Today sees the next episode of Shadows of the Past: The Unkindness of Birds being published on Wattpad. The episode ends the second act and leads into Act 3.
I wrote this scene in a different form as part of the original form of the story, and got adapted when I rewrote it. Initially, it followed on from the fight in the bedchamber, with "Gertrude" performing the actions she takes at a much earlier point in the original. The whole thing I wanted to emphasise initially was the way that Lady Ella-Dýr was being manipulated and was more or less helpless to stop the changeling from doing anything. The rewrite changed that to make her more formidable, and to introduce more problems for Elna in the process - which is really what the rewrite was all about.
Other changes crept their way in, for example I changed the birds that "Gertrude" changed into - to make her a literal cuckoo in the nest. I also wanted to play around with Fergus' apparent inability to understand Elna isn't a man (his own sexism blinding him to what Elna feels is obvious), but also to underline the idea that in some respects Elna is assumed to be male because she presents as one. The Medieval physique would have been very different to the way we think about women today and I wanted to underscore the fact that the protagonist isn't what we'd think of as "womanly" and, in Judith Butler's terms, she doesn't "perform" femininity at all.
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