ferdiath | Dictaphone’s lament retro (maybe the only one maybe not i don’t know)

Ok. First and foremost, this fic began with its peaks. Mei Fan loses the Frau Platin revue to Yachiyo. Mei Fan defeats Yachiyo at the end. That’s been the plan the whole time. The journey to get there was itself a journey (and what a journey, since I’ve been thinking about Mei Fan in some capacity since writing Past is Prologue).

The title, dictaphone’s lament, is originally the title of Past is Prologue.

I said I’d never write anything longer than my Yachiyo fic, and I lied (more than that, this is only a few thousand words shorter than the entire first dying king au, so there’s that). You can take this however you want, but Past Is Prologue is the name of the album as well as a song on the album. Dictaphone’s Lament is also a song on the album. I’m very fond of the album. I have listened to it many times. Cloud Generator is my favorite song off it. This is all kind of just explanations.

Dictaphone was a company that produced dictation machines back in the day. I don’t know what else to say. Calling it dictaphone’s lament was kind of just because frog knew the original title of the yachiyo fic.

How this fic has also spiraled into my sense of why I write, alongside the mission of writing itself, is kind of a coincidence. But I think writing is just always something I’ve done. It’s always something I’ve been doing, whether the actual stories were good or bad.

Mei Fan is a really simple character, and unlike my usual modus operandi she runs on a lot of action and choices—it’s so easy to get into the mindset of floundering around and wondering about choices and actions and consequences—it gets easy to write and easy to present. Akira and Yachiyo for certain, and Fumi in how her choices wrt Siegfeld are very frantic and clearly not overly thought out and the fact a lot of her life is the “presentation” but not realization of being over Siegfeld. Mei Fan is very “do first think later” (affectionate). Which is fun, but it’s hard for me to write in a way that feels like it’s carrying weight (i could present to you a fic of the most masterful dialogue in the world. No action just talking. And it would really do a lot, but it would feel weird for me to present without anything besides dialogue. Because y’know. We do more than just talk).

It’s weird to receive compliments about my fics carrying emotional impact. I think that’s funny. I never thought they would. I started writing this in the morning and now it’s evening and I think it’s even funnier having read (skimmed) my Very old Love Live fic again. Like.. i don’t think it’s wrong but it’s just interesting within the context of.. knowing how i have developed as a writer and then finding the space to say anything of—apparent—significance.

I think the repetition ended well. The sort of.. I forget I forget but the progression from “This story does not have a happy ending. There are no answers that are satisfactory” the the final revue’s “if you know already, you have all the answers you need.” Linear progression to knowing.

Musically this fic is hell. I don’t really listen to music that lends itself well to Mei Fan and her perspectives. Spaceman (like the song by the killers. The really silly and fun one) was kind of the initial vibe for the frau platin revue. The sort of “everybody look down/it’s all in your mind” thing.

Alongside it for vague inspiration early on was Pure Gold and creature by half alive.. they have a religious slant to their songs and creature in particular was primarily part of me conceiving of yachiyo and just sort of.. fell from there.

Agh what is there to say.. there’s a lot going on. I will never write a Yachiyo that I find particularly satisfactory.. her position here is meant to contrast Mei Fan’s, which perhaps plays into the whole thing that centers her in this—that she already knows the conclusion, and there’s sort of. No choices. Initially I leaned a lot more into the sense of “you are a fictional character with no free will” but it was a path that was really really difficult to tread meaningfully. It still skirts that way, but I kept it more understated compared to some initial ideas where Yachiyo was pretty directly like “Dude We Are Not Real??”

Alongside that, I started to get some introduction of music that is more in my range into the fic (like. The sad man stuff I use for akifumi normally). The scene of Mei Fan trying to embody the Yachiyo imagination vibe (that I’m myself borrowing from my own fic) takes a lot from an American Football song “Translate all the colors that I can't see/I think I'm in trouble/You explain why all the reds look green to me/With my nerves exposed, I can't say no” and probably My Instincts Are The Enemy would have ended up being the song I pulled the title lyric from if it weren’t for the Past Is Prologue significance. I used a lot of American Football (LP2) for the latter half of this especially. In particular “If you need me, don’t/You can’t trust a man who can’t find his way home/My impaired intuition is telling me just to give in” (I’ve Been So Lost For So Long).

