he’s a classically trained painter. he’s been a lawyer for over a hundred years and won only one case. he captained the titanic for two seconds. he swore to never go back to england because some english guys were mean to his wife. he was jack the ripper. he burned down two buildings to help fund a high school volleyball team. he can play every single instrument. he stuffed a living human man into a coffin because he got baby fever. absolutely no one’s doing it like him
Thinking of how, while Beaumont’s 1756’s Beauty and the Beast adaptation is a fairy tale, Villeneuve’s original 1740 novella is a full-on supernatural/monster romance:
• Beauty is a kind, generous, “strong of mind” and excessively beautiful woman, who is cruelly imprisoned by a fearsome monster to save her misguided (and kind of greedy) father.
• This imprisonment, however, involves being welcomed with fireworks and fanfare, being given free rein of a gorgeous palace, beautiful clothes, splendid meals, daily amusements, and servants to tend to her.
• The Beast is very threatening in appearance, but very polite. He also wants to make sure she is in his castle “voluntarily”, (by which he means “not brought by force”, so…still not quite free will.)
• During her imprisonment she is visited in her dreams by visions of a beautiful Prince who courts her every night, swearing that “she should be entirely her own mistress”. “Sometimes he seemed to be at her feet, sometimes abandoning himself to the most excessive delight, at others shedding a torrent of tears, which touched the depths of her soul.”
• The Beast is described as “gentle”, “docile” and “more inclined to stupidity than to ferocity”, meaning that he is not very eloquent. He visits her briefly every day, to make her compliments, anxiously enquire whether she is living pleasantly, and finally to ask her very awkwardly if she will marry him. She always refuses, which he accepts with a polite goodnight.
• Beauty grows used to the Beast and while she is in love with the stranger in her dreams she begins to feel protective of the Beast because he treats her so well.
• When she asks permission to see her family he wails that he cannot refuse her anything (this is he first direct), but gets incredibly anxious that despite all his efforts she dislikes him. She promises that is not the case and that she will gladly come back. When her dream-Prince poses to her that it would be a good thing if the Beast died of grief for losing her she gets angry: “Know that I would lay down my life to save his, and that this Monster, who is only one in form, has a heart so humane, that he should not be persecuted for a deformity which he refrains from rendering more hideous by his actions.”
• She returns to the castle to find the Beast unconscious with grief, but she manages to wake him (with water and smelling salts) and tells him: “What anxiety have you caused me? I knew not how much I loved you. The fear of losing you has proved to me that I was attached to you by stronger ties than those of gratitude.” She expects the Beast to scold her for breaking her promise, but he proclaims that her love for him has saved his life with nothing but sincerity and gentleness.
• She is visited in her sleep by a fairy who explains to her that her love for her dream lover and her affection for the Beast need not be incompatible and to follow her own inclinations. She agrees to marry the Beast after he swears that he pledges her his faith and promises to never have any wife but her. The next day it is revealed that the dream-Prince and the Beast are the same.
• When his mother the Queen is displeased to find Beauty only a merchant’s daughter and argues with the fairy that she is not a suitable bride the Prince: “was no longer master of himself (…) He flung himself at the feet of the Fairy and of his mother, and implored them, in the strongest terms, not to make him more miserable than he had been, by sending away Beauty, and depriving him of the happiness of being her husband.”
• When Beauty professes her love to him but states she will not marry him without proper parental consent the Prince begs the fairy to just turn him back into the Beast again, because then at least he can be Beauty’s husband.
• The Queen repents and Beauty asks her new betrothed to tell him his side of the story and: “The Prince, whose recovery of his natural form had not lessened his anxiety to obey her.” It turns out he was turned into a Beast by an old fairy whose offer of marriage he refused, and that another fairy foretold him that she would be the one to save him.
• For good measure, it is revealed that Beauty is actually the lost daughter of a King and a Fairy Queen and she is restored to her rightful place, with a devoted husband and admiring subjects.
Add a couple of content warnings and it’s ready for AO3.
I wanted to look up what kind of dogs the vikings had in order to make a historically accurate shitpost meme, but while googling “viking dog”, figuring I’d find pictures of some kind of big cool war dogs or dogs used for hunting moose and bear, but instead I found this
why did we as a society stop putting gargoyles on everything. what fucking loser looked at a building and was like no actually this doesn’t need a horrid little creacher
