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Feb. 19th, 2022 08:59 amI have a more-or-less weekly c/ or k/drama night with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenillypo, around the edges of which we usually take time to tell each other about what other stuff we've been watching solo.
T: [finishing her description of her current show] ... and so the villain gave the heroine a cat that turned out to have a listening device implanted in it so he could spy on her!
ME: I feel like I watched a cdrama that I ought to tell you about but I'm sure I didn't ... why do I feel like I did ...?
ME [one episode of a different show later]: Oh it's because I finished reading 'She Who Became The Sun'!
She Who Became The Sun really does feel like an entire forty-episode cdrama in a single book, and for the most part I ate it up. The main story follows an unwanted daughter who hears a fortune-teller prophesy a tremendous and important fate for her older brother Zhu Chongba and nothing for herself -- and then, after watching him succumb to famine and depression, decides to spend her life impersonating him to the world and also the heavens and steal his fate for her own. Zhu Chongba ends up first in a monastery and then in the middle of the Red Turban Rebellion, using wits, determination and ambition to rise to power as a ruthless trickster antihero. Everything about Zhu's defiant struggle to rules-lawyer the gods into delivering on the fate promised to the original Zhu Chongba is very much the poison for Becca, Becca's poison, and I hugely enjoyed it.
The parallel plot focuses on General Ouyang, Zhu's occasional enemy and narrative foil, a eunuch from a murdered Han Chinese family who has risen to military power among the current Mongolian overlords of the country but secretly dreams of revenge against them despite his very strong personal feelings about the Mongolian heir who loves and trusts him. A lot of the reviews I've seen seemed to find this storyline more compelling than Zhu's but I personally did not enjoy it nearly as much; I understand and appreciate why the narrative spent so much time with General Ouyang's internalized misogyny but I personally did not have a great time experiencing it, and his main relationship was such a clearly signaled trainwreck that the actual wreck didn't hit me all that hard after watching the train chug unswervingly down the self-destruction rail to tragedy junction over 400 pages. However, all that does work very well as a parallel to Zhu, and I appreciated the way the book revolves around their mirror-reflections of each other and their very different but equally messy relationships with gender and masculinity and power and fate; technically speaking it's just very cool as a way to structure a narrative.
(There's also a whole other set of interesting things to be said about Ouyang and his own secondary narrative foil, the half-Han younger Mongolian prince, and their respective relationships to the two cultures in between which they're caught, but they're all so extremely tangled up in the historical presence of the Mongolians as Imperial conquerers and the contemporary portrayal of non-Han characters in a lot of mainland Chinese media and the book's existence as an English-language Chinese diaspora work that as a person with only the shallowest of knowledge of any of these things I wouldn't even know where to start. I am glad to have read this Tor.com article about language, culture and diaspora in the novel, though.)
One of the things I actually found really fascinating is the way that fate, specifically, is literalized in the book through ghosts and the flame of divine mandates of power. The word 'fate' appears 75 times in the text; the word 'duty' appears only ten, and most times in context of someone who has already rejected or is in the process of rejecting it. Ouyang's self-appointed task of revenge for his family is described as a filial duty -- something that one feels as a responsibility but can choose to fulfill or disappoint -- only once in the whole book. The rest of the time, the task is simply his fate, something which he is Going to do, which he feels he has no choice about doing. On this particular perception of Ouyang's the book turns.
I really loved the way the book handles fate, and the way, especially, that Zhu ends up engaging with it hits a lot of my narrative buttons. But I do think the broad absence of the concept of duty -- of duty, specifically, as a responsibility towards others-as-others rather than towards destiny-as-destiny -- and the way that gets entirely subsumed into the protagonists' relationship with fate is really interesting. It makes a clear point within the text, but I did occasionally miss its presence.
tenillypo, around the edges of which we usually take time to tell each other about what other stuff we've been watching solo.T: [finishing her description of her current show] ... and so the villain gave the heroine a cat that turned out to have a listening device implanted in it so he could spy on her!
ME: I feel like I watched a cdrama that I ought to tell you about but I'm sure I didn't ... why do I feel like I did ...?
ME [one episode of a different show later]: Oh it's because I finished reading 'She Who Became The Sun'!
She Who Became The Sun really does feel like an entire forty-episode cdrama in a single book, and for the most part I ate it up. The main story follows an unwanted daughter who hears a fortune-teller prophesy a tremendous and important fate for her older brother Zhu Chongba and nothing for herself -- and then, after watching him succumb to famine and depression, decides to spend her life impersonating him to the world and also the heavens and steal his fate for her own. Zhu Chongba ends up first in a monastery and then in the middle of the Red Turban Rebellion, using wits, determination and ambition to rise to power as a ruthless trickster antihero. Everything about Zhu's defiant struggle to rules-lawyer the gods into delivering on the fate promised to the original Zhu Chongba is very much the poison for Becca, Becca's poison, and I hugely enjoyed it.
The parallel plot focuses on General Ouyang, Zhu's occasional enemy and narrative foil, a eunuch from a murdered Han Chinese family who has risen to military power among the current Mongolian overlords of the country but secretly dreams of revenge against them despite his very strong personal feelings about the Mongolian heir who loves and trusts him. A lot of the reviews I've seen seemed to find this storyline more compelling than Zhu's but I personally did not enjoy it nearly as much; I understand and appreciate why the narrative spent so much time with General Ouyang's internalized misogyny but I personally did not have a great time experiencing it, and his main relationship was such a clearly signaled trainwreck that the actual wreck didn't hit me all that hard after watching the train chug unswervingly down the self-destruction rail to tragedy junction over 400 pages. However, all that does work very well as a parallel to Zhu, and I appreciated the way the book revolves around their mirror-reflections of each other and their very different but equally messy relationships with gender and masculinity and power and fate; technically speaking it's just very cool as a way to structure a narrative.
(There's also a whole other set of interesting things to be said about Ouyang and his own secondary narrative foil, the half-Han younger Mongolian prince, and their respective relationships to the two cultures in between which they're caught, but they're all so extremely tangled up in the historical presence of the Mongolians as Imperial conquerers and the contemporary portrayal of non-Han characters in a lot of mainland Chinese media and the book's existence as an English-language Chinese diaspora work that as a person with only the shallowest of knowledge of any of these things I wouldn't even know where to start. I am glad to have read this Tor.com article about language, culture and diaspora in the novel, though.)
One of the things I actually found really fascinating is the way that fate, specifically, is literalized in the book through ghosts and the flame of divine mandates of power. The word 'fate' appears 75 times in the text; the word 'duty' appears only ten, and most times in context of someone who has already rejected or is in the process of rejecting it. Ouyang's self-appointed task of revenge for his family is described as a filial duty -- something that one feels as a responsibility but can choose to fulfill or disappoint -- only once in the whole book. The rest of the time, the task is simply his fate, something which he is Going to do, which he feels he has no choice about doing. On this particular perception of Ouyang's the book turns.
I really loved the way the book handles fate, and the way, especially, that Zhu ends up engaging with it hits a lot of my narrative buttons. But I do think the broad absence of the concept of duty -- of duty, specifically, as a responsibility towards others-as-others rather than towards destiny-as-destiny -- and the way that gets entirely subsumed into the protagonists' relationship with fate is really interesting. It makes a clear point within the text, but I did occasionally miss its presence.
