So were you aware that the The Beauty and the Beast story we all know is a heavily abridged and rewritten version of a much longer novella by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve? And that a lot of the plot holes existing in the current versions exist because the 1756 rewrite cut out the second half of the novella, which consisted entirely of the elaborate backstory that explains all the weird shit that happened before? And that the elaborate backstory is presented in a way that’s kind of boring because the novel had only just been invented in 1740 and no one knew how they worked yet, but contains a bazillion awesome ideas that beg for a modern retelling? And that you are probably not aware that the modern world needs this story like air but the modern world absolutely needs this story like air? Allow me to explain:
The totally awesome elaborate backstory that explains Beauty and the Beast
Once upon a time there was a king, a queen, and their only son
But while the prince was still in his infancy, in a neat reversal of how these fairy tales usually go, the king tragically died, leaving his wife to act as Regent until their son reaches maturity
Unfortunately, the rulers of all the lands surrounding them go, “Hmm, the kingdom is ruled by a woman now, it must be weak, time for an invasion!”
And the Queen goes, “Well, if I let some general fight all these battles for me, he’ll totally amass enough fame and power to make a bid for the throne; if I want to protect my son’s crown, I have no choice but to take up arms and lead the troops myself!”
(Btw, I want to stress that this woman is not Eowyn or Boudica and nothing in the way her story is presented suggests that she had any interest martial exploits before or in any way came to enjoy them during these battles. This is a perfectly ordinary court lady who would much rather be embroidering altar covers for the royal chapel and playing with her child until necessity made her go, “Oh no, this sucks, I guess I have to become a Warrior Queen now” and she just happened to kick ass at it anyway.)
And the Queen totally kicked ass, but the whole “twice as good for half the credit” thing meant that no matter how many battles she won, potential enemies refused to take her and her army seriously until she had defeated them so no sooner would she fend off one invasion than another one would pop up on a different border.
So she spent the majority of her young son’s life away from the castle leading armies, but it was OK because she left him in the care of her two best friends, who just happen to be fairies! This was an awesome idea because a) fairies have magic, and therefore are like the best people to protect the prince from any threats and b) fairies consider themselves to be so above humanity that the lowest fairy outranks the highest mortal, so they’d have no interest in taking a human throne. Good thing they were both good fairies instead of one good and one evil one!
(Spoiler: they were not both good fairies.)
So the two fairies basically take turns raising the prince until he’s old enough to rule. And on the eve of his twenty-first birthday, the evil older one comes into the prince’s bedroom.
“So listen, kid. You’re about to become king, your mother’s on her way home from the war to see you crowned, and I have a third piece of good news for you! You see, I’ve actually been spending so much time here lately because Fairyland’s become a bit too hot to hold me for reasons totally not related to me being secretly evil. And if I have to hang in the human world, I might as well reside in the upper echelons of it, so even though as a powerful fairy I completely eclipse your puny human status in a staggeringly unimaginable way, since you’re about to be king and since my premonition that I should stick this whole guardianship thing out because you would be hot one day has totally proved accurate (go me), I will graciously lower myself to allowing you to marry me. Please feel free to grovel at my feet in gratitude. (Btw, we can totally start the wedding night now, we’ll tell your mother about it when she arrives tomorrow.)”
I started thinking absently about Steve Rogers’ jogging route during my run today and then i couldn’t STOP thinking about it because there’s literally NO WAY it makes sense unless you accept that he is specifically fucking up his entire morning routine to get another look at the cute boy he clocked on his run. I got home and started to make a post about it but it was like
so you’re just going to have to trust me
Enough people asked me to Get Into This that, you know what, fine. Let’s get into it. Under the cut please enjoy my doctoral dissertation, There Is No Carol In HR, or Captain America Is a Big Ol’ Creep and I Can Prove It with Maps.
Writing a novel when you imagine all you stories in film format is hard because there’s really no written equivalent of “lens flare” or “slow motion montage backed by Gregorian choir”
You can get the same effect of a lens flare with close-detail descriptions, combined with breaks to new paragraphs.
