History Literature / IronWidow

The sequel, ''Heavenly Tyrant'', will be released in Spring 2024.

* AbusiveParents: Zetian's parents treat her like a possession and a possible cash cow (as concubines' families are given large payouts when they die piloting). This is why she doesn't feel bad that they'll be executed if she manages to murder Yang Guang. Zetian's father in particular, always screams at her, constantly [[SlutShaming accuses her of "fooling with boys"]] with an ever present death threat to [[HonorRelatedAbuse kill Zetian if she "shamed" them.]] He even makes a point of being as loud and volatile as possible to always keep his wife and daughters on edge for fear of his temper. He even beat up Zetian for being sad after they are initially told of his elder daughter's death.

* PoliticallyIncorrectVillain: Gao Qiu has a deep misogynistic streak, despising that Zetian is the more dominant one with Li Shimin. He accuses Zetian of purposely leading his son on and makes a point to humiliate her when she asks for his support in the media [[spoiler:by forcing her to be filmed naked.]] He also had Yizhi's mother killed for not smiling on command.

* ReadingsAreOffTheScale: Li Shimin's qi of more than 10000 certainly counts, and while we never get an exact number for Wu Zetian she's shown to be stronger than him. Before him, Qin Zheng, the strongest pilot in history, had a qi reading that straight up couldn’t be measured with the technology of his time. [[spoiler:Considering that his mech was designed to drain the female pilot, his Balanced Match would have been even stronger.]]

* RuleOfSymbolism: In the first chapter, Zetian is pondering how strictly Huaxian society maintains gender roles based on the idea that [[MarsAndVenusGenderContrast women are naturally yin and men naturally yang]], and that all of nature must be one of the two. She then spots a butterfly hatching and sees that it has one yin wing and one yang wing, making it half male and half female.

** The Silver River is described as arching "like a [[Anime/YuGiOh5Ds stardust dragon]] across the cosmos." Given that the author started out as a self-proclaimed ''Franchise/YuGiOh'' shitposter and they are fond of using the unofficial version of the book’s cover where Zetian wears a Duel Disk, this reference was most certainly intentional.

* WhatYouAreInTheDark: [[spoiler:Li Shimin discovered his brother sexually assaulting a young girl. Both of them knew that if Li tried to call for help, his brother would use his popularity with the guards to pin the crime on Li. He had the choice to ignore the crime and leave the girl to her fate. [[TakeAThirdOption He chose to kill his brother instead]], even if it meant taking up arms against his father and other brother in self-defense.]]

* WouldntHurtAChild: [[spoiler:Gao Qiu, being more aware of Zetian's personality, takes a bunch of little girls hostages when he attempts to blackmail her into making him her regent when she takes over as Empress. Zetian refuses to kill the vulnerable young girls after making it her mission to tear down their patriarchal society. ]]
* YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness:

* AMechByAnyOtherName: Here they're called Chrysalises

* TheGodsMustBeLazy: While the gods are mentioned several times as receiving sacrifices occasionally in exchange for forgotten knowledge, they're also explicitly mentioned as not getting involved in human affairs. [[spoiler:Until the end, when they decide Zetian has meddled enough and knows too many dangerous secrets, and thus needs to be blackmailed into falling in line. Even the emperor stirs from his stupor in fury when they do - the gods certainly never felt the need to contact him or offer him any sort of aid.]]

* GodGuise: [[spoiler:By the end of the book, it’s abundantly obvious that the Gods are simply technologically-advanced humans living in orbit of the planet, using Huaxia and possibly other human strongholds as a way to mine spirit metal and entertain themselves.]]

** The Vermilion Bird piloted by Li Shimin and Wu Zetian.[[labelnote:*]]Interestingly Vermillion Bird breaks the ThemeNaming, as the historical Wu Zetian was never Tang Taizong's Empress, nor was Tang Taizong the founding Emperor of his Dynasty.[[/labelnote]]
** and finally The Yellow Dragon, piloted in the past by the legendary Emperor-General [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Shi_Huang Qin Zheng]].

