Join Our Enchanted Bridegroom Aftermath Program Today!

 Have you recently confessed your undying love to a monstrous figure of some sort? Did he then transform into an attractive human man? Is he severely traumatized? We’re here to help!

Many women, in the immediate aftermath of a curse-breaking, expect to live a romantic life of luxury and ease with their dashing Prince Charming. But your Prince Charming has PTSD. Yes, I’m talking to you. Because they all have PTSD. Coming out of an animal transformation is no joke.

Here are just a few of the issues to be on the lookout for as he adjusts:

• Disassociation

• Dysphoria

• General confusion about identity

• Sensory overload

• Other processing difficulties

• Large gaps in education

• Large gaps in social development

• Large gaps in physical development

• Codependency

• Trust issues

• Fear of intimacy due to previous trauma

• Depression

• Heightened anxiety

• Attachment difficulties

• Trouble setting boundaries

• Trouble understanding boundaries

• Trouble understanding age appropriate behavior

• Trouble understanding species appropriate behavior

• Difficulties with nutritional intake

• Agoraphobia

• Insomnia

• Anger issues

We understand that all of this can be a lot, and it wasn’t what you were expecting. But remember, your Prince is suffering a lot more than you are, and he desperately needs your support.

We are proud to offer several options to support you in supporting him, from talk therapy to basic education modules on a wide range of topics, including but not limited to:

• How to walk

• How to read

• How to write

• How to use a fork

• Basic arithmetic

• Basic etiquette

We will gladly work with you to address any gaps in knowledge or skills lost to prolonged change in form. We also offer customized history and science lessons based on your Prince’s education level at time of curse, and the duration of his curse. Did he spend ninth grade social studies and health class living in a cave? We can help. Did he spend two hundred years isolated in an enchanted palace, missing numerous wars and major scientific advancements? We can help with that, too.

Call 1-800-XXX-XXXX today to speak with a representative about your Prince’s custom-tailored adjustment plan.

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Beauty and the Beast and Prejudice

 Look, it's not surprising that someone decided to make the Beast's curse a punishment for wickedness. If anything, it's a surprise that it took them 200 years to do it. We do, after all, see a precedent for characters being transformed as punishment; the new thing here was combining "enchanted bridegroom" with "rightful punishment."

This makes perfect sense as a direction to take the story in. What confuses me is that pretty much everyone in the last 70 years has continued to take the story in that exact same direction. After two entire centuries of Beauty and the Beast as a well-known and well-loved story, the entire point of it changed practically overnight, and no one ever looked back.

My theory is that there are two main reasons for this.

1. Our society equates beauty with goodness, and ugliness with wickedness, a pervasive and incorrect viewpoint that makes it hard for us to accept that someone as hideous, as monstrous, as the Beast did literally nothing wrong.

2. Our society struggles to grasp the concept of men as victims of violence, particularly violence perpetrated by women, particularly sexual violence. Men are tough and strong. Large, hairy, ugly men, especially. Men carry out violence. Men do not have violence inflicted upon them.

It's much easier for us to view the Beast as a villain in need of reform than as a prisoner in need of rescue, because that fits in better with our prejudices and preconceived notions. Shirley Temple said, "But what if the Beast was a little bit bad," and we grabbed it, and ran with it, because it makes more sense to us.

But it's not what happened. Granted, none of it happened; this is a fairy tale. But it's a fairy tale that holds a major place in our society, a fairy tale than everyone knows, that's been spread and shared in a thousand ways. And that our cultural awareness of the story has completely shifted, in a relatively brief period of time, says, I think, unfortunate things about us. We want the big ugly dude to be the bad guy. As soon as someone suggested he could be, we embraced it wholeheartedly and never looked back.

And, like, he doesn’t stay a bad guy. It’s a redemption story now. But the original Beast didn’t need to be redeemed! He needed to be rescued. Beauty needed to overcome her own prejudices so she was able to rescue him. We need to overcome ours so we can restore his reputation and his intended role in the story.

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Read Your Source Material

 Not to, like, gatekeep fairy tale retellings, but how many authors who've retold Beauty and the Beast do you think have actually read Beauty and the Beast? This is a story that's been around for 280 years, and I have never read a retelling that was not very clearly influenced by variants that have only existed for the last 70 years. That's a quarter of the history of this story.

I've read so many BATB retellings, and so many of them are so, so good. I'm not complaining about any of these specific books. Just, like, the trend in retellings, and the fact that it's apparently normal not to even read the source material before writing an entire book about it. It's just...weird. I mean, it's not just me, right? That's weird.

There's dozens if not hundreds of variants of Cinderella, and I wouldn't expect someone to read every single one of them. But Beauty and the Beast isn't a folktale. It has a clear origin point. I wouldn't expect a reteller to read every version of Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, or even necessarily to track down and read the earliest documented version. But I would expect you to read The Little Mermaid, or The Wizard of Oz. Not read a picture book based on The Little Mermaid, or watch the MGM movie. Read the books. Because those aren't just fairy tales, they're also books that have authors.

I think, because it was written so long ago, pre-copyright laws, and because it became so popular, people have largely forgotten that Beauty and the Beast is also a book that has an author.

The source material is right there. Why wouldn't you read it? And it's not just Villeneuve; as I read more and more retellings that are clearly influenced by the Shirley Temple version, I'm starting to doubt that all of these authors have even read Beaumont or Lang.

You are welcome to tell your version of Beauty and the Beast exactly the way you want to, obviously, regardless of how it relates to any other versions. But why wouldn't you want to read the original first, and at least see if it has any ideas to offer? If you don't want to bother tracking it down, I have already tracked it down for you, and it’s here. And if you don’t want to take the time to read something so much longer than the average fairy tale, even reading something like the detailed summary on Wikipedia is useful.

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Beauty and the Beast: Reasons for Curses, Changing Trends: Part II

 Where we left off last week, the earliest example of our current version of the curse was Robin McKinley’s Beauty, and for a long time, I couldn’t find anything else.

Did Robin McKinley singlehandedly change the story? Or, I guess, change it with the aid of Disney, taking the idea and running with it?

