What we really need is an adaptation of the original 1740 The Beauty and the Beast

So were you aware that the The Beauty and the Beast story we all know is a heavily abridged and rewritten version of a much longer novella by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve?  And that a lot of the plot holes existing in the current versions exist because the 1756 rewrite cut out the second half of the novella, which consisted entirely of the elaborate backstory that explains all the weird shit that happened before?  And that the elaborate backstory is presented in a way that’s kind of boring because the novel had only just been invented in 1740 and no one knew how they worked yet, but contains a bazillion awesome ideas that beg for a modern retelling?  And that you are probably not aware that the modern world needs this story like air but the modern world absolutely needs this story like air?  Allow me to explain:

The totally awesome elaborate backstory that explains Beauty and the Beast

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This post actually inspired me to go back and read the original, and I was not disappointed. In addition to Beast’s Warrior Queen mom, there’s also a whole bunch of backstory about how Beauty’s Fairy Mom fell for a human even though she wasn’t supposed to and the ramifications of that, which I think has a lot of potential too. (Though I’d keep Beauty’s biological dad as the merchant, in an adaptation.) I also enjoyed how much of fairy society was apparently dependent on snake transformations.

My favorite moment that doesn’t make it into adaptations, though, is that when everyone is arguing about how Beast totally can’t marry a merchant’s daughter because it’s beneath him, he says that if him being a human prince is what’s standing between them, he’s willing to be turned back into a beast because he’d rather be with her that way than not at all. That should 100% be included in every version.

magic beans 🫘

Dunno how to put it properly into words but lately I find myself thinking more about that particular innocence of fairy tales, for lack of better word. Where a traveller in the middle of a field comes across an old woman with a scythe who is very clearly Death, but he treats her as any other auntie from the village. Or meeting a strange green-skinned man by the lake and sharing your loaf of bread with him when he asks because even though he's clearly not human, your mother's last words before you left home were to be kind to everyone. Where the old man in the forest rewards you for your help with nothing but a dove feather, and when you accept even such a seemingly useless reward with gratitude, on your way home you learn that it's turned to solid gold. Where supernatural beings never harm a person directly and every action against humans is a test of character, and every supernatural punishment is the result of a person bringing on their own demise through their own actions they could have avoided had they changed their ways. Where the hero wins for no other reason than that they were a good person. I don't have the braincells to describe this better right now but I wish modern fairy tales did this more instead of trying to be fantasy action movies.

"In [fairy tales], power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness - from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis."

-Rebecca Solnit

hello

cinderella: redo

so i was watching cinderella while doing my nails and waiting for them to dry which was clearly a Mistake because now i can’t help but think -

the evil stepmother was always evil, okay. say her abuse of her own daughters was different than that of cinderella’s - but it was still abuse. giving them impossible expectations, telling them they were never good enough, never pretty enough, never smart enough. and then she gets married, and anastasia and drizella are ecstatic because this man seems kind and warm and maybe just maybe he can temper their mother, maybe with him around she won’t be so cruel. so they’re on their very best behavior in the beginning, they do just as their mother taught - they trot out their best upper court manners in an attempt to get their new stepfather to like them. but it just comes off as cold and snooty and they’re trying, they are, they’re just bad at it. and they see how he is with cinderella, the smiling girl their own age, and they are jealous. they don’t mean to be, they try not to be, they know it isn’t becoming of young ladies. but she gets hugs and kisses and affection and they get rulers slapped on their hands when they reach for desert and sharp jabs to their sides when they slouch and - soon they hate cinderella, not for anything she’s done, but for what she has and they dont

but then her father dies. and it’s all a tumble of things and cinderella is crying and they’ve lost their only chance at escaping their mother’s clutches and it’s terrible. and everything settles and there’s no reason to be jealous anymore but resentment is hard to let go of and they don’t know what to do. they’re only kids too after all. and they’re so terribly bad at comforting people, they can do flowery words and know all the right bows but cinderella is so sad and they just don’t know what to do with that, because they’re supposed to be sisters but they’re not even friends

and slowly but surely their mother starts abusing cinderella, starts making her a maid in her own home, and she’s their mother, what are anastasia and drizella supposed to do? she rules them with an iron fist, and cinderella doesn’t even like them anyway, it’s none of their business.

except one night anastasia crawls into her sister’s bed in the middle of the night and wakes her up. “i was thirsty,” she explains, eyes wide and shiny, and they’re bad at this with other people but drizella has no problems with pulling anastasia into her arms. the younger girl clutches her sister and continues, “i was thirsty and i went down to the kitchen to get some water and - and cinderella is still up! she’s doing the dishes, and she should be asleep, mom is going to make her make breakfast in the morning and -” she cuts herself off with a hiccup and whispers, “it’s not fair.”

“life isn’t fair,” drizella says, echoing one of their mother’s favorite phrases. but her sister is staring at her with wet eyes, and it’s not like their mother is likely to get up before sunrise anyway, she hates waking up, so she pulls herself and anastasia out of bed and off they go.

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a hypothetical d&d party

The bard is mute.

It’s not the first thing people notice about her, usually.  The first thing is generally that she’s young, and female, and lovely–the first thing people notice about their entire party is that they’re all young, and female, and lovely, and that’s gotten more than one would-be thief or mugger in far over their head when they haven’t noticed the the paladin’s hammer or the ranger’s axe.  It comes up rather quickly though, often enough.  Whoever heard of a bard who can’t sing?

