#wizardjail

phantom of the opera and mall bookstores and weird little primates and the inherent eroticism of wizard-themed accessories and ghost stories

per a prior post i added a smart/dumb axis. subject to change because i just drew my silly little dots as the spirit led me

i’ve written on this subject many times

monsterfuckery is a fine pursuit but it’s not the most productive lens to read beauty and the beast through. if you do, you’re going to be let down by the beast’s transformation into a human being --- which leads to a lot of criticism that amounts to “beauty and the beast ending Objectively Bad.” if you ask me, this is a sheer failure to engage with the story on its own terms. when you’re considering what kind of narrative you’re looking at, the ending matters! the ending is part of the key to interpretation! 

to me, monsterfucking implies that the monster’s monstrousness is part of what the other partner wants from the relationship. if the ending of beauty and the beast were different, do i think beauty would have abandoned the beast? no --- in most versions, she has to admit she loves him without knowing about the curse, after all, and in the original she not only confesses her love but agrees to marry him. you can read that as a journey about the heroine embracing monsterhood, but i would argue that her position in the story is monster-neutral. she loves the beast either way.

and, you know, you would think that would be important to him, since the beast is fundamentally cursed. he does not enjoy being a beast. he does not want to be a beast. his physical (and in some versions other forms of) agency has been stripped from him. his journey isn’t about embracing monsterhood, but about embracing humanity.

B. Who’s your favorite side-character from something you wrote?

you know i love magnus and i know you love magnus but i already talked about him here

my favorite side character from beauty and the beast wip is definitely sofia. she’s an Older Sister, but feels like she hasn’t been a very good one, which is writing from the heart lol. i tend to write about siblings a lot, because i have a lot of them, and imo authors tend to undervalue any kind of sibling relationship between “hate each other completely” and “love each other devotedly.” sofia’s experience, and mine, is more in the middle: she can love her sister and still resent things she does, and feel guilty for resenting them, and wonder how much of that responsibility is hers, and not want it, and still step up to the plate as a protector and a friend.

F. What stories are you planning for the future?

#1 is my batb revision. i’ve got a lot of other things on the back burner, though, not least of which are threads (woods horror / gay coming of age), the priestess and the knight (romancing a faerie knight), and library keepers (“high fantasy” series).

P. What are your pet peeves in other people’s work?

it takes a skillful writer to sell me on a first-person narrator or the use of, like, more than 3 povs. the real kicker is multiple first-person povs. if i see that when i open a book, you’ve got an uphill battle

protagonists who do not give a shit about their surroundings

protagonists who don’t... drive... the plot... at all

as you also talked about: heroes who are called compassionate, but can’t actually be assed to care about anyone but their significant other

“monster romances” where the love interest is just a dude

for the love of god. your heroine is not not like other girls

feminist retellings that uh. take shallower views of women and their experiences than the texts they draw from

Z. If you could choose one work and immediately finish it, what would it be? How would you end it?

it’s OLD!! the premise was something like, earth has been taken over by bodysnatching aliens, and the pov character is a human who gets rescued from the brink of being snatched by an Enigmatic, Dorky Badass girl. he has amnesia and nowhere to go, so she travels around with him in a very dr who/companion kind of way, trying to help the resistance along the way

at the two-thirds point of the book, he would have found out that she actually is one of the aliens, but when she was first assimilated, she was living with the human girl’s consciousness alive in her head for a long time, so that really fucked her up

i honestly don’t remember what else i had planned... is this basically the plot of the host? smeyer call me, i’m sure i can improve on it