Comments | archosauria: [Fic] The River Girl

archosauria

[Fic] The River Girl

Jun 29, 2011 19:57

Title : The River Girl
Characters : One-sided Belarus->Russia, OC
Rating : G
Genre : Character Study/Drama
Word count : ~5000
Summary : Once upon a time, I met a girl by the Dnieper who called herself Natalya, and she told me she was waiting for someone who might never come. Contains folklore and possibly creepy allusions, but hey, it's Belarus.

( And now she turned to me again, with for the first time an expression that seemed more man than beast. )

fanfiction

Comments 13

hetaliafaerie June 30 2011, 01:41:54 UTC

Th-that was beautiful. ;.; Just...beautiful. Wow. This fic needs a 'Love' button. Wow. I don't know much Russian folklore(I've heard of Baba Yaga, but that's about it), but you still explained it in a way that was easy to understand. I...I...wow. I can't even speak coherently now xD and it doesn't help that the entire time I was reading this, the Turret Opera from Portal 2 was playing over and over in my brain. Pure beauty. <3

archosauria June 30 2011, 01:56:05 UTC

Awww, thank you! I'm glad it all made sense, I was quite worried for a while that I was being unnecessarily obtuse. XD I haven't finished a fic for the longest time and this comment makes me feel a lot more heartened, really. <3

Russian folklore is awesome, by the way. It's possibly the most melancholy folklore ever. Everybody else's mermaid = hot chicks with fins. Russia's mermaid = dead chicks with permanent depression. Yikes.

hetaliafaerie June 30 2011, 14:06:07 UTC

If it was obtuse, I didn't notice. xD It sorta reminded me of first-person stories where someone(usually a guy) encounters the supernatural and has to do something to help. I was reading it in a male head-voice until Little Natasha called the main character 'Sister' xD I'm glad I made you feel better. :)

Wow. Leave to Russia-San xD For some reason, it...actually makes sense that this would be HIS folklore o.o

archosauria June 30 2011, 15:29:09 UTC

Haha, well, the whole 'reading it as a guy' part was kind of intentional. When I started writing it, Natalya was Belarus, but about two sentences in I decided that the Narrator should be Belarus instead but that it'd make for a better fic to keep things more ambiguous until the second half.

........I'd say Finland's and Norway's folklore might just have him beat in terms of creepiness, though, if not melancholy. Oh, Finland, we'd never see it in you...

Thread 7

twistedsheets10 June 30 2011, 15:37:34 UTC

*gives you this LOOK*

I haven't read it all, will comment back later. ♥

archosauria June 30 2011, 15:58:17 UTC

..........WHAT LOOK. WHY.

It wrote itself, I swear! I'm innocent! I'm supposed to be writing papers on the possibilities of alternative energy!

yvesste July 4 2011, 01:05:48 UTC

The passage that starts, "Poor thing," I said, loud enough for her to hear. Poor thing. Poor, miserable thing absolutely took my breath away, as I was reading it. Just--wow. And me, coming in with no knowledge of Russian folklore beyond Baba Yaga! This was so, so good.

You didn't see that comment >_> archosauria July 4 2011, 13:53:23 UTC

Isn't the real scope of time magnificently weird when you try to actually thing about it? Especially if you're sort-of-immortal-but-not and have to explain it to a peasant girl who may end up being a real immortal thing without the Russian Guide to Living Forever.

Thank you for your kind words. <3 Slavic folklore is sadly quite obscure, but isn't it a lovely thing? Since Christianity got there quite late and never really worked the same way as anywhere else, it still retains a lot of the Original Flavor of Europe. I wish there are more books about it on the market.

What comment, where, I saw nothing :D yvesste July 5 2011, 16:02:31 UTC

The Mechanics of Immortality (and Why it Kinda Blows) is one of my faaaavorite things to think about in fiction, and in Hetalia... there's so many things to think about because they're whole countries, too, I just want to pick it up and hold it. [/yammering]

Ooooh do you have any recommendations? For books, that is.

archosauria July 5 2011, 16:56:02 UTC

For the basic stuff, anything that says 'Russian folktale' would probably do. There's a few on Gutenberg, Wikipedia has articles on most well-known creatures IIRC. Now, for ones that aren't well known, I'd recommend Afanasev's 'Russian Fairytales', the 1976 edition. There's a wild difference in what you get when the collector of the tales is an actual Russian, the focus and ideas on what's 'appropriate as a fairytale' are very different. (I'd say that everybody's original folklore when seen without the eyes of modern culture are very interesting. It's kinda hard to get to that for most of Western Europe, however.)

For more modern uses of Slavic Folklore, there's also Ekaterina Sedia's The Secret History of Moscow, which is kind of like a Neverwhere set in Moscow, but is much more about the various lives of the supernatural sub-characters than about the plot. Cathrynne Valente also wrote one book on Koschei the Deathless and I usually love her books, but I haven't read that one yet.

Happy reading! :D