[Fic] "In Death's Garden" -- The Nightingale
Authors have been revealed for the main Remix archive, and since events conspired against my attempt to write a Madness ficlet, I only have the one fic to announce. So!
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In Death's Garden (1693 words)
Fandom: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, Nattergalen | The Nightingale - Hans Christian Andersen
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Additional Tags: Remix
Summary: Death's garden is not a place one can normally reach by looking for it, though all find their way there in the end. However, sometimes when one begins to travel with no clear destination, one finds oneself in strange places. So it was with the nightingale when she slipped from the Emperor's palace in the confusion of her mechanical copy's first performance.
[Remixed from The Nightingale at Dawn by
Quillori]
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This is a slightly unusual remix for me, in that it's as much in conversation with the original canon as with the work I'm remixing. I think the only other time I did that was in 2017, when I remixed
gramarye's Haroun and the Sea of Stories fic The Monster at the End of This Book into Turn the Page (Don't Fear the Ending). Haroun and the Sea of Stories is an awfully fairy-tale/folktale influenced canon in its own right, so possibly it's just something about fairy-tales influencing the paths my mind turns down. *hands* Look, brains are weird and I overdosed on fairy-tales as a child; these are not new developments.
Anyway,
Quillori writes a lot of folktale-based, myth-based, and song-based fics, which is not my usual fannish wheelhouse. But I stuck fairy-tales in my offer this year for a reason, and was quite pleased to be matched on that criterion. I spent a week or so reading through Quillori's works, but kept circling back to The Nightingale at Dawn. The imagery in that vignette is stunning, the mood transition is incredibly deft, and I was also a super morbid child, so the mix of fairy-tales and DEATH is one that was practically hand-blended to sneak under my defenses. *wry*
So I went into the remix with the goal of echoing that mood transition, but I also wanted to do something a bit more narrative because A) extending a vignette to a thousand words is HARD and B) there was no way to do that without it turning into a lesser reflection of Quillori's work, which is not really the point of a remix. The point is to shake the component elements up until they fall into a new configuration. So I started wondering about the singing bird, and why this one note of life/change was present in the garden at all. Which led me to reread Andersen's story, at which point the related questions of "How does the nightingale know exactly what will make Death homesick for his/its garden?" and "What was the nightingale doing between escaping the palace and returning to cure the Emperor?" fit neatly together with my question about the singing bird in Quillori's fic and I had a narrative.
Then it was just writing, and also a smidge of research on traditional Chinese graveyards because I wanted to kind of blend Andersen's very European imagery (which Quillori echoed and expanded) into something a tiny bit more relevant to the Chinese setting.
...
Also, as I said in my author's note on AO3, I did a smidge of linguistic research in regard to pronouns, because the translations of Andersen's story I found online used different ones for the nightingale. To summarize, "it" would probably be the most grammatically faithful to the original, but I went with "she" for personal reasons.
If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)
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In Death's Garden (1693 words)
Fandom: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, Nattergalen | The Nightingale - Hans Christian Andersen
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Additional Tags: Remix
Summary: Death's garden is not a place one can normally reach by looking for it, though all find their way there in the end. However, sometimes when one begins to travel with no clear destination, one finds oneself in strange places. So it was with the nightingale when she slipped from the Emperor's palace in the confusion of her mechanical copy's first performance.
[Remixed from The Nightingale at Dawn by
Quillori]
-----
This is a slightly unusual remix for me, in that it's as much in conversation with the original canon as with the work I'm remixing. I think the only other time I did that was in 2017, when I remixed
gramarye's Haroun and the Sea of Stories fic The Monster at the End of This Book into Turn the Page (Don't Fear the Ending). Haroun and the Sea of Stories is an awfully fairy-tale/folktale influenced canon in its own right, so possibly it's just something about fairy-tales influencing the paths my mind turns down. *hands* Look, brains are weird and I overdosed on fairy-tales as a child; these are not new developments.
Anyway,
Quillori writes a lot of folktale-based, myth-based, and song-based fics, which is not my usual fannish wheelhouse. But I stuck fairy-tales in my offer this year for a reason, and was quite pleased to be matched on that criterion. I spent a week or so reading through Quillori's works, but kept circling back to The Nightingale at Dawn. The imagery in that vignette is stunning, the mood transition is incredibly deft, and I was also a super morbid child, so the mix of fairy-tales and DEATH is one that was practically hand-blended to sneak under my defenses. *wry*
So I went into the remix with the goal of echoing that mood transition, but I also wanted to do something a bit more narrative because A) extending a vignette to a thousand words is HARD and B) there was no way to do that without it turning into a lesser reflection of Quillori's work, which is not really the point of a remix. The point is to shake the component elements up until they fall into a new configuration. So I started wondering about the singing bird, and why this one note of life/change was present in the garden at all. Which led me to reread Andersen's story, at which point the related questions of "How does the nightingale know exactly what will make Death homesick for his/its garden?" and "What was the nightingale doing between escaping the palace and returning to cure the Emperor?" fit neatly together with my question about the singing bird in Quillori's fic and I had a narrative.
Then it was just writing, and also a smidge of research on traditional Chinese graveyards because I wanted to kind of blend Andersen's very European imagery (which Quillori echoed and expanded) into something a tiny bit more relevant to the Chinese setting.
...
Also, as I said in my author's note on AO3, I did a smidge of linguistic research in regard to pronouns, because the translations of Andersen's story I found online used different ones for the nightingale. To summarize, "it" would probably be the most grammatically faithful to the original, but I went with "she" for personal reasons.
If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)