The late 1970s seems like much too late for a something that’s such a fundamental part of our understanding of the story now. And Robin McKinley’s mention of the Beast being rightfully punished is so casual—it doesn’t feel like she’s introducing an exciting new variation to a classic story. It doesn’t have enough importance to the overall story to make sense as a new element.

I found one other variant with a good fairy/bad prince—the picture book Beauty and the Beast, with text by Marianne Meyer and art by Mercer Meyer. This was originally published in the same year as Beauty—1978. It remains an extremely popular version even today, still in print, still spotted in bookstores. It’s possible that this was at least a significant influence on the current pop culture version of the story.

But Meyer's book came out 2 months before McKinley's—there's no way they influenced each other.  McKinley's would have been completely finished long before she had access to Meyer's. Which means there must have been another, earlier source than influenced them both, unless they both came up with the same change independently, which seems unlikely. The odds of two independent writers making the same change to the same well-known story in the same year, with no outside influences are pretty low.

It took me several more weeks to find any promising potential sources. And when I did, it was on Wikipedia. But don’t worry, I only started there. The primary sources have been located, and the accuracy of the Wikipedia article has been confirmed.

Henri Pourrat published over 1000 French fairy tales in the 1940s and 1950s, which were translated into English in the 1950s. Which means his works could easily have been available to and influential for a young McKinley and a young Meyer, twenty years before they wrote their books.

Pourrat’s version is called Belle-Rose, or The Lovely Rose, depending on the translation. It doesn’t deviate enough from the standard Beauty and the Beast to warrant its own post, so I’m just gonna highlight some key differences. The mother is alive. The beast is described as having a muzzle like a mastiff, paws like a lizard, and a body and tail like a salamander, with skin as wrinkled as a turkey’s neck and as slimy as a frog’s. So, like, this dude is gross. Spell is broken when the daughter of a poor man touches him without being asked and without shuddering.

And the important part: the casting of the spell. As the Beast puts it, “All I could think of was revelry and battles; nothing did I know of pity and charity. Beggars disgusted me, with their rags and their sores. One day, when I mocked at a poor man who asked for bread at the door, I beheld myself changed into a Beast.” (translated by Mary Mian).

So. Here we have not just a very clear bad prince, but one whose curse will look very familiar to anyone who’s seen the Disney movie. Even if this didn’t influence McKinley and Meyer, I very much suspect it influenced Disney.

After I found this story, I was ready to give up. Nothing else had panned out. But there was one version of Beauty and the Beast I wasn't able to access.

Shirley Temple had a fairy tale TV show - Shirley Temple's Storybook - which ran from 1958-1961. The first episode featured a version of Beauty and the Beast starring Charlton Heston. This may or may not have once been released on VHS, but if so I can’t find it. It was never released on DVD. It doesn’t seem to be available online. I can’t find a script or detailed summary.

A book associated with the first season of the series came out in 1958. For a while it looked like I wasn't going to be able to access that, either. It was difficult to find a library willing to send it to me. I was ready to give up on the whole thing and just assume Shirley Temple's version wasn't noteworthy. But I just got the book today. And this is what it says about the spell:

"A magician cast a spell over me and condemned me to remain in that form...Because I was proud and thoughtless, vain and selfish, he made me look as I really was."

If the book features a good fairy and bad Beast, the TV show it's based on almost certainly does as well.

Things get a little weird when we try to work out who actually made the change; Shirley Temple wasn't writing her own scripts. The book attributes the story to Andrew Lang, but this is not Andrew Lang's version. I read Lang's version from multiple sources just to make sure there wasn't a fluke; Andrew Lang absolutely did not write the Shirley Temple version.

The IMBD page for the TV episode lists the writers as Lang, Beaumont, and Joseph Schrank. This element of the story certainly didn't come from Lang or Beaumont, so it looks like we can probably trace this whole thing back to Joseph Schrank.

Shirley Temple's Storybook is a much more likely source of the shift than Belle Rose, although I do still suspect it influenced Disney somewhat. I'm so glad I kept investigating the Shirley Temple thing. This was a very popular show at the time, and the book is a picture book published by Random House, with Shirley Temple's name on the cover, which means it was likely much more popular and more widely available than the Pourrat translation. This version was likely watched and read by children, was likely the first exposure to the story for many, which means it would easily be accepted and remembered as How The Story Was Supposed To Be. Robin McKinley would have been six when this came out. Mayer would have been 13.

So. If you've ever wondered, like me, why everyone keeps vilifying our completely innocent Beast, you can blame Shirley Temple. 

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Beauty and the Beast: Reasons for Curses, Changing Trends: Part I

 So—I’m sure this will come as a shock to all of you—I’ve been thinking about Beauty and the Beast.

Specifically, about the nature of the curse.

In the original novel, he’s being punished for not responding favorably to unwanted sexual advances. In modern pop culture, he’s being punished for just sort of generally being a jerk. So over the course of 280-ish years, we’ve flipflopped from good prince/bad fairy to bad prince/good fairy.

When, exactly, did this change take place?

Let’s break it down.

I started with two obvious ends of the timeline.

Villeneuve’s 1740 La Belle et la Bete: good prince/bad fairy

Disney’s 1991 Beauty and the Beast: bad prince/good fairy

But it certainly didn’t start with Disney.

The first bad prince/good fairy version I could recall off the top of my head was Robin McKinley’s 1978 Beauty. Robin McKinley is awesome, and you should all read Beauty, but I doubt she single-handedly brought about this change.

I thought, briefly, maybe this has been here since nearly the beginning. Maybe when Beaumont altered and abridged the original novel in 1756, specifically to act as a moral tale for young girls, she thought “if you are naughty you become ugly” would be a good lesson.

Nope. She doesn’t go into details, but specifies the Beast was cursed by a wicked fairy.

So. Let’s look at some other Beauty and the Beast milestones.

In Andrew Lang’s 1889 Beauty and the Beast, in The Blue Fairy Book, we’re told by the Beast’s mother that Beauty has released him from a terrible enchantment, but no further details are provided. So that’s a wash. I was looking at Lang as a likely candidate for the shift, since the color fairy books were quite popular, and we already know he's not a super reliable source of information on fairy tales. He is the guy who claimed Prince Lindworm was Swedish, a claim which has absolutely no supporting evidence or basis in reality.

