Why Cinderella and the Little Match Girl?

Hey everyone! Now that a little bit of time has passed and some of you super-fast readers have had the chance to read Cinders of Glass, I’m super excited to start the behind the scenes posts! Today’s post is about why I decided to combine Cinderella and the Little Match Girl. Some spoilers ahead if you haven’t finished Cinders of Glass yet!

If you’re unfamiliar with the stories you can read (some of the many versions of) Cinderella here, and you can read the Little Match Girl here.

So the fun thing about Cinders of Glass is that this is the first book in the series where I didn’t have a years-old idea in my head for it. The idea for this book was born completely for the series when I knew I wanted to write a whole series of fairytale retellings. Well, it was born when I started shaping Mirrors of Ice and working on all of Sterling’s siblings and figuring out the direction I wanted to go with the prince charming in the Snow White story as well as thinking ahead to a Cinderella retelling. And that’s how we got Cynrik. The concept for Liora came a smidge later.

I knew as soon as the concept for Cynrik entered my head, Sterling’s “charming” but antagonistic older brother, he was exactly who I wanted for my Prince Charming in the future Cinderella retelling. I love characters doubling or tripling or taking on as many roles as works for them in this fairy tale universe (thank you to Once Upon A Time for influencing me as a teen for that), so having Cynrik as the Prince Charming figure from Snow White and Cinderella worked perfectly.

And because I can’t do anything as a straightforward adaptation, I had to put a twist on my Prince Charming. So, since Sterling was the prince for my Snow White, Cynrik needed to be a little something else. In most of the Cinderella retellings I’ve come across there’s two to three main ways I’ve seen the Prince Charming character go. The first is the straightforward interpretation. He’s exactly what he says on the tin, good, charming, heroic, and the authors do their best to give him more of a personality than Disney did in their original movie! The second is that he’s charming, in a womanizing, rakish sort of way, and the story involves him falling in love and giving up his womanizing ways. The third I see less often. While he might still be womanizing and rakish, he’s not really the hero, he’s more of a villain, typically with the Cinderella figure ending up with someone else or escaping him. Oftentimes this dark interpretation of Prince Charming is manipulative and selfish and all sorts of terrible things we don’t want in the guy our heroine ends up with.

I knew from the moment I thought of Cynrik what I wanted him to be. I wanted him to be charming in a very calculated, manipulative way. I wanted his charm to be a façade to cover his selfish, cruel tendencies. And I wanted him to still be the hero and end up with my Cinderella.

So you can see, I like to challenge myself.

Of course, I also had to pick what fairytale I was going to combine with Cinderella. Like Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella is a BIG fairytale. This one I didn’t have an immediate match in mind for it. (Ha, see what I did there?) So I did some reading, brainstormed some fairytales I knew but didn’t know as well as some of the bigger classics. While reading and researching some lesser known fairytales that’s how I came across The Little Match Girl. The second I read it, I knew it was perfect! It’s lesser known without being completely obscure that no one has ever heard of it.

But more importantly, there were some great cross-over points, the biggest being how both heroines relationships with fire (cinders/matches respectively) are centered around their poverty and struggles. While it can be hard to ascribe specific personalities to fairytale characters given how short and perfunctory the writing can be, both Cinderella and the Little Match Girl are dreamers at their hearts. Cinderella dreams of going to the ball and escaping her abusive family for a night while the match girl dreams of an exquisite banquet and her loving grandmother, seeing it in the smoke. They both dream of escaping their abusive families and terrible circumstances.

Funnily, they both also lose a shoe.

It was the shoe thing that sold me; I didn’t care about anything else. (Kidding!)

I’ll be going into all of this more in the next post!

It wasn’t until I’d picked The Little Match Girl that I really started to put together who my Cinderella would be.

One of the things that’s most interesting to me about Cinderella characters is their past. Often a wealthy merchant’s daughter who falls into poverty and is treated as servant by her stepfamily, usually a girl who had an incredibly close relationship with her mother, and most often her father (although not necessary, some variations of the original fairytale her father is still alive while she’s being mistreated by her stepfamily, making him neglectful at best and outright abusive himself at worst) who has now also passed away by the time the story starts. Since my plots are always very big and epic, I knew my Cinderella’s past was going to be very important.

And that’s why I decided to go with making my Cinderella former nobility. But I knew I didn’t want her to still be noble. I wanted her fall from grace to be big. What bigger way than for her father to be convicted of treason?

And I started to think about the direction I wanted to take my Cinderella and her stepfamily.

As you might have guessed by now… I like to balance the fine line of being faithful to the spirit of the original fairytales while giving pieces my own interpretation and taking a less common approach. Although, often not necessarily a completely original approach/ With fairytales like Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella, there’s very few stones left unturned in retellings! But I still do my best to bring my touch to it!

I knew I was already approaching Prince Charming in a different way, but I just couldn’t help myself from doing the same with my Cinderella and her stepfamily. I knew I didn’t want to go the straightforward route of having the stepmother and stepsisters be very verbally abusive and physically abusive. I’ve read lots of retellings that go that route, and it’s great, it just wasn’t right for the story I was already setting up with Cynrik being a more nuanced, manipulative character in desperate need of a redemption arc.

But, I’ll save the dissection for next time. I had my Prince Charming thanks to Mirrors of Ice, and I had my Cinderella thanks to the Little Match Girl. I still had a ton of questions to answer like… Why does my Prince Charming have to get married if he’s only the second youngest son of seven siblings and his eldest brother the king is already married and has a baby on the way?

Why does my Cinderella stay with her stepfamily? If she’s in Avia now, why wasn’t she during Mirrors of Ice? 

When does she meet Prince Charming? At the ball? Or before? When does the ball take place and why? How does her selling matches fit with the pieces of the Cinderella story? Why matches?

Where does this story fit in the world of the Bewitching Fairy Tales series?

I will tell you I did not know what I was in for when I started working on this book. It wasn’t until I was 40k into the first draft and barely scratching the surface that I realized this book was going to be something else. I loved working on this book, and I’m so glad it’s finally ready to share with you all!

I’ll see you all next time as I dive into more detail about the specific aspects of each fairytale that I used and how I combined them! If you haven’t gotten grabbed Cinders of Glass you can do so here!