A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Here is a famous story about Wu Zetian, the only female emperor of China. I'm going to tell it in the style in which I first heard it.

There was a beautiful but ferocious stallion that no one could tame. Wu Zetian said, "I can tame that stallion."

They asked her how she would tame the stallion, when the strongest men had tried and failed.

Wu Zetian said, "All I need is a whip, a hammer, and an axe. First, I'd use the whip to show it I mean business. If the whip fails, I'd use the hammer to really drive my point home. And if the hammer fails, I'd use the axe to CUT OFF HIS HEAD!"

So I was initially quite excited when I heard that a YA book was coming out starring Wu Zetian as a teenage mecha pilot.

But when the book actually launched, the impression I got via fandom osmosis was that it was a joyless slog through oppression, murder, torture, foot-binding, and more oppression, interspersed with lectures on feminism. I pictured late seasons of The Handmaid's Tale, written in Tumblr-speak with a little mecha as an afterthought, and wrote the book off as yet another story that has a great premise and then avoids it.

Then I idly clicked on the "Look Inside" to see just how awesomely depressing it was. Chapter one was called "A Butterfly That Better Not Be My Dead Sister" - a title bearing more resemblance to Percy Jackson than the "I survived eye cancer and foot-binding only to be run over by a cement truck and then get tongue cancer" tone I was expecting.

The next thing I knew, I had hit the end of the sample and had to keep reading. So I bought the book, and tore through it in a single evening.

I'm now going to copy some comments from my previous post, because they illuminate the somewhat hilariously opposing results of what you expect going in vs. what you notice while reading:

Rachel: The description makes it sound so grim and depressing! And it does have those elements, but for me the reading experience was more like YES LAUGH MANIACALLY SOME MORE YOU BEAUTIFUL BLOODTHIRSTY MANIAC and BRING ON THE DRUNKEN BOXING and HAHA I KNOW WHO'S BEEN WATCHING EVANGELION and POWER UP and BRING ON THE QI TREATMENTS FOR THE FORCED ADDICTION and OH NO HIS KIDNEY.

Shadaras: I have read Iron Widow! Which was quite an experience, because I went into it for the tropes and then went "huh this has a lot more disability theory and patriarchal shittiness than I was expecting", which seems to have been the opposite of your experience. :)

Rivkat: FWIW I saw it promoted as tropey and was a little surprised about the grim overt patriarchy.

So this is a very polarizing book, partly but not only because of the "is it a vase or is it two faces optical illusion" phenemonon, or in this case "is about horrific violent sexism and rage against the patriarchy or is it about mecha and wuxia tropiness." (Both. It's both.)

It's also a very unique book. I've never read a female character quite like Zhao's Wu Zetian. I've never read a YA book quite like this one. A lot of its tropes aren't Western novel tropes at all, but are from wuxia and anime. The entire frame of reference feels very itself, from the moon "reincarnating" rather than being "new" to the CELEBRITY MECHA WEDDING. It has a ton of sources, but it feels sui generis.

Iron Widow is a vibrant, gleeful, furious, cracktastic mash-up of Chinese history, Chinese legends, mecha anime, classic SF tropes, The Hunger Games, feminist and disability theory, fanfic tropes, and Hamilton-esque anachronism. It's batshit and weird and compelling, and I loved it.

It's not without flaws, but some of the critiques of it I think are interrogating the text from the wrong perspective. ;) I don't think Wu Zetian is meant to be a role model for feminism or anything else, and I don't think she's supposed to be a naturalistic character at all.

Zhao's Wu Zetian is a larger-than-life force of nature, a wild AU of a historical character whose key anecdote involves "OFF WITH HIS HEAD!" She's more akin to Son Goku or Lian Nichang from The Bride With White Hair than to Katniss Everdeen. She places her lotus foot on the corpse of her enemy and laughs maniacally. She gets in a giant Gundam and stomps on the homes of her enemies. She is rage personified, without apology or regret, and she is a delight.