And they lived happily ever after
Chapter One:
Ah Cinderella. The classic princess. I never thought that she would be your typical Ingénue, perfect and pure, especially after reading the 1st version of Cinderella by Giambattista Basile. It’s pretty much the same, but with one crucial twist. Cinderella murdered her first mother, leading to her father, on her recommendation, to marry the governess, which inevitably turns out to be an “evil stepmother”. Oh and how did she kill her mother? By slamming a trunk lid down on her neck. Oh fairytales. When will you learn that trunk decapitation is not the way to go? In any case, this Cinderella is based on what I felt Basile’s Cinderella would be like, manipulative and self-serving, not above evil.
The prince in this tale is really prop, just like every other prince. He may or may not be really disfigured, but at the same time, I’ve always wondered why the prince, being as charming as the stories tell us he is, can never find a lady friend he likes.
Status Quo Ante Bellum
I actually really like this story for some ridiculous reason, though I’m sure I executed it so badly that no one could tell at all what the story was talking about. Cinderella becomes Ilsabil, the fisherman’s wife from that story we were always told when we were young and selfish and ate all the cookies. It isn’t too much of a stretch in the Waiting verse, especially since in canon, Cinderella is only a nickname at best.
I really wanted Cinderella to have a happy ending of sort, and I couldn’t really do that in Waiting itself since the theme of Waiting is, well, waiting. Ante Bellum shifts the focus to moving on and confronting your mistakes.
Chapter Two:
This was actually inspired by an article I read. The article talked about how no one really knows what being comatose is like. Those people, sleeping so peacefully, could be fully aware, trapped nightmarishly in their bodies, or maybe not. They could even be under the delusion that there’s absolutely nothing wrong, though that’s a bit of a stretch.
Sleeping Beauty, herself, is a pretty tragic character in my opinion. She doesn’t even get the choice to like her prince. It’s kiss and BAM love happens, or if you’re a fairytale purist, it’s rape, kids, and BAM taking responsibility happens. No one really seems to care much for her in the first place.
Chapter Three:
For Little Brittle and her cupcake reviews. She asked me to do Snow White, that much is obvious, and, I think, asked me to incorporate the dwarves. I clearly failed to do that. I was planning it though! The original version involved a mechanical heart and 7 ghosts, but that didn’t pan out. This version…eh it’s okay. I’m not that fond of it to tell you the truth. Frankly I’m not too fond of any of these, but that’s life I guess.
While Cinderella never struck me as someone who would be so profoundly nice, Snow White does. Maybe because in the original version she was like 7 when she died? *shrugs* I really, really hope the prince is 7 years old too because the implications of a grown man/teenager dragging along the dead body of a little girl is…disturbing to say the least. Anyways, the point is that whole “have the wicked queen dance on coals until she died” struck me as very out of place for her character.
As for the queen, I really liked her, especially when I was young. She was very beautiful, but above that she was powerful and could turn into a dragon. Man, I wanted to do that so badly. Even now I still like her. I mean, yeah she was ridiculously vain, but she at least did something about it, unlike most princesses who just clean and hope a big strong man will come to save them. On that note, the idea that the first person to kiss you doesn’t determine your “true love”, but the first person who bothered to try, is fundamentally a good one…if you aren’t a princess with a huge kingdom…or dead.
Chapter Four:
I have no idea why I decided to make Beauty an assassin. My brain just said “Everything is better with serial killers!” and ta-da, you get this. This is probably why this story doesn’t quite fit the collection as well.
On the original story, Beauty is fairly competent in the original, but I definitely consider B&B a terrible fairytale. It’s probably because the moral of the story is pretty much “Looks don’t matter…except when they do.” Learning the message that “Ugly people are people too” nets you a hot, rich prince, not to mention that you are hot too, golden heart or not. What. Then there’s the whole the Beast is a huge bastard. The whole “you can change a man of his personality” is rather misleading.
