commentary: like synapses

[headstone]

like synapses: my Haman Karn character study via forensic autopsy of what went on between Char and Haman before we’re introduced to their relationship in Zeta Gundam. This post, like the fic, contains spoilers for that show.

(post credit)

help, I don't have an encyclopedic understanding of minor details of Zeta Gundam

Let’s go over the timeline, hewing as strictly to TV canon as possible (including Stardust Memory in that category.)

The One Year War concludes late 0079/early 0080. Char, like many members of the Zeon military & political elite, goes into exile in the Asteroid Belt to lick his wounds. He was present in the life of the very young Mineva Zabi, as she remembers him from her early childhood. By late 0083, Char is no longer present on Axis, and Haman Karn is in command. Occam’s razor says he was getting involved with the AEUG by this point.

The way Char talks about Haman—the first time she’s ever mentioned—tells us a few things:

Allow me to state the obvious.

1. Haman was in control of Axis when Char left, and he assumes she’s still in control four years later.
2. Char has a derisive opinion of Haman and her political project.
3. Haman is 20 years old, max, in 0087, making her 16 when Char last saw her.

This is… a rich trove to unpack.

Upon their reunion in ep. 33, Haman first pretends she doesn’t know who he is…

…Haman, you comedian; she quickly reverts to addressing him with personal resentment:

You know the song from here: their nebulous history keeps bubbling up throughout the back third of Zeta. Haman makes Char beg to borrow her nukes in front of a room full of people. Normal stuff.

(Sorry for random New Translation screenshot, I just had it on hand. The person who edited those movies was a Chaman warrior tho.)

Char tries to seem less invested than Haman, but he loses his cool over Haman’s treatment of Mineva worse than over almost anything else in the series. He is also apparently unperturbed about the prospect of killing her:

So I’m watching UC for the first time and immediately fond of this space witch/cringe dominatrix/Wormtongue-ass villainess, because of course I am, have you met me, and trying to solve the 4D chess puzzle: how did we get here?

There’s always the possibility that Tomino and the other creatives involved were losing track of details. I truly think it’s fine when people resolve the weird questions and inconsistencies by aging Haman up. But I felt an urge to square the circle, because taking the text at face value painted a strange and intriguing picture.

Chief among my questions:

• What made Char decide to leave Axis after several years?
• On what pretext did Char leave? Haman says, “So you’ve betrayed us,” so presumably he was an agent of Axis in the Earth Sphere, but what was his ostensible mission and why did Haman agree to it?
• Why does he refer to Haman as “the ghost of Zeon” years later when, I repeat, she was 16 when he last saw her (these pieces of information come from the same bit of dialogue)? (I mention her age because generational divides are so thematically significant; young people are never evil-aligned in Zeta, just manipulated by adults… except Haman, apparently. The trajectory of Sakakibara’s voice acting choices across Zeta and ZZ also support the centrality of Haman’s youth to her character in her early appearances.)
• How does Haman understand their relationship? In what ways are her perceptions at odds with Char’s, and where do they overlap?

Most importantly, in terms of causing me writerly grief,

• Taking into account the jilted-ex/coparent-of-your-child energy: was Char sexually/romantically out of pocket towards Haman, or is Haman projecting?

Char is enough of a principled scumbag that I didn’t feel I could make a hard and fast judgement. Then I watched CCA and went, “wow, Char’s relationships with women are even weirder than I thought.” The Quess situation in combination with the Lalah situation forced me to revisit the idea that Haman being significantly younger than Char would stop him from at least emotionally manipulating her if it supported his goals. Haman also goes on to attempt to use her feminine wiles on a teenage Judau in ZZ, so, you know. The cycles.

Of the two options outlined in my bullet point, the He’s Just Not That Into You reading is much less compelling. Particularly when set against the rest of Zeta’s treatment of female characters, it has a “bitches be crazy” flavour. On the other hand, I didn’t want to write Haman as an innocent victim who was hurt by a man and then became Damaged and Evil. It was my fascination with/fondness for her that had me writing this in the first place; I want to give her more credit for her own villainy than that.

why haman ???

The central contradiction of her character is that she’s a Newtype with the potential to connect with other people on the astral plane, but she’s a lonely and isolated misanthrope torn between the desire for love and the reality of intimacy… ahh, Haman, your pathos.

