dogwood's bloom post-script

[ferdiath]

 OKAY HOLY SHIT I genuinely need to write this retrospective (for the first chapter) bc it’ll drive me insane if I don’t.

I forget the exact timing but basically—bear is dumb and stupid—I finished a fic and said “holy shit I need to take a break from writing desperately.” So I set down to do a solid month of just consuming and reading and just. Enjoying and immediately fucked it up by trying to catch up on the Paris Review and stumbling across an excerpt from The Stumble by David Adjmi, which is a really cool play setup where Oscar Levant is retelling something from his life/past and there’s this sort of self-aware in time but out of it energy to the whole thing. I can’t quite describe the vibe but it’s delightfully fun and I enjoy it so much. - I am of the opinion that paying for something like the Paris Review is pointless unless you’re someone like me who really really wants to, but if you wanted to read something from the paris review you could. Get it from me your friend, or like, stumble on my login info from me messaging it to you and get it that way, y’know? It’s really interesting but it’s also an expensive pretentious quarterly literary magazine basically. But the Adjmi piece is so interesting and I want to read/see the full play (I want to see it but won’t feel comfortable going to a theater for a while—also I don’t know when where it’s being performed—so reading is the next option I would have I suppose).

The format gets shifted, obviously, because Levant talks to the audience as a way to separate himself from his memories, and eventually it became less about Fumi sitting in her memories and more about Fumi being haunted by something that appears like a memory, or a memory she has control over based on her own desires (or parts of her mind working against her desires). I think it would have been really interesting to match the format more precisely, but I was less interested in that. Anyway this fic has existed as a collection of scenes for a WHILE. June is the earliest scene I could find but I’ve been cleaning out my phone’s history so I don’t know when I first wrote...the first scene in my phone. But June is when I reached the second half of the fic idea, and June is also when I actually made the google doc it’s drafted in.

Ummmmmm god this fic is a mess. It’s felt very disconnected from anybody else understanding it since I’ve written it. Froggy gets it, but honestly we have been on the same wavelength regarding starira for a while so maybe if you’re not me or froggy it’s just gibberish. I like to play into Fumi’s self-hatred a lot, especially in this specific period between Siegfeld and Rinmeikan, where she’s planning to give up standing on stage forever. I also wanted to play a lot into stuff that has really been building for a while across my writing (even though most of my stories are standalone, I think if you read everything together you get a big feel for a lot of consistent and concurrent major themes). Fumi and Akira’s joint relationship to the throne, their inability to treat each other as anything other than work partners basically (even though both of them imply they saw it as genuine friendship—Akira more directly and Fumi more indirectly or implying more that she wanted a more genuine friendship maybe, at least in how I present it), their projection through the stage and performances, as well as both of their feelings regarding Fumi leaving Siegfeld and death (and how often I equate the two).

This is the first fic I have used the angst tag on. That’s because this is just very genuinely meant to suck. My desperate desire for validation has recognized that, because I’m unlikely to get a lot of validation on one fic for a while, if I get little bits and bits of validation on a lot of fics, that is roughly equivalent. ALSO and more importantly I am aggressively determined to finish as many of my drafts (or else announce them UNFINISHABLE) in the next month or so. This is. A tall order but it is one I am determined on).

Hmmm I can’t say much. As I write more I feel like I am more and more just expanding foundations that are present throughout my fics. The two references for the text are the final scene (iirc) of medea (Tragedy), with Fumi as Medea and Akira as Jason, and then Hrothgar’s eulogy for Aeschere from Beowulf. Heaney’s soulmate line was the most overtly romantic I had, as I remember, and the specific lines are.. I’m so sorry for this I love old english.

Ne frīn þū æfter sǣlum;              sorh is genīwod       
Denigea lēodum.                         Dēad is Æschere,
Yrmenlāfes                                 yldra brōþor,
mīn rūn-wita                              ond mīn rǣd-bora,
eaxl-gestealla,                           ðonne wē on orlege
hafelan weredon,                       þonne hniton fēþan,,
eoferas cnysedan.                      Swylc scolde eorl wesan,
æðeling ǣr-gōd,                        swylc Æschere wæs!

(1323-1329)

The Heaney’s has the most overtly vague romantic implications, whereas the others focus in more on Aeschere as an advisor to Hrothgar. I like this ambiguity not just because it’s interesting just textually, but also in terms of the ambiguity of Akira and Fumi’s relationship to each other. I don’t write them as having been dating, but they occupy a sort of mediary space. Hrothgar’s specific wordings are mīn rūn-wita, meaning his confidant “privy councillor” per the Bosworth Toller dictionary, and rǣd-bora, also translates to something like counselor, but holds more widespread use (the only existence of rūn-wita seems to be within Beowulf(?)). Rūn on it’s own refers to something like whispered secrets, while wita is another word for sage/counselor. “Whispered counselor” or “secrets counselor” implying a sort of personal, “behind-closed-doors” relationship—per my professor at college’s explanations and interpretations. I trust him I did research under him for two years. Good guy. Very scatterbrained.

Essentially the best literal translation of the word would be secret-keeper.. which is like. Who are you AS A MAN to be telling someone else your secrets. This isn’t about the fic anymore Hrothgar’s a gay homo gay man.

This is a weird linguistic journey I’m bothering with for no reason. Anyway, the point is. Well honestly the point is stylistically Michiru would fit more with the implied relationship between Hrothgar and Aeschere, but Michiru hasn’t abandoned Siegfeld, so it’s hard for Akira to mourn her and have it mean anything. And the ambiguity, between reading rūn-wita as just another word for counselor or one for a sort of non-political confidant—you know, a friend or something.

Anyway. Okay. That aside. So there’s that eulogy, there’s Beowulf, and then two lines I needed specifically that don’t come from anything and I just imply are real plays. I am fond as always of intertextuality between both the works I write and those I draw from, and I am always drawing from stuff.

A lot of Fumi’s ideology was molded and adjusted by arcana updates, the way Ichie refers to her performances at Rinmeikan as “playing on a scab” left from Siegfeld, and specifically referencing Fumi as watching Akira directly before talking about her watching Shiori—essentially Akira being second (logically) to Fumi’s sister in terms of the importance and the looking and so forth. The game has multiple times essentially insisted that next to Shiori herself Akira is the one who suffered the most from Fumi’s departure (stranded stage girls, the way she’s the one who can bond with Shiori about Fumi’s departure, etc etc etc), but Ichie’s comments in her revue with Fumi imply that’s not just a one-sided holy shit Akira’s gay (who are you AS A FRAU PLATIN to care about someone dropping out of Siegfeld), but Fumi’s longing for Siegfeld and for Siegfeld’s stage has to be at least partially a longing for Akira, in a sense. Fumi essentially never wanted to leave Siegfeld behind, but felt she couldn’t and/or didn’t deserve to stand on stage anymore, and forced herself to leave. It’s reasonable to believe she would still want that back, still miss the things she is denying herself.

So. hallucination. Or are they ? :] I’ll get back to you on that one. It was fun. I’m sorry for using the angst tag I’ll never do it again. More people need to write Akifumi fics we have to overtake mayakuro. We only need. Hundreds more to get there.