She plays a lute, mostly, or a lap-harp made of shell and sinew, string instruments she can pluck while she smiles in secret and watches everyone around her.  She dances quick, except when she’s tired, when she’s scared, when she forgets to remember the feet at the ends of her legs.

She doesn’t tell her story to strangers, but enough of the other girls have learned to sign by now, and it’s easy enough to sketch out the outlines of the old bargain: the voice, the prince, the witch, the thousand shards of glass she walked upon on her way up the beach, the look in her sea-green eyes when they travel too near water.  The thousand shards of glass she walked upon when she left the palace, and turned back towards the sea to throw herself upon the rocks, and then made her way up the road inland, and kept walking.

.

The warlock is beautiful and mild and self-effacing and shy, is tidy and generous and charming.  She’s small with herself in exactly the right way to shout abuse to the half of her party who knows how to recognize that same look in the mirror in the morning.  The bird on her shoulder is too small, too bright, too sweet for a real warlock’s familiar.  The knife at her belt is sharp enough for anything that needs doing, though, cooking or otherwise.

Her fae patron visits sometimes, in the quiet hours between dusk and midnight, a sweetly old godmother made of moonlight and shadow.  She’s kind to the whole lot of them in her own chaotic way, free-handed with transmutations and illusions that break halfway through the evening, for better or worse.  She once spent three hours around their campfire drinking brandy and gossipping outrageously about the Feywild and teasing the wizard into fits of laughter.

She’s never told the story of how she met the warlock’s mother, or what debt was owed there, and the warlock doesn’t know herself.  It was never meant to be a debt paid in power and violence and the deft will-sapping enchantments the warlock weaves now, but, well.  The prince wasn’t meant to be cruel, the warlock says.  The palace was meant to be warmer than the fireplace cinders in her stepmother’s house.  The faerie was meant to be saving her from her lot, not throwing her into something worse.  The power’s an apology of sorts.

.

The wizard is awkward and joyful and nervous.  She has no fear of heights or small places, which just stands to be expected, she says, after all those years in that little tower, and she’s got no skill at lying or even edging around the truth at all, which is why she isn’t in the tower any more in the first place.  She says too much or too little or the wrong thing entirely, always, but the most well-socialized member of the whole party is the ranger who walks around with a dire wolf at her hip, or maybe their mute bard, so who are any of them to judge.

There was nothing to do in that tower but read, and brush her hair, and sort through the witch’s endless stockpile of dried herbs and potions ingredients, and watch out the window as woodcutters and hunters and princes rode by, and dream.  The reading was more interesting than the dreaming, most of the time, and the witch didn’t mind it as much when she talked about it.  She never bothered to actually use any of the magic in the witch’s books until the thing with the prince and the haircut and the desert, which she’s told them all about in all the detail they could ever ask for, but most of the girls get uncomfortable when she starts talking about princes.  It’s a little easier if she just starts rambling about conjuration and abjuration and illusion theory, about the 400-year-old history of a city that doesn’t exist any more, about the proper grammatical structure of Celestial, until maybe one of the quiet ones finally answers back.

Her hair is too short.  She keeps an illusion up over it whenever she can, while it grows back slowly, tickling the side of her face and the back of her neck and leaving her head too light and unbalanced.  

.

The ranger doesn’t care about princes, which makes one of them at least.  Then again, the ranger doesn’t trust anyone, really, prince or no, not wolves or monsters or the men who kill them.  She more or less trusts the rest of them by now, mostly, when the wind blows in the right direction.

She wears bright red in the middle of the woods and it shouldn’t help her slip into the shadows half as easily as it does, but most beasts can’t see color and red’s just another shade of gray if the light’s low enough.  She never uses her axe against trees.  She doesn’t need to.  She can find a path through any brush without it.  She picks flowers when she finds them, and tucks them into the other girls’ hair.

Her wolf’s mother killed the man who taught her to use the axe, and the man who taught her to use the axe killed that wolf’s mate before that, and the mate had an old woman’s blood on his teeth when it happened.  The ranger’s blade found the wolf’s mother’s throat.  The ranger’s mother sent her out into the woods in the first place.  It’s not as though anywhere is really safe, cottage or forest, axe or teeth.  One of these days maybe her wolf will turn and go for her in return, and maybe one of these days her axe will be faster and maybe it won’t.  In the mean time, there’s flowers and berries and pastries and enough game to keep everyone sated, for a little while.

.

The paladin’s hair is raven black and her skin is chalky as a corpse.  She’s not undead, mostly.  The undead are her job.  She knows that much.

She was sweet, once (they were all sweet, once) but apples are bitter now and so is she, and there’s judgment to lay out in the world.  Her grip on her warhammer’s all wrong–she holds it like a mining hammer, but it hits as hard as it needs to.  Her armor’s all dwarven make, and her shield’s black and red and white like snow.

She was sweet once, and frightened, and when she says it quietly around the campfire in the night when none of them can quite make out the glimmer of understanding on each others’ faces, everyone still nods.  She took a bite of poison and somebody left her a full year in a glass coffin of Gentle Repose, dangling on the edge of the Raven Queen’s domain while all the other newly-arrived dead passed by and faded away.  She woke up to somebody’s lips and hands and skin on her lips and her hands and her skin.  She doesn’t like princes.  She doesn’t like necromancers.

She likes sunlight, and summer, and colors that aren’t black and white and red.  She likes the way the bard grins when she whirls into a dance, and the look in the warlock’s eye when she sets her feet to say no, and the wizard’s laughter on high with a Fly spell, and the ranger’s gentle fingers braiding flowers into everything she can touch.  