Moving on.

In Cocteau’s 1946 live action movie La Belle et la Bete, the Beast is cursed because his parents didn’t believe in spirits. Which I think we can count as good prince/bad fairy.

Does that mean that the shift happened sometime after 1946? The 1946 movie and the 1991 movie are the probably the biggest pop culture moments for Beauty and the Beast in the 19th century, and they use two different versions.

I need to go to the library. We’ll pick this back up after some research. In the meantime, please let me know if you remember any pre-1978 versions with a bad prince and good fairy!

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The Mother of the Beast

 I just want to take a moment today to go over yet another horrifying, heartbreaking element of the Beast’s suffering in the original Beauty and the Beast. I recently read the translation in the Gutenberg book I’ve linked here, to confirm it was legit before sharing, and I noticed a detail that I’d missed on my previous readings.

The Beast’s mother—his bio mother, not his creepy foster mom who wanted to marry him—was present when he was cursed. The fairy was attempting to ask her for her son’s hand in marriage, and she and her son both said no.

A quote from the fairy, to the queen: “I warn you that if you acknowledge to anyone that this monster is your son, he shall never recover his natural shape.”

Can you even imagine? You trusted this woman to take care of your son while you were at war. You love your child so much, and you’ve been separated from him for years, doing your duty as queen, protecting your subjects. You miss him. You miss him so much. And this is the woman you trusted to raise him.

She makes this outrageous suggestion, and you realize that you should never have trusted her, that she’s been grooming your son for who knows how long, and the only good thing about this situation is that at least she’s not very good at grooming, because your son clearly doesn’t like the idea any more than you do.

So you say no, because what else could you possibly say, and then she turns your baby into a monster, and then she forces you to sever ties with him if there’s to be any hope of the spell ever breaking.

I often go years at a time between rereading things like this, and this detail had completely slipped my memory, and I have spent all this time thinking, “What is wrong with this poor Beast’s mother? We know she’s alive, because she shows up at the end; why wasn’t she here earlier? Why wasn’t she here the whole time?”

Well, it turns out there’s nothing wrong with her, and she wasn’t here because the fairy was very thorough with the curse.

All this time with an evil fairy, separated from his mother, and the Beast gets her back so briefly before the fairy separates them again, and he’s all alone, all alone for so long.

And the way the fairy phrases things, it sounds like her primary concern isn't depriving the Beast of companionship from the mother figure who hasn’t just propositioned and then cursed him, so much as she’s worried the spell will break too easily if people know there’s a spell, which of course they would if the queen was like, “Hey, everyone, this is my kid, he’s a monster now.”

But the fact that the fairy is just thinking about the logistics of the spell, and not about the Beast’s emotional state—it’s almost worse, somehow? Like, deliberately causing more emotional distress to a person, when your whole goal in life right now is to cause him emotional distress, that’s one thing. But you have raised this guy from childhood, and you don’t even think about how hard this is going to be? Like, hurting someone on purpose is terrible—and she is very much also doing that—but so is spending several years with someone and not even thinking about how this is going to hurt. If she’d thought about the separation from his mom hurting him, she would totally also have done it for that reason. But she didn’t think about it.

So now our guy has been propositioned by the woman who raised him. He’s been very briefly reunited with his mother. (And also very briefly fought in a war, that’s a thing that happened, too.) He’s been turned into a monster, he’s been trapped inside his own mind by the curse clause “I command thee to appear as stupid as thou art horrible.” And now he's been separated from his mom.

I was thinking, well, if we get to the point, several years down the line, where it’s becoming clear that the spell isn't going to break, maybe we could just accept the consequences of breaking the fairy’s rules. Like, the Beast could go home, and the queen could tell everyone what happened. And then the spell wouldn’t break, but he can be home, and everyone will know who he really is, and can treat him accordingly.

But then there’s the ‘stupid as thou art horrible’ clause. If the queen acknowledges him and renders the curse unbreakable, he will forever be trapped inside his own head, unable to properly express himself because he has to appear significantly less intelligent than he is. This isn't just physical. Which means we can’t afford to give up on the remote possibility of the spell someday breaking.

Also, as far as I can tell he’s the only kid, the queen’s only heir. Even if the people will accept being ruled by a monster, he won’t be able to utilize his skillset to rule effectively until the spell, with that stupid clause, is broken. So even if they didn’t have to be separated for the Beast’s sake, they would have to be separated for the kingdom’s sake.

This just makes me so sad. She didn’t want to abandon her son. Abandoning him was the only thing she could do, if she wanted him to have any chance of breaking his spell. If she’d kept him close, if she let people figure it out, he’d never be free. So she set him up in the property that reminded her of her deceased husband, the estate she wanted to retire to when she was finally done with her war, and she left him. Because she had to.

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Untitled Beauty and the Beast Retelling

 Mira weeps.

She has not, these last few days. She has not let herself. But now she’s alone, in her private hollow in the woods, and no one will search for her for a quarter hour, at least.

A twig snaps. 

Mira looks up. Standing before her is a great beast, seven feet tall at least, his antlers adding another foot or two. He has glossy dark fur, and a snout the looks somehow like both a bear’s and a deer’s. Horrifying and majestic, like a forest god of old.

“Hello,” he says.

She stares at him for a long moment before recovering her manners. “Oh! Hello.”

“You’re upset.”

“Um. Yes.” She really does not want to explain the situation to a monster in the woods.

He stares at her for nearly as long as she stared at him, when he first spoke. “You want to get away,” he says at last, half a question. It sounds like an offer.

“Oh, yes,” Mira says, her need for escape overwhelming both reason and fear. “But I can’t. my family is depending on my marriage. We need the bride price desperately.”

“And do you want to be married?”

She thinks of Ralph, of his bright smile and soft hands. She thinks of Ralph three days ago, when he— “No.”

The creature nods. “What is your bride price? I will pay it double, and take you away, and you needn’t be my bride.”

She studies the monster. He has no reason to help her, and she has no reason to trust him. He may be lying, about her not being his bride. He may plan to eat her instead.

She cannot stay here.

“You’ll have to speak with my father,” she says.

