A rather silly and somewhat strange retelling of the Hans Christian Andersen story.
Originally printed in the 2017 Advent calendar Once Upon 24 Times and owing much to Hans Christian Andersen. And CLAMP. And Kunihiko Ikuhara. And Pink Floyd. And Genesis. And William Shakespeare. And Michael Ende. And Günter Grass. And Julio Cortázar. The list is endless.
Last year, I had the Fairytale Tarot by Lisa Hunt given to myself as an encouragement gift, right before Christmas (Spanish edition, published by Editorial Sirio). And I had the idea to let 2017's Advent Calendar be based upon the premise of drawing a card of the day from that deck and retelling the tale as a fic, a story with original characters of mine, or a poem.
It turned out to be a most pleasant surprise. Many bunnies from my old bunny farm came back, all of them pêle-mêle, thanks to that impetus.
Including the one for an Enjoltaire Snow Queen AU. A bunny which had been lying dormant for years, like a puzzle whose pieces I was struggling to put into place: Enj as Gerda and R as Kai, first things first: Grantaire is the realist at best and cynic at worst, dark-haired, stubbly, more muscular one (making him the more masculine-looking one) and he struggles with addiction but still has Enj for a guiding star and redeeming factor... Enjolras looks distinctly girly, with long golden hair, and a slender waist and limbs, and is dressed in scarlet, just like Gerda (most illustrators and character or costume designers have her wear red to symbolise the warmth of her feelings; the icing of the cake is the royal velvet ensemble in Christian Birmingham's illustrations, trimmed and frogged with golden soutaches making her look even more Enjolraic)!
You see what I mean?
And here we can see her with Kai
And most surely Marius and Cosette as the Prince and Princess. A better-looking dark-haired bohemian and his fiancée-young wife; also, my straight OTP to mirror my queer OTP in the leading cast. And the Mariusette pairing arc in canon also mirrors the Fourth Story subplot of the fateful test-interview (not to mention Shakespeare's Portia, which was most likely the inspiration for Andersen!). The hair colour of the princess is something that fluctuates between adaptations: Christian Birmingham made her a brainy brunette, for instance, Edmond Dulac gave her powdered hair, and in the Atamanov film and Manuel Sumberac illustrations, she is a ginger. Fair nutbrown, like caffè latte, in The Fairytaler. But there are versions, like the Elspethdixon fic or the Nicki Raven retelling, or the illustrations by Sanna Annukka or Enrique Bernárdez or Rie Cramer (below), in which she is golden-haired or Titian-haired, as a young adult Gerda to her prince's young adult Kai -and of course Cosette may be the straight Enjolras to Marius's straight Grantaire!
Sanna Annukka
Enrique Bernárdez
Rie Cramer
The next piece fell into place the winter before the AU was published (2016), as I did the FutureLearn MOOC course "Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales", and had a chat with a French coursemate of mine. Our chat went on something like this:
- Going back to the Robber girl...is it just me or does she remind anybody of Gavroche in Les Miserables or rather the depiction of Gavroche on Delacroix's painting "liberty leading the people",where, just like the robber girl, he brandishes his two pistols ?
...or maybe that is just me being far too French..
Sandra Elena Dermark Bufi
Yes, she reminds me of both Éponine and Gavroche.
True, she has Eponine's plucky personality too !
Sandra Elena Dermark Bufi
And she renounces to Kai to let him have his Gerda, much like Éponine when it comes to Marius (only that, unlike Éponine and the Little Mermaid, the Robber Girl does not sacrifice her own life).
Emma Robertson 24 NOV
Okay, I have to see Les Miserables now!
And from that moment on, I had cast the robber maiden in my Enjoltaire fusion. The icing on the cake is that the Thénardier girl is the spitting image of the dark-featured robber maiden!
With her Maman as the robber woman and the rest of the Patron-Minette as the other brigands.
Christian Birmingham
Anastasia Arkhipova
I felt that I had left 'Ponine to deal with the korrigans and not given Enj enough demanding tasks by means of having him run thrice around the fort. So the thorn bush came in handy; it also echoed Sleeping Beauty and added more symbolism of warmth and blood to the story and to Enj's character arc in both canon and this Snow Queen fusion.
Rie Cramer
Angela Barrett -- this illustration inspired A LOT of the Enjonine chapter
But still something seemed to be amiss. It took yet another year to realise that the original Andersenian Snow Queen was not the right villainess for the story.
