Mastodawn

"beauty and the beast" - critical writing #beautyandthebeast #beast #beauty #disney #writing
Read at:
https://andispebbles.wordpress.com/2025/01/16/beauty-and-the-beast/

beauty and the beast

Magyarul /Read in English /avagy vélemény “A szépség és a szörnyeteg” 2017-es élőszereplős Walt Dinsey filmről.Ez a történet két férfi útjáról szól akik hasonló mentális egészségi probl…

pebbles

cmrosens 2d ago

Audio Release for Yelen & Yelena Chapter 13: Wind and Water

Chapter 13: Wind and Water

Yelen and Yelena head down to the dungeons and the underground spring to do some blood letting, and Yelen begins to accept personal responsibility for his past. Stick around to the end of this shorter chapter for some behind-the-scenes worldbuilding chat, where I discuss my influences and how I used folklore and Beauty and the Beast adaptations to help shape the world and the characters.

Listen Now

CWs: Depression, and suicide ideation more pronounced here. Blood-letting with antique medical equipment.

Needle/injection description begins at 08:29 – jump to 09:00 to avoid the description of the injection itself.

There is conversation and some character notes from 09:00 while the blood-letting takes place (it’s painful).

This whole sequence from needle in to taken out runs from 08:29–10:00. After 10:00 there is mention of wound cleaning.

Music Credits:

Kevin McLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Quinn’s Song: The Dance Begins

Bittersweet

Quinn’s Song: A New Man

Transcript for Worldbuilding Chat:

00:19:53.200 –> 00:29:08.420
This is a shorter one again, and I wanted to leave it there because we’re now going into part three, The Rot, with chapters 14 to 20. But also I thought I could do world building part two on the end of this shorter episode.

I’m going to talk about some influences for this and also some of the folklore that I used while I was worldbuilding.

So one of the most fun things about the worldbuilding was riffing off the Beauty and the Beast story, where Belle’s father is a merchant who falls on hard times and Belle’s sisters want silks and expensive gifts when he gets back from his latest venture that’s going to turn his fortunes around. But all Belle wants is a rose. One of my favourite live-action versions is the 2014 version with Vincent Cassell as the Beast and Lea… Seydoux, I think I said that right, as Belle, directed by Christophe Gans.

In that one she falls in love with him through her dreams of seeing him interacting with his late wife, which is gorgeously French, and she literally just has these dreams of him as a man, and he’s married to the love of his life and she sees them interacting and she’s like yes that is the man that I want to marry myself when she dies.

And then like, when… she’s awake she denies that she cares about him because he’s a beast and he’s also very annoying, very grumpy, and then he lands on top of her during a chase scene and they nearly kiss but they fall through the ice or something like that and then there’s a lot of fantasy elements…

And it’s a lot of fun but there’s also a lot more time given to the family back home and the father’s debts and the consequences and there’s all of these shady gamblers and debtors going on and ruffians and it’s it’s just – oh yeah I just really liked it as a as a film because there’s quite a lot of influence here.

And I wanted to switch it up a bit and have my protagonist already on Hard Times. And I took the merchant idea and I was like, what if it’s a world where merchants run everything? And so it would make sense if my protagonist is not part of that class at all. And I did kind of toy with the idea of making her father a merchant who is now not a merchant. But I kind of like the fact that he never ever got to be and so that shapes Yelena in a different way to a way, you know, where she potentially thought she’s owed something or she feels like she should be part of that class but she isn’t. I kind of wanted her to be completely separated from it and have to sort her own life out and have very little agency and be very aware of the agency that she doesn’t have.

So I knew that was the situation I wanted her to be in and I built that world for her to be at the bottom of the pecking order.

I didn’t know anything about her really but I wanted to kind of see how the world would shape her, how the situation would shape her. And also it’s very difficult to build a Belle character that isn’t like a shell of a person from all of the other stories. So I wanted to make her kind of her own person.

And I also used the Disney animation version. So the songs about Belle being from a poor provincial town as my setting inspiration. I grew up in a very small place, which is not really a town. It’s in the countryside. I couldn’t wait to leave it. And I ended up basically back there as an adult for the longest time. And I know a few people who left and then deliberately came back because they love it so much. And they have many ties to it. And they literally can’t imagine living anywhere else because they love it. Like they go away for university. They go far away. They go to London. They go to like, other cities. They try life out somewhere else. And it’s just not for them. And they come back.

And that’s what I wanted. I wanted to kind of honour that story of someone who loves their village, loves their community, loves all the memories they’ve made there, and then they have it taken away from them piece by piece until there’s nobody left And everyone who is left is so busy fighting for their own survival there that they’ll turn on each other. And it’s kind of like this deconstruction of a community that’s just had its heart and soul ripped out of it, just because everybody’s moved away. A lot of Yelena’s family are all dead. That’s just part of my story and it’s part of communities that I know.