He nods.

“I am Mira. What shall I call you?”

He doesn’t answer for a long moment. “I don’t have a name,” he says. “You may call me Beast; it is what I am.”

-

The Beast speaks with her father in the doorway; his antlers prevent him from fitting inside. Not, Mira thinks, that her father would be inclined to let him in regardless. He closes the door on him, rudely, to discuss his offer.

“You can’t mean to marry a monster.”

“You can’t mean to turn down the bride price he offers, not with Mother sickly, and your only son still in diapers.”

“Young Ralph has—”

“Ralph will offer you half what the Beast has. We’ve made him no promises. Take the better offer.”

“I am not so desperate for gold that I would—”

“I’ll not marry Ralph, Father. Accept the Beast’s offer, or I’ll go with him anyway, and bring shame on the family.”

“He has bewitched you. Mira, child. He’s a monster. He’s—”

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The Shoemaker Prince

So I wrote another book. The Shoemaker Prince is a collection of thirteen short stories based on or inspired by folklore, and it’s coming out on November 2. Digital preorders are open now through most major retailers, and print preorders open through the Wax Heart website on October 12. And I’m super excited!

Some of these stories I wrote as recently as August—I think one I actually finished in early September. It happened to me, very suddenly, as stories sometimes do, and I knew it belonged in this collection.

Other stories I’ve been working on for a very long time. I wrote the first draft of “Violet and Zorzal” when I was sixteen, and I consider it my first real story—the first one I wrote down in its entirety that was for myself and not a school assignment. Before that, my stories existed only in my head.

I began “The Girl With No Heart in Her Body” when I was somewhere in the eight to ten range. It’s a story about a girl born literally heartless, and I think it was my small child attempt to make sense of my undiagnosed mental illness—most of the stories I remember telling myself at this age were about girls with something missing, and no one around them understanding what was wrong with them or why they couldn’t just be like everyone else. The story has obviously been updated significantly since my mental first draft twenty years ago, but it’s still very important to me.

Other stories include:

The title story, about a boy with amnesia, red shoes, and a pet cardinal.

“The Princess Who Refused to Marry a Merman,” a story about a sailor princess with a missing, enchanted fiancé.

A retelling of “The Frog Prince.”

A retelling of “The Frog Princess.”

A retelling of “Puss in Boots” from the perspective of the princess that the cat and his owner are attempting to hoodwink.

At this exact moment, my personal favorite stories are “The Princess Who Refused to Marry a Merman” and “The Ogre Bride,” both largely original stories, though obviously heavily inspired by folk traditions. So keep an eye out for those, and the other eleven!

(Because people often ask: This book can be purchased in print or digitally, from Wax Heart Press or from most major booksellers. All purchases support me both financially and in terms of sort of passive promotion. I get the same amount of money for print purchases no matter where you buy them, but while I get a fraction of the profits from ebook sales elsewhere, I do get 100% of the profit from ebook sales through waxheartpress.com. You’re also charged a dollar less for buying it from there. I make about the same amount of money from print sales and from ebook sales through Wax Heart Press, and a bit less from ebook sales through other channels. But I am super grateful for any purchase you make, and you should absolutely do what works best for you!)

 

 

Beauty and the Beast: Dream Prince

I’m going to take some time today to talk about one of my (many) favorite aspects of the original Beauty and the Beast, which I’ve somehow managed to go all these years without covering.

The Superman love triangle.

Is there some sort of official name for this phenomenon that I haven’t bothered to look up? Probably.

But you know what I’m talking about. Lois likes Clark, but she’s really hung up on Superman. So this poor guy is in competition with himself for her affections.

In “The Beauty and the Beast,” the beauty is living with a beast who proposes to her every night, and every night she says no. But she’s growing increasingly fond of him, and one of the main things preventing her from saying yes is her Dream Guy.

Now. A brief explanation of the beast’s situation here. Part of his curse is that he seems as dumb as the beast he looks like. So he’s sort of trapped inside his own head, and it’s not possible for the beauty to really get to know him.

But he’s visiting her in her dreams, as a prince - as his real self. And she’s fallen in love with the dream prince, who she hasn’t connected with the beast.

So she’s refusing to marry him because she’s in love with the person he’ll become as soon as she says yes.

Basically, it’s a mess.

And ultimately she does agree to marry the beast, when it seems he’ll die if she doesn’t. At which point we have two options.

She agreed to marry him because she does care for him deeply, even if she’s not in love with him, and has decided that she’d rather keep him alive than keep waiting on a man who might be only a figment of her imagination. In which case everything is gonna be great when he changes; she saved the beast she’s fond of, and now gets to marry the man she loves.

The beast’s near death has made her realize that it’s him she truly loves, not a man who may only be a figment of her imagination. And as soon as she realizes she loves the beast more than the man, the beast ceases to exist forever and is replaced by the man. Which is a major bummer, and much awkwardness is bound to ensue.

It’s a worse situation than Superman’s; once he comes clean to Lois, it’s all good, because Clark and Superman are the same person in different clothes. But while the beast may be fundamentally the same person he always was, the terms of his curse prevent him from acting like himself while he’s a beast. Which means that the two people the beauty is torn between are, in a way, simultaneously the same person and two different people.

And it’s just - honestly I’m not sure I see this working out well. If you’ve fallen for this big, kinda ugly guy who’s a little slow, a little dumb, are you going to be happy with a whip-smart hottie? And if the girl you like was always nice to you when you were slow and ugly, but is suddenly all over you when the spell breaks, if she agreed to marry you, but is clearly delighted when this causes you to become a radically different person from the one she agreed to marry, how are you going to feel about that?

Overall, it’s this “seem like a beast” clause that continues to be problematic. Because if you love someone, it shouldn’t really matter what he looks like, right? But if the spell changes how you act, that’s...it’s just difficult. That fairy who cursed him knew what she was doing; he is thoroughly screwed over.

 

 

Transformation Through Love

I've talked before about the transforming power of love, and specifically about the transforming power of love in "Prince Lindworm." But that was a 20+ page academic essay, and who wants to read a 20+ page academic essay? (Although, if you do, it's here.) So let's talk about it again, in a more casual setting. 

