#dead moms

[thatfoolinthehat]

It's funny how the only two types of dead moms in fiction are "Haunts the people who loved her years after her death, like an image in the corner of your eye that you can't see clearly but know it's there, who's memory shapes every aspect of everybody's lives and who they'll never fully be able to move on from" and "She died offscreen to make the protagonist feel sad for two seconds and now she'll never be mentioned again." There is no in-between.

[lyledebeast]

One thing I always think about when I watch Billy Elliot since my whole obsession with The Patriot started is how differently these two movies released in 2000 depict the dead moms.

Not only does no one ever say Elizabeth Martin's name in The Patriot, we only know what it is because of a scene in the extended cut where Benjamin Martin visits her grave and we see it on the stone. When people talk about her, it is always in terms of showing us who her stand-in is rather than showing why she was important to her loved ones. For example, when Gabriel tells Martin to "stay the course," Martin points out that Gabriel's mother used to say that. Aunt Charlotte has to remind Martin that she's "not [her] sister," and he assures her that he knows that, but I'm not sure anyone really believes her. The daughter who becomes mute after her mother's death begins talking almost as soon as she comes to be under her aunt's care. Hmmmm. . . .

Meanwhile, the casting director for Billy Elliot had to find a whole live woman to feature in family pictures and even a flashback because Billy's mam is a person, not a symbol. She is fleshed out in the most literal possible sense! Billy pays multiple visits to her grave, imagines the aforementioned flashback, and brings his dance instructor a letter his mam wrote for him that he has also memorized. Not only Billy but every person in his household has vivid memories of his mother. His grandmother tells him is mother's favorite dancer was Fred Astair. Her husband sobs openly while burning pieces of her piano to keep the rest of the family warm. A later scene lingers on a picture of just the two of them while he takes her jewelry to pawn so he can take Billy to his audition in London. Even Tony tells Billy their mam would have let him pursue ballet school.

Mostly importantly, Billy's mam is irreplaceable. It would have been so easy for Daldry to make Mrs. Wilkinson a stand-in for her (she's even played by Julie Walters, whom you all know as Molly Weasley in the Harry Potter movies). That does not happen because as much as Billy Elliot does focus on masculinities, it also does its due diligence in showing that not all women are the same.

[pretty-sweet-plums]

but srsly i thought i hit my peak dead mom on first episode with Carla but then Ai comes along and yeah. goddamn.

[ellie-eggshell]

I shattered

I shattered,

In the moment before I hit the ground I felt you. In the space between my fingers and toes, I felt you in the space beneath my arms trying to hold me up under the weight of bricks I was carrying on my back since you left.

I shattered,

I've been staring at walls trying to find you within them, letting my mind go to places it shouldn't in an attempt to keep myself from falling apart. I've been looking for your messages and calls, a simple yet painful reminder that you're really gone.

I shattered,

The moment I heard the sounds of you passing I lost my breath and lost myself in the moment of breaking and falling. I felt myself grasping my chest looking in horror as they did all they could to bring you back to us.

I shattered,

At the heart racing fear of you. Connected to tubes and wires, the sounds of machines taking your breaths for you. Begging you with each pump and inflation of your lungs, begging you to try begging you to fight. I began counting our blessing on fingers,

I'm blessed to be alive.

I'm blessed that you are....

I shattered.

[haraxvati]

dead moms, pt 1

The other day Twitter prompted me to make a newsletter, so I did, more to try out a new toy-type service than anything. I'm not sure if or whether it'll be anything yet, and in fact the service has been down for the last day or so (lol!), but this is what I wrote for the first edition. I'll keep you posted if/when it comes back online, and if "the hat in the rain" becomes a real newsletter.

Under discussion: A running theme, Alchemy of Souls, episodes 1-6, Hamlet.