* DarkSecret: Huaxia society fully believes that the sacrifice of concubines to the mechas is just the way the world works. [[spoiler:The true structure is devastatingly simple: the military ensures that girls with low qi power are always paired with boys of high qi power. The girls quickly get consumed during the battle, which the military can easily claim is just because she's a woman rather than any manipulation on their part. The status quo and hierarchy of the system continues unchallenged, with thousands of girls dead to maintain it.]] The last third of the book reveals how much worse it is: [[spoiler:Not only does the military pair low qi girls with high qi boys, the mechas are also deliberately designed so that the female pilot seat draws more qi from the user than the male pilot seat, which draws less power and has stronger control inputs. The logic being that men would be less likely to volunteer if they thought there would be an equal opportunity for them to die compared to their female pilots, and it was decided it was more important for the men to return alive anyway. For a woman to survive this situation, she actually has to have stronger qi than her male pilot counterpart, which is why the match-pairing is so rare. The women are set up to die, the survivors are flukes.]]

* DescentIntoAddiction: By the time Zetian meets Li Shimin, the pressures of the military and deaths around him have driven him into a deep alcoholism. [[spoiler:An addiction intentionally inflicted by the military to ensure Li would be easier to control.]]

* PublicityStuntRelationship: Zetian and Li Shimin know that their status as [[TradingBarsForStripes press-ganged]] mecha pilots is precarious, so to make themselves too famous to dispose of, they sign a media contract that promotes them as a BattleCouple of [[EvilIsSexy darkly alluring anti-heroes]][[invoked]]. They do end up in a real relationship, but keep that part private.

* BullyingTheDragon: [[spoiler:Gao Qiu genuinely thinks he can get a seat at Wu's new reign as Empress by blackmailing Wu with the footage of him forcing her to undress for him. Yizhi is quick to disabuse him of the notion.]]

* DescentIntoAddiction: By the time Wu meets Li Shimin, the pressures of the military and deaths around him have driven him into a deep alcoholism. [[spoiler:An addiction intentionally inflicted by the military to ensure Li would be easier to control.]]

* TheGentlemanOrTheScoundrel: Wu's primary love triangle involves her attraction for the loyal, sweet Yizhi versus the dangerous, powerful, and deadly Li Shimin. This is gradually subverted as Yizhi and Shimin prove to be not that different and [[spoiler:the three of them ultimately realize [[{{Polyamory}} they all love each other]].]]

[[caption-width-right:350:''You've been living a dream for long enough. Welcome to your nightmare!'']]
%%

* ForcedAddiction: The convicted murderer Li Shimin is [[TradingBarsForStripes forced to serve as a mech pilot]] due to his vast spiritual energy, but spends the rest of his time drinking heavily in his cell. Zetian and Yizhi eventually learn that he was {{force fe|eding}}d alcohol to the point of addiction in order to control him, so they get him into treatment, kidnap the government agent responsible, and [[KarmicDeath drown him in liquor]].

* BittersweetEnding: [[spoiler:When Zetian returns to the battle site to recover Shimin's body, she is informed by Qieluo that the Gods have taken him. Shortly after, Yizhi contacts her completely devastated and tells her the AwfulTruth: humanity aren't the invaded, they're the invaders. The hunduns have only been fighting back this whole time. The book ends as the Gods contact Zetian directly, revealing that they have what remains of Shimin on a life support and then threatening to kill him if Zetian doesn't obey them from now on. However, considering how far Zetian is willing to go to liberate women from tyranny, you have to wonder if the Gods' gambit will work for very long and she still has the power over humanity.]]

* AgonyOfTheFeet: Huaxia practices footbinding and Zetian herself has bound feet. In her case, it's bad enough that she needs a cane or wheelchair to get around, and she's always in pain from them: when she and Shimin start sharing memories due to their bond and he experiences it for himself, he compares it to walking on knives. How she got them is an example of this in itself: when she was five her grandmother made her run across a frozen lake barefoot, then took a hammer to her feet.