I find it so fun and compelling to think about Haman in this timeframe being only five years out from doing this kind of bullshit, while also acknowledging that the difference between ages 16 and 20 is a gulf. If you’re going to write about a character in a significantly different context & life stage than they are in canon, they should… feel different… while maintaining continuity with their canon personality.

Haman’s oneesan issues stuck out to me when I was watching ZZ (sorry about the font size, these subs looked really wonky on my display):

The Zeta novelizations provide some context, to be taken with a large grain of salt: Haman’s “older sister, who always had a weak constitution, was Dozle Zabi’s mistress. When Zeon was on the verge of collapse and people were fleeing the Earth Sphere, Haman even advised her to disregard Dozle’s order to leave.” She dies en route to Axis. We get some additional detail, but it's some pretty classic “Tomino Writing Women” fare (derogatory), so I pulled from the novels just enough to scaffold my ideas.

Wrestling with the parts of canon where Haman’s potential as a character is fumbled by the narrative misogyny and gender essentialism prevalent throughout original UC and particularly in Zeta (and yes, I know it’s Themes; this does not change my opinion), was one of my interests/motivations going into this fic. Not paranoid reading, not reparative reading, a secret third thing…?

On the topic of canon cherrypicking, I stole a few details from Char’s Deleted Affair, which I haven’t read outside of plot summary. As a piece of character writing I don’t like it for either of them, but it offers two convenient and intriguing ideas:

1. Haman’s father, a Zeon admiral, was Mineva’s regent for the first few years, and control passed to Haman after his death.
2. The Zeon judges’ panel initially asked Char to take up the mantle, but he declined and suggested Haman instead.

I would have disregarded these ideas if they didn’t suit my purposes, but I liked the possible trajectory they implied for Char and Haman’s relationship (a different trajectory, I should specify, from the one actually present in CDA.) A post by wordsandrobots on tumblr outlines a possible approach to these concepts that resonated with my Vision and was pretty influential as I got my bearings/put together an outline. Regarding extratextual/pseudocanon details, I believe an artbook(?) suggests Kycilia Zabi herself brought Haman into the Flanagan Institute/Newtype Corps orbit, and I incorporated that into my imagined backstory as well.

Taking all of the above into consideration, some answers to the big questions start to emerge: why Haman was so proximal to power on Axis; why anyone would respect her authority once she had it; how she would have met Char; how they might have developed an emotional relationship before Char came to feel she was, as he says, “the ghost of Zeon.” It ties their history into Char’s broader arc about responsibility, leadership, structural change, legacy, and bravery/cowardice. It gives Haman thematic weight in Char’s trajectory beyond being another entry in the list of his failed relationships with women. It gives Haman a reasonable grievance against Char: “Why did you pass this massive responsibility onto me and then abandon me with it?” It gives Char a reasonable rationale for leaving once a certain amount of writing manifests on the wall: “I don’t yet know what I’m meant to be doing, but I can tell it’s not this.”

I don’t think Haman’s desire for Char to have stayed to support her is in opposition to her need for control and dominance; I think it’s clear that she wishes Char was being subordinate to her in a loyal and steadfast way and not disagreeing with her on anything (or at least she thinks that’s what she wants. I don’t think she gave a fuck about any of the guys and gals onto whom she cast her Megan Thee Stallion - Big Ole Freak spell in ZZ. What she really wants is to never be rejected for anything, which is unreasonable but a very human way to feel.)

Wet Dog Haman is also really important to me:

Others have analyzed Haman’s personal presentation in great detail, so I won’t retread that ground here, but this episode of ZZ is part of what got me so invested in Haman; it’s rare to see a femme fatale villainess at leisure, looking kind of frumpy, without it being played for laughs. The Haman Karn we see most of the time is a performance, and I wanted to dig into the process of Haman learning how to do this, how to navigate desirability and femininity as a leader as well as a person.

The other Haman Fact I wanted to play with was that, of UC Gundam characters, Haman is probably the one whose Newtype abilities manifest the most like a Nen power from Hunter x Hunter.

Like, bro… she showed Judau Ashta her Ren…

the zero draft: Char POV?!?