+++

I am not bothered by the preponderance of dead mothers in Korean drama. I never feel like the dead are purely instrumental in dramas, or at least the dramas I watch. All over the world, an absent parent is a symptom in a story, a stand-in for some other problem that the orphan protagonist needs to solve. In the Christopher Nolan worldview, for example, the dead parent seems typically to be the answer to some complex and elaborate puzzle: an easy solution to a seemingly difficult question.

But in the Korean TV I watch the dead are alive, in constant conversation with their living descendants. They are wounds that will never heal, that you never want to have healed. They are first loves and chief torturers. Ghosts are as real to their hauntees as the living. They aren’t the abstract truth behind some tangible sign of loss. They are the loss itself, and also the instrument of a larger and never-ending grief (a historical one, and I think perhaps even a political one). It’s not unusual for the protagonists of a drama to live life in mourning, which is in itself a condition of relief and loving joy as much as it is of sorrow and disorientation. In the famous Buddhist fable about attachments, there’s a novice monk who can’t believe the abbot violated the rules of their order by having physical contact with a woman, whom he carried across a flooded river. The abbot, in his defence, notes that he set her down long ago, but the novice is still carrying her. That’s who the dead are to the living. We are always letting them go. They are always beside us.

So it’s an unusual feeling, to have the dead mom in Alchemy of Souls bother me so much.

Spoilers follow.

The major birth secret that opens Alchemy of Souls is that its male lead, Jang Uk, was born of legally wedded parents, but only in the biological sense. His (extremely hot) father’s body was, as far as we know, occupied by the soul of the ailing and very sneaky king of the land when he was conceived. All the tension in Uk’s strand of the story comes from this: who knows this secret, who’s trying to protect it, and what terrible things will happen if this is revealed. Straight-forward, self-explanatory, significant: all the things we’re told about Uk are things about his paternity.

Why, then, are all the things we’re shown about him about his mother? We don’t know anything about her beyond her name and her strikingly lovely face. In a show where we are given plenty of information about genealogy and inheritance, we know nothing about Do-hwa’s family or her magical ability. We’re yet to learn of her knowledge or ignorance of her own rape, which is what it was: her husband was forced to give up his body to the soul of a man she never consented to go to bed with. We’re not told what, if anything, she left to her son. We don’t know what this son thinks of her. We haven’t yet heard him speak of her. Who does Uk think Do-hwa is, this person who was the apple of the eye of all his guardians — this person who is, all the same, at the centre of the astonishing and commonly repeated lie that she knowingly got Uk out of wedlock?

We’re barely a quarter through the show. Is it a fifth? I’m confused by how long it's going to be. In any case, there should be time to figure this out. But I’m unsure if we’re even meant to. In the other Hong Sisters shows I’ve seen, the protagonists’ parent trouble usually stems from a father, living or dead. Mothers conveniently stay out of the picture, though a plethora of other women figures — sisters, colleagues, friends, freaking deities — surround the leads. So any intrigue around Do-hwa may not be purposefully crafted. We’ve met an array of characters, but we’ve never heard Do-hwa speak, or even really lingered on her face, in a flashback.

There’s a patriarchy in Daeho, the country of Alchemy of Souls, and there’s a matriliny within it. The tensions of this configuration are almost certainly going to be resolved in the figure of Mu-deok, who is now Naksu. Whether the Hongs have created this layer of conflict as a plot convenience, or whether it’s central to their world-building, remains to be seen. Do-hwa’s afterlife, too, may depend on this. In a story that’s already weaving together many strands of plot and character, it may suit them to leave her as a cipher.

But I’ve also always found the Hongs to be psychologically astute, sometimes devastatingly so. What you seek is always quite literally seeking you back in their shows: as ghosts and monsters, as spirits, as love from people who must give it to you in the form of a sacrifice. Uk has lived his whole life so far as a kind of sacrifice to his brilliant father, the biological one, and as events begin to gather force it’s clear that this father must return to him at last, to repay him.

