the gender-supportive social exile can be pro-life. Regardless, Domitia is ready to die because she's always been alone among people, and doesn't know Merulo or Hydna exist as her kin. She catches up to Cameron and Merulo where they're unconscious in the sand after trying to see God, and just sits down and waits.

Fifty-four: They wake up. Merulo safewords Cameron's breakdown about the endless void, because that's how that works. Domitia has a glass eye because she also tried to look at God, and explains that God must have died during its arrival; ”It came to our choked, dying world and answered a prayer” as its final act. Domitia explains that she believes God had an immense love for the world it saw and that the connections people find through God now can be beautiful and moving. She also admits it was an arrogant act to force its will on the world and accuses Merulo of doing the same, challenging him to fight her if he wants to take the world by force. Cameron tries to strike her while she pleads with Merulo to reconsider, but his weapon shatters because she's a dragon. She destroys Merulo's wand and his prosthetics, and he has no use for the severed limbs because God is already dead, but Hydna starts her half of the spell (without God, it seemingly only takes one person's magic, no amputation necessary, to undo the isolation of the world) and Domitia burns her body away as she casts her own spell to preserve the current world while still allowing it to return to the rest of the universe. She dies. She didn't even know she had a sister.

Fifty-five: Cameron gets Merulo to use his severed leg to magically write a message in the sky so that incoming shuttles from space can come pick them up from the desert.

Fifty-six: We get narration from the occupants of that shuttle as they try to translate the planet's language. They find a match in an old franchise's conlang, because there was a marketing campaign of that franchise that included launching information about their fantasy world into space. The first theory is of course that some power saw that as a manual and remade the world in its image, which someone else calls stupid and then immediately goes along with because that is the book that it is. The shuttle is sent to pick up our three protagonists.

Fifty-seven: Merulo dies but space science revives him. The ship can translate but they get earbuds so it can talk to them directly. The ship fixed Merulo's digestive system, which wasn't mentioned to be a problem.

Fifty-eight: Magic is still real and can be used in space, which freaks everyone out.

Fifty-nine: The dragons are obsessed with scrolling on their new computers and go clothes shopping. Everything is still plastic because there are bacteria that eat plastic now. Joke about bacteria eating and recycling celebrity underwear. Cameron gets shown a dress even though he's a man so why would it show that to him? And he finds he's picked it along with his outfit anyway. It would be compelling as a potential egg situation if the rest of the book wasn't like that.

Sixty: Glenda thinks maybe the end of the world could be okay actually because maybe without the Church she could fuck women. She's still with the Church by choice. Other elves are still doing stuff the Church dislikes. There's no reason given for why she personally is so invested in the Church.

Epilogue: Our fantasy trio learn their world is from a video game promotion and nearly twelve billion people died in the transformation of the world, which Cameron can't picture despite picturing it as a child. Merulo is the villain on the box art. People living on the moon aren't bothered by Cameron wearing a dress. The spaceship named itself two slurs and doesn't like its original name, and this is the closest we get to a vocally trans character. Merulo has new prosthetics that are perfect and also the eye is red and scary now. And then they fuck offscreen again to close the book.

The end. A lot of things happen in this book. Let me specify my points of contention.

Part Two: Okay, So You Have The Too-Long Summary, Let's Cover Some Opinions On It Now

To get it out of the way, a reiteration: I don't hate the book, and I don't hate the author. I don't believe that this book should have reached formal publication in the state that it's in, and I don't feel it meets the standards adult fiction should aim for when published. I want to believe that the author had positive intentions that were executed in harmful ways and that an inexperience in writing of this kind amplified that harm. I do believe the problems Sir Cameron has are fixable for future works, and I'm glad that something advertised as a gay, old-man-love-interest novel has an audience. I would not have put this much effort into a public review if I did not believe it could have beneficial consequences; if I just wanted to rag on it, it would have stayed private.

I'll be talking about the plot and writing skill points first, and then moving on to the concerns about representation and tone. This will repeat points from earlier, expanding more on my personal perspective of each.

The plot is a lot.

Sir Cameron tries to be a lot of genres at once. This isn't unusual; many genres can overlap and have been overlapped successfully over the years, especially merging more setting-centric genres like dystopian or xenofiction and more plot-centric genres like drama or thriller. Fantasy and science fiction, as well, have more often been a shared setting genre than they have been distinct from each other. Sir Cameron struggles with balancing its genres, resulting in a strangely prioritized but still cluttered chain of events that don't meaningfully connect to each other.

There are also aspects of Merulo's plan that are concerning to me in how similar they sound to the return-to-the-past mentality of the modern, real life alt-right. Merulo, as a white man, is fixated on returning the world to a state in the past where many people were dying due to environmental upheaval, which he believes was a superior time due to humanity’s scientific and technological advances as well as their colonization of the solar system. This puts him in opposition to Domitia, his mixed half-sister who wants to preserve the good of the present world and the people living in it, as she believes that despite the circumstances of the change between eras, what humanity currently has is worth protecting. She dies during the execution of Merulo's plan, where he still achieves his goal of reconnecting with the technological world he treated as lost to the past, and her death allows magic and the world as it currently exists to persist. While the aesthetics are reversed from the real-life alt-right movement, where pastoralism, homesteading, and racial segregation is seen as something to return to and the current, globally connected world is something to escape, i feel it's worth mentioning because while I do not believe it was intentional, the mystification of the past and the sacrifice of non-white (or non-white-coded) characters in benefit of white characters is a troubling trend across much of fantasy, and should be noted as such.

