He Who Drowned the World
Jan. 31st, 2024 02:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraHe Who Drowned the World, Shelley Parker-Chan, 2023 conclusion of the duology started in She Who Became the Sun. Everything behind a cut except that I have not changed in recommending them, if high-body-count cdrama is something you want to read. (Parker-Chan has provided their own content notes here.)
This is a more grueling read than the first one - there is a *lot* of "his pain was the most painy pain that had ever pained", and sometimes it felt like the wheels of inevitable tragedy that people were caught in were grinding very slowly, and couldn't they maybe get on with it already. But it did take a certain amount of unavoidable plot time for all the various chess pieces to play out their moves taking each other off the board, and the palace-intrigue and military strategy parts - wuxia Game of Thrones - moved briskly enough. And there's a lot of interesting character work! All the stuff dissecting queerness - all the often non-overlapping ways different characters reject or can't meet the masculine/heteronormative ideal, in the body, in desires, in actions, in mannerisms. (Arguably every character whose motivations are driving the plot deviates from that ideal somehow, in queer or not queer ways (impotence, affair with brother's wife), and the key to victory is leaning into/embracing/utilizing deviation, and the tragic flaw is trying to resist or deny it.)
And the end is really interesting - if the big-picture theme of the whole duology is about how far people would go for their various motivations, and whether it was worth it or not (the revenge pointless, the spite unsatisfying) then the last and somewhat open question is whether Zhu is going to *do* something with her power that makes her pursuit of power worthwhile. I thought it was handled well - Zhu believes she will, and the people who believe in her believe she will, but Parker-Chan keeps it very vague what that might be. Partially because I think they weren't interested in the "governance" phase of Zhu's story at all, and partially because that means they can thread the gap to avoid both anachronistic 21st-century ideals that would sound ridiculous from these 14th century warlords, and the actual policies of the Hongwu Emperor that might alienate modern audiences. (The replacement of mandatory Mongol hairstyles by mandatory Han hairstyles! Yay?) Although, I don't know, maybe we *were* supposed to feel like the AU was about to really truly fork, and the new Ming dynasty was going to be the no-homophobia fantasy China I read so much fanfic set in. The things that do get said about the new world are very much "people will be able to be their true selves" and "a world of loving kindness rather than violence and domination", which, like, I could not help but feel "sure, whatever" about as a person who has read any actual history, but, I don't know, as a momentary triumph of that ideal? Maybe. (I also had some trouble buying into the ending on pure logistics - it really seemed like the next thing that was going to happen was that the guards were going to come in and kill Zhu - but I guess we're supposed to buy that with the only Mandate left in the palace everyone will just fall in line, and I do admire Parker-Chan for going with the "after that it was just a chase scene" of endings and stopping cold on the big line rather than having any kind of aftermath or epilogue to confirm that it all worked out. (And whatever Wang goes and does is left for the fanfic.)) And maybe it's enough just to queer this piece of history - I'm pretty sure the founding of the Ming is a big deal in the whole Han Chinese national identity mythos - in the way that Hamilton rereads the American mythos.
This is a more grueling read than the first one - there is a *lot* of "his pain was the most painy pain that had ever pained", and sometimes it felt like the wheels of inevitable tragedy that people were caught in were grinding very slowly, and couldn't they maybe get on with it already. But it did take a certain amount of unavoidable plot time for all the various chess pieces to play out their moves taking each other off the board, and the palace-intrigue and military strategy parts - wuxia Game of Thrones - moved briskly enough. And there's a lot of interesting character work! All the stuff dissecting queerness - all the often non-overlapping ways different characters reject or can't meet the masculine/heteronormative ideal, in the body, in desires, in actions, in mannerisms. (Arguably every character whose motivations are driving the plot deviates from that ideal somehow, in queer or not queer ways (impotence, affair with brother's wife), and the key to victory is leaning into/embracing/utilizing deviation, and the tragic flaw is trying to resist or deny it.)
And the end is really interesting - if the big-picture theme of the whole duology is about how far people would go for their various motivations, and whether it was worth it or not (the revenge pointless, the spite unsatisfying) then the last and somewhat open question is whether Zhu is going to *do* something with her power that makes her pursuit of power worthwhile. I thought it was handled well - Zhu believes she will, and the people who believe in her believe she will, but Parker-Chan keeps it very vague what that might be. Partially because I think they weren't interested in the "governance" phase of Zhu's story at all, and partially because that means they can thread the gap to avoid both anachronistic 21st-century ideals that would sound ridiculous from these 14th century warlords, and the actual policies of the Hongwu Emperor that might alienate modern audiences. (The replacement of mandatory Mongol hairstyles by mandatory Han hairstyles! Yay?) Although, I don't know, maybe we *were* supposed to feel like the AU was about to really truly fork, and the new Ming dynasty was going to be the no-homophobia fantasy China I read so much fanfic set in. The things that do get said about the new world are very much "people will be able to be their true selves" and "a world of loving kindness rather than violence and domination", which, like, I could not help but feel "sure, whatever" about as a person who has read any actual history, but, I don't know, as a momentary triumph of that ideal? Maybe. (I also had some trouble buying into the ending on pure logistics - it really seemed like the next thing that was going to happen was that the guards were going to come in and kill Zhu - but I guess we're supposed to buy that with the only Mandate left in the palace everyone will just fall in line, and I do admire Parker-Chan for going with the "after that it was just a chase scene" of endings and stopping cold on the big line rather than having any kind of aftermath or epilogue to confirm that it all worked out. (And whatever Wang goes and does is left for the fanfic.)) And maybe it's enough just to queer this piece of history - I'm pretty sure the founding of the Ming is a big deal in the whole Han Chinese national identity mythos - in the way that Hamilton rereads the American mythos.
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Date: 2024-02-04 04:54 am (UTC)