so I start a new job tomorrow, have a 9-day workweek and I'm giving myself stress ulcers sooooo I'm just gonna ramble out a Beauty and the Beast concept story I cooked up a while ago:
in most iterations of the beast's curse, breaking it involves having another person fall in love with the beast, seeing past their physical or emotional flaws. so, for mine, I wanted to do something a little different: the only way for the curse to lift is for the beast to love himself.
isolated from society with nothing to remind him of the man he once was, the beast can no longer remember his name, his face, how long he's been this way, or even the reason why - the only thing he's certain of is that he deserved it, and the fact that he's forgotten his sin only serves as proof.
and so he stays, for years - decades, maybe even centuries - never changing, never dying. self-inflicted scars on his throat remain to remind him of that. no, he decides, he is to live in penance, for whatever wrong it is that he's done. sullen. solitary.
until, one day, he spots a young girl slumped over in the snow. left alone in the dead of winter, the child will die... if it hasn't already. initially, he thinks to leave it as it is - the lives of others are not something to concern himself with. and besides, if it's that child's fate to die, who is he to defy it?
but... what sins could a child possibly have to answer for? surely, someone so young couldn't deserve such a fate.
and so, he takes her in, giving her shelter and food for the winter, all the while taking care to hide himself away while doing so. but a child's curiosity isn't easily sated, and she eventually catches sight of him - and isn't nearly as terrified as she rightly should be. after all, she insists, he was nice! he gave her hot food and a nice bed! sure, he's big and hairy and his house is shabby and really, REALLY dusty, but he hadn't given her any reason to be afraid, so she wasn't. her father always told her to help those that help you, so she set herself to work, cleaning and mending what she could in return for her stay. when questions came, the beast would only call her brave and kind to show concern for a soul like his. and so they lived, until the first day of spring, where the girl found herself back in her village, soon surrounded by her relieved family.
but when she told them of the beast, they only shook their heads. a child's fantasy, she was told. a fever dream, said others. and as she grew, she began to believe them. she survived the winter and made it home - in the end, wasn't that was all that mattered?
as the years passed, she nearly forgot all about the beast and that winter's stay. but, when she lost her father and her family broke apart, and she found herself struggling to face life on her own, she remembered his kind words once more. surely - surely, that couldn't be a dream. it just couldn't!
and so, she set out to find the beast once more. to prove to herself, once and for all, that what she she knew wasn't false.
... and this is getting much longer and less summary-esque than I'd intended for just the set-up, so I'm gonna try and abridge it from here. I haven't gotten the rest as hammered out yet, but it mainly focuses on the girl's interactions with the beast; her attempts to get him to see himself the way she seems him, and not his own, warped sense of self. she does genuinely fall for him, but that itself is not enough to make him recognize his virtues - if anything, it only makes him feel guilty for having "fooled" her into thinking he was anything other than the beast he resembled.
I wanted both characters to suffer at least somewhat with their self-image, with the girl being pushed by society into thinking her own memories are mistaken, and the beast essentially being his own echo chamber of self-loathing and defeatism. if you hear the same thing, day after day ... someday, you're gonna start to believe it, right? and once you believe it, is just one voice enough to convince you otherwise? it's not always enough to have someone tell you you're valid, if you've conditioned yourself into finding reasons you're not in everything you do... you have to change your way of thinking, of seeing yourself and the world around you.
... of course, how you actually write those concepts into a story and also make it, interesting and subtle and not boring as hell when it’s basically just two people talking a lot and all the conflict is internal is a bit beyond me, but hey - I’ll never know if I don’t try, yeah? ;)
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