Rai (is hard to please)’s Reviews > She Who Became the Sun > Status Update

“It was suffering that was lit around without shadow, the purest thing under Heaven. He was no longer a thinking being that could curse the universe, or imagine how it could have gone differently, but a single point of blind agony that would go on unending. He had done what he had to do, and in doing so he had destroyed the world.”

“That was his tragedy. Not being born to a terrible fate, but not being able to let it go.”

To think a queer Mulan retelling would be what introduced me to fisting in literature….

“How could her body be a woman’s body, if it didn’t house a woman?”

“This was the price of her desire: to ask those she loved for their suffering, again and again, so she could get what she wanted.”

“For a moment she saw the two of them as Heaven might: two briefly embodied human spirits, brushing together for a moment during the long dark journey of their life and death and life again.”

“She saw someone who seemed neither male nor female, but another substance entirely: something wholly and powerfully of its own kind.”

“Freedom, and desire, and her life to make her own. And if the price of all that was suffering, why did it matter when she would suffer no matter what she chose?”

“Not because she understood it, but because she didn’t, and for that reason it seemed precious.”

“Not-wanting is a desire too.”

“But you know what’s worse than suffering? Not suffering, because you’re not even alive to feel it.”

“Blamed him even more than he would a stranger, because it hurt more that someone so beloved should not see the truth of him. And he blamed and hated himself, for hiding that truth.”