As a fantasy adventure, Sir Cameron is about a reluctant knight who, upon being the target of a prophecy that dooms him, rejects that fate to ally with the forces of evil that he was meant to be fighting, and helps that evil achieve the goal of fundamentally upsetting their primary religion and the way their world functions.

As a romance, Sir Cameron is about being attracted to someone with the power to protect you from harm and who has a vested interest in doing so, and attempting to stop them from destroying themselves in pursuit of their personal goals.

As erotica, Sir Cameron is about experimenting with entry level BDSM, more specifically inventing a brat fetish without any pre-existing concept of one, and having sex with someone who is also into the idea of hurting you for the sexual pleasure of both parties.

As speculative science fiction, Sir Cameron is about the potential of an unknown spacefaring entity to reshape our world and the consequences it would have on our society, how the remnants of society would adapt to a fundamentally different way of life, and (though this is barely broached in this book) the impact that reshaped world would have on the extraterrestrial human colonies that were unaffected in the original incident.

As a comedy, Sir Cameron is about insulting people with quippable phrasing, bodily functions, and not taking anything seriously.

All of these are accomplished, to a degree (excluding the erotica, which never gets to shoot its shot, ha ha), but are frequently undermined by the others. The comedy points especially tend to gut any emotional impact the story could have, as they essentially bully the reader out of caring. Even the most straightforwardly engaging portions, the parts that read most like erotica set-ups and are the blatant target of sexual desire, are more often than not then treated as gross or comedic rather than genuine. It's weird or funny that this would make our protagonist narrator horny, and by extension, dear reader, it's weird or funny that you get off to it too!

From the specific angle of comedy writing. Sir Cameron is a comedy, unavoidably, but it lacks the pacing of one. A good comedy plays off of contrast; sentence rhythms, boring lead ups to startling events, a sense of grounded reality beneath it all that the humor itself can play off of. Sir Cameron lacks this familiarity with the genre, instead opting for an amateur stand-up routine, pushing quip after quip without leaving time for anything else. It's funny for a few chapters, sure, just as a joke is funnier the first time you hear it, but when it continues relentlessly, it doesn't give you time to catch your metaphorical breath before the next joke hits. It becomes tedious, and then annoying, and then grueling; is a boner still funny the seventeenth time? Often, too, the humor is not focused inward at the characters, but outward, at the reader; isn't it funny that someone could be genuinely into the things this book was advertised as? Aren't we all laughing about a man turned into a woman to clean another man's messes? Can't you at least get a chuckle out of how silly this plot you've been reading about for hours is? By the way, in case you forgot, the only character that chose their own name picked two slurs so everyone would be uncomfortable referring to them. Would someone like to draw that one in a reblog? My repetition of earlier points is intentional here; it's tedious to read over and over again. If you just keep harping on the same issues, people will get bored, and bored people get annoyed.

The fantasy adventure and the romance aspects play well together, but they're kneecapped by the science fiction plot points. Merulo as a character is so much more knowledgeable than our narrator, and as he's the only venue for exploring the mystery of what the world was before, that exploration takes the form of long, dedicated scenes where he explains to Cameron exactly what has happened and why, and the precise information about the world before that he wishes to return to. Merulo's reasoning for this goal is also inconsistent: he wishes to be able to talk to others who know more about the forbidden, sacrilegious past than he does without being targeted by the suppressive Church, but we are told elves still practice and study this knowledge, and also that there are places on the continent where the Church has little to no influence. These two options are not explored, or even offered as options, further minimizing the impact of the sacrificial plotline. It doesn't feel like a necessary act to meet Merulo's goals, because it doesn't feel like other, more reasonable options have been explored, and it also doesn't feel like the suicidal plan is being done as a suicide, because we don't get to see any of Merulo's interiorly about the situation and Cameron is kept from emotionally engaging with him to that degree even as their sexual relationship blossoms off-page. As a solely fantasy adventure, a big climactic spell is a reasonable final stage, and casting that spell can be a goal in itself, and in a romance, the suicidal sacrifice to cast it can be a deeply compelling risk for a relationship to be built on. The drama of knowing helping your lover reach their goal will destroy them - that's delicious! That's a reliable plot for a book like this to have! But the way it's dressed up to tie into the science fiction elements means Cameron has very little to say in the matter. He's not involved in the discovery of how to do it, he's not involved in the process of the casting itself. He's there while it happens, and he gets to try and convince Merulo to not go through with the plan he's already sacrificed years and body parts to by saying, hey, wouldn't you miss me, that guy who annoys you so much you have to fuck him? And because their relationship ends there, with Merulo having no serious connection to stay for and Cameron being able to find other people into dominating him if the need arose, that's the extent of the fighting Cameron gets to do.