Your slow-motion montage backed by a Gregorian choir can be done with a few technques that all involve repetition.
First is epizeuxis, the repeating of a word for emphasis.
Example:
Falling. Falling. Falling. There was nothing to keep Marie from plunging into the rolling river below. She could only hope for a miracle now, that she would come out alive somehow despite a twenty-foot drop into five-foot-deep water.
Then there’s anaphora, where you write a number of phrases with the same words at the beginning.
There were still mages out there living in terror of shining steel armor emblazoned with the Sword of Mercy.
There were still mages out there being forced by desperation into the clutches of demons.
There were mages out there being threatened with Tranquility as
punishment for their disobedience, and the threats were being made good
upon.
Mages who had attempted to flee, but knew nothing of the outside
world and were forced to return to their prison out of need for
sustenance and shelter.
Mages who only desired to find the families they were torn from.
Mages who only wanted to see the sun.
This kind of repetition effectively slows the pace of your writing and puts the focus on that small scene. That’s where you get your slow pan. The same repetition also has a subtle musicality to it depending on the words you use. That’s where you get the same vibe as you might get from a Gregorian choir.
Damn I made relatable reblog- bait post and writer Tumblr went hard with it. This is legitimately very good advice.
And then your copyeditor will query every repetition of words and phrases, and that’s where you get your lens flare…
Ok so we all know that the answer to “Where did Captain America learn to
steal a car?” is “Nazi Germany” but I think the more pressing question
here is when the fuck did this complete maniac get a driver’s license
Because ok, Mighty Mouse 1.0 is too poor to own a car, too short to
reach the pedals, has vision problems, and is a goddamn New Yorker in the motherfucking 1930s, why on earth would he ever have learned to drive?
So this little bastard can’t even tell the gas from the brakes, he gets
all beefified, he goes on tour with the USO. Unless one of the showgirls
coached him through stalling out a car all over some Hollywood back
lot, he still can’t drive. He goes to Europe. At some point, some genius
looks at him and thinks “this strapping specimen of American hunkhood
obviously knows his way around a vehicle, let’s give him a motorcycle,”
and Steve “no parachute” Rogers is like “how hard could this be?” and
promptly wraps himself around approximately eight trees at the same time.
So then he’s kickin’ ass, fightin’ Hydra, and it’s just months of Bucky being like
“give me the goddamn keys, Steven,” and Dum Dum and Morita endlessly
encouraging his fucking insane Fury Road bullshit, like the Howling Commandos just use “grenade” as code for “Rogers” when they’re reporting
why yet another truck has been destroyed beyond recognition. Yes, sir, another grenade, I agree, sir, it’s very odd that we keep losing vehicles in the same way, that’s the third this month alone
So then he’s in the future and SHIELD is sorting his shit out, and
they’re not going to force Captain goddamn America to wait in line at
the DMV, they’re all in complete awe in him and they’ve seen the old
reels of him on his bike, so when they issue him his driver’s license without any type of road test
they go ahead and give him a motorcycle license too
and steve is like …neat.
Ok so then Bucky is back, shit is settled down, everyone’s heading
somewhere and Steve gets in the driver’s seat and Buck’s like WHOA WHOA
WHOA are you people out of your goddamn minds?! Why is Steve driving, is
this some kind of mission, are we heading into a combat zone, is the
plan for the vehicle to get blown up?? GIVE ME THE GODDAMN KEYS STEVEN
And Sam is all “what are you talking about, Steve’s a great driver, I saw him jump his bike over a car once”
And Buck is all “yes but have you seen him use a turn signal?”
And Steve’s like, “Listen, we never needed to ‘signal’ our ‘turns’ in Nazi Germany.”
And after that Bucky always drives.