Once upon a time, there was a city ruled by three sister princesses. They were much-loved in their kingdom- the eldest with eyes of brightest blue, the middle with lips of sweetest pink, and the youngest with hair of deepest red. They were incredibly close, acting as each other’s friends and confidantes. They were just, and kind, able to balance the people and keep the peace in their land.

For a time, all was well.

And then it wasn’t.

Mother?

Shh.

A neighboring kingdom, jealous of this city’s prosperity and peace, sought to disrupt it. They dragged to its gates hideous war machines, made of magic and steel and human skin. The king, a man of great magical learning and power, demanded the princesses surrender their city to him, and if they did not, he said, he would raze it to the ground.

Mother, I’ve never heard of this story.

Then listen when I tell it to you.

The youngest daughter, when she heard, did up her deep red hair, put on a delicate crown, and clothed herself in a beautiful dress. “I will offer him an alliance,” she told her sisters. “I will give him my hand in marriage for our kingdom’s safety.”

The other sisters wept, understanding the sacrifice that their youngest was making, and held her close until dawn. They saw her off at the castle gates, and watched until she disappeared into the still city.

When the youngest daughter reached the enemy’s camp, she stood tall, and did not show her fear. She spoke kindly to the weary soldiers, curtsied before the cruel sorcerer-king as custom demanded. She was brave, oh, my darling, she was so brave.

And the king spat at her fine words, and spoke the words that drew all the light from out of her, until she went mad with despair. As the sun set on the day, and on the youngest sister, who lay despondent in the middle of the camp, a soldier came upon her, and killed her in a fit of mercy.

But you said that she was brave.

Yes. She was.

When the other sisters heard, the middle sister donned silver armor, borrowed from the guards in the castle, and took up a crossbow. “I go to kill the king,” she said. “I go to avenge our youngest.”

And the eldest held her close, and wept, until she let her go and watched her disappear from sight into the streets.

When the middle sister arrived at the camp, she moved quietly, looking through the tents with eyes and a heart made cold with fury and grief. She reached the king’s tent- asleep, inside was the enemy, and she raised her crossbow to finish the job. And she would have, darling, she would have, had she not seen, hanging from the post of the kings fine bed, her sister’s delicate crown.

The king awoke when she sobbed at the sight of it, and spoke words that caused her to wither and decay where she stood, crumbling to rotted remains inside a suit of armor.

Mother, I don’t like this story.

You must hear it.

The eldest sister heard the news and she did not weep. She drew her courage about her, and set off into the forest to find her and her sister’s mother, who was a powerful witch.

Her mother answered the door and bade her come inside, offering her condolences about her sister’s fates. Once the door had closed, her mother hesitated, then spoke.

“I left you in that castle long ago, and I will give you your answers, and then I will give you your vengeance against the king.”

And so the daughter listened.

Mother, I don’t want to hear this.

Listen, daughter.

Long ago, there had been a queen with great magickal abilities, but she was never able to find a love, so she used those powers to create three daughters.

One, she formed from a bottle of light captured at the sun’s violent surrender to night. It woke last, a child with beautiful red hair, and so it was the youngest.

One, she shaped from a gentle pink anemone, the last in her castle’s courtyard to survive winter’s onslaught. It woke second, a child with curved pink lips, and so it was the middle.

One, she carved from a piece of sapphire the size of her fist, and as she did, she cut her finger with the blade, so it was made with blood, as well. It woke immediately, with bright blue eyes, so it was the eldest.

The sun took her first child home, she told the sapphire-girl. Her body turned to light, and then to nothing, what it always was. The body of her second daughter rotted in the encampment like a flower decayed beyond its lifespan. “All the king can do is turn you back to what you were before,” she told her daughter. “He will turn you back to stone if you are unprotected.”

She gave her daughter a vial full of black liquid. “This will turn your heart forever to sapphire. The king will be unable to change you- but you will never feel again. No blade shall pierce your skin, but no joy or grief will stir within you. You will never be warm, or cold. I offer you not immortality, but a half-life of invincibility.”

The daughter regarded the vial, and uncorked it. She brought it to her lips, but before she drank, she asked her mother, “Why did you leave us?”

And then she swallowed, so she would not care about the response, and she left her mother in her home before she found the answer.

But why did their mother leave them?

Because she knew, daughter, even then, that her eldest child was capable of committing this act, and she was afraid.

The eldest daughter marched to the encampment, and to the kings tent. She was attacked, but nothing drew blood, and so she went forward. The king, upon seeing her, spoke the words that would have crumbled her to so many sapphire shards, but nothing happened.

She pulled out the king’s heart through his armor, and she felt no relief at having killed him.

She felt nothing.

The end.

Mother?

Mother, that can’t be how the story ends.

Mother, that is not how the story ends.

Do you want another ending?

Yes.

Very well, then.

The people saw what their queen had done, and began to fear her. The queen, unable to feel love or even affection, went back to her mother to find a way to make a child that her people would adore, because, without emotion, she saw that that was what they needed.

The child was made of ice over a pond, and her hair was the orange-white color of the fish, still alive in the cold.

And the queen raised her daughter to love the kingdom, to rule well, and to one day overthrow her mother.

Is that better?

No, mother, it’s- it’s not.

I am sorry.

Why did you tell it to me?

Because you deserved to know, daughter.

You deserved to know what I did.

The world’s tiniest dragon must defend his hoard, a single gold coin, from those who would steal it.

Suggestion: The dragon’s definition of “steal” is somewhat loose. It still allows the coin to be used and bartered and change hands–but on one condition: the dragon must be with it at all times.