ME, ON MASTODON, CIRCA DECEMBER 2025:

lowkey i think this was char->haman for about six weeks before being like "actually maybe not." haman has never emotionally recovered

Story beats I wanted to hit included the co-parenting of Mineva and rebuilding of Axis, but I wanted to keep the scope under control—I really wanted this to be a four digit word count situation (and was successful! Barely.) My first attempts to noodle around and write something came out as Char POV; there are a couple reasons for this, chief among them that I wanted to write outsider POV on my fave. This was the energy early on:

They had met in passing at the Flanagan Institute, and she was, he guessed, a year or two younger than Amuro Ray. Young even compared to the youths taking to the battlefield. A few years younger yet than Lalah.

Admiral Karn’s second daughter had not drawn Char’s attention at the time. He would have described her as a shy girl, quiet and slight and not especially pretty, but with good test scores and the makings of a good pilot. A Newtype, certainly. For better or worse, she never saw action outside of simulations, and after A Baoa Qu, he could have gone the rest of his life without remembering Haman Karn.

On Axis, after the war, she made herself unavoidable.

I had forgotten that her age was specified early in the show, because it comes up before we've actually met her; however, shortly after starting to write, I did the math on their respective ages based on the wiki and went, “wait, she’s more than a year or two younger than Amuro Ray! This dynamic is way creepier than I thought... this throws a wrench into my beautiful vision of the Chaman divorce.” I had to rethink things, which sparked much of the canon review and conspiracy pinboard-ing summarized in this post.

Here are some more bullet points from the early Char POV outline, for funsies:

• reeling from intense transformative newtype empathy experiences with amuro and lalah that changed him as a person but in a way that was also heartbreaking and he never came to a point of reconciling those things within himself
• looking for next steps, looking for meaning, what’s the next best thing/next step? i guess we go to axis, rebuild, figure out what to do with ourselves now.
• peacetime when you’re on the losing side of a war. “Who wins a war isn’t determined by who wins the last battle but what happens during reconstruction”
• aimlessness fixing itself onto mineva as proverbial innocent, a zabi—the last zabi—but she’s just a child, can’t be held responsible for those things. char’s idea “it’s over for us, maybe it’s the next generation who can change things. if i can’t understand who i am, i can at least understand who i am in relation to this parentless child.” true love is possible but only in the next world, not for us. Make war on the bourgeoisie etc. at the same time, resistant to putting roots down or committing emotionally to anyone or anything
• doesn’t want to seem too disengaged but also doesn’t want to seem too engaged—doesn’t want to seem like he’s making a power play
• increasingly drawn into Haman’s orbit; fascinated and compelled by her but also finds the strength of her powers, force of her personality worrying for a variety of reasons
• she has this charisma but it’s a cold charisma
• she’s a bit of a daredevil—he sees himself in that
• when you really look below the surface, what’s really motivating her? rage and resentment. disgust for all the people who came before, hatred of everyone who brought them to this point and lost them the war. including a lot of bad feeling for the zabis, which he can relate to, but it’s also like… ok what about mineva…
• she’s a bit childish, naturally, as she’s a young person, but he senses in her a lot of mixed emotions, including a little bit of awkwardness, but there’s a deep vein of steeliness and self-confidence. he thinks, this is why people do what she tells them. people right now just want to be told what to do by someone who seems like they know what they're doing, and she’s that person when i’m not willing to be.
• he doesn’t LIKE it but they can exist in unsteady truce for time being—both want zeon remnants to persist in some capacity; both want to be prepared for whatever bullshit is going to come next—winning the war isn’t going to make the earth federation any less corrupt. and they both want this child, encapsulation of hopes for the future, to be okay.

This work was in no way wasted, because trying to get across WTF is going on with Char was a major concern up until the final iterations of the draft (but we’ll get to that.)

figuring out next steps, or, do they use condoms in the universal century?

I will excerpt my fedi posts from October 9, 2025:

OPEN POLL (no gundam knowledge required): in fic for a sf canon set in the future but written/produced pre-AIDS crisis, should you or should you not have the characters use condoms?

i feel strongly that haman would have an IUD but "invention of massive orbital space colonies, minimal widespread adoption of the condom" feels in keeping with the setting. except where i keep getting tripped up is that gundam LOVES weird little analog tech/material culture details, in the way where describing a condom in detail feels appropriate. also the state of birth control in general is very up in the air because i imagine space colonies go hard on family planning but also HALF THE TOTAL HUMAN POPULATION JUST DIED so maybe everyone is having babies to try and repopulate the hive ???? much to consider. i feel like the STI situation on these warships has to be crazy though.

this was sparked by rotating the horrible sexual encounter in my horrible fanfic and imagining the following interaction

CHAR: retrieves condom

HAMAN: [trying to seem mature and confident] i have an IUD

CHAR: those only do so much

HAMAN, mentally: oh you big SLUT you're out here SUCKING AND FUCKING soldiers all over the asteroid aren't you !!!!!!!!!

first draft

As the above excerpt hopefully illustrates, the most fruitful direction was a kind of story I’ve never written: a very heterosexual Girl Losing Her Virginity story. (Very heterosexual… or is it???)

