✨🌹📚☕As Old As Time | Meta (2) ☕📚🌹✨
Magic worlds where the impossible
Becomes the everyday.
I'll read him stories from picture books, all filled with wonder, magic worlds where the impossible becomes the everyday...
His gift was a pretty picture book whose brightly painted images seemed to move whenever you weren't looking straight at them. And perhaps its stories didn't always end the same way.
As Old As Time by Liz Braswell, Twisted Tales #3, page 103 of paperback edition
The lyrics to "Stories" from The Enchanted Christmas mentions picture books. And I know that the animated movies in the BATB franchise are geared towards families and children, but I cannot stress how complex picture books are, especially when there is a dialogue between the words and pictures. I adore looking at picture books, to this day.
We will slay the dragons that still follow him around. And he’ll smile, yes he’ll smile as his dreams leave the ground…Stories about heroes who overcame their deepest sorrow. They’ll put hope into his heart again; he’ll cherish every day.
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I'll read him stories From picture books All filled with w o n d e r
The crowd looked so tiny from up where she was. Belle backed away from the tree, watching the wedding party grow even smaller. In the strange, honey-like softening of the afternoon sunlight, the scene looked both more brilliant and less real - like a miniature painting. She held up her thumb and managed to block out everything with its tip, erasing everyone from the landscape.
It was like what she did when she read.
As soon as she opened a book, this little town disappeared into a vast map of countries both real and imagined.
The people down below, cleaning up from the non-wedding and erased by her thumb tip, didn't think anything interesting or important lay beyond the next bend in the river. They had no curiosity about the new lands beyond the sea or the ancient lands to the east. They had no regard for the recent discovery that other planets had moons just like the one that smiled down at them.
Belle wanted more. She wanted to see more. She wanted to travel to the lands she had read about, where people ate with delicate sticks, not forks. At the very least, she wanted to be carried there in her imagination.
Belle lowered her thumb, and the townspeople reappeared.
She plopped herself down on the grass, defeated.
The truth was...reading wasn't enough anymore.
It wasn't enough to catch a glimpse of these lands and ideas through the small window of the pages she turned. She wanted to step through and feel the yellow waters of the Yangtze herself, to hear the celestial music of foreign pipes, to taste the foods described by adventurers who traveled purposefully into the areas on maps labeled Here there be tygres.
As Old As Time by Liz Braswell, Twisted Tales #3, page 39-40 of paperback edition
This post is kind of a redo of this one. I love that Liz Braswell describes, so beautifully, the magic that happens when Belle reads, and that she longs to actually see and experience the fantastical lands she reads about in her books. I love this animation sequence from The Enchanted Christmas, because it actually depicts, visually, the magic Belle experiences when she reads. I do want to say that Belle definitely does have an air of superiority - she clearly thinks that she is "above" all of the common townsfolk because she has loftier ambitions than putting in an honest day's work to provide for a family. And I guess I wish Belle would acknowlege the common townspeople as just a noble, albeit different than herself. Belle has a certain amount of privilege, because she doesn't have to do many farm chores at all, and she obviously has time to read and daydream. I guess this is kind of like how women with paid professions in the 18th and 19th centuries were looked down upon by the middle and upper classes. And then contrast Belle to Tiana, a young black woman, working two restaurant waitress jobs and being chastised by her friends because, "Girl, all you do is work!" Anyhow, I kind of went off a bit on a tangent there.