They become a familiar sight in the marketplace.

“Here’s your change, ma'am. One gold piece.” The merchant holds out a palm, on top of which rests a tiny, brilliantly colored creature clutching a single gold coin.

“That’s a dragon,” you say dumbly. “One piece… and a dragon.”

“Yes.”

You cautiously reach out and attempt to take your change. You tug. It holds. You tug harder. The dragon lets loose a tiny, protective growl.

“Ma'am–no, ma'am, you have to take the dragon, too.”

“Sorry?”

The seller notes your dubious expression. “Not from around here, are ya?” They shrug. “Them’s the rules. Take the coin, take the dragon.”

They wait expectantly. Wondering how the world has so suddenly gone mad, you slowly, slowly hold out your hand.

The dragon perks right up. It scampers from their palm to yours with the coin clamped in its jaws and scales your sleeve with sharp little claws.

“Have a nice day, ma'am,” the merchant says. “Spend him soon, now, you hear? At another booth, if you can. He likes to travel.”

From its perch upon your shoulder, the dragon lets out a happy trill.

from its perch upon your shoulder the dragon lets out a happy trill

^Haiku^bot^8. I detect haikus with 5-7-5 format. Sometimes I make mistakes. Help keep my meatbag slave alive. Contact | HAIKU BOT NO | Good bot! | Beep-boop!

what's a fire and how does it - what's the word? - burn

so i have this disney playlist i listen to usually when i’m driving and i was blasting poor unfortunate souls this morning and i was thinking

what if ariel didn’t sign the scroll?

because she’s about to, okay, and she looks at the paper. the parchment made of seaweed, the ones that’s specially treated to survive underwater. and she thinks of her cave of treasures, her books that remain perfectly preserved underwater. “no thank you,” she says slowly, becoming keenly aware of air of this place, of the not-people she’d seen who hadn’t been able to pay the price for sea witch’s bargain. “i – no. thank you. but no.”

ursula tries to convince her otherwise, but ariel runs. she goes back to her cave, destroyed as it was by her father’s anger, and thinks.

she’s the daughter of triton. her books never got wet, though she lives in the ocean. she feels a pull inside her, to the land, to somewhere else, but what if – what if –

what if she doesn’t need the sea witch or her father to perform magic for her? what if she has her own?

ursula had wanted her voice because that’s how she performed her magic. singing in this cave had given it powers and protection, and when she saved her prince from the sea – she sang then too, to keep him safe, to guide him back to life and away from death.

so she has magic. she only needs to figure out how to use it.

so that’s what ariel does now. she’s quiet and keeps to herself, and her father and sisters think that it’s because she’s upset with her father, that she’s busy licking her wounds. she’s moved on from that. she has no trident, and is uninterested with fueling her magic with the souls of the damned like ursula has. so she needs to figure something else out.

she does what she’s not supposed to do, and goes where she’s not supposed to go, slipping past the guards and patrols to the one place in the sea that is forbidden to all of them.

the crevice in the earth where what remains of her grandmother lives.

ariel goes to amphitrite, and the sea goddess is so much bigger than ariel, the size of great whale as she curls at the bottom of the sea floor, too old and too tired to do anything more than sleep. “granddaughter,” the great being croaks, opening an eye as blue and as unfathomable as the sea, “you look like me.”

“they say i look like my mother,” she says, and to herself adds: that’s why father can barely stand to look at me.

“you have more of me in you than your mother,” she says, and she shifts and pulls her mass of red hair over her shoulder. “more of me in you than your father does, even.”

“i have magic,” she says, pulling her bravery to the fore as she swims closer to her grandmother, “i want you to teach me how to use it.” amphitrite pushes herself up, and it’s the first time she’s moved in a millennia, and ariel notices for the first time that her grandmother isn’t a mermaid – she has legs.

she has legs.

“you have power,” amphitrite corrects fiercely, “and i will teach you to wield it.”

and so she does. ariel spends her nights by her grandmother, learning to harness the power of the sea that runs in her veins, and sleeps her days away while her sisters and flounder and sebastian grow more and more concerned, but she refuses to tell them why. she refuses to be stopped.

but her heart still aches. she fell in love with her prince, and she wants him still. so she swims to the edge, goes to the beach where his castle resides in the dead of night when her lessons with her grandmother are complete, and sings

. she’s careful not to let any magic leak through, only her voice. she does not want to enchant him. she wants him to love her as she is. so she sings, her voice clear and powerful and cutting through the air. she hopes he can hear it.

then one day a figure walks to the beach, and it’s him, her prince. “hello?” he calls out, “are you out there? are you – please, it was you that saved me, wasn’t it? won’t you come out and let me see you?”

so she does, waves her tail at him until he catches sight of her and takes hesitant, disbelieving steps closer.

“you’re a mermaid,” he says, eyes wide, “i thought i saw – but it couldn’t be.”

“i am, and it can,” she says, heart beating wildly in her chest. he’s just as handsome as she remembered, and she wants him just as much. “my name is ariel.”

“ariel,” he repeats, and pulls off his boots and goes wading into the water, watching her to see if she flinches away from him. she doesn’t, and his strides grow bolder. “my name is eric.”

