Happy Pride Month! Here is my character Rosenwyn with Princess Serena, who is from the Cornish fairytale "The Lady of the Silver Bell"
Depending on the version you read and how you interpret the story, you could interpret Princess Serena as Aroace.
REMEMBER THAT YOU CAN HAVE A DIFFERENT INTEPRETATION FROM ME AND THAT’S OK.
Princess Serena could be greyromantic and greysexual in the older version by Anna Eliza Bray in ‘A Peep at the Pixies: Or, Legends of the West’ as Serena says ‘that neither he nor any other of her father's friends, were handsome enough to please her'.
Serena turns down a suitor 'that every body said how happy she would be as his wife.' The opposition that Serena faces for her decision not to marry her suitor reflects amatonormative beliefs, which many aromantic people face.
Based on the reading I have done on Victorian attitudes towards romance and marriage, the ideal for middle and upper class Victorian women was to be happily married with children. Princess Serena's lack of desire to marry is portrayed as 'her vanity' which Bray refers to as one of Serena's 'some very great faults'. This comes off as aphobic but is not surprising based on the time the book was published in.
When Serena sees a prince created by the Piskies, she experiences some form of attraction due to supernatural intervention. In this version, I would argue that she is greysexual and/or greyromantic. Even though she is attracted to the prince she focuses more on his possessions and wants to marry him so she can wear his tiara 'to bind around her own dark and flowing hair.
In Anna Chorlton’s version on the Mazed Tales website, Princess Serena turns down a suitor even though ‘he was perfect in every way’ and we could interpret Serena in this instance as Aroace. Furthermore, Serena’s vanity does not appear in this version and Serena's attraction to the prince created by the Piskies could be based on platonic attraction from the common ground of music and dance, which is emphasised at the start of this version.
I will make an Instagram reel and a Tumblr blog post which goes into more detail soon.