During Haman and Kamille’s ill-fated Newtype communion in ep. 47, Kamille sees the following memory of Haman and Char, which lives in my mind as The Photo:

The way this is framed as an actual posed photograph made me desperate for context; what were they doing when this was taken? (Assuming it’s a memory and not just a fantasy.) The overall vibe, plus my interest in Haman having a very weird and bad first sexual experience, pushed me toward changing POV.

I was reluctant to write from Haman’s perspective at first, because she is The Type Of Character I Always Write (very kind AO3 commenters: I love how emotionally detached and cold Haman feels here! me: haha yeah…). However, once I got a sense of the shape of the story, I realized that the easiest way to square the circle between the things that I was interested in writing about and the revised timeline/sense of their ages was to write a coming of age story centred on Haman. There’s a little bit of Audrey Horne/Dale Cooper in there, not only regarding the age gap but also the incongruous midcentury trappings of the relationship and setiting.

But also, Haman is a villain. Crucially. Her bildungsroman is also the story of how she became the kind of person to drop a space colony on the Earth on purpose. Haman is Coming of Villainous Age; Char is Retired From Villain, New Career in Sad.

I didn’t want to use the same structural move I always fucking do in filling-in-implied-backstory fics of this nature (see Nieyao 1, my Three Tumours fic); alternating between a sordid emotional/romantic/sexual entanglement in the present and snapshots of important moments in their relationship that explain how we got here is basically my hackest of hack techniques (not because it's bad, I just do it too often.)

I ….. tried to avoid this and write a linear narrative. Stay tuned to hear how this worked out lol

Haman’s character voice wasn’t too hard for me to land on, again, because this is a kind of character I gravitate toward, but other aspects of the story made the narration tricky to handle—particularly weaving in Haman’s Newtype powers in a way that felt organic and not driven exclusively by narrative convenience, as well as little details of living in low-gravity…

Once I finally got my draft in front of some folks for feedback (for which I am very, very appreciative–thank you Max, Frogie, and Soph!!!) and I got enough space from it to return with some perspective, it became clear that I had a few problems, chiefly: the Backstory Problem, the Timing Problem, and the Problem of Char. let’s start with the latter.

the problem of char

He's hard to write! Especially from an external POV.

The fic hinged on Haman not having a wholly accurate sense of Char’s motivations, even after the end, when he’s blindsided her with the declaration that he’s leaving Axis indefinitely for the Earth Sphere. I had to balance this with her being sharply perceptive and highly invested in him/their relationship, and Char being someone who keeps stuff close to the chest habitually.

I also had trepidation about doing Char character assassination in favour of my Haman Blorboism, when she is like. A terrible person. And I don’t want to downplay this. I just think it’s possible to conceive of their relationship at this period as one in which they both act pretty terribly, in different ways—it brings out the worst of each of them.

An unintended consequence of this was that their dynamic came across as incredibly skewed in the first draft—specifically, that Haman was consistently the aggressor and Char wasn’t being nearly as sleazy and manipulative as he needed to be. This was a side effect of lack of confidence in my characterization—I had a better handle on the kinds of things Haman would do and say, so I had her doing and saying many more things, while Char rode alongside as a narrative passenger and reacted to Haman’s behaviour.

I dealt with this by, drumroll please, more canon review; I rewatched late 0079 and selections from Zeta to solidify my sense of his character, which was fruitful.

[watching this, nodding] I see. This is why you left Axis.

the timing problem

While the scene-to-scene pacing was fine, the timing of each character crossing their respective emotional thresholds was way off and it made the emotional logic less tight than it could be.

In the first draft, Char came across as distant and uninvolved because I was writing him as if he’d already decided to leave and just hadn’t found a time to tell Haman. The events of this fic matter because the happenings of the sex scene—particularly Haman exerting her will as psychic violence and forcing her way into Char’s mind—are what make him decide to leave. This was an extreme “oh, duh” moment—you’re telling me it’s better for characters to change over the course of the story than stay exactly the same????????????