“eric,” she whispers, and when he’s close enough he touches her, trailing fingers across the bare skin of her shoulder and tangling them in her hair.

when he kisses her, she feels powerful enough to undo the world.

so there’s that now, spending her nights with her grandmother and her prince, and she knows how to make her own legs now, could walk onto land and be made a queen among the two legged men.

but she’s a princess here first, and before she can do that she needs to take care of something.

ursula.

the rotten sea witch with her rotten sea magic won’t be allowed to torment her people any longer.

she tells her grandmother, and amphitrite smiles and says, “an excellent decision, child. i’ve enjoyed our time together, but i think it’s time for me to sleep once more. i’ve taught you everything i can.”

and tears prick ariel’s eyes, but she holds them back. she knew that it couldn’t be forever, that her grandmother can’t die but no longer desires to live and this is the in-between.

“you’ll be an amazing queen,” amphitrite murmurs, and closes her eyes for a millennia more.

this isn’t something to be done in the dead of night, although it would be easier to do it then.

she will make a spectacle of it, she will remind the sea that her people are not to be trifled with.

once upon a time they feared a blue eyed, red haired sea queen with the power to destroy them all. it’s time for them to do so again.

so she drives ursula to the center of the city. her sisters cower and people hide, and her father comes rushing forward to save her.

“you’ve committed great crimes against my people,” she says, not flinching as lightning gathers in the sea witch’s hands, “so now shall a great crime be committed against you.”

“foolish girl,” the sea witch snarls.

triton is yelling. he won’t get there in time.

he doesn’t have to.

she doesn’t need to sing anymore. instead she lifts her hands and pulls ursula apart without ever touching her, not only renders flesh from bone but also sets free the souls she’s been hoarding, reverses the magic done to those who’d fallen into the sea witch’s trap.

they all stare at her, her people, her father, and her sisters. she looks to triton and says, “i’m not a little girl anymore.”

he opens his mouth, closes it again, then says, “i can see that.”

all at once everyone’s perceptions are turned sideways about their youngest princess. she commands a power that even her father doesn’t have access to, she’s not depressed and dreamy – she’s powerful young woman who knows exactly what she’s doing.

so she does what she wanted to do, she gives herself legs and steps onto the sand and launches herself into eric’s arms. she becomes his bride, and the rumors run rampant of what she is, of where she came from, but they can’t prove anything and so they rule.

they live long, happy lives. ariel is his consort, his advisor, his wife, his tactician, and his best friend. all those years reading drowned books have certainly paid off. she ages herself along with her husband, bears his children and then teaches them they ways of her – their – people.

her husband dies, and she disappears, like the stories of selkie women that everyone whispers around her. their children give their father a sea burial, and vow to see him again one day. what they know and none of their subjects do is this – their father’s body isn’t in that casket.

she returns to her ocean, her legs form into her glittering green tail, and she goes home. she uses her terribly powerful magic, and brings her husband with her. she went from princess ariel of the sea to queen ariel of the land, and now she’s back again.

she’s not quite a teenager, but neither is she the old woman she pretended to be on land. she’s returned her and her husband to the prime of their life, and as she gained legs to be with him, he now gives his up to be with her.

eric becomes a merman, and a prince by virtue of being ariel’s husband.

she returns to her family and her world without missing a beat, and they all welcome her as if she never left, treat her husband with kindness and respect.

because they all know.

it doesn’t matter that she’s the youngest. when, far in the future, triton’s reign ends –

ariel’s reign will begin.

YYYYYEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS @nehirose

OH MY GOD THE @ NOTIFICATION GOT BURIED SO I ONLY JUST SAW THIS?  AND IT’S SO AMAZING I’M REBLOGGING IT REGARDLESS OF IT NOT BEING SUNDAY BECAUSE IT’S AMAAAAAAAZING.

ok you know that ‘make the princess laugh and you can have her hand in marriage’ thing?

imagine so many come in.

they try, so hard, to make her laugh.

she just sits there, morose, ignoring every man who tries to coax a smile.

one day she’s sitting on the balcony. she just looks so sad.

of course that little thief tries to make her smile.

a girl who goes through the (semi public) royal gardens every day to pick flowers, even though technically only the royal family is allowed to do that. 

she sees the princess while she’s picking them up to sell on the streets, and she’s just… so sad. this princess needs someone to cheer her up.

and she tries. she’ll do silly dances when she comes in, she’ll bring up frogs from ponds and act out comedies, she’ll make flower crowns and exaggerate just how hard it is.

the first few days, the princess doesn’t even look at her.

then she starts noticing. this girl, trying so hard to cheer her up. she probably hasn’t even heard of the hand in marriage thing, she doesn’t know she’s trying so hard for nothing.

but she does it anyway.

one day, the princess starts talking to her as she does these things. “You do know that it’s useless?”

“What?” the thief says. “No way! I’m going to get you to laugh!”

“The best jesters in the kingdom have tried, don’t bother,” the princess declared pessimistically, staring down at the girl.

Then the thief puffs out her chest, “Of course I am! I’ll find the best jokes, even better than the jesters have found! I’ll… fight a fire breathing dog for them!”

There’s no laugh, but the corner of the princess’s mouth twitches. it’s sad how she thinks she can make me laugh…

the girl keeps trying, for years, making more silly stories and trading flowers for jokes rather than food or money. the princess slowly realizes the girl is getting closer and closer, asking her for responses in knock knock jokes and encouraging her to speak when she wouldn’t respond immediately.

the princess eventually had the girl hanging from her balcony, holding on tight to the rail and feet wedged between the columns, grinning and telling yet another iteration of that already old chicken joke.

the princess has been smiling, slightly, but she mostly just looks unresponsive. the girl is happy, it’s better than looking so sad, like she had been years before.

the girl moves on to puns, pointing at the exotic lunch the princess was eating. “Why do the melons have to go to get married? They cantaloupe!”