We've gone over the bizarro transformation sequence before, but let's run through it again for anyone who's new here: Girl forced to marry snake monster with history of eating wives. Girl wears 10 shifts under her wedding dress. Lindworm asks girl to take off shift, girl demands lindworm take off skin first. Lindworm complies, repeat 10 times. Girl whips nasty mass of skinless lindworm with whips dipped in lye. Girl dunks nasty mass of skinless, whipped lindworm in tub of milk. Girl embraces nasty mass of sticky, skinless, whipped lindworm. Lindworm turns into hot guy.

Now, the majority of the transformation process is extremely violent. It also sort of matches up with the Catholic sacrament of penance, which is consistent with the whole story being a Christian allegory, which you can read about here. And transformation through violence is certainly an established pattern in folklore, as we see most prominently in The Frog King, but also in more minor forms in a number of stories from throughout Europe. Which I will talk about more in a future blog.

But today we're going to focus on that last step. On that embrace.

There are a few things to keep in mind here. Firstly, hugging a dragon-thing that wants to eat you? Really gross and unpleasant. Secondly, hugging any sort of creature that has, through various abuses, become a quivering mass of exposed muscle and veins, likely bleeding profusely? Really, really gross and unpleasant. Thirdly, is "embrace" a euphemism? Maybe. Let's not dwell on the logistics of that. Fourthly, this girl is the lindworm's third bride, which probably means she's the third shot at transformation. An old woman in the forest told her what to do; there's no reason to believe she didn't give the same instructions to the two brides the lindworm ate, even if the text doesn't spell this out; there's a strong tradition in folklore of three people speaking to a mysterious old woman, and the first two ignoring her and dying.

So, my theory: the first two girls may have ignored the instructions entirely, but even if they didn't, they wouldn't have been able to complete the last step. Because it's the last step that makes our heroine remarkable. The last step is a kindness. To take up in your arms a disgusting, suffering thing, which would have destroyed you given the chance, to provide comfort - that takes a special kind of person.

A lot of weird, creepy things went into making the lindworm a man. But ultimately, the thing that changed him was one moment of kindness.

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Growing Up Beastly

As you probably know by now, I’m kind of obsessed with Beauty and the Beast. And I’ve spent a lot of time focusing on the nature of the Beast, and especially on his origins and on the idea of the Beast as a victim. (Like this post in my Sexual Abuse in the Folk Tradition series, and this post and this one about why we don’t curse children.) 

Today we’re going to talk about a slightly different Beast, from a different variant of this story type. This is, of course, Prince Lindworm.

Like our usual beloved Beast, it’s not the lindworm’s fault that he’s a lindworm, although for slightly different reasons—his mom screwed up, and he was born a lindworm. This enchanted bridegroom has literally never been unenchanted; there’s no natural state for him to return to. He’s always been a beast. (Sort of like Hans My Hedgehog, actually; maybe I’ll come back to that in another post.)

Before the lindworm gets transformed into a man, he eats two princesses. Which is…not great. However. He is a lindworm. Which is a kind of dragon. Which is, you know—I mean presumably they have dietary needs that differ from a human’s?

I have so, so many questions about this story that are not addressed in the original text. But the main one is what on earth did the lindworm think was going on here? So. Several points.

Firstly. There is a distinct possibility that he’s sort of a baby lindworm. (At least in the early Danish version. In the later version incorrectly attributed to Asbjorsen and Moe, we have a clearer timeline.) The queen gives birth while the king is at war. The lindworm slithers away, and reappears as the king is coming home from war.

Is this a war that’s lasted fifteen to twenty years? Did the king come home from the first war, stay home for several years, then go fight in another war that he’s returning from when the lindworm approaches him? Did the queen give birth to a fully grown lindworm that met the king a few months later? Did the queen give birth to a baby lindworm that was an adult by the time the king got home, either because lindworms grow faster than humans or because magic? Did she give birth to a baby lindworm that’s still a baby? How old is this lindworm?

Secondly. How did the lindworm know the king was his dad? Because he clearly did. He just slithered up one day and said “Hey, I’m your son. I wanna get married.”

Who raised this lindworm? Who told him who his real parents were? The text says he burrows under the bedchamber as soon as he’s born, and doesn’t mention him having any further contact with the queen or with anyone else.

Thirdly. Did the lindworm even know he was under a spell? Dude’s been a lindworm for his entire life. He knows his parents are human, but, like, do lindworms have access to comprehensive sex education? For all he knows, all lindworms might have human parents. Is he aware that he’s not supposed to be a lindworm? Even if he is, does that necessarily mean he wants to stop being a lindworm?

Fourthly. What was his ultimate goal here? He demands brides. He eats them. He demands more. Why?

Personally, I know nothing about lindworm culture and tradition. Maybe they’re, like, reverse black widows or praying mantises, and eating their wives is just, like, what they do. Or maybe he was just really hungry—though surely there would be people other than his new wives available to eat.

Why did he want to get married? Did he ever intend for a wife to survive past the wedding night?

Fifthly. The transformation. Did he see this coming? Again, did he even realize it was a possibility? When this chick starts demanding that he molt out of season and then whips him and bathes him in milk, what does he think is happening? Does he realize it’s a transformation spell? Was he expecting it or hoping for it? Does he think it’s just a bizarre human wedding tradition? Did the other two girls try to break the spell too, and do it wrong?

Shedding ten layers of skin in a row is gonna be pretty incapacitating for any sort of reptile. Once he’s done that, there’s no defending himself from things like the whipping. If the other girls tried to break the spell too, but skipped the shedding step and went right to whipping, he might have eaten them in self-defense.

Sixthly. The aftermath. So our lindworm is now a handsome prince. Okay, now what? What does that even mean? He’s literally always been a lindworm, with, as far as we can tell, lindworm behaviors and a lindworm palate. You aren’t turning him back into a prince—you’re turning him into a prince. Even if he always knew he was under a spell and it would someday be broken, that doesn’t change the fact that he’s like, inherently, fundamentally, a lindworm. He grew up as a lindworm, doing lindworm things.

He has no idea how to be a person, much less a prince. Walking, gesturing, chewing food—all exciting new experiences.

