Beasts of Beauty Inspiration

Hey everyone! Today, I’ll be talking about the inspiration behind the book. Some (semi-big) spoilers ahead if you haven’t read Beasts of Beauty yet!

We’re going to start with the Little Red Riding Hood aspect, which is an absolute classic fairy tale that we know that doesn’t feature royalty at all! Which is really cool and refreshing! And of course I ended up including royalty in mind, but you know, you win some you lose some.

Like most fairytales there are quite a few variations out there, and as usual my researching phase was… a while ago, so forgive me for not remembering all the ones I’ve read. But I do have my list of hallmarks of a Little Red Riding Hood story:

• Young(ish?) girl
• Red, hooded cape
• Grandmother
• Told to stay on the path
• A Big Bad Wolf
• The girl is naïve
• Flowers are what lead her astray
• Wolf swallows the grandmother and pretends to be her
• A woodcutter/huntsman saves Little Red and the grandmother

You can give or take a few details, like filling the wolf’s stomach with stones. My list is just the items that I found important.

Here’s my list for Beauty and the Beast:

• Merchant with lots of kids (6-12 depending upon the version, I think it was 3 boys and 3 girls to 6 boys and 6 girls)
• Youngest daughter is Beauty, she is lovely, kind, well-read, and pure of heart. She’s pretty much perfect.
• Their wealth is lost
• Move from the city to the country
• Beauty asks her father for a rose
• The father seeks shelter in the castle and plucks a rose
• Magical castle
• Beauty exchanges herself for her father
• Beauty sees a handsome prince in her dreams
• She gets homesick and the Beast lets her return home
• When the Beast is near death, Beauty realizes she loves him and the curse breaks
• A fairy shows up and explains everything

Give or take a few details. (Villeneuve’s version doesn’t end when the curse is broken, it goes on for a while after that.) But we all know Beauty and the Beast more from Disney’s version, most likely, at least that’s the version I grew up with more than the original. And a Beauty and the Beast retelling doesn’t need much to be a Beauty and the Beast retelling, as long as you’ve got a “beast” (who sometimes isn’t even a physical beast depending upon adaptation) and a Beauty, and some kind of castle equivalent so they can grow closer, you’ve pretty much got the most important elements.

So let’s get started with merging. I had my female Beast and my male Beauty, but who was Little Red Riding Hood? And I mentioned this briefly, but here’s the long version. In a way, Katja, Chasen, and Aerona are all Little Red at different points of the story, and I’m not just saying that because they’re the three that wear the enchanted red cloak. (Of course, the cloak has to be special, and what better way than an enchanted cloak that prevents the wearer from injury?)

They are the three that wear the red cloak (excepting the Apprentice), but it’s more than that. Katja is the more traditional Little Red, she’s young, usually wears the red cloak to protect her, and strays off her path looking for roses to bring to her grandmother.

Chasen, however, is the one who deals with the Big Bad Wolf… who actually isn’t our Beast. Kind of. Chasen is influenced by the Scholar who is more of the Big Bad Wolf here, who tries to lead him off the path of his conscience, and pretends to be his grandfather in order to fool the village.

And Aerona is the girl who gets swallowed by the wolf. In a sense, she is both the wolf and Little Red when it comes to her curse. This isn’t a new concept, Little Red being the wolf/werewolf. Mine is less of the physical sense of being and more of a mental one, since she’s a wolf most of the book and still her. Her curse is meant to rid herself of her humanity and turn her into a mindless wolf, so when the curse is finished, she’s… swallowed in a sense, and our huntsman has to pull her out of the wolf.

So while Little Red Riding Hood isn’t part of the major, physical plot beats except at the beginning and end, it still is an undercurrent of the story in Katja, Chasen, and Aerona, as evidenced by who has the cloak.

And a little more obviously, flowers are an important part of Little Red Riding Hood and roses are a big part of Beauty and the Beast, so that was an excellent cross-over opportunity. And a great way to give depth to why Beauty would ask for a rose, or in our case why our Little Red is willing to go into the spooky forest looking for one. Because roses are a symbol of the royal family, the fairies, and the country that was taken from them.

And, if Beauty is a man, our huntsman, and Little Red is his little sister, that works really well for the familial and sacrificial aspect of Beauty and the Beast. And… the thing about the original Beauty and the Beast is she had older brothers who wanted to kill the Beast in order to protect their sister and save her from having to go to him. So I decided to lean into that aspect. A brother trying to save his sister from a monster was really interesting to me, especially coming from Mirrors of Ice where the familial relationships were.., strained at best. It was really nice and interesting to write a family that was so close while somehow still being so far. (They definitely have tension and strain but it’s not nearly as distant.)

Another aspect of Beauty and the Beast that I thought was really interesting, that while I’ve seen come up sometimes, doesn’t come up often, which is Beauty seeing a handsome prince (the true form of the Beast) in her dreams and falling in love with that prince before eventually realizing she also loves the Beast. And that was how Aerona turned from a shapeshifter who had some control to a completely cursed being who involuntarily transformed into back into her human form for one hour at midnight, allowing Chasen to see a… not so beautiful almost princess at night.

Another important aspect of a Beauty and the Beast retelling that the original doesn’t really talk much about. The servants… or whoever else is in the manor. And why is the castle magical? There’s lots of ways to go about this. Invisible servants as part of the curse is one. Disney had all the servants be cursed and turned into furniture. One could go with no servants, but it’s nice to have other characters to involve.

I decided to take the fairy aspect that appears at the end and instead of servants, have fairies live in the manor, but the relationship isn’t the same. I wanted to sort of explore this idea of what if the Beast wasn’t completely in charge in a sense. What if she and the servant-like figures were on a more equal footing? So that’s why the fairies and Aerona had the relationship they do. She’s in charge in the sense that she’s taken responsibility for their protection onto their shoulders, and she’s not technically Helio’s subject, so he can’t order her around, and she can’t really order the fairies around either.

And of course, our villain, the Scholar is our Big Bad Wolf, and also the one who cursed our Beast. But more than that… there’s another question to answer in a Beauty and the Beast retelling, if the Beast is a prince (or in our case princess) who’s ruling the country and why isn’t it common knowledge the Beast is in a magic castle? (Or is it common knowledge?) Well, my answer was, because the country doesn’t exist anymore, and therefore her presence needs to be hidden. If the country had lost an invasion, then of course a princess would go into hiding. And the rest of the country would go on as part of an empire with no one left to miss the royalty.

So, I would say Beasts of Beauty definitely leans more into the Beauty and the Beast aspect than the Little Red Riding Hood aspect simply because it follows the Beauty and the Beast plot beats and romance, which means the Little Red Riding Hood aspects are quieter, subtler. They’re still there, and they’re by no means less important, they’re just not as loud. And I’m okay with that. Beauty and the Beast is by its well-known and beloved nature a louder story which just leaves more nuance and fun for readers to pick up on the quieter aspects of Little Red.

I hope you enjoyed this peek into my process! This retelling was a long time coming and took a lot out of me. The first draft was 73k, and from the first draft to the second, the word count became 168k. The second draft more than doubled the word count, but it was all worth it… is what I tell myself to make me feel better! In all honestly, I really loved working on this story, and it’s really bittersweet to me that it’s finished. It’s hard to let go of a story that’s been in my heart for so long, but that’s part of the process.

I’ll see you all next time for an in-depth look at Aerona and Chasen as our Beast and our Beauty!