“You only know that word because of me,” the princess snarks, but there’s a small smile there, a bit of happiness. This little flower girl, this thief has grown into an amazing friend, a wonderful person who genuinely just wants to help. she doesn’t know of the deal, only nobles and jesters could know, not the commonfolk.

“Well, it makes quite the pun,” the girl says, proud of her joke. a smile! what an accomplishment!

“Say…” she continued, “What would you call a princess who got swept up in conversation a thief?” she pulled a flower out of her pocket, waving it in front of the princess’s face. the princess’s eyes crossed to see the flower before they rolled at the obvious setup.

though, it was interesting that it obviously involved them.

“I don’t know,” she admitted, sighing in preparation for another horrible pun. “What?”

the girl grinned. “A pretty theft!” she exclaimed, ticking the flower against the princess’s nose.

the princess froze for a moment, stunned. she had been complimented a million times over, called graceful by etiquette instructors, been called beautiful by many a suitor, been called wonderful by her mother before… she stopped thinking about that. 

she had never been called pretty.

she burst into laughter at the commonplace compliment, as if she was some sort of milkmaid who had somehow grown up to be good looking! it was ridiculous, the notion, yet somehow it had her blushing all the same.

then she suddenly stopped, realizing what she’d done.

the flower thief was staring at her in amazement, a blush of her own speckling her cheeks. her flower tilted out from in front of the princess’s nose, as if it had it’s own amazement.

“Wow…” the girl breathed. she’d never heard something so beautiful in her life.

The princess was silent, knowing what she had just done. She had just laughed for the first time in years.

The girl may not have been aware of the arrangement, but she was quickly swept up in it. A maid had heard the laughter and burst in, to find the thief and the princess, caught up in each other’s eyes, reveling in what had just happened.

The wedding was beautiful, a flower filled affair, a wonderful nod to how it happened. The king was so happy to see his daughter with someone who made her smile for once, tearing up as they were wed.

The princess’s laugh was still incredibly rare. She still had a hard time smiling. But a well timed joke from the girl– no, her wife– and another flower that had a hidden meaning behind it, than maybe, maybe you would hear it.

After all, the princess had finally laughed with the one she loved.

One of the things I love about Eastern European folklore and folk magic is the completely blasé assumption that there are vampires everywhere. It’s not even “here’s how to get rid of vampires” - it’s more like “here’s how to exploit your vampire problem for personal gain”, or even “here’s how to live with the fact that your neighbour is probably a vampire”. Sure, everybody knows that old Vladislaus and his wife are blood-sucking abominations… but, well, come harvest time, you need every pair of hands you can get. So just smile and nod, hang fresh garlic in your windows every new moon, and try not to think too hard about what they’re using to fertilise those strangely vigorous crops.

#i remember when i first read a book of unabridged russian fairy tales #they were so creepy and matter-of-fact and offered no chance of a life whre this shit is not everywhere #they made me get my first gray hair at the age of eight is2g (via @sabacc)

I love Russian fairy tales. One of my favorites is this girl is babysitting her little brother and he gets kidnapped by swan geese and she’s just like ‘well… guess i better go deal with that.’

Irish folklore is like this with fairies.

“Ah shit, looks like they’ve stolen my son away. Again. Better go deal with that.”

I’m a big fan of any folklore where the primary reaction to supernatural bullshit is “again? Better go deal with that.” Just resigned practicality about the bullshit that is the supernatural.

isnt this a thing in folklore in general? like, when did we get the idea legends and fairytales are disney-like? most north-spanish folklore is pretty scary and the children kidnapping is a constant in most creatures. Also all spanish fairytales include blood yes or yes. i have a book thats censored by the church and im like bitch where?? its incredibly gory

And then there is a legend in my region where a dude makes a dragon explode

how metal, we jsut give them poisoned goat and bread baked with needles in it

But what if the princess was in the tower because she was the dragon?

Like the queen gives birth and oops it’s this adorable little scaley lizard with tiny wings that she can never quite seem to fold right

None of the King’s advisors or doctors can explain it, no one can remember anyone who might have cursed the royal family, plus sire she’s clearly yours still I mean look at those eyes

They just kind of accept it and keep her in a tower so no one tries to slay her

The queen or castle servants reading bedtime stories to the toddler princess, who’s made a nest of her favorite toys and some jewelery she stole off her mother, and when she laughs little puffs of smoke come out of her mouth

The king being so proud when she flies across the room for the first time

And once the princess comes of age, confused knights breaking into the tower to find a twenty foot long dragon sitting at the vanity getting her horns polished by her handmaidens

and the “kidnapped” princess is her girlfriend?

this feels like a minotaur myth gone amazingly right.

Okay, who brought this back? Because I haven’t seen notes on this thing in literally months.

She goes flying around the surrounding kingdoms, just watching and listening.

And pretty soon she has a dozen girls sharing the tower with her.

Some were being pushed to marry, or promised in marriage to someone they hated. Some were already married.

Some were poor, or hunted, or enslaved.

Some were thrown out, abandoned, banished.

There’s a princess there, yes, one who would rather sit in the solar and read books than marry a boorish prince and interact with her subjects all day.

There’s a wizard-student who fled her university after one of the professors tried to curse her for disagreeing with him.

There’s a girl who ran away to be a knight, and a girl who was thrown out for being pregnant, and a wife who ran out the door with her toddler carried in her broken arms, her belly swollen and unwieldy, and stories circulate from the bar the next day about how the dragon swooped down and stole away a man’s wife.

Probably ate her, he says. Good riddance.