Cameron also struggles to tell this story as the main protagonist and narrator. He is supposedly shallow, careless, and generally kind of stupid, but we aren't given anyone to really contrast him to. Glenda, as the other infrequent narrator, is written with a similar level of maturity, but with the “edgy murder drug addict” goal instead of “the jokes about sex are funny” goal. Both are perspectives I would expect to see in teenage fiction, and I mean the stuff written by teenagers, not the stuff written for them. Neither are particularly good or compelling, especially as our sole insights into a world we have never seen before, or a plot with so many tangles. Glenda could have been a view into elf society, which still practices the forbidden knowledge of the past, but we don't see any of that because Glenda is entrenched in the beliefs of the Church that scorns it, with really no explanation about how she ended up so divorced from her own people and so dedicated to a socially conservative, regressive religion. (Why the group that was formerly influencers and celebrities gets to be the ones still using advanced science and understanding technology while the rest of the world is reduced to quasi-medieval living is not notable to any of the plots, though the metatextual implications of such a choice have more concerns. The elves are blue, though, so who can tell if they were white?). Cameron could have been a contrast to that, as someone whose main association with the Church since childhood has been fear and who at present has a pretty dramatic reason to reject their tenets seeing as they want to kill him. Merulo and his sister Hydna, of course, should presumably be a different perspective entirely, raised in isolation from the Church and informed of the past, but they echo the same vague neutrality that Cameron does. Even Domitia, claimed by the Church as a child and kept away from the other dragons, somehow ends up with the most connection to others as she dedicates her magic to helping those the Church would reject. Otherwise, none of these characters have any connection to a greater societal movement; Glenda isolates herself from elves and sees herself as above human followers of the Church, though she has family connections that are mentioned but not elaborated on, Cameron’s family and peers almost universally dislike him and he is further pushed away by the prophecy making him a target, and Merulo and Hydna are only focused on their own desires, uncontacted by most of society entirely. They talk about how it'll affect others, sure, but those others don't really matter. We don't see enough of them to matter. The fierce independence of the characters from the rest of their world except for the select few in near-total agreement with them means the ramifications of any action are meaningless. People die, or are maimed, but it's mostly an afterthought. Merulo presumably has a kill count that is astronomical after a magical war that's gone on so long, but that's not mentioned. Do regular people have reason to fear the mad sorcerer, or is his battle specifically with the Church? Are there people whose livelihoods have been ruined by shifting battlegrounds? Does Merulo see humans as disposable, lacking interiority, because he believes that the current state of the world is “false”, and so anything he does is inconsequential and will be eventually reverted when he succeeds?

This, along with a lot of my criticisms, runs up against an elephant in the room:

The world that Cameron is in for most of the book is, explicitly, based on an in-universe fantasy franchise that had received criticisms for being conservative. This is a reveal in the tail end of the book, when contact with space is restored, and potentially it does negate most criticisms I could have with the worldbuilding. Other characters seem unimportant? Well, that's because they were NPCs in the original franchise. Widespread social conservatism with odd pockets of liberalism? Different installments being written by different authors. Decisions seem flippant and inconsequential? Of course they do, it's a player-protagonist going through the motions of quest goals. Even the one-sided, abrupt romances and infodump dialogue can be explained by just being how the world has to interface with its blank, reader-insert protagonist. Every criticism I could have of the book could almost entirely be explained as being a problem with the source material that Earth got ported into.

The problem, if that's the justification, is that it's a really bad writing choice. On top of how weak “it's okay that my thing has these problems because in the story the thing that made it also had those problems” is, it begs the question of what the story is even supposed to mean. Everything everyone does forever was predestined and we're just sitting through the motions of it? What's the point of writing the whole book, then? Video games and TTRPG have this structure because the player, their own narrator, is personally immersed in the story; what they do has immediate consequence for their enjoyment of the piece, even if it's just trying to pet a dog and getting to pet a dog. Even if those consequences don't expand beyond the player's immediate vicinity, that doesn't matter, because there is one true person in the world and that is the player. The rest are truly fictional. The premise of this book, however, is that that fictional setting is a real, living, breathing reality. Cameron may be the replacement for the protagonist or player or what have you, but he was born to parents who met and had a relationship, he grew up in this world with his brother. He has existed in a mundane way before his perspective as a narrator begins, he didn't just appear in their society and center it around himself. The people weren't transported, the world was; the survivors of the change were still people who had lives and families and children that were upended by the shift, and because people in the book at present are aware that the technological past exists - it's a part of their religious scripture! - there would have been a transitional period where people who lived in the old world were slowly replaced by their descendants who reinvented their society. And that is completely and utterly irrelevant to the story, because it's just not important! But because that foundation isn't stable, everything on top of it is wobbly. What is the story trying to tell, if the entire reason it is the way it is is just Well, Other Fantasy Is Like That? There is a lot of noise as it tries to merge the other genres into this preestablished expectation, but it doesn't ever turn into words. The most frequently repeated message of Sir Cameron<\i> is that fecal matter is funny to talk about, and I had higher hopes than that. I wanted what this book was sold to me as being, and it didn't deliver, but the potential of it is still so untouchably there.

