fic rec
This was just recently posted, and deserves as wide an audience as it can get. ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
octavius_x is a very gifted young author who has a unique ability to make the exotic feel both intensely personal and eminently unknowable. Her fic, Hanged Man (GW, Wufei-centric), uses that paradox to the best effect yet.
Brief Summary: The story shifts time and place, but seems rooted in the moment of Wufei's decision to join Dekim Barton's rebellion. The steps that inform that decision are woven back through his childhood with particular emphasis on his marriage and his child bride, Meilin.
What Makes It Good: This fic gives Wufei full access to his culture (both colonial and Chinese/Mandarin) that can be lacking in other interpretations of his character. It integrates the Nataku mythos with the grief of a young man who's lost everything, but doesn't minimalise either the religious reverence or the deeper spirituality he's invested in his Gundam as, he calls it, a totem and a temple. I was particularly taken with the passage of Wufei visiting the Forbidden City in China on Earth, where he comes across as both a pilgrim and a disappointed reverent. This Wufei is hardly one-dimensional even in his fits of anger. He's got a self-awareness he's rarely given, but he's also lost to himself, stuck in a whirlwind of contradictory truths that he struggles to honour and ignore. As a character piece, I loved it. But what's also so good about this fic, and what is here fully matured from her other fics before it, is the use of small details to build minutiae into significance. A visitor's brass rail at the Foridden City symbolically bars Wufei from connecting to his ancestral history. The deliberate laying out of garments-- his Barton army uniform-- as if they were priestly vestments that he dons after almost ceremoniously stripping himself of his old clothes, his old life, imbues his betrayal with a deliberateness and an importance that it lacks when perceived purely as an adolescent inability to settle into the peace. My one complaint might be the edge-of-mixing cultural and religious metaphors; Wufei's religion isn't specified, perhaps deliberately, and any clearer focus on it might have taken away from the otherwise clean immersion in his inward-focussed world, but I felt that some of the imagery hinted more at Catholicism, more Western identifications. This, however, is cleverly balanced by the use of Duo's character. I got hints that Wufei might have read up a little on Duo, bemused by his religiosity in the absence of faith, and that he starts to tinge his own identity in the encounter with the Other.
Anyway, read it. It's great. I think this is an author to be watching.
octavius_x is a very gifted young author who has a unique ability to make the exotic feel both intensely personal and eminently unknowable. Her fic, Hanged Man (GW, Wufei-centric), uses that paradox to the best effect yet.Brief Summary: The story shifts time and place, but seems rooted in the moment of Wufei's decision to join Dekim Barton's rebellion. The steps that inform that decision are woven back through his childhood with particular emphasis on his marriage and his child bride, Meilin.
What Makes It Good: This fic gives Wufei full access to his culture (both colonial and Chinese/Mandarin) that can be lacking in other interpretations of his character. It integrates the Nataku mythos with the grief of a young man who's lost everything, but doesn't minimalise either the religious reverence or the deeper spirituality he's invested in his Gundam as, he calls it, a totem and a temple. I was particularly taken with the passage of Wufei visiting the Forbidden City in China on Earth, where he comes across as both a pilgrim and a disappointed reverent. This Wufei is hardly one-dimensional even in his fits of anger. He's got a self-awareness he's rarely given, but he's also lost to himself, stuck in a whirlwind of contradictory truths that he struggles to honour and ignore. As a character piece, I loved it. But what's also so good about this fic, and what is here fully matured from her other fics before it, is the use of small details to build minutiae into significance. A visitor's brass rail at the Foridden City symbolically bars Wufei from connecting to his ancestral history. The deliberate laying out of garments-- his Barton army uniform-- as if they were priestly vestments that he dons after almost ceremoniously stripping himself of his old clothes, his old life, imbues his betrayal with a deliberateness and an importance that it lacks when perceived purely as an adolescent inability to settle into the peace. My one complaint might be the edge-of-mixing cultural and religious metaphors; Wufei's religion isn't specified, perhaps deliberately, and any clearer focus on it might have taken away from the otherwise clean immersion in his inward-focussed world, but I felt that some of the imagery hinted more at Catholicism, more Western identifications. This, however, is cleverly balanced by the use of Duo's character. I got hints that Wufei might have read up a little on Duo, bemused by his religiosity in the absence of faith, and that he starts to tinge his own identity in the encounter with the Other.
Anyway, read it. It's great. I think this is an author to be watching.