And so I put all of that in there as well because I kind of don’t like the… naivety, I suppose, of oh it’s a poor provincial town and I’m too good for it, and I don’t want to be part of it, and they’re all really narrow-minded here, and they’re all selfish, and they’re all… you know. It’s just such a stereotype and I know that there are also small towns like that, but I don’t know, man. I think a community is what you make it, you know.

And I kind of liked the idea of there being a community there that was worth going back to. And so that was Yelena’s story. And I deliberately didn’t want her to be conventionally beautiful either, because I really don’t see the point of that. And I also deliberately didn’t want Yelen to be a Disney prince, even if he changed back. Because again, I don’t see the point of that either. And I thought, you know, if he changes back, he’s going to be a fat man in his 50s. not some ripped angelic looking 18 year old. And I really like that. So it’s an age gap thing, even if he hadn’t been cursed for 200 years. And I quite like that too.

So that’s why Yelena then became a laundress and a sex worker for fun and profit in her 30s. So she’s still quite young, but she’s also not a kid who doesn’t know the world. She’s had time to build up some adult life experiences. She’s
been beyond the village and come back. And she’s a much better match for Yelen as he is now than a younger girl would be, so…

As for the aesthetics of it, I think a lot of that are influenced by the disney animation which I think sparked my love of the Gothic as a small child, and also of course Jean Cocteau’s 1946 version which I really love, but a lot of the village itself and village life comes from Juraj Hertz’s 1978 Czech New Wave production Panna a Netvor, The Maiden and the Monster or Beauty and the Beast and that’s the one where the beast has a bird head and is a kind of half man half bird and is really weird like I really love that I think that’s probably my favourite film. So that’s where a lot of world building came from and I built it from there.

The Butterfly as souls is a piece of real world folklore. In Ireland, white butterflies were thought to be the souls of departed [or unbaptised] children,
which is where I think I heard it first, and I couldn’t remember the source for it so I looked it up, and it’s everywhere. So, I didn’t know that there are butterfly legends in Mexico as well. It’s an indigenous Mexican myth about butterflies
being the souls of the dead but I haven’t really looked into that, and also it’s in Japan too, and I thought that was really cool so I thought okay. I stuck with it as a piece of folklore because of the European folklore connection, the Irish connection, I kept that in.

The wind was just a random thought because of the way we anthropomorphise the winds and the way the wind is described as having a voice, it whispers, it screams, it cries. So I thought it would be good to give it an actual stream of voices to carry and make it part of the fantasy afterlife and weave it into folk belief and religion. And I thought maybe city people can’t hear those voices because they’re no longer attuned to them. And the provinces are still one of the only places that you can hear the dead voices on the wind properly above the noise of life or what the industrial life and urban life has become. And that might be really fun to explore if I do anything more in this world where the wind could be used to differentiate the city from the country.

I have mentioned As Below, So Above before, and that also takes place in a rural setting, and it’s all set in an alchemy tower. So I won’t be exploring the wind concept there, I don’t think, but we’ll see.

So I thought it would also be nice to have the water carrying something too, and for there to be debate about it. So that kind of… balanced out the wind, I thought we also need something else that’s more kind of grounded, and again water is often anthropomorphized as babbling, chattering, laughing, especially in mid-20th century children’s books that were read to me as a child. Like, the laughing brook, the laughing stream… and I think I just internalized that because that’s what I instinctively think of as an adjective. I think of like, you
know, The Laughing Stream or something, so it made sense to have the water be the laughing element that balances out the bad news of the air.

So I think that’s what I was going for, and that’s sort of how my process went and some influences that got me thinking about the layers I was going to build on, and where some of those ideas began.

I had a lot of fun building up my fantasy religions, as you might have noticed, and the legends in particular, so I may talk more about that in future episodes, but for now. I will leave it there and see you next time. Bye for now.

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Yelen and Yelena Chapter 13: Water and Winter | Podcast Episode on RSS.com

Yelen and Yelena head down to the dungeons and the underground spring to do some blood letting, and Yelen begins to accept personal responsibility for his past. Stick around to the end of this shorter chapter for some behind-the-scenes worldbuilding chat, where I discuss my influences and how I used folklore and Beauty and the Beast adaptations to help shape the world and the characters. CWs: Depression, and suicide ideation more pronounced here. Blood-letting with antique medical equipment.Needle/injection description begins at 08:29 - jump to 09:00 to avoid the description of the injection itself.There is conversation and some character notes from 09:00 while the blood-letting takes place (it's painful).This whole sequence from needle in to taken out runs from 08:29-10:00. After 10:00 there is mention of wound cleaning.Music Credits:Kevin McLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0Quinn's Song: The Dance BeginsBittersweetQuinn's Song: A New Man

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