Rosie's Mechsplo Wrap Up: April 2026

Prepare yourself for a very long and rambling post.

After ending last month with my thoughts on all of the Mechsplo writing jam entries I thought it would be fun to write about some of the things that I have enjoyed reading this month. I want to feature a range of writers from the BNOCs to the people making the debuts and I've picked out the ones that I read this month that stand out to me the most.

If you ever have any suggestions of stories in the scene that you think I'd like, that might fit my vibe, then please do recommend them to me. I mostly find stuff through the tumblr tag and through the self-promo channel of the single related discord server I am in. I'm not always the best at discovering new things and would appreciate recommendations!

Archon

By @kallidora-rho (link)

There was new Warhound this month and so it must be talked about. I really liked it.

This is a two part story with an epilogue that focuses on Kione and radio girl. I really liked the return to Kione as a focus. Given that Rescue Hound was the longest part of the series and that it had Kione as a POV character, she has, to me at least, felt like the main character of the series. Perhaps even the protagonist. I understand that this is maybe not a popular view but it is how I view things and it is therefore wonderful to see her back as the driving force in a story. She is spectacular, just as you would expect. She's petty and she's arrogant and I just felt so very sorry for her by the end of part two.

The first part features a really wonderful fight scene. The mech battles are some of my favourite parts of Kallie's writing in recent Warhound. I loved the fight between Ancyor and Kosterion but this one managed to top even that. The writing as radio girl keeps getting more and more desperate just sings out and her deeply felt need for violence and revenge is so wonderful and it is all so almost cathartic. It's not though, the catharsis does not arrive: Kione is who Kione is. I love her. She is, by far, my favourite Warhound character.

The one thing that I didn't really mesh with was the final epilogue in the piece. All the conversation I had seen around Archon had me thinking it was going to be this huge emotional gut punch but, for me, it lacked the weight found in either of the previous two chapters' twists. I do think it works really well as an epilogue but it's just maybe not the emotional sledgehammer that the community had me expecting. I don't know, maybe I'm heartless, but I didn't feel it. No tears for radio girl or her Kione.

All said, this is probably my favourite entry in the Warhound series. I really think that this is a new height. The fight scene is brilliant. Kione is as good as ever. I don't need to tell you to read this because you probably read it months ago.

Beast Beset

by @meli-writes (AO3 link)

There's something about Mel's writing that sparkles. As you pour a part of yourself into the text the meaning refracts through implication and spreads out a universe in front of you. With just a few words the she can capture ideas that fill out whole worlds in the imagination.

Within this space, I think Mel is probably my favourite writer. I've tried in the past to imitate her style, that sparse prose laden with implication and characterisation, but I feel like I've never quite got there. My recent stories Crystal Glass and Orange Juice were both in some part inspired by the way that Mel writes and the things she chooses to write about: it's the little parts of relationships and the struggles and the humanity and the mundane that is made transcendent. In a creative community that is filled with characters that often feel more archetype than human I find that Mel writes some of the most human and most believable characters.

In her recent mechsplo story Beast Beset this strength is really clearly in view. Pell's awkwardness is really wonderful and the way that the two of them navigate this new and complicated relationship is compelling and sweet and emotional. I instantly fell in love with both of them. The setting is great, it's like a space feudalism govern by ancient laws and customs (and also has mechs). There's never any need for tiresome exposition: the ideas of what this setting represents, especially the patriarchy of it, are explored through the characters' relations to each other and the world they inhabit.

It's a short read, coming in at only 3.7k words on AO3 but in those words it captures more story than some works with tens of thousands. It's short enough that I feel safe telling you, the person reading this, to just go and read it now. It won't take you that long. I read it as it was coming out of tumblr and it made it a joy to check this website every day to see the latest part. If you enjoy it and want to read more then check out Long Time, No Shear. That's my favourite Mel story.

