Kristina

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gkmoberg1
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Re: Kristina

Post by gkmoberg1 » Thu Oct 24, 2019 10:03 pm

PeteMork wrote:
Thu Oct 24, 2019 3:43 am
Bump again, for all those who are still uncertain about what that "Wonderful Idea" was. One of GK's better efforts, IMO. But start at the beginning of the thread. :o
dongregg wrote:
Thu Oct 24, 2019 6:10 am
Just in time for Halloween. I loved rereading this. Yes, Rakel is a writerly transformation of Kristina (with GK's kind permission). I'm afraid that my Rakel story is more of an adventure story--not bone chilling like Kristina.

Again, GK, you have accomplished becoming a professional-level writer.

I've been following Ruthanne Reid's stories through Joe Bunting's Write Practice site. I love Ruthanne, but in all candor, your unpublished "Treetops," short as it is, is a fully realized fairy tale of unsurpassed beauty and enchantment. :wub:
:blushes furiously: ... I'm honored you remember this tale.

The But now my friend, I have a wonderful idea... discussion @Wolchild dug up for us to help with the That unnamed vampire woman... discussion was perhaps a seed for what became this story. A sub-discussion in the old thread, about how the unnamed woman might have wanted as her "wonderful idea" to put Elias out of his misery while at the same time providing herself with a tasty snack, was something I had not considered until I read that. But it seemed to me, somehow, that something close to that might have been her goal. From that, after several years of getting lost in my noggin, perhaps it was this idea of this story that resurfaced. What if, in that germ's updated form, her goal was to eliminate Elias ... but that it was driven out of simple, nasty revenge :twisted:

( The 'Treetops' story @dongregg is kindly referring is 'Ilsa'. )

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Re: Kristina

Post by dongregg » Fri Oct 25, 2019 2:01 am

( The 'Treetops' story @dongregg is kindly referring is 'Ilsa'. )
Thanks for the link. I'm enchanted once again. :)
“For drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.”

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Re: Kristina

Post by gkmoberg1 » Sun Jan 24, 2021 4:50 am

Something I included in this story but did not explain is the number of boys haunting around the lord's manor. (And notice it is a manor house with an adjacent tower. It is not a castle (because such did not exist in 1770-ish Sweden, to my understanding). For young Elias, it may have well looked like a castle, but in this story what Kristina describes falls far short of stone walls and turrets.) Kristina described the boys in one of her chapters, saying she could spot them in the evenings looking in at her or scurrying past a light outside such that she catches a glimpse. But she never learns how many there are. Nor any of their names.

In the end when the lord's manor is overrun and she flees to the basement, she finds she has wandered into the den where they hide during the days.

My inspiration had been this line of thought: If the contest Elias was entered into was not its first occasion, then there must have been prior winners ... prior young boys who were chosen by the role of the lord's dice. Yet what became of them? My conclusion was nothing happened: they continued on as 11 or 12 year old boys, hidden by day and with the manor's lord at night. Elias, by 'winning' when he was 10 or 11, became another.

Was he the last? Possibly. I didn't ponder that one.

Yet once the manor was overrun, the boys scattered. Afterwards, Elias never reconnected with any of them. He does say to Oskar in the novel that he has never had a true friend.

Perhaps they are still to be found.

Perhaps Kristina could tell you otherwise :twisted:

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Re: Kristina

Post by metoo » Sun Jan 24, 2021 7:09 am

gkmoberg1 wrote:
Sun Jan 24, 2021 4:50 am
Something I included in this story but did not explain is the number of boys haunting around the lord's manor. (And notice it is a manor house with an adjacent tower. It is not a castle (because such did not exist in 1770-ish Sweden, to my understanding). For young Elias, it may have well looked like a castle, but in this story what Kristina describes falls far short of stone walls and turrets.) Kristina described the boys in one of her chapters, saying she could spot them in the evenings looking in at her or scurrying past a light outside such that she catches a glimpse. But she never learns how many there are. Nor any of their names.
The Swedish original uses the word slott. This would translate into English castle, but the latter would also cover what in Swedish is called a borg.
A slott is a big and luxurious building or building complex intended as living quarters for a king or a nobleman.
A borg is a fortified building or building complex intended to function as a defence post. It may function as a living quarters for a nobleman as well.