I had the bunny for a Snow Queen Enjoltaire AU just like this one since long ago. Including whom to cast as the prince and princess, and the robber maiden (some unrequited, one-sided Enjonine, aside from obvious Mariusette!): I knew exactly how they would fit into the grand scheme of things (ie Cosette, Marius, and the Thénardier family). As well as the whole "Enj is Gerda and R is Kai" thing, and not the other way around, knowing who was the most feminine and the most masculine of the two (and, the icing on the cake: Enj is a blond in scarlet, while R has this addiction...). This classic adventure story fit this pairing, just like it fit Jaimienne, like a glove. Et voilà, it became my first Enjoltaire, and my first Mizzie, story EVER!! I figured out how to fit most of the Les Mis characters into it, for one thing. That bunny took a while to star the Green Faery as the titular villainess (I must clarify she is not my OC, but still she is the Green Faery from Moulin Rouge, with a dash of Lady of the Green Kirtle; while the Mizzie characters look as they do in the musical film of 2012... except for Enj's hairstyle: that long golden queue is from the WMT anime and the manga by Arai, aside from the SunNeko Lee manga! And I am as weak for men in low ponytails as for Enjoltaire... In the animated version, all the characters would be just like in the anime Shoujo Cosette or the Arai manga, but the Green Faery would look like Alala in Pichi Pichi Pitch!).
Alala - though I imagine her as older and larger, though with the same Perky Female Minion personality!
An illustration of a frozenhearted Perlino (in canon, like in this illustration, he looks far more like Enj than R, but no matter)
Also, the effect of the intoxicant, including the withdrawal symptoms, is that of rauha. I just adore this take on the fairytale sleeping-draught and thought of absinthe with rauha... There are also "Goblin Market" references in the form of that bloodstained awakening kiss... and Rossetti's poem, the third fairytale that inspired me for this AU, is also one of the great Victorian fairytales concerning drug addiction and sacrificial love, starring a queer couple (Laura and Lizzie, said to be "sisters," and living under the same roof; but, just like the "sibling" bond of Gerda and Kai, or Enj and R for that matter, this may rather be referring to moirallegiance). The final releasing kiss, that thaws the frozen heart, and much of the scene there I paraphrased in prose from "Goblin Market", in particular from this illustration (just think these two are Enj and R, hair colour obvious, and not Lizzie and Laura respectively)!
The potion being made from the villainess's blood and trapping the antihero in an addiction-fueled toxic relationship is from the cautionary tale "La adormidera" in the collection La vida de las flores, another of my sources. The story being a cautionary tale, however, ends in a far more tragic fashion - unlike Kai or Laura, Martín has no one to look after him and save his life, and he dies of an overdose.
From the MOOC, I also took another Andersenian element that I mentioned as being echoed by Oscar Wilde in my comments, the painful ordeal of embracing a thornbush: As for the barren thornbush that blossoms when watered with heart's blood once a loving character's chest is pushed against the thorns...
That qualifying test of warming the thornbush had always been a poignant image, all the way since childhood. Jacob Böggild, the educator on the MOOC, gave the following analysis of the qualifying test of the thorns:
[···] contains several of the basic components of the folk tale.
[···] initiates a quest to get [···] back. Before being able to meet and fight [···] adversary, [···] must overcome a number of obstacles.
Firstly, in order to acquire information about which way to go, [···] must [···] and then warm up the thorn bush with heart blood.
But the story is also a psychological allegory; an allegory about what one could call the work of mourning.
[···] mental pain is then translated into physical pain by the thorns which draw blood.
And I replied to Böggild: "as for the thorns-into-chest-heart's-blood-make-barren-rose-bush-blossom, it's such a beautiful metaphor for the good that can spring out of suffering." So a thread sprung from this, just like the Éponine/robber maiden simile:
I would add to the symbols of deep sorrow the scene with thorn bushes. If
[···], can the scene with the bushes, when [···] clasps the bushes to [···] breast and they go deep into [···] flesh and blood comes out, symbolise that [···] hurts [···]self unconciously in pain?
Jacob BøggildLEAD EDUCATOR
i think the physical pain reflects or symbolizes mental or psychic pain, Gayane.