I want to reach a conclusion about this fic, and I think that’s the hardest thing to do. I do not know why I wrote all of the things I wrote. Or why I wrote this at all, really, except to write it.

I don’t know if I find Mei Fan particularly relatable, or her struggle, or her journey to her conclusion in the fic. I guess (per personalitydatabases), her and I are similar, but no we’re not. Not much at all, and I don’t really see or relate personally to too much in her. Honestly maybe I used so many words because I don’t.

So I’ve accidentally created a personality crisis throughout this fic, but it’s not mine, and i wouldn’t say the conclusions are mine, either, although I don’t think they’re wrong. Mei Fan comes to a few general conclusions through the visiting portion of the fic, although she never directly states she understands them, and they influence her final conclusions.

There are goals outside of the pull of Elysion within Siegfeld (shizuha)
The stage has to exist with the group. It isn’t just one lead at the center, but the collaboration of every moving part (seiran)
Her method is okay—forward momentum is forward momentum, and the path forward is worth it even if it feels wrong and ends in failure. (Karen/Junna)
She’s Mei Fan. Not frau rubin, not the general, not anybody else (Rui)

To that end, Karen quotes two Mary Oliver poems. One directly, and one indirectly. The indirect quote comes from Goldfinches:

every year,

and every year

the hatchlings wake in the swaying branches,

in the silver baskets,

and love the world.

Is it necessary to say any more?

Have you heard them singing in the wind, above the final fields?

Have you ever been so happy in your life?

And the direct quote is from When Death Comes: “I don't want to end up simply having visited this world”. Personally, I think Karen would get a kick out of Mary Oliver. I just think she’d like her. I also think writing Karen was really fun. She’s a fair mix of humor and seriousness and I think I could get a lot from her if I wanted to—ideologically how I write her is probably the closest I can get to writing a starira character like myself in terms of seriousness and silliness. IN SHORT i think Karen would also think Swiss chard is a fish ( i hate myself for this why did i say it out loud . Banger)

Anyway back on the Mei Fan fun anyway. I don’t know if it’s directly clear the four ideals (+ akifumi’s earlier “the reason we’re all at siegfeld) molding into Mei Fan’s final ideology. Her revue intro, besides herself, contains no lines from Siegfeld students, while Yachiyo’s contrasts with a combination of herself and Akira’s. The sense of, sort of, Yachiyo embodying the role of Frau Platin and upholding the mantle of the cycle while Mei Fan moves away from it.

The implication is that every year for Frau Platin had 3 roles — Frau platin who achieves their dream, frau saphir who gives theirs up/betrays it, and a third, who becomes separated from the dream. In Fumi’s case, this is leaving Siegfeld, and in Mei Fan’s it’s remembering and re-centering her goals beyond Akira, and beyond what Frau Platin symbolically would have meant for those Akira related goals.

Yachiyo’s “only I am beloved by the stage” is reminiscent of both Nana’s similar feelings about the stage, as well as Yachiyo’s Caesar lines about being beloved by the gods—she is in both cases likened to someone given supernatural credence. The Caesar comparison is more apt, because the gods can’t save you from mortal men, and the stage can’t save you from a determined puppy.

I try and keep away from describing the stage, because it’s not natural to my writing style to describe scenery and I think it drives the pacing to a full halt, but I’ve always imagined Mei Fan’s stage control being like Karen’s in the anime—she’s not destroying the sets created by the other participants, and she herself does not have a stage set (until the end for Karen in the anime, and for Mei Fan I imagine she only manipulates the stage in the final revue). It’s indicative of Mei Fan’s whole “this is my all” thing from Dying King—quite literally this is her all, and there’s no hidden world of her mind she pulls from to manipulate the world around her. If in order to stand at center stage you have to give something of yourself, up, Mei Fan has nothing to give, and that’s why she can’t control the king’s stage in the Frau Platin revue. This.. was an idea that I pulled from Past Is Prologue. And I’ll keep on it, i guess.

“The stage bends to her will, in the way it never has to Mei Fan. But that. Mei Fan has never demanded anything of the stage. She has given everything, given all herself so willingly. Only asks what it wants to give her. Not in return, but free of the sense of obligation. She doesn’t not demand the stage, the spotlight, even if she competes for it. Even if she tries to take it. She doesn’t let it get in the way of herself. So the stage cannot demand from her the things she tries to keep from it, in exchange for brilliance.”

