Fanfiction: Original Sin (Princess Tutu)

[nebroadwe]

Title: Drabble: Original Sin
Fandom: Princess Tutu (anime version)
Character: Kraehe
Pairing(s): None
Rating: G
Word Count: 100
Warnings: None.
A/N: And the Princess Tutu drabbles just keep on coming. The inspiration for this one arose out of my job: I work with rare books and am being initiated into the lesser mysteries of fine bindings, so the idea of someone leaning against a particular kind of cover cross-pollinated with an earlier idea I'd had about Kraehe, and voilà! Crossposted from nebroadwe to princesstutu and tutufic.
Dedication: Still for fmanalyst; welcome home! :-)

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      Once a king decreed that his seven sons wed his brother's seven daughters. The unwilling maidens' father gave each daughter the bride-gift of a dagger, and on their wedding night six of the maidens stabbed their sleeping grooms. When the seventh prince awoke alive, he slew his uncle and cousins for their crime. The father's spirit thereafter suffered an unslakable thirst, while his daughters fruitlessly offered him water in sieves ...

      Kraehe closes the book and pillows her head on its blind-stamped cover, wondering what sin she has committed that she cannot bring her father the relief he craves.

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Author's Note: The reader familiar with classical mythology will recognize in this story elements from the tale of the Danaides. "Blind-stamping" is a method of book decoration that impresses a pattern in the leather or cloth of the cover but does not fill it with gold or color.

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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

[tomoyoichijouji.livejournal.com]

Huhhh...interesting relation, even if I'm not sure if they're entirely synonymous. It's interesting in that it shows how Kraehe feels guilty that she isn't measuring up, even though she's trying her best, and thus she reacts this way to the story. Just not sure whether the story explains how the Raven might have gotten that unquenchable thirst for hearts (just because it doesn't match up enough with story canon, i.e. Mytho doesn't kill or attempt to kill Kraehe, even if Kraehe does, and they really don't seem related by blood or anything...?) Just me being technical and literal; the connection of guilt Kraehe makes from the story to herself as a result is interesting enough. :)

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Agh. Missed the target, I guess. The italicized story isn't meant to explain Kraehe's backstory or anything like that -- it's all metaphorical. She's reading the story and suddenly some similarities to her own life jump out at her, and it hurts. The reader (my ideal reader has seen the entire anime already :-) is supposed to recognize that she's drawing a false analogy: she hasn't committed any sins; she's another of the Raven's innocent victims, though she doesn't yet know it. (That's the ultimate reason for the "blind-stamped" book -- there's a highly implicit play on words going on there.) There's also an implicit warning in the story that Kraehe misses: by obeying her "father" and trying to prevent Mytho from regaining his identity as Siegfried, she's setting herself up for disaster -- for the commission of a real sin. (The phrase "unwilling maidens' father" is also supposed to be fruitfully ambiguous: who in that phrase is unwilling, daughters or father? Heh.)

But I may have been trying to pack too much into 100 words. Drabbles are tricky that way: you have to pick juuust the right subject and then pare down like nobody's business.

[insaneladybug.livejournal.com]

Ahh I see! I did definitely catch that she is drawing a false analogy; that seemed very obvious to me, and made the piece quite tragic. I didn't quite catch the warning, but now I see what you mean, and I like that the book's cover actually has an important meaning. Obviously you must have put a lot of thought into this.

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Well, a hundred words' worth of thought, anyway. :-) But thanks. I'm glad the false analogy wasn't completely lost. I remember thinking at the end of this drabble that it's almost eighty percent fairy-tale summary, which leaves very little room for Kraehe's characterization. I worried that I was compressing too much into that final sentence, but I'm hoping it has enough [zing!] to it to play properly.