Spontaneous Musings

I just finished The Captive Prince (http://freece.livejournal.com/) over the weekend and found it a really great read. It's an original fic, a historical fantasy m/m romance, with a really zippy plot once it gets going and more UST than graphic sex. I'm usually not fond of stories with serious power imbalances between the leads, but this one navigated it in a way that acknowledged said imbalance and dealt with it in a way that allowed both characters agency. As well, I was impressed to see a romance that had both leads able to be awesome in very different yet complementary ways. So many times the POV character - unfortunately usually a female, but I had the same problem with Patrocolus in the novel Song of Achilles - is so caught up in describing the wonder of their love interest that the author forgets to show us why such a paragon would be interested in the other person at all. Often there's a late speech about their beauty or heart, but it's so often a tell rather than a show - that's not the case here.