Fic: Tools of the Trade (Lilo & Stitch, The Grand Councilwoman)

[tiamatschild.livejournal.com]

Title: Tools of the Trade
Author: tiamatschild
Fandom: Lilo & Stitch
Rating: K
Characters: The Grand Councilwoman
Summary: It’s meant to make life livable.
Notes: Written for katarik’s prompt: “Grand Councilwoman, bureaucracy”.

Tools of the Trade

The bureaucracy that wrapped around the law was built to be a tool. Or perhaps, the Grand Councilwoman occasionally thought to herself, sifting through the thousand things that needed to be done simply to run her own office, it might be more accurate to say it grew.

She knew a young mathematician from a local gas giant who made nervous noises and fluttered her long, graceful flukes when she said things like that – the poor child found it almost blasphemous, and was too polite to say so, but too young to effectively hide her shock. Give her another thousand years and she’d state her position or give nothing away with the best of them. Mmm, but perhaps it did grow, in the idle, unconscious, airily mindless way algal mats grew.

Still and all, bloated as it could occasionally be – and really, she’d worked centuries as an intern and low level diplomat and harassed legal clerk, she knew exactly how overblown it all was – it was meant to be a tool. It was there to allow many people, who came from many individual experiences, families, cultural groups, species, and galactic clusters to live peaceful, fulfilling lives to their own best potential, and the wonderful thing about it was that, when it failed to do so, when it became destructive, unthinking, a blunt instrument that punished instead of supported –

It always carried within its vast, contradictory systems and structures a way to put things right.

Comments

[katarik.livejournal.com]

Oh, I *love* this story. The last line especially is perfect for her, her patience and compassion and belief in justice and the ways she can make laws work for her given a minute to think about. Thank you so much for picking up my prompt!

[tiamatschild.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I'm glad you like it - thank you very much for the prompt, the Grand Councilwoman is one of my favorite characters, but I'd never been able to think of her in a fanfic sort of way before, so this was great fun to do.

I'm especially glad the last line works for you: one of the things that has always struck me as slightly unusual about Lilo and Stitch is the way that one of its main thematic strands is that the law is a thing that is meant to create justice and positive sociality, but that it can't do so without the moral action of sapient beings. And the Grand Councilwoman and Bubbles are totally the two characters who articulate and demonstrate that philosophy. /meta blither

[katarik.livejournal.com]

one of the things that has always struck me as slightly unusual about Lilo and Stitch is the way that one of its main thematic strands is that the law is a thing that is meant to create justice and positive sociality, but that it can't do so without the moral action of sapient beings

*Yes*. I loved this about L&S -- my mother used to practice law, so I was raised on the idea that a) lawyer ethics were strange and odd things not always based on *morality*, and b) the law is, fundamentally, a good thing. If you, individual person that you are, *make* it that way.

[tiamatschild.livejournal.com]

Oh neat - my folks are ministers, and my grandfather and aunt are social workers, so we came at it from a slightly different angle but Yes. Yes, completely. I think that's a big part of why L&S hit me so hard: it's a celebration of all things difficult and tangled and ultimately good.

[katarik.livejournal.com]

Yes yes yes -- I had a little difficult-but-necessary contact with social workers in my mid-teens, and Cobra Bubbles... oh, he was perfect and he broke my heart. I wanted to hug him and buy him a drink and thank him for doing his job so well.

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

I'd vote for her.

[tiamatschild.livejournal.com]

Golly, me too. In a heartbeat.

[curuchamion.livejournal.com]

Awwww!!!

[tiamatschild.livejournal.com]

Thanks!