jwhouk wrote:Five of the biggest punches to the gut in WS:
- Bud telling the story of how she and Brandi were killed;
- Shelly 56 dying in the time forest;
- Phix having Apo for lunch;
- Bud tearing Monica's heart out;
- Phix "facing off" against Monca.
Re Shelly 56's death... the moment of her death didn't hit me quite that hard when I first read it, as I was very new to Wapsi Square at the time (that's actually the point at which I tuned in to the story) and didn't have a history with Shelly or the other characters.
What did hit me quite powerfully came over the next few days. Seeing Shellynx (as we then learned) weep over Shelly 56's body and say "I think that I can go home now", and struggle with the question of whether she has a home and friends to return to, and then dare to pick up the Artifact despite her fear, and the time-lines converge once again...
wow. As somebody wrote in the Comments section for "So Fragile", my brain was officially blown.
It was a bit like G'kar, in the Babylon 5 episode "Mind War"... a character who had been portrayed as a blustering heavy, turns out to have a great deal more personal depth than had been seen... "No one here is exactly what they appear"... and what he said about the First Ones showed that the whole story had great depths that were yet to be seen. That's the sense I got from just these few days of Wapsi Square... and I was deeply, deeply hooked.
Julie wrote:I dunno...Brandi's tale of how she became the being she is...that was a serious gut punch, just minus the accompanying imagery.
I think I'm with you on this one, Julie.
It doesn't have to do with just the imagery or the absence thereof. It's what's being described.
Bud's tale is terrible, no question... two young girls, tortured (and raped IIRC) and killed most painfully. What was done to them was horrible.
Brandi's tale hit me even harder, on a deeper level... because it was in part about what she was
made to do. In trying to defend herself, she took an innocent baby's life... and in doing so, her own innocence was lost, probably forever. She was burdened with a guilt that she did not deserve... and it's been far more than just a "life-long" guilt. She surrendered to the priests (and what she was probably sure was her own death) without fighting any further... but her death did not erase the guilt.
"My job was to protect them." I hear her saying it almost in a whisper... and for me those six simple words are probably the most heart-wrenching thing Paul has ever written into the story.