I mean, on the bright side, the king and queen didn’t actually miss out on their only child’s babyhood, after all—they still get to have all those fun experiences, just with an adult man who’s on his third wife and ate the first two.

I just, like, I don’t get how this whole thing is going to work. I have questions. I have concerns. I have many, many concerns.

Th circumstances are wildly different, but ultimately I think he’s a victim, too. Brides for lunch and all.

It’s not his fault he’s a lindworm, and while he was a lindworm, he did, presumably, what lindworms do. And now he’s a man, whether he wants to be or not. So he’s lost everything he’s ever known and been, and now he has to learn how to be a different kind of creature, from scratch, twenty years too late. (And depending on that whole king-at-war timeline, he may have just transitioned over night from a baby dragon to an adult man, which….yikes.)

What is the learning curve going to be like here? Let’s assume he’s not going to try to eat any more people, because of the sizing issue if nothing else—lindworms are probably a lot bigger than men. (How does he feel about the bride eating, looking back? Does he feel guilty? Does he shrug it off as a lindworm thing that he did when he was a lindworm? Is it all just kind of awkward?) Is he going to eat—or try to eat—a few cats or rats or lap dogs? How many months or years will it take him to remember he has to step out of bed in the mornings, instead of trying to slither and falling in a heap on the floor? When molting season comes around, is he going to try it and sprain something? (Or will molting forever be associated with terrible, terrible trauma after that bizarro transformation sequence?)

This guy has been totally screwed over since literally the moment of his conception. And for the stupidest reason. He didn’t insult someone, didn’t turn down their advances or refuse to share or help. His mom ate too many flowers. That’s it. That’s the whole reason he’s a monster, the whole reason two innocent girls are dead.

(Also, on the subject of those flowers, he should have been a girl. The queen ate the girl flower first, then the boy flower; she should have had a girl. I think I’ve done everything I’m going to with this story, but if you want to write a retelling where the lindworm is a girl, hit me up in like five years when my publishing company has expanded a little and I’ll publish it for you.)

(I wrote a book about the crazy aftermath, and you can get it here.)

Born a Monster

While animal bridegrooms are an extremely popular folktale motif, it’s fairly rare to encounter bridegrooms who were originally born non-human. (This is particularly interesting as it is much more common for brides to be born nonhuman—see “The Little Mermaid,” anything about selkies, “Undine,” “Melusine”—there’s also a distinct aquatic theme here, but I’m getting off-topic.)

There are only two other stories like this that come to mind: “The Pig King” (Italian and French) and “Hans My Hedgehog.” (German) (I am sure there are other stories out there that fit into this category, but there are hundreds of thousands of fairy tales in the world, and I can only read a small percentage of them, and can remember even less.)

“Prince Lindworm” differs from these other two born-a-monster stories in that his reason for being a monster is slightly more traditional. Monster bridegrooms are generally turned into monsters as a punishment—usually for a fairly minor offense, such as general rudeness or turning down romantic advances. The lindworm is a lindworm because of his mother’s minor offense of eating too many flowers. There’s no punishment involved in Hans’ or the Pig King’s monstrousness; their parents wanted desperately to have children, and someone magical heard their pleas and said yeah, okay, sure—but with a fun little twist. (Although Hans’ dad totally brought it on himself by saying “I want a kid so bad I wouldn’t even care if he was a hedgehog.”)

All three stories involve the beast marrying before his transformation. But while Hans and both versions of the Pig King remain beasts at least part-time for some time after their marriage (we’re talking months, here), the lindworm is transformed on their wedding night. Hans and French pig are the types of characters that can only be permanently freed from their animal forms when the animal skins are destroyed. Which their wives handle, having become extremely fed up with this whole bestiality situation. The terms of transformation for the Italian pig are just that he be married three times. (Which, by the way, no one actually knew about. The terms and conditions were totally secret in this situation. And personally, if I didn’t know about the 3 weddings deal, I probably wouldn’t have kept getting married after multiple spouses attempted to kill me, but whatever, you do you.)

Prince Lindworm just feels more like an enchanted bridegroom story than the others—partly because of the consequences-for-your-actions element of his lindworm-iness, but mostly I think because of the transformation sequence? And the role the main girl plays.

Hans’ bride comes off more like a Brave Little Tailor girl than an enchanted bridegroom girl; you don’t really get the sense that she’s saving him from enchantment. He won the right to marry her through tailor-typical feats, and their relationship is something that she endures until she figures out she can make it a little more bearable by trashing his hedgehog skin.

The pig king’s bride lying with him every night when he’s not wearing an animal skin is actually pretty common in folklore, with the best example being “East of the Sun, West of the Moon”—and of course there’s “Cupid and Psyche” there, too. But I do feel that a fundamental part of those stories is the journey that the girl goes on after seeing his face. “The Pig King” just feels—I don’t know.

I think an important part of enchanted bridegroom stories is the step where the girl does something to save the beast—whether that’s going on a journey to find him, initiating a bizarro transformation sequence, or searching frantically through the palace to find him and marry him before he dies of sorrow.

I don’t know. I just think that "Prince Lindworm" is better than the other born-enchanted stories I’ve encountered. It just feels right.

I can’t think of a good ending, here. Whatever. Remind me to come back to that whole girls-more-commonly-start-out-non-human thing sometime when I have the energy to spare for anything non-Lindworm related. (Even when bridegrooms are born monsters, they’re still distinctly enchanted, born from normal humans. Brides are more likely to be just naturally nonhuman, which is—there’s something significant in that, I’m sure, and I actually meant it to be a part of my seminar paper five years ago, but the professor made me narrow my focus, which was probably a good idea as the paper was still like 25 pages long.) 

Preorder my book, Lindworm, here!

Beauty and the Beast Reviews: Liz Braswell's As Old As Time

I reread Liz Braswell’s As Old As Time on Wednesday, and it’s not a great work of literature or anything, but it sure is fun! This is a little different; it’s published by Disney, and is a retelling of Disney’s animated Beauty and the Beast, not of the original fairy tale.

