NOTES on The Bronze Labyrinth: 26 Feb 04
This was originally intended to be a series of four stories, loosely interconnected to tell a full story but not limited to the confines of a "series fic." That original idea didn't change much throughout, though I ended up expanding it to five stories instead of four when I felt like four was too restrictive to the natural flow of the plot.
I guess you can say that this fic is really about the Frost brothers, which is ironic because I don't like them at all in the TV series. The one main gripe that I had about Gundam X as a TV series was that the characterization was one-sided: the "good guys" were given plenty of screen time and development, while the "bad guys" were reduced to almost mere stereotypes. Shagia and Olba had a lot of villain potential, but we never really got to see much of that. Instead, they were relegated to spouting a lot of one-line evil threats. It seemed like the producers stuck them in the series so that they could check off the "cool-looking villain" square.
That was mostly the reason I decided to write about them. I wanted to bring the Frost brothers from stereotypes into real people, to give them more than just one-dimensional personalities. The TV series hints at deeper characterization at times, but we never see it. I suppose I considered it a personal challenge to do that for them. I wanted to take Shagia's drive for perfection and Olba's obsession with his brother and turn that into something that would make them real in the eyes of the audience.
In case you were wondering, this is not really an AU fic. Shagia and Olba actually do not die at the end of the series; in the last scene where the camera is panning out from Garrod and Tifa and the two guys trying to convince the audience they are Newtypes, you can see Olba and Shagia at the corner of the screen. Shagia is in a wheelchair and Olba is pushing him.
The initial inspiration for this story was taken from an unfinished series fic, Redemption, by Kouri. I credit most of my beginning ideas, if not all of them, to her fic, which is an AU fic that also takes place after the series, in which Shagia loses his memory and Olba must try to take care of him and restore it. I liked the premise of it, but the fic was only 2 chapters long, and it seems to be abandoned. I wrote Kouri and asked if she was going to continue it, but didn't get a reply.
Naturally, being an author, the little voice inside my head told me I had to write something to remedy that. I don't consider The Bronze Labyrinth to be a copy of Kouri's story, because mine looks at things from a totally different angle, with an entirely different format as well. I merely credit her for the idea and inspiration.
I took the titles and inserts in each individual fic from songs, poems, works of literature. I tried to stay away from the standard pop song "songfic" format, and only one of the insert songs is even recent or mainstream enough to be considered a "pop" song, and that is Sting's The Soul Cages, which is Olba's part II (but I wouldn't classify it as one). I'm not sure why this kind of format appealed to me at first, but it felt fitting to match the characters up like that. Looking at it now, The Bronze Labyrinth is mostly a story about the passage of time and how the world before the war and after the war are at odds with each other, and how the characters are still struggling to find their place in it. As the insert works I chose also all deal with that concept, they highlight the theme of each character's section.
I. LA CASA DEL ASTERION (The House of Asterion) is by Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentinian writer, and is a semi-retelling of the legend of the Minotaur (Asterion) from the Minotaur's point of view. I wanted to portray Shagia in the same kind of situation - bounded by a labyrinth with no doors, but yet from which he cannot really escape because he has no concept of the outside world. He is waiting for someone or something to rescue him. Asterion's concept of freedom is death, but Shagia isn't sure what his definition of freedom is.
Besides the fact that I took inspiration from Kouri's fic, I decided to have him lose his memory because I wanted to see how he would react having to relearn everything all over again. Shagia in the anime was always supremely calm, controlled, very in charge of his surroundings. What would a Shagia who had that stripped away do? How would he react? These things I wanted to explore.
I really don't have much to say about Catarina except that she represents the common folk that Shagia so despised. If he had met her before the war, he would have thought nothing of her because she was not "special." Now, however, he envies the fact that she is able to lead such a normal life.
II. WHERE THE OCEANS DIE is from the lyrics of the Sting song The Soul Cages, which I mentioned above. The complete song reads like a poem, and I didn't realize until after I was almost done with Olba's part how perfectly the lyrics mirror Olba's and Caris' situation. The concept of forgiveness and redemption plays a key role in Olba's section. Olba here is a man without a purpose, without a cause, because he believes that Shagia is dead. In the TV series, it is rather painfully obvious that if Shagia told Olba that the sky was purple, Olba would believe him, so I wanted to separate him from his brother and all of those memories, leave him alone and see if he would grow up.
The similarities between Caris and Olba, as Caris states, are striking. I believe that Caris is the only character in the series who could hope to have helped Olba in any way. Jamil or Lancelow could be others, but they are too much older than Olba and could not have reached him on that same level. Caris, having at one time believed he was "special" and then had that belief refuted, has much more to offer to Olba in that regard.