Inexplicably, without my realizing (like genuinely I didn’t remember this) it echoes Maya’s monologue from the anime—talking about giving something up and putting it on the line for the stage wrt claudine and then karen—so that’s a fun parallel. Per this fics logic, at the Performance Festival Yachiyo will learn Bad Life Skills in the act 6 revue.

They don’t take place in the same universe, although it’s funny I suppose, to imagine that Yachiyo thinks Mei Fan and Fumi never reconciled but actually they’ve been talking since like, the revues with Elle first started. But Past Is Prologue has a very put together Mei Fan, and a Yachiyo who doesn’t quite understand everything. But the revue for Frau Platin is the same—Mei Fan can’t manipulate the stage, Yachiyo holds Mei Fan’s cape in her hands when she wins, and she doesn’t let go of it, even when she becomes Frau Platin. There’s an internal struggle regarding the things you do have to give up to become the king.

There’s a lot within the final revue, even though it’s pretty short, all things considered (this fic is so long why did I do this). Mei Fan’s understanding, for one, and the general crux of Mei Fan’s conclusion: “So she does what she does best: pick a point in the sky, and reach it. The next step always comes after the first. She starts running.”

They’re sort of running through multiple arguments at once, which originally I was planning more connective tissue, but I didn’t follow through because there’s. Like it works. Generally, Mei Fan is keeping up with the conversations she wasn’t able to before (not understanding Akifumi earlier). Even if she never fully does, she’s understanding the King’s burden now, hence how they jump from Mei Fan leaving to the question of choice to what separates Mei Fan pretty frantically. And then her final conclusion parallels Nana’s “I hate starlight”, in a way.

I think this is the conclusion I was aiming for with Mei Fan for a while. Siegfeld’s cycle is pretty severe, and that everyone goes there for Elysion and works for Elysion creates a pretty circular system. What separates her is that she’s not tied to Elysion, she’s tied to Akira. And so with Yachiyo’s Frau Platin, she’s truly not tied to Elysion at all, because the Akira—Elysion tie is gone.

Mei Fan ends with part of her own revue speech “O king, my burning passion will create your noble path!” The line is interesting because Mei Fan isn’t creating a path for Akira, and in this case her goal is very Ferdinand von Aegir—to become better than someone in order to help support them better. To lead a path forward she has to push past Yachiyo, so she can lead the path. And in her case, the path is away from the cycle of Elysion. Yachiyo is sort of trying to perform elysion entirely on her own—i think Yachiyo having the giraffe’s sort of “unpredictable stage” vibe is interesting and she’s trying to pull it off on her own. Pull of an unparalleled stage—Elysion alone—in a sense. She’s not trying to drive the Edels away from Siegfeld, but in the sense of her tenure as Frau Platin and everything outside of the actual performance of Elysion, she’s looking to do that all on her own, basically.

Mei Fan’s end goal is essentially pushing Yachiyo off of the tread path of Elysion, even as they still tread the path of Elysion, if that makes sense. This is really the happiest ending I could think of. To add onto it another section of, say, silly stuff, or Yachiyo and Mei Fan being like. Friendly again, or Yachiyo and Mei Fan addressing their questionably stated romantic feelings or etc, none of that felt right. This is the end of it, happy or not.

The final thing, The final revue conclusion is the only time an Edel wins a revue and doesn’t say their Edel title. Frau Rubin doesn’t win, Liu Mei Fan does. Y’know?

So in conclusion this fic isn’t my identity crisis, and I’m sorry if it’s yours, and I’m sorry if you had fun or didn’t. I wrote 23,000 words about a kid struggling to find their place in a world they are told is nothing more than a collection of cycles they don’t want to be part of. I have written a collection of different coming of age stories for revue starlight. And i have no idea why, except that they’re fun stories, and people might find something in them. I think that’s silly, but I think that’s fun. It’s okay for them to exist for their own sake. Maybe

I have no idea how this reads.. it’s not even my full thoughts on everything I did in this fic. But that is what it is. I also have no idea how the fic reads. I cannot reread it. I can only get through like two or three nonlinear scenes. But that’s also done. I’m sorry for the entire ace attorney section. Some crimes can never be forgiven. holy fucking shit . anyway :)

Dictaphone’s lament retro (maybe the only one maybe not i don’t know)

no subject