There’s a formerly-wealthy merchant wife, cast out by her husband in middle age so he can wed someone young and pretty.

There’s an elderly grandmother who’s outlived her family and her usefulness.

A street child, rag-clad and starving. A baby, left abandoned on a hillside.

It begins to filter through the land, spoken from fathers to daughter, husbands to wives, employers to servants: if you are bad, the dragon will take you. if you are stubborn, or willful, or refuse to marry, the dragon will find you. if you are useless, or slovenly, or disobedient, you will be thrown out and the dragon will pluck you up in its claws and take you back to its lair filled with bones.

They do not understand that this is not a threat but a promise.

They do not know that the version their servants tell each other, their wives tell their daughters, their mothers tell circles of friends, is “if you are desperate, the dragon will find you. if you want out, the dragon will rescue you. if you pause outside, and tell your fears to the soft beating of wings somewhere in the sky, you will fly, and the dragon will carry you home.”

There are bones, but they are surrounded by living flesh.

The tower, the Princess’s Tower in the central kingdom, is hidden by the finest spells and left alone by longstanding tradition. The nature of the Princess’s curse is a matter of speculation, but most likely, people say, she is under some fairy’s enchantment, and she will sleep for a hundred years until the right prince finds the way in.

The wizard-student was fairly advanced in her studies, and is quite good at teaching the runaway scullery-maid and the young unmarried mother turned out when her belly showed. The gates to the far reaches of the tower grounds open to a hillside two kingdoms away, and to an alleyway in a major city, and to a deep tideswept cave near a fishing village and a harbor, and to a storage room in the oldest wing of the Princess’s home palace.

The rich former merchant’s wife sorts through the dragon’s hoard of gold and gems, and delivers instructions to the runaway postulant and the worn old farm wife; dressed as a young clerk and a common tradesman, they go to call on this merchant who sets the best prices, and that factor who has misplaced goods available for a low price, and this manufacturer of looms and that seller of books.

The farm wife knows the best sheep to buy at market, the ewes who will bear twins and the lambs which will have the finest wool. Another country over, this time in the company of “his” elderly “father,” she buys cows that will give good milk, and chickens that will lay good eggs.

An elderly wizard visits a university, and inquires after their library; she is let in, and watched as she pages through books filled with arcane topics in languages she can’t understand; back at the tower, the wizard girl and her students capture the pages in a scrying crystal.

A pretty young fishwife smiles at the vegetable-seller as her daughter clings to her skirts, and soon the girls and women of the tower have seeds to plant. Looms hum, and dyestuffs are boiled, and even the poorest in their former lives wear bright dresses, or breeches and tunics if they prefer.

The dragon brings back a pirate woman from the harbor, stolen from the hangman’s noose while the crowd cheers; she knows where there is treasure stored, and soon the young girls have gems to play with, and the girl who ran away to be a knight has someone to learn proper swordwork from.

The little girl whose first flight was in her mother’s broken arms wants to be a blacksmith; when a swordblade breaks, the dragon breathes on it, as long as needed, while the child determinedly hammers it back together.

The dragon princess surveys her kingdom with approval. It is small, and tonight she will fly over a small town, where she heard breaking crockery and yelling last night, to see if someone steps out into the darkness and wishes for a better life, and tomorrow there may be one more.

@yaminoendo @gay-is-more-than-ok @quiet-savior

DAMN, this got better! I don’t care the format, be it a movie, a series or a book, I need this story like I need air.

is this on Amazon yet? please let it come to paper/movie/ or a 100k fic. ;__;

“So you see,” said the Royal Advisor, wringing his hands, “the curse states the princess will die on the night before her twenty-fifth birthday–”

“Hang on,” said the princess, “‘ON the night before’–”

The Advisor nodded grimly.

“So what you’re saying is that, until that one specific date, I am effectively immortal?”

“Technically yes, but then–” the King stammered.

“Wow,” said the princess, who was sixteen and did not possess amazing impulse control. “I’m gonna go teach myself how to juggle chainsaws while hang gliding over shark-infested waters, catch you chuckleheads later.”

@ursula-vernon

In fairy tales and fantasy, two types of people go in towers:  princesses and wizards.

Princesses are placed there against their will or with the intention of ‘keeping them safe.’ This is very different from wizards, who seek out towers to hone their sorcery in solitude.

I would like a story where a princess is placed in an abandoned tower that used to belong to a wizard, and so she spends long years learning the craft of wizardry from the scraps left behind and becomes the most powerful magic wielder the world has seen in centuries, busts out of the tower and wreaks glorious, bloody vengeance on the fools that imprisoned her. 

That would be my kind of story.

When Princess Talia was fourteen, her eldest sister was placed in a tower.

Princess Adina was eighteen by then, and so of a marriageable age. She had grown quite beautiful, though she was more willful than winsome, and she did not care for the notion of the tower very much at all. Their mother did her best to persuade her on the subject. After all, the queen herself had been eighteen when her own parents had sent her to live in that very same tower, to be safely tucked away until her husband could be chosen, and then ride out to claim her. A tradition going back ages and ages.

Keep reading

So what happens if two people who have promised their firstborn to separate witches have a child together? Do they both just pop up in the nursery and have a custody battle?

I need a book about a little girl whose parents had promised their firstborn to different witches and the only way that both ends of the deal were fulfilled was for them to have joint custody of the child.

And then the witches, forced to share a cottage while raising their joint stolen child, fall in love…

#more witch-centric lesbian fairytale rom-coms#….a sentence I never thought I’d type

Done. Double, Double.