The premise, as advertised on the cover, is that the Enchantress who cursed the Beast is Belle’s mom. A good chunk of the story is comprised of flashbacks to when Maurice and the Enchantress (her name is Rosalind) were young, before Belle was born and when she was a baby. We have two big things happening in this back story: there’s a plague, and anyone remotely magical is being persecuted. The king and queen aren’t doing anything about either issue. So when they both die of the plague, Rosalind goes to test their son, to see if he’ll be a better ruler than his parents.

He fails. It’s possible she overreacts.

This is where a lot of the things I really love about the story come in. It addresses all the questions and concerns I had about the movie. The Beast is a 10 or 11 year old child when the curse is placed. The story and all the characters in it acknowledge that the curse was absolutely not an appropriate way to handle the situation, and was deeply unfair to both a child and a house full of servants who had nothing to do with anything. Which I really, really appreciate. The picture in the West Wing of an adult Prince is explained, too; it’s some really mean-spirited Dorian Grey crap, enchanted to show him what he would look like if he hadn’t been cursed.

Also, the Beast can read. We see him reading. I always hated the way the musical version made him illiterate; at 11 you should have learned to read. Especially as a prince. The only acceptable exception is The Whipping Boy.

So. Back to the story. Rosalind never returns home after placing the curse. She’s grabbed by the story’s Big Bad, who’s been kidnapping anyone with magic. We’ll come back to that subplot later. Her last act as she’s taken away is to set a spell that makes all normal people—including Belle and Maurice—forget about the existence of magic, to protect any of her people who are still free. Unfortunately, the Big Bad also has magic, so he remembers.

And I think that’s enough on the back story. Belle gets to the castle like usual. The change comes in the West Wing, when she manages to actually grab the rose before the Beast stops her, destroying it and any chance at breaking the curse.

(Afterwards, she points out rather callously that judging by the state of the rose, he didn’t have much time left anyway. Did he really think a girl was going to fall in love with him in the next couple months? She then proceeds to fall in love with him over the course of the next THREE DAYS. Also, the entire story, aside from the Maurice and Rosalind flashbacks, happens in three days. It’s a lot.)

This is when information about Belle’s mom starts coming out. They go through a bunch of old census records and fail to find anything about her, including her name, but they discover in the process that the local bookshop owner was in the census a few hundred years ago, and therefore probably knows something about all the magic stuff.

They head back to town to talk to him, and find him missing, with the book store burned down. We find out later that Gaston did it, and this was how he defended himself:

(A fire hazard, Gaston? Really?)

So they go to talk to Maurice next, and Belle has the Beast wait outside when she goes in the house, considering how their last meeting went. Except she never comes out; the big bad has her and Maurice now, too. The Beast sees where she’s being taken, but there are too many people for him to overpower.

He goes home for help, and finds that everyone is gone; the furniture and knick-knacks are just furniture and knick-knacks. The Beast himself has been struggling with animal instincts since the rose was destroyed; the curse is progressing.

With no other options, he goes to recruit the villagers for a rescue mission. He has the mirror, so they can see that Belle is in danger; they decide to deal with the whole Beast situation after rescuing Belle.

Meanwhile, Belle has gotten away, rescued her father, rescued her mother who’s been held her for a full decade, and released dozens of other prisoners.

And we’re into serious spoiler territory now, so I’m just gonna say the good guys win, Gaston kills the Big Bad, and everyone present is horrified, because he deserved a fair trial, Gaston!, which for some reason I just find hilarious.

Rosalind is seriously weakened by her decade of captivity. She says that the Beast isn't in danger of giving in to his animal instinct anymore because of his love for Belle. (Three days, guys!) But she has only enough power to either restore the Beast’s humanity or the humanity of all the servants. He chooses to restore everyone else’s humanity, of course, but it’s implied at the end that he and Belle are going to go on an adventure to find all the other magical people who went into hiding, and maybe one of them will be able to fix him.

Adorable awkwardness of Beast: Yes! He really gives off strong I-try-hard-but-my-life-basically-stopped-when-I-was-10 vibes. I love him!

Stand-Up-For-Herself-iness of Beauty: Good.

Human at the End: Nope.

Who Learns and Grows the Most? About equal.

Also, one more thing; have this conversation I thought was hilarious. Idk how the stove is drinking, exactly.

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Beauty and the Beast Review: Stacey Jay's Of Beast and Beauty

This book is…a lot. There are so many things to say about it.

So we’ll start with this: technically it’s sci-fi. It all takes place on another planet. None of the characters are technically aliens, but a lot of them are technically mutants, adapted to survive the new planet. But it doesn’t feel like sci-fi. It reads like a fantasy.

The second thing is a not-so-great one. Overall I really enjoy this book. I think it’s very clever. But this one thing—well. You don’t give little blind girls reading books a blind princess to relate to, then take away her blindness as part of her happy ending. That’s bad. That implies that you can’t be blind and live happy ever after.

There were people in the background—not present enough to be considered characters—who were missing both arms and legs. Who were missing chunks of their faces. Who weren’t exactly equipped to have good lives in a setting like this. And healing them, I guess I can understand better. It’s a quality of life issue. But the blind girl and the mute girl were awesome, capable characters who didn’t need to be healed to have happy endings, so to heal them feels almost cheap. It’s not solving a problem as much as it’s taking away valuable representation.

Okay. On to the good things.

The main characters are a beautiful young woman and a man described as “Monstrous.”

But it’s the man who attempts to steal a rose, the man who is held prisoner by the woman, and the man whose departure to help his family and delayed return nearly result in the woman’s death. It’s the woman who gets the transformation scene at the end when the man says “I love you.”

And all of this is done so cleverly that it doesn’t occur to you, for quite some time, that the roles have been reversed, that the woman is the Beast and the man the Beauty. Which I suppose is what comes of getting caught up in physical appearances in a story that’s literally about how deceiving physical appearances can be.

The Beauty and the Beast relationship is usually a very solitary one—just the two of them alone in an enchanted palace. Our girl here is a princess, though, and then a queen, with a court to manage and a city to care for. There’s a lot of political intrigue that a story like Beauty and the Beast doesn’t usually get into.

The story ends with the power of love bringing life to a dying planet, everyone’s disabilities erased, and everyone’s body changing in some way to better adapt to life on this planet. The characters are surprisingly nonchalant about major physical transformations. But it’s a fun story overall.

