mark_asphodel | Fic Update and Notes: "Bellflower, Chapter One"

myaru , this one's for you. Late birthday present? Anyway, it's weird. I've been working on it for months and I think I finally have it.

I think I started writing this one shortly after Challenge 002 for

fe_contest , for which I contributed a story about Yumina. I was contemplating the differences between the captivity that Maria experienced when Michalis farmed her out as a hostage (which seems to have left little to no ill effect on her) and the horrors the Grust twins went through, so I thought about exploring all the ways in which Maria might have erected defenses against, you know, the stresses of being a hostage. Her faith and her imagination were two obvious outlets for a spirited young child, and so I started with that. Then the Midia angle entered the picture; as Maria is imprisoned within Midia's own family estates, I got the idea that Maria might construct a sort of imaginary friend out of Midia, based on childhood relics left behind, and use that as part of her psychic armor against loneliness and depression. Since we know from her event conversation with Minerva in FE11 that Maria likes stories about "princes and damsels," I thought of the book of fairy tales as a means of passing time. A "princess in the tower" story was perfect, given it works as a warped reflection of Maria's own situation (and Midia's, really... they both keep requiring a rescue), and the Rapunzel story in particular tied in to some floral imagery I'd wanted to use for a while. [Rapunzel = rampion = lamb's lettuce = bellflowers. Really.]

Initially, that was it. It was a strange little 'fic-- almost a ghost story, but without an actual ghost given that Midia's not dead. But something was missing in the falling action, and I sat on it for a long time until FE12 stirred me up with all its screwiness re: the Macedonians. But recently I was examining the WIP heap and thought about restarting this, and I began digging deeper into the Rapunzel story looking for some kind of archetypical ~~bullshit~~ material to mine.

Most fairy tales have fucked-up source material. Rapunzel, aka Persinette, has fucked-up source material that makes far, far more sense than later bowdlerized adaptations. In older versions, the heroine is deeply, deeply naive but isn't totally passive... nor is she a thoughtless little fool, which she did become by the 1850s Bros Grimm adaptation. That "innocence" kind of clicked with me when combined with the "Maria Full of Grace" crap that FE12 is dishing out, and suddenly the story wasn't How Maria Copes With Imprisonment anymore, it was more like How Maria Copes With Adolescence, and loose endings from the original draft re: her siblings, Midia, and Marth all went together in a way that worked, whereas the first draft kind of just... ended.

Anyway, the first chapter is pretty tame but the second and third will require a stronger rating. It's a coming-of-age story (dammit, I hate those) and those get a little messy by nature. Maria is supposed to be about twelve years old in this, and if I'm wrong about how old she's supposed to be, oh well. If we have a canonical age for her, do let me know... her age has always bugged me because she seems so very young in BOTH wars.