I'm a fairytale fanatic AND an Axolotl!

PSA about Beauty and the Beast:

Recently I have seen some strange posts along the lines of “Why can’t they follow the original dark ending?  Why does Disney have to give it a Happy ending?” in regard to Beauty and the Beast.

I decided to get to the bottom of this and found there is an old Internet rumor that the original Beauty and the Beast ended with either the death of The Beast or The Beast eating Belle.  Whoever started this rumor is confusing Beauty and the Beast for the oldest version of Little Red Riding Hood also known as Little Red Riding Cap (from 1693).

The version of Beauty and the Beast that is the popular fairy tale is an abridged and revised version of the surprisingly feminist 1740 French novel La belle et la bête by Madame  Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve.  (It talks about a woman’s right to choose a husband, and The Prince’s mother was a Queen who lead an army to defend her kingdom).

No version of Beauty and the Beast exists in which The Beast eats Belle (Beauty) or where The Beast dies and stays dead.  There are versions where the evil faery haunts Belle with dreams that The Beast will bring her ruin if not kill her and there are versions where Belle’s sisters conspire to try to get the Beast to eat her but it never happens.  The Beast comes close to death or briefly dies but he never once stays dead. That version simply does not exist.   This Internet rumor needs to stop.

If you doubt me you can buy the original novel on Amazon translated by Rachel Louise Lawrence, completely unabridged or you can check out the book The Classic Fairy Tales by Iona and Peter Opie which gives the full history of many of the classic fairy tales and their various alternate versions.

The darkest thing about the original Beauty and the Beast novel is that the faery who raised The Prince (because his mother was off fighting a war) tried to seduce him as soon as he was of age and Belle (who discovers her mother was actually a faery and father was actually a king, she had only believed the merchant to be her father) and the Beast turned out to be cousins. 

The faery tale that originally ended in the death of the protagonist was Little Red Riding Cap.   The Little mermaid ended in death too but that was Hans Christian Anderson, not Madame de Villeneuve.

But I always Really disliked interpretations of Beauty and the Beast (whether the Disney film/s or other animal bridegroom stories) that insist on how “the beast was ~hot~ before he transformed”

And give zero thought to that character’s experience of being cursed to live in a horrifically Wrong form for years on end. And finally being restored to something that feels correct and familiar—and can you imagine the first reaction to that, from the person who fell in love with you and with whom you’re in love, the one who broke the curse, saying “hm I liked you better before”?

I get it might be some kind of attempt to turn the “ugly” curse on its head and instead view it as the more attractive form

But that’s Not The Point!

The animal bridegroom tale is one of the oldest in the indo-European language family and it is time and again about coming to love someone for who they are rather than how they look. If anything the human transformation at the end can be best read as the phenomenon by which the person one loves becomes attractive in the lover’s eyes Because they are beloved.

And you know what sure I acknowledge and respect that interacting with it as a monsterfucker story is something people are going to do and will find the story appeals to them for that reason