Five Questions about Lily & Nina

[osprey_archer]

From cordialcount, five questions about Lily & Nina from Black Swan. I think this would be fun as a more general meme: Ask me five questions about characters from any fandom that I'm familiar with! (And repost to your own journal, should you desire.)

1. Where are they a month after the performance of Swan Lake?
Assuming Lily doesn’t hightail it right back to San Francisco, I like to think that she and Nina have become friends. I also think Nina probably stops dancing after Swan Lake, but given that she has no other marketable skills and her mother is unlikely to support that decision, I’m not sure what she’s doing. Working a minimum wage job and trying not to weep in corners because she's so worried she's going crazy and/or making the biggest mistake of her life by quitting ballet?

OMG. Black Swan coffeeshop...well, it wouldn’t technically be an AU...post-canon fic. Lily would drop by at the end of Nina’s shifts to get a coffee and chat with Nina and try to give Nina some emotional stability in her life. (I doubt Nina has ever spelled out for Lily - or anyone - the full extent of her mental health issues, so Lily is doing the best she can.)

I also like to think Nina’s getting some kind of therapy, but I don’t know who would pay for it, so probably not.

2. Did your impressions of the characters change over time?
Yes. I was pretty sure at the beginning that Lily was going to be a bog standard rival character; I think it was the scene where they’re practicing together after hours and Lily teases Nina (“Somebody’s hot for teacher”) that I realized there was going to be more to her than that.

3. Have you ever attempted to rec the film to other people?
All my RL friends who I think would like it have already seen it. But I did write a long post about my epic love for Black Swan on LJ. And if that wasn’t reccy enough: EVERYONE, BLACK SWAN IS AMAZING! Although kind of scarring at the same time.

4. Favorite fic, if you have one?
It’s kind of a jackass move saying “I like my own Black Swan story best,” right? I swear I don’t think my stories are the bestest best thing ever in every fandom I write, it’s just that this one doesn’t have a huge number of fics.

5. Did Nina imagine the entire sex sequence within the film? (Because intellectual curiosity, oh yes.)
I think it is completely imaginary. Lily clearly doesn’t remember it at all, and I don’t think she was that wasted. Also Nina’s mother never brings up the incident, and I feel like she would have Opinions if Nina barricaded herself in her room and had loud lesbian sex at three am. Like, possibly "You are never leaving the house again" opinions.

Comments

[cordialcount]

Black Swan coffeeshop...well, it wouldn’t technically be an AU...post-canon fic. Lily would drop by at the end of Nina’s shifts to get a coffee and chat with Nina and try to give Nina some emotional stability in her life.

This sounds excellent! I support trying therapy for anyone who can afford it, but when it's clearly not possible for someone's life, knowing you have friends with the best intentions has therapeutic value too, and something about Lily strikes me as a person who has her internal life in order even if others may not recognize it as such.

Although kind of scarring at the same time.

Which scene was worst for you? /can't even think about the one with the screaming portraits

It’s kind of a jackass move saying “I like my own Black Swan story best,” right? I swear I don’t think my stories are the bestest best thing ever in every fandom I write

Even if you don't think you're writing the most amazing thing ever, with what you've said about incompleteness as a defining feature of ficability for you, you sound like you're driven by making an interesting and original contribution to the greater universe of a canon. :D

I feel like she would have Opinions if Nina barricaded herself in her room and had loud lesbian sex at three am

Agreed, although she may also have undergone spontaneous brain combustion with how unexpected that behavior was from her gloriously imperfect daughter. Surprised there aren't boatloads of meta about Nina's mother and what she's done to her daughter's sense of personhood, purpose, and desires for loud f/f sex-- I generally cut male characters less slack, but she still creeps me far more than Leroy.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Coffee shop stories just seem to fit Black Swan! You can just imagine them leaving Nina there alone to close, and Nina freaking out as weird things start happening in the weirdly lighted coffee shop - culminating, of course, in Lily showing up (or at least a hallucination of Lily showing up), leading either to sex beneath the espresso machine or a duel to the death with coffee pots (shattered so the glass has sharp edges). Or both.

And then the real Lily shows up to find Nina gibbering in a corner.

And there were a lot of scarring scenes. I watched the creepy stuff in the empty studio scenes mostly through my hands - those weren't so much with the body horror, but the atmosphere freaked me out. And the scene where Nina pulls a feather out of her arm, or pulls the shard of mirror out of her stomach (or at least hallucinates about it) - ack!

I think Leroy is a worse person, because his cruelty toward Nina is motivated by selfishness and lust. But Nina's mother has probably had more long-term deleterious effects on Nina's sense of personhood etc., even though I think she (mostly) wants to be supportive, because she's got such a skewed sense of priorities and possibilities - like the fact that it doesn't seem to have occurred to her that Nina could get professional help when Nina started scratching herself raw.

[cordialcount]

I suspect I'm less creeped out by Leroy because what he does with Nina is so obviously wrong and easy to intervene in; there's a kind of moral clarity there that makes it easy for me to write him off. Her mother, as you said, seems like she's being supportive and intends to be good for her, even though her methods deny Nina's agency and isolate her from anyone else who might help her grow. I agree that she caused more damage to Nina's personhood-- it's much harder for Nina to figure out exactly what was done to her and how to be an individual and not a role. Of the people I've known like both, the latter were far more difficult to get away from.

Sex beneath the espresso machine! At least Nina won't fall asleep and have nightmares, this time. *g* All those spindly chairs throwing shadows in the dark...

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Yes! Creepy spindly chair shadows! A funky coffee shop would be just full of creepy things after dark, with only the closed lights on while you clean up...