Topic: My storybook will be about the lives of fairy tale princesses after the end of their stories. Most stories don't cover the entire lives of the main characters (from birth to death) so there is usually more that happens after "The End" or things that happened before "Once Upon a Time." I want to use the details of the fairy tales to make reasonable inferences about what the lives of the happy couples would be like as their relationships continued to grow and change. One story I definitely want to include is Beauty and the Beast because it has always been one of my favorite fairy tales. Another story I want to use is Cinderella because I'm interested in imagining how she would transition from being an emotionally abused maid to a pampered royal. Finding stories of other classic fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Rapunzel should be a cinch, and there will likely be a number of variations of each story so I can pick the version I like the most.
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| Beauty and the Beast by Walter Crane (Wikipedia) |
Bibliography:
1. Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête), from The Young Misses Magazine, Containing Dialogues between a Governess and Several Young Ladies of Quality Her Scholars, by Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont (1783).
2. Cinderella; or The Little Glass Slipper, from The Blue Fairy Book by Andrew Lang (1891), based on a story of the same name (Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoufle de verre) by Charles Perrault (1697).
Possible Styles
The Real Housewives of Far Far Away. One fun way to do this storybook would be to do it like a modern-day reality TV series. Each story would be an "episode" from the show's first season. It would include descriptions of each princess's daily life along with commentary by/interviews with the princess, her husband, and any children they might have. I might even be able to work in a group meeting of all the princesses at the end for a get-together or maybe a "reunion show" where we find out even more about their lives since "filming" ended like real reality TV shows do sometimes. This would be a good style for the topic because it would make the stories feel more modern and relate-able than the original stories.
Fairy Tale Princesses: Where Are They Now. This is similar to the first style but with a few key differences. While the first style focuses only on their current lives and information given by the main characters, this style would be like the popular "Where Are They Now?" documentaries with an overview of the princess's story (including recently "discovered" information not in the stories), interviews from less central characters (e.g. the ugly stepsisters, the witch from Rapunzel), and of course, interviews with the princess herself. These stories would be more isolated from each other than the reality TV series idea (which might have all the princesses coming together to interact). This would be a good style for the topic because it would inform the readers about the details of the particular version of the fairy tale that I chose to base my stories off of so that they aren't confused by things that weren't in the versions they might have read (or seen in a Disney movie).
Forgotten Sequels. This style is more straightforward than the previous two. It would be a collection of sequel stories (supposedly written by the same authors) that, like many movie sequels, didn't do as well as the original. I could make the stories cheesy and try to capitalize on the success of the first fairy tale by sticking with "what worked," like what usually ruins a cinematic sequel. Conversely, I could write the stories more seriously and have them be "forgotten classics" that were good but simply overshadowed by the wild success of their predecessors. This would be a good style for the topic because the stories would be more natural continuations of the first stories because the storytelling styles would be similar (straightforward, traditional storytelling).
The Untold Tragic Ends to Classic Fairy Tales. This style would have a much more gloomy tone than all the other style possibilities. The basic theme is that though "happily ever after" was written at the end of the stories, the events coming after those words (the "real" endings of the stories) are very tragic. There's the possibility of the princess dying, the prince dying, a scorned villain getting their revenge, or perhaps just an unhappy marriage that ended in divorce (or worse, they stay together and are miserable for the rest of their lives). While the other styles could include one or two tales of woe, every story in this storybook would be a tragedy. This would be a good style for the topic because it would actually be very similar to how the original stories were told. Most of the princesses started out in bad situations (deceased parents, nearly murdered or abused by a stepparent, stolen by a witch or a beast) but got a happy ending, this time they would not though.
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