FADQ #1: WHY FREDERICK AND FREDERICA?

Yevgenia Yeretskaya, 2013.

Reader: Why did you name the Prince and Princess in your Snow Queen spin-off play Frederick and Frederica? Is it for another reason than having matching names only a sound apart (masculine and feminine counterparts), or because both names mean "peaceful ruler..." or something else?
Dermark: It IS for having matching/counterpart names and ALSO for their meaning, but there's also an intertextual reference here. It happens to be a tribute to the stage version by Charles Way. (The crows were named JJ and Lil and made humans: in my version, I retained them as avian crows and gave them the names of Odin's.)
Nota bene:
Frederica: The Queen of Spring and a princess on the verge of marriage.
(JJ: Fred’s best friend and an instigator in getting him into trouble.
Lil: Princess Frederica’s best friend, but cannot tell her no.)
James Russell does well as the quirky Prince Fred. Claire Sundin as the endearing Princess Frederica, complete with temper tantrums and speech impediments.

PRINCESS FREDRICA A beautiful Princess - in love and about to get married to Prince Fredrick. Loves a giggle and having fun. Self-assured and bossy, thinks she can always have anything she wants.
FREDRICK A young Prince - “impossibly charming”. In love and about to get married to Princess Fredrica. Confident and successful with the ladies. Loves a good party. He assumes his Prince-like responsibilities.
(JJ Prince Fredrick’s best friend and secretly in love with Lily. Very proud of his rich friend - he wants to keep him happy and entertained and is always up for a laugh.
LILY Posh best friend of Princess Fredrica. A snob who means no harm. Secretly in love with JJ.)

Here are costume designs for Frederica and Fred in a Charles Way production.

Why do all the aristocratic characters in Story the Fourth speak in pentameter?

I used pentameter as a tribute to that everlasting bard that is known as William Shakespeare. Sadly, I didn't use pentameter in the Travesty of Othello, but (good news!) this springtime, hopefully, there will be a retelling in pentameter of the Travesty!

In my English-language Gustavus Adolphus, by the way, there's a narrator who speaks in pentameter alongside a prose-speaking cast. This divide, like the one between courtiers and smallfolk (the latter speak in prose, though Frederick and Gerda are unafraid of shame and manage to pull off some impressive pentameter, it's with Maria, the robber maiden, that the divide is most pronounced), is used to put some very interesting contrast, not to mention that all the descriptions of setting and costume in Story the Fourth are in prose (and in ALL CAPS as well).

Speaking of which... Why is the robber girl called Maria?

It's a tribute to the tragic heroine in Esaias Tegnér's poem Axel and Maria, a feisty and fiery dark-haired orphan tomboy able to bring down a bear or a pack of wolves, and to join the Russian Army in drag to go to war in Sweden and meet her delaying fiancé (it doesn't end well). It also sounds, like Gerda and Kai, like a more popular/less aristocratic and shorter name.

Familiar faces among the suitors... I spy Enjolras, one of your favourite male characters ever, for instance, in the queue. Still queer and über-patriotic...

That's right, I wanted to put in some of my favourite nineteenth-century male characters (minus Drummle, who is definitely the like of Joffrey and on my black list, but I put him in the queue to roast him) as failed suitors, but the three first ones, the fop, the lieutenant, and the student, are actually stock characters in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction.

There are so many references to all kinds of works outside the various versions of The Snow Queen in Story the Fourth that I fear I might only have got a few of them, such as the Little List song, here courtesy of Frederica, René Descartes, Othello and Desdemona...

That's only the tip of the iceberg. I challenge every reader of this story to a drinking game. A drink for each reference, a shot for the most obscure references. The play is rife with Easter eggs, I warn you. So some of you may plunge into an ethyl coma if they spot every single non-TSQ allusion.

We've also seen that you collect pictures and retellings of Story the Fourth, and also that you've penned a few. What draws you towards that subplot so much?

I identify with the clever princess since childhood. I'm whimsical, eccentric, intellectual, and lonely myself, as well as self-assured and good at heart, so it comes as no surprise that Frederica is a self-portrait of mine, with some Portia and some Christina Vasa thrown in for good measure. The subplot has always been a stock childhood fantasy of mine, alongside those when I am Rapunzel, Portia, and Salmacis.

To put my perchance most extreme example of Story the Fourth crossed over with The MOV and Swedish history (in a tale set in the Stormlands!), my Westeros OC Elysenne of Tarth, an ancestor of Brienne's, blurs the line between the clever princess, Portia, Christina, and me.

You even made the dreamcast, I can see. Starring Lily James or Mia Wasikowska and Richard Madden, featuring Natalia Tena as Maria...

I couldn't resist the dreamcasting. Mostly to see what the characters would look like in live action. Tena, whom I adore as Osha and Tonks, would do great as the robber girl in any Snow Queen (or Axel and Maria) adaptations.

Othello, Story the Fourth, and now the Austro-Swedish phase of the 30 Years' War as Gustavus Adolphus. What do you find about this real-life narrative that is so exciting, that drives you to wish to retell it, that gives you the passion? For Othello, it's the plot and the way it unfurls, and the fact that evil, though vanquished, has the last word. For the Andersen subplot it's these two characters who were meant to have each other and get each other. What makes you passionate about the 30YW?

The plot itself, ostensibly (at least as the Victorian POV on the war goes) the classic "freedom fighters vs. oppressive empire" story that has been told across the ages, from Moses and Ramses all the way down to Starks and Lannisters? It's already a cliché as old as time itself. What attracted me was not the dead-horse ostensible plot, but the real-life cast used in this variation of the plot, and the variations of the theme this real history makes. The mid-seventeenth century was an age of badasses. Every single warlord of those days, no matter rank, age, or nationality, was a sheer badass, on both the Imperialist and Protestant-French sides. Taste the rainbow when it comes to badass characters: there's the deeply religious aged one, the dark and aloof one, the sunny one who irradiates charm and is always passionate, the hothead who will not stop at anything to achieve his goals... And there are the casualties and the grey areas in which I depict the conflict, an echo of Westeros, and an effort to detach myself from "Good Gustavus vs. Evil Empire" manichaean 19th-century historical fiction.

Any author avatar of yours in this play (Gustavus Adolphus(? You had Cassio and then Frederica...

There is the story's narrator, in fact,

who happens to speak in pentameter.

In the original German, 'twas in rhyme

along a prose narration, like a rap.

But that rap would only in German make sense,

and thus, I changed it to pentameter

for my English translation. For my awe

for Avon's Bard is yet another cause.

A Lemony narrator, as you 'spect,

who, goddess-like, knows everything on stage,

and whose verses make my war play worthwhile.