A/N: Recently I've gotten a laptop, and have been getting any CDs I like the look of out of the library just long enough to rip them. One of these was the soundtrack to Mulan. Listening to it...it struck a chord. I honestly believed I would never write fic for any fandom other than video games, but...without getting too deep into personal information...let's just say that Mulan is probably my favourite Disney movie of all(well-tied for top, anyway)and that I have my own very good reasons for that.
I own neither Disney, nor the story of Mulan herself, nor the handful of similar tales scattered across the surface of the Earth...and mostlike that's a good thing. I doubt I'd do well as CEO of a huge business concern, and as for stories, well, nobody owns those. Stories-especially the old ones and the good ones-are like cats. You don't have them; they have you.
Truth
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
-e. e. cummings
If Fa Mulan has any message for the world, it is this; being yourself hurts.
It hurts like tight bandages and iron plate binding your breasts, so that every breath you take is a gasp of pain. It hurts like other people watching you like a freak show, or some rare animal in a menagerie, amused or pitying or horrified or all three at once. It hurts like people you don't even know watching you, people who if you'd only kept your head down, kept silent, would barely know you existed and certainly not give two grains of rice about you one way or another, but who, now that you are different, now that you are unusual, think it their bounden duty to judge you.
It hurts like the confusion in even the friendliest of people's eyes-the confusion that means they have no idea how to talk to you, how to treat you, what to think about you even. The utter incomprehension. It hurts like seeing that expression even in the faces of the people who love you, who you know love you, who you love too, people who try to understand, are trying, but it's hard work for them, an effort to make, and something in you cringes thinking that you are putting them through this, hurting them without even meaning to, and something else rages uselessly and unfairly at them for not understanding at once...
It hurts like knowing that there is nobody, nobody in the length and breadth of the empire like you. That perhaps there has never been. And perhaps will never be again.
And yet, it is worth it. It is all worth it, because the alternative is worse.
It is worth it all to be able to look in the mirror and see your own face, to hold your own sword in your own hand, to be one person, filling your proper outlines, instead of a cacophony of bitter, miserable, self-hating voices hidden behind a cheap, cracked actor's mask.
Truth