Upon trying to get other Tumblr quotes about the story's development cited, I found this post, which affirms the story's struggles with its narrator through the author's own mouth, and also describes that the big surprise twist was just taken from something else. Your first book should not have to rely on a second book to clarify how the main plot of the first book works. I don't want to harp too heavily on this, because I feel I've made my point, but it is wildly disappointing to know that the problems were evident to the author and they just continued with it anyway rather than trying to structure the story in a way that would compensate for it.

Speaking of story structure, from a prose perspective, Sir Cameron is underwhelming. I have been an avid reader since I was a child, and the novel's sentence structure is something I would expect from a book for much younger readers. Many, many sentences have a near-identical structure (average length, broken up with one central comma or two at the thirds), which means the rhythm has virtually no variation and thus no interest. It uses sentences, sure, but it doesn't make use of sentences; scenes plod on because they just feel like someone's bored recitation of events that have occurred with little structural tension or build up. I unintentionally mimicked it a bit while summarizing, because that's the structure that summary makes good use of. It's also one of the issues that I would consider most easily fixable. Reading what you've written out loud, taking time to pause where you've indicated pauses, can make you more aware of a monotonous tone and show you where you need to start changing things up, like including a needlessly long sentence to indicate when someone's really stuck on a point. Or short ones! Indicate that you're moving on!

There are multiple branches from the sentence structure criticism; one is the visualization aspect, which I'm sure has a more specific term I'm forgetting. Scenes in are simply not immersive. Scenery and characters can be described, but often in specific, devoted paragraphs; using an example not in the books, if the characters were to visit the Grand Canyon, the canyon would be described when they got there, but then any following events or conversations wouldn't mention wind, or an echo, or the temperature, or interruptions from other people looking at the canyon. You get it. The environment rarely matters. Props, if mentioned, are frequently brought into the scene rather than being a natural part of it. Perhaps as a consequence of most chapters of the story featuring two or three characters who are on the same “side” (meaning: not trying to hide anything from or work against the other) with no chance of being overheard or interrupted, in quiet, isolated locations that are protected from nonhuman intrusion, there's little note of surroundings, volume of dialogue, and so on. Two people in Merulo's castle, two people in a carriage with no driver, three people in a dome underwater: the scenes that feel most grounded in their surroundings are the prologue, first chapter, Domitia and Glenda being interrupted at a festival, and the final chapters in space, simply because there is a sense in these that the characters are existing in a world that other people are in. Even in chapters with more characters - like Cameron's shopping outing as a woman - the individual scenes are still isolated; Cameron interacts with a dressmaker, Cameron interacts with a knight, Cameron and Merulo fight with the knight. There are other people presumably present in and around these scenes, but they do not contribute. There are few to no filler characters, the often-unnamed people who flesh out the world by simply existing in it and reacting to it. Instead, scenes with other side characters are just as clearly individual conversations. Even in a castle filled with magical constructs, little attention is paid to their shared space. The narration not paying heed to these parts of the world makes them irrelevant, compounding the issue of repetitive prose by making the setting essentially interchangeable.

Characters themselves are often frustrating to visualize; they have few mannerisms, and despite being a person focused on appearances, Cameron as our narrator pays little attention to describing how characters look beyond their dedicated introductory paragraph. In a book marketed as a romance, one expects the narrator to at least describe what they find appealing about their love interest, but this is not done. Merulo is an older-looking, skinny man with greasy hair, and Cameron's view of him even when infatuated does not ever flatter this. We don't know if Cameron enjoys the aged lines of his face, or frets over the definition of his bones under his skin. Does he like the shine to Merulo's hair, or at least is he speculating on how it manages to be greasy when we know Merulo bathes? I'll admit, as someone who has been malnourished, there's little about the appearance to romanticize, but there's no genuine concern given to it in the text either. A lover could make note of eye bags, of trembling hands, of a sluggishness or hesitation to movements brought about by exhaustion or pain, but our narrator just doesn't think like that, and so by extension we as the readers don't get to feel it, save for one brief scene where Merulo struggles to climb a ladder. Cameron rarely even describes himself; we know he is handsome, but it's rarely elaborated on, as if simply saying handsome means we must all be on the same page of attraction meaning a white blond guy with a bunch of defined muscles. Are those traits that are handsome in this world? At one point, Cameron insists he's most attractive when he's blond. Why? What led to the establishment of that beauty standard in their world, especially if elves are considered the most beautiful and have silver hair? When there is little time given to explore things like this, they become purely choices made by an author, not irrefutable facts of a setting we have found and peered into, and those have implications for real beliefs when the narrative only repeats them. I got distracted; more on that at a later point. At the moment, what's relevant is that characters have an appearance considered default, are described once in that way, and the expectation is more or less that they will be identical to that description for the rest of the book, with little variance based on their situation or mental state. It again removes them from the world! They are not affected by their surroundings, and their surroundings do not affect them.

