Fandom: SHAKESPEARE -- HAMLET
Pairing: Hamlet/Horatio, sorta-kinda
Length: 2430 words
Author on LJ:
mod_alcyoneAuthor Website: http://www.fictionpress.com/~modalcyoneWhy this must be read: Who would ever have thought to take the situation at the end of
Hamlet and apply a coat of Latin American magical realism? Mod_Alcyone, that's who, and she does a brilliant job at it. Magical realism is a genre that tends toward the lyrical and elegiac, but also contains elements of horror and the fantastic, and that's exactly what this story does. For everyone who thinks that the most tragic character in
Hamlet is not the title character (who, after all, gets to die and be released from his misery) but Horatio, the devoted friend left behind in a pile of bodies facing his country's conquest by a foreign power, this is for you. In the afterlife of death, Horatio's tragedy slowly overwhelms both Elsinore and himself as he discovers his particular kind of cruelty.
( Horatio blames no one. )In Your Philosophy