In the 18th century, most medieval borgs would have been transformed into slotts. More and larger windows would have been opened in the walls, moats would have been filled in, etc.

The slott in Eli's memory and tale would most likely have been a manor, as you suggest - in Swedish a herrgård. This is also a very large house, but not as large as a slott, but would still impress Eli who probably lived in a house like this (note how low it is compared to the sitting woman):

Image
gkmoberg1 wrote:
Sun Jan 24, 2021 4:50 am
In the end when the lord's manor is overrun and she flees to the basement, she finds she has wandered into the den where they hide during the days.

My inspiration had been this line of thought: If the contest Elias was entered into was not its first occasion, then there must have been prior winners ... prior young boys who were chosen by the role of the lord's dice. Yet what became of them? My conclusion was nothing happened: they continued on as 11 or 12 year old boys, hidden by day and with the manor's lord at night. Elias, by 'winning' when he was 10 or 11, became another.

Was he the last? Possibly. I didn't ponder that one.

Yet once the manor was overrun, the boys scattered. Afterwards, Elias never reconnected with any of them. He does say to Oskar in the novel that he has never had a true friend.

Perhaps they are still to be found.

Perhaps Kristina could tell you otherwise :twisted:
Regarding if Eli was just one in a long sequence of children, I would say that he probably was. Why would the lord otherwise have bothered to have that table made?

However, I think the other children didn't survive. Perhaps they just succumbed, or maybe they were killed when the lord got tired of them. Eli didn't meet any of them, anyway, he just learned about them, I think. Or perhaps he figured their previous existence out by himself from clues that were around during all those years I think he spent with the lord.

But Eli survived. Perhaps he was special, and was treated differently than the others. Perhaps he was able to escape, maybe when the local population finally got tired of the lord's ways and revolted. Perhaps both. However, a favourite idea of mine is that Eli was brought with the lord to England when the lord fled just before the revolt. Eli thus would have arrived to England in the very late 18th century, to the budding industrial era with its overcrowded cities...
Last edited by metoo on Sun Jan 24, 2021 6:03 pm, edited 3 times in total.
But from the beginning Eli was just Eli. Nothing. Anything. And he is still a mystery to me. John Ajvide Lindqvist

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Siggdalos
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Re: Kristina

Post by Siggdalos » Sun Jan 24, 2021 5:57 pm

metoo wrote:
Sun Jan 24, 2021 7:09 am
Regarding if Eli was just one in a long sequence of children, I would say that he probably was. Why would the lord otherwise have bothered to have that table made?
I think it's also strongly implied by Eli's morphine nightmare when he sees and hears hundreds of children whispering "their story, Eli's story" from inside the lord's coat, and shortly after sees a long line of children walking towards an ice castle.
metoo wrote:
Sun Jan 24, 2021 7:09 am
But Eli survived. Perhaps he was special, and was treated differently than the others. Perhaps he was able to escape, maybe when the local population finally got tired of the lord's ways and revolted. Perhaps both.
I tend to think that the lord didn't care much about his previous victims and was content to choose them at random with the dice, whereas he specifically wanted Elias because of his unusual beauty (hence changing the die result to land on him) and therefore also treated him differently from the others. I have my own idea about how Eli escaped, but I'm saving that for a fanfic I'm working on.
De höll om varandra i tystnad. Oskar blundade och visste: detta var det största. Ljuset från lyktan i portvalvet trängde svagt in genom hans slutna ögonlock, la en hinna av rött för hans ögon. Det största.

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Re: Kristina

Post by Wolfchild » Mon Jan 25, 2021 9:07 pm

Siggdalos wrote:
Sun Jan 24, 2021 5:57 pm
metoo wrote:
Sun Jan 24, 2021 7:09 am
Regarding if Eli was just one in a long sequence of children, I would say that he probably was. Why would the lord otherwise have bothered to have that table made?
I think it's also strongly implied by Eli's morphine nightmare when he sees and hears hundreds of children whispering "their story, Eli's story" from inside the lord's coat, and shortly after sees a long line of children walking towards an ice castle.
Exactly this. To quote the English translation:
"Eeeeli ... Eeeeliii ..."