** Ma Xiuying, the female pilot of the Black Tortoise, is nothing but kind and supportive towards Zetian during their first meeting, encouraging her to see other points of view and later on urging her to make up with her abusive family. [[spoiler: But during the battle to take back the Zhou-province, her and her co-pilot attack the Vermillion Bird under the military's orders, which leads to Shimin dying and the Bird being destroyed. When Zetian has the Black Tortoise at her mercy, Xiuying tries to avoid her revenge by revealing that her children are being held hostage by the military, only to shatter any sympathy this has given her from Zetian by threatening her right after.]]

* BullyingTheDragon: [[spoiler: Gao Qiu genuinely thinks he can get a seat at Wu's new reign as Empress by blackmailing Wu with the footage of him forcing her to undress for him. Yizhi is quick to disabuse him of the notion.]]

** Zetian also counts: being a girl from a frontier village, her entire family is cruel towards her, with her father being physically and verbally abusive, her mother being complicit and excusing her husband's behavior, and her grandmother having been the one to enforce Zetian's [[AgonyOfTheFeet foot-binding]]. [[spoiler: When she kills them near the end of the book in her assault on Chang'an, she notes that she feels no regret about it whatsoever.]]

* DarkSecret: Huaxia society fully believes that the sacrifice of concubines to the mechas is just the way the world works. [[spoiler:The true structure is devastatingly simple: the military ensures that girls with low qi power are always paired with boys of high qi power. The girls quickly get consumed during the battle, which the military can easily claim is just because she's a woman rather than any manipulation on their part. The status quo and hierarchy of the system continues unchallenged, with thousands of girls dead to maintain it.]] The last third of the book reveals how much worse it is: [[spoiler: Not only does the military pair low qi girls with high qi boys, the mechas are also deliberately designed so that the female pilot seat draws more qi from the user than the male pilot seat, which draws less power and has stronger control inputs. The logic being that men would be less likely to volunteer if they thought there would be an equal opportunity for them to die compared to their female pilots, and it was decided it was more important for the men to return alive anyway. For a woman to survive this situation, she actually has to have stronger qi than her male pilot counterpart, which is why the match-pairing is so rare. The women are set up to die, the survivors are flukes.]]

* TheGentlemanOrTheScoundrel: Wu's primary love triangle involves her attraction for the loyal, sweet Yizhi versus the dangerous, powerful, and deadly Li Shimin. This is gradually subverted as Yizhi and Shimin prove to be not that different and [[spoiler: the three of them ultimately realize [[{{Polyamory}} they all love each other]].]]

* TheGodsMustBeLazy: While the gods are mentioned several times as receiving sacrifices occasionally in exchange for forgotten knowledge, they're also explicitly mentioned as not getting involved in human affairs. [[spoiler: Until the end, when they decide Zetian has meddled enough and knows too many dangerous secrets, and thus needs to be blackmailed into falling in line. Even the emperor stirs from his stupor in fury when they do - the gods certainly never felt the need to contact him or offer him any sort of aid.]]

* TheGreatWall: It’s a story based on ancient China, of course it features a Great Wall. However, the term is mostly propaganda - the wall consists mainly of railway lines, and while sections of huge, solid fortifications certainly exist, they’re only a small fraction of the Wall, and used to block off valleys and the like that would otherwise serve as entry points for Hundun attacks.

* HonorRelatedAbuse: An ever present threat: if girls are disgraced through pre-marital sex or raped, their families will kill them by drowning them in pig pens. Which gives Zetian a massive negative association with sex, she knows her family would literally kill her.
* HugeGuyTinyGirl: WordOfGod puts Zetian's and Shimin's heights at 5'2" and 6'5" respectively, made more dramatic by Shimin being quite muscular compared to Zetian.