Another distinct concern is the overall tone. I will be blunt: this is not a book that wants to be sexy, it is a book that wants to be able to tell jokes about sex. And it does. It also tells jokes about men in dresses, poop, being gay, women, and wanting someone to hurt you sexually. Poop jokes especially are made with a frequency and maturity reminiscent of The Day My Butt Went Psycho, a middle grade novel about butts disconnecting from people and being evil. Punching down at men in dresses (both men wearing dresses at all and the more blatantly transmisogynistic “I was tricked into almost sexually assaulting a woman who was actually a man in disguise, so I'm the victim” versions) is repeated, because it's such a weird and perverted thing that (according to the narration) it has to be funny. It's funny that the most handsome character turned into the most beautiful woman would be physically weak with big tits and want to cook and clean and do sexual favors. At many points, the book presents you with a potentially compelling plot point and then either drops it and moves on or it openly mocks it. The novel constantly challenges you for reading it; not intellectually, but mockingly. Much like its protagonist, it is written like the only reason to grow fond of something is that it annoyed you for too long, like a piece of paper that's been on the floor for a month without being picked up so you get attached. Sir Cameron, I wanted to enjoy your story without it pissing me off. No amount of annoyance will get me to fuck a book.

To avoid getting more repetitive myself, I'll end this part of the criticism here, with a reiteration that I do genuinely wish it had done better because if it had been done well “gay romance with a dominant, disabled old guy who's also a dragon” would be the perfect book for me. I'm generally easy to please, despite how long this review is. Besides, I think a lot of people do tend to click this kind of post to see the most controversial parts, the drama, the discourse, the citations to justify any personal distaste of the work lest your peers think you just find something personally annoying. This section will be pretty straightforward with minimal commentary, because I feel it speaks for itself.

Part Three: I Think Any Editor Or Publishing Company Should Actually Be Ashamed They Let This Shit Fly, Unless They're Just Conservative And Got Confused

Sir Cameron is probably the most bigoted book I've read in quite a long time, and I really hope it didn't mean to be. Its subject matter, tonal inconsistency, and inspiration drawn from what is popular on social media has driven it very solidly into sexist, racist, transmisogynistic territory. I'm going to present these as individual subheaders with short explanations for each. These explanations will be collapsed into the lines of text shown: click on the sentences, and the additional information will appear. It's structured in this way because I feel that those affected by the topics should be allowed to opt out of seeing exactly how badly they are being treated.

Racism

Click on this sentence to expand the explanation. Cameron and Merulo are both white. Cameron as a woman, when he is servile to Merulo and offering him sexual favors, is described as having skin that glows bronze in the sun (Chapter 11). Glenda is blue, and while she has no true coding one way or the other, it is a much more charitable reading to assume she is not coded as a person of color, because the implications are worse if she was. Domitia is considered ugly for having a darker, redder skin tone than other elves (Chapter 31). As it stands, Hydna is the darkest of the main three when it comes to permanent, human skin tones, described as “tawny”.

The most frequent example of racism is Hydna, which also straddles the line between racism and transmisogyny. She is huge, heavily muscled, tawny-skinned, has a wild mane of dark red hair, dresses like a man, is naturally loud and immensely strong, enjoys threats of violence and eats a lot, with her hands. And she's also referred to as a dog.

It's clear that she was written this way because the conventional way to depict an aggressive dominating strong character is by giving them darker skin than gentler, weaker, or more timid others. This masculinization also lends to the sexism of the novel as a whole (the further you are from being a woman, the more respect the narration gives) and shadows the frequent transmisogyny in its descriptions (frequent focus on the masculine build of a woman and an emphasis on the danger she poses to others because of those features).

These are the descriptions I'm citing for the summary above.

  • [...] the dragon contracted into a giant woman. Muscular, broad-shouldered, big of hip and thigh and breast. Just . .. large. Her clothes didn't particularly impress me, being a man's standard tunic and leggings, but I marveled at how they stretched to fit her contours.

    “Listen, man, I'm not being bigoted." The dragon made an obvious effort to soften her voice as she approached. "My brother has never had a friend before. I'm proud of him, is all." She dropped a hand on Merulo's shoulder with enough force to hammer in a six-inch nail. It was commend- able that he did not visibly vibrate.

    I peered at the two of them in disbelief. With her tawny complexion, wild mane of bur- gundy hair, and overall glow of health and vitality, the woman could not have looked more dissimilar to my poor, pasty Merulo. - Chapter 30

  • In Which Merulo's Sister Is Very Intimidating and Large and Does Not Seem to Abide by Normal Social Standards. - Chapter 32
  • Despite her imposing frame, her crooked nose (obviously healed from past violence), and those muscles, Hydna bounded about with the eager friendliness of a puppy. - Chapter 32
  • [...] then banished me to spend more time with his sister. Or rather to "provide that creature with whatever form of entertainment you see fit, so that I might be spared its company.” - Chapter 32
  • I squinted up at the dragon woman. She'd dressed herself in relics for the tour, having wasted God knows how much magic on their restoration. A wide-brimmed hat embroidered with water droplets sat atop her massive skull, while a shirt stretched painfully tight over what might either be breasts or prodigious pectorals, its smiling fish distorted into a boggle-eyed monster. - Chapter 32
  • She stepped forward for her own hug, her arms crushing the oxygen from my lungs. As I squirmed, ribs cracking and eyes bulging, [...]

