Fanfiction: Tea and Sympathy (Princess Tutu)

[nebroadwe]

Title: Drabble: Tea and Sympathy
Fandom: Princess Tutu (anime version)
Character: Lilié
Pairing(s): None
Rating: G
Word Count: 100
Warnings: None.
A/N: Yet another Princess Tutu drabble. This one attacked me at a bus stop, off the realization that Lilié's rhetoric sounded unnervingly similar to another character's. I already found her disturbing as well as amusing, so ... Crossposted from nebroadwe to princesstutu and tutufic.
Dedication: Still for fmanalyst; all for you. :-)

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      She wakes each morning to the glorious certainty that man is at the mercy of the gods, his end inevitable from his beginning. Her friends, pawns of fate, are blind as Oedipus to what awaits them, and she their only comforter. Brewing tempests in teacups, she pours forth angst and sympathy in less than equal measure, the bitter whelming the sweet. All the world's a stage to her, the play a Gothic melodrama endlessly repeating its second act.

      She is Drosselmayer's true heir, did she but know it. Well for her friends (and for the world) that she does not.

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Author's Note: I would be remiss if I did not credit the American playwright Lillian Hellman for the phrases with which Lilié's "glorious certainty" is at first described. Quotation is the sincerest form of flattery.

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[Disclaimers: Princess Tutu was created by Ikuko Ito and Junichi Sato. Copyright for this property is held by HAL and GANSIS/TUTU. All rights reserved.]

Comments

[flo-nelja.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Lilie is evil !!! But in your drabble, she is in a classy way. :-)

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

I like to describe the kind of language I'm using here as "taking my English major out for a walk." :-) There's also some deliberate bathos in the last line. Lilie couldn't really take over the world ... um, right?

[tomoyoichijouji.livejournal.com]

WURD. XD And "Lillian Hellman"/Lilie...hmmmmm. O_O
Although...I wonder what made her this way. Or did she always believe that?

[tasha-o.livejournal.com]

Haha, this further proves my belief that Lilie is the most self aware character of the series. You got to love the fact that she knows what the world is, but instead of being upset about it she revels in it :D Now because of you, I will forever be seeing similarities between her and Drosselmayer ^__^

[tomoyoichijouji.livejournal.com]

Er...self aware? She might also love tragedy and predestinated doom, but I don't think she's actually aware that the town is being controlled. What makes them so similar is that she shares his love of seeing others in pain, and also that bad ends give her pleasure.

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

"Lillian Hellman"/Lilie...hmmmmm. O_O

I did notice that. In deference to Ms. Hellman's reputation, however, let me give the entire quotation: "If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama."

I wonder what made her this way. Or did she always believe that?

Lilie strikes me as an exaggerated version of a common adolescent psychological type: the angst-bunny, who thrives on the soap opera antics of fellow-adolescents, spends hours gossiping about them, and is not above stirring the pot. All without being actively malicious, mostly. Not a type I hung out with in high school, but you couldn't miss 'em even in a crowd.

[tasha-o.livejournal.com]

Well I didn't mean about being self aware of the town being controlled, but more realating to her being self aware of the dark side of life ...its tragedies etc and her enjoyment of it...which connects to your statement about what makes them similiar.

[mangaka-chan.livejournal.com]

Wow, bull's eye for Lilie's character. Somehow you've made her seem innocent (she's only doing what fate's already decreeded...) but evil at the same time (...by accentuating other people's angst). In terms of her love for conflict and tragedy, she really is Drosselmeyer's true successor. Very nice job. :)

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure "self-aware" is quiiite the right term here -- I mean, a truly self-aware person would have more of a handle on how her actions affected other people, wouldn't she? And Lilie's constant refrain, when confronted with the fact that she's the one hurting Duck, is "Usou!" I think maybe it's C.S. Lewis -- probably somewhere in Perelandra -- who talks about the tendency to revel in tragedy as a form of self-deception (but at the same time I'm also pretty certain he's talking about the tendency to cast oneself as the endurer of tragedy. Lilie concocts pseudotragedies for other people. Grump. Must go home and look all this up ... )

[tasha-o.livejournal.com]

Haha, okay I know when I'm beaten ^___^ I suppose I need to rework my wording...I can see where you're coming from with the self-deception idea...but my personal feelings when she says "Usou!" is like she realizes she's been caught doing somethng other people see as bad, so she pretends to act as if she didn't realize what she being mean...I open to the fact that I could be wrong about that, its just what I thought when I watched the series.