III. THE QUEEN OF THE FAIRIES is the Scottish ballad of Tam Lin, a knight who was captured by the Fairy Queen while out hunting and is cursed to serve the fairy realm. He waits for young women at a well and then rapes them. The girl Janet, who is taken and raped by him and conceives his child, vows to release him from his bondage and succeeds in doing so. I warped the meaning of the ballad a little in Tifa's section; no one is raped, obviously. But the concept of aiding the enemy remains.
Tifa is my least favorite main character in Gundam X, and she was very hard to write. Ironically, her section is the longest of all of them (14 pages in 10 pt font). I knew when I started writing it that I wanted her and Shagia to meet. It seemed inevitable in my mind, that Shagia would come to find the counsel of a Newtype just like his brother had the counsel of another Newtype. This wasn't because of any belief on my part that Newtypes could "teach" the former Category Fs anything, but rather because Newtypes after the war are also considered fairly useless, unwanted, discarded in the "new society" that is being created. Shagia is lost, but Tifa is, in a sense, also lost. She seeks solace in her new, mundane life in the village with Toniya and Witz and Garrod, but I don't believe she is happy.
Meeting Shagia, being able to share his pain, brings Tifa a new awareness. Shagia becomes, to her, the embodiment of the war's aftermath. Making peace with him is her way of making peace with the past, and that is why she tells Garrod to go. She knows they cannot both go on living the lie, and Garrod must find his own peace before he can be with her.
IV. QUAND LA LUNE EST HAUTE is from the Sarah Brightman song La Lune, which is sung in French. However, I cheated a bit because there are four lines spoken/chanted in the beginning in English, and this one, "when the moon is high," is one of them. I took the liberty to translate it into French because the rest of the song is French.
The moon is a prominent symbol throughout this whole series, and it all relates back to Garrod and his Gundam X/Double X. The moon haunts Shagia and it haunts Garrod most out of all of them, for obvious reasons. There are many ways to characterize the moon, and it has been made into all kinds of symbols throughout history and literature. I think I said it best when Garrod tells Cryant, "I don't hate the moon, but I don't love it, either. There's so much mysticism about the moon...so much that the moon represents, and yet whenever I look at it, I think of death." Garrod's mistrust of Shagia's intentions toward Tifa are in part comprised of that: a man who he thought he had killed has come back from the dead.
Garrod's section is the shortest out of all of them, because I don't think there was too much to say. Garrod is a very simple character - simple and true to what he believes. He doesn't require long-winded introspection to get the job done, and I think the length of his story was just right.
V. THE CRYSTAL MIRROR is a line from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem The Lady of Shallott, about Elaine of Astolat, a maiden who dies of a broken heart because Lancelot doesn't love her. The rest of the poetry in Caris' fic is the poem Merlin, by Edwin Muir.
Caris' final section brings the storylines together in sort of a weird weaving of timelines. I chose the King Arthur legend here because the main theme of Caris' part is "history," how history is recorded and passed down, how people will remember the war in the future, how history/the past is not something that can be changed, but sometimes is wrongly recorded and can be misleading. The Arthurian legend is an example of history that has been distorted until it has become a larger than life collection of fairytales. Caris is someone who desperately searches for the truth, and his resolve to chronicle the truth and only the truth is representative of that.
That gets him in trouble, however, when dealing with Olba and then Shagia. Caris' world after the war consists of himself and Olba. He has never been close to another human being before, and he ultimately begins to cling to Olba just as Olba had clung to Shagia. Olba recognizes this, but Caris does not - cannot, because he's never experienced it. This strange relationship mixes itself up in Caris' mind with Olba's recollections of Shagia, with Caris' own desire to rewrite history and keep Olba close to him even as he tells himself he won't.
I didn't want Shagia to regain his memory right away when he saw Olba, because I don't think things are like that all the time. Shagia and Olba were incredibly close and had an amazing mental bond, but still, two years is a long time and they have been living separate lives away from each other, each having found their own selves. I wanted Caris to bring them together. Caris is a character that bridges a lot of gaps - from normal human to Newtype, from ruler of a city to humble civilian, from tortured boy to hopeful man. More than anyone in this show, I think, Caris embodies the idea of turning around, looking away from a tainted past and gazing toward the future.
The title for the overall story is based on another Borges short story, "The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths" (there is a brass labyrinth in there which I changed to bronze) from his collection "The Aleph" (from which "La Casa del Asterion" is also found). The entire series of those stories deal with the concept of the labyrinth, and I wanted to evoke the feeling of a world rebuilding from the ground up, organized chaos, feelings of hope and hopelessness all in one. The world of "after war" is very much a labyrinth in this sense.
To those who do read (Laurel, Vitani, Tin? there are woefully few GX fans out there, but maybe some shall find this fic), hope you enjoyed.