Fin.
okay but
this is basically how just about everyone in the us army in ww2 learned to drive
most infantrymen didn’t receive any instruction in vehicle use, but during ww2 they shipped about half a million jeeps overseas. most of them got used by logistics units and a lot got shipped to russia, but there were still so dang many of them that they would hand them to just about anyone who could have an excuse to use one.
gotta run a message? here’s a jeep. running gear up the line? take a jeep. got a 24 hour pass? just bring this jeep back safe, will you? you’re a cartoonist? here’s your own jeep. they handed them out like candy to everyone.
it wasn’t unreasonable on the face of it because the us was a car culture basically from the minute the car was invented, so most rural kids knew how to drive already. but tons of them didn’t, and at some point they’d almost certainly end up behind the wheel of a jeep.
as a result, accidents were hilariously common.
they pretty much assumed everyone knew how to drive based on the exact same logic used in this post. it was only after the war that somebody sat down and was like, yo, maybe we should make sure these kids know what a car is before we let them drive them.
So if “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” is be believed, you can fiddle duel the devil for your soul. My question is, does it only work with fiddles, or any contest? Saxophone duel? Guitar shred-off? Can you challenge the devil to a rap battle when he comes for you?
Even though I play piano I want to see someone fight for their soul with the tuba.
The Devil went back to Georgia and his thoughts were dark and cold That Johnny kid had screwed him and he still needed a soul. When he came across this young man blowin’ on a tuba and playin’ hits And the devil took one look and said “You know what? Fuck this shit.”
“Kid, I know you won’t believe this, but I play the tuba too “And if you wanna wager, well I’ve got a deal for you “If I’m the better tubist, then I get to take your soul “If you’re the best, you get this horn here, made from solid gold.”
The boy replied, “My name is Hans, and though it may be wrong, “Your bet’s pretty intriguing, so I guess I’ll play along”
Hans, clean out your spit valves, and get ready for a show, Two tubas feudin’ face to face; pick up your horn and blow. ‘Cause if you win, you get a brand new tuba made of gold, And if you lose the Devil gets your soul!
(Oompah music intensifies)
The Devil opened up his case and said, “I’ll start, I guess.” And fire puffed out from the bell as on the valves he pressed He raised the mouthpiece to his lips, it made a wicked BLART And a band of lederhosen demons joined in with him to start
(Roll Out the Barrel plays with extended tuba solo)
Hans looked the Devil in the eye, once he finished his piece, Said “That’s okay, old man, but just you get a load of this!”
The Devil bowed his head, because he knew he can’t compete. He dragged that heavy tuba down; it crashed by Hans’s feet. He turned away from Hans and as he retreated he said, “Forget this crap. I’m gonna try telemarketing instead.”
(Tuba outro)
@hamstergal you are amazing and owe me 1 clean monitor.
:(((
Fiddles are historically associated with the devil not through any Christian imagery, but because older European folk tradition held that several uber powerful water demons, known as nock, nikyr, necks, etc, were insanely good fiddle players.
In Norway, for example, the violin known as the Hardanger fiddle was played initially by the creepy otherwordly beings, like the hulderfolk, the trolls, as well as the nock. There are equivalents in other European cultures.
These beings were known as preternaturally skilled fiddle players, the nocks above all others. So some people would make a deal to learn the fiddle from the nock, or have their children trained. The only problem being nocks usually needed life or blood sacrifices to learn their skills.
So as Christianity was introduced, the water demon nock was conflated with the devil. Because other stories of nykyrs, nocks, etc were generally sacrificing a human to appease treacherous tides, which was the pinnacle of terror.
The devil knows the fiddle, because the ancient tradition is that if you can win your freedom from the nocks, they will honor this pact.
this post is the perfect mix of creativity, historical facts, and folklore/mythology, and above all shitposting.
Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles,
tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they
don’t really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight
them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit
space-magic countermeasures out of their arses – but they’re as likely
as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the
process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and
accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn’t actually
happen to anyone else; it’s literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.
So to everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown.
Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally don’t realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They’re just like “yes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experience”.
K, the younger ladies are awesome but the older ladies absolutely steal the hell outta this show. (PS Nice to see the uniforms and decorations aren’t completely off the wall)
kototyph 