So today I thought it would be fun to break down all the details of the Beast’s curse in the original novel, because it’s really just a lot.
1. Turn into hideous monster
2. Appear as stupid as you are horrible
3. Remain in this state until a girl comes to you of her own accord despite expecting to be eaten
4. Said girl must be both young and beautiful
5. Said girl must crash at your place
6. Said girl must marry you
7. If your mom tells anyone you’re her son, you’ll stay a monster forever
8. If you let yourself be flattered by respect or titles, you’ll stay a monster forever (hence the “My Lord,” “No, I’m a Beast,” exchange that occurs multiple times)
9. If you use what remains of your intellect to make good conversation, you’ll stay a monster forever
That’s…a lot of curse.
And in addition to all of these conditions restricting his ability to break the curse, he is also shooting himself in the foot with the Dream Prince.
There’s a whole separate post about the Dream Prince somewhere on my upload schedule, but a quick summary if you haven’t seen that: he’s appearing in Beauty’s dreams as his human self, and she’s in love with the dream-him. The text does confirm that it is really him having these conversations with her in her dreams, and he doesn’t seem to have any restrictions on how he behaves there aside from not telling her who he is, so the mess he’s making here is entirely on him.
He's competing with himself for her affections, and the version of himself that he needs to win that competition is the less appealing one. But that’s not all.
Because the prince version of him also stabs the beast version in one of the dreams, and Beauty steps in to protect him. He calls the Beast an obstacle to his happiness, and tells Beauty she must not really love him since she would defend the Beast.
In another dream, he asks her which of them she would help, if he and the Beast were trying to kill each other. She says she would kill herself before hurting either of them.
So the prince is deliberately setting the two parts of himself up as antagonists, and seems to hate his Beast self, which, like, maybe it’s a self esteem thing? But it’s causing a lot of frustration and confusion for Beauty, and if she didn’t have the dream prince around she would probably have agreed to marry the Beast sooner.
Between the insane curse and the idiotic dream prince, it really is amazing the spell ever got broken.
Preorder your copy of To Be Loved from waxheartpress.com today!
No comments:
Post a Comment