Finally, there is this nagging feeling at the back of my head that tells me Stephanie Meyer loved B&B when she was younger.
Chapter Five:
For the lovely Jax-Win and her winning reviews. I’m sorry it was so cliché. Despite how many “what if she killed the prince” stories I’ve read, I could never understand why in the world she wouldn’t kill him. I would, or at least I hope I would. While writing this, though, I began to feel a little more empathic. The Little Mermaid really doesn’t have the personality to do that and still live in peace. At the same time, I tried to leave it open as to why she feels regret/remorse. Is it because she killed the prince and his lover, or because she never got to go to heaven? Though as far as I can tell, in the original story it’s the latter, which pretty much means the prince was her meal ticket to paradise. Not exactly the best moral.
Chapter Six:
As some of you know, I did a vote on what Rapunzel was going to be like. If I remember correctly, it was between some reincarnation thing, which ended up being a short original fic as well as an inspiration for tableau viviant, and a retelling of the original Rapunzel. I was actually pretty surprised that the retelling won.
Rapunzel really exemplifies for me your typical princess. She has absolutely no personality at all and apparently sleeps with the first man she meets, who you know, just so happens to be a prince. The story is absolutely ridiculous in any case.
The prince, oh the prince. I’m not sure if I should be happy that the prince was a bit different in Rapunzel or bemoan his utter, utter stupidity. Look out Romeo, you have a rival in impulsive, suicidal prattish-ness.
As for the Waiting version, I always felt that isolation in a tower was going to unhinge some screws, and I tried to write it in a way that it would be a part of the story. The Waiting prince…I envision him as a random forest man, though of course he could totally be a traveling rapist prince (see Sleeping Beauty). You never know when you’re talking about fairy tales.
Chapter Seven:
My least popular chapter review wise, though I kind of expected it. It was a really weird chapter. I actually like the original Twelve Dancing Princesses…or at least I do in theory. I might be completely off base (but hey it’s literary analysis) but to me it seems like the story was about escapism and how it doesn’t last. The under-their-bed magical world is something that a little kid would dream of when they’re young and is held in sharp contrast to daily palace life, which is actually not romanticized or at least not romanticized to such a degree. People do get beheaded, and regularly. There is war. There is poverty. There is also a magic invisibility cloak, but let’s not get into that. Thus in Waiting tradition, I wanted subvert that and, just to stick it to the Man, the concept of Mary Sue, because that is literally what the main character in this version was. The whole “And she was a boy. o.O” thing was to that end.
Chapter Eight:
Well to tell you the truth, this was always going to be the ending of Waiting, but I planned to do a few more stories first. Then I realized my writing is absolutely horrid. Oh well. That’s life.
Anyways, Maid Maleen, now she’s a good princess. One thing I find very interesting in that even though she’s a princess, everyone refers to her as Maid Maleen, even the prince, who would have known her before she was an actual maid. Of course that could be her actual name in the fairytale tradition of off-kilter names or just a shortened form of maiden (which I don’t really buy since no other princesses are called Maid whatever). In any case, the reason why this story was always going to be the last chapter of Waiting is because her prince never came to find her in the original. He actually said, “She has long been shut up in the tower, or dead”, as in he never bothered to check. I really do applaud him for moving on, though.
Like all the other Waiting princesses, she is a reversal of her established character. Instead of taking matters into her own hands, she acts in complete concordance with what she ought to do. Even the song she sings is feminine. She doesn’t sing epic poetry. She sings a song about a lady so happy that her son has come home, probably from adventures she can never have. She’s flat character, defined only by her symbolic actions, incorporating every cliché of your traditional fairytale “heroine” (the helplessness, the purity, a touch of Ophelia) into one not-so-grand finale. Some might say that being so helpless that she doesn’t even attempt to escape when facing starvation is a bit too much, but you have to remember Cinderella, the cardboard cutout by which all cutouts are measured, does absolutely nothing to help herself, save crying and hoping, despite being clearly miserable.