Marianne Stecher-Hansen points out that "this sacrifice may represent the creator's sacrifices for their art: when one's blood flows for the thorn bush, it is the artist offering their heart to the public." Just like both Enjolras and Yours Truly, and so many other authors who have echoed the motif, have done. The motif has been echoed in subsequent literary tales by Oscar Wilde and Magda Bergquist.
I just felt that such a cathartic motif would never be out of place in an Enjoltaire gothic fusion fic like this; it encapsulates Enjolras' character perfectly (and also echoes the refrain of La Marseillaise to a certain degree = ie the blood that will water the meadows and furrows of France). That qualifying test of warming the thornbush had always been a poignant image, all the way since childhood. I felt that I had left 'Ponine to deal with the korrigans and not given Enj enough demanding tasks by means of having him run thrice around the fort. So the thorn bush came in handy; it also echoed Sleeping Beauty (the prince making his way through) and the Tireur d'Épine in the first chapter, and added more symbolism of warmth and blood and hearts/chests to the story and to Enj's character arc in both canon and this Snow Queen fusion. Furthermore, the Biedermeier (early Victorian idyl) style in which the original tale is written unfurled in the 1820s-1830s that are most popular choice of setting for illustrators, theatre groups, and filmmakers when it comes to adapting Andersenian tales. The same historical setting of Les Misérables, long story short.
As the AU went on, it gradually unfurled into a novella, even longer than the French versions that Louis Moland and Alexandre Dumas translated of "La Reine des Neiges" by adding more detail (their mis-translation of Finnmark as "la Finlande" aside). And that notwithstanding that I pruned away all the big-lipped alligator moments in the Andersenian tale: the middle and last thirds of Story the Third (the whole flower garden of eternal springtime) and the first half of Story the Sixth (the Saami wise woman, just like a bureaucrat, merely redirects Gerda to the Finnmark wise woman with a message to deliver). So, cutting out all these big-lipped alligator moments, the basic story of The Snow Queen fits neatly into a classical Shakespearean five-act structure, I thought; and the five-act structure was implemented into this Enjoltaire fusion.
Also, Éponine became a Finnwoman+Robber-Maiden composite. I couldn't find the right people in the Mis-verse... I thought of casting Fauchelevent/Valjean as the owner of the springtime garden, but I was obliged to portray him as Cosette's guardian, so I have skipped that chapter entirely (and got earlier to Mariusette)... Ditto for finding out who would be the Finnwoman.
Then there was the inspiration from Shakespeare, from symphonic rock tunes and lyrics (Genesis: mainly Lilywhite Lilith, The Musical Box, and The Fountain of Salmacis - Pink Floyd: Crazy Diamond, Lunatic, Wish You Were Here, any song dedicated by Roger Waters to Syd Barrett [might as well be an Enjoltaire song, sent from the leader to the drugged prodigal without whom, at the end of the day, makes the group what it is]- Yes: that Roundabout that became the ending tune to JoJo's Bizarre Adventure sagas 1 and 2), from Celtic lore, from Mylène Farmer videoclips (where the French popstar has always got something of Éponine in her), from One Piece (kuroashi fighting style, which was inspired by savate), from the anime adaptations of CLAMP manga series, and many other sources; aside from my own Mediterranean upbringing and first brushes with the Scandinavian climate...
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It wound up being faaaaaar longer than its Westerosi counterpart and spiritual predecessor, The Queen Beyond the Wall, because there is so much more lore (knowledge, culture...) to nineteenth-century France, and to nineteenth-century Europe as a whole, than to Westeros!
However, the story "La Fée Verte" I have published for Once Upon 24 Times was sentenced to be but a Director's Cut, due to the constraints of the size limits of blog posts.
It seems that La Fée Verte is exceeding the length allowed by the size limits -I have had this problem before with other fics-. So I cut out most of the commentaries -and the epilogue- from the original document in order to make it fit. I hope I can write as much as I want about this world and these characters... I wish I could, indeed. XOXO
As mentioned earlier, if your one post already exceeds the 1MB limit, there is little you can do except to split that article into separate posts.
"Your readers might be happy, if you were to segment your narrative..." I heard that advice and resolved to pay heed to it.
There is autopagination. So there is nothing to do but surrender, and leave this as but a draft-first version-director's cut of the integral story (ditto for the Baratheon saga, I must say).
And thus, for this year's Samhain (this is a pretty adult, scary version, though not bereft of fluff) I decided to post the uncut version in chapters.
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