The Blissful Dead

by @archangel-roxy (link)

The other week Roxy pointed out to me that both our works lean towards the morbid. It's true. There is a difference though, I think. The death that I write about is the nightmarish void, the thing that necessitated gods. It's Mackenzie staring into the Atlantic, unable to close the curtains. When Roxy write a death it feels different. It's the quiet at the end of the struggle. It's a reassuring voice coming to greet you at the ending of the day. It is something that, in the midst of horrors beyond anything I could imagine, can be welcomed. It is a nightmare ending and it can also be beautiful. It's the same thing but they are different things at the same time. I find that compelling.

So, during the last month one of the major Mechsplo series of the last year finally drew to a close. The last chapter of AotKH was great. I loved the ending. I loved the taxidermy. I didn't love it as much as I loved the previous chapter but that's just because I'm Imeshan's biggest fan. Even more so than both of these though I loved the short story that followed.

I originally had a whole three paragraphs in this review comparing this story to the Herbert Howells/GK Chesteron post-WW1 Christmas anthem Here is the Little Door. But I cut that because I was starting to sound way too pretentious and I don't want to turn this into an analysis of mechsplo through the lens of liturgical music. The important point is that the aesthetics of the Great War often paint it as a meaningless struggle. The deaths achieved nothing, they were just numbers, but when it was over everyone had to try and make meaning out of the meaninglessness. That same line of thought is baked in to the Great War aesthetic of AotKH but this story really elevates those ideas even further.

In The Blissful Dead, death was never going to achieve anything. It was, from the outset and inevitably, doomed to mean nothing. That feeling lingers throughout the piece with the frequent mention of the point of view characters previous work in stables. Hesha craves to be useful, craves to give her inevitable death meaning, but we know it won't mean anything, at least not in the way she wants... There will be meaning though. The story's twist gives her purpose. It is nightmarish and horrible and I love it.

The scene of the death itself is also just wonderful. Barbed wires that grab and tighten and pull Hesha closer and closer to the end until she is just wishing for that sleep that warmly greets her. Sublime, great, delicious. If you haven't already read this one then you should. It is good.

Functional Compensation

by MonaBunny (link)

Here we have a story about a hound in a fairly standard mechsplo setting in which the rebels have won. The imperial base is captured and the rebels find the forgotten hound starving in the kennels. They then do something to try and make her better, to try and recover the person inside.

This short description is a factual accounting of what happens in this story but it isn't why you should read it. I want to say why you should read it but it's a twist and it's a twist I really liked. If you've read my mechsplo series then you know I find changes in narration and tense to be compelling and this does something with that which I really liked. It's short enough, being just under 2k words, that I think you should check it out just to see!

Now I saw this story because it popped up in the self-promo channel of the one mechsplo discord sever that I kind of check sometimes and you know, at the time I didn't think I had read any of Mona's other work, but as I was pulling up the link to write this review I noticed that I had! One of her other stories, Hagiography, was one of my favourites from the September Mechsplo writing jam last year (oh it always comes back to you, my old nemesis: the September writing jam). I had looked for it before in the past and hadn't been able to find it, I had thought that it had been deleted/lost, so imagine my surprise upon seeing it again! I guess it had to be reuploaded for some reason. I was really happy to see it wasn't gone and so I also recommend that story if you enjoyed this one and want more.

Catechism

by EleanorThorn (link)

I think about this story when I walk past the optics labs at work. I think about the ways in which scientific progress is an idea which can be used to exploit people just as much as religion can. I think about how the majority of people doing scientific research at universities are paid less than minimum wage and are discarded by their institutions as soon as the money runs out. I think about the ways that scientific research makes people disposable. I think of how people are willing to put up with that to be part of something bigger, how they are willing to sacrifice their minds and bodies at the altar of science. I think about all the ways I have been exploited, about the free labour that I have done in the name of scientific progress. I think about how that left me burned out and about how it has affected my immigration status and how, now that I have been disposed of, I feel even less human.

That's all just me though. Let's talk about this story!