The voice coming from the TV was familiar. Eli tried to back away from it, but her body wouldn't obey her. Only her hands moved around on the floor, in slow motion, searching for something to hold onto. Found a cord. Squeezed it hard with one hand as if it were a lifeline out of the tunnel that ended in the TV that was talking to Eli.

"Eli ... where are you?"

Her head felt too heavy to lift from the floor; the only action Eli managed was to raise her eyes to the screen and of course it was ... Him.

The blond tendrils from his wig made of human hair fanned out over the silk robe and made the effeminate face look even smaller than it was. The thin lips were pressed together, drawn into a lipsticked smile that looked like a knife gash in the pale powdered face.

Eli managed to raise her head slightly and saw His whole face. Blue, childishly large eyes, and above his eyes ... the air came out of Eli's lungs in ragged spurts, and her head fell heavily to the ground, causing a crunching noise in her nose. Funny. He was wearing a cowboy hat on His head.

"Eeeliii ..."

Other voices. Children's voices. Eli raised her head again, trembling like a baby. Drops of the sick blood ran from Eli's nose down to her mouth. The man had opened his arms in a gesture of welcome, revealing the red lining of his robe. The lining billowed out; it was swarming, made up of lips. Hundreds of children's lips that writhed painfully, whispering their story, Eli's story.

"Eli ... come home ..."

Eli sobbed, shut her eyes. Waited for the cold grip around the neck. Nothing happened. Opened her eyes again. The picture had changed. Now you could see a long line of children in poor clothes wandering over a snowy landscape, waddling in the direction of a castle of ice on the horizon.
Eli seems to have believed that there were others, although that doesn't necessarily make it so. This is after all a hallucination of a twelve year old. Since Eli didn't know why he was being taken to the contest in the first place, whatever he learned about any others must have been afterwards. It seems unlikely that The Man in the Wig would have had hundreds of turned children in his manor that Eli could have seen or met. Eli could have formed this impression on his own, or been told something that led him to believe it.

Failing all of that, would it be likely that a lonely, isolated, and abused child would create a phalanx of other abused children to accompany him in his loneliness? Or would he be more likely to create imaginary friends whose circumstances were as far from his own as he could imagine? I think he would be more likely to invent a Pippi Longstocking than other victims. This helps to create the feeling that Eli is hallucinating from actual memory.

Either way, I have always thought that JAL was wise to not turn The Man in the Wig into an actual character and instead just leave him as a plot device. Otherwise, he would take up far too much room in the story - even in the novel. His purpose is to give us a look into Eli's existence and lead us to sympathize with our favorite little monster. A purpose of the scene with the cancer woman was to have a reason to show him to us. This scene is to be about Eli, not The Man in the Wig. Would Eli's backstory seem more horrible if he was one of many? Would the hallucination feel more like a real memory if Eli was one more in a long line of children in poor clothes? One thing that is clear is the its real to Eli, and it terrifies him. This scene and the vision of the Man in the Wig briefly transforms Eli from a monster who has just killed an old woman for her blood into a terrified little child. Having Eli's vision include perhaps hundreds of other gives it a feeling of inexorability, of implacability, of hopelessness. It happened to all of those others, it happened to me, and none of us could stop it. This could indeed be a vision to terrify a monster, or at least the child with the monster inside. I believe that JAL wrote it in this way be he intended for us to believe that Eli was one of many, therefore increase our sympathy for him.
...the story derives a lot of its appeal from its sense of despair and a darkness in which the love of Eli and Oskar seems to shine with a strange and disturbing light.
-Lacenaire

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Re: Kristina

Post by Siggdalos » Thu Jul 29, 2021 4:43 pm

Despite my earlier reply to this thread, I didn't actually read the entirety of this story from start to finish until a few days ago. I regret not doing so earlier. It's pretty great.

What's the status on adding parts 5-11 to the Fan Content area? That version is still incomplete.
De höll om varandra i tystnad. Oskar blundade och visste: detta var det största. Ljuset från lyktan i portvalvet trängde svagt in genom hans slutna ögonlock, la en hinna av rött för hans ögon. Det största.

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