** [[spoiler: Yizhi doctors a photo so Wu Zetian can make An Lushan think that they have taken his son hostage to force him to talk.]]
** [[spoiler: The military uses Ma Xiuying's children in order to force her and her husband into attacking and destroying the Vermilion Bird.]]
** [[spoiler: The Sages attempt to pull this to save themselves from Zetian's RoaringRampageOfRevenge by keeping her family hostage. Unfortunately for them, Zetian's parents are AbusiveParents while her brother is just as bad as her father, so it doesn't work.]]
** [[spoiler: In the epilogue the Gods kidnap Shimin's mangled body out of the remains of the Vermillion Bird and blackmail Zetian to comply with them or lose Shimin for good.]]

* KingInTheMountain: Yang Guang talks about the only known Emperor class pilot towards the beginning of the book, and how the Emperor is believed to still be alive behind enemy lines but dormant, awaiting the cure to a disease that was killing him. [[spoiler: This is completely true. Zetian uses a vaccine injector and her knowledge of current events to gain the emperor's compliance. The fact that he doesn't seem to be entirely coherent after 200+ years in stasis helps. She's worried that as he becomes more lucid and starts having a better understanding of his situation, she'll lose her leverage over him. However, said Emperor class pilot, Qin Zheng is rather displeased at pilots no longer being rulers and goes along with Zetian's plan to take over using the Yellow Dragon to annihilate the government and military command.]]

* MassOhCrap: When the other pilots see the Yellow Dragon, they are elated. [[spoiler: Only for it to quickly change to fear when they realize that Zetian is also piloting with the legendary Emperor-class pilot...after the Black Tortoise acted on orders to have her and Li Shimin killed.]]

* ParentalFavoritism: Zetian's parents adore her brother the most to the point of selling her older sister and herself to secure ''his'' future. Zetian has memories of her parents lovingly telling her brother stories while Zetian doesn't have a space to herself. [[spoiler: She has her feelings confirmed when the government attempts to hold her family hostage to stop her from razing them to the ground. Her parents try to bargain for her brother's life, hitting her that they had the capacity to love and protect. They just chose not to love her nor her sister.]]

* PoliticallyIncorrectVillain: Gao Qiu has a deep misogynistic streak, despising that Zetian is the more dominant one with Li Shimin. He accuses Zetian of purposely leading his son on and makes a point to humiliate her when she asks for his support in the media [[spoiler: by forcing her to be filmed naked.]] He also had Yizhi's mother killed for not smiling on command.

** [[spoiler: The book's finale has Zetian and Yizhi doing this for real. With the help of the Yellow Dragon, Zetian razes the empire to the ground destroying the old power structures one by one with the goal of taking over once everything is in ruins.]]

** Li Shimin, before the book starts (though his mother was dead long before the murder happened). [[spoiler: In Li Shimin's case, the murder was because his brother was an unapologetic rapist, and his family attacked him afterwards and he defended himself.]]
** [[spoiler: Wu Zetian orphans herself on purpose: not only because her family never valued her, but to keep any lingering attachment to her blood relatives from being used against her at an inconvenient time, after two subsequent attempts at exactly that by the military/government she's in the process of destroying. She mashes her family and the military officials attempting to hold them hostage with the claw of her mecha.]]
** [[spoiler: Yizhi kills his father using the shoulder and arm pieces of Zetian's spirit metal armor to shoot his father dead with lightning when Gao Qiu attempts to humiliate Zetian by exposing his blackmail on her to Yizhi. Yizhi immediately takes control of his father's forces and Gao Enterprises to force them to submit to Zetian.]]

* ShootTheShaggyDogStory: [[spoiler: Li Shimin killed his brother, his brother's friends and his own family to defend a girl that his brother was raping. The girl's family drowned her for getting raped.]]

* TreacherousAdvisor: [[spoiler: Sima Yi, who had supported the Vermilion Bird and acted as a mentor to them, had no issue with the Black Tortoise killing them on the military's orders.]]

* WhatYouAreInTheDark: [[spoiler: Li Shimin discovered his brother sexually assaulting a young girl. Both of them knew that if Li tried to call for help, his brother would use his popularity with the guards to pin the crime on Li. He had the choice to ignore the crime and leave the girl to her fate. [[TakeAThirdOption He chose to kill his brother instead]], even if it meant taking up arms against his father and other brother in self-defense.]]