It's about nuns that work as lab technicians and like I feel that's all I need to say. If you like the idea of nuns that work as lab technicians then you're going to love this. If you, like me, have thoughts about the way institutions exploit these kinds of workers then you're going to like it even more. If you just want to see powerful lasers doing powerful things then just go and read it right now.

As with The Blissful Dead I'm going to resist my impulse to make this entire thing an analysis of liturgical music in mechsplo but given the centrality of the piece of music I feel like I have to talk about it. Aesthetically I think of Be Thou My Vision as a very protestant song. I feel like I have encountered it in the contexts of the Calvinist Church of Scotland or maybe Methodism. Which, to me, initially made it feel very at odds with the more catholic imagery of holy orders. The more I dwelled on it though the more I did come to find something interesting in that idea. It made me think about the way that disconnect is manifesting in USian Christianity today: the adopting of Roman Catholic imagery and aesthetics by right wing nationalism, in what remains a very protestant structure. I don't know, just some thoughts. The choice is great in the sense that the initial line is be thou my vision and someone's about to have their vision taken away by a laser.

What About Me?

It's been an interesting month for my participation in the mechsplo community. When I began writing Orange Juice at the start of March it was intended to be the last thing I wrote in this space. It was going to be a goodbye piece, one last beautiful swan song of a story about queerness and damage and the ways we can rebuild ourselves. I made this decision after finishing Burn With Me. I'm fairly happy with how Burn With Me turned out but in the last couple of weeks when I was trying to edit and proof read it I found myself become increasingly miserable. Nobody read part 2 of Surusm Corda, why would anyone want to read this? I think the final chapter especially suffered from this misery. Nobody was going to read it so why should I care to make it perfect? That was why I decided that I was going to make my exit from Mechsplo.

I don't know what twist of fate put a six month old story with around 30 hits on AO3 in front of the biggest name in the mechsplo community mid-March. That changed things though, it changed things in ways that I'm still trying to come to grips with. I'm still a nobody in this community, I'm still on the periphery, but there are people who really enjoy the stories I write. There are people who have told me they find my writing inspiring, especially Orange Juice seems to have really touched people. It does terrify me slightly that the people who seemed to initially latch on to my writing all had thousands more followers than I can imagine myself ever having, people who seem completely unapproachable to me, but I have managed to find some community, some people who I can talk to about writing.

I'm hugely grateful to everyone who has read my works and especially those who have commented and let me know how much they enjoyed it. Thank you all! It has been humbling and brilliant and heart-warming to see people reading and enjoying the things I wrote and given that I did end up writing two more stories (Crystal Glass and Song of the Mud Crab) I think it's clear I'm going to be sticking around somewhat.

So what's next for me? I've got some work related writing that I need to be focusing on in the next couple of weeks: preparing some articles for publication (no, I'm not getting paid for any of that grumble grumble), so it might be a bit before I work on any major projects. That said I'm planning on doing some microfics as part of an arrangement so keep your eyes open for that. Once I've got more writing time though I do want my next project to be either revisiting the setting of To the Slaughter with another VN or working on Gasworks Girls, the next part of Sursum Corda. I've already put a bunch of work into both of these so it's just going to be deciding which I want to focus on finishing first.

Thanks for reading through this! I hope you enjoyed it or found a story that you might want to check out. If you do have any recomendations for me please do shoot them my way! I hope to make another post like this at the end of next month. It's fun to talk about the things you liked, it's fun to write about them. Even without my desire to recomend things and shine spotlights on things, there is value to just writing about the things you enjoy. It's part of what makes this feel like an artistic community as opposed to just an internet aesthetic. I want to talk about things. I want to read things. I want to get better as a writer.

I picked these five stories because I loved them, because I had things to say about them. I'd encourage other people to try and do similar things. My post about the March Mechsplo Writing Jam inspired several other people to do thier own read throughs and reviews and I hope maybe this one too will inspire people to think and to write so that we can come together as artists and write good stuff.