Why Beauty and the Beast and Little Red Riding Hood?

Hey everyone! Now that everyone has had some time to read Beasts of Beauty, I’m excited to start the behind the scenes posts! Today’s post is about why I decided to combine Beauty and the Beast and Little Red Riding Hood. Minor spoilers ahead if you haven’t read Beasts of Beauty yet.

If you’re unfamiliar with the stories you can read an abridged version of Beauty and the Beast for free here and Little Red Riding Hood here.

Of all my fairytale retellings, completed and future, this idea is the oldest. Except… in its original conception it didn’t really look like this at all. The original idea was only very loosely inspired by Beauty and the Beast in the sense that there was a girl who was cursed to be a physical beast, a fairy best friend, a beautiful male love interest, and an evil wizard after her. It was more of a quest adventure than the getting stuck at a castle kind of thing. And the love interest was a prince, and Aerona wasn’t royalty. And she was a natural born shapeshifter.

In high school, I participated in NaNoWriMo with that idea, and I hit the 50k and won, but it all got set to the side and later scrapped when I decided to do a fairytale retelling, and I knew the original idea just wasn’t going to cut it. So the only thing that I really truly kept from that idea was Aerona’s name, her appearance, and the Scholar. But the reason why I wanted to write that story in the first place is still the same reason I wanted to write this story as well.

In media, it is almost impossible for an ugly girl to have a happy ending with a traditionally beautifully love interest and stay ugly. (Ugly is a very loaded word, and I in no way mean to imply Aerona’s individual features such as having a curved spine or scars or being tall are inherently ugly. I will be going into detail on this in a future post, so hang tight.)

There’s plenty of stories out there where the female protagonists are plain which means usually translates to pretty but just not a super model. Average looks, not really all that ugly, not a face that causes people to double take and wince.

Anyway, the heart of this story was always a female beast who isn’t “fixed” by becoming beautiful according to society’s standards or having her physically appearance dramatically altered at all.

So when I decided to revisit this idea as part of my fairy tale series, I thought through fairy tales I was familiar with, and Little Red Riding Hood just seemed to fit. In a loose sort of way.

Both fairy tales include: a beast/wolf, flowers as a crucial plot element, and the theme of appearances being deceiving.

So, with my female beast already in mind, I had a very important question to answer. If the Beast was a girl and Beauty was a man, what does that mean? Because there’s not just different physical standards of beauty in terms of appearance, but there’s also different societal expectations when it comes to men than women.

Beauty, as a woman, is traditionally, and in no small part thanks to Disney, beautiful but doesn’t fit in to society. In the original, she doesn’t fit in with her sisters because she is just… too good. In the original version, she’s actually well-liked by everyone but her sisters. She’s pretty and a nice person who doesn’t let her family’s reversal in fortune get her down, so it makes sense for people to like her. I’ll get more into that later as well. But regardless of that happening in the original, she’s often portrayed as intellectual and well-read in a society that doesn’t believe women should be, or at least doesn’t encourage it, and she’s considered strange for that.

So if Beauty is a man… I didn’t want him to literally be a male Belle. It wouldn’t be as weird for him to be intelligent and well-read as a man even in a small village, at least it wouldn’t hold the same weight. And then I thought, well, in Disney’s version, Gaston is a foil to both the Beast and Belle. He’s everything their society values as beautiful in men from appearance to physical occupation, a hunter.

And I really liked the idea of Beauty being… not a well-read intellectual, and I’d find another way to bring in the societal otherness. I was sold, and it worked out really well because in Little Red Riding Hood, depending on the version a huntsman or a lumberjack saves Little Red from the wolf. I’ll go more into this on another post as well.

And you know what other fairytale features a huntsman that was coming up right before this story? Snow White.

So great, I’ve got some questions answered, but… uh, who was Little Red Riding Hood, then? Because my Beast is my wolf, kind of, and my Beauty is my huntsman… And the answer is, well no one person is Little Red Riding Hood in a traditional sense, but for simplicity’s sake, because we need a girl in a red cloak to stray from her path, my huntsman has a little sister.

And what about the grandmother? And the whole wolf appearing to be the grandmother? And what about the other Beauty and the Beast aspects like the father and Beauty sacrificing herself and taking her father’s place? And the whole magic castle aspect of it?

So, I knew I had a lot of work to do adapting my original concept, which really turned into scrapping 99% of it, which was for the best! I knew pretty early on in this concept I’d end up leaning into the Beauty and the Beast plot structure, especially for the romance than Little Red Riding Hood. But I still made sure to layer the stories, and while the Beauty and the Beast aspects are easier to spot, Little Red Riding Hood is still in there, and if you don’t recall where, don’t worry another post is coming with more detail there.

Like Mirrors of Ice, these stories didn’t have a whole lot of obvious cross-over points, but there was enough, and honestly, I don’t need much to inspire me. I just need something in both of them that resonates with me. There’s a lot of Beauty and the Beast retellings out there, a lot, and there’s even other Beauty and the Beast/Little Red Riding Hood crossovers (The Scarred Prince by Erika Everest), and there’s even gender swapped Beauty and the Beast stories out there. I haven’t read them all, so maybe I’m not breaking new ground, but that wasn’t really the goal.

Aerona’s story is so dear to my heart, for all the girls out there who feel ugly, who feel beastly, I wanted to write a story where their physical appearance wasn’t something to be “fixed.” Often we see men are allowed to be “beasts” and we get to see them grow. Very rarely do we get to see women as “beasts” that get to grow, and I’ve never seen a story where the “ugly” girl isn’t “fixed” and ends up with a beautiful man. And even if there are other stories that have done the same thing, good! The more stories like that out there, the better the chances are that someone who needs it will find it.

If you haven’t picked up a copy of Beasts of Beauty, you can do so here. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you all next time!