    Gasping, I begged my way free of her grip. “Thank you,” I wheezed, my eyes overflowing with either gratitude or pain. - Chapter 33

  • She acknowledged my words with a brisk nod, before ripping off another chunk of fish with her teeth. More than half of this feast would be disappearing down her gullet, as per usual. - Chapter 35
  • [...] she dipped her brush and resumed the intricate scrawling, the veined bulk of her hand belying the delicacy of its movements. - Chapter 38
  • Merulo had been less wasteful than I'd thought with his magic. Hydna favoured shows of brute strength. - Chapter 42

Domitia has a much briefer role in the story, but in the time she is present, as she is mixed dragon and elf she is called the “mongrel witch” (Chapter 31 onwards). As a baby she is described as “warped” and requiring surgical correction to pass as an elf (31).

Misogyny

Click on this sentence to expand the explanation. Throughout the book, women are treated miserably by the novel itself more than they are by the world the book has constructed.

Glenda is constantly given more reasons to hate her, while having little introspection into her life and no real definition as a character. She exists to be an antagonist to Cameron and Merulo, and her entire existence in the novel is centered around playing that role for their relationship. Her struggle with genuine addiction is framed as a justification for her cruelty or as a joke that it's something she returns to. She is frequently unnecessarily cruel in her desire for “revenge” against Cameron for giving her brain damage, which is also framed as a joke rather than a significant impairment and then, additionally, is cured by magic. She is deeply bigoted even, seemingly, by the standards of other followers of the Church.

While Cameron is transformed into a woman, he focuses completely on cooking and cleaning, and emphasizes his efforts to seduce or perform sexual favors for the men he meets, including the man he is presently subservient to. Description of his body while transformed into a woman sexualizes him far more than any description of men at any point in the book. When he is transformed back into his original body, he considers it a relief and a freedom to no longer be a woman, and becomes more emotionally stable.

Hydna, as said in the section about racism, is often dehumanized, degendered in her introduction, and consistently described in a transmisogynistic and racist way for being a larger, stronger woman than average in the setting. Despite being the same age as Merulo, who looks to be in his sixties, by word of the author she appears to be in her thirties. Her personal drive is the same as her brother's, and she (like Glenda) has little to do beyond making the plot work out for Merulo Cameron, as her contribution (which is mostly off-page) makes it possible for Merulo to reach his goals. She has also done most of the cleaning in the underwater hideout, in contrast to Merulo's messy castle.

Domitia is, like Hydna, treated in a way that reflects sexism, transmisogyny, and racism. She is described negatively for her weight and height, which are both considered excessive by Glenda, the character who primarily describes her. While Domitia has more personal drive than the other women in the story, her presence is almost entirely accompanied by Glenda, whose perspective constantly belittles and insults her, and ultimately Domitia sacrifices herself so Merulo and Cameron (and the rest of the world) will live.

Hydna never directly interacts with the other two women, despite Domitia being her half-sister. Domitia’s interactions with Glenda mostly center on talking about Cameron, or have Glenda insulting Domitia. In every scene that Glenda and Domitia have that features other characters, those other characters are men, even unnamed ones. Hydna is never shown interacting with anyone who isn't Cameron or Merulo. No other women appear in or are relevant for more than one chapter.

Transmisogyny

Click on this sentence to expand the explanation. The overall mocking tone of the novel nullifies any potential transgender readings of its characters.

Cameron's transformation into a woman's body is treated as a fetish; the person who transformed him is called a pervert for making him attractive (Chapter 11). His attempt to seduce others as a woman is later used to confirm he is not transgender but simply pretending to be a woman (Chapter 37), and tried to trick a man into having sex with him while doing so (Chapter 12, 37). Glenda says any type of physical transition is lying, which Domitia refutes (Chapter 37). Cameron is mocked for wearing a dress while he was a woman (Chapter 30).

  • Well," I said. "Aren't you the pervert? Look how delectable you made me!" - Chapter 11
  • Before the Elder could launch into further inquiries, Glenda interjected, "Could we have a physical description of this 'sister'?"

    The knights looked at one another, frowning with the effort of remembering, before the bearded one spoke. "Pretty little thing. Wavy golden hair in eh, ringlets. Had some strange mannerisms."

    Glenda wrinkled her nose, turning to the Elder. "It's Sir Cameron."

    "Sir Cameron is his sister?" The bearded knight sounded astonished.

    Elder Beth pursed her lips, wrinkles appearing in fine webs, and exchanged a glance with Glenda.

    “No, you fool, he's been transformed again." Glenda's tolerance for the bulky men filling the tent was waning.

    "I almost kissed a man?” - Chapter 12

  • "Let us pray you make a better maid than Sir Cameron," Merulo drawled, as his sister ushered us in.

    "Oh?" Hydna leaned closer as I passed. "Did he make you wear a little outfit?"

    "Uh... just my dress?" I said, then flushed. "I was a woman at the time, so the dress was - I mean - Merulo, wait up.” I broke into a trot, escaping Hydna's laughter. - Chapter 30

  • That's right!" said the knight, saliva escaping from his mouth. “I am a victim of Sir Cameron!”

