Voiceover: Good morning, lovely people! Welcome back from the commercial break! It is 7:45 AM and you are watching MPR morning news. Up next, we’ll be sharing an interview we did with a real-life, in-the-flesh PRODIGY, Elmire Fier! She has been playing the piano since before she was born—I’m not even kidding because this girl must have been practicing in the womb!—and today the cute, little bona fide PRODIGY will be sharing her sonata with us! You will love our interview! Stay tuned!
Elmire reviewed the news segment that had aired about her. It wasn’t what she had expected …
She was grateful and she tried not to feel irritated, but she was completely over being called “cute.” She was a teenager, not a cute kid. “Little” didn’t even make sense. She had been just as tall as her interviewer. And “prodigy”? It was a personal pet peeve, but she really hated that word because she wanted to be treated normally and not like a spectacle. Why would anyone take her seriously when she was described as cute and little and playing from the womb, when the womb thing obviously wasn’t true and when a lot of people thought prodigies were either unrelatable paragons of perfection or overrated puppets who peaked by age eight and burnt out spectacularly before they turned twenty?
She was a rising high school freshman who happened to love music and play piano at a professional level, which was all fine and norm—not that weird! She wasn’t a perfect pianist. She still had tons to learn about music, so she wished that everyone would calm down, not use the word “prodigy,” and try listening to or discussing her actual music.
But that wasn’t happening. The online response was also focused on her age and appearance …
Elmire tried to shake her negative feelings while practicing, but …
She couldn’t. She was frustrated because she didn’t think she could complain either.
Complaining about being called “nice” things was “rude.” She did not want to seem ungrateful, arrogant or naïve. Deep down, she understood that MPR was trying to create interest in her and the word “prodigy” was “needed” for marketing and promotions—Elmire actually disagreed about it being “needed.” Adult musicians weren’t marketed in such an exaggerated, spectacle-making, come-see-the-weirdo sort of way, but it was a minor thing, and even though it seemed to inspire people to call her fake and even though it was a truly burdensome label that inflated expectations, she was going to let it go … MPR marketing and production got a little carried away by adding prodigy-this and -that in random voiceovers, but at least they hadn’t dramatically edited her interview.
As for the insults? Most of the mean comments had been nonsensical. She would ignore them. She was ugly? Okay, whatever. Being ugly had very little to do with playing the piano. Part of her really wanted to respond like 🤬🤬🤬, but she didn’t have time … and that wasn’t a good idea at any rate.
Besides, if her mother had seen her reading comments, her mother would have asked her to please not do that and to let someone else read them first and then trust that person to pass on reasonable feedback. But she had wanted to read all the comments and most of the bad ones honestly weren’t that big of a deal.
But, most importantly, some comments had mentioned her music! Some people even said they loved it, which had made her smile uncontrollably for a solid seven minutes earlier.
The fact that people were enjoying her music was honestly spectacular!!! She would focus on that and on playing piano like she wanted. Hopefully, eventually, most would understand and the noise about her being a nepotism baby fake prodigy would go away.
Now, she would practice vigorously to her exorcise the frustrations that possessed her because she wasn’t going to complain or even troll fools online.
Author’s Notes:
- I imagine Elmire conducting her exorcism by practicing Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 7 in B♭ major, Op. 83 (from 13:43):
- I used KawaiiStacie’s Switch Streaming mod to generate most of the comments, which I used slighty out of context. The mod needs to be updated, so I can’t recommend it now.
6 Comments
MonaSolstraale
September 25, 2023 at 5:34 pmYour photos are always so delicious. A pleasure to behold 😍
It is very interesting to hear the piece of music that Elmira plays. In my lack of knowledge about classical music, I had imagined something else, perhaps more romantic. However, I think that the chosen one emphasizes her mood and passion.
Haneul
September 28, 2023 at 5:44 pmThank you for the compliment! 🙂 I imagine that Elmire plays lots of different classical music, including a lot of unpretty, fairly noisy pieces, and this one seemed to suit the mood best. I imagine her playing more romantic pieces too, though.
Yimiki
September 28, 2023 at 3:25 pmElmire is fighting a losing battle there – she might want to be seen as an ordinary girl that “just happens” to have a talent for the piano, yet she is anything but. A prodigy suits her well and to top that off, she’s also a daughter of a ridiculously wealthy and influential man and a pretty young girl. That response from the masses is to be expected, unfortunately. I wonder if she realizes that “cute” can have very different meanings when it’s said to a child versus a teenager? Doesn’t seem like she does.
I have great respect for Elmire for reading all of those comments and not letting the negative ones get to her. That’s not something that a lot of girls her age would also be able to do.