Adorable awkwardness of Beast: Sadly none

Stand-Up-For-Herself-iness of Beauty: Good

Human at the End: Not really, but that’s because a transformation did happen

Who Learns and Grows the Most? About equal

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Beauty and the Beast Review: Lisa Jensen's Beast: A Tale of Love and Revenge

This is the newest retelling of Beauty and the Beast I’ve read. It was a gift from a friend, and I’d been wanting to read it, but honestly if it hadn’t been a gift I might not have finished it.

It’s actually a really great book. But the beginning is extremely off-putting, and there’s not really a way around that—it needed to be, for the story to be able to develop the way it did.

So. Trigger warnings. Implied/referenced abortion, and rape. The first one I’m not going to dwell on, because it technically didn’t happen. But you spend a good chunk of the book thinking it did. (Well, I did. Now you don’t have to.)

But the other thing. Well. The prince who will become the Beast rapes our narrator. Not super explicit, because this is YA, but it’s very clear what happened, and it’s strongly implied that he’s done it to many other women in the past.

The only reason the book works is that there’s a complete disconnect between the Beast and the prince. He has no memory of what he did or who he was before the spell, which turned him into a Beast and our narrator into a sort of telepathic candlestick.

The fun thing about this book is that it spins out in a completely different direction from an other Beauty and the Beast retelling. Because we cannot allow the spell to be broken. Beauty isn't the main character, and though she’s a nice girl, she almost fills the role of antagonist—her entire time at the palace is spent hoping frantically that she won’t agree to marry the Beast, because we don’t want to lose our ugly amnesiac sweetheart to that evil prince.

Two important things to note for this story. The first is that this is one of the versions where our guy genuinely did something very wicked before being transformed—not some vague, undefined Bad Thing as in a lot of stories, and not Literally Nothing, as in the original novel. But this isn't a redemption story.

The second thing is that this is the first book in our series where the Beast is still a Beast at the end of the story. More and more often, the tendency is to be drawn more to the Beast, to want him to stay the way we first knew and loved him. Who is this hot guy? Give me back the person I fell for!

It’s especially pronounced here, since the prince and the Beast are essentially two different characters. But it’s a pattern that’s emerging in general—I call it “The Unothering of the Beast.” We’ll talk about this—and it’s implications—more as the series progresses.

Adorable Awkwardness of Beast: occasional

Stand-Up-For-Herself-iness of Beauty: abysmal, but we don’t care

Human at the End? No

Who learns and grows the most? The narrator, who is neither Beauty nor Beast

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Beauty and the Beast Review: Robin McKinley's Beauty

I’ve read a lot of books. I’ve loved a lot of books. This is the first one I remember really, really loving—obsessing over, probably. I checked it out of the library dozens of times in middle school. It was the first book I was invested enough in to go out and deliberately track down other books by the same author—until then I had been content with whatever appeared on the library shelves.

Beauty draws from one of the versions of the fairy tale in which the Beauty has sisters, and turns things on their head by making her sisters kind and loving. Robin McKinley has no patience for jealous, wicked relatives—a trend that continues in her other work.

Beauty came out several years before Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, and there’s been speculation that Disney took some of their ideas for the movie from Robin McKinley. Uncredited, of course. Beauty’s love for books and her horse, the Beast’s large library, and feeding the birds come to mind, specifically.

Beauty is not beautiful—she makes sure to tell us so several times in the first person narrative. “Beauty” is an unfortunate childhood nickname. Her given name is Honour.

The Beast gives off distinguished older gentleman vibes, when he’s not being awkward and adorable. He’s one of those Beasts that proposes every night, and the secondhand embarrassment is painful.

The Beast doesn’t even show up until about halfway through the book, but I’m never bored waiting for him, and I’ve always been much more interested in the Beast than the Beauty. The relationship is sweet and develops in a believable fashion. I especially appreciate how Beauty often feels like she isn't good enough for the Beast because of how poor and plain she is—it’s such a lovely, absurd detail as she falls in love with a man who isn't even human.

One of my favorite books of all time. Strongly recommend!

Adorable awkwardness of Beast: moderate

Stand-Up-For-Herself-iness of Beauty: good

Human at the End: yes

Who Learns and Grows the Most? Beauty


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In Defense of the Beast, Part Two Hundred Eighty Seven

You are a little boy. Ten, maybe eleven years old. Your parents aren’t here; you don’t know where they are. Maybe there’s a war. Maybe they just left you here because they didn’t want a child under foot. It’s been a long time since you’ve seen your parents. You used to miss them. You used to cry for your mama in the night.
Version 1                                                                         Version 2
You have a new mama now. She’s much nicer than your old mama. She always pays attention to you, and she hugs you and kisses you and holds you when you’re sad or scared. But you don’t stay eleven. And it begins to seem…strange, how affectionate she is. It makes you uncomfortable, but you don’t know why. You don’t say anything, because she is your mama, the only one who’s been here for you, and surely she knows what she’s doing. And then she asks you to marry her. You say no.	But you hardly think of them anymore. You have new people to take care of you now. These people aren’t your family. They’re your employees. You think they care for you, at least a little; after all, you are their prince. But it isn't the same. They don’t hug you. Their children don’t want to play with you. They call you master and prince and sir, until you think you might forget your own name, it’s been so long since you’ve heard it. One night, a strange old woman comes to the door, and all the grownups turn to you. You are young, a little spoiled, a little afraid. You tell them to send her away.
She doesn’t take it well. You are not the bad guy. It wasn’t your fault. It was never your fault.

As you have probably noticed, I like Beauty and the Beast. A lot. Yesterday I saw the Disney musical at my local community theater—and oh my goodness, I know I’ve said this before, but I am head over heels in love with how awkward and adorable the Beast is in the second half.

And I know there isn't anyone actively arguing with me or anything, but I felt the need to defend him. Again.

I know it’s been a really long time since I’ve been around—sorry. I bought a house, and now I’m in the process of moving into a house—more about that later—and I’ve been so busy I’ve hardly had a chance to write at all. It’ll probably continue being slow going for the next month or so, but I’m working on it. Stay tuned.