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

[grin] No problem -- reasonable people can always disagree about literature. I just don't see Lilie pretending to act as if she's not being mean, but rather being genuinely surprised that anyone would accuse her of that. Mind you, as her behavior goes farther over the top, this idea becomes difficult to sustain with any credibility, which is why (to bring up a small peeve) I'm less satisfied with her portrayal at the back end of the series than I am at the front. In the beginning she's a caricature; by the end she's a grotesque.

Pardon the pontification. I was trained as an academic; it's an occupational hazard.

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I have no idea why this particular sketch decided to leap screaming onto me at the bus stop, but it was pretty easy to pull together once I found the Hellman quotation to start it off. "Brewing tempests in teacups" and the final lines were what kept rolling around in my head on the bus ride home. :-)

[mangaka-chan.livejournal.com]

Completely understandable. ^^ I'd be dead tired, getting ready to go to sleep but fanfic or fanart ideas would plague me and keep me awake. Often times I don't even know what triggered the deluge of ideas, but it's as if the "off" button for my brain was broken and I simply can't stop thinking about it. :p

[tomoyoichijouji.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it has to do with the fact that she sees the lives of her friends as glamorous stories, and thus tragedies. There is a point where Lilie is trying out pointe for the first time along with the other students, and it is apparently quite painful. What she says is: "If only Duck were here to feel this pain!" I'm not quite sure about the exact wording, which I think would be useful, but this seems to indicate that she really does take pleasure in seeing other people in pain. In both the 1st and 2nd seasons, she says constantly to Ahiru, "I know you can't do it anyway; so you can come to us and we'll comfort you!", and "Oh, Pike, why are you making her try so hard? It's impossible for someone like her!" This kinda does make it unclear if she is deliberately being mean or cruel. Notice also that even though she was excited hearing about Pike and Ahiru's supposed 'bitter duel', at the same time she was taking hot cocoa or such to her. So...it's almost like, her idea of good times is a series of pity parties? Plus, and both Pique and Lilie do this, they seem to live through Ahiru's exploits, talking about themselves perhaps only as saying which guy they fangirl, and events around school. So I'm tending toward the 'angst-bunny' adolescent personality type theory, it seems. But it seems like she has sugarloads of sympathy, but zero empathy. She starts like noogieing Ahiru to pieces, and she denies that she's done anything to Ahiru; this indicates to me that she really doesn't feel the suffering that Ahiru does, or even more, she does feel the suffering but gets a sort of high off it. Masochism, anyone? ^^;;

[swordsncarrots.livejournal.com]

Drosselemeyer's true heir...there are a lot of parallels between Lilie and Drosselemeyer, aren't there?

That also makes her semi-related to Fakir....and incestuous XD

But props to you...most people look upon Lilie as simply "annoying" (myself included), without really analyzing her behavior.

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Drosselemeyer's true heir...there are a lot of parallels between Lilie and Drosselemeyer, aren't there?

They do seem to take a similar joy in angsty drama, to the point of creating it if it doesn't want to exist naturally. Such folk are dangerous ...

But props to you...most people look upon Lilie as simply "annoying" (myself included), without really analyzing her behavior.

Thanks! I do frequently find myself working with minor characters when I write fanfic. It's a challenge: there's both more room to work with them (because the original doesn't say as much about them) and less (ditto -- one has to find something to say that doesn't contradict a secondary character's place in the main story).

Peace!