December Discourse: 6

[toujours_nigel]

selenak asked for favourite fictional mothers.


My current favourite is Concubine/Consort/Empress Dowager Jing, from Nirvana in Fire, which is a show that will eat your life if you let it. Jingmum, as fandom has largely dubbed her, is someone to whose given name the audience is not privy, who comes from a family without wealth and has lost her sponsors and supporters outside and within the harem to treason charges, and whose only child is rarely allowed to visit her. She ends the show with her son the Crown Prince, and herself the favoured Royal Consort, and all of it without particularly harming anyone. The Empress describes her as a cotton ball, bouncing back from any attempts at repression.



I love her. I would have anyway, because she's so much a Good Slytherin, down to being a deft cook and medic. But she's also extremely compassionate and sincerely kind to people who need her, from another--higher-ranked--Consort, through her long-lost nephew, to of course her son, who is one of the main characters of the show. Now NiF as a whole is very much a story about mothers and sons, so it's not surprising that Consort and Prince Jing are a Mutual Devotion Society. But it's... you know the Slytherin&Hufflepuff duos? These two are that way, and Jingmum sweetly, sincerely coaxes and manipulates her way from a low level concubine to highest consort and effectively Empress in, uh, less than two years. After having been a concubine for thirty years or so.

And she does it, obviously for her son but not on his behalf. There's no Mummy Knows Best going on; they're explicitly a team, and as long as they're together, they can withstand whatever comes. Since they've withstood the wrongful deaths of practically everyone they loved (Jingmum's adoptive brother and nephew and sister-in-law, her adoptive sister/co-wife and married nephew/step-son with his entire household), it's nothing like an empty boast. I love her, and while selenak said this could be irrespective of relevant children, I do very much love Prince Jing and his obvious love and respect for his mother: one of the only moments we see him really gloriously happy is upon being granted permission to visit his mother whenever he wants.

But if he's only thinking he wants to see his Mum more often, she's definitely awake to the political implications and advantages. Consort Jing is one of the best political minds on this extremely political show, and once she gets going you can see she never really put in an effort before this. All of it, of course, with lowered eyelids and a sweet smile, because that's how you survive your husband being omnipotent and increasingly nuts, your surviving co-wives being power-hungry and/or terrified, and your son being stubborn and incapable of misdirection.
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Consort Jing also fits my general favourite model for fictional mothers, especially in historical texts: ones who are very concerned about their children, but not necessarily every last detail of their daily lives. I adore Kunti from the Mahabharata; the Dowager Duchess of Denver from the Wimsey mysteries: mothers who are allowed to let go without being seen as abandoning, who effectively fulfill the 'distant but loving' parental role usually reserved for fathers in fiction.