I'm struggling to find words for this fic, but I like how incredibly vulnerable you managed to make Mai, and how one might make the mistake of thinking a little vulnerability, a chink in her armour, is what she needs to be more approachable, but it's really not like that at all. I like the way she lashes out - reminding zuko crudely and vividly of her rape, insinuating he might be relieved her son died and he need not deal with a competing claim for the throne. This section really stood out to me: "It was about what kind of story she wanted to tell. But she was so tired of stories, and of managing what everybody else was supposed to think. She was so tired of thinking about politics and the fate of nations when inside she was crumbling. It never occurred to her that there would be a time she was less able to deal with the mess of it all than Zuko." But then Mai still has the mindfulness to be critical when Zuko goes ahead and names the kid Ichirou, firstborn son, lol. Idk how accessible foreign language jokes are but it made me chuckle irl.
And I don't have a lot of strong feelings one way or the other about canon Ursa, but I felt grateful to her in this story - that she was able to be the person Mai needed to hear from.
And the ending. Zuko's trying to hard to communicate and be supportive and do right by Mai, but it's still not enough, because of course it's not. I'm glad that you gave Mai space to have her feelings and still assert her inability to handle more right now. It was a great read.
It took me a while to reply to this comment, because there's just so much here!
In literature in general and fanfic in particular, a lot of writers use trauma as a way to make a character more sympathetic, and post trauma, they're often made more cuddly with the sharp edges filed off. But real trauma and recovery is messy and painful, and doesn't give the victim much time ot energy left to cater to the expectations of what others think a victim should be. Mai in canon is already clearly traumatized by her parents and by Azula, and this made her bury things, including an obvious well of anger. There was no way adding more trauma was goung to make her more approachable, when the trauma she had in canon was what made her so unapproachable in the first place.
Japanese is not one of the languages I speak, so it's not the deepest or most obscure of jokes. I figure a google search can give most people the meaning pretty quickly.
I have very strong feelings about canon Ursa, and she shows up a lot in my fics and AUs, not to mention the reams of meta I have written on the subject (the tl:dr version is that she gets a lot of undeserved hate due to a combination of Azula stans wanting someone to blame other than Azula, our sexist societal cinstruction of motherhood, and victim blaming abuse rhetoric) and this fic's title alludes to another horribly mistreated woman in (mythological) literature, Vashti, and how she too is villainized. Oddly enough, Mai is more like Vashti in her responses, and Ursa like Esther, even though Ursa fills the role of Vashti and Mai is the second wife after the first was insufficiently compliant, the story's Esther.
I wrote this fic for a ship week and ended it on a less than romantic note, but ultimately I don't think there was a way I could have ended it with them together that was true to Mai and her experience of trauma. Down the road, someday theybcan get back together, but Mai is not ready for that, and I wish as a society that kind of space was allowed to more people, since it's often the healthiest thing for them. Getting together with someone isn't always the happy ending.
Comment on Esther and Vashti
Cryptographic_Delurk on Chapter 7 Tue 08 Oct 2019 12:45AM UTC
Comment Actions
attackfish on Chapter 7 Sat 12 Oct 2019 02:35PM UTC
Comment Actions