edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
[personal profile] edenfalling
Apropos of nothing in particular, I was thinking about phases girls are often said to go through -- among them the princess phase and the horse-crazy phase -- and it struck me that while I definitely did the horse-crazy thing, I never wanted to be a princess. Not once.

As far back as I can verifiably remember (so, six years old) what I wanted to be -- what I imagined myself as in all my daydreams and self-insert characters -- was a reality-warping all-powerful sorceress. When I told myself interminable superhero epics in first grade, I was a sorceress who gave one of the other heroes his powers, and who directed the team on missions because I could see what the enemy was planning. When Vicky and I did baby's first LARPing with our neighbors, I was a sorceress and had magic wand duels with the kid who played a wizard. When I first invented Small, I self-inserted as a mysterious sorceress who lived in a tower in the woods and could have solved all the questing characters' problems in two days if she hadn't been more interested in catching up on her reading. When I dreamed up a sort of self-insert fanfic continuation to Pamela Service's Tomorrow's Magic series, it featured a girl who was basically me by another name as the child of a family who'd kept magic alive through the dry times -- in other words, a sorceress -- and who accidentally cast herself into the future when the nuclear holocaust hit.

All these figures were from explicitly ordinary backgrounds, which is not surprising since they were all based on me. And while I could imagine myself phenomenal cosmic powers at the drop of a hat, it never occurred to me to imagine myself an aristocratic backstory, let alone a royal one. (The time-traveling sorceress fantasy, in fact, was centered around recreating democracy in the radioactive wastes of the former eastern seaboard. And also constructing a town with nice brick houses and a functional sewer system. Look, I like logistics, okay?)

The thing is, I am not certain if that persistent fantasy pattern is an intrinsic part of my character, or whether it's an unintended side effect of my name.

You see, my legal first name is Diana. I was born in 1982, one year after Diana Spencer married Prince Charles. They were highly public figures. So I spent my childhood with adults asking me in sugary-sweet voices whether I was named after Princess Diana. And as far back as I can remember (five years old, in this case), my knee-jerk indignant response was, "NO! I'm named after the Roman goddess!" And then I'd seethe to myself that this weirdo princess who I didn't know and didn't want to know had stolen my name, grr argh, how dare she!

That is not a situation likely to foster positive feelings toward princesses in general.

I mean, I'm quite sure I'd have fantasized having phenomenal magic powers in any case -- as I've said before, I have a hell of a power kink, and it clearly goes way back -- but I do wonder if I might have imagined myself as a magical princess if not for that coincidental confluence of names.

(no subject)

Date: 2015-03-25 10:59 am (UTC)
sapote: The TARDIS sits near a tree in sunlight (Default)
From: [personal profile] sapote
Oh man, I love the idea of being the sorceress who's off in the woods somewhere, being perfectly capable of fixing problems if everyone would just take her perfectly-good advice. I feel like that person gets a lot of comfortable robes and her own kitchen where no one bothers her. I remember my favorite game with my American Girl Doll was Felicity's Adventures As An Herbal Healer in the Postapocalyptic Wasteland, which is kind of a sorceress figure. Though I was old enough that she had a will-they-won't-they with the local warlord.

I don't know if I would have been susceptible to plain-old princessing otherwise, but my magnificent nerd of a mother kept saying things like "You know, modern real life princesses don't really have that much fun, we could play Beautiful Princess Attends The Ribboncutting of a Municipal Wastewater Plant!" or "you really don't want to have been a medieval princess, in my opinion, lots of sad things happened to them, but we could play Queen Regent whose husband got bumped off in the Crusades!". (There was probably also some impact from Princess Di in this story, as I was hitting the dress-up stage right as it was obvious to everyone that she was not enjoying being a princess at all).

(no subject)

Date: 2015-03-25 05:00 pm (UTC)
sapote: The TARDIS sits near a tree in sunlight (Default)
From: [personal profile] sapote
Morwen was a) the best b) one of the best portrayals of a middle-aged lady having a nice life I can think of in any media, so of course I love her. So many cats! Tea! Reading! Perfect!

(no subject)

Date: 2015-04-01 05:19 pm (UTC)
marmota_b: Photo of my groundhog plushie puppet, holding a wrapped present (Default)
From: [personal profile] marmota_b
Ouch, well-intentioned questions that get on your nerves. I feel like I know exactly what that was like, except that I can't lay my finger on what it was in my case. I suspect what I really had in mind was everyone's total shock at my being able to function without a TV. Which kind of made me go the exact same knee-jerk way of thinking "of course I can, I never ever want to have a TV, just to prove you wrong." (I guess the contemporary equivalent would be having no computer and no internet, which, sadly, I really can't function without.)

I did have a horse phase, and I did have a princess phase, but very soon stumbled on the practical problem of "I would have to be a lost princess, and there are only so many countries I could be a lost princess of." So I kind of dreamed about being a lost princess for a while (in a sort of Princess Diaries way, before there was Princess Diaries?), and then decided it was boring and unrealistic or something. And anyway, it was completely overshadowed by the preceding Slavic-fairy-slash-Narnian-Naiad-or-Dryad phase, and the following maker-of-things-and-dreamer-of-worlds phase, which, to be honest, hasn't left me yet and has been with me since my earliest memories as well.

(no subject)

Date: 2015-04-02 08:01 am (UTC)
marmota_b: Photo of my groundhog plushie puppet, holding a wrapped present (Default)
From: [personal profile] marmota_b
Heh. Interest is never unbiased, anyway.

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edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
Elizabeth Culmer

May 2025

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