LJ Idol, Season 9 - Week 16

[tsuki_no_bara]

title: The Beauty of Destruction
topic: a terrible beauty has been born
(thanks to dear-tiger for looking it over

Comments

[karmasoup]

I love everything about this. It is a truly beautiful sentiment, and one not often seen or appreciated. I can relate to this character on a personal level, but while I can see the terribly tragedy in this profound moment, I too, along with him, have a great respect for the awesomeness and finality of it. Thank you for doing this so reverently.

[tsuki_no_bara]

this was the very first thing i thought of when i saw the prompt, and then i had to figure out how to convince readers that a mushroom cloud can be beautiful. >.< it's such a fraught image, you know? and oskar is SO CONFLICTED about his feelings - on the one hand, if you kind of discount all the people it killed, it really is impressive. it was an awesome display of man-made power like humans had never seen. but on the other, so much death and destruction. and he knows from death and destruction. and he's an obstetrician - his goal is to bring people into the world, not take them out of it. but the bomb brought ww2 to a screeching halt, and he can't help but think that if the americans had dropped it on berlin in, like, 1942, his parents and literally millions of other people might've lived.

i'm really glad you liked this, and that i seem to have done ok.

[kehlen]

It can, it can. And that it can is such a beautiful and terrible thing, yes. Very well done.

[embroiderama]

Oh, wow. This is so intense and yet you wrote it with such a light touch. Beautiful work!

[tsuki_no_bara]

i tried not to be anvilicious.... thank you. ^_^

[charisstoma]

Okay let's start with the least important part of this. They live in Milwaukee. *delighted glee* Having grown up in Madison, Milwaukee was the BIG city my parents would take us to to go shopping at a special store pre-cursor to Costco

[tsuki_no_bara]

i picked milwaukee because i figured it would have a good-sized german population. (when i was a wee thing and lived in nashville, twice a year we'd go to atlanta to get, like, school clothes for me and my sister. and bagels. lots and lots of bagels. i don't think nashville was as small as madison, but i totally get the shopping in the big city thing. hee

[bleodswean]

This is utterly fantastic! You have so many superb lines but this one really leapt out at me - It is the last move of a desperate chess player, a terrible and terrifying checkmate. and this - his desire for such a thing to have happened at a different time and in a different place, so that his world might have been spared. This is a genre and you took it out of predictable and into psychological.

[tsuki_no_bara]

that first one is my favorite line too! and i rewrote the second one like ten times before it sounded right to me. >.< and i hate to admit it but i read so little holocaust or post-holocaust lit (by which i mean, pretty much none) that i don't actually know what constitutes "predictable", so i'm really pleased i sidestepped it. also, thank you. ^_^

[lrodell]

So much to think about here. Thank you.

[tsuki_no_bara]

i'll take that as a good thing. :D you're very welcome.