The plot, such as it is, involves Haman making a bid for intimacy and validation at a time when Char is on the fence about whether he should stay or go. Part of what keeps Char on Axis is his affection for Haman. Part of what makes him want to leave is wariness of Haman as a person as well as trepidation about getting involved with her in the way he suspects will happen if things continue. (What I hoped to communicate by the line Everyone thought they would end up together when she was older—Haman and Char. Her father had thought this; the nannies thought this; Char thought this, too. wasn’t that Char was diabolically and consciously doing jailbait wait so much as that I think he’d feel a sort of cosmic inevitability about getting tangled up with Haman if he remained on Axis for long enough. The combined forces of Newtype interpersonal magnetism, political expedience, and heteronormativity? Powerful stuff.) Char, due to a combination of guilt, self-hatred, attraction, and emotional projection, goes along with it up to a point, but Haman wants a level of intimacy and commitment he’s not willing to give. She overplays her hand on the assumption that Char will come around—she’s an “ask forgiveness rather than permission” kind of gal. Char realizes at this moment that if he stays much longer, the only path forward will involve subordinating himself to her in a way he’s not willing to do, so he emotionally checks out. Haman knows she fucked up, but pushes this feeling into frustration with and resentment towards Char for making her feel bad, and she doesn’t know he was already considering leaving. When he tells her he’s out, it’s the most humiliating and miserable experience of her life.

…once I understood that sequence of events, massaging the story into shape wasn’t difficult, but it took like four months to get there.

the backstory problem

The other thing I realized was not coming through At All was how the toxic environment of Axis and the Zeon upper classes would contribute to Haman’s terrible psychosexual quagmire.

I don’t think Haman was Born Evil, and I don’t think she’s done anything in her life until this moment that could be categorized as Serious Interpersonal Harm. That harm needs to be situated in the context of Haman having been regarded as a sexual object, surrogate mother, and psychic research subject/mecha test pilot for her entire adolescence. She still comes off very badly, but Char bears some responsibility, along with every other adult in her life, for having brought this state of affairs into being in the first place. Char is also directly responsible for her full-blown parentification vizierification, because it’s convenient for him. He’s been grooming her, it’s just not sexual grooming; it’s grooming for command. Except there are also romantic and sexual overtones because Char Aznable is not exactly Mr. Boundaries.

At the same time, Haman doesn’t want to be seen as a child. All teenagers are like that, but for Haman, maintaining her position as a leader is… kind of important. If someone else were to make a power play on Axis, they would absolutely want to get rid of Haman, and considering this fic posits that her older sister was essentially given away as a political concubine to preserve the family’s standing, Haman is correct to be looking out for #1!

In that context, and though she may not be aware of it, Haman wants a relational venue to be vulnerable and, dare I say it, silly/whimsical/playful. However, to the misfortune of everyone in the universe, she looks for that no-longer-a-girl-but-not-yet-a-woman space via her weird relationship with Char, onto which Haman is mapping a kind of 1950s college-guy-dating-high-school-girl schema… with a dash of “henchman boyfriend to my glorious space queen (all in good time.)”

If Haman wants power, Char wants purpose, and though he’s more measured in his emotional investment than Haman… well, let me just quote my own fedi posts again.

got to lalah's debut in gundamwatch with my friend... a) she's so awesome b) the way she acts with char truly makes me believe his greatest desire in life is to be the creepy and devoted college boyfriend of a girl who would be in the coven from the craft

haman blew her mystique in his eyes when it became clear she wanted her face on money for real

Plus fairly recent Sayla baggage and, you know, this:

It’s possible that I could’ve massaged the backstory into the final product more skillfully if I let the story cook for another month or two, but I wanted to move on to other projects, so hacky flashback interspersal it was.

I regret not working Kycilia into the story more deeply, but there was so much Business going on already, and I wanted to avoid extended flashbacks outside of Axis; I wanted the story’s scope to feel suffocating and claustrophobic, like it’s almost hard to believe you’ll ever leave the darkness.

On that note, Stardust Memory has a grand total of 30 seconds of Hamantent, but they were pretty influential for me:

I wrote my fic assuming this is where Haman is at a couple weeks after the end of the thing. “You good?”

evil heiresses, fascist cultural production, and the Axis Zeon food court

So that’s about it for the writing process, but I’m not done yapping!