    [...]

    "How so?" the witch asked calmly as the man scrambled to his hands and knees. She took one of the knight's abandoned chairs, lowering herself with a regality that Glenda had to admire.

    "Sir Cameron transformed himself into a woman." The burly man's posture was pleading, dog-like on all fours. "And- and-it was him that came on to me, not the other way around! He deceived me."

    The witch rubbed her chin. "If that was her true self, then no deception took place. I perform that procedure often, for those who seek it. This is your sword?"

    The knight nodded, still not daring to rise. "He took it from me, him and the sorcerer."

    "She took it," the witch said sternly- then, ignoring the knight's rushed apologies, swept to her feet and exited the small outpost, stepping carefully over the ruined door. Glenda hurried after her.

    "You failed to mention that Cameron is a woman now," Domitia said as they walked, annoyance clear in her voice.

    [...].

    "He was a man again the last time I saw him." Glenda climbed in after the witch. "It wasn't his 'true self,' just some Cameron stupidity. He was a vulture, the time before that."

    [...]

    "You help people to lie, then?" She might as well enrich herself with some gossip. Glenda treated the witch to a smile, but froze at a snapping sound; the biscuit in the witch's hand, destroyed by a tensed fist. - Chapter 37 /Ul>

    Extensive emphasis is put on Hydna’s masculine features after her primary introduction (through voice) has Cameron unsure if she is a man or a woman. Her size, focus on violence, and lack of femininity is transmisogynistic caricature amplified by the existing transmisogyny of the text and paired with defeminizing racism. The following excerpts are repeated from the Racism section.

    • I jumped in before things could devolve further. "Please, sir, or... ma'am? [...]” - Chapter 30
    • [...] the dragon contracted into a giant woman. Muscular, broad-shouldered, big of hip and thigh and breast. Just . .. large. Her clothes didn't particularly impress me, being a man's standard tunic and leggings, but I marveled at how they stretched to fit her contours.

      “Listen, man, I'm not being bigoted." The dragon made an obvious effort to soften her voice as she approached. "My brother has never had a friend before. I'm proud of him, is all." She dropped a hand on Merulo's shoulder with enough force to hammer in a six-inch nail. It was commend- able that he did not visibly vibrate.

      I peered at the two of them in disbelief. With her tawny complexion, wild mane of bur- gundy hair, and overall glow of health and vitality, the woman could not have looked more dissimilar to my poor, pasty Merulo. - Chapter 30

    • In Which Merulo's Sister Is Very Intimidating and Large and Does Not Seem to Abide by Normal Social Standards. - Chapter 32
    • Despite her imposing frame, her crooked nose (obviously healed from past violence), and those muscles, Hydna bounded about with the eager friendliness of a puppy. - Chapter 32
    • [...] then banished me to spend more time with his sister. Or rather to "provide that creature with whatever form of entertainment you see fit, so that I might be spared its company.” - Chapter 32
    • I squinted up at the dragon woman. She'd dressed herself in relics for the tour, having wasted God knows how much magic on their restoration. A wide-brimmed hat embroidered with water droplets sat atop her massive skull, while a shirt stretched painfully tight over what might either be breasts or prodigious pectorals, its smiling fish distorted into a boggle-eyed monster. - Chapter 32
    • She stepped forward for her own hug, her arms crushing the oxygen from my lungs. As I squirmed, ribs cracking and eyes bulging, [...]

      Gasping, I begged my way free of her grip. “Thank you,” I wheezed, my eyes overflowing with either gratitude or pain. - Chapter 33

    • She acknowledged my words with a brisk nod, before ripping off another chunk of fish with her teeth. More than half of this feast would be disappearing down her gullet, as per usual. - Chapter 35
    • [...] she dipped her brush and resumed the intricate scrawling, the veined bulk of her hand belying the delicacy of its movements. - Chapter 38
    • Merulo had been less wasteful than I'd thought with his magic. Hydna favoured shows of brute strength. - Chapter 42

Ableism

Click on this sentence to expand the explanation. While much less frequent than the issues above, ableism is still present.

Merulo's original disability (removed eye) and additional disability gained over the course of the story (amputated limbs) are replaced by futuristic prosthetics that have no drawbacks and increased strength. Additionally, his digestive issues may have been disabling but were also repaired in the end sequence of the book, though not mentioned before then. Merulo's physical weakness is also credited as why he is reluctant to be dominating in their sexual relationship, (Chapter 45) contributing to the stereotype of disabled people as nonsexual.

Glenda's brain damage from a concussion and emotional dysregulation from drug abuse is treated as a gag more than as a serious plot point. These are also used as justification for her rage and violence against Cameron. The brain damage is cured later on, though her reliance on emotionally regulating drugs remains. She briefly had facial scarring which was removed along with the magical healing of her brain injury shortly after receiving it, as she feared it would ruin her looks forever.

Domitia also removed an eye for the purposes of casting a spell and her replacement seemed non-magical. However, she is additionally disabled as a dragon, as a chapter title describes her missing wing leather as "embarrassing" and further social media posts clarify that her wings had been clipped so she wouldn't be able to fly away, despite transformation spells easily being within a dragon's ability to cast. She also dies sacrificing herself to save the other characters.