* WouldntHurtAChild: [[spoiler: Gao Qiu, being more aware of Zetian's personality, takes a bunch of little girls hostages when he attempts to blackmail her into making him her regent when she takes over as Empress. Zetian refuses to kill the vulnerable young girls after making it her mission to tear down their patriarchal society. ]]

* {{Animesque}}: As unabashedly detailed in the “Bonus Summary for Weebs,” the author took a LOT of influence from various anime in writing ''Iron Widow''.
* ApocalypseHow: A class 2, planetary and societal collapse--the hundun attacks destroyed society as people knew it thousands of years ago, and it was only rebuilt when the gods granted humanity the knowledge of how to turn the corpses of Prince-class hunduns into Chrysalises. [[spoiler: Or at least, that’s what the people have been told.]]

** [[spoiler: Senior Strategist An Lushan, who spends almost the entire book hounding Zetian and Shimin out of a petty grudge because Shimin beat up two of his star pilots. Even worse, he's later revealed to have forced Shimin into becoming an alcoholic in order to have absolute control over him and he's one of the few people who know that the pilot system is rigged against girls. He's also a misogynist and an overly petty greedy jerk. His torture and eventual death through Zetian and Shimin is possibly one of the most satisfying moments in the book.]]
* AwesomeMomentOfCrowning: Shimin and Zetian's "Match Crowning" is done as a publicity stunt, and oh man do they ''deliver.''

* BewareTheNiceOnes: Yizhi is a pleasant and charming young man, but it's clear that he has a dark side deep down: he coldly stands up to Li Shimin when trying to convince him to sober up (even yanking on his leash to drag him down to eye level), and when he watches the tape of [[spoiler: Zetian and Li Shimin interrogating, torturing, and murdering An Lushan]], Zetian notes that Yizhi doesn't even blink.
* BewareTheQuietOnes: By all accounts, Li Shimin was a gentle scholar and artist, on the track of a pristine academic career. [[spoiler: Then he caught his brother raping a young girl.]] He proceeded to murder his brothers and father, permanently cementing himself as a family killer to the world.

** Yang Guang, the pilot who killed Zetian's big sister at first acts so gentlemanly and kind towards her that Zetian begins to have doubts over whether her hatred of him is justified and whether or not it's possible that her big sister really did die in a terrible accident like the brass claims. But when she's forced to pilot with him, she sees into his mind - and it turns out not only ''did'' Guang kill her sister, she wasn't even the first of his concubines he killed outside of battle.

* BittersweetEnding: [[spoiler: When Zetian returns to the battle site to recover Shimin's body, she is informed by Qieluo that the Gods have taken him. Shortly after, Yizhi contacts her completely devastated and tells her the AwfulTruth: humanity aren't the invaded, they're the invaders. The hunduns have only been fighting back this whole time. The book ends as the Gods contact Zetian directly, revealing that they have what remains of Shimin on a life support and then threatening to kill him if Zetian doesn't obey them from now on. However, considering how far Zetian is willing to go to liberate women from tyranny, you have to wonder if the Gods' gambit will work for very long and she still has the power over humanity.]]

--> '''Father''': I bet you would love it if we rotted here in this frontier slum! If we were first to be crushed when the Hunduns break through the Wall!
--> '''Zetian''': ''Yes, and what of it?''

--> '''Zetian''': Don't pretend like any of you ever saw me as anything but a tool! You were all fine with selling me as a concubine to Yang Guang, ''who really did murder Big Sister, by the way.'' I shared a mental link with him - I confirmed it! None of this would've happened if you had just cherished us, so the consequences are yours to deal with!

** Oh boy, ''does Li Shimin have one''. [[spoiler: Due to being half-Rongdi, he was discriminated against by people despite being a gentle and artistic boy. After discovering his brother raping a girl (who happened to be one of the only people who was nice to him), he chose to murder his brothers, and included his father in the body count when he tried to stop him. After being put on death row, he was recruited into the military instead due to his powerful qi, given a forced addiction to alcohol to make him more controllable, caused the deaths of many female pilots due to his qi overpowering them, and the only one of his fellow pilots who genuinely connected to him died.]]