The scene in the movie theatre is the first one I wrote that still made it into the final fic. The film that jumped to mind was Leave Her to Heaven (1945). This short video essay does a good job of summarizing critical perspectives on the film, particularly regarding its cinematography and production design, use of psychoanalytic tropes, and its entanglement with midcentury anxieties about women's autonomy and mobility.

Leave Her to Heaven is a Technicolour noir starring Gene Tierney as Ellen Berent, a beautiful and charming Bostonian heiress whose facade masks a bottomless pit of possessiveness and resentment. Her family dynamic was shaped by her obsessive psychosexual connection with her recently deceased father, whom she seeks to replace via a whirlwind courtship and marriage to a successful novelist. Unfortunately, her husband is a real person with a life and other commitments, such as being the devoted guardian of his disabled younger brother, Danny. The film’s most famous scene involves Ellen orchestrating Danny drowning in a lake; she watches him go under the surface without a wrinkle of emotion on her perfect face.

What stuck out to me was the juxtaposition of Ellen’s monumental, dominating quality with the smallness and desperation of her ambitions. As another character says early in the film, “Ellen [will win]. Ellen always wins.” But what does she win? Surely nothing worth the effort; her husband is easily the film’s most boring character (apologies to Cornel Wilde.)

We do not have to hand it to her, but being someone with this personal magnetism and evil genius and making her a socialite? Of course she started killing.

Putting someone like Haman into the pressure cooker of a revanchist breakaway state, where she has access to significant power without any guarantee of basic self-determination is the perfect set of conditions for her blossom in the worst ways. Extremely patriarchal cultures create conditions in which ambitious women are blocked from “upright” channels to power and have to resort to cunning. So this dynamic between Haman and Char is one in which Haman is, genuinely, showing herself to be dangerous and frightening, but it’s also one in which the way Char is constantly trying to dodge leadership drives Haman absolutely nuts.

Haman isn’t so much an exception to as a variation upon the authorial misogyny that constrains the depiction of women in Zeta as having rich inner lives. I admire many things about Tomino’s storytelling, but gender is a major weak spot. ZZ actually improves on this quite a bit, but this fic is much more in dialogue with Zeta prime. The problem is not “being sexist and unwoke” for its own sake, it’s a failure of imagination! Haman certainly has the most narrative agency of Zeta’s female characters, but her interior life revolves around an unrequited, or at least unequally requited, obsession with Char. Part of the task of doing transformative fanwork is deciding how much you’re willing to change and tweak while maintaining a connection to the source that justifies why it’s fanwork in the first place. If you just reiterate canon, with all its problems, what “transformation” is happening?

In that sense, shifting the locus of the story to Haman’s inner life was an attempt to “Yes, and…” her obsession with Char and her immense, selfish ambition and braid them into a tapestry of experiences, beliefs, convictions that take her seriously as a character. I wanted to explore how her villainous ambitions for domination and self-aggrandizement and her obsession with Char are connected, and how both things are influenced by her experience growing up in this family system, this culture, this historical moment.

Invoking old Hollywood and midcentury dating mores was also an attempt to gesture at something I find compelling about the way several Zeon movements are portrayed in mainline UC (essentially all of them except Char’s eventual Newborn Neo Zeon): they’re so… tacky. There are the Riefenstahls and Mishimas of the world, but fascist movements are generally terrible at creating artistic work or cultural entities that are in any way vibrant. Axis very advanced in terms of what it can manage re: manufacturing but stilted and stale regarding culture. Everything is a prewar holdover or postmodern appropriation of historical signifiers from Earth. They’re not creating anything new or alive.