Fatphobia

Click on this sentence to expand the explanation. The only main character who is fat is Domitia, and Glenda thinks less of her for being large and insults how often and much she eats (Chapter 48). Additional fat characters are a sloppy, rude knight met in the first chapter, and the Chancellor whose weight is implied to be unmasculine.
  • "Maybe if you weren't so preoccupied with eating all the time, you'd be better equipped to fight.” - Chapter 48
  • A thickset knight pushed the dish toward me with enough force that I flinched. "Sir Cameron,” he boomed. “I caught your performance."

    “Thank you!” I said, before realizing that he’d forgotten to add a compliment.

    The knight chewed slowly, flecks of meat occasionally making their way down his chin. "Anyway. Didn't think we'd be seeing you today.” - Chapter 1

  • Lavish fabric framed him expertly, his embroidered red cape hanging over, unbelievably, a violet shirt, making even his paunch look deliberate and masculine. - Chapter 8

Homophobia

Click on this sentence to expand the explanation. Despite being a romance between two men, the sexual attraction between them (and often sexual arousal at all) is frequently mocked or belittled. Cameron's inability to hold in bowel movements while knocked unconscious, while others can, also comes across as a joke that being a bottom has loosened his anal muscles to the point of incontinence, leading into further jokes about him shitting constantly and uncontrollably as a bird. Dressing in feminine clothing is also frequently mocked, as explained under the Transmisogyny header.

Final Thoughts

I truly don't want this to be a discouraging review, despite its length.

I also write, including fantasy and science fiction. I write about dragons who can shapeshift. I write about characters who are gay, lesbian, transgender, fat, women, nonwhite; the list goes on, and I try to do it respectfully. I have a deep personal interest in reading the works by others in the same subjects, not because I need to know what I'm up against, but because I want to be able to spotlight their work alongside mine. (I have specifically avoided (favorable) comparisons to my own works, their works, or other works I have enjoyed as I do not want this to feel like an elaborate sponsorship where controversy about Sir Cameron is being used as a promotion for others.) I want to be inspired to put my creations into the world to be shared, and I want to be able to take part in the sharing done by others. I want to be one of many, to build off of the genres established by writers long before me, to add a stepping stone for writers who may come after. Art, especially fiction, is not something that happens in isolation.

Sir Cameron is aware that it is surrounded by others, and it doesn't like it. It feels like a rushed collage of paper-thin characters over a plot map made of pages that fell out of old library books. It doesn't tell one story, it tells dozens - all competing for space, none of them able to truly finish before running into the start of another one. It is a book written to be complimented in pieces (every scene is a conveniently screenshottable length) and to add more books on to later, rather than a book intending to tell a story on its own. The Acknowledgements state directly, before any other credit, that this book was written primarily because posting excerpts got people to say it was funny on Tumblr, and secondarily because when people on Tumblr said it wouldn't make a good book, the author wanted those people to be wrong, and it shows; the book constantly undermines its own potential to handhold the reader through any uncertainty about the world while leaving the actual world to be fleshed out by the expectations other fantasy books have set. There is no tension, because time is unimportant, and it eschews the fantasy-adventure structure that would give it stability. Likewise, the romance falls flat because you are expected to automatically want to mash the two men together, Barbie-doll style, simply because they are two men in a room together. The societal homophobia and transphobia of this world is never substantially challenged, instead avoided by placing our characters outside of its reach; the racism and misogyny are so baked into the perspectives we're shown that it doesn't even earn the pittance of being noticed. In a world where a mixed, surgically-altered-at-birth-to-look-more-conventional woman performs abortions for anyone desperate enough to find her traveling home, she still feels that terminating an unwanted pregnancy is a necessary evil.

What does Sir Cameron bring to the communal table, to the artistic potluck? What does it adapt, what does it subvert, what does it embody? It is not truly a romance, or science fiction, or fantasy, or adventure, or even erotica, though it borrows enough from each that it can pretend to be. Much like its characters, it exists as a means to an end: it does not grow or become, because it was created simply to be done. It exists, hypocritically, in the same space it derides its protagonist for: making its choices only to get specific reactions from others, never taking a risk on true independence when it could have consequences. It's biddable, reads its criticisms only to mock them, and assumes blithely that everyone will like it, because it likes itself.

Sir Cameron the character doesn't make the changes he needs to be respected by his peers, he simply escapes them, keeping company only with those who will encourage his habits. There is no such shuttle arriving to take Sir Cameron the novel away from its peers; I can only hope it has a better character arc than its namesake, and that its clumsy first steps that fall short of being a coherent standalone are amended by expansions on the world in the future, even if they can't be retroactively applied. I want to see it do better, because I believe better can be done.

Thank you for your time.

* I'd just finished Watership Down, being a fan of xenofiction, and my father heartily encouraged me to read more of “the classics”. The Fountainhead was not about talking animals, but I gave it my best shot anyway. The only part I can remember is an in-universe excerpt of an abstract book that doesn't exist, about brushing teeth. I don't recommend reading this book, either. a