I’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR THIS FOR SO LONG OH MY GOD IT’S THE FIC IT’S BEEN YEARS IT’S FINALLY HERE AGAIN

OH LOOK SOMEONE DID THE THING and that is the perfect title

Hogfather, Sir! Terry Pratchett (via zombeesknees)

Let’s talk about an Ariel who walks away—limping, mouthing inaudible sailors’ curses, a sea-brine knife in her belt.

Ariel traded her voice for a chance to walk on land. That was the deal: every time she steps, it will feel like being stabbed by knives. She must win the hand of her one true love, or she will die at his wedding day, turn to sea foam, forgotten. The helpful steward tells her to dance for the prince, even though her feet scream each time she steps. Love is pain, the sea witch promised. Devotion calls for blood.

But how about this? When the prince marries another, nothing happens. When Ariel stands over the prince and his fiance the night before their wedding, her sisters’ hard-won knife in hand, she doesn’t decide his happiness is more important than her life. She decides that his happiness is irrelevant. Her curse does not turn on the whims of this boy’s heart. 

She does not throw away the knife and throw herself into the sea. She does not bury it in the prince and break her curse—it would not have broken. She leaves them sleeping in what will be their marriage bed and limps into a quiet night, her knife clean in her belt, her heart caught in her throat. Her feet scream, but they ache, too, for the places she has yet to see. 

Ariel will not be sea foam or a queen. There is life beyond love. There is love in just living. Her true love will not be married on the morn—the prince will be married then, in glorious splendor, but he had never been why she was here.

Ariel traded her voice for legs to stand on, a chance at another life. When she poked her head above the waves, it wasn’t the handsome biped that she fell for. It was the way the hills rolled, golden in the sun. It was the clouds chasing each other across blue sky, like sea foam you could never reach.

(She does reach it, one day, bouncing around in the back of a tinker’s cart, signing jokes to him in between helping to tune his guitar. They crest up a high mountain pass and into the belly of a cloud. Her breath whistles out, swirls water droplets, and she reaches out a hand to touch the sky. Her feet will scream all her life, but after that morning they ache just a little bit less). 

I want an Ariel who is in love with a world, not a prince. I don’t want her to be a moral for little girls about what love is supposed to hurt like, about how it is supposed to kill you. Ariel will be one more wandering soul, forgotten. Her voice will live in everything she does. She uses her sisters’ knife to turn a reed into a pipe. She cannot speak, but she still has lungs. 

Love is pain, says the old man, when Ariel smiles too wide at sunrises. It’s pain, says the innkeeper, with pity, as Ariel hobbles to a seat, pipe in hand. At least you are beautiful, soothes the country healer who looks over her undamaged feet. The helpful steward had thought she was shy. Dance for the prince even though your feet feel stuck with a hundred knives.

Her feet feel like knives but she goes out dancing in the grass at midnight anyway. She’s never seen stars before. Moonlight reaches down through the depths, but starlight fractures on the surface. Ariel dances for herself.

She goes down to caves and rocky shores. Sometimes she meets with her sisters there. Mouths filled with water cannot speak above the sea, so she drops into the waves and they sing to her, old songs, and she steals breaths of air between the stanzas. She can drown now. She holds her breath. She opens her eyes to the salt and brine. 

Ariel uses canes and takes rides on wagons filled with hay, chickens, tomatoes—never fish. She earns coins and paper scraps of money with a conch shell her youngest sister swam up from the depths for her, with her reed pipe, with a lyre from her eldest sister which sounds eerie and high out of the water. The shadow plays she makes on the walls of taverns waver and wriggle like on the sea caves of her childhood, but not because of water’s lap and current. It is the firelight that flickers over her hands. 

When she has limped and hitched rides so far that no one knows the name of her prince’s kingdom, she meets a tinker on the road with an extra seat in his cart and an ear for music. He never asks her to dance for him and she never does. She drops messages in bottles to her sisters, at every river and coastline they come to, and sometimes she finds bottles washed up the shore just for her. 

They travel on. When she breathes, these days, her lungs fill with air.

Some nights she wakes, gasping, coughing up black water that never comes. There is something lying heavy on her chest and there always will be.

Somewhere in the ocean, a sea witch thinks she has won. When Ariel walks, she hobbles. Her voice was the sunken treasure of the king’s loveliest daughter, and so when they tell Ariel’s story they say she has been robbed. They say she has been stolen. 

She has many instruments because she has many voices—all of them, hers; made by her hands, or gifted from her sisters’ dripping ones. Ariel will sing until the day she dies with every instrument but her vocal cords. 

She cannot win it back, the high sweet voice of a merchild who had never blistered her shoulders red with sun, who had never made a barroom rise to its feet to sing along to her strumming fingers. She cannot ever again sing like a girl who has not held a dagger over two sleeping lovers and then decided to spare them. She decided not to wither. She decided to walk on knives for the rest of her life. She cannot win it back, but even if she could, she knows she would not sound the same. 

They call her story a tragedy and she rests her aching feet beside the warming hearth. With every new ridge climbed, new river forded, new night sky met, her feet ache a little less. They call her a tragedy, but the tinker’s donkey is warm and contrary on cold mornings. The tinker’s shoulder is warm under her cheek.

Her feet will always hurt. She has cut out so many parts of her self, traded them up, won twisted promises back and then twisted them herself. She lives with so many curses under her skin, but she lives. They call her story a moral, and maybe it is.

When she breathes, her lungs fill. When she walks, the earth holds her up. There is sun and there is light and she can catch it in her hands. This is love.