Disco Elysium came to mind a few times during the writing process; I kept thinking about how if this were a different kind of fugitive rebel force living in an abandoned mining facility on the edge of space, the shining jewel of their socio-cultural achievements over their first 3 years on Axis might be something other than a tiny mall where you can see reruns of the same 24 movies. Like, idk, you guys want to start a choir or something? Put on some community theatre productions????? There’s a bit from one of the Zeta novels in which the interior decor of the Gwadan reminds Kamille of the Sears catalogue.

inspo soup

I told myself, if the Sears catalogue has made it to space, surely a couple paperbacks of The Prince have, too. Haman is not very Machiavellian in the literal sense; there’s a bit in The Prince where Machiavelli outlines Haman’s whole schtick in Zeta/her approach to Operation Stardust as an example of what the prudent ruler should not do:

Thus it will always happen that he who is not your friend will demand your neutrality, whilst he who is your friend will entreat you to declare yourself with arms. And irresolute princes, to avoid present dangers, generally follow the neutral path, and are generally ruined. But when a prince declares himself gallantly in favour of one side, if the party with whom he allies himself conquers, although the victor may be powerful and may have him at his mercy, yet he is indebted to him, and there is established a bond of amity; and men are never so shameless as to become a monument of ingratitude by oppressing you. Victories after all are never so complete that the victor must not show some regard, especially to justice. But if he with whom you ally yourself loses, you may be sheltered by him, and whilst he is able he may aid you, and you become companions on a fortune that may rise again.

I find it believable she could read things like this and go “rip to your prince but I’m different.”

Other works that seeped into this one by juxtaposition (i.e. I happened to be reading them alongside the writing process):

Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, a desolate erotic literary novel about a young woman’s sexual awakening as a catalyst for unrequited love as firmamental obsession:

While we drive along the road in the evening, talking as impersonally as a radio discussion, he tells me, 'A boy with green eyes and long lashes, whom I had never seen before, took me into the back of a printshop and made love to me, and for two weeks I went around remembering the numbers on bus conductors' hats.'

'One should love beings whatever their sex,' I reply, but withdraw into the dark with obstreperous shape of shame, offended with my own flesh which cannot metamorphose into a printshop boy with armpits like chalices.

Sarah Elaine Smith's Marilou Is Everywhere, for its lyrical approach to depicting teen girl insanity:

Now, I know how that sounds: teenage, teenage. I was, and it brought me to wickedness. Except in wickedness, I loved the world, too, in a way so fierce I assumed no one could imagine. And I love it still.

The DNA of AKIRA is all over my vision of the Flanagan institute, though in reality it was probably somewhat less ghoulish than “the nursery.” I wanted to sprinkle sci-fi horror elements into the background where I could, because it seemed fun: it took restraint to avoid going into too much detail about the Mouthwashing shit I imagined going down on the trip from Side 3 to Axis.

Eloise Klein Healy’s poem “Asking About You”:

Instead of having sex all the time I like to hold you and not get into some involved discussion of what life means. I want you to tell me something I don’t know about you. Something about the day before that photograph in which you’re standing on your head. I want to know about softball and the team picture. Why are you so little next to the others? Were you younger? Were you small as a girl? What I want most is to have been a girl with you and played on the opposite team so I could have liked you and competed against you at the same time.

It might sound strange or even crass for me to view this dreadful hetero nightmare though the prism of a beautiful and moving piece of art about lesbian love, but this fic is About Gender in the sense that it posits an ostensibly heterosexual encounter can just be two people projecting onto each other about their dead/estranged sisters. And also Haman’s ultimate sexual fantasy is to have hazed Char at the Zeon officer’s academy.

Grand Central Station was also a touchpoint for some of the queer/trans undercurrents of a story that is self-consciously heterosexual:

Alas, I know he is the hermaphrodite whose love looks up through the appletree with a golden indeterminate face. […] smoothed away from all detail, I see, not the face of a lover to arouse my coquetry or defiance, but the gentle outline of a young girl. And this, though shocking, enables me to understand, and myself rise as virile as a cobra, out of my loge, to assume control.

Haman goes past “not like other girls” to “not like other people.” Through Newtype bonding with Char, she encounters the potential for profound connection that overcomes interpersonal divisions, particularly boundaries of gender. Except, because it’s Haman, she can’t conceive of relationality without domination and superiority. Because of this, she can’t surrender her ego to be part of the primordial intersubjective soup, which is the great tragedy of her character—what if having magical empathy just made you incredibly misanthropic and alone? There are some shades of Psycho Mantis from Metal Gear Solid, I tried to explore these ideas through a sort of fantasized gender transmogrification; Haman doesn’t think of herself and Char on an equal plane, but finds alluring the prospect of a psychic communion where physical size and strength is irrelevant and either of them has the capacity to dominate, to become the one to assert a gendered form of power.

I will trans anything I touch.

Comments

[luckyzukky]

this was a fun read, i love getting insight into your writing process!