[FIc] "Tiny Grass Is Dreaming (Failure To Communicate)" -- Homestuck
Today is Ladystuck Remix reveal day! I wrote two fics: my assignment and a pinch hit. I will talk about each in a separate post.
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Tiny Grass Is Dreaming (Failure To Communicate): Something about talking to Damara makes Aranea feel like all her words twist in her mouth and come out as unintelligible nonsense. She hates it. [1,500 words]
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This is my assignment, written for
feralphoenix! It is a remix of Tiny Grass Is Dreaming.
While I like the Serkets a lot within canon, I don't write or read much about them in fic. This presented a small challenge when I was trying to decide what story to remix, since they seem to be feralphoenix's favorite characters.
In the end, I took a story about Damara and her issues with language, culture shock, and Meenah, and switched it around to be mostly about Aranea, though still heavily focused on Damara (and Meenah) insofar as Aranea is using Damara and her problems as a focus for some of her own more abstract frustrations about communication and the story she's telling herself about who she is and how she fits into her society.
The original fic has a really cool text effect where all Damara's dialogue is rendered in Japanese with translations at the end, thus making her unintelligible to the reader even while she's the POV character and we're in her head. I wanted to flip that and show Aranea feeling that Damara makes her unintelligible, and reacting very badly to that sensation. My first thought was to translate her dialogue into German -- and I did go through with that in the end, but only after running through various other options that proved unsatisfactory in various ways.
You see, it's been over a decade since I regularly read or wrote anything in German, so I decided I should pick a simpler option. Like fonts. I wanted to render Aranea's dialogue in Fraktur, but that's not a font (or font family) that most people will just casually have in their browsers. So I tried to force the issue with Unicode (weirdly, Fraktur characters have Unicode symbols even though it's a font rather than a language?) but AO3 refused to recognize them. So I said argh and just ran the lines through a rot13 generator.
But the thing about rot13 is that A) it is an unpronounceable cypher rather than a language, and B) it is among the most unaesthetic things I have seen in my life. So I said argh again, and went back to my first impulse: German translation. As I said, it's been a long time, so while I hand-translated Aranea's second and fourth dialogue passages, the first and third I ran through seven different online translation programs. The results all came out wrong, of course, but with a sample size that big, the errors were in different places and I could patchwork the not-wrong bits together. (And then spend an hour trawling for idioms, because idioms. *headdesk*) I also kept the font idea via a CSS work skin that will put the lines in Fraktur if a reader has a Fraktur font installed, but will otherwise default to Papyrus (this is what I see) and then to a generic serif font. (Or at least I hope it goes to a serif font. I don't actually know CSS, anymore than I actually know html; I just google and kludge, because why not try?)
...
There are thematic reasons I went with German, beyond the whole 'I used to know the language' factor. Aranea is trying to impose her own ideas of who Damara is and should be instead of listening to what Damara tells her, and German carries a lot of negative, authoritarian baggage in the English-speaking world, because WWII. Spanish and French (or English itself, of course, if I'd been writing the fic proper in a non-English language) would also work to invoke colonialist/imperialist undertones, but that connection tends to be more intellectual: a thought upon reflection rather than a deep stereotype.
I think Latin and/or classical Greek would also have worked thematically -- they'd reinforce Aranea's intellectual snobbery very nicely -- but my friend Cat would have strangled me if I'd asked her to translate stuff on less than a week's notice, so. *wry*
Anyway, Aranea is not what I'd call a reliable observer/analyst here. She's too caught up in the blueblood savior narrative she's trying to live out, and the narratives she wants to impose on Damara-the-symbol without understanding what Damara-the-person actually needs and wants. Despite that, I hope she comes across as understandable: a girl who is trying to do good according to her (flawed) understanding of her culture's professed values, while also watering the seeds of her later canon descent into villainy.
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(And hey, if anyone has grammar and/or tone corrections for the German, I am all ears.)
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comments)
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Tiny Grass Is Dreaming (Failure To Communicate): Something about talking to Damara makes Aranea feel like all her words twist in her mouth and come out as unintelligible nonsense. She hates it. [1,500 words]
-----
This is my assignment, written for
feralphoenix! It is a remix of Tiny Grass Is Dreaming.
While I like the Serkets a lot within canon, I don't write or read much about them in fic. This presented a small challenge when I was trying to decide what story to remix, since they seem to be feralphoenix's favorite characters.
In the end, I took a story about Damara and her issues with language, culture shock, and Meenah, and switched it around to be mostly about Aranea, though still heavily focused on Damara (and Meenah) insofar as Aranea is using Damara and her problems as a focus for some of her own more abstract frustrations about communication and the story she's telling herself about who she is and how she fits into her society.
The original fic has a really cool text effect where all Damara's dialogue is rendered in Japanese with translations at the end, thus making her unintelligible to the reader even while she's the POV character and we're in her head. I wanted to flip that and show Aranea feeling that Damara makes her unintelligible, and reacting very badly to that sensation. My first thought was to translate her dialogue into German -- and I did go through with that in the end, but only after running through various other options that proved unsatisfactory in various ways.
You see, it's been over a decade since I regularly read or wrote anything in German, so I decided I should pick a simpler option. Like fonts. I wanted to render Aranea's dialogue in Fraktur, but that's not a font (or font family) that most people will just casually have in their browsers. So I tried to force the issue with Unicode (weirdly, Fraktur characters have Unicode symbols even though it's a font rather than a language?) but AO3 refused to recognize them. So I said argh and just ran the lines through a rot13 generator.
But the thing about rot13 is that A) it is an unpronounceable cypher rather than a language, and B) it is among the most unaesthetic things I have seen in my life. So I said argh again, and went back to my first impulse: German translation. As I said, it's been a long time, so while I hand-translated Aranea's second and fourth dialogue passages, the first and third I ran through seven different online translation programs. The results all came out wrong, of course, but with a sample size that big, the errors were in different places and I could patchwork the not-wrong bits together. (And then spend an hour trawling for idioms, because idioms. *headdesk*) I also kept the font idea via a CSS work skin that will put the lines in Fraktur if a reader has a Fraktur font installed, but will otherwise default to Papyrus (this is what I see) and then to a generic serif font. (Or at least I hope it goes to a serif font. I don't actually know CSS, anymore than I actually know html; I just google and kludge, because why not try?)
...
There are thematic reasons I went with German, beyond the whole 'I used to know the language' factor. Aranea is trying to impose her own ideas of who Damara is and should be instead of listening to what Damara tells her, and German carries a lot of negative, authoritarian baggage in the English-speaking world, because WWII. Spanish and French (or English itself, of course, if I'd been writing the fic proper in a non-English language) would also work to invoke colonialist/imperialist undertones, but that connection tends to be more intellectual: a thought upon reflection rather than a deep stereotype.
I think Latin and/or classical Greek would also have worked thematically -- they'd reinforce Aranea's intellectual snobbery very nicely -- but my friend Cat would have strangled me if I'd asked her to translate stuff on less than a week's notice, so. *wry*
Anyway, Aranea is not what I'd call a reliable observer/analyst here. She's too caught up in the blueblood savior narrative she's trying to live out, and the narratives she wants to impose on Damara-the-symbol without understanding what Damara-the-person actually needs and wants. Despite that, I hope she comes across as understandable: a girl who is trying to do good according to her (flawed) understanding of her culture's professed values, while also watering the seeds of her later canon descent into villainy.
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(And hey, if anyone has grammar and/or tone corrections for the German, I am all ears.)
You can also read this entry on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)