To
EP, I respect your opinion, but I think you're giving Katherine Sparrow a bad rap regarding: maleness as the butt of plots. As you pointed out, both the characters were well drawn. And I think it's fair to suggest they both had flaws. But I think the Magician's flaws, or at least his actions, outweigh anything the Alchemist did.
And
That said, if you're looking for more Sparrow, you might want to check out her flash fiction story "Hello, I Love You" or her "Pirate Solutions", both over at Escape Pod. I think both of those stories would cause the line you've drawn to be less flat and more wavy.
I'd actually not noticed that Sparrow wrote
Pirate Solutions, so the line is wavier already. I quite liked that one.
Both this story, and The Petrified Girl, are about women who have been, or who become, wounded, and how they cope. IMO, in horrible ways. It is not surprising to me that the person who did the wounding was a man.
Well... yes and no. Men and women hurt each other in many ways. Not all the wounds I carry came from women. Or men. Or hamsters. I guess it
does surprise me that the person who did the wounding in
The Petrified Girl was a man, because there are so many choices, so many possibilities. Any of them would have been surprising. But, as I've said, it has to be someone, so really I have no business being annoyed that it was a man in either story. And that's not it, it's something a little subtler. Let me see if I can explain myself. The caffeine will help.
I felt that
The Petrified Girl was kind of simplistic. Lesbian girl runaway meets sad old lesbian woman, falls in love with a mysterious girl trapped in a mythic loop (also lesbian, or at least bisexual). And how does the narrative signify that their love has broken the cycle and freed Lesbian #3? Her twins are born girls this time instead of boys. The way that story was going, it wouldn't surprise me if the twins grew up to also be lesbians. It isn't any of the choices alone, it's all of them together. If lesbian girl runaway had been a boy, if the twins had stayed male but something else had signified the breaking of the cycle, if the sad old lesbian woman had been a sad old man, we would have had
some example of maleness in the story that wasn't heaped with negative connotations.
It wasn't that I thought the story was bad, it was that I thought it was simple. And I'll be straight up about it; it's totally possible to appreciate simple stories that point the finger - allegory is a proud and respectable literary tradition - but I just can't do it when they point the finger at me.
By the way, if it's at all interesting, my wife also disagreed with me about
The Petrified Girl. So, maybe it really is just me, and not you (her, it, whatever).
Anyway, as to the story we're actually talking about...
Standing entirely on its own merits,
Chemical Magic bothered me a lot less than
The Petrified Girl. The latter actually annoyed me, while the former and I just didn't connect. Ultimately, what bothered me was this: the Magician's character was primarily composed of three parts. He was insecure, he desired intimacy, and he was a dude. The Alchemist, by contrast, was secure, desired space, and was a chick. From those three parts came a sin and a (apparently just) punishment.
The trouble for me was that I didn't see the Magician's insecurity as being as strong as the author did, because I didn't see his approach to relationships as being any more wrong than the Alchemist's equally immature stand-offishness. As a result, I only have one thing to pin his crime - and therefore, his punishment - on: his maleness. Maybe for someone who bought the Alchemist's approach to relationships it would have been different.