** Even Yizhi has one, though because he's not mind-connected like Shimi and Zetian, we don't see it directly, and he doesn't like to talk about it. [[spoiler: His mother was a maidservant who was killed by Gao Qiu for [[DisproportionateRetribution not smiling enough at a dinner party.]] He was raised in wealth and privilege, but with a price: his father had him forcibly tattooed to show that he is "part of the family", and given that his dad is basically this universe's Harvey Weinstein, there's definitely more to his backstory than he wants to let on.]]
* DarkSecret: Huaxia society fully believes that the sacrifice of concubines to the mechas is just the way the world works. [[spoiler: The true structure is devastatingly simple: the military ensures that girls with low qi power are always paired with boys of high qi power. The girls quickly get consumed during the battle, which the military can easily claim is just because she's a woman rather than any manipulation on their part. The status quo and hierarchy of the system continues unchallenged, with thousands of girls dead to maintain it.]] The last third of the book reveals how much worse it is: [[spoiler: Not only does the military pair low qi girls with high qi boys, the mechas are also deliberately designed so that the female pilot seat draws more qi from the user than the male pilot seat, which draws less power and has stronger control inputs. The logic being that men would be less likely to volunteer if they thought there would be an equal opportunity for them to die compared to their female pilots, and it was decided it was more important for the men to return alive anyway. For a woman to survive this situation, she actually has to have stronger qi than her male pilot counterpart, which is why the match-pairing is so rare. The women are set up to die, the survivors are flukes.]]
* DeathByIrony: [[spoiler: An Lushan forced alcoholism onto Li Shimin to make him more controllable by the military. He's killed by Li Shimin, who waterboards and drowns him with liquor.]]
* DescentIntoAddiction: By the time Wu meets Li Shimin, the pressures of the military and deaths around him have driven him into a deep alcoholism. [[spoiler: An addiction intentionally inflicted by the military to ensure Li would be easier to control.]]

* DracoInLeatherPants: In-universe, this is how Zetian and Shimin market themselves to gain popularity: As two attractive criminals who are on a path to redemption.

* EarthAllAlong: [[spoiler: ''Inverted.'' The book's final moments reveal that the story has never been set on Earth. The gods that "rebuilt" humanity gave them a new planet: the Hundun's planet.]]

* FeministFantasy: The author described it as 400 pages of female rage conducted through giant mechas. Huaxian society oppresses and commodifies women, even killing concubines to use as power sources for mecha. Zetian not only manages to reverse this onto the pilot who killed her sister, she becomes determined to find out why the system works this way to save other women from the same fate. In the process, she crashes through everyone’s attempts to manipulate or restrain her because the threat her gender poses them, [[TheReasonYouSuckSpeech furiously calls out]] representatives of Huaxia’s misogynistic power structures (and gets to kill some of them), and ultimately [[spoiler:becomes Empress of Huaxia by sheer force, having become impossible to oppose by virtue of piloting the unstoppable Yellow Dragon and having taking Qin Zheng himself as her subordinate concubine-pilot.]]
* Fiction500: Yizhi's father, Gao Qiu, is an entertainment mogul worth over a billion yuan (the in-universe currency). In fact, WordOfGod describes Yizhi's in-universe "superpower" as simply being rich. Lampshaded when Sima Yi and Yizhi try to rescue Zetian and Shimin from being tributed and break through a group of soldiers.
-->'''Sima Yi''': You can't shoot me, I'm from Central Command!\\
'''Yizhi''': You can't shoot me, I'm rich!

** It’s mentioned that, in addition to spirit metal, the Gods also take girls as offerings. Nobody knows why or what happens to them.

--> '''Zetian''': I swear, people cannot make up their minds about who is supposed to be the clueless infants in need of constant supervision: men or women.

The sequel, ''Iron Widow 2: Heavenly Tyrant'', will be released in spring 2024.