Haneul
September 28, 2023 at 5:41 pmThanks for this comment! You’re the first person (including comments on the forum) who’s pointed out that Elmire could be wrong here and that “prodigy” may be appropriate. I like your point of view 🙂 and am always grateful for it.
I imagine that she may be dealing with a lot for a normal teen. She’s not a vampire and in her family that may make her feel comparatively ordinary even when she’s not. She’s also at least somewhat aware of her privilege so she may not be sure if she should get a lot of credit for something that perhaps a lot of people could also do if they grew up with rich, supportive parents and a grand piano in their home. She also could be being a bit subconsciously delusional because “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down” and she doesn’t want to endanger her social life by appearing arrogant or better than others before high school even starts. And she’s a perfectionist and might have some black & white thinking and messed up ability to judge what she does if she’s passionate about it and it’s not clearly perfect/almost perfect.
With cute, I think it’s different. She’s always been trying to crash my game by autonomously attempting things that the game prohibits children from doing, so here I imagine she’s just trying to get away from descriptions that are often associated with children like cute and little so that she can be taken more seriously/be seen as less of a kid.
As for negative comments, this is the first time, so as long as they don’t come for her piano playing with a real critique, she’s fine. She’s grown up passionate about music, fairly self-assured, and surrounded by people who are pretty supportive and generally kind to her, so random comments from random people about her face won’t land but if they had seemingly real critiques about her playing (“ewww why does she play the trill so ugly like that?! her wrist is too high and that measure sounded awful.”) that might be different…
Anyway, Elmire was having a bad morning and did make that face unprovoked when reviewing/uploading the interview video and was sad at the piano, and got most of those comments…so I had to have a reason.
Sorry my comment is so long.
Yimiki
September 28, 2023 at 9:21 pmNo need to apologise! I like a good discussion 😁 haha, Elmire sounds like a real handful for the game to handle! My child sims have never tried to do things the code won’t let them – granted, most of the time, free will is turned off for them to begin with.
Elmire seems to be in the unique position of being extraordinary in one way, while surrounded by people who are extraordinary in a completely different way, and believing that she is average as a result. She’s an interesting one. Some time around her peers in high school will change her perspective, I bet. Or not. Maybe she’ll take to high school life like a fish to water with no revelations.
I’ve had mostly opposite experiences with young teen girls – the ones that were constantly surrounded by praise and support were the most sensitive to negative attention, as they rarely had to deal with that before. Elmire is great for being so confident 😁
On a different note, I can completely imagine Asher behind the screens, making sure that his daughter is hyped up and seen as special 🤣
Haneul
September 28, 2023 at 11:54 pmHaha – I always have free will on to the highest extent possible, which leads to some odds happenings. 🙂
We’ll see how she handles things in school and how Asher handles them as well. 🤐 Hopefully, her thought process will become clearer too.
I’ve had mostly opposite experiences with young teen girls – the ones that were constantly surrounded by praise and support were the most sensitive to negative attention, as they rarely had to deal with that before. Elmire is great for being so confident.
I definitely agree that dealing with negativity can be really upsetting if you’re used to praise. I think the way I tried to explain Elmire’s reaction to it in my comment was confusing/wrong. There are two-ish sides to it. One, she has some of her dad in her and she has some confidence from that and from being supported. The other side is that she’s a perfectionist. When she was an actual child, she received a lot of praise (not just from her father ^^) and much of it probably annoyed her, especially when she was praised after making a “mistake.” So praise from most adults eventually became rather meaningless to her (because in her opinion, they had no standards, honestly just lied sometimes, generally refused to take her seriously, and praised everything unreasonably – hence some of the annoyance with “prodigy”). She craves valid, helpful criticism because she wants to improve and feels stifled by the constant praise (it was hard for tell how much of it was “you’re good for a kid” vs. “by any standard, that’s really good” vs. giving-compliment-to-be-polite) and she’s also a little toxic…
Mean comments are different, but the ones she got were mostly off-topic, nonsensical and from randoms. She can ignore them for now without being affected because they just seem weird. The positive comments are good too because people are saying they enjoy her music and she can trust that (they’re not offering weird evaluations of her skill). She’s more bothered by the prodigy thing because she doesn’t really understand it and also hates it if it’s going to lead to social problems or people seeing her as being so good already that there’s no need or way for her to improve (an idea Elmire is 100% against). She probably doesn’t think she’s average, but she doesn’t like “prodigy” either and tries to play subconscious games with words by admitting to being “talented” or “at a professional level” to get rid of the uncomfortableness and uncertainty around “prodigy.”