But Uk also has ghosts, the way Naksu has the ruins of her life; the way Lady Jin and Cho-yeon have Jin Bu-yeon, who’s sometimes said to be dead and sometimes to be lost. In the Hong worldview, ghosts are those to whom the living must make reparations. And perhaps Uk’s ghost will turn out to be his soul-father, the wicked, scheming king who begot him out of greed. That may dictate his destiny: to be king hereafter, like the constellation says, carrying a burden he never consented to bear. After all, isn’t that the essence of what being a child is? To be born of a suffering person, and to inherit their suffering when they leave us?

Uk doesn’t know this, though. The suffering he knows of, and the suffering he is left with, is Do-hwa’s. He is unusually clever and unusually gifted, and this may be his patrimony. But he knows how to love, with generosity and gentleness, and that’s because he was taught love by the people who loved his birth mother. She, really, is his ghost. Hamlet is maddened by an entirely understandable grief for his dead father, but his tragedy is really his more inexplicable grief for his mother, who is alive. Couched in the prickly language of rejection (“I will speak daggers to her, but use none”) he mourns her loss: she cannot grieve his father the way he does, and that, to him, is an unbridgeable separation. She has cast him out of herself all over again.

Uk is Hamlet, but his parents’ roles are reversed. His rage and resentment are for Jang Gang, who is alive, and who deserves it, even if he made the least worst decision out of an array of terrible ones when he abandoned Uk. What about Do-hwa, though? Who will do justice to her, who was wronged by a man who thought of her as an instrument, and also by the man who loved her? To whom will she appear in a dream, to say Adieu, adieu! Remember me —

— if not to the child whom she had to set down, unable to live for him; and whom she has carried, all the same, for all his life?

Thanks for reading! This post dedicated to @coolbeansbuddyofmine, who said, why don’t you write more meta about Alchemy of Souls?

[harveyscape]

hehhehhhhhhehhhhh,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, what if aeryn interacted w/ john’s mom in-between scenes in Kansas,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

[whetstonefires]

evaporating mothers

have I mentioned how much it bugs me that at the very beginning of FFVII, while still in the slums, there’s dialogue to suggest that President Shinra’s wife is alive and married to him and Having Opinions about his sexual conduct, and then she never comes up again?

we have a lot of moms in this setting who were explicitly killed, such as Nanaki’s, Tifa’s, Cloud’s, and of course Ifalna, and one voluntarily entombed in crystal for whatever reason; some that can safely be presumed dead like Cid, Barret, and Vincent’s...and then there’s Madame Shinra,

who should be at least slightly relevant in post-game materials focusing on Rufus, even if there really was no place for her in the game considering how gestural and vague they were about developments in company politics in general.

even if all you did was establish she got blown up, and rufus doesn’t really give a shit because they didn’t have much of a relationship.

(i suspect the OtWtaS retcons may have killed her off in Rufus’ childhood for simplicity’s sake, which would add a small mark to the many, many issues I have with the storytelling decisions in those novellas, which i don’t consider canon but have to deal with other people telling me are canon and therefore stuff i include in fic based on preexisting game canon is wrong.)

and Elmyra Gainsborough, who never comes up again after being kidnapped by the Turks.

We know Marlene came through that experience essentially alright, and I can’t actually imagine Tseng harming Aerith’s mother unnecessarily, so she ought to have survived Meteor, so...where is she? gah.

imma write a fic where Elmyra, Marlene, and Barret all live with Tifa. along with Cloud and Denzel because i do like Denzel. Big happy family. Honorary grandma childcare assistance valuable.

rufus’ mom sometimes calls him up from wherever she retired to and lectures him about his business decisions.

[chintitheicebear-blog]

ME: Steven universe is SO relatable!

FRIEND: what do you live with all women and are treated like a kid and fights aliens and shit?

ME: No I also have a dead mom from birth, don’t know about her past and people are fighting about it!

FRIEND: ...

